Magic 101

So, You Want To Be A Magic User?

Note: what follows is a personal view of how to get the best from the Daggerfall magic system. It is unlikely to be to everyone's liking or style of game play so please proceed with caution and an open mind!

Becoming successful at magic basically involves joining the Mages guild where at the appropriate rank you can make your own custom spells and buy or make magical items. Rank in the guild is not directly equivalent to character rank, but is earned by improving magical skills and reputation with the guild. The number of spell points available to a character for spell casting is directly related to the intelligence attribute of the character. Magic resistance is based on the willpower attribute. These attributes can be increased with the bonus points given when a character increases in level. In addition, attributes and skills can be magically enhanced with spells and items. Not surprisingly all this requires time and a fair amount of expense.

For the power magic user there are a few things you can do to help speed things along and advance more quickly in the guild.

Once you get out of Privateers' Hold you need to head for the nearest town (Gothway Garden is just south of the hold and has a Mages Guild) and sell the stuff you've picked up to get some money. If necessary, buy a cart and go back to PH to pick up some more, or rob some graveyards along the way. Join the mages guild. For this your highest magical skill needs to be at 22 or higher and you need a second skill at 4. If your magical skills are not high enough you may need to work them up some other way first. All temples will train in at least one magic skill so join the appropriate one and buy training in one magical skill to raise it up to 22. The trainable skills are:

arkay.gif - 1798 Bytes ArkayDestruction, Restoration
akatosh.gif - 3330 Bytes AkatoshDestruction
dibella.gif - 1739 BytesDibellaIllusion, Restoration
julianos.gif - 1586 Bytes JulianosAlteration, Mysticism, Thaumaturgy
kynareth.gif - 2006 Bytes KynarethDestruction, Illusion
mara.gif - 2276 Bytes MaraIllusion, Restoration
stendarr.gif - 2018 Bytes StendarrRestoration
zenithar.gif - 2298 Bytes ZenitharThaumaturgy

Note: Temple Kynareth also has a spellmaker, but this is not available until you reach the 6th temple rank, so does not provide a fast path to powerful magic use!

Once you're accepted in the mages guild you immediately have access to the spellmaker. The first thing to do once you have enough money is to use the spellmaker to make some cheap training spells and a few other essentials for survival. Once you have the training spells it's practice, practice, practice to increase your magic skills. At the same time you need to do lots of quests for the mages guild to increase your rep with them. Each successful quest will earn you 5 reputation points and the best quests to take for speed are the 'guard the blank' quests. These can be done within a day so you can get plenty done in the 30 days you have before the guild reviews your rank standing again. When the time comes for review you'll be promoted to whatever rank is appropriate to your current skill and reputation level. For real power magic using you are aiming for rank 5 and access to the item maker. The figures for accessing the important benefits are as follows:

RankBenefitHigh SkillLow SkillReputation
0access to spellmaker2240
3buy magic items391630
5access to item maker552450

Warning: If all your magical skills are in your primary and major skill slots increasing them will also increase your character's game level. This can be dangerous if your other skills are not advancing at the same rate as the game will generate your opponents according to your character level. As a result you may find yourself facing quite tough opponents before you're ready for them.

There's one other thing you should be aware of before rushing off to the nearest item maker. The game was never designed for magic items to be used constantly, hence the need to employ a cheat code in order to repair them. They were supposed to be there as a backup to be used when you had no other means of achieving an objective and as a result excessive use of them could upset game balance and make things too easy.

That said, if you're still bursting to be the most powerful and invincible mage in all of the Iliac Bay, choose your method:

The SpellMaker
The ItemMaker

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