Trump sorcery may also have issues of scale. It’s one thing to teleport someone to lower Saskatchewan in the middle of combat. It’s quite another to teleport someone to lower Ankh-Morpork in the middle of combat when you’re a hundred Shadows from Discworld.

Most of the ways in which one uses Trump are going to be much more convenient to just use Trump than to use Sorcery in conjunction with Trump. I can only see a few applications that it might be useful for, honestly: identification, jamming, defense, and traps.

Shapeshifting, to me, is much less problematic – I actually already have an example or two of spells that would fit into that application. Same scale as Pattern/Logrus sorcery, I think: Advanced power + sorcery + extra 5.

Power Words are a totally different power to me than Sorcery, though I’ve been argued with about this. Yes, they are technically cantrips, not too far off the order of the student spells in Harry Potter – but they’re not real spells. I could argue that they’re building blocks for bigger spells, but I just don’t like it. To me, there’s this clear division between the power sources of the two. Power Words come from personal energy exclusively. Sorcery uses the forces of the Shadow to work, with the wielder riding herd over them. (There’s an implication by Merlin, I think, that this is the way it works – when he discusses spikards. I can’t see why else it would be significant that the rings draw from multiple power sources through Shadow instead of just one.)

« »