The Power of Ten

The Threes were a Power Level. Various Power Feats that could only be taken once every three Levels keyed in on Three, Six, Nine, and so forth. Granted, those were mostly Melee Feats, but even so, Threes had power for another reason.

You got an extra General Feat at Three. So, if you were being force-fed side Levels, you were picking up a LOT of extra Feats by taking Threes.

Of course, at Four you were getting Stat points, so Fours were also very important...

The other key thing it did was allow me to take my first Theurgic Levels.

The Theurgic Levels were semi-Advanced Classes. You couldn’t take them until you had a Caster Level of Three in each of the Classes involved, but then you could basically take them every other Level, as long as you could Cast a new Valence of spells. The key effect was the effective Caster Level of the Class, and if you had the best spell progressions, which I most certainly did, that was all that was important.

This was somewhat amusing, because my most advanced prepared Caster Class was Witch. Still, Witch was an Arcane Caster, the flip side from Sorcerer, and definitely qualified me to take it... so as soon as my Witch/3 clicked past, the next day was about Arcane Theurge.

Arcane Theurge gave me no skill points, no hit points, no proficiencies, no save modifiers, no nothing beyond the very core of what it was meant to do: it fused the first Valences of two Arcane Caster Classes together, so you could Cast the spells of the one with the techniques of the other. It basically meant that I used my highest Caster Level for spells of those Valences, and I could Cast Wizard, Witch, and Magus spells with Sorcerer Slots, or sacrifice my Prepared Spells to cast Sorcerer Spells Known.

Ultimate versatility, using the highest Casting power. That was a Magos, and it was why Magos were very respected.

In addition, I could take my first Levels in Archwizardry and Archsorcery. Doubling the numbers of Wizard Spells and Sorcerer Slots did a lot for staying power, but the most important thing for me is that it would allow me to start building my Stars.

I still wasn’t high enough, of course. Building the first two Stars took four Spells at each Level, and only while they were resident in memory did the buff apply. That meant that a pure Star Wizard could easily have a Caster Level advantage over his opponents, but as soon as he cast a spell making up a Star, he’d start losing that bonus.

It was one of the reasons having Sorcerer Levels was so important. Instead of burning the Engram, I could just burn a Slot and keep the Stars intact.

Very importantly, the Spell Power buff was centered on Wizard, but would also apply to any Class that I had Theurgy with. This was important because Wizard was a Favored Class, but Sorcerer was my Primary!

There were six potential Stars that I knew of: the First Star, the Second Star, the Arcane Rose Star; the Blood Star; the Divine Star; and the Elemental Star.

The first three were self-contained within a Wizard’s Valences, and had set the standard that Stars could only be formed by generalist mages. Specialists got extra spells, Generalists got Stars.

Ninive had discovered the Rose Star, and earned the Title The Arcane Rose, the first character to have three Stars. Toutzer had discovered the Blood Star, and with it was Titled The Archtheurge Arcane. Hazé had discovered the Divine Star, and left knowledge of it behind after she was forced to quit the game due to cancer. She had been forever Titled The Archtheurge Mystic and The Star Mage, the first person to have five Stars. No one had ever tried to take the Title, even after she became an NPC.

Lady Green had actually discovered the Elemental Star after the game became reality; it was rigidly defined by what you couldn’t have (any competing Schools, Domains, or Bloodlines). It also directly required the exact same Wisdom bonus Slots that the Divine Star required, which meant to have both Stars, you needed an operating 26 Wisdom and Intelligence. All the Elemental Magos had really gnashed their teeth as the truth of Stars came through once again... Specialists got spells, Generalists got Stars, and they were Specialists.

I intended to get ALL those Stars, one way or another. Because, why not? Aelryinth had been intending to, too, redoing his build from the bottom up... as a Fifteen, he didn’t need to be a Div Spec any more. Spell Power was everything!

Doubling my Valence I’s was nice, at least as nice as getting access to II’s finally. Bloodline spells kicked in, Favored Class benefits triggered, permanent Spells Known sank into Rune Engrams in my Valences, and my options and power expanded.

Oh, and my Caster Level for Shards hit Nine, giving me five base Shards and up to three more bonus ones. I wasn’t doing too bad at all here, the glass cannon was firmly in place. Alas, I was getting no rep counts to speak of, as I was doing a lot of Writing, helping make holy water, using my new Marrowmeld spell to work on my Staff, and similarly uninteresting things that had little to do with blasting the crap out of stuff.

The Hall had long opened its archives and libraries to me, and to say my days were full of intellectual stuff was hardly a stretch of the imagination. The senior Casters and eggheads of all the Temples were in a tizzy over the sheer volume of stuff I was putting out, and it only got faster with the addition of a second thoughtstream to do all the composing and editing while Public Me did the Casting.

One focused on the mental aspects of the spell, magic awareness, energy gathering, perfected results; one focused on Casting technique and where to put the damn thing and how it needed to be used.

Mithar and Sylune, I loved being smart. Being merely a genius just didn’t cut it when you were working with magic.

It also helped that I was Nogging in my Stat Raises.

So many Classes, with so many useless Valence structures. One Prepared, One Spontaneous... that’s all your Matrix would take. All the extra wannabes did was attune my Matrix for their spells and styles; they didn’t actually add more Casting ability.

