Write your own magic.

The six schools, and what each one is for

Magic in Daggerfall is split across six schools, and every spell belongs to one or more of them. Your skill in a school governs how cheap that school's spells are to cast, and nothing else — it never makes a spell more powerful.

Willpower trains every school at once, which sounds powerful until you remember that casting cost is a pure function of school skill. Doubling your Willpower gives you faster skill progression in all six schools, and it gives you exactly zero discount on your spells. If you want cheap magic, put your points into the individual school skills on your character sheet.

Stacking schools in one spell

The Spell Maker lets you combine up to three effects per spell, and each can come from a different school. The costs of the individual components simply add together, and the school you cast under decides the discount. Multi-school spells are why the list above matters more than picking one.

Spell points: the pool you spend and the eight-hour rule

Spell points, shown in the HUD as magicka, come straight from Intelligence at a 0.5 multiplier, so 80 Intelligence carries 40 spell points. Nothing else raises that multiplier: no level, no guild, no equipment.

BASE MULTIPLIER

Spell points = 0.5 × Intelligence.

THE ONLY EXCEPTION

The "Increased Magery" special advantage raises the multiplier to 3× Intelligence.

REGENERATION

Spell points refill completely after 8 hours of rest.

FAILURE CHANCE

There is none. You cast or you cannot.

The single most important sentence on this page is the last one. There is no chance of spellcasting failure in Daggerfall. You are not rolling against your school skill to see whether a spell takes. You either pay its cost and it fires, or you do not have the points and the cast is refused. That is why a cheap spell at high skill is dependable.

Increased Magery is a special advantage, which means it competes for slots against things like Acute Hearing and the various combat bonuses. Six times the magicka of a normal character is transformative enough to plan a whole build around — read the character creation guide before you lock it in, because you cannot take it back without rolling a new character.

How a spell's magicka cost is calculated

Every spell in the game — bought, found, or written by you — has a Spell Cost number. That number is the sum of what its individual effects cost. What you actually pay when you cast is a fraction of it, determined by your skill in that spell's school:

Casting cost = (0.275 − 0.0025 × Skill) × Spell Cost, with a hard floor of 5 spell points.

Read that as a table rather than a formula. At skill 0 you pay 27.5% of a spell's cost, at skill 50 you pay 15%, and at skill 100 you pay 2.5% — at which point almost every cheap spell lands on the floor of 5 and stops falling. Willpower does not appear in the formula.

Multi-school spells add their individual costs together before the multiplier is applied, so blending a cheap Alteration effect into an expensive Thaumaturgy effect raises the base, and the school you cast it under decides the discount. If you write a spell that trains three schools, be deliberate about which one you intend to use it under.

Remember the clock: one in-game minute is five real seconds. Every duration in the Spell Maker is expressed in game minutes, so a "60 minute" duration is five real minutes and a "5 minute" duration is twenty-five real seconds. Long-lasting effects are far, far shorter than they look.

What the spell cost is not

Spell Cost has nothing to do with the fee the Spell Maker charges you for writing it. That fee is a fixed gold price determined by the maker, and it is unaffected by your school skills, your Willpower, or your Mercantile skill. You can haggle your way into cheap books at a shop — see the shopping guide — but the Spell Maker's fee does not move.

Inside the Spell Maker

The Spell Maker is the single most powerful tool in the Iliac Bay, and it is available to almost anyone: Mages Guild rank 0, which means simple membership, or rank 6 or higher in the Temple of Kynareth. You do not have to be a mage to write magic — you have to be in the right building.

The interface, panel by panel

You name the spell, pick a HUD icon for the hotbar, select an element, and stack up to three effects. The element is free — it costs nothing to make a fire spell rather than a shock spell, which matters enormously when you are writing damage magic.

For every effect you get three parameters, and the distinction between them trips up most first-time makers:

Duration extension is computed separately from the rest and added on, which produces one of the guide's favourite facts: adding one minute of duration costs the same at 100% chance as it does at 1% chance. Chance and duration are billed independently. If you want a spell that is cheap to write and certain to land, put your gold into chance and buy your time in minutes you actually need.

Reference costs for common effects

These are the numbers to plan against. Each entry is the constant cost plus the per-level cost, before any target-scope multiplier is applied.

What those numbers tell you

Jumping, Free Action, Water Breathing and Water Walking are remarkably cheap at 5 constant and 2 per level — they scale almost for free. Invisibility at 10/30 is expensive for what it does, and Chameleon at 5/20 sits in the awkward middle: cheap to start, punishing to extend. Regenerate has a brutal 25 constant on its duration component but a trivial 2/2 on magnitude, so a small steady heal is cheap and a large one is not.

Target scope decides how much a spell multiplies

Where you aim a spell changes its Spell Cost before your skill is ever applied. This is the multiplier most players overlook, and it is often the difference between a spell being usable and not.

Notice that By touch costs exactly what Caster only costs. If a spell can be written to work by touch on a door, that is a free upgrade in capability at zero additional gold.

