OdanBaere's page

Hey! Your database is a lot better than mine! I have tried doing something a little different and wanted to run it by you. I'm not so good at this and wanted to add mine to yours. I have tried listing the spells under their essential essences rather than their spell lists. If you check the back of the book there are essences assigned to the 4 spell lists. I compared the spell lists to see if there were any overlapping spells, and of course there were, which means depending on which overlap, then the spell must have that associated essence. The book breaks down the spell lists like this:

Arcane: Material & Mental
Divine: Spiritual & Vital
Occult: Mental & Spiritual
Primal: Material & Vital

So if a spell is on the occult and arcane list, it must have a mental essence, or trait. And if it's on the arcane, occult, and primal list it's got both the mental and material essence. In some cases they end up on all the lists and these are universal spells. I have found 1 case where the spell is seemingly misplaced, where the spell is on the occult and primal list without being on any other and thus somehow attuned to all the essences without being universal. It's remove paralysis by the way.

So anyways, I'm not sure how to go about adding an essence section to this database, but I think it may add even more minutia and thus better ability to find interesting trends! I'll put here my poor attempt. Let me know how to help!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cknqI1_gIogsO2A9jOCG-C5Vk3-KkPcI/view

I made my first Wizard last night and had an incredibility hard time with picking spells. Flipping back and forth was tedious. The biggest issue I had is that powers and spells are in the same area. I believe there should be a section for spells and then a section for powers.

When you are looking through the spells and just looking at the traits such as Evocation or Illusion to find your school you tend to stop dead when you get to a trait section that has no school. Then you realize, oh wait, this is a power... It is jarring and makes finding spells rough.

I also know it has never been done in the books but it would be nice if spells were (not in the spell lists but spell section) laid out as such with headers for each level:

Cantrips:
All Cantrips by alpha

1st Level Spells:
All 1st level spells by alpha

2nd Level Spells:
All 2nd level spells by alpha

etc....

Powers:
You could then just do Powers by level & alpha or just alpha.

Just my opinion from someone who doesn't usually play a caster but then when I wanted to had a confusing time finding information, more so than in 1st edition.

Hey! I have something you may like. A list of spells with listed traits and schools. You can see the traits and schools shorthands to the side and just search for those. I have them divided into different spell lists - due to another fascination I have, but you can recreate the spell lists by checking out the essences in the back of the book for each spell list. Should go something like this -

Arcane: Material & Mental
Divine: Spiritual & Vital
Occult: Mental & Spiritual
Primal: Material & Vital

and of course universal is for them all and then I created a list where the spells were only in the one spell list. It may be confusing, but let me know if you've any questions.

That is strange! An alternative may be to allow a spell caster to choose two essences (material, mental, spiritual, vital) and give them the option to pick spells out of those lists.

I made a list of those here and vital is probably a good choice for necromancy spells.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cknqI1_gIogsO2A9jOCG-C5Vk3-KkPcI/view

It recreates the arcane list by choosing the material and mental, but may give your players or you a better option in the meantime. And of course the universal list is for any spell caster.

I think that doing something like this would give casters the ability to refine what spells they want on a narrative level.

Ah. Yes that's a thing.

https://goo.gl/51dsyg

The H and U you'll find after spells up to like level 7 is from the direct copy from the PDF. Then I switched to another computer and I couldn't do that anymore and had to turn them out and forgot to add those in our take the others out. There are two major traits missing, attack and mental, as I didn't see them being important but I'll add them in at a later time.

Hopefully you find this interesting! I love the idea of narrative essences for spells and since they got so close to doing it even without wanting to publish it as a big thing, it's funny to see only one error.

The occult spell list is defined by a mental and spiritual essence whereas arcane is mental and material. I think the problem becomes the 3 mental attributes trying to fit 4 spell lists. Either they try to balance 3 attributes into 4 lists or just 2. Or they ignore the essences and leave spell castings primary stat as a class feature and not tied to the spell list.

What combination of mental, material, vital, and spiritual is charisma to you?

There's not a great way to transfer the Excel sheet into a forum post, but I'll see what I can do! Right now I've got the lists lined up along with the traits and schools of the spells. Was looking for consistent patterns for school choices and traits given the meta-atrribute. I'll get this in later today (Tuesday).

And some of them are only used like once? Chaotic and Misfortune? Tied to one spell it seems...

It also seems like having 38+ different spell traits is excessive. is there not a way to condense them? Like do you need morph if you have polymorph?

Ah, I see that now.

Hopefully they tighten up the formatting and wording before the final release.

I think there's a mistake for Unseen Servant, as it has a school/trait listing of

Medium
Mindless

Unless that's the exception you mentioned. I agree that "school" and "traits" should be separated! I wonder at what point the number of "fields" for this unique data becomes too many though.

I've done some nerding with the spell lists, essentially fabricating the meta-attribute (material, mental, spiritual, vital) spell lists instead of the given spell lists (arcane, Divine, occult, primal). While there are some spells that only show up on one list, meaning you need access to both the meta-attributes to cast it, 99% of the spells fall easily into either 1, 2, or 4 meta-attributes. You can check the definition of the spell list types in the back of the book and find these meta-attributes. If you want to recreate what I did, compare the spell lists and where there is overlap then the spell must resonate with some meta-attribute. This also brings to light a set of universal spells, but for now let's set this long intro aside.

Remove paralysis is the only spell that is on the occult and primal spell lists, but not on any others. The occult spell list has the meta-attributes of mental and spiritual whereas the primal spell list has material and vital. This means that the remove paralysis spell somehow resonantes with all the meta-attributes, but isn't on all the spell lists. As the only one that stands out in this manner I thought it prudent to inform the community of the narrative inconsistency.
A quick solution that I think would fit perfectly well with the narrative would be to either remove it from the occult list and add it to the Divine list, or simply add it to the Divine list.

I apologise for any improper forumn ettiquete as I never post on these.