Arcanum Equilibrium Spell Mastery

Greetings community I've been a long time player of Arcanum, and have posted here once or twice before. After a hiatus, I bought it from GOG and have been loving having it again, though it does play slightly choppier than I expected. But I saw a new to me mod by the name of Arcanume Equilibrium and loaded it up after drooling a bit over all the new magic fun in there. I have it installed and running fine, but what I'm not certain about is the effect of mastering a school of magic. I certainly don't see a halving of any wp cost for spells, and other than a vague mention in the readme file of "magic specialization is a huge benefit" I see no mention of the actual benefits that it brings.

If anyone is able to enlighten me on magic specialization I would be most grateful, and thank you in advance.

 

Spell mastery halves the casting cost for spells of the magical school in which you received mastery only.

You can use the virgil debug menu to artificially grant spell masteries by the way.

Evil characters cannot legitimately get spell masteries because the magical city of Tulla won't accept you.

There are some necklaces of spell masteries you can get from certain masters in Tulla, but those don't actually provide the mastery. You get the mastery by completing their quest.

That's pretty much all there is to it, and hopefully that answers any questions you might have.

 

Re:

That's not necessarily true, you can resolve the good and evil parts of the main quest in tandem if you wish. All you have to do is...

Spoiler

find clues relating to Nasrudin, allowing you to travel to Thanatos and resolve the good questline as normal. This option is intentional, with K'an Hua and Nasrudin meeting at the Ring of Brodgar at the end of the game.

 

Most interesting. I did try various ways of fighting/sneaking into tulla and charming/dominating masters as an evil character to be sure it was impossible, but I never thought to try a game that played both sides.

Brilliant, Jojo. Do you remember exactly what clues for Nasrudin you need and at what points in the story? And do you start as evil, but find clues to Nasrudin and meet him, turn good and go from there?

 

Muro told me first actually, unsurprisingly. And I think the only clue you need is the note that has the discrepancies in the Archaeon in on that can be found on Gunther Willhelm's person. I think I remained pretty evil, agreeing to use the Vendigroth Device is pretty much agreeing to stop a mass maniac - which a fair few rational evil characters wouldn't be opposed to.

 

Before Nasrudin helps an 100% evil character, he sends you to kill the Bogaroth. It's worth 50% goodness, and that good enough to be sent to Tulla.

 

Re:

Well if no one else is going to point out my mistake I may as well - what a moron! In fact I'm double the moron for hitting edit instead of quote, posting a message similar to this in the other's place, then having to re-post the original message; hence the edits.

Anyway, moving on...