The free teleport bug and the rounding exploits

Daggerfall's magic system has a handful of long-standing bugs that players kept deliberately for thirty years. The Spell Maker is where most of them live, because the cost evaluation runs on the effect parameters rather than on the finished spell.

The free Teleport

Teleport has no parameters at all. No duration, no chance, no magnitude. Because the Spell Maker evaluates the cost of an effect by walking its parameters, and Teleport has none to walk, it evaluates to zero and the maker will hand you a Teleport spell for nothing. Pick Teleport, add it to your spell, name it something dignified, and walk away with a spell that should cost a fortune.

The catch is one click away: open the effect and edit it, and the maker recalculates and puts the correct price of 320 spell points back. Editing the effect restores the evaluation. That is why this is a curiosity rather than a permanent feature, and why you will see people describing both "the free teleport" and "teleport costs 320" in the same breath. Both are true, depending on whether the effect was touched.

Why you still want it

Teleport is a combat-escape button and a dungeon-skipping tool, and no amount of spell points removes its value. If you find it free, take it. If you write it yourself, budget 320 spell points of casting cost.

The rounding exploit that scales for free

Two rounding behaviours let you write spells that get stronger as your character levels, at no additional gold:

• A magnitude range of 1–1 costs the same as 1–2. The cost rounds downward, so the smallest possible range already pays the smallest possible price.
• Setting a per-level term to "1 per 2 levels" makes that component cost zero. The per-level contribution rounds below the smallest payable increment and is discarded.

Put those two together and you can build a spell whose base output is trivial but whose per-level growth is effectively free. The spell gets stronger every time you level and you never pay again for the privilege. This is the single most important thing to understand about the Spell Maker, because it converts magic from a fixed expense into a scaling one — exactly the opposite of how most players use magic, as a fixed expense they grumble about.

Five worked spell recipes

Every figure below is the Spell Cost before your skill multiplier, then the actual casting cost at a skill of 50, where the multiplier is 0.150. Duration extension is priced separately by the maker and is not included in these totals — the maker shows the running total as you adjust each slider.

Recipe 1 — Invisibility you can cast six times in a row

1. Name the spell Veil and give it any HUD icon.
2. Add Invisibility from Illusion as your only effect.
3. Set the duration to the length you actually want in game minutes, remembering that one game minute is five real seconds.
4. Set Chance to 100. Duration and chance are billed separately, so certainty does not scale with how long you want it to last.
5. Set target scope to Caster only, a 1.0× multiplier.

Invisibility costs 10 constant and 30 per level. At skill 50 that is 0.150 × 10 = 1.5, which drops onto the 5-point floor. Every Invisibility spell you write costs 5 spell points to cast. You will not build a spell that is cheaper than the game's minimum, but you will build one you can repeat until your pool empties.

Recipe 2 — Levitate across the Iliac Bay

1. Name it Skyward.
2. Add Levitate from Alteration.
3. Set duration high enough to cover a long crossing. Divvy the time up in your head against the five-seconds-per-minute clock before you commit.
4. Set Chance to 100.
5. Set scope to Area around caster, a 2.0× multiplier, so the effect travels with you through anything you pass.

Levitate is 15 constant, so 15 × 2.0 = a Spell Cost of 30. At skill 50, 0.150 × 30 = 4.5, and the floor makes it 5 spell points. Even at the most expensive scope in common use, a Levitate spell is one of the cheapest things you can cast. This is the travel spell to write first — the travel guide covers where it actually saves you time.

Recipe 3 — A Soul Trap you can fire at farmable monsters

1. Name it Cage.
2. Add Soul Trap from Mysticism.
3. Soul Trap has two parameter lines: duration at 15 constant and 17 per level, chance at 10 constant and 17 per level.
4. Set scope to Single target at range, a 1.5× multiplier, so you can trap from across a room.
5. Raise chance to a level you trust. At 10 constant the chance line is cheap, so certainty here is affordable.

Using the 10 constant as the Spell Cost figure: 10 × 1.5 = 15, and 0.150 × 15 = 2.25, floored to 5 spell points. This is the workhorse spell behind every Soul Bound item you will ever make, and it is covered in detail later in this guide.

Recipe 4 — A Regenerate self-heal that costs almost nothing to use

1. Name it Knit.
2. Add Regenerate from Restoration. Its duration line is 25 constant and 5 per level; its magnitude line is only 2 constant and 2 per level.
3. Keep the magnitude modest. At 2 constant the magnitude slider is nearly free, while the 25 constant duration line is the expensive part.
4. Set Chance to 100 and scope to Caster only.

On the magnitude figure of 2: 0.150 × 2 = 0.3, floored to 5 spell points. Regenerate is the cheapest sustained healing in the game if you keep the numbers small, and it beats carrying twenty healing potions from your alchemy bench into every dungeon.

Recipe 5 — Damage that scales with your level for free

1. Name it Wither.
2. Add Damage Health from Restoration, which costs 5 constant and 7 per level.
3. Set the magnitude range to the minimum, 1–1. It costs exactly the same as 1–2.
4. Set the per-level term to 1 per 2 levels. That component evaluates to zero cost.
5. Pick your element. The element is free, so match it to what you are fighting.
6. Set scope to Single target at range, 1.5×.

