In the Magic Burner on page 168 under the heading of Speak the Abstraction it mentions normal spell casting rules: Test Will + Sorcery.
Is this something from the pre gold days or is it referring to Socery and Tax? (Or have I missed something)
It’s from pre-Gold.
I believe Thor mentioned at some point that most things in the Magic Burner should be compatible with Gold, exception the Abstractions, due to their use of the BWRevised Will + Sorcery rules…
Here’s my current but never tested thoughts on bringing Abstraction and Distillation in line with BWG: http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?11438-Using-Abstraction-and-Distillation-with-BWG
Should we allow spell casters to use their sorcery skill as a task to tweak out or learn different facets from the spells they already know? Perhaps even an advantage die for knowing spells with similar facets and increased obstacle for no related spell facet?
(If you wanted your mage to learn anima and you already new Falcon Skin, Horses Stride, and Mage Sight you might receive a 1D advantage to learn the Anima facet but if you were trying to learn the Transformation facet you would face a +1 Obstacle as you wouldn’t have enough similar spells to base it on.)
A similar question came to me regarding Distillations.
Once a wizard has successfully distilled two facets into one (such as Fire-Destroyer in the example on page 175 of the Magic Burner) does he get to keep that distillation then for future abstractions, or does he have to keep reinventing the same distillation for every spell he creates that destroys by fire? And if so, should he get an advantage die for multiple usage of the same ? (Illusionists would use a lot of Anima and Control facets. Elementalists would use a lot of Create-Control plus their favorite elements, Shape Shifters would use Anima and Transformation ect.).
I think that Abstractions would and could work out well in my game as most spell casters would begin using them to alter existing spells (we haven’t had anyone try it yet. I have burned up some low power spells to try out the system and it seems to work well for that purpose.