iFAQ: Magical Education

While we’re all in quarantine, I’m going to do what I can to post more short articles. I’m building up a log of interesting questions from the inner circle of my Patreon supporters that I’ll be answering as time permits. Today’s question is a spinoff from yesterday’s discussion of Aereni Learning.

University is the primary way magewrights and wizards are educated. Is a Magewright getting further education to become a Wizard like going from a bachelor’s degree to a doctorate (Wizard 3) or a second, separate, degree (Magewright 2/Wizard 1)?

None of the above!

It’s easy to see mechanics and lose sight of story. A wizard can change out their spells every time they rest, which makes spells feel interchangeable. But that’s not how magewrights work at all. The concept of the magewright has always been at odds with the rules; the idea never really worked with the Vancian magic of third edition. In fifth edition, the mechanics of the magewright finally are in line with the core idea. “Magewright” is a general term, like “artisan.” It means “Someone who uses magic as a part of their occupation.” The standard magewright has one or two tool or skill proficiencies and can cast two or three spells. They cast those spells as rituals—even if they’re spells that don’t normally have the ritual tag—and have an added component cost, even if the spell doesn’t normally have a cost associated with casting.

So: a locksmith can cast mending as a cantrip and arcane lock and knock as rituals, and has proficiency with tinker’s tools and thieves’ tools. A healer can cast resistance and spare the dying as cantrips, and detect poison and disease and lesser restoration as rituals, and is proficient with Medicine and herbalism kits. These are two entirely different sets of skills—and learning to magically repair objects (mending) is as different from learning to repair people (lesser restoration) as mechanics versus medicine in our world; the fact that it’s using arcane science instead of mundane science doesn’t alter that fact. So just as an automotive mechanic isn’t going to go to the same school as a medical doctor, a magewright locksmith won’t study at the same institution as a magewright healer.

MOST magewright education isn’t done at universities. It’s handled by trade schools maintained by the associated guild. So if you want to be a healer, you’ll study with the Healer’s Guild of House Jorasco; if you want to be a locksmith, you’ll get your training from the Warding Guild of House Kundarak. When you’re done, you’ll be licensed by the guild, which will also help place you with a business. The Arcane Congress of Aundair has been developing its own trade programs, but this is something discouraged by the house guilds.

So: what does this mean for arcane universities, such as Arcanix? It’s the difference between studying physics and learning to repair a dishwasher. Guild schools train magewrights to perform clear and concrete tasks. At Arcanix, people study the THEORIES of arcane science. They learn to perform magic in very different ways than magewrights, and to cast spells that magewrights could never master. Even when casting the exact same spell, a wizard and a magewright do so in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WAYS. When a wizard casts arcane lock, it takes one action and costs 25 gp, and burns one of the wizard’s spell slots. When a magewright locksmith casts arcane lock, it costs 65 gp and takes an hour; but if they’ve got the gold and the time, they can cast it over and over and over again. The key point here is that the result is the same, but what they are DOING is very different… and the training for each is entirely different. Magewrights study for years to master their rituals; this is because those rituals are very different from the techniques of wizardry, which is WHY your wizard can’t cast arcane lock as a ritual.

Now: NPCs don’t follow the same rules as player characters. You CAN have an NPC who has the same powers as a wizard—as shown by some NPC stat blocks—but this is also an opportunity to add story and flavor to the world. It’s possible that many graduates of Arcanix are never able to cast spells except as rituals. Some will be wandslingers or Magic Initiates, mastering just a few cantrips or a single spell. Others may only be able to master spellcasting in specific spheres: an NPC evoker can ONLY cast evocation spells, and just doesn’t understand conjuration. The professors at Arcanix aren’t supposed to all be fully operational 9th level wizards; they are arcane scholars, but don’t have the same powers as player characters. Even at low levels, player characters are remarkable; the versatility of a PC wizard reflects remarkable talent and an understanding of arcane principles that most students never master.

So back to the original question: Magewrights and wizards are on completely different paths and study at different institutions. A magewright will usually study at a guild trade school that teaches both the specialized rituals and the skill and tool proficiencies they need for their work. Universities such as Arcanix teach broader arcane science; they can produce wizards and artificers, but many graduates only possess a fraction of the abilities of those classes. They understand the THEORY—and end up trained in Arcana, and perhaps possessing the abilities of a Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster, or other limited spellcasting abilities as decided by the DM—but they aren’t all full wizards. What happens if a magewright studies at Arcanix? Assuming they’re an NPC, it’s up the the DM to decide how these two entirely different sets of education combine. It could be as simple as “They’re a magewright, but now they have proficiency with Arcana.”

