I write this because I'd like to see shards and spellbooks work better together, and I've looked around for the person who had this idea first, but can't seem to find the thread again.  I also add in ideas from Matreus and Hound here, who had some really good, intelligent ideas for organizing spells in a way that made you want to collect shards, but still made the game playable if you didn't get any shards.

The core idea was to separate spellbooks from shards.  That is, no more book of fire, or earth.  Instead, you'd have spellbooks of evocation, or summoning.  I'll present my list in a bit, but you get the idea.  If you have a spellbook of summoning, and then you find a fire shard, you can summon a fire imp (with the proper research into the summoning spellbook).  Invest more in that spellbook, and you get a fire mephit.  Then maybe a fire elemental.  All the way up to a fire giant, if you invest deeply enough.  The idea being that combinations of spellbook plus shards unlock a certain spell type, and then by researching that spell type more and more, it becomes more effective (more damage, more bonuses to enchantments, more healing, etc).

I fiddled around with this a bit, and came up with 10 books, and what' they'd affect:

So, on sovereign creation, you pick a few spellbooks (or maybe all of them, but at significant penalty).  Each of the books as a base spell set, and then has spells that get unlocked if you control a shard (or two, or three...)  Thaumaturgy may have a spell that drops enemy attack speed by 0.5.  With an earth shard, it may encase them in mud, making it possible to have them miss a turn (because they slipped and fell).

THe thing I can see with this is that you'd want to perhaps go beyond the 4 shards we have now, to include life and death shards (and maybe chaos or order shards, or maybe spirit shards, as was suggested in another thread).

Anyway, I wanted to capture the ideas here, because I'm concerned that thread and that discussion got buried, and I think the idea was good enough from the various sources to gather up and keep in front of the devs for their consideration.

As a side note, "affecting the dead" could be anything from earth ("the grasping hands of the recently deceased claw and grab at all passersby, making the tile on which they died impassible in strategic combat") to fire ("this corpse explodes, doing damage to all within two tiles").  Having a dead body on the tactical field can do more than just cause them to be revived (air or life) or reanimated (water or death).

Winni