You are left paying only the 5 constant, doubled by scope to a Spell Cost of 7.5. At skill 50 that is 1.1, floored to 5 spell points — and the spell keeps getting stronger as your character levels while the gold price stays where it was. That is the exploit stated as a recipe, because understanding it as a recipe is how you stop leaving it on the table.

The Item Maker and its ten slots

Spells are half of magic. The other half is putting magic on your sword. The Item Maker is accessed at Mages Guild rank 5 (Enchanter) or higher, or at the Temple of Julianos, which is the route most players use if they never join the Guild. Guild ranks and how to reach them are in the guilds guide.

BASE PRICE

10 gold per enchantment point

SLOTS

Up to 10 advantages or disadvantages on a single item

SURCHARGES

Certain powers add their own fee on top of the point cost

SOUL GEM TRADE

Mages Guild rank 4, or Dark Brotherhood rank 5

Advantages worth building an item around

• Cast When Held / When Used / When Strikes — binds a spell to the object. When Strikes is how a sword casts without taking a hotbar slot.
• Absorbs Spells — 1500 enchantment points, and it is the most expensive single power in the game.
• Enhances Skill — +15, can exceed 100, and stacks.
• Extra Spell Pts — +75 per point, and it stacks.
• Feather Weight — reduces weight by 0.25 kg.
• Improved Talents and Increased Weight Allowance — utility enchantments that quietly make every other part of the build work.
• Potent Vs, Good Rep With — the social and damage ones.
• Regens Health — 1 hp per 4 in-game minutes.
• Repairs Objects — stop worrying about durability entirely.
• Strengthens Armor — +5.
• Vampiric Effect — heals you as you fight.

Disadvantages you should think twice about

Bad Reactions From, Bad Rep With, Health Leech, User Takes Damage and Low Damage Vs are all manageable. Two are not. Extra Weight multiplies the item's weight by four, which will quietly wreck your encumbrance. Soul Bound is covered in the next section and deserves its own warning, because binding a soul without understanding the escape clause can cost you an item and leave you fighting the thing that used to be in it.

Soul gems, Soul Trap and Soul Bound

Enchantment points are capped by the item's condition, and souls are how you get around that cap.

What is actually in a soul gem

A soul gem holds a creature's soul. Not blood. Not lich dust. You buy an empty gem from a guild merchant — Mages Guild rank 4, or Dark Brotherhood rank 5 — load it with the Soul Trap effect, hit a creature with it, then kill that creature before the trap duration expires. Trap first, kill second. The other order gets you an ordinary gem and a corpse.

What will not work

• Humanoids. Soul Trap simply fails on them, with the message "Trap will not work on humanoids". It also fails on the player.
• Dispel. Banish Daedra and Holy Word remove the trap before it can fire.

How Soul Bound uses the soul

Soul Bound consumes a trapped non-human soul. The stronger the soul, the smaller the penalty the item takes to its enchantment point maximum. The catch: if the item is ever destroyed, the creature is released — and it attacks you. Keep your bound gear out of the hands of bandits who can break it.

There is a cleaner path if you can find it. The Azura's Star artifact traps one soul per kill automatically, which largely replaces soul gems as a source. It removes the entire trap-then-kill discipline from your routine, and it is worth detouring for early.

The side-effect-free binding

There is a trick for binding a soul without taking the escape clause: fill the item's power list first, then bind. A full power list leaves nowhere for the creature's item to come back to, so the item never breaks. Learn it before you bind anything you cannot afford to lose.

Plan spells around resistances and material minimums

The last piece of spell planning is knowing what your target shrugs off. Resistance and immunity are checked separately from damage type, so an elemental spell that works on one thing can do nothing to another thing standing beside it.

Notice that vampires and lamias show up twice, under two different elements. A single "elemental damage" spell is not going to cover your late-game problem list.

There is also a known bug worth knowing before you rely on magic resistance: magic resistance and immunity also block Disease, Paralysis and Poison effects. An enemy immune to magic is immune to all three, which makes certain casters far less of a problem than their spellbook suggests.

Weapons still decide the fight

Enchantments do not override material minimums. Whatever you hang on a blade, the blade's material sets what it can hurt:

If your plan against a lich was a clever custom spell rather than a mithril blade, the spell will do nothing. Write magic to solve what material cannot, and buy the material for what it cannot. The combat guide covers the weapon side of that trade in full.

Getting magicka for free

There are three ways to cast spells without a real magicka budget, and all three are consequences of how the game checks spells rather than deliberate features:

• Cast an area spell at your own feet while wearing Spell Absorption, plus Immunity to Magic for the area-of-effect damage. The spell hits you, gets absorbed, and effectively costs you nothing.
• Reach 100 or more mastery in a school. Every spell in that school collapses to the 5-point floor, so your whole hotbar becomes repeatable indefinitely.
• Bind a soul with no side effects by filling the item's power list first, as described above.

Frequently asked questions