[56.2] The following numbers are added to the Base Chance of performing any talent, spell, or ritual of the College of Air Magics .
|
Caster occupies a mountain top |
+20 |
|
Caster is underground or otherwise totally enclosed* |
-15 |
|
Caster is only partially enclosed** |
-5 |
* Total enclosure is defined as being surrounded by walls or earth in a windowless area where there is no direct and immediate communication with the air outside.
** Partial enclosure is defined as being in a cave or dwelling or similar walled or earth-enclosed area, but being in sight of a window or means of egress or other means of direct contact with the air outside. All modifiers are cumulative (DQ 2nd Edition Revised Version 2.19, p.53).
OK, what corporate lawyer wrote this? "
[B]eing in sight of a window or means of egress or other means of direct contact with the air outside." Sheesh! (Can you have indirect contact with air? Anyway
)
T-1. Predict Weather
Obviously, they modeled the chance for success after the National Weather Service. Really, this is a near-useless talent. Unless you roll 86 or better, you're just as well off guessing the weather by what time of year it is, how many sparrows you saw in flight this morning, and if your trick knee is acting up.
G-1. Spell of Resistance to Cold
The spell's description doesn't really match the name of the spell (unfortunately something of a trend throughout these spell descriptions), as it limits its usefulness to resisting damaging cold-based spells. And naturally, it also grants protection from fire-based spells, because HUH?!? So you get a plus to resisting cold spells, but you actually get to subtract damage from fire spells. I guess you're putting up a barrier of coldness, or something. Don't you think the damage of a cold-based spell would be reduced, though? Or that you could just be immune to those chilly drafts coming in under your door?
Note the inequity between this college and the College of Fire Magics : the latter college has a spell to resist fire AND one to be immune from normal fires AND one providing immunity from magical fires. Why are there no such corresponding spells in this college? (In my house rules, there are
)
G-2. Spell of Ice Creation
I've gotten more mileage out of this silly spell than I can count. I have: created ice slides to evade pursuit (the landing at the bottom of the hill was a bit rough, but still); made ice cubes (after shattering the large initial cube, of course) to impress a noblewoman; created temporary refrigerated boxes (by coating the inside of a cedar chest with ice). Awesomely useful spell.
G-3. Spell of Mage Wind
Enough wind to propel a longship. Hmmm
what else can you do with that much wind? And you're free to control the direction it blows, too. Great for smoking goblins out of nasty little warrens. Also great for producing out-of-control brush fires, which can really mess with an army's morale, not to mention its sense of direction. Oh, and it's enough wind to stop a longship, too.
G-4. Spell of Communicating with Avians
OK, here's another spell where the name and description don't match. The title says "avians." The description says "flying creatures." These are not congruent sets (the word "avian" means "pertaining to birds"). I've always assumed it really should be all flying creatures, since you have to figure they'd all have some kind of affinity with air, and hence subject to the spell. As with all such spells, I'm not sure how much information you can get from a black-capped chickadee, but hey, it's your dime.
G-5. Wind Whistle Spell
OK, so with G-3, you get a guaranteed wind strength, and you can alter it's direction at will. With this spell, not only do you have to wait for the wind to get there (what, is it taking a shower? It's wind), but it can only come from one direction, and you have a 25% chance of it being a wimpier wind than the Mage Wind spell. So you have to eat all that for the chance that it might be a strong wind? Hardly seems worth it. I suppose the increased duration is helpful if your ship is going in a straight line, or if you want a nice breeze for your nap.
G-6. Spell of Conjuring Mist
You can conjure mist or fog with this spell good to know. (What's with the litigious hair-splitting?) What makes this spell great is that you can shape it any way you want to, and then move it around. Wanna scare the natives? Have a giant mist-dragon fly slowly towards their settlement. Also good for making obscene gestures at a distance you ain't lived until you've used a towering fog-titan to flip the bird to fleeing foes. It also makes for a good Ghostly Army (can you tell I played this character in a game with lots of military goings on?).