This in turn ties to what I said in the previous article: Aereni students take far longer with their arcane studies than their counterparts in the Five Nations… and they also produce more actual wizards. Because despite its limitations, Aerenal is fundamentally more advanced in its understanding of arcane science than the Five Nations; they are just resistant to abandoning their established traditions and pursuing dramatic innovation, while the Five Nations is quickly evolving.

Where do wand adepts fall into the wizard-magewright dichotomy?

Wand adepts fall in between, in the same category as “Magic Initiates.” They’ve learned how to cast a few cantrips and a spell or two, and critically, they cast them in the once-per-short-rest fashion of a wizard as opposed to the as-a-ritual of the Magewright. They just lack the brilliant insight into arcane principles that makes the wizard so flexible; they’ve learned how to do a few very specific things. This where MOST Arcanix students fall—they can do a LITTLE magic, but they aren’t as versatile or as gifted as a full wizard.

With that said, most wand adepts learned their skills in specific military training programs, not at Arcanix. We SAY that a wandslinger can have any two offensive cantrips and a spell, but in practice, everyone in an Aundairian Flametongue unit would be trained in control flamesfire bolt, and burning hands. If you have a different set of spells, you’re from a different unit.

Do magewrights occurs in less civilized areas or are those almost always adepts and the like?

Magewrights require specialized training. They shouldn’t just appear randomly in the wild, any more than a random villager could suddenly become an electrician. With that said, there’s a few options I could imagine.

  • They apprenticed to a previous magewright. Somewhere down the line, there was someone with formal training, and they passed it on. Personally, I think it would take longer to do this that to learn through the standard training, or this person might have gaps in their knowledge; but it should be possible to “learn on the job.”
  • You could posit a sort of sorcerous magewright. Sorcery exists and can manifest spontaneously. Just as the professors of Arcanix aren’t full wizards, you could posit a sorcerer who has a specific arcane talent but whose powers don’t go any further. They wouldn’t LOOK like a normal magewright—it wouldn’t be the SAME sort of ritual a magewright performed—but they could potentially perform the same functions.
  • They could be adepts or gleaners, driven more by faith than arcane training. Again, adepts don’t perform the SAME rituals as magewrights and to a large degree it’s about honing a gift as opposed to choosing a profession. You can discover you have a gift for healing or divination and hone that gift to become an oracle, but you can’t just declare “I’m going to become a faith-based plumber!”

Is it possible for PC wizards, artificers and others to learn rituals for magewrights? How about the Ritual Caster feat?

As it stands, no. The Ritual Caster feat only lets you cast spells that have the ritual tag; magewrights cast spells AS rituals in spite of the fact that they don’t have the ritual tag. Again, the idea is that magewrights spend years in specialized training learning to cast their specific rituals; they aren’t supposed to be something you can casually pick up.

On the one hand, this seems odd; why can’t you play a character who was a magewright before they became an adventurer? The answer is because it would break the balance of the game. Ritual casting is a fundamentally different system than the Vancian model of spell slots. If a player character cleric could cast lesser restoration as a ritual, it would fundamentally alter the balance of many threats; as is, the DM has control over whether a Jorasco healer is available. Magewrights break the rules, but that’s OK because NPCs and player characters don’t follow the same rules; player characters get wide versatility and the ability to rapidly improve, while NPCs get the benefits of deep specialization.

That’s all for now! If you want a deeper dive into magewrights, take a look at this article. Thanks as always to my Patreon supporters!

Dragonmarks: Magewrights and Wand Adepts

One of the underlying principles of Eberron is that magic is a part of civilization. It’s not limited to a handful of mighty wizards in ivory towers; there’s an arcane locksmith down on Third Street, next door to the medium and the guy who makes everbright lanterns. With that said, this magic is widespread and useful, but not powerful. The streets may be lit with continual flame, but teleportation and resurrection are rare… and a wish is unheard of. It’s wide magic, not high magic.

The previous article looked at common magic items and magic item creation, and considered how to make that work in 5E D&D. But magic items are only part of the wide magic of Eberron. It also embraces the idea that spellcasting can be a job – not limited to full wizards or sorcerers, but also people who do nothing but make magic lanterns or speak to the dead. Now, you may look at this article and say “In 5E, anyone can get the Magic Initiate feat – doesn’t that mean magic is just scattered throughout the world without any of this?” It only means that if YOU decide it means that, because there are no rules about NPCs acquiring feats. A player character can be a Magic Initiate, but as a DM and world designer it’s up to you to decide how that’s reflected in the wider world. In Eberron, magic is a science. People don’t just wake up one day with a new feat and know how to cast light. These things take time and training – and that produces magewrights and wand adepts.

