Level Up (A5E) New Spell Schools and How to Handle Them

[xiphumor]

Periodically, spell schools are introduced either in official or 3rd party material, generally with very little fanfare when they’re added as tags to new spells. These new schools are usually good ideas, but they’re somewhat useless because there are no older spells in their school. So far, I count the following:

Added in GPG 6: travel
Added in the DDG: architecture, control
Added by PMG: ritual, multiclass
Added by Paranormal Power: object, psionic
Included on A5e.tools, but empty: displacement

Then there are a few I just think would be good
ideas:

• Aberrant: Lemure Transformation, Writhing Transformation, etc.
• Charm: we have a fear school, so why not?
• Fae: Faerie Fire, Conjure Woodland Beings, etc.
• Exhaustion: After GPG 15, this should be its own school, including all strife and fatigue spells.
• Light: it would be nice to have all of the spells that shed light grouped together
• Sustenance: anything that has to do with food or potable water

I have a spreadsheet of every official spell (and I’m adding unofficial spells), and I would be interested in doing the work of retroactive classification and making it available, but I’d like to know how other people think this problem could be best handled.

Also, if you can think of any other good schools, let me know.

 

[foxblade]

I added alchemical, but there are only a few in there so far: Alchemical Admixture, Remote Detonation, Tinkerer's Measure, and Transmutation Circle (all of which are PMG spells - I am sure I will add more, but I just added it yesterday and haven't finished going through my lists yet)

 

[VenerableBede]

At some point the A5e heads will need to decide we’ve got enough schools of magic, otherwise this retroactive work will never end.

 

[xiphumor]

At some point the A5e heads will need to decide we’ve got enough schools of magic, otherwise this retroactive work will never end.

True, but in fairness, I don’t think they were fully aware of the schools they did add.

 

[Pedantic]

I added alchemical, but there are only a few in there so far: Alchemical Admixture, Remote Detonation, Tinkerer's Measure, and Transmutation Circle (all of which are PMG spells - I am sure I will add more, but I just added it yesterday and haven't finished going through my lists yet)

I think you could make a good case for Seed Bomb.

 

[foxblade]

Periodically, spell schools are introduced either in official or 3rd party material, generally with very little fanfare when they’re added as tags to new spells. These new schools are usually good ideas, but they’re somewhat useless because there are no older spells in their school. So far, I count the following:

Added in GPG 6: travel
Added in the DDG: architecture, control
Added by PMG: ritual, multiclass
Added by Paranormal Power: object, psionic
Included on A5e.tools, but empty: displacement

Then there are a few I just think would be good
ideas:

• Aberrant: Lemure Transformation, Writhing Transformation, etc.
• Charm: we have a fear school, so why not?
• Fae: Faerie Fire, Conjure Woodland Beings, etc.
• Exhaustion: After GPG 15, this should be its own school, including all strife and fatigue spells.
• Light: it would be nice to have all of the spells that shed light grouped together
• Sustenance: anything that has to do with food or potable water

I have a spreadsheet of every official spell (and I’m adding unofficial spells), and I would be interested in doing the work of retroactive classification and making it available, but I’d like to know how other people think this problem could be best handled.

Also, if you can think of any other good schools, let me know.

Light and Sustenance are good ideas. I am compiling my spell lists and I keep running into wanting those. There are a LOT of spells that shed light incidentally (at least in my mind) that might need to be parsed

 

[Morrus]

Open-ended tag systems like this are defintely a weakness of printed books, and more suited to online tools which can be updated easily.

 

[xiphumor]

Open-ended tag systems like this are defintely a weakness of printed books, and more suited to online tools which can be updated easily.

It would seem like a waste of a GPG article, but do you suppose a blog post might occasionally introduce some new schools?

 

[Pedantic]

It would seem like a waste of a GPG article, but do you suppose a blog post might occasionally introduce some new schools?

I'm not actually sure there's a downside (aside from the print vs. digital divide) issue with new school creation. Schools don't have any mechanical impact until called by a class or feat or other feature, so they don't pose any new rules in and of themselves. Really, all I think you'd want to do is make sure that any new content that does call new schools, our theoretical Light herald, should just include a link/call to whatever digital reference has the schools and/or a table that's correct at the time of printing.