So, burning them was totally a thing, and so I grabbed Nog Mastery/1 and /2, allowing me to burn I and II Valences to make myself a more perfect person than I was currently, yay.

It took some arranging and finagling, as there were a bunch of things to do, but it was cheap to raise low Stats. I’d have to wait until I had my Fours to really start improving things.

I burned through enough Slots across all my Classes to get my Strength to 13, my Constitution to a full 18, and my Charisma and Wisdom to 14 foundational. Combined with getting all my Stat Masteries to /3, and thus +1 to all Stats, I did have some nice improvements... and I was pulling in the Inherent Bonuses, too, one every other day.

+5 to Intellect, Wisdom, and Charisma was no small thing. I’d be working on my physicals later, but the Casting Stats were my focus for now.

Four was almost nothing. Sorcerer/4 would sit there all alone while my Theurgies played catch-up with my Secondary Classes, which would all be stuck at Three until I reached Six.

But at Five... at Five I’d be going straight to Ten!

You could never add more than four Theurgic bonus Caster Levels to any Class. Normally that occurred at Nine or Ten, and the Theurgy/5 kicked over the last Level, giving you access to those sweet 5’s in the Secondary Class, and maximum amount of spells by level, even if you didn’t get all the skill points and Class Levels and such.

But... there was nothing explicitly forbidding you from taking multiple Theurgies early, and applying the bonuses early, too.

You could not raise a Theurgic Class Bonus Level above the Primary Class; that was an absolute fact. It could easily trip up someone who didn’t know about it, say, by applying a Racial Bonus early, and suddenly being unable to increase your Level, ahem!...

In the long term, everything evened out. As long as your Primary Class kept going up, everything ended up in the same place.

But in a place where the force of the Shroud was leaning on the souls of everyone, and making it nigh impossible to get past Six without shenanigans? Fah to that, it was time to cheat, and cheat as hard as was needed to gain the advantage.

The hard thing was getting the Stats for what you needed to do. Nogging helped with that... but there were only so many Spell Slots to go around, and if your mentals were bad, you could have a REAL hard time.

I had no problem at all with Stats, now. I’d had the base to start the ball rolling, which was really all that was important. Once you could Nog en masse, Stats were not an issue.

The key to the early power cheat was simple enough. For me, it involved keeping Wizard at One, and then heaping four Theurgy Levels on it after I reached Sorcerer/5... and not taking my Racial/2’s until after then.

Once I had +4 Theurgic Levels ladled on top of my Wizard Levels... I would just start taking my Wizard Levels, and then my Racial Levels.

Going from Wizard/1 (5) to Wizard/3 (7), and then applying the three Racial Levels that Halvyr could... meant I’d be a Wizard/3 (10)... and still fundamentally a Fifth Level Character, albeit one that could Cast at Ten, and had the Rank and Mastery limitations of a Ten.

It also meant that I could then Level right to Ten, as I was already a Ten Caster in a secondary Casting Class, and since that wasn’t supposed to be higher than my Primary Caster Class...

It was the exact same trick I’d laid out for Helix, and was laying out for the people I was now advising on Leveling. In his case, he would have to burn his Minstrel Slots for Intellect bonuses. He could get Minstrel to /3, which meant he’d get to Int 11.

Int 11 meant he could take a Wizard Level... and a Magus Level, and maybe a Witch Level, not sure on that last.

He could also burn his Bard Slots eventually, which were irrelevant if he managed to raise his Int to 14 and could advance as a Wizard. Lore Theurgy would allow him to use the superior Wizard Matrix, and stuff it with his Bard spells if he wanted to.

He would probably have to get back to Sorcerer/5 and access the Stat Masteries again to make it work. Bard Slots would get his Intellect to 13, the Intellect Mastery to 14, meaning he could hit Four, getting him to 15, meaning he could reach Five in Wizard... but the Matrix would be there to fill with Bardic spells as long as he kept up with the Theurgy...

It would be ideal if he could double dip into Charisma like I was with Intellect, using Sage Sorcerer to avoid multi-Stat dependency.

Wizard was ideal for him, but if he wanted to work Bard and save himself the effort, he’d just lose out on some higher Valences with a crappier Matrix. As long as he kept raising Stats, eventually he’d get to the same place, it was just going to take longer and lot more Karma and jumping through hoops...

Karma was a thing in this world, where it was hard to find stuff to grind against that wouldn’t kill you, especially since everyone was topping out at Seven to Nine, IF they were lucky.

Helix could reach Ten. The road was in front in him. What he was doing about it was going to decide for him if I took further risks with him...

Which meant it was pretty much time for a phone call...

----------

“Pellier,” the calm, dry voice answered.

“Sir Pellier! How are you doing?”

“Lady Traveler,” the grim Paladin answered, and I could hear his smile. “I think you need to turn the phone over.”

I did so. “Better?” I asked, it happening so automatically I was immune to even finding it funny anymore.

“Yes,” he said. “I see you’ve been turning the Caster World on its ear. Is it true that you’ve been basically Writing down a new spell every day since you hit Detroit?”

“You know how people like to exaggerate things, Sir Pellier. Some days I Write two or three, and then there’s the stuff buried in the libraries they haven’t discovered which I’m digging out for them...”

He laughed...