Moon Mage new player guide

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Introduction

Welcome to the Moon Mage guild. Here, you’ll find elegance, cleverness, a connection with something greater than the mere antics of a small world in a vast cosmos. If you want to make your foes explode in a shower of fire and ice, this guild isn’t for you. If you want to rely on the power of fickle Immortals, this guild isn’t for you. If you want to bludgeon your enemies to death with a clumsy weapon of steel, this guild isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, you want to twist the very fabric of fate to your advantage, pick apart the subtle insecurities in your foes subconscious, and bend time and space to your very whim, then oh yes, you have come to the right place.

The path of the Moon Mage is not one of blood and glory and conquest, but rather of careful study, precise deliberation, and decisive action. We are the purveyors of the stars, of immense and ancient forces, predictable with enough study, but never controllable. Your power will wax with the rising of the three moons of Elanthia, and will wane with their setting. As you grow in power, you will learn to read the skies to your benefit and your enemy’s detriment, to cross the entire breadth of the lands in a moment. Welcome to being a Moon Mage.

Roleplaying your Moon Mage

The Moon Mage guild was originally founded by six groups, or sects, of magic users that were unified by their prophetic ability and use of lunar magic during en event known as the Lunar Accord. Each sect had a unique philosophic approach to the use of these abilities, and many of these differences persist to the present at least in part to the relatively recent re-emergence of the original sects. Although not every (or even most) students choose to join one of the sects, studying the philosophy of at least one is an excellent way to explore ones' own relationship with fate.

The Current Sects Are:

• The Celestial Compact is a group of astrologers and politicians who seek to shape Kermoria with their knowledge of the future.
• The Followers of Fortunes Path are often carefree, but occasionally fatalistic, wanderers who strive to follow the whims of fate.
• The Monks of the Crystal Hand are stoic and ascetic seekers of transcendence.
• The Nomads of the Arid Steppe are an association of tribesmen who seek guidance from the stars and their ancestors.
• The Projent of Tezirah are masters of both shadow magic and backroom politics.
• The Prophets of G'nar Peth are seekers of Esoteric knowledge who many believe are afflicted with madness.
• Heritage House is an emergent sect that strives to unify the divergent perspective of the guild into a single coherent philosophy.

Training your Moon Mage

Take a look at the guild circling requirements. You’ll notice it’s pretty much all magic, all the way down. While you only need four magics trained up to 10th circle, you’ll quickly start needing additional magic skills. To this end, it is recommended that you select spells that will allow you to train each of the magic skills, Augmentation, Debilitation, Targeted Magic, Utility, and Warding. Since training Astrology is somewhat slow going at first, it is also recommended that you learn the spell Piercing Gaze to facilitate observations in cloudy weather.

Moon Mages are Magic Primary, Survival and Lore Secondary, and Weapon and Armor Tertiary. To that end, Magic will always be your strongest tool, while Weapons and Armor your weakest. You may of course train whatever you want, but it is advisable to focus on lighter faster weapons and less hindering armors.

Magic Skills

This is what you will excel at. Your ability with Targeted and Debilitation magics will always be better than your ability to swing a sword, and the Wards you create will be more potent than any armor. Train your magics, and train them hard. We'll talk more about spell selection later, but as an overview, some very potent and unique spells within the Moon Mage arsenal to look at are, in no particular order, Starlight Sphere, Mind Shout, Moonblade, Telekinetic Storm, Mental Blast, Moongate, and Invocation of the Spheres. Moon Mages have a unique way of training the Attunement skill using the Perceive command. For more details, see the article on Moon Mage Power Perception.

Training Astrology

The guild skill is Astrology, which is trained by observing the cosmos and making predictions. You can start by OBSERVE SKY, which will show you all the celestial objects you can perceive. As you circle, your guild leader will teach you how to understand more and more celestial objects. If you OBSERVE a constellation you have been taught, you may learn something about it.

Each of celestial object governs a skillset, Defense, Event, Lore, Magic, Offense, Survival and All. Each time you observe an object, it adds a bit of knowledge to a prediction pool of that skillset. If you PREDICT STATE LORE, you will see how much you have learned about the Lore skillset from observing the heavens. Once a prediction pool is sufficiently filled, you can ALIGN to a given skillset or even a specific skill, and then PREDICT FUTURE <person>. This will give you a vision about the prediction, which may look something like this;

You look inside yourself in an attempt to see beyond the now.
After a few moments, the mists of time begin to part.
You see the midday sun warming you under its soft face.
You see a young boy taking his vows of apprenticeship.
A man stands in darkness clad in plate armor.
A shiver runs through your spine.
Roundtime: 10 sec.

Evaluating visions is a tricky business, but there’s some method to the madness. Read a bit about prediction. At 10th circle you can learn Event Prediction from another Moon Mage. This is a handy way of training Astrology without running the risk of cursing someone, and also a means of telling what is going on in the realms and what is to come. If you STUDY SKY, you’ll start filling your Event prediction pool. When you have studied the sky sufficiently, you can PREDICT FUTURE EVENT, which will give you a vision, and teach Astrology.

Soon, you’ll want to pick up a divining tool, like a set of bones to cast, or starcharts to study, etc. Each of these tools are affiliated with a type of Moon Mage, which is a primarily role playing choice, though there are some differences.

Training Attunement

It is common, but by no means universal, for attunement to be a moon mage's first magic skill. Broadly speaking, attunement governs the size of your pool of available mana streams. This is of obvious importance: the higher your attunement, the more spells you can cast at a given harness before you need to recover. Training attunement is straight-forward, you simply PERCEIVE MANA in a room. There is a per-room timer on the training of this skill (120 seconds), which means that you will not learn from successive perceives until the requisite time has elapsed from the initial one. This suggests two methods to train attunement. You can move from room to room, perceiving the mana in each one (affectionately called "power walking"), and you can build perceive calls into a bigger training loop, for example by doing it every so often when you hunt, or after every pair of socks you knit.

Training Arcana

If attunement tends to be the first magic skill, arcana is the second. This skill can be confusing and frustrating for new players, especially because for the first hundred ranks it may not feel like it's useful for anything. It is! Firstly, 100 ranks are needed for most magical feats (discussed below), and secondly, you will eventually want to use mana streams harnessed in cambrinth, though it may not seem so when you're endlessly charging a little ring over and over. Eventually, some spells' maximum streams will be greater than what you can harness, and so to cast these at full power you will need first charge some streams in a cambrinth item. Furthermore, with the appropriate feat (Dedicated Cambrinth Use), you can use the mana streams stored in a cambrinth item to sustain cyclic spells. This way, when you hold open a moongate for an eternity while your slowpoke barbarian friend takes her sweet time crossing through it, you won’t have to step through after her into a room full of Giant Murdercats with your attunement shot to pieces.

To train arcana, you will want to charge and invoke cambrinth items. These come in all shapes and sizes, from a couple mana streams to over a hundred. The most efficient way to train arcana is to charge the item with as much as you can, on every cast. How much is this? Ideally, this will be the amount at which you wish to cast your spell, minus the minimum harness. You cannot prepare the spell at less than the minimum harness, and so this procedure puts as much into the object as is safe to do. There are two limitations to this, which are that you may not have the ranks in arcana to actually charge as much as you want into an item at first, and that the object you have may not be able to take all of the charge. Supposing you can cast a spell at M streams, with a minimum of m, then the general procedure will be to prepare the spell at m streams, charge the cambrinth item with (M-m) streams, invoke it, and then cast the spell when it’s ready. If you have a worn cambrinth item, like an armband, you will eventually be able to charge and invoke this item while wearing it, though at first you will need to remove it and hold it to do so.

Survival Skills

Moon Mages must train at least five survival skills in order to advance. You are a Survival Secondary, and there are many useful survival skills, so you have every reason to train more than five if you want to. Athletics, Outdoorsmanship, Perception, and First Aid can all be trained out of combat. To train Evasion you’ll need to be in combat, and with the exception of a few NPCs, the same is true of Stealth. Skinning and Locksmithing, while not trained directly through hunting, require dead things which are easiest to acquire by killing living things. Both of these latter skills also provide good sources of income. A reasonable conclusion from this information is that it is a good idea to train by hunting. In the subsequent sections, we discuss how to do so effectively.

Lore Skills

Being Lore secondary, you'll want to use combat Tactics to your advantage. You'll also probably want to pick up a craft. Forging isn’t a bad choice, as it will improve the power of your Moonblade if you choose to use it, though Enchanting, a currently unreleased craft, will likely be a better choice for Moon Mages. Scholarship can be earned from classes and studying star charts, Performance can be learned while playing instruments, and Appraisal can be learned either by APPRAISEing creatures or gear.

