@occipitallobe We can go and do Spirits and Remedial Spellcraft and Runic Theory next turn, yes??
Mostly yes, Remedial Spellcraft runs all the time, but Spirits and Runic Theory won't turn up again until Term 3. Of course, you're not really able to do the
advanced versions of those subjects until Year 2 unless you really kick the shit of Runic Theory, so it doesn't change much in the long term in theory.
That being said, we're specced for solo learning (Willpower + Int being the most important stats for personal study), so if you decide to specialize in Alchemy, having it in Term 1 instead of Term 3 means you'll have an additional two terms of solo study under your belt. Given you get 1 Class Training Roll per subject per week and potentially up to 9 Free Actions as Alchemy Training Rolls, a character maxing Alchemy would only learn 10% of their Alchemy in class.
Here is my argument for spellcraft we live in a culture where everyone wants to kill us, and the only way for us to get our full power back is to kill of that bastard we sold them too so we must get good at combat. Also I dont trus mercenarys to take care of our safety so we should get good at protecting ourself.
To be honest, your chances of taking on the Necromancer who took your power in a straight-up fight is somewhere between 0% and 0.01%. He's got his Magic Pool
plus yours, and he has forty to fifty years of studying and training as a head start. He also has access to a school of magic (Necromancy) you have no teachers in. It's potentially possible to take him down, but you'll need to use guile of some sort to even stand a chance.
We will never be good in a straight fight with our current channeling it is simply to low all spell craft does is slightly reduce just how weak we are.
One of the loreposts mentions a Channeling 1 combat mage who killed thousands of people in the Archipelagean War. It's
possible to be good at combat, it's just very, very suboptimal for your stat lineup. That being said, if you managed to get your power back, you'd be a pretty tremendous combat mage...
How will we learn rare spells if no one likes us? How will standard spells help if our opponent knows all the spells we know and can cast them for a longer period of time?
Regeneration potions, acid flasks, clouds of blinding, poison our enemy beforehand, etc. It's as likely to be useful as Runes would be.
Alchemy is generally more about personal buffs and nerfs (in gameplay terms) than it is about combat. You could maybe amp the shit out of your reflexes, speed, strength and become a combat monster temporarily with Alchemy. You
can do things like clouds of blinding, but doing that Alchemically is incredibly doing, while doing it as a spell is pretty easy.
Runes, on the other hand, are generally used to defensively spec a character. Get a bunch of runes that activate Shields of various sorts on your person, pay someone to charge them, and you can walk around with similar combat defenses as a great combat mage. Of course, this is expensive, but forging a bunch of runic equipment can really stop people from killing you.
Do we even have a family?
Yes. You sold your magical power for the money to take care of them, and they now live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle funded by your sacrifice.
But most of those attacks dont sound like they will so much damage. I would think that properly powerd up runic attacks would be super powerful.
Runes generally aren't used for attacks. Attacks need to be altered on the fly (range, magnitude, etc), and runes can't be changed on the fly. Generally speaking they're a better bet for your standard defensive options, though that's not to say you couldn't use runic attacks, just that to do it effectively it'd mostly be original research.
Meanwhile, acid to the face is acid to the face; a gas filled with sleeping is going to knock people out; the ability to heal yourself means that you're no longer going to die. Arguably, we could even create mana potions and allow ourselves to cast for longer. All of these are things we can do alone and sell for benefits.
Magic and magic strength is one of the few things you
can't transfer easily. Magic can transfer other conceptual stuff, but not magic itself. The Curse of Transferal is unique in the sense that it allows you to draw on someone else's Magic Pool, and the number of people who know how to cast and break it probably number less than a hundred in the entire world.
I thought that we could charge them up ourself just that it would take a long time, also I would think that a fireball spell that we have been powering up for like 1 week would outpower a acid potion
Hell yeah it would, but when you cast a spell (or engrave a rune) you also set up the parameters of the spell/rune. So if you know you're going to need a fireball that needs to be 2 metres in radius and fly exactly 18 metres, you're golden. This is why runes tend to be either really weirdly specific (does x to y, where y is some fixed thing in the world), or activate fields of a certain radius because those are more than likely to be useful.
That being said, you could create a rune that just create a field of pure fire for a radius of twenty metres or so, and just have it on you as a sort of 'fuck off and die' option.
Or a cone attack, or a ten-metre energy spear, or... as long as you can define the effect precisely beforehand, you can make it work.
Runic weapons are
really finicky, though. Runes are always on (they're either set to 'charged' or set to 'off'), but this can be gamed. For instance, if you carve a reversed rune for water into an amulet of iron it won't do anything even though it'll hold a charge. Run some water over it, and
bam, activated rune. (This is the standard method for using runes of water, as water is somewhat difficult to carve permanent symbols into).
You can't charge a rune over time (or a spell over time), though. If there's not enough magic to activate something, it just flows out. There needs to be a certain level of magic to stabilise it. Almost everything spell-related needs to get its entire charge dumped in very quickly, or it just won't work.
I thought that the empire was super cutthroat and that some random nobel might just kill us for the lolz. Also they will try to hunt us down after we break that spell, plus we might want to involve ourself in politics so that we can gain imortalety.
The Empire is
really cutthroat, but mainly among the upper and middle classes. The upper classes loathe each other, each Undying Clan governs an entirely different city, and they usually think nothing of killing off another clan's Scions if they think they can get away with it. The middle classes serve the upper classes, though the upper classes are generally worried enough about revolts from that angle (which is how the Six-Fox Pact became a rebellion, and then a set of nations) that they intentionally cripple their ability to be powerful mages. No respectable lich or necromancer would bother killing a member of the middle class unless he thought they were genuinely indispensable to one of their enemies.
The massive underclass is seen as cattle. You might kill cattle if it became necessary, or if there were too many of them, or if one of them got in your way, but anyone who murders for sport is generally taken care of, because while the underclass are unimportant, they're also a source of potential rebellion
