First, I want to register a pet peeve. In the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, sorcerer/wizard spells are presented by level and then broken down by school. In every other book, including the Advanced Players Guide, Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Combat, and the Advanced Race Guide, they’re at best presented by level, with no breakdown by school. In the Advanced Race Guide, there’s not even a list, so you have to page through the book and look at each spell by race. Ugh.
This is frustrating to me because if you’re trying to put together a themed spell list, for a player, a supporting character, or a spellbook to be added to a treasure horde, it makes things difficult. Then there are the spell sub-types. Start at the top of the core book, and acid arrow is of the conjuration school, but also has the (creation) and (acid) subtypes. Scroll to the end, and the last spell, zone of truth, is from the enchantment school and has the (compulsion) and [mind-affecting] subtypes. But there’s no index or list of all of those sub-types. You need to page through the book (or search the PDF).
One of the cool things about Pathfinder is that there are so many spells that no two wizards will be alike. Your character can specialize. Even where it doesn’t make sense for a player character to specialize, as a gamemaster I could think of fun things to do with a non-player character that’s super-specialized in, say, creation-subtype spells, or figment-subtype spells. It seems like impractical research, but the real world is full of impractical research. Digging into the possible answers to the question of why is where good stories come from. What kind of person devotes their life to nothing but teleportation spells? What larger problem are they trying to solve?
This is one of the many, many reasons I love tabletop roleplaying games. You can filter through trivial little details in the rules, and in trying make them make sense you suddenly find yourself worldbuilding. You make up explanations that make your game world a little bit different from everyone else’s game world, and you find adventures past, present, and future embedded in those explanations.
I agree with the sentiment you express here. My personal take on the idea of using a thematic collection of spells is to expand it from the personal level to the national level, with the added twist of also tying that to what language is used for verbal components, something which I’ve written about previously.
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