Telecanter's Garden of Sources

Take a handful of these nibs cut from used quills, say a phrase, and cast them on the ground like seeds and they will quickly grow into plants that flower and fruit.  The fruit resembles maize and when husked,  reveals a scroll with a passage from an ancient source about the phrase invoked, whether it be "siege engines" or "Imperial footwear" or "the poisons of peasants."

The Saffron Path

It's unclear whether by invocation or magic artifact, but Anshumat the Quiet could  toss a a handful of saffron threads before him and walk safely anywhere.  When the lepers rioted for bread in Dhunar, he slipped through the crowd as if he weren't there.  When hunted for heresy, he lived in the Untouched Tomb of Ambareesh, for only he could walk safely through those trapped halls.

Mother of Answers

It is said that the hermit-wizards of Khezh knew a ritual to conduct when they had a singular question.  They must write their question on rose petals and consume them.  They must build a ship, christen it the name of their question, then sink it.  They must compose a verse in the manner of the stressed poems of Bahim and recite it in front of a ruler.  And if these were done in accordance with the strictures, the wizard would become gravid with the bearer of the answer.  The person that knew the answer to the singular question, wherever they were in the world, would become gravely ill.  They would die in seven days.  And on the seventh day the wizard would give birth to a misshapen child whose first words would be to utter the answer.

Golden Leash

It's said the first thing of note when entering the court of the Great Lich Ksawery was the many people bound to him by golden chains.  Some say that Ksawery drew the thin links from the chests of the victims through daily incantations, while others insist that each chain was an artifact stolen from an ancient tomb.  There is agreement on the function: each person so chained increased Ksawery's ability to store spells

(prisoners attached are treated as magic-user of level the same as their level or HD, with appropriate number of spell slots, now available for use by the imprisoner as if they were their own.) 

The Prayer that is Answered is Eternal

When then hill tribes came down conquering the city states of the coastal plain, nothing could stop them.  In desperation, the King of Kings, Ur-melem-nungal, had the heads of the great priests that died in those battles, saved.  His alchemists placed them in lead boxes mounted on poles.  And the boxes had a hinged front with a thin brass chain attached.  And they were carried in front of the army like standards.  And when the enemy was met they pulled the chains and opened the boxes.  And the hollