almost cliche cults
Cults! Unlike Cthulhu, this post isn't going to break open your mind about that or anything else. Everything in here is just close enough to the cliche that you can substitute it with almost no other changes.
dungeon ecology generator
Inspired by the work pioneered at Chromatic Cauldron and extended by DIY And Dragons (although cruder than their own methods.) No man is an island, but a dungeon may be an island ecology. Results not guaranteed to cohere.
Vancian memory palaces
Vancian wizards get their power from memorizing
tremendously complex spell formulae. Therefore, they use the gold
standard of memory techniques, the method of loci - placing memories within
the layout of a familiar building.
If
you want to memorize a deck of cards, any building will do. But you
wouldn’t store a spell in any building, any more than you (or a snobbier
version of you - wizards are infamous snobs) would hang the Mona Lisa
in an outhouse. It’s disrespectful, and degrades the potency of the
spells you house there.
Obviously,
this is one reason wizards power up by raiding tombs - big, dangerous
cavern networks brewing with magical energy tend to twist themselves
into geomantically potent shapes. Necromancers may find especially
useful models for their spell palaces in crypts, abjurists in
fortifications, transmutationists in ancient sorcerous factories.
Temples
and magical academies are of course built into shapes of puissant feng
shui, and access to wander and familiarize oneself with the deeper
levels is restricted to trusted senior members for this reason.
Potent
shapes for spell storage are hard to predict a priori, and even with
potent visualization techniques, it’s difficult to substitute a
blueprint on paper for familiarization with a physical space. (Though to
be clear: most spell books do include the relevant maps/blueprints,
geometrically transformed through codes that are as elaborate as the
wizard is paranoid.) Searching for ideal buildings in lucid dreams is a
popular option - and also a popular vector through which hostile
interplanar memeplexes come to set up shop in a wizard’s brain.
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