Weapons and Armor

Being tertiary, these tend to be harder to move effectively for a Moon Mage than the other skillsets. In fact, many Moon Mages choose not to rely on physical weapons and armors, training them only for the TDPs. That being said, with careful planning and diligence, it is possible to train your combat skills well, and if you choose to do so you might find yourself at a decisive advantage in combat situations.

Weapons

A good set of weapons to train for a starting moon mage is Small Edged, Small Blunt, and Brawling for melee and Light Thrown, Bow, and Crossbow for ranged. The weapons that train these skills are less tiring to use, and are better for preserving or recovering balance. The consequences of this are that you will need to take fewer breaks to recover stamina, that you will hit more often, and critically, that you will be better able to maintain your position and hence get hit less often. Because almost all of your non-magical defensive skills are tertiary, this can make a big difference. Why train so many skills, as a weapons tertiary? Besides the TDPs, training multiple types of melee weapons is the best way to train Melee Mastery (and likewise with ranged weapons for Missile Mastey). These masteries give a bonus to any attack that trains a melee or ranged skill, respectively. Training multiple weapons can keep your mastery skills well above the individual weapon skills, which helps to bridge the gap between your magical and non-magical combat skills. This provides a way to train all of your combat skills together, at level, if you wish to pursue this training path.

What about heavier weapons? You should (almost) never let mechanical min-maxing stop you from role-playing your character the way you want to. If you want to use a spear as your main weapon, for example, then you should do so. In the event that it is difficult to train in the beginning, you can always focus on the weapons discussed above for a little while until it is safer to train with the weapon of your choice.

Armor

Heavier armor provides more protection at the cost of Hindrance. The severity of this hindrance decreases as you get more ranks in the respective armor skill. Additionally, your guild influences how much certain armor types will hinder you; this is in addition to the effects of the skill being tertiary. As an armor tertiary, this means that it is going to be harder to use heavier armor, especially in the beginning.

All of these considerations make Leather or Cloth armor (Light Armor) a good starting choice. You can swap in Chain or even Brigandine armor for the TDPs, or even to get enough ranks in them to wear more of these types of armor. Since you’ll want to use Stealth if you’re hunting, make sure you’re in Light Armor when you hide on your foes. It is recommended that you also use a small shield. Different physical defenses are better suited for different types of attacks, and shields are good at defending against ranged. This is useful, beyond just the TDPs.

Later on, you’ll be able to summon a Shadow Servant, which will allow you to hold a much greater number of objects, and keeping extra weapons and armor for training becomes much easier.

Signature Guild Abilities

Moon Mages can travel throughout the realms easiest of any guild. With sufficient skill, a Moon Mage can Locate any player under an open sky and either teleport to them, summon them to the Moon Mages location, or open a Moon Gate, a portal that allows anyone to travel between.

Around 40th circle, Moon Mages will learn to Walk the Ways, utilizing powerful Lunar artifacts scattered around Elanthia as a sort of fast transit system, similar to a subway that allows a rider to travel around a city at great speed. At 100th circle, Moon Mages will learn how to enter the Ways from any location, similar to… a completely insane person who jumps the tracks and hops on a fast moving train.

It is worth pointing out that all of a Moon Mages mobility tools are fraught with peril and extreme risk of life and limb to the Moon Mage, and even in some cases to bystanders. The inexperienced Moon Mage that isn’t paying attention to the forces they are attempting to utilize will quickly find themselves vaporized, their bodies becoming but a smear of blood and bone.

Additionally, Moon Mages have the power of Prediction. As they observe the cosmos, they gain a deeper understanding of the turning of Fate. By utilizing this knowledge, a Moon Mage can enhance their ability in a single skill. As a Moon Mage gains a deeper understanding Fate, they will have an easier time manipulating it, even being able to curse their foes.

Astrology is also tied to Moon Mage Enchanting, which is not to be confused with the not yet implemented crafting skill Enchanting. This system involves studying celestial bodies and inscribing their sigils upon various objects in a certain order to create various effects. The system is currently somewhat in flux, though many Lunar Enchantments still exist.

Getting Started

Starting Spell Choices

Choosing starting spells for a Moon mage can be a rather daunting task, especially considering that the sheer volume of paths one can take and that the number of prerequisite spells is large compared to other guilds. One first needs to make the decision if you are going to learn towards or away from combat, since Moon mages can be successful anywhere on the spectrum since they have no actual combat skill requirements. A neutral approach can also be successful and each has their own benefits and issues to deal with.

