Wizards can spend substantial amounts of time in their labs, performing various tasks, many of which require the expenditure of crystals to power them.
For the purposes of these rules, a "week" is considered to be the standard 8-day week of the Imperial calendar and a "month" is 32 days. Each day of lab work requires a minimum of 8 hours work, but additional time beyond 8 hours confers no additional benefit. Days of work on a project need not be contiguous unless otherwise specified.
Texts describing Arts or spells may be copied at a rate of two pages per day. Due to the nature of magical texts, the character making the copy must possess at least rudimentary magical ability: To copy spells, he must have at least level 1 ability with each Art required to cast it. To copy a tome on an Art, his skill must at least equal the level of the book.
A character may record any spells he knows in a format suitable for use by others as a text to learn them at a rate of 1 Complexity per 2 weeks. The text will take up 5 pages per Complexity and 1 page per Power of the spell.
See the section on Learning Arts.
A character with the Research Spell skill may attempt to devise new spells based upon the Arts with which he is familiar.
The first step in this process is to decide upon the desired effects and do preliminary research on the spell. This research takes 1 week, after which the character may make an Int test at +5 * Art Total and an additional +10 for Thaumatology skill. If the character knows a similar spell (GM's discretion, but a previous flawed version of the same concept will always be "similar"), he also receives +5 * Complexity of the similar spell. If this test is successful, the GM will reveal the Complexity and Power requirements for the spell as described. On a failure, the character may try again every 4 days until he succeeds.
Should the character decide to proceed after learning the difficulty of the spell, he must spend 10 EP * Complexity (for the first month or research only), do another month of research, then the GM rolls another Int test with the same modifiers as the initial design test, but additional penalties of -10 * Complexity and -1 * Power. If this roll succeeds, the character may 'buy' one Complexity per 10 points the roll was made by, one Power per 3 points the roll was made by, or any combination of the two. (e.g., If the roll is made by 15, you may choose to buy 1 Complexity and 1 Power or just 5 Power.) Any excess points on the roll which are not 'spent' may be used as a bonus on the next research roll for this spell. If this roll is an extreme critical failure, a flaw has been introduced - perhaps the Power or Complexity has been increased (this only affects learning and casting the spell, not researching it), the spell has a chance of causing Chaos Taint rather than the Magical variety, the spell cannot be mastered, or whatever else the GM's twisted imagination can devise. (The nature of the flaw, or even that there is a flaw, need not be revealed until the spell is cast...) Any other failure simply indicates that no progress has been made.
Once the full Complexity and Power of the spell have been 'bought', it is complete. At this point, he will have a text describing the spell and may immediately begin studying the text with a +20 on his rolls to learn the spell, as he is already intimately familiar with how it works.
A character wishing to record his knowledge of an Art must do so one level of knowledge at a time. To do so, he must spend a month working, then roll an Int test at +10 * his level in the Art and -20 * the level being written. If this test succeeds, the knowledge has been successfully recorded and he may proceed to record the next level. If it fails, the information is not yet clear and another month must be spent elaborating upon it.
The tome produced by the character grows by 25 pages with the first attempt to record each level and 10 pages for each subsequent attempt. On a critical success, the character manages to be exceptionally concise while remaining clear, reducing the volume of that month's writing by 1 page per 5 points the roll was made by. Similarly, on a critical failure, the author rambles on, adding 1 page per 5 points the roll was missed by.
Under no circumstances is a character able to author a text exceeding half his own level of knowledge (rounded down) in an Art.
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