Our entire lives, our defense should far outmatch the strength of any potential opponent which we might run across. We traverse our way to the hunt with our swords drawn and in full defensive stance, so that any beastie that we happen across will not strike us down. When we start to really need defensive spells to hunt, we will get mass spells, particularly mass guards, cast upon us. Mass guards is a nickname for mass elemental defense 419.
When someone has announced that they are casting mass guards, mass blurs, or mass colors, you must first join the caster. This makes you a member of the caster's group. The caster then will proceed to cast the same spell repeatedly on every member of the group simultaneously.
If you are old enough and are trained in the art of mana sharing, it is customary to send mana to the caster of mass spells. If you are young and cannot, it is perfectly ok to simply reap the rewards from the gracious caster. If you wanted to share 10 mana with me, the caster, you would send 10 zanovere. You will lose 10 mana, and I will recieve some amount between zero to ten mana, depending upon how well you and I each share.
In town, nodes can be found at tables in the taverns. Many of the places where people congregate are mana nodes. People are preparing for hunts and need mana as quickly as they can get it.
The amount of mana you can expect from a pulse at a node is your total normal capacity to hold mana, divided by four, rounded up to the nearest full piece of mana. Mana pulses come about every two minutes, so in eight minutes you should have a full head of mana if you stay at a node.
Check the size of a mana pulse if you wish to determine whether any given room in the lands is a mana node or not. Always spell up at a node if at all possible.
By the time you have achieved five trainings of experience, you have a head of 15 mana when full. You can cast fifteen shots of silveries on yourself at five minutes each. This is a total of 75 minutes, or an hour and a quarter. You can do some pretty good hunting in an hour and a quarter. With another head full of mana, you can cast 5 shots of blurs 503. That's only 25 minutes. You can wait for another head of mana, which takes about eight minutes, and then cast another 25 minutes worth of blurs. Or you can go ahead and start hunting, adding a cast or two of blurs every few minutes as your mana regenerates.
This is called maintaining your spells. Before a spell you are maintaining wears off, you make another cast of the spell on yourself. If the spell completely wears off, you go into a defensive stance and then recast the spell on yourself. If you are using mana for attacks as well as the sword (and you should be) you need to remember to keep some mana in reserve so that you can put a spell back on when it melts off.
One trick to spell maintenance is to realize that silveries, blurs, and brights all last the same amount of time per cast. If we can survive without our silveries, we may cast silveries a minute or two earlier than we cast blurs or brights, so that when our silveries wear off it serves as an early warning that we are about two minutes away from losing something more substantial.
So if we are six, with a full head of 18 mana, and we cast 12 shots of silveries about ourselves for a total of 12 X 6 = 72 minutes = 1 hour 12 minutes. We can probably have a really good hunt or two in that time. Now we have six mana left over, so we cast two shots of blurs, wait eight minutes for our mana to come back and then cast another six shots of blurs. We now have 8 shots of blurs total for 48 minutes. Wait a few minutes and take another 4 casts of blurs.
Now we are spelled up with our mass spells -- guards, blurs, and colors, and with silveries, and blurs. That's 25 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 60 added to our natural defense. So we have our reflex trait and our shield use for defense strength, plus an extra 60 for mass spells, silveries, and blurs. Our total defense strength in offensive stance is probably around 100. To find out for sure, someone or something will have to attack us so that we can watch the numbers spew out. Another character can go into a defensive stance and swing at us, or we can find a rolton out on the trail that will try to bite us if we stand there with it long enough. We can go up against a lot of stuff with a DS of 100 and never get hit. That's the object. Never get hit.
You are six trainings along and you just got a new spell, brights 406. If you want to add brights to the mix when you hunt, it really isn't practical to spell up with brights at only six trainings. It will take too much mana. It will take three heads-full of mana, 24 minutes, to put on an hour's worth of brights at this age. It is practical, however, to cast a shot or two of brights, and then add a shot of brights before the current cast falls off. That is, spell up with silveries and blurs before the hunt, and maintain our brights as we hunt.
The more mana we use for maintaining spells, the less mana we have for
hunting. But that is what magic wands are for.
One spell which becomes very important over time is the Elemental
Detection 405 spell. As a young wizard casting detection, we have
a lot of problems with it. We cast it on ourselves and all it does
is show us some of the spells that we have on. Occasionally it might
show us all of the spells at once. It might also give us a hint as
to the duration of one or two of the spells.
Over time, the detection spell becomes more reliable. It will show
you all of your spells most of the time, and an indication of how much
time is left. You may need to cast the spell on yourself several times
in order to get all of the information you need.
If you get the indication that a spell has a great amount of time left then
you know that the spell has an hour or more of duration. If a spell has a
lot of time left then it has a half-hour or more left. If it has some time
left then it has less than a half hour. If it has very little time left
then you have no more than a minute or two.
Elemental Detection
We have to keep a pretty close watch on our time with the spells we
spelled up with, or they may wear off at a very inopportune time. The
more we rely upon any given spell, the more important it is that we
record the time that the spell was cast, and the cumulative duration
of the spell. We'd like to be someplace safe when our spells fail.
The Two-Hour Rule for Spelling Up
You can cast up to four hours of spells upon yourself prior to the hunt.
That is usually a tremendous investment of time before the hunt. If you
can wrack for mana or if you are a
Voln master using symbol of dreams,
you can regenerate mana and spell up more quickly, but it remains an
investment of time. There is nothing more frustrating than putting on
three and a half hours
of spells, only to be struck dead when you get to the hunt because you
forgot to hold your shield. Yes, that has happened to this old wizard,
in clear violation of the Zanovere mantra, never get hit.
A much more time-efficient method of spelling up is the two-hour rule. Cast as many casts as it takes of a spell that it last you for two hours. Start with your weakest spell, silveries usually. Cast the full two hours of silveries before going on to the next spell, blurs. Cast two hours of blurs and move onto brights. Finish spelling up with one spell completely before going onto the next spell. This will space your spells out a bit so that they don't all fail at the same time.
Then you go hunting. Afterward, you come back to a node and you check your spells against your notes or with Elemental Detection 405. All of the spells which have less than an hour left on them, or have less than a great amount of time using detection, you add an additional two hours worth of those spells to. This way, you can hunt for hours or days at a time, only refreshing a spell or two in between hunts.