Ah yes...our old friend, that most heated topic of furious debate...Battle Magic.

While I have no interest to dredge up all the heated tempers and hard feelings of previous discussions, I'm also well aware that nothing conclusive was ever decided regarding battle magic and how to handle it. So rather than pussy-footing around the meat of the matter with abstract guidelines, I went ahead and began work on a list of battle spells.

My working assumption is that Battle Spells are ritual versions of standard spells, using extended ritual casting times (around one minute or so is reasonable with 10-minute battle turns) and large amounts of components (500 gp per spell level) to achieve large-scale and extended duration effects. In essence, they combine effects similar to multiple metamagic feats (like Extend, Enlarge, Widen) - thus, I don't recommend allowing metamagic feats to affect Battle Spells.

Design Notes:
Scale: the spells assume a battle system in which 1" = 100' on a square grid of varying size, and that a battle square is a 100' x 100' square on the field (one unit's area). A battle turn is 10 minutes long.
Conversion Suitability: In order to limit the potentially un-balancing power of battle magic, I imposed a strict limitation of conversion: only mass and area-affecting spells could be cast as battle spells. Spells that affect only a single person are unsuitable as battle spells, as expanding their effects to entire units seemed ridiculously over-powered to me. As a result, many of the "old school" 2e spells won't be showing up in this system...you know, the ones that did things like multiply spell effects times a hundred or so? Broken (Rain of Magic Missiles, Hammer Storm?, etc).

[see following post for continuation]