Post by oakesspalding on Oct 31, 2017 11:10:00 GMT -6
From What is Book of Spells? Part I: Magic-Users at Save Versus All Wands
The short answer is that it's a spell catalog for the Seven Voyages of Zylarthen universe, containing 296 spells presented alphabetically, approximately half of which are new to Zylarthen. Some of the old spells have been rewritten and shuffled around slightly among classes and levels. Thus, Magic-Users now have 216 spells - 30 per level for levels 1-6 and 12 per level for levels 7-9. And Witches and High Priests each have completely unique lists of 40 spells - or "powers" for High Priests. In the process, the Witch and High Priest NPC classes have been somewhat re-designed.
I'm going to break the longer answer up into three parts. Today I'll focus on Magic-User spells.
Let me go back a step and describe what was done for spells in the original Zylarthen. In the foreword to Vol. 1, I implied that the game was based solely on OD&D's "three little brown books," published in 1974. That was true for classes, abilities and (roughly) the combat mechanism. But attentive readers of Zylarthen and these blog posts know that monsters, magic items and spells tracked the first two-years of Dungeons & Dragons, taking things through the late fall of 1975. Or, in other words, I made use not only of the three little brown books but also Greyhawk and the first four issues of The Strategic Review. Most spells were inspired by these sources. There were a few original ones, and we declined to use some others, most notably the upper-level Magic-User spells (levels 7-9) of Greyhawk and roughly half of the Illusionist spells of Strategic Review. Of the spells we used, Magic-Users got all of the Magic-User spells and some of the Cleric spells. NPC High Priests (clerics) got a list similar, though not identical to, the OD&D list, the bulk of it shared with Magic-Users. Witches got a mix of the most "witchlike" Magic-User, Cleric and Illusionist offerings. Again, a few were unique, but most were shared...
More here.
The short answer is that it's a spell catalog for the Seven Voyages of Zylarthen universe, containing 296 spells presented alphabetically, approximately half of which are new to Zylarthen. Some of the old spells have been rewritten and shuffled around slightly among classes and levels. Thus, Magic-Users now have 216 spells - 30 per level for levels 1-6 and 12 per level for levels 7-9. And Witches and High Priests each have completely unique lists of 40 spells - or "powers" for High Priests. In the process, the Witch and High Priest NPC classes have been somewhat re-designed.
I'm going to break the longer answer up into three parts. Today I'll focus on Magic-User spells.
Let me go back a step and describe what was done for spells in the original Zylarthen. In the foreword to Vol. 1, I implied that the game was based solely on OD&D's "three little brown books," published in 1974. That was true for classes, abilities and (roughly) the combat mechanism. But attentive readers of Zylarthen and these blog posts know that monsters, magic items and spells tracked the first two-years of Dungeons & Dragons, taking things through the late fall of 1975. Or, in other words, I made use not only of the three little brown books but also Greyhawk and the first four issues of The Strategic Review. Most spells were inspired by these sources. There were a few original ones, and we declined to use some others, most notably the upper-level Magic-User spells (levels 7-9) of Greyhawk and roughly half of the Illusionist spells of Strategic Review. Of the spells we used, Magic-Users got all of the Magic-User spells and some of the Cleric spells. NPC High Priests (clerics) got a list similar, though not identical to, the OD&D list, the bulk of it shared with Magic-Users. Witches got a mix of the most "witchlike" Magic-User, Cleric and Illusionist offerings. Again, a few were unique, but most were shared...
More here.