Firstly: Get someone to show you how to fight safely. Ask the New Player team and they should be able to sort you someone to demonstrate. This is especially important when using a staff, as longer weapons are easier to hit too hard with. As a tip, aim it downwards and try to hit people in the legs. This is both effective, and means you avoid accidentally clobbering people in the head.
Saxon Violence also do excellent thrust-safe staves to order.
Magical Healing is great, and if you decide to wait on a commission for a thrust staff, you could always play as a healer mage for your first event.
In terms of weapons, I generally advise getting a buckler, and a sword you’re comfortable fighting with. Because swords are generic and easy to fight with, and any Empire PC can use a buckler. Then you have a backup set of kit you can take to anything.
Penny brought up something here I want to expand on. Chamber of Delights is a fairly low-magnitude Night ritual that creates an aura of relaxation. Among other things, spending 15 minutes relaxing in this aura will refresh your daily personal mana. You can’t do it on the battlefield, but between quests or generally through the day at Anvil is perfectly possible.
If you look around there are likely to be a handful on the field during the event. Or you could make one yourself - a coven of four magicians with Night Lore 1 who have mastered the ritual could cast it for four mana, well within the reach of a starting group. Similar rituals exist for Autumn and Day lore.
Like mage armour, stab-safe staves are not a common stock item. Saxon violence made mine:
That blue crystal tip collapses when I stab with it.
As others have said, you can’t stab with a staff that isn’t made to be stab-safe. Swinging motions are entirely reasonable, and something I also do quite a few of. I’m 5’8" and I haven’t found myself being too short to get stuck in with polearms even without being able to thrust.
Are you joining an existing group, or forming one of your own?
It is also worth paying close attention to the area lammies on a tent. They won’t just have the RP effect, they will state if the aura recharges your mana. Unsurprisingly the relaxation auras are popular with IC recreational businesses.
I’m going with 2/3 mates so we will form our own group. But I’m likely to be the only One interested in Mage. We were also looking to see if we could join/ alliance with a more experienced group/ house in dawn to show us what’s what. Give us tips and set us tests of mettle.
I was going to make a new thread about it but may as well talk about it. As we arnt too sure how the whole groups and house things work.
Also I fear that having played too much dnd all of us are looking into different skills (a tanky fighter, a battle Mage, a combat medic) and sure it we have a wide set of skills and a ‘balanced party’ in table top terms. But I’m getting the feeling that that’s not what you want in this game? I don’t know
Thats fine, being balanced means you can join any group and provide complementary skills. No one will turn away a healer. A mage is always an asset and a fighter to protect you both, thats a good little utility group.
But in anvil you will find yourselves drawn to different things,
This is a Good Thing! (Trademarked)
Having different contacts, different things of Interest etc will expand all of your game.
Also you all will be welcome on most skirmishes as you have a diverse set of skills and work well together. While you are not going to beat a group of dedicated fighters, you will be more versatile. Work with it.
One obvious thing to point out is that you will never be the party, a small empire quest is 15 people. Generally 30 and the battles are hundreds, there is no problem in being balanced but on the other hand rocking up as a group of 3 warwitches or 3 armoured knights is also not a problem.
In terms of support I’d probably suggest having one artisan might help, having played in a small group getting our own artisan was a small increase in power, and there are ways you can build an artisan so if the group provides them with some resources they can be as efficent as a starting character + and artisan. (It’s potentially doable with battlemage, but it ends up with a wierd battlemage build.)
I was at a high combat player event last weekend and have over half the spells, the ones I actually used were:
Heal. A LOT. About 10 - 20? There was a Chamber of Delights so mana refresh happened on a regular basis.
Restore limb - About 5?
Mend - about 3 times?
Purify - about 3 again, once on a weakness I cast (see below)
Paralyse - once, when it was that, someone else stops healing someone, or fight something nasty on my own.
Weakness - once to break a curse.
Voice for the Dead - once in a failed attempt to prod some plot.
It’s worth pointing out that player events are very wierd, I was at one where venom was hands down the most useful spell and I quick cast detect magic.
That’s not to say healing isn’t worthwhile, in terms of event use I’d actually rate restore limb as up there with heal (More people loose hits but healing limbs spells are either the cheapest or fastest way to do it.)
