Hello! We have something of a debate going on in our campaign and I am hoping for an official answer. The question is:
Can a mage copy a spell from their spellbook to a captured spellbook or a blank one, thus creating a “backup copy” of formulas for spells. If their spellbook were destroyed, they would use the backup as a formula so they could add the spells to their repertoire without having to track down a bunch of other wizards to copy spells out of their books or completely recreate it from memory.
We know they would still need to spend the gold and the time to add them to their repertoire if the book was destroyed.
Sorry a fast adendum to this: Is your spellbook and your repertoire the same thing? I thought the book was just a list of different omens, starsigns, etc to track and your repertoire was which of those you were choosing to track to cast those specific spells.
Furthermore, you don’t need to spend gold to copy spells or to fill an empty repertoire slot, only to switch-out spells in your repertoire, rewrite them from memory, or research them. If you picked up your personally scribed back-up spell-book before losing you started losing spells for having lost your spell-book, you might not even need any study time.
The only difficult part of this strategy is the time required to make your back-up may be inconvenient, but if you have some down-time, you might want to do it bit-by-bit. Heck, you could even hide a few emergency spell pages on your person in case you lose access to your book for whatever reason. Arcane liches almost certainly keep an extra spell-book hidden by there phylactery and other high level mages may have a travel spellbook for the road keeping their large, arcane grimoire with less-often used spells, back home.
Furthermore, you don’t need to spend gold to copy spells or to fill an empty repertoire slot, only to switch-out spells in your repertoire, rewrite them from memory, or research them. If you picked up your personally scribed back-up spell-book before losing you started losing spells for having lost your spell-book, you might not even need any study time.
The only difficult part of this strategy is the time required to make your back-up may be inconvenient, but if you have some down-time, you might want to do it bit-by-bit. Heck, you could even hide a few emergency spell pages on your person in case you lose access to your book for whatever reason. Arcane liches almost certainly keep an extra spell-book hidden by there phylactery and other high level mages may have a travel spellbook for the road keeping their large, arcane grimoire with less-often used spells, back home.
And that time cost for copying is the reason our party’s MU is seriously considering researching a Copy / Erase spell… Libramancy is an awesome discipline, and the logical extension of the arcane magic mechanics.
Well, your spellbook is full of personalized shorthand and specific to your metaphyscial situation. So you can’t copy spells into somebody else’s spellbook, because they wouldn’t be able to understand your notes.
It seems to me that you’re asking if a mage can have more than one copy of his spellbook. I don’t see why not, if he put the time and resources into creating a copy.
Potentially unbalancing, though. I would say that magically copying magical formula/spells is difficult because of interactions between the arcane structures. Therefore a spell copying cannont be safely done with a normal copy spell. Arcane copy spells have one or more of the following weaknesses:
They take longer than normal copies, possibly as long as scribing yourself (but hey, you can still do something else while it works)
There is a slight chance of error or mishap
arcane copy spells are higher level than normal copy spells
they need some amount of active intervention to work (you can scribe at magically enhanced 2x speed)
There is a limit to your use of the copy spell (perhaps only one concurent copy, or only one use per day).
I like the idea of copy spells, but copy machines and arcane grimiores really shouldn’t mix unless you are mid-to-high level.
On the other hand, it has to be worth sinking research costs compared to the cost to hire a scribe (or 1st-level wizard henchman… or familiar?) to transcribe things for you… Either of which, admittedly, should probably carry drawbacks 1, 2 and, 5, because noob wizards are noobs and you only have one spellbook to make the intitial backup from.
I’m less than concerned about the balance implications of copy spells, though, because if you make lots of backups of your spellbook, each of which contains a copy of the copy spell, then at some point it’s going to leak and then the next time you want to go after some enemy wizard by taking out his spellbook, you’ve shafted yourself. And if you don’t include the copy spell in your backups, if you do lose your main spellbook you’re also out of luck.
So… game changing / world changing, perhaps. Unbalancing, not so sure.
You can’t have someone copy a spell for you, you have to do it yourself (each mage has their own short-hand spell calculations that are specific to the caster, while that is more important when you are copying someone else’s spell, it isn’t a good idea to have someone else try to copy your spells for you).
I don’t think there SHOULDN’T necessarily be any spell-copy-spells, I just think that they shouldn’t be as simple and low-level as a generic, non-spell copy-spell.
Sure, that’s why you take a L0 man and train him up as an apprentice using your formulae :P.
I feel like wizard spellbook loss is a problem which should be semi-preventable with a little bit of thought, work, and planning (will still screw you for this expedition, but recoverable in less than months of downtime), and that the debilitating penalties for it should be punitive for being stupid about it. Hence probably the differences in our beliefs on how difficulty backups should be to make.
A diligent/paranoid mage can keep a back-up spell-book pretty much up-to-date in various stretches of downtime without too much trouble. I just think that it should take a bit of effort to mass-produce arcane grimiore back-ups. Having one near-complete back-up (and maybe a partial holdout book) in addition to one’s main spellbook is the limit to what I think that “reasonable” mages should be able to manage easily. More than that should be the domain of the less-reasonable.
How about a spell that copies spells from your spellbook to another book overnight, allowing you to copy spells at the same rate that you normally would, except you do it gradually during travel and adventure. (I’m not sure if you should have to recast nightly or weekly). This way, you can easily and conveniently copy spells, but you can’t make a hundred copies of your spell book to hide in emergency caches in every town in the region. Higher level spells might be able to do that, but don’t hold your breath.
I appreciate all the input guys, but I would still like something official on whether you can copy a spell formula from your spellbook to a blank or captured spellbook. Researching a copy-spell mechanic is kind of interesting, but seems more like a gm call to me and is a little off-topic from the basic question I am asking.
Sorry to bump my own thread, but an additional question popped up. What happens if you get interrupted while copying a spell to your repertoire? For example, if I have begun copying fireball and a week has gone by, but then the village gets attacked by a dragon or something and interrupts the process. Does it start back from the beginning, or would I just have another two weeks to go?
This is not covered in the rules. It is up to the Judge to decide what is appropriate.
As Judge, I would allow the caster to make a backup spell book, under the following guidelines.
1. It takes one week to copy each spell into the spell book.
2. The backup spellbook needs to be scribed anew once the caster levels. Unlike his main spellbook it's not being actively maintained with metaphysical data.
If you get interrupted during copying, etc. you just resume whe you left off.