All fans of Renaissance magic are invited to join us on the Shewstone Publishing forum to help us decide what spells will make it into the core book. This week, we’ll be selecting Astrology spells by choosing what character concepts will be supported in the core book.
The Astrologer by Ferdinand Bol (1616-1684), courtesy of the Rosenwald Collection, US National Gallery of Art
The author team has developed slightly over 200 spells for Magonomia®. This presents a bit of a challenge because, as you can see from the Starter Rules, each spell takes up the better part of a page. From a production standpoint, we can’t fit that many pages in a book. A 400-page book would only be cost effective at a large scale and it’s not realistic to expect our crowdfunding campaign to bring in over 1,000 backers who want hard copies. It might happen, but we certainly can’t count on it.
The way forward for the Magonomia® Core Rules project is a more typically sized, 250-300 page rule book. This means not all of our spells will fit — some have to be saved for future supplements.
To help us decide which spells to prioritize in the near term, we’re using the concept of archetypes. Archetypes are an optional tool for character creation that describe a broad concept for a type of Renaissance wizard, such as “Alchemist mystic” or “Astrologer detective.” The archetype comes with a list of suggested spells that will best equip the wizard to do their job. Come help us figure out which archetypes are your favorites, and we’ll make sure they have a collection of interesting, useful, and historically-themed spells to match their concept.