Ftr, Nature magic is referred to as Druidism/Shamanism or something like that in the original Amstaad rules.
In post 18, Yaw wrote:The big thing here is figuring out the aspects/skills for magic, and figuring out a balanced way to make Fire/Water/Air/Earth/Nature work. I personally prefer not having lists of spells, but instead a solid framework of how they work that mods can refer to, and a good understanding of the power level involved in sample effects.
Definitely this.
Gathering materials for normal casting will probably get dull fast and makes magic much harder to balance with other types of combat (non-combat magic like Alchemy/most sorts of Nature excepted of course). If all your spells require time to prepare then they have to be more powerful to be balanced, but then won't a mage one-shot all his enemies? etc.
We're playing with elves and dwarves in a medieval setting, I say we screw physics.
Just create that fireball or earth wall from nothing, who's going to stop you? The universe? We make the universe.
On the types of magic:
Fire, Water, Air, Earth
obviously (should decide whether lightning is fire, air or it's own element).
Divination
, I love the flavour, we should definitely try to get this working. My suggestion: You can look for something specific (the more absolute/detailed the harder it is) you either pass or fail, or you can look in general and you see something depending on your MoS, different methods/races are better for finding different types of things. Yeah you can look up the exact wwwwwh of a PCs death but it's going to be Legendary+++ difficulty.
Conjuration
, meh, too much trouble and how does it even work, most other types of magic you can just say use mana get effect, for conjuration you are drawing out an item from an astral realm (what is it? does everything exist there?), if I can summon a small pellet, can I also summon a small pellet filled with the most deadly poison known to man?
Alchemy
, possibly combine this with enchanting, anything that (semi-)permanently alters the properties of an object.
Nature
, prossibly divide this into healing and earth/water magic. I don't really like the whole Druidism/animal companion thing it's hard to scale, some mages having a familiar or something is possible but doesn't have to be related to one specific type of magic.
There are of course a load of more possibilities, I'm not so good at thinking those up... Lets make that T-Bone's job.