Interesting read; does this mean that only one player can posess the spells in the "lost" spellbooks?  Or is it that once unleashed on the world (by someone completing a quest, say), the book becomes available to all players?

What's the Book of Valar for? Curses do curses, Vengeance makes you...well, vengeful. But Valar?

Time to bust open the spell book! Me want!

Valar is a typo probably. Thinking he meant "Book of Valor".

The cast once spell limitation is kinda a downer. Wish there was some other method to allow for powerful, neat spells but not have them ruin the game.

Perhaps have these types of spell as a one-use artifact found in game through a quest or something.

I think it would add much more interest to make shard types not have exact overlap or duplication with spell book types. Ie when you capture a Fire Shard, it unlocks fire-themed spells from a variety of books: Fireball (Combat), Brilliance (Enchantment), Summon Fire Elemental (Summoning), Create Desert (Ruin), Thaw Tundra (Revival), etc.

This way the set of spells you can use is potentially different with each game, depending on the interplay between what books you have and what shard types you managed to access. Kind of like the system in Dominions 3, where the combination between levels of magic power (Fire, Air, Earth, Death, etc) and research in magic schools (Enchantment, Evocation, Summoning etc) determines what combinations and subsets of spells you gain access to.

Otherwise, if you have a Fire Book you're pretty much screwed if you don't get the Fire Shard, then when you do you always just unlock the exact same set of spells that were in the book all at once.

Hehe... Wreak Havoc vaguely reminds me of Zombie Mastery from MoM.

"Can only be cast once" -- per player, or per game? I'm hoping it's the latter. The spell equivalent of World Wonders in Civ.

I'm looking forward to the new version of the beta. And then seeing what these spells do, and how the whole magic system functions now.

To be honest, now we'll really be able to start the "Gameplay" testing. The stuff that drives the fun of the game. Should be a good ride.

Hooray! Been waiting for the spellbook for a loooooong time!

OOoooo good idea dryman! though im not sure if frogboy and co are dead set on having the shard specific books or not. your idea seems to solve many issues people (including me) have with the shards and having to have the corresponding books. maybe there could be a way to research the shard specific books as more of a mid magic tree tech. either way, shards would still be of strategic importance, gotta collect them all! if for no other reason than to keep em from my enemies..

man i cant wait for this game!

dryman's idea is freaking genius, Frogboy. That will make all shards valuable to everyone and it will be far more interesting to choose which shards you want to go after if you only have a couple spell books.  

A set of stun spells would be useful or paralysis/hold person as higher end versions of slow.

If some creatures end up being resistant to normal weapons you could have an enchant weapon so your mundane creatures could fight them without penalty and without the need to be equipped with magical weapons.

Or a storm/wind spell that made arrows and siege weapons inaccurate or ineffective.

Magical diseases would be pretty messed up. Imagine if the "sloth disease/curse" spread outside of a city and ended up spreading through a trade network. Or like in Wizard's First Rule when the ancient mages made it so all red fruit became poisonous in the entire midlands region thus ruining much of their food supply.

Then maybe your herbalists would have to come up with a cure before you unleashed your biomagical weapon of mass destruction so you could defend yourself...and sell off the formula to those "accidentally" afflicted.

Like your idea Dryman.

If find it strange that the revive land spell cost only 1 essence while the ruin land spell cost 1 essence + 5 mana.

Needs a domination spell of some sort. "Ogre, obey me!"

So what's the deal with shards now? Do we only care about them for the big spells or do they give bonuses for all spells as well? It doesn't seem like there are very many shard-requiring spells...