[st.patrik]

Originally Posted by Edi

Note that in this respect, our fearless enchanter has deliberately studied only one spell, but the highly trained minds of mages do not take well into forced idleness and working at less than full capacity, so he is likely to find quite suddenly that the other spells are clamoring for attention in his mind.

What he should have done was memorize Fortitude, Venom Ward and Fire Ward, because while spells that are cast in combat are randomly picked from among the memorized one, mages will not cast totally useless spells (e.g. Fire Ward against spearmen who have no fire attacks, and same goes for Venom Ward). Now, since the rememorization is random, he may find himself casting fireshield, which may or may not be a good thing depending on whether he casts it at a front row swordsman and whether the enemy will attack that swordsman or another.

The reason mages cannot memorize less than a full complement of spells is precisely to prevent abuse of the system exactly like that, because, believe me, you don't want to run into mages who have random blooper spells except for that one "I can instantly kill all of your army with this, so I shall cast nothing else" nightmare. And they are out there...

Oops!