Magewrights

A wizard is extremely versatile. Your wizard can grab a spellbook, spend a few hours studying it, and cast a spell they’ve never seen before. That’s great, because wizards are exceptional people. But in Eberron, you can cast magic without having that degree of versatility. This is the magewright, someone who spends years learning how to perform the skills and spells associated with a particular trade. In 3.5 D&D this was an NPC class, but that’s not required in 5E; instead, you can simple state that an NPC magewright has the ability to cast the spells you want them to cast. Beyond this, we can also say that the spells the magewrights can perform are different from those used by PCs – typically, because they are more limited. For example, Prestidigitation allows the caster to heat, chill, clean, soil, and more. Mending allows the caster to mend anything. But you can say that a magewright chef knows a limited version of Prestidigitation that only affects food – and that a launderer knows Prestidigitation and Mending, but can only work with cloth. The fact that the player character can mend anything is again a sign of their versatility and exceptional talent.

My idea of a magewright is that they can cast one to three cantrips or spells. They don’t require spellbooks or memorization; they have perfected these spells over the course of years. However, their cantrips may be limited (as noted above) and their spells can only be cast as rituals. So the arcane locksmith can cast Arcane Lock all day, but it takes time. I’ll talk more about ways in which these rituals differ from PC spells further below, but first, let’s take a look at a few Magewrights you could find in the world…

  • Chef: Prestidigitation, only affecting food; perhaps a form of Gentle Repose for preserving meals, or Purify Food and Drink. Proficient with cook’s utensils.
  • Healer: Detect Poison & DiseaseLesser Restoration, Spare the Dying. Proficient with Medicine and herbalism kits.
  • Launderer: Prestidigitation and Mending, both only affecting cloth.
  • Lamplighter: Light, Continual Flame. Uses tinkers’ tools to construct lanterns.
  • Locksmith: Arcane Lock, Knock. Proficient with thieves’ tools and tinkers’ tools.
  • Medium: Speak with Dead. Perhaps a form of Minor Illusion that produces an image of a dead person as they were in life. Possibly proficient in Insight and Persuasion, if they help bereaved make sense of a loss… or Insight and Deception, if they use grief to take advantage of mourners.
  • Oracle: Augury, Divination. Proficient in Insight and Investigation. This is definitely a case where I would adjust the magewright versions of these spells. In the hands of a magewright, Augury – which should be the bread and butter of a common oracle – should be able to predict outcomes farther in the future, though still only with the binary answer of woe or weal. An oracle who can perform full Divination should be rarer (it is a fourth level spell) and the ritual could take longer than usual and be more expensive.

These are just a handful of ideas; there are many possibilities. A suspicious noble could have a food taster who knows Detect Poison and Purify Food and Drink. The city watch in a major city could have a verifier who can cast Detect Thoughts and Zone of Truth. There’s also a critical spell from Eberron that’s missing in 5E, and that’s Magecraft – a spell that provides a bonus to a skill check related to crafting. So you begin to get a sense of the possibilities. But also consider the limitations.

  • What does it cost? Eberron treats magic as a science and magewrights as part of the economy. The lesser restoration spell has no cost, which is fine, because it’s NOT a ritual and player characters can’t use it that often; the “cost” is that it uses a limited spell slot. But if you’re going to introduce it as a service that can be performed by a magewright, you either need to ADD a cost or come up with an explanation for why disease still exists in the world. While every spell has unique components, it’s always been the idea that Eberron dragonshards are the basic fuel of the magical economy, and that applies here. House Tharashk refines raw shards to produce residuum, glowing powder that serves as a fuel for most rituals – so a locksmith can use residuum instead of powdered gold dust when casting arcane lock. You can add whatever cost you want to set the price of a service. Does curing a disease cost ten gold pieces or a hundred? Even the launderer might have to sprinkle a copper’s worth of residuum over the cloth they wish to cleanse.
  • What does it look like? These are jobs people do. Mechanically they involve performing a ritual. But it’s up to you to add the color to that. An oracle can cast augury as a ritual. But what are they doing in that ritual? Are they reading cards? Palms? Auras? Are they studying star charts or patterns of the planes? A locksmith can cast arcane lock. Are they tracing elaborate patterns in the air with an iron wand? Just because these things are mechanically all “spells” doesn’t mean that the magewright just chews their lip and concentrates for a few minutes, regardless of what they are doing. Add flavor!
  • Who can do this? In Eberron in particular, it’s established that the Dragonmarked Houses dominate certain fields of magical industry. One possibility is that the Houses are where you go to learn the skills of the magewright – that most locksmiths are trained and licensed by House Kundarak. On the other hand, if you want to give the houses a tighter hold you can say that many magewright rituals are restricted to someone with a particular dragonmark… that only Kundarak dwarves can master the rituals of the arcane locksmith, that only Jorasco halflings can be magewright healers. The reason you don’t see a verifier at every watch station is because it requires the Mark of Detection. This is a way to truly emphasize the power and influence of a house; if you want a magic lock, Kundarak is your only option. Of course this is specifically about magewrights; your PC wizard can cast Arcane Lock, but do you really want to make a living doing it?

So that’s the idea of the magewright: that beyond magical items, there are people in the world who can perform magical services. It’s up to you how prevalent they are in your campaign. In a major city like Sharn, you’d see many magewrights performing all sorts of services. But in a small village, they probably do their laundry the old fashioned way. Their might be a single magewright in town; what service do they provide?

Divine Magewrights? 

Under 3.5, “magewright” was an NPC class that specifically dealt with arcane magic, counterbalanced against the adept NPC class which was a limited divine caster. Using the approach I suggest above, I don’t think it’s necessary to draw that line so sharply. Certainly any single individual is either practicing divine or arcane magic, but I think that you can use this same approach either way; you as DM simply need to be clear in your mind which is which. Specifically taking the Healer and the Oracle suggested above: either one of these could be presented as either arcane or divine. An arcane healer might be a Jorasco halfling who makes no prayers, but simply weaves rituals to cleanse the sick… while a divine healer might be a Silver Flame friar whose faith allows them to heal the sick. The oracle could be studying arcane patterns or asking the divine for guidance. Someone versed in Arcana or Religion should easily be able to tell which is which, but MECHANICALLY they are the same: an individual who can perform a few magical effects but who lacks the abilities or versatility of a spellcasting class.

Notably, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything adds a spell called Ceremony that allows a priest to imbue a religious ritual with divine power, adding a magical effect to a wedding or a coming of age ceremony. Following this magewright approach, you could easily have Ceremony, Thaumaturgy, and maybe Spare The Dying as a common set of spells known by a typical lead priest in a community – a halfway between an entirely mundane priest and a full spellcasting cleric.

Wand Adepts

When we initially developed Eberron wands were powerful and disposable magic items, and we made a conscious decision not to make them everyday tools; a fighter who wanted to kill someone across a room would still rely on a bow or a crossbow. We invented the eternal wand – a wand with only two charges, but that recharged over time and could be used with less restrictions. But even there, the cost of such a wand was too great to make it feasible as something every soldier would carry… and it still required some magical training.

However, I certainly like the IDEA of the Aundairian “musketeer” with a bandolier of wands. And with the various changes to magic over the last two editions – notably, the introduction of cantrips, the idea of wands as nonmagical arcane focus items, and the Magic Initiate feat – I think there’s a lot of room to introduce the casual wand.

A wand adept learns to perform a few offensive spells, but they require an arcane focus to channel those effects. A typical wand adept knows two offensive cantrips and a single first level spell they can perform once per long rest. But all of these require the arcane focus of a wand. So one wand adept might know acid splash, poison spray, and color spray; another might have ray of frost, fire bolt and burning hands. The critical point here is that the adept requires a wand to perform these spells, but the wand isn’t magical. It’s not a magic item worth hundreds of gold pieces; it’s an arcane focus costing ten galifars. While you COULD say that any wand will do, I would further say that adept wands are specialized by effect. Looking above, I might say that an adept uses the same wand for fire bolt and burning hands… but that ray of frost requires a different wand, one attuned to cold. So you can have the Aundairian duelist flinging fire from one wand and ice from the other, and if you disarm them of one wand they’re limited until they recover it.

The principle of this is drawn from the Magic Initiate feat; it’s simply adding an additional restriction that a player character isn’t bound by, because PCs are remarkable. It’s adding the idea that offensive magic is evolving… but that most of the time a wand is a focus, and that the fully magic wands are more significant and expensive.

