About Spells

All spells available on Penwick are categorised by Tier and each Tier has its own tab in this shop. Most standard spells are in the Tier 0 through Tier 4 categories, but there are additional categories as well. All spells, except Tier 0 spells, cost AT (Advancement Tokens) to purchase, which you can read more about here.

Tier 0-5 Spells

Tier 0 through Tier 5 spells are the bulk of all spells available on Penwick. Simply put: lower tier spells are weaker but cheaper spells whilst high tier spells are expensive, more powerful spells.

The lowest tier of regular spells is Tier 0. Tier 0 spells are free spells which cost no AT to purchase because they are spells which every witch or wizard past a certain age would know. Examples of Tier 0 spells are spells like Lumos or Pack. Tier 1 spells are ordinary spells which are inexpensive to purchase while Tier 4 spells are advanced, powerful spells that are significantly more expensive to purchase. Since AT is also used to purchase abilities on your character, you will have to make a careful decision between buying spells and buying abilities as well as deciding between having a few, powerful advanced spells or many cheap, weaker spells. You may choose to give your character advanced spells early on if you believe this would suit them. However, due to their high cost, you will be left with fewer Advancement Tokens to spend elsewhere, so choose carefully!

Spells at a certain Tier fall within a bracket of Advancement Token cost. These costs are as follows:

  1. Tier 0 Spell: 0 AT (free, but may have a year/age requirement).
  2. Tier 1 Spell: 5AT, 10AT or 15AT.
  3. Tier 2 Spell: 25AT, 30AT, 35AT, or 40AT.
  4. Tier 3 Spell: 50AT, 55AT, 60AT, or 65AT.
  5. Tier 4 Spell: 75AT, 80AT, 85AT, or 90AT.
  6. Tier 5 Spell: 95AT+

Restricted Tier Spells

Restricted Tier spells are spells not taught in the usual curriculum at Penwick because they are dangerous, powerful, or both. Restricted Tier spells often require certain prerequisites to be met before they can be learned and are usually expensive to purchase. For example: you may need to have access to the Librarium Gerardi (the restricted section of the library at Penwick) in order to be able to buy Restricted Tier spells. Access to the Librarium Gerardi is an ability which you must first purchase for your character in the ability shop and which itself also has its own prerequisites.

There are no fixed AT costs for Restricted Tier spells, but their cost is usually above 50AT.

Story Tier

Story Tier spells are a special category of spells. These spells cannot be purchased with Advancement Tokens and can only be earned. The methods of earning these spells are:

  1. Your character attends a class taught by a Professor. Note, you can't just say you did, you have to actually write with other students and a Professor character who is hosting the class. By the end of the class, you will be awarded the Story Tier spell.
  2. Your character participates in a moderated adventure and is awarded a Story Tier spell at the end.
  3. Your Sigerth or Adult character invents a new spell (not yet available).

Since in-character classes and moderated adventures are an infrequent occurrence and cannot always be attended by everyone, there is a secondary way to earn Story Tier spells, and that is through peer-to-peer teaching. This means that a student character, or any other character who has a Story Tier spell, can teach it to another player. The only requirements for teaching a spell are these:

  1. Peer-to-peer teaching only applies to Story Tier spells. You cannot learn a Tier 4 or a Restricted Tier spell through peer-to-peer teaching, only Story Tier spells.
  2. The character teaching the spell must have the Story Tier spell in their inventory in order to be able to teach it.
  3. The thread where the spell is taught must have at least 2 posts from both the teaching character and the receiving character.
  4. You must perform a dice roll to determine if the spell was successfully learned. If this dice roll fails, the receiving character will not have learned the spell. This means failure is possible and success is not guaranteed when a Story Tier spell is taught through peer-to-peer teaching. While this may sometimes be dissapointing, remember that even unfavourable outcomes from these rolls can generate new stories and plots for your character. The dice roll you must perform is as follows:
    • Take the teaching character's Intelligence + Spirit + Sorcery, divide it by 3 and write this number down. This number represents this character's ability to teach
    • Take the learning character's Spirit + Sorcery divide it by 2 and write this number down. This number represent this character's ability to learn.
    • Add the Teaching and Learning numbers together and subtract its result from 34. The resulting number is the Difficulty Check.
      • proof so that the moderator can verify this.
    • Here is the full formula written out:
      1d20 ≥ (34 - ((Teacher's Intelligence + Teacher's Spirit + Teacher's Sorcery) / 3) + ((Student Spirit + Student Sorcery) / 2))
    • Now roll a 1d20 using the site's dice roller. If the roll is higher than or equal to the Difficulty Check, then the spell will have been succesfully learned. Message a moderator with a link to your thread to have the Story Tier spell awarded to the receiving character. Make sure that you include a link to your dice roll and the aforementioned math in an OOC note in the thread as

Legacy Tier

Legacy Tier spells are disabled spells. These spells cannot be purchased either. They are spells that are not active any longer and cannot be used in roleplay anymore, but which have not yet been fully deleted from the site. You can think of these as archived, disabled or deactivated spells.

You must have a spell in your character's inventory (by purchasing it in this shop) in order to be able to use that spell in the roleplay.