[Cainehill]

One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.