For the combat leaning Moon mage, the most common choice for a first spell would be Telekinetic Throw to start gaining ranks in Targeted Magic skill. However, Shadows is also good for those who wish to be more physical in combat and want to train stealth. If you choose your first Targeted Magic spell after you select shadows, Dinazen Olkar is an excellent alternative to Telekinetic Throw. Late bloomers might even consider Partial Displacement if they select their first combat spell after 10th circle. If you are heavily interested in combat, selecting your first Debilitation spell early will help you avoid having this skill fall behind your combat skills. Although Mental Blast is the penultimate moon mage debilitation spell are you will likely choose calm or Dazzle first. Dazzle has perhaps more long term utility since calm will later be eclipsed by other spells (mostly Mental Blast), however it has the major disadvantage of being unusable underground or without the Sun, Xibar or Yavash above the horizon. Calm, on the other hand, is usable at all times and is a prerequisite for many other spells, including the Psychic Shield, which will probably be your first warding spell.

For the (at least initially) non-combat leaning Moon mage, the common choice of spell is Clear Vision, which allows access to many essential Augmentation and Utility spells. After that Piercing Gaze will pierce through inclement weather to allow you to train your Astrology skill even when clouds obscure the heavens. Aura Sight will boost your Attunement and Astrology skills, which will allow you to cast more spells without needing a break and improve the potency of your observations and predictions. All of the spells, are, unfortunately, Augmentation spells and you will likely want to train the other major non-combat magic skill, utility, at some point. If you choose Shadows you can later learn Focus Moonbeam at second circle for no cost, which makes this path a very attractive alternative. Focus Moonbeam is also required for several different later spells such as Moonblade, Moongate, Distant Gaze and Shadewatch Mirror and is a major building block in your future repoire. In addition to this the spell Shift Moonbeam will allow you greater manipulation of your moonbeam allowing you to send it to other locations and facilitate easy movement through Teleport and Moongate.

Statistic Training

For stats, a good first goal is getting everything to a reasonable minimum (people often advocate 30). This will give you a good base.

Next, if you are combat focused, you'll probably want to keep Reflex high, as dodging enemies will be easier than surviving getting hit and let you stay in combat longer. Discipline will improve your ability to hide and your ability to target spells. Intelligence and Wisdom will improve spell damage. All three statistics will improve your ability with Debilitation contests. Charisma will be helpful in charm vs mind attacks but Calm is the only such spell we have in our spell book. Stamina should not be neglected as it will improve your ability to withstand damage and avoid fatigue. Agility will aid in your ability to hit things, as well as help with parrying. Strength and Stamina are likely the stats you can train to a certain range and then ignore, as you will not need to rely on hitting things harder, nor surviving blows better, for some time. Strength affects how much weight you can carry, which may be useful until you can summon a Shadow Servant.

Outside of combat one can choose to focus on mental abilities. Intelligence and Wisdom are very important in speeding your learning rate and should be the foundation of your abilities. Wisdom also improves the probability that a prediction will have a positive result. Intelligence and Discipline both increase concentration and are therefore very important in spell casting. Although it is often neglected, Charisma does improve your ability to bond with prediction tools and strength of your predictions and can be useful. Basically, Moon Mages are the archetypal magical intellectual. You can and probably should focus principally on mentals, then on Reflex or Agility, and finally on Strength and Stamina.

Starting Gear

What weapons and armor you train is up to you, but initially sticking to lighter choices would be optimal. Small Edged and Small Blunt, Light Thrown and Bows all make good choices. The obvious choice for stealth and low hindrance armor is Cloth or Leather, though you can swap Chain Armor or even Brigandine Armor if you're not training stealth at the moment. It might be worth mentioning that Moonblade can be shaped into a Small Edge, Large Edge, Two handed Edge, and Quarterstaff weapon, so if you enjoy using Moonweapons, training those weapons from the start is a good idea, though you'll probably want to pick up lightened versions of the heavier weapons.

You’ll want to find some starting magical items to train with, preferably a small cambrinth, like a shard or a ring or a runestone. If you choose a runestone that contains a non-lunar spell you will also learn sorcery when you focus on it, although, unlike cambrinth, it will stop teaching you around 50-80 ranks.

Now What?

Holder

(more to come)