:I think that's very different from every kind of sorcery I'm aware of - they still have inherited bloodlines that affect the nature of their powers, but they increase in circle like every other kind of spellcaster on Golarion, there's no - brief initial training period followed by leveling out at a predetermined cap of power. Also sorcerers have a hard time learning new spells in any way other than by gaining circles, while wizards can as long as there are still spells of the circles they can cast that they haven't picked up yet... would this mean that a very young mage could be just as dangerous as a venerable experienced one, at least in principle if not in strategic knowhow and repertoire?:

:Depends on the situation, but sometimes! A very young inexperienced mage with Adept-potential could be more dangerous in direct face-to-face combat than a weakly Gifted mage with any amount of training, for sure. Though they'd be vulnerable – most people can do some amount of magic instinctively with no training, but that's way more likely to be setting things on fire than something more controlled like shielding. An experienced mage would have options like hiding themselves with magic and casting at a distance with a lower-power but precisely targeted attack, so a weaker but experienced mage could still take out an untrained Adept-potential mage if they were very clever about it.: 

Aaaaand she doesn't love talking about blood-magic but she really should, given that Leareth's army is the main possible threat that could come up soon. :I don't know if your world uses blood-magic? Here, er, a mage who's willing to be unethical can - kill someone, and use the life-energies released to power their magic. It's...bad for you...and I think it's much harder to control, but even weakly Gifted mages or inexperienced mages can use it to boost offensive spells and be pretty scary. It was a problem in the war with Karse, they were sending out weakly Gifted teenagers loaded up with blood-magic to throw fireballs around.: 

:There are some relatively obscure rituals that are rumored to involve human sacrifice but it's not standard for any ordinary spells.:

Nod. :That's a major difference, then. I think blood-magic can be used for any kind of magic as long as power matters more than finesse.: 

What else seems like it could be different. 

:...Our mages don't have a limited number of spells, and they don't come in - when you said 'circles' it seemed like you meant sort of steps in power? For us, a given mage-technique can sort of be ordered by how hard it is, which is a mix of the minimum power it takes to cast at all and how much detail and complexity goes into it, but usually you can put more or less oomph into the same spell – a Master-potential mage can cast the same shield-technique as an Adept, it would just be weaker and stand up to fewer attacks. Mages are usually limited by using up their energy reserves and getting tired – or for Adepts, they can draw on node-energy and keep casting a lot longer, but eventually it gives you backlash and you get a horrible headache. If you really push too hard, especially with a technique like Gates where the spell is stable once cast but drawing energy from a link continuously as long as you're holding it, you can drain yourself unconscious. It's a lot harder to give yourself really dangerous backlash with other Gifts, but the limitation is the same – if I Mindspeak too much at distances that are long-range for me, I get tired and then I get a headache and eventually - it's a bit like when you try to lift a really heavy weight too many times in a row, it's doable when you're fresh but at some point your muscles just won't anymore. Practice does help with endurance – my range hasn't extended since I graduated into Whites but I can manage a much longer conversation at my maximum range now.: 

Pause. 

:...It's also possible to - sort of choose to burn all your life-energies at once? It's called a Final Strike. Even the very weakest mage could take out this whole building in a fireball, if they were willing to die for it. An Adept's Final Strike leaves a crater half a mile across.: 

Vanyel, they think, would take out all of Haven. Katri doesn't say that, though. 

:I don't think it's normal for any magic use to knock the caster unconscious unless they do something like center a fireball on their own position and as far as I'm aware no one on Golarion is specifically rigged to explode but that does seem important to know!:

:Right, it seems like your magic is limited by something else, even for casters who use their own power rather than getting it from a god.: 

:Right. I have an incompletely learned version of a wizard spell, if that matters to anything.:

:I guess it might be neat to see if they look different to mage-sight, at some point. ...Or if they don't show up at all, like how Fetching doesn't look like anything to mage-sight.: Shrug. :I'm not really a researcher, though, Vanyel would be able to learn more that way. I'm sure he'll want to ask you about it later.: 

:At his convenience, of course. Mage-sight is your technique for seeing magic and it can't see Fetching? That's so strange.:

:...You know, I never thought about it before but it really is strange! Especially because you can shield against it with mage-work - though I think that technique took a lot of research to develop, and it's hard enough that I haven't learned it.: 

