Humanoid Spellcasters

How do humanoid spellcasters (goblin witch-doctors, in this case) learn their spells? Do they have and use spellbooks that the PCs can plunder and use?

I could go either way on this; it would be perfectly reasonable for a witch-doctor to operate on the basis of oral tradition, but I do like to reward players who knock over beastman villages. I think that since most tribal spellcasters cap out at 3rd level spells and any spellbooks they have will likely be in their native tongues, this is probably not problematic.

Won’t their spell books be in ‘magic script’ read by Read Magic? I know scrolls come in various languages, but I always thought spell books used ‘arcane script’ or whatever, which Read Magic allowed you to read.

I believe that portion refers to scrolls of different forms of magic being useless to one another. An arcane scroll is useless to a divine caster and vice versa. In addition to that, it’s possible for a scroll to be in another language, which the caster may not speak. The example in the book I remember is an arcane scroll in a language that only the cleric can understand, making it undecipherable to anyone in the group.

Read Magic doesn’t exist in ACKS. To read a spell book or spell scroll you have to be the right kind of caster (arcane or divine) and be able to read the language the book or scroll is written in.

I note, however, that there is a 1st level arcane spell Read Languages, which does pretty much what the name suggests.

Only lasts 2 turns so it might be challenging to read a spellbook with it, though it does perfectly fine for scroll usage.