Welcome to SpellMaster III! I recommend that to get started, you thoroughly read the entire SpellMaster web site (it's really not that big) and as much of the SM3 forum threads as you can stand to read.
The XP comment is due to the fact that your character receives one XP per hour, just for existing. You can spend these XP to buy skills (bases and intents) which determine what spells you can cast. A new character probably won't have much XP to spend, so you would have purchased few of the bases and intents. Therefore you would not really be able to use many of the spells you would get to start with. (I didn't even know there was a "starter pack"!)
