I was thinking about this today…
To learn Arcanis, OOCly you basically just need to get ARC-CT. ARC-CT has as prereqs:
- CHARGEN BLD-PA
- GP-ARCANIS/1
- GL-PATHI/3
GL-PATHI/1 has the prereq of GL-GC/4. Thus, technically it's not all that hard.
However, this leads to questions based on our actual background. Obviously, since we go out in search of people with "the gift", and since it seems that anyone with Pathi blood tends to have it as well, the capability to learn Arcanis is as much "genetic" as intellectual.
ICly, I think it makes sense (and would be cool) if we could stipulate that in order to learn Arcanis, you need some blood of dragons. Does that mean it should be a required thing to have BLD-PA? I'm not entirely sure. I'd be willing to let that slide, but perhaps with an IC note that generally speaking, you can't just teach someone Arcanis. PCs get to "have the blood" if they want, but that is not true of the general (NPC) population. In other words, someone can't go out and start an Arcanis University in Amber, and expect that to work…