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Let's face it, one of the big things people are going to want to do in a world where magic is hard to come by is to create their own spells. That's the way it works and the way it should work. So, in order to bet- ter adjudicate that, we have put together the following system that goes along with the idea of Theoreti- cal Magic Schools.

In order to create a new spell, the researcher must make a skill roll against their:

The modifier is calculated for each spell and is equal to:

That is, the number of spells ahead of it in the prereq chain plus twice the magery requirement, plus one if the spell si Very Hard. (In essence, this makes spells which are deep in the prereq chain or which are just more difficult to learn harder to research.)

How long does it take? Well, that depends on how lucky you are. For any spell, start by taking three weeks. After the third week, make a skill roll as described above. Make another roll each week until you succeed a number of times equal to the spell modifier.

Researching a spell means that this is all that you are doing for that time. Eat, drink, tend to the neces- sities fo life. But, you are not out travelling, nor learning other skills nor none of that. It need not be done in one contiguous chunk, though. After the initial 3 week shot, you can break it up along week boundaries. But, each time you come back there is a 1 week "ramping up" time to pay. You know, work for 5 weeks on a spell, take a month off, take a week to get back to where you were, then you can make some progress the next week. That sort of thing. One half of the time spent researching spells can be applied as "off-time XP" towards your Theoretical Magery skill. (Since you can't have a teacher for this, that's 1 point of ThM for every 400 hours of research. Assuming 12x7 work weeks, that's one point in ThM every 33 days.)

Example: Marvin the Magnificent wants to invent a spell that Creates Water. Create Water is 2 steps down on the prereq chain. It does not have a magery requirement and is not Very Hard. Marvin has a Theoretical Magery skill of 15 and Magery 2. The modifier for the spell is 2, so Marvin's skill roll is 15 (15 + 2 - 2).

Marvin goes into his study and spends all fo his time for three weeks working like a programmer. At the end of three weeks, he makes a skill roll. He rolls a 14. Cool. He works for another week. He rolls a 16. Not good. He didn't get very far that week. He has to work for another week. He rolls again. An 8 this time. That's 2 rolls against a spell with a modifier of 2, he is done. He has the Create Water spell and it only took him 5 weeks to do it.

If Marvin had crit succeeded a roll, he could have shaved a week off of that time. (Each crit counts as two successful rolls.) A crit fail takes two weeks to recover from.

Translating spells is slightly different matter. If you have Theoretical Magery in two schools, and you know a spell in one of them, you can translate it from one school to the other one. In this case, your skill roll and the time required are improved by half your ThM score in the destination school.

Spell Research Modifier Chart

New characters should not start with any spell which has a modifier rating of more than 3. No, that is not as restrictive as it sounds, and Yes, there will always be exceptions to that rule that GMs can review and approve.

The prereq chains in the above table are done from what seems like the most reasonable, shortest route there. In the most technically correct sense, we could say that each path to a spell has a different modi- fier and a different value and such. This is a true statement. But, for the sake of simplification, let's just use the values from the table and be done with it. The difference, when you average it out over all the research we do, just isn't worth fiddling with.

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