Wonky Inscription Difficulties for Necromancy Scrolls

Rock

I recently trained my scribe on Baja to GM and am now working my scribe on Origin.  Her current Inscription skill is 71.4.  My Baja scribe didn't make reference books in Mysticism and Necromancy until he was already GM.  But I decided to get an earlier start on my Origin scribe, knowing that she would net yet be able to make the full sets of scrolls.

Mysticism worked as expected.  The spells therein are disciplined in design and follow the Magery example of 8 circles.  Except with Mysticism there are only 2 spells per circle instead of 8.  As expected, She had no problem making a set of scrolls for the first 7 circles and has no chance yet of making the 2 eighth circle scrolls.

Necromancy spell and inscription difficulties seem to have a slightly chaotic design. One element is ordered; unlike most other spellbooks, Necromancy spells are listed in alphabetical order, not difficulty order. (I think Chivalry spells are also listed alphabetically.)

Spell             Castable  Inscriptable
Animated Dead        40         39.6
Blood Oath           20         19.6
Corpse Skin          20         19.6
Curse Weapon          0         19.6
Evil Omen            20         19.6
Horrific Beast       40         39.6
Lich Form            70         69.6
Mind Rot             30         29.6
Pain Spike           20         19.6
Poison Strike        50         49.6
Strangle             65         64.6
Summon Familiar      30         29.6
Vampiric Embrace     99         98.6
Vengeful Spirit      80         79.6
Wither               60         59.6
Wraith Form          20         79.6
eXorcism             80         79.6

The normal relationship between castability and inscribability is that the latter is 0.4 less than the former. The two exceptions are Curse Weapon (CW) and Wraith Form (WF).  CW sort of makes sense; since it is castable at 0, it had to be inscribable at 0 or above.  I guess the designers chose 19.6 because that is the same level as so many other scrolls.  WF, however, is weird, perhaps bugged.  At 71.4 Inscription, my scribe is unable to make a 20-difficulty spell scroll.

At a guess, the original castability level for WF was 80, which would spread the HB, Lich, WF, and VE forms evenly from 40 to 99.  Players would have begged the devs to lower the casting level of WF so that they could Recall at low levels.  In this scenario the devs would have done so, but forgot to also lower the scribing difficulty of WF scrolls.  (The original forms order would have had another nice feature; HB has the negative effect of blocking the ability to cast spells in most builds, Lich has the negative effect of a -HPR.  The negative side effects of WF and VE are relatively minor by comparison. Aesthetically, I find that to be pleasing.)

Another unusual feature of scribing Necromancy scrolls is that their success chance is binary, or close to it.  My 71.4-level scribe had a 100% chance of scribing all scrolls within her difficulty range.  If out of range, she couldn't make them.  This makes these sets of items a poor choice to use for skill gain, but it is sort of a moot point with so many other things a scribe can make that follow a more linear difficulty curve,   The devs may have chosen a binary approach here to make the scribing of VE scrolls to seem reasonable.  If, say, they only had a 7% success chance at 100 inscription, players would have complained.  IIRC, Necromancy came long before talismans existed, so a solution would have been to make the difficulty of this set to be binary.

Mervyn

Good work