Template: Mage

The mage trades the warrior’s simplicity for range, mobility, and the best money-per-danger ratio in the game — once past the reagent-poverty phase. Your damage comes from Magery + Evaluating Intelligence; your endurance from Meditation; your wallet from knowing which monsters die to spells without ever touching you.

Endgame goal (700.0 total): Magery, Evaluating Intelligence, Meditation, Wrestling, Resisting Spells at 100, plus two flex slots (Inscription for income, or Tactics/a weapon for a hybrid).

Character creation on this shard

Full rules: character creation.

Stats: 30 STR / 10 DEX / 50 INT. INT is your mana pool and Meditation fuel. 50 is the practical ceiling worth paying for at creation; stat gain raises the rest.
Skills: Magery 50, Meditation 50, Evaluating Intelligence 20. Magery’s starting kit is the best in the game: a spellbook with 12 spells — including Fireball, Lightning, and Greater Heal — plus a bag of 50 of each reagent, 3 random scrolls, a wizard’s hat, and a blue robe.
The book does NOT contain Recall (or Mark). Buying those two scrolls is your first errand; Recall mobility is half the class.
City: Moonglow. Mage shop, scribe, and alchemist clustered by the bank — “training Magery here means never running dry of reagents.” Britain works too (mage shop + everything else); era advice also names Trinsic for reagents, but our Trinsic page lists no mage shop — go Moonglow.

First purchases: Recall and Mark scrolls, blank runes, and more reagents. Your 1,000 gold exists to be converted into black pearl.

Stage 1 — Novice (creation → ~60 Magery)

Goals: Magery to ~65 on Fireball/Lightning, mark a rune at your bank, never melee anything.

You start at 50 Magery — already past the NPC-training phase era guides begin with. Per the casting table, Fireball (circle 3) stops teaching around 48.6, so your training spells are circle 4: Lightning and Greater Heal carry you to ~63.
Train on things that pay for the reagents: ettins (82–99 hits) and ogres (100–117 hits) on the roads die to a few Lightnings and drop Average-tier gold and potions. Harpies (58–72 hits, 50 feathers) are even safer.
Learn Recall + Mark immediately (cast from scrolls — scrolls cast two circles easier, per the Magery page). Mark runes at the Moonglow bank and your hunting ground; Recall is also respectable Magery training.

Collect: gold, gems, every scroll (fill your spellbook free), reagents from mage-type corpses. Money: tight. Reagents eat most income this stage — that is normal and temporary.

Stage 2 — Journeyman (60 → 90)

Goals: Magery to ~91 on Energy Bolt, Eval Int climbing alongside, Meditation passively maxing, a runebook’s worth of marked locations.

Shame is the mage dungeon. On this shard it holds earth elementals (76–93 hits, melee-only, slow — a mage’s ideal prey) and air elementals (76–93 hits, caster — practice Resist). Earth elementals drop gold, gems, and mandrake root; the kills partially restock your own pouch. Era guides praise Shame’s fire elemental room; our dungeons page places fire elementals in the Fire Dungeon (unverified) instead — they carry gems and sulfurous ash, same self-restocking logic.
Evil mage towers (era location: east of Britain, unverified here): evil mages (49–63 hits — fragile) drop Average gold, medium-circle scrolls, and reagents. Scroll loot is direct profit via your own book or the scribe.
Despise ettins/ogres/earth elementals remain solid Recall-in, bolt-things-down, Recall-out farming.

Collect: gems, scrolls (use or sell), mandrake/sulfurous ash, magic items (properties visible — no ID step on this AoS-rules shard). Money: this is where the build flips from poor to comfortable; elemental farming with Recall logistics out-earns any Stage 2 warrior. Consider an Inscription sideline: scribing Recall scrolls sells to every non-mage on the shard (no wiki page yet for Inscription — era advice, unverified).

Stage 3 — Master (90+)

Goals: GM Magery via Flame Strike (circle 7 trains to ~105), then 8th-circle warfare; GM Eval/Med; Resist against real casters.

At high Magery, switch to summon farming: Energy Vortex (and Blade Spirits, cheaper) kill things you cannot safely touch — point them at trolls, liches (103–120 hits, Rich loot + necro scrolls), and Covetous spawn while you loot.
Top gold per hour: Deceit lich lords (250–303 hits, FilthyRich packs) and — with a partner or very good kiting — dragons (478–495 hits, FilthyRich ×2 + 8 gems) in Destard.
Gate Travel makes you the shard’s taxi service; gating players to dungeons or selling gates at the bank is real income on busy days.

The trade loop

Buy	Where
Reagents (the eternal expense)	Moonglow mage shop, Britain mage shop, Vesper mages — see reagents
Recall/Mark/blank runes/spell scrolls	Mage shops and scribes (Moonglow has both)
Potions, bottles	Alchemists (Moonglow, Britain)

Sell	Where
Gems	NPC jewelers
Looted scrolls you already know	Mage shops, or players
Scribed Recall/Gate scrolls	Players at banks, forum trade board
Magic item loot	NPCs for vendor trash; players for good properties

Decision points & common mistakes

If you are below ~20 Eval Int, your damage spells hit for embarrassing numbers — fix Eval before blaming Magery.
If a fizzle streak is eating reagents, you are casting above your window (casting table) — drop a circle or cast from scrolls.
If reagents cost more than the corpse pays, the target is wrong: hunt elementals and evil mages, whose loot includes reagents, gems, and scrolls.
If something melee-fast closes on you (harpies are slow; brigands are not): Recall out. You have ~30 STR; you lose every wrestling match.
Mistake: skipping Eval Int entirely. A GM mage without Eval does less damage than a mid-level warrior.
Mistake: carrying your spellbook in a pouch or bag — era wisdom says loose in the main backpack. Note this shard enables auto-renewing item insurance (character creation) which may protect it; insure it and report findings.
Mistake: treating the blue robe as armor. It is cloth. You are the squishiest template on this list; range is your armor.