Now with this said: the idea of a wand adept IS that learning to use a wand requires training and effort. This is common in a place like Aundair, which places a high value on magical talent. But just as a player character who wanted to use a wand like this would need to get the Magic Initiate feat (with the wand being there for color), the wand adept has invested resources learning to use the wand that could have been spent elsewhere. If I have an Aundairian soldier blasting her foes with wands, I might give the Karrnathi knight the benefit of Heavy Armor Master or make the expert Thrane archer a Sharpshooter. The skill isn’t in the wand, it’s in the person using it… and if I introduce wand adepts, I’d want to make clear that they could have invested that skill in other ways.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR PLAYER CHARACTERS? Well, if you have the ability to cast an offensive cantrip, congratulations! You’re a wand adept. You’re so talented that you can cast your spell even without a wand, but nothing’s stopping you from using the wand for flavor. If you’re not a spellcaster, that’s what the Magic Initiate feat is for. Essentially, with the integration of cantrips as a reliable form of magical weapon, it’s more plausible to have people using magical attacks instead of mundane weapons – but at this point in time, the amount of training required to use a wand has prevented wands from replacing mundane weapons. And in that small Brelish village nobody knows how to use a wand, and they’ll consider your wand-wielding duelist to be an Aundairian hipster. If you and your DM want to embrace the idea of the wand adept, I could see a variation of the Magic Initiate feat that requires the use of a wand… perhaps in exchange for a +1 bonus to attack rolls or spell DC with these cantrips as a balance for requiring the focus.

Like magewrights, you COULD push beyond the limitations of the Magic Initiate feat. For example, putting the two concepts together, you could have a staff adept who can cast fireball as a ritual, but requires both a specialized staff and burns dragonshards with every casting. This is a way to compromise with the question of “How could the Five Nations afford to deploy magic items on the field?” It could be that the mystical artillery relied on the skills of the artillerists as much as on the power of the item… that a siege staff is just a big piece of carved wood if you don’t have someone who can use it. This of course gets into the question of war magic, as a fireball isn’t actually that useful in a truly large-scale military engagement… but THAT is a topic for another article.

Let’s Talk About Wands

Wands themselves serve a different role in 5E. When we created Eberron in 3.5, we introduced the idea of eternal wands as an evolution of “wand science” – a wand that wasn’t entirely disposable, and that could be used by a wider range of people. In 5E, that’s standard for a wand; the average wand has 7 charges and regains 1d6+1 charges every day. In addition, many wands don’t require the user to be a spellcaster; anyone can use a wand of magic missiles. This ties also to the introduction of at-will offensive magic over the last two editions… allowing for a character who prefers to rely on cantrips instead of ranged weapons. This idea of wand adepts is about incorporating the evolution of these mechanics into the setting in a logical way. If this is how magic works, this is how we would see it in the world.

With that said, this can cause some confusion about what exactly a wand IS. As I see it, there are three types of wands in the world.

  • Unaligned Focus Item. As described on pages 151 and 203 of the PHB. This is a wand that is generally designed for channeling arcane energy, but not for any particular purpose; a wizard can use that one wand for all of their spells. This has a base cost of 10 GP… but I’ll talk more about this later.
  • Aligned Focus Item. This is what a wand adept uses. The idea is that the design or components of the wand predispose it to channeling a particular type of energy; a “fire wand” might be made from charred wood harvested from a Fernian manifest zone. The wand has no innate power, but it’s easier to channel a particular type of energy through it, and a wand adept needs that boost. So the wand doesn’t grant you the ability to cast Burning Hands; it’s simply that if you’re a wand adept who knows how to cast Burning Hands, you still need a fire-aligned wand to cast the spell. This still has a base cost of 10 GP.
  • Actual Magic Item. This is a Wand of Fireballs or Wand of Magic Missiles. The magic is IN THE WAND… in the case of a Wand of Magic Missiles, ANYONE can use it. Many wands require “Attunement by a spellcaster” and I would allow the talents of a wand adept to count for this purpose – so if you’re a wand adept, you can attune a Wand of Lightning Bolts, even if it’s not a spell you can cast alone. You are trained in the science of wandcraft, and the power is in the wand. In 5E, a Wand of Fireballs is rare. So they definitely EXIST, but they are expensive and NOT things you’d see a common soldier carrying; We’re talking thousands of galifars, as opposed to the 10 gp aligned wand. Someone pulling out a Wand of Fireballs is like someone producing a bazooka.

Now, there’s definitely room for middle ground here… and that’s the enhanced focus item. As it stands, a fire-aligned focus item is simply restrictive – saying that the wand adept MUST have a fire-aligned wand to cast fire spells. But you could also have fancy aligned wands that provide BENEFITS when you channel certain types of spells. For example, a darkwood wand studded with Mabar crystals that adds +1 DC to any necromancy spells you cast using the wand. That should cost more than 10 GP, but certainly less that 4,000 GP. A wand adept could use it as a focus for necromancy spells, but I’d generally allow a wizard to use it with ANY spells – it’s just that necromancy spells get a bonus.

Post your thoughts and questions below. In my next article I’ll be getting back to Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and how I’d incorporate it into my Eberron campaign. Thanks as always to my Patreon supporters, who make it possible for me to spend time on this site.As always, bear in mind that nothing I say on this site is canon; these are simply ideas that I’m exploring.