Recovery of Spells:
If nothing else was ground into my head playing Pool of Radiance (aside from, when replaying it in 1997 at my tech support job, the fact that the spell sounds annoyed my co-workers) is that you need to rest 4 hours to recover 1st and 2nd level spells and 6 hours for 3rd and 4th level ones. Well, now I’ve seen the rule in the DMG. Looking more closely, I note that 15 minutes per spell per level is additionally needed in “study/prayer” for each spell to be memorized. This means that certain high level magic users would need more than a day to recoup their spells, if they cast them all.
Example: Bongo (now Lord of the Arcane Tower of Fzonk), used up all his spells defeating an army of ettin-zombies (twice as hard to kill, you know). As a 14th level magic users, he needs to recover 5 1st, 5 2nd, 5 3rd, 4 4th, 4 5th, 2 6th, and 1 7th level spells. He first must rest at least 10 hours (for the 7th level spells) plus 21 hours, 15 minutes to learn all those other spell, for a total of 31 hours, 15 minutes, simply to re-learn his spells. ( I also notice that the spell table goes up to 29th level- A) who has a 29th level m-u? B) it would take 7.5 million experience points to reach 29th level; Demogorgon is only worth 74,000 xp.)
Spell Casting:
Here’s some information that I never knew:
“All magics and cleric spells are similar in that the word sounds, when combined into whatever patterns are applicable, are charged with energy from the Positive or Negative Material Plane. When uttered, these sounds cause the release of this energy, which in turn triggers a set reaction. The release of the energy contained in these words is what causes the spell to be forgotten or the writing to disappear from the surface upon which it is written…
“To replace [energy from the Positive/Negative Planes] something must flow back in reverse. The dissolution and destruction of material components provides the energy that balances out this flow, through the principle of similarity… Those spells without apparent material components are actually utilizing the air exhaled by the magic-user in the utterance of the spell.”
Wow- that’s not how I envisioned it at all (as much as I ever envisioned how ‘magic’ worked). I guess I always thought it was somehow connected to the astral or ethereal plane, and that magic was some sort of ether in the world, not that spell-casters were some sort of, as Gygax puts it, an “electrical heater” (the metaphor being that the energy comes from elsewhere). At the end he recommends Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld, as well as The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs; I’ve read neither, but know that AD&D’s magic system is directly derived from Vance’s work. I suspect I wouldn’t be a fan…
Tribal Spell Casters:
I must say, I was always fond of including these guys in my dungeons (sure, I designed them, but never ran them) and I have happy memories of a magic-user of mine going toe-to-toe with a nasty orc shaman and living to tell the tale. Some humanoid races (bugbears, cavemen[?], ettins, giants, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, lizard men, ogres, orcs, troglodytes, and trolls) are allowed to have some magic-using individuals. These are of two types- shaman (i.e. clerics) and witch-doctors (i.e. magic users). These spell casters are really not all that powerful (max level of 7 for ’shaman’ and 4 for witchdoctors of selected races) but they do add a bit of flavor. Unfortunately their spell selection is rather limited, sometimes inexplicably so. For example, while shaman can cast cure light wounds, they lack cure serious wounds, even though they can cast 4th level spells; witch-doctors lack even a single offensive spell (unless you count ’scare’).
I always thought the humanoids should get an even break, so to speak (I love the notion of Tucker’s Kobolds, for example) and I think giving them some magic capabilities is only fair. How these unaccredited 2 year community college equivalent clerics and magic users could create the various nasty magic items orcs and goblins seem to have is beyond me though.
(This is one of the few places I seem to have written in my book as well; I penciled “/good” onto the spell “protection from evil”.)
Art: The bottom left corner of the page is an illustration by long-time AD&D (and beyond) illustrator Erol Otus (I may have used that link before). It shows a bit of close-range magical combat between a wizard (or a be-robed and hatted fellow) and a cloak-wearing skeleton (a lich perhaps?). The wizard is shooting a lightning-bolt (or some such) which is striking the chest of the skeleton while the skeleton is blasting the wizard in the face. My assumption is that the skeleton is winning.
