Channelling

Every time a priest casts a spell, he touches a small portion of the infinite. The unimaginable power of a deity pours into his body and is directed into a spell effect. But the mortal frame was not meant to contain such energies, and the priest risks exhaustion or even death by calling on his god’s power too frequently.

The same rules described for channelling wizards apply to a channelling priest. The priest gains spell points as described above, allocates them to fixed or free theurgies, and selects the spells he wants to have locked into memory as fixed theurgies. Free theurgies may be used to provide the priest with access to any spell in his repertoire, although they’re more expensive than fixed slots. The priest may exceed his normal spell level limit or cast spells for greater effect, although his deity may choose not to grant him these enhanced powers. The priest modifies his spell point total based on his Constitution score; the character’s hit point adjustment for Constitution is added to or subtracted from his spell point total. If this lowers a 1st-level priest to less than 4 spell points, he ignores the adjustments; all priests have at least 4 spell points.

While the priest may have spell points “allocated” or “tied up” in fixed and free theurgies, this makes no difference for a channeller. His selection of spells simply creates a slate of spell powers which the character can access and defines the cost in spell points for making use of these powers. The character may cast any spell that he has available through either a fixed or free slot normally, except that the spell slot does not vanish from his memory once he’s cast the spell. Instead, the character deducts the number of spell points required to energize the spell from his spell point total.

Spell points in this system represent magical stamina. They are recovered as the character’s fatigue fades and his strength returns. (Refer to Channellers , on page 80.) Spell points are recovered as shown on Table 20 .

In addition to the depletion of spell points, channelling also causes immediate fatigue effects. Refer to Table 21 and the fatigue rules that follow. Note that the effective level of a spell may be higher than its true level, especially if the priest makes use of a spell from a minor sphere of access or casts a spell at a greater than normal effectiveness by paying extra spell points to do so. Consider quest spells to be two spell levels higher than the caster can cast for purposes of caster fatigue and exhaustion.

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