Artificer school is rough. You have to learn so many ways to manipulate magic forces and try to shove it all into small items. Sometimes it doesn't work as well as hoped. Even if every student gives it their best effort, someone has to be the worst passing student in the class.

In my campaigns, I try to explore this concept by adding niche items or items of student project quality. Often times these items end up adding quite a bit of fun to the lower levels before access to "real" magic items is available.

I would love to throw this idea out to the world and maybe get a bigger collection of these items for all of the Tildes DMs to use in their campaigns if they fit in the setting.

Kids or younger reader book. Fantasy genre.

In this book world weather can be controlled by sorcerers, and especially powerful sorcerers can summon dragons. When the sorcerers die the dragons vanish, except in the case of the most powerful sorcerers where their dragon is buried with them. The villain wanted the scales of the blue dragon that belonged to a sorcerer. There were also weather spells that were too destructive and were trapped, including the scarlet snow that made people fall asleep. The villain was holding the main character's parents hostage. The main character can summon a dragon. The main character is going to school to become a meteorologist

Other key words that may or may not be the same story -- Yeti, ball lightning, jar, lab, gardening supply shop

As a pre-teen and teenager I was the bookish kid who was always reading, and, like many a kid, love of Mythology lead into a love of fantasy, and the idea of the direct application of "Knowledge is power" that magic offers in those tales was intoxicating. As I got older I branched out into history, which became a passion and my reading has been mostly in that realm.

Then I got Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies as a gift. As various magical or texts on magic, Davies outlines the difference, came up I tried to find them. Naturally, many are public domain, and can be found for free on Project Gutenberg but they can also be found fairly cheap for sale in print. So, I order a couple, and had a blast flipping through them, so I got a few more. Now I have a nice Occult bookshelf, and I smile because teenage me would be so proud.

However, I've also picked up a number of other History books on the history of the belief in magic, and the crossover between the men who advanced science and learning, and those who dabbled and wrote about magic is quite staggering, but I guess not surprising. Both are born from the desire to control and change the environment we live in, and so, in a lot of ways the history of magic is part of the history of science.