Getting started in sorcery is easy but, typically for Conan Exiles, will require a fair amount of bloodshed. Your first job is finding a sorcerer. This is fairly straightforward as most Exile camps will have at least one sorcerer on the premises. Watch out for sinister, hooded figures lurking next to blood-stained altar stones.
Then you have to kill the sorcerer (or sorcerers) and see what kind of goodies they drop. All sorcerers will give you a skull (more about these in the article explaining Chapter 2 of the Age of Sorcery) possibly a Satchel (which you open to find a Pouch) and usually a document of some kind.
There are three kinds of document:
Sorcerous Spell Pages
Failed Sorcerous Spell Pages
A Sorcerer’s Map
All of these are useful, but the most important at this stage is the Sorcerer’s Map as this will tell you where to get the magical equipment you need to become a sorcerer yourself, so keep killing sorcerers till you find one. I won’t spoil it by revealing the location, but the map will show you a cave you have to visit.
The cave has some unpleasant creatures guarding it, but they’re easy to run around and once you’re past them you can enter the hidden sanctum of Kurak a mysterious magician who has somehow ended up in the Exiled Lands. Kurak’s not around, which is good because we’re going to rob him.
Inside the sanctum, approach the magician’s bench (a Thaumaturgy Bench) in the middle of the cave and interact with it to obtain recipes that will allow you to craft a Thaumaturgy Bench of your own, an Arcane Staff (a kind of magic wand) and the recipes to make three types of magic pouches: Burlap, Cotton and Leather. You will also obtain a Tome of Kurak (a spell book).
Once you have this knowledge return to your base and build your own Thaumaturgy Bench using Crystal (50), Stone (300) and Iron Bar (50). Then place your Tome of Kurak in the Bench and start the process of upgrading it.
To upgrade your Tome you need to add pages to it. And for each upgrade you’ll need a new Spell Page and various reagents (Blood, Feral Flesh, Brimstone etc). You can find Spell Pages on dead sorcerers, but more often you’ll get Failed Sorcerous Pages, but don’t worry, you just need to collect ten failed pages to make one good one. You can also manufacture pages using plant Fiber, Sacrificial Blood in a Flask, and an Inking Brush.
There are fifteen upgrades to go through (see below) and as you get into the higher levels the rarity of the reagents you need will increase, so you’ll need to be collecting more exotic ingredients such as Fragments of Power, Black Blood and Dragonbone.
With each upgrade you learn new recipes and spells. To cast spells you need to equip your Arcane Staff and press R1 on your controller (on a PS4/5) then select the appropriate floating rock to choose the spell you want.
Note that to work, some spells require a Pouch of reagents and a level of character corruption ranging from mild (20%) to severe (40%). As mentioned earlier there are three types of Pouch:
Burlap
Cloth
Leather
and each of these can be made from simple ingredients at an Alchemist’s Bench.
Tome of Kurak - Upgrade Levels
Spellbook Level 1
Learn the spells ‘Embed Wisp’ and ‘Imbue Wisp’. Get the recipe for the Sacrificial Stone.
Spellbook Level 2
Learn the spell ‘Slow Fall’.
Spellbook Level 3
Get the recipe for the ‘Circle of Power’.
Spellbook Level 4
Learn the spell ‘Wall of Fire’.
Spellbook Level 5
Learn the spell ‘Creeping Darkness’.
Spellbook Level 6
Learn the spells ‘Mass Cull’ and ‘Detect Resources’.
Spellbook Level 7
Learn the spell ‘Summon Corpse’.
Spellbook Level 8
Learn the spells ‘Call of the Dead’ and ‘Raise the Dead’.
Spellbook Level 9
Learn the spells ‘Mirror Mark’, ‘Invisibility Self’ and ‘Conceal Corruption’.
Spellbook Level 10
Learn the spell ‘Elixir of Rebirth’
Spellbook Level 11
Learn the spells ‘Call of Nergal’ and ‘Abyssal Call’.
Spellbook Level 12
Learn the spells ‘Abyssal Maul’ and ‘Abyssal Bow’.
Spellbook Level 13
Learn the spell ‘Abyssal Armour’.
Spellbook Level 14
Learn the spell ‘Lightning Storm’.
Spellbook Level 15
Learn the recipe for the ‘Transportory Stone’.
In the next article we'll look at the innovations introduced in Chapter 2 of the Age of Sorcery.
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