:If mage-sight is specific to other mage techniques I'd be surprised if anything I can do showed up.:

:It's not only mage-techniques, natural sources of magic - like living things, or ley-lines - show up too! And - wow, I'm just realizing I never noticed how weird this was - you can use mage-energy for other Gifts, we think it's all the same kind of energy. I don't know why other Gifts don't show up, I– hmm. I've heard of it being possible to make artifacts that also don't show up as magical, because the energy signature is, er, sort of only pointed inward? Maybe it's like that. And other Gifts don't leave anything behind, you can't make a Mindspeech set-spell - even Healing-Gift doesn't leave magic behind, the patient is healed but it's still just their body...: 

Katri is thoroughly nerdsniped and has completely forgotten that the goal of the conversation is to answer Blai's questions. 

:I suppose I should prepare Detect Magic in the morning to see if it has the same limitations.:

:Ooh, that does sound like a good idea. Unless it trades off against some defensive spell you could have instead just in case, that might be more important?: 

:No, it's a zeroth-circle spell and I can have four of them available for unlimited castings each day.:

Nod. :It might be good to have even as defensive magic, if you can't directly see magic otherwise? I would feel really helpless without mage-sight, if I couldn't see what was going on. Though I guess it helps less if your magic works totally different from ours and you can't tell what any of the spells you see are going to do.: 

:With Golarion magic I can tell a moderate amount about what kind of magic I'm looking at, but it's not fast, I have to concentrate for a little while.:

:Is it something where you get faster with more practice and familiarity? Or is that just how the spell works? - that is a way that experienced mages are meaningfully more powerful and dangerous than inexperienced mages, if you get good enough you can figure out what another mage is doing fast enough to counter their offensive spells in real time. Van can do it.: 

:It's how the spell works. There might be someone with a trick for it but it wouldn't be the sort of thing they could trivially teach everyone they met. Counterspells are a thing on Golarion but usually not tactically worthwhile compared to getting off a spell of your own unless the situation is asymmetrical. I can prepare Dispel Magic in my third circle slot tomorrow, though.:

:Oh, huh, does that - am I picking up right that it counters arbitrary other spells? That's - really powerful - that's not a thing here, you can either shield and deflect it or if you're really good like Van you can interfere with the spell-structure as they're building it and make it collapse on them - that's the part that takes a lot of experience, you have to be able to figure it out and react in a fraction of a second. And, yeah, if you're fast enough to do that it might make more sense just to try to hit them with a levinbolt so they lose it.: 

:I do not have a spell that does levinbolts. That's more of a wizard thing. I can do Dispel Magic but I can only do it once.:

...All right, the thing where he has a limited number of spells per day and that's it is, in fact, really limiting. Katri can imagine someone like Vanyel getting a lot of mileage out of being able to vanish an arbitrary spell even if it was only once a day - he could take out someone's shield-talisman, for example - but it helps that he could still be fighting normally the rest of the time. Really it sounds like it would be most useful in something other than a fight. If you were sneaking into a place and needed to take down a shield, for example. 

:What are the options for spells you can do unlimited times? Almost anything a Velgarth mage can do, they can just do again if it doesn't work the first time, so I think being able to dispel magic would mostly work if it was something complicated that would take a while to redo and you could run away or get backup in the meantime.: 

:The orisons I have today are Spark, Light, Guidance, and Create Water. The last two I usually have, Light I often have but not as reliably, Spark I only have today because I was at some risk of needing to camp out. Sometimes I take Detect Magic, or Virtue, or Resistance, or Stabilize. There's also Mending, which I didn't usually have because I was at a fortress with a lot of spellcasters and could delegate the mending, but it's also an orison.:

Katri listens attentively. (She's not sure whether helping Select Blai game out how to handle himself in a fight with a Velgarth mage should be her top priority, but it makes sense for it to be important to him, and it feels like it's actually a pretty fruitful way to hone in on the differences between their magic. Vanyel didn't give her very precise instructions.) 

:Mmm. Some of those sound pretty self-evident - though creating water is weird, I don't think you can do that with any Gift unless the thing it does is transport water from somewhere else - but I'm not sure what Guidance or Virtue do?: 

:Guidance makes you a little bit better at almost anything, so long as the thing begins before the spell wears off. I cast it a lot. Would you like one?: