Dragons - Casting Spells
From: Vincent H. Coffey <[email protected]>
BY: Carmen A Tanzio <[email protected]>
I don't recall the specifics of the CJ article, but I can give you a general guideline that follows the rules GW uses for costing wizards of other races.
If all you want to do is give the dragon access to a spell deck, add 50pts to the cost of the dragon for each spell level. Thus a level 3 mage-dragon would cost 600pts instead of 450pts. Do NOT give the model access to magic items for this cost. This only entitles the model to randomly draw and cast spells.
If you want the dragon to have access to wizard arcana, the problem becomes more difficult. GW uses a type of sliding scale to inflate the base cost of mage models to account for magic items. The base cost of a dragon greatly exceeds any examples we can conjure from the army books.
Because dragons are so expensive to start with, I would probably select the factors used for men:
Magic
Level
L1 = 400x1 + 50 = 450pts, 1 spell + 1 magic item
L2 = 400x1.5 + 100 = 700pts, 2 spells + 2 magic items
L3 = 400x2 + 150 = 950pts, 3 spells + 3 magic items
L4 = 400x3 + 200 = 1400pts, 4 spells + 4 magic items
I would restrict them to wizard arcana only, and, as sentient creatures, they must be unridden. What self-respecting wizard would allow itself to be treated as a beast of burden? <grin>
You can get more sophisticated and increase the stat line by the typical 'adds' given to the mages for other races (like +1T and +1W/level), but the cost formula gets a bit more complicated.
Carmen