Updates on Lantern Guild

Starting the Menagerie campaign tonight and as one of the players wants to be a mage from the Lantern Guild I have been updating that.
Most of the rules are offline but I wanted to share the concepts here and will be updating some of the guilds as we make new spells.
The Lantern Guild is a professional and academic oriented guild. Members include 50 point NPCs, 250 point adventurers and even higher point guild leaders.
How do you have an effective system that fits within a magic based economy. yet is also suitable for adventuring or even epic style campaigns?
I wanted a flexible system to give my players options and to keep my GM workload down. So I started with GURPS Thaumatology which has some great flexible magic systems but due to limited space was weak on spell creation.

So the Lanterns use 3 separate but related systems, with very similar rules for creating spells.  That similarity makes life easier for me and my players.

Tier 1 Book

The Lantern Guild is organized into several sub guilds.with different themes or functions. They share the same Magic (Lantern) skill which makes cross training easier. This tier uses Book magic with structured lengthy rituals that do not require magery to use, though magery adds to ritual effect. It uses cooperative collaboration so weak mages an achieve useful effects. Not really suitable for adventuring due to the casting time but the books make good background rituals.

Tier 2 Affinity Magic (Path with inspiration from RPM)

Each guild has a handful of Affinities/Paths and what I think is a simple to use spell design system. A caster would have Magic (Lantern) which caps the Affinities which are full skills with spells being Techniques. Magery is required and adds to Affinity skills (and hence spells) but not Magic (Lantern) which is basically Thaumatology (Tradition). Spells are fast casting and this tier is a good one for adventurers. I feel they are comparable to Ritual Magic from GURPS Basic in game play and hope to have players use both systems in the campaign to test this.

For those interested in under the hood bits the spell design system has 18 spell types, most with about a paragraph of individual modifiers and guidelines for designing spells. Types: Attack, Barrier, Bonus and Penalty, Calling, Communication, Concealment and Observation, Control and Shape, Create, Healing and Restoration, Information, Movement, Protection, Purify and Refinement, Seek and Identification, Special Effect, Summoning, Transformation, Work

Tier 3 Thaumaturgy (Realm)

Each Realm costs 10 points (with a few possible exceptions) and work pretty much like the Realm system in GURPS Thaumatology with 6 possible levels. Spells are designed with the same rules as Affinity, just some different modifiers. Magery is not required but adds to spell skill and this tends to be a more point intensive system but unlocks more raw power.