G-7. Spell of Summoning Avians
Again, we have the erroneous conflation of "avian" with "flying creature." OK, I'll get over it. Anyway, you get to summon something that flies. (In the right ecosystem, this is also known as the "Spell of Summoning Dinner.") Here we also have the infamous "if you can't whistle, your character can't cast the spell" idiocy. All my copies of DQ have this crossed out. That's like telling a fire mage player his character doesn't get a +20 unless he actually stands in a bonfire. Even the justification for it is dumb. You think the Air College didn't have Whistling classes in the curriculum? If you do enforce this rule, be sure to try and feed the player about to cast this spell some crackers
G-8. Spell of Detecting Fumes
OK, you can detect fumes and vapors. Now, I'm a picky SOB who irrationally expects precision of language in a 25-year-old RPG, so I'm wondering exactly what value this spell has. Webster's defines a vapor as "barely visible or cloudy diffused matter." In other words, you can see it. "Fumes" generally carries the connotation of a smelly gaseous substance, so that's readily detectible, too. What's left to detect? A handy spell to have in a mine, maybe, but canaries don't cost FT. Of course, canaries don't get a 25% chance to tell you what's slowly poisoning them, either, so there's that...
Or, they could just re-name it "Spell of Detecting and Identifying Gasses."
And how many of us in our youth referenced this spell in a cutting remark about someone else's farts?
Wow, only eight general knowledge spells. A bit on the paltry side, compared to Earth Magic's 11 and Water Magic's 14. Oh, well.
Q-1. Ritual of Wind Speak
This ritual deserves some serious analysis, because it bespeaks loads about the designer's assumptions about a gaming world. First, it assumes that the world has "wind spirits." Second, it assumes that these spirits can see and hear things, know the local languages, and that they're plentiful enough that there's at least one every 300 feet. Wow! That's a lot of assumption about how the world is composed. A low BC, but you get +5 per rank, and the XM is dirt-cheap for a ritual of this much power.
Q-2. Ritual of Binding Air
OK, here we go with the binding rituals. I wish the authors had spent just a wee bit of time describing what one can do with a bound element; however, we get more information regarding the element of air than any other elemental binding ritual. Here's the scary sentence: "The Adept gains control of all of the facets of the element." This includes, we are told, the ability to control weather, to "shape the winds" (which I guess means intensity and direction), and even create an air elemental(!). That is frickin' powerful. You could create an air helmet for underwater/poisonous gas immunity or create a tornado. Or the mother of all hailstorms. Or using them to change the air pressure around enmies to pop their eardrums and make their eyes bug out. I'd think the penalties for losing one's concentration while working with bound air would be pretty steep.
S-1. Windstorm Spell
(aka "Why adventurers hate Air Adepts" spell)
"Now, taste my airy wrath
whoops, sorry, there Larry
Elvira
Pip
" This spell has a huge radius as you progress in rank, and you're likely to knock over everyone friends, enemies, your horses, your battle standard
S-2. Spell of Storm Calling
Legitimate question: If the Adept moves after the storm arrives, does the storm front move, too, or does it stay put?
S-3. Spell of Ice Construction
The upgraded version of Ice Creation, this spell put joy in my heart and fear in my GM's eyes. 10 cubic feet + another 10 per rank, in any shape or shapes I want. I mean, where do I start? A favorite: sending a barrage of bowling-ball-sized, spiked ice balls rolling down a steeply-slanted roof or hillside onto unwary enemies. Ice marbles are great for making people slip and fall, and 10 cubic feet plus 10 per rank makes a mess of ice marbles. Ice caltrops can stop a whole company of cavalry. I even made an ice wheel (a series of them, actually), to replace a bad wheel on a wagon. Also, tavern-owners pay premium prices for crushed ice in the summer time.
S-4. Spell of Controlling Avians
The only way to make the Spell of Summoning Avians worth much besides a hearty skeet shoot is to control them once you call them, otherwise they tend to show up and then just fly away again. Even so, make sure you send them flying far away before the end of the spell duration, otherwise you get attacked. Or, just eat them (see Spell of Summoning Dinner).
S-5. Spell of Freezing Wind
OK, so why is it that being damaged by a freezing wind increases your chances of getting infected? Anybody? ("Because it's magic, that's why
now shut it.") Seriously, I don't get the whole cold = infectious equation. Maybe it's a really dirty freezing wind
S-6. Spell of Ice Projectiles
A formidable spell, as it attacks multiple targets, not to mention increasing the BC of infection. (Maybe it's really dirty ice
)
DEMONIC FUN: A demon can hit 21 separate targets with this spell. Each target that doesn't resist gets hit for +17 damage. Yeah.
