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I have the 4th Edition. But I have never heard of this initiation system. Implementing something like this into Elemental could be a good idea. So you and the AI are forced to let your mage wander about and are not able to hide him inside your fortress.
The Fall from Heaven mod sounds nice. Maybe I will try it once. But as I understand the shards in Elemental they will probably belong to one specific type of magic.
Maybe they are more like the Nodes in Master of Magic. There you could control multiple typs of Nodes.