It's long been a contention of mine that D&D has too many spells. One responsible factor is that there is a need for every school of magic to have a meaningful choice of spells at every level, of which there are probably too many.
Abandoning that pattern, I set myself some constraints. First, there would be five orders of magic. Second, each order would contain fewer spells than the one before it. Third, the first order should have a number of spells it is easy to roll on a random table for.
One 5th-level spell being a natural minimum, I settled on thirty-five spells in total, eleven of which (entries on a 2d6 table) would be first level. To achieve this compression, I also used up-casting for more powerful effects and the splitting out of certain effects into feats or properties of items only.
