Because There Are More Spells Out There
…So, imagine this:
Whatever iteration of the game you are playing, the 1st level Magic-User spells are the entire syllabus of known spells.
Fly? You wish. Fireball? Who can shoot exploding balls of fire; this is magic, sonny, not comic-books.
Of course, everyone knows that there are, in fact, other spells out there. Every first-year sorcerer has read that bit of Laconius where he mentions the Miraculous Mantle of Obfuscation, which renders the user invisible, and the intemperate uses to which he put it in relation to the Witches’ Coven of Outreterre Or known the frustration of studying that antique blabber-mouth Quinquarine, who, over the course of several volumes, promises to reveal the formula obscurely referred to as The Perambulatory Revelator of One-and-All, only to have no copies of the final volume survive the bonfires of the Irenian Orthodoxists. Or stared at the great tapestry at Biancule, depicting the turning of the invasion of the Mauvrian Hordes, and wondered what incantation allowed the fabled archimagus Villondro to enmesh the Mauvrians in gigantic spider-webs?
So, of course there are more than just these twelve spells. That’s why you are crawling down a hole in the ground with a party of cerebrally-challenged bravos, cut-purses, and roustabouts, facing death a hundred times over in the form of goblins, traps, and pneumonia, instead of staying in a nice cosy manse somewhere, casting Charm Person over and over for a hundred crowns a pop. Because there are more spells out there.
And whoever finds even one of them, is going to be star among the thaumaturgical-set. Seriously, people are going to be hitting you up right, left, and center for just a peek at your grimoire; the grimoire that contains the only known copy of Ariste’s Vertical Realignment in the world (even if some slack-witted copyist wrote it down as Levitation. But, hey, that error kept the thing lost all these centuries ’til you found it, so be nice to the guy). You now become famous as “So-and-So the Levitator” and anybody who needs something vertically-realigned has to come to you; either to pay for the privilege or to try and steal your spell (recall, in this context, the bit in The Dying Earth where Turjan crashes the chambers of Prince Kandive)….