S-7. Lightning Spell
Follow the bouncing bolt
I had a player who would try to figure out insane multiple ricochets for surprise attacks with lightning. Frequently, he'd mess up his vectors and then the fun began
A strong spell, as it automatically causes Stun, and still does half damage upon a successful resist.
S-8. Spell of Hibernation
A favorite of kidnappers (keeps the victims nice and quiet). It can also preserve your dying friends until you get them to a Healer.
S-9. Weapon of Cold Spell
The Air Magics weapon modification spell. Not just cold it's infernally cold. But you can't conjure a magic weapon out of ice, which is a bummer. Sure, you can make a normal sword using Ice Construction, but it's not magical, and they tend to break on the first hit.
S-10. Barrier of Wind Spell
Barrier of Wind plus Spell of Freezing Wind can make an Air Adept an untempting target.
S-11. Snow Simulacrum Spell
Man, if you thought Spell of Ice Construction was fun
I was eternally upset with my GM who would not allow me to use Spell of Ice Construction to quickly whip up, say, an ice stone giant, and then animate it with this spell. "It has to be made out of snow, not ice," he told me. Picky SOB
Anyway, the ramifications of this spell are astounding. If your party has the time to sculpt a snow dragon or a snow giant, you can have a bit of fun (and many possible backfires from the low BC). Beginners might want to go with a giant snow snake they're much easier to sculpt. I never got the chance to have my group actually go out in the snow and sculpt something, though one of my fondest wishes. The timing just never worked out.
Here's a few interesting questions that came up when I played an Air Mage: can snow spiders spin webs? Are snow vipers poisonous? Can you make a snow efreet? Can you use Communicate with Avians to talk to a snow owl? (The answers I received were: No; no; yes, but it's basically just a normal dude; and yes. This last one was useful for scouting and sending messages.)
S-12. Wall of Ice
The wall spell for this college. Ice pillars are fun to push over on things. A ring of ice coupled with Ice Construction can make a reasonable, if somewhat short-lived, igloo on short notice.
S-13. Ray of Cold Spell
More dirty, germ-laden air to bother others.
S-14. Spell of Sleep Gas
Damaging sleep gas, to be exact, which I've never completely understood. Anyone have rules as to how long an affected target stays unconscious?
S-15. Spell of Windwalking
One of the shortest descriptions of any spell, which naturally provides the greatest number of possible interpretations. What exactly is a "target" for this spell? A person? A dragon? A mountain? The distance traveled works out to be one mile + one additional mile per rank, if you continuously propel the target in the same direction for the entire duration. Can you change directions? Can the target be moved about in a circle? How about straight up? How about slammed repeatedly into the side of a castle wall or mountainside? What's the damage for 120 MPH impacts into a stone wall?
S-16. Spell of Whirlwind Vortex
Isn't "whirlwind vortex" kind of redundant? Anyway, I love the "you die, G.I." type of spell, even if the starting BC is 1%. A particularly gruesome way to dispatch foes; battlefields (and combatants) tend to look like Jackson Pollack paintings if anyone fails his resistance roll. You take damage even if you resist, although oddly, this whirlwind is not dirty and infectious. (It must clean like a white tornado
)
S-17. Spell of Frozen Doom
You die, G.I. part 2. (And I thought it was good to have ice water in your veins
)
R-1. Ritual of Controlling Weather
The only spell I know in all of gamerdom that has specific guidelines for how much you can alter the temperature and barometric pressure. However, these changes seem paltry compared to the twelve inches of precipitation you can dump on the area. I mean, you get a foot of rain on your house in one hour: you think you're going to care that the temperature went down by a few degrees, or that the barometer dropped under 29? Do barometers even exist in most game worlds? Does the character need a degree in meteorology to know how to manipulate these forces in such a way as to actually control the weather?
And
doesn't Q-2 let you control the weather? How is that different than this?
R-2. Ritual of Summoning and Controlling Air Elemental
Along similar lines, the specifics of this and similar spells makes me wonder: if you use the Ritual of Binding Air to create an Air Elemental, haven't you basically performed the same ritual as this? I mean, you have an air elemental, and it's bound, right? What's the diff?
The only difference I can really see is that Q-2 has a limitation of Concentration/maximum 1 hour + 1 hour per rank, while R-2 is Concentration only.