Editing Dominions (section)

===The Schools===
====Conjuration====
Summoning magical monsters, mainly. They vary from fire drakes to bane lords to otherworldly abominations. Most notably, the spell Tartarian Gate is in this school, allowing you to summon insane ancient undead gods to fight for you.

====Alteration====
Changing yourself, do alchemy, warp the battlefield, or reality itself to fit your needs. Many buffs and debuffs are located in this school, like Ironskin and Petrify. The absolute gamebreaker spell is Wish, which has a rather wide utility. No, you can't wish to win. But you can wish for girls! On the safe side, you can turn fire and earth gems into cash.

====Construction====
One of the schools that is pretty much mandatory, though getting it up to level 8 is sort of a give or take. It primarily deals in the forging of magical tools, weapons, and armor. There's also your giant golems and mecha dragons, which make pretty decent combatants.

====Enchantment====
Sort of a brother to Conjuration and Alteration, this school is notable for letting you flip the bird to all the other players through the use of global spells like flooding all the coastal provinces or drilling a hole to the earth's core to harvest its riches. Many mass defensive spells are also included from keeping your guys safe from fire, or shielding an entire province from enemy spells. Also, enchanting corpses to give them false life. (As opposed to Conjuration which brings pre-existing undead from their native realm IE ghosts)

====Evocation====
Good old pew pew. The school of zapping, burning, and icing motherfuckas. Start out shooting sparks and end with lighting the entire battlefield on fire. Out of combat spells include making a volcanic eruption, hurricanes, and tidal waves that all wipe out population.

====Thaumaturgy====
The "gimmick" school. A lot of it is based on fucking over or seizing another faction's magical or undead creatures and fucking units with low magic resistance. Most famous for the Communion spells, [[God-Emperor of Mankind|that allow your mages to combine their powers to become one mega mage]], although it is also home to mind control (including a battlefield wide mind control) and Soul Slay, which instantly kills anything that fails its save (and makes it impossible for immortal units to return to life).

====Blood====
Both a school and a path, it deals with mainly the summoning of demons and extremely harmful spells. Demons are nothing to sneeze at and are a LOT harder to banish than undead due to having generally higher health and magic resistance. There are also spells that can completely fuck a nation's production through Rain of Toads or Send Horror. In the fluff this is considered heretical by the most nations and is the only magic you could call objectively evil since it requires human sacrifice - it uses virgins instead of magic gems to fuel its spells. You get virgins by forcibly kidnapping girls, and yes, the province will get unrest, you'll disrupt life and ruin people, reducing the population. Its spells, however, are incredibly powerful, up to the point of poisoning ALL magic in the world or summoning greater demons that run over entire armies. Got hit with a nerfstick FINALLY: when your nation has no initial blood magic, spending virgins to boost your wizards' blood skills hs a very high chance of damnning said spellcaster with a Horror Mark, a debuff that ''doesn't'' go away and has a chance to attract a Horror trying to kill you.

====Divine====
The only school you can't research, as all the spells are researched already. While some nations have their own unique Divine spells, divine spells are generally blessings, banishments, and smites. Blessings are the real thing here, as depending on what your Pretender has for magic, it can either be a minor aid or the focus of your nation. Used only by priests, though some priests can be mages too, and now can cast elemental-hybrid prayers and blast their way to victory. Blessings only affect sacred units, however, the variety and availability of which varies from nation to nation.

In the latest game, Dominions 5, divine spells get even more attention in form of hybrid schools, like water-proficient gods giving their priests power to drown land-based units, stellar-able gods' priests invoking starlight to burn undead and so on.