So you've decided to further your magical scholarship on the Sword Coast, have you? Well, as your local friendly priestess of Mystra I'd like to give you a few gems of advice to help you along your way and make your experience as painless as I possibly can! I must add, though, that this advice is for scholars of the arcane art only. . . if you're one of those plucky sorcerers you'll need to look somewhere else for some advice about the best way to focus your innate connection to magic. Furthermore, while I am more than willing to help my fellow divines discuss their prayers and powers I recommend they too talk to their local temple or for the paladins, a local Knightly Order, about the peculiars of their own faith.
Spell School Selection
Firstly, you want to decide very early on if you're going to specialise in a particular spell school. Doing so will net you the obvious advantage over your generalist peers in that you can memorise a total of nine bonus spells, one for each spell tier except for cantrips. The drawback, unfortunately, is that you must pick a spell school to eschew as you focus your studies more and more. Fortunately you can choose any spell school you wish, and you are not locked into any pre-ordained choices unlike other places in the realms . I do not believe it is necessary for me to detail the reasons why Red Wizards must choose two spell schools to eschew.
Secondly, the budding apprentice will want to collect and acquire a great variety of spells from various sources. Some of these you may be fortunate enough to find in your general adventuring. Others may be purchased reliably from the various magic shops about the coast. Some kinder folks even prepared a few lists of what can be obtained at these! There are some, though, that simply cannot be found around the coast. It is best to study such magic, especially of your specialised school, in the time between adventures because you are not likely to ever find a scroll of them laying around anywhere, and I won't be able to provide them to you courteousy of the Temple of Mystra either.
Besides acquiring spells, of course, is the matter of actually adding them to your spell book. Every wizard needs to take the time to sit down to perform the feat of Study Spell. One then needs to study the spell at hand carefully, reading over the full details of the scroll. If you successfully comprehend what you've read, you may then attempt to copy it into your spell book. Do this by reading the scroll aloud (you may need to direct it at an inanimate object or even a blank scroll for the purposes of targeting). If you succeed, and have adequate magical understanding, the spell will find itself copied into your spell book in short order. Of course, the less experienced might bide their time before trying to learn their rarer or more expensive spells, or at least seek the aid of a colleague who can inspire your studious competence.
The eventual bane to every talented arcanist is managing all those spells you accumulate over the years. It is wise to realise that every spell book has it's limit and the Sword Coast is no different to elsewhere in Faerun in this regard. Remember that higher level spells will naturally occupy more pages of your spell book, meaning at some point you're going to have to make the conscious choice to start to cut back on spells you rarely, or indeed never, use. I shall leave that to each particular wizard, but I know the spells that I relegated to the temple archives due to seldom use.
It is very easy to get befuddled with spell book management if you are a poor organiser of your notes. Fortunately there are a variety of means to combat this, detailed at length in Halbazzer Drin's work on the topic, "Discessio Incantamenti." Copies are available for loan from Sorcerous Sundries.
My dear friend and talented alchemist Miss Maddy Thunderkeg has seen to write to me to remind all prospective students of magic some of the finer arts of successfully marking magical runestones for the purposes of teleportation. As a diviner I have to remark of first importance that the cantrip Mark Rune is part of the School of Divination. If you have specialised and eschewed that particular school from your studies, you will not be able to mark runes for the purposes of teleportation.
For the rest of you, the process is simple. First you want to use Detect Magic to discern if your location is warded against teleportation magics because there is no point preparing a rune if you cannot teleport to and from the place to begin with! Next, if your magical analysis has given you the all-clear, find the location of your choice (and face in the direction of your choice) and cast Mark Rune there. Your runestone will be permanently marked with the exact spot, including face direction, and teleporting there is as simple as holding that runestone in your hands and chanting the verbal completion phrase for the teleport spell.
All runes can be wiped by casting Mark Rune on the stone you wish to clear and can then be reused. Note that only blank, unmarked runes can be traded; any runestone which has been marked to a location is bound to your person and must be cleared before it can be removed. Normal inherent dangers involved in teleportation still apply!
Now it may just be that during your adventurers in long forgotten crypts and ancient conduits of magic that you may come across old and weathered tomes of obscure knowledge. Never throw these away! They may contain the jewel all conjurers desire to find: a piece of a being's True Name, and therefore the power to call that creature to your side at a whim. Of course such power must be ably contained, and the only thing you will find capable of so doing are diamond gemstones. As to which spell you need to pull your being from another plane? Well, I'll leave you to find that out and hope you didn't skimp on your classes in extra-planar diplomacy during your apprenticeship.
I dearly hope that these few pointers will prove to allay any difficulties that new wizards may experience when they arrive on the Sword Coast for the first time. And may all your research and spellcasting be fruitful, deft, efficient and responsible, remembering to praise the one who makes it all possible: Mystra, Lady of Mysteries and Guardian of the Weave.
Priestess Aeili Azenci.