It used to be the case that magical healing was far better than combat magic, honestly at the moment it’s more a matter of preference
I’ve seen people have a lot of fun with repel on the field, and it’s potentially really potent in the new rules but it requires a slightly different mindset. Shatter costs more mana but is somewhat easier to use (and was the old use for empower.)
Having a balanced group is cool and very handy on the battlefield, skirmish or quests. Handily though you can add in stuff that you can do on the field in Anvil without spreading yourself too thinly, your battlefield healer has 4xp left over after picking up Chirurgeon and Physick and likewise you can be a Battlemage on 5xp (Mage, Battle Mage, 1 Spell). If you picked up ritual magic between you could be casting Magnitude 8 spells in the Regio. The fact that you can wear whatever armour you can afford OOC and use a sword and a buckler on the field means that anyone can be useful there.
And don’t worry a group of three of you may be smallish, but you have a lot less people to organise when people need help on a quest at the drop of a hat. Bigger groups involve a lot more cat herding, if you can be ready to go as a group at short notice that’s a powerful asset, you also have less voices to hear before you decide stuff. You’re agile to use a buzzword .
Smason, have you considered joining the Dawn Faceboook page:
You will likely find a good amount of advice and assistance, and about a dozen houses willing to show you around.
As you’re planning on coming along next season (which I assume means next year) you’ll have plenty of time to hash out backstories, decide what sort of things you’d like to have a go at, and generally ease into the game.
If you wish to play a small house with an alliance with a larger one, that’s fine. If you wish to show up as members of an existing house, that will need their permission, to an extent. There’s also the option of arriving as a group of Knights Errant. This has a simple costume requirement ( a tabard or similar, pattern of yellow/gold sun on royal blue) and allows you to wander around, definately Dawnish, but not affiliated to any one house, until you find a group or group that you like the look of.
I play the Earl of House Dromond, a Dawnish house of Pirate-Wizard-Knights. While I’d welcome new members, not until after the September event. Feel free to drop me a private message or ask here if you have any queries
Ever wanted to play the hero whose home was destroyed by Barbarians? Who has seen their home burned down around them, by forces no one could have hoped to stand against alone. A surprise strike by more than twenty thousand Orcs that caught everyone unprepared. To have lost family members, either to death or the slavery of the Druj.
My group de Carsenere is from a region (The Barrens) that was completely taken by Barbarian Orcs (the Druj) just before last event. As you can imagine it’s a fairly interesting time for us, and while like many areas of the gameworld alot has happened since the start. Honestly that first sentence hold the most important informatio atm.
We have a fairly broad mixture from players who have been in the game since the start, to players on their second event, so if you have any questions there will be someone who can answer them. (Also we might have an IC library for next event.)
While the group started as a pure combat group we now have a fairly broad range of characters with someone playing most parts of the game.
As a battlemage artisan the key issue is your choice of resource.
If you have a mana site, you have no materials for making items. If you have a material producing resource, you don’t have access to the mana from a mana site. Since you need crystal mana for ritual magic and for speaking in conclave this limits your options somewhat.
It’s possible to get around that with trading and a group effort, but without extra mana you’ll find yourself much more limited in how many spells you can throw out per battle. Let’s say you rock into your first battle with 6 mana. That’s 6 “cheap” spells (eg. repel, normal heal/restore limb) or 3 “oh shit” spells (paralyse, shatter, quick heal/restore limb)
Assume you cast a mix of those, you’re going to cast somewhere between 3-6 spells over the course of the battle before you start dipping into extra resources like potions and mana crystals. (I’d recommend making friends with an apothecary and throwing herbs at them.)
What this means is that a lot of the time you will be hitting people with your magic stick and dodging arrows, so your spell casts need to be chosen carefully for maximum effect. However the good news is that most approaches are viable.
I started with one offensive spell (paralyse) , and heal. That was fine for battles for a long time, although I feel like having access to restore limb massively increased both my survivability and usefulness in groups.
One thing to bear in mind, there’s a low level ritual Illuminate the Higher Mind which will allow you to “borrow” a spell from another mage for a season, and there are relatively cheap artisan items that give you access to certain spells. Both can be very useful for trying out new spells before you commit to spending XP on them. I had entangle for a season and never used it, had restore limb for a season and then forked out the mana to borrow it every season until I had the xp to learn it for myself.
You don’t have to have a massive crystaly thing on your staff to get a stab-safe staff - mine is from Skian Mhor and that top end is in fact squashy and stab-safe (photo by TomG from a different system, but shows the staff off well):
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