Warning: this is very long, and is given over largely to logical,
occasionally technical arguments for or against certain rules. If this is
not what you want to read, by all means skip ahead now.
Oh yes -- below, "mage" means "wizard", not "non-specialist
wizard". I still call them "magic-users" quite a lot. =)

>> Yes I know that Hammer Storm is the battle spell version of Spiritual
>> hammer but for your information Fireball is already a battle spell just
>
> No no. The cards of which you speak list conventional spells that
>are useful in a war card battle; they appeared in the original boxed set.
>"Battle spells" as a concept were not introduced until the Book of
>Magecraft, and are not listed on any such card. As magic missile implies
>rain of magic missiles, fireball implies rain of fireballs -- which has
>been avoided, I feel, for the very reason that Pieter gives: it would be
>immensely powerful. A battlefield version of Mass Destruction, as it
>were. And thus, perhaps, not too powerful when compared to the spells
>that can be cast at the realm level (the next step up in power) -- it
>simply would render conventional warfare obsolete, so it was left out
>because Birthright is supposed to have aspects of a wargame.


You are right in that they are not called battle spells on the card but as you might note if you have the BoM or BoP is that the spells are said to already be approved for use as battle spells. The concept of Battle spells are simply that they are spells usable in a warcard battle and since fireballs, flamesstriksn bless and all those other spells already are useable they are therefor also battle spells otherwise what is there to stop a person (except of cause the DM) from making a "Rain of Hammer storm" spell that further increases the effectivness of that spell.

>> Well I used TSRs own demographic figures to calculated my numbers and
>
> Where did TSR publish these figures? Even more importantly, on
>what assumptions were they founded? Anything designed for a mortal
>population goes completely out the window when immortals are considered.
>The same goes for standard human vs. wacky elven economy and agriculture.


I found the demographic figures in the Players Option High Level Campaigning but it didn't say if it was for any particular race it was just use to give the DM a feel of how many persons of a certain level there would be in a given population.

>> then I even made 1 in every 5 elves a wizard (same chance of being
>> wizard as a human adventurer from the Monstous Manual. If I had used the
>> figures from the elven part then 1 of every 40 elves would have been a
>> wizard) and that gave me 6 wizards in a population of 16.000.
>
> That gives me 3,200 wizards in a population of 16,000. Are you
>implicitly using figures for how many people in a rpg-feudal-human society
>are adventurers? If so, that is the problem: as I said, the elven setup
>is radically different, so those statistics do not apply -- new ones must
>be invented.


Well we where talking about level 8+ wizards to begin with and not even every elf is of a level above 0. As to the figures used for adventurers, yes they are for humans but they are concerning the division of classes within an adventuring party it does not take up how large a part of a population that are adventurers but if you don't like those numbers just use the 1 in 40 figure then since they are for elves. It should also be noted that yes none of these numbers from either the Highl evel campaigning or the Monstius Manual is for birthright and as far as I can tell from what people have been writing on this list nearly every one thinks that BR is a world with lower levels of both magic and experience levels so that might even imply that the number of wizards should be even lower.

> In the Tuarhievel sourcebook, Siebharrin is 20th.


Well I didn't use any sourcebook when I came up with the levels I just use what I remembered from the campaign expansions for the various parts of Cerilia.

> In published materials, which contain particularly noteworthy
>people. I would say that this argument has a serious sample selection
>problem, and probably contains a far higher percentage of high-level human
>wizards than of high-level elven ones -- powerful human mages strike me as
>much less likely to avoid notoriety than powerful elven ones.
>Particularly as powerful elven wizards can easily just sit in their towers
>doing research for millennia, and the first any humans know about it is
>when they get disintegrated for tresspassing, and never live long enough
>to discover that the landlord is a 35th level wizard who's been around
>since before humans first used fire.


On the other hand there are at least one elf that I know of that it says fought at Deismaar and who lived before that and he is still only 14th level so time isn't everything.

> Like I said before, immortality does all sorts of screwy things to
>demographics. For example, even though the elves are now in the small
>minority, if there is no major human-elven war, *the elves will eventually
>outpopulate the humans* because they grow faster than geometrically:
>humans are like constant to the x, and elves are a Fibonacci sequence
>(which grows for large x as x to the x) -- indeed, I first heard the
>concept of a Fibonacci sequence phrased as "population growth of immortal
>rabbits".


Well the immortal rabbit might use a Fibonacci sequence to calculate it's population growth but for some reason I don't think that elves are as prolific as rabbits. The elf that I mentioned above that fought at the battle of Deismaar he still doesn't have even one offspring and that is in over 1500 years during that time Roeles descendants are quite a few.

Another small thing that is against the elves when it comes to spell casting is that they don't like to use spells even if they are wizards and they also shun Invocation/Evocation and Necromacy spells while humans are not afraid to use any spells (at least the wizards, peasants are scared out of there wits but that don't stop wizards from casting their spells).

I also like elves but lets face it they are a race on the decline while the humans are on the rise.

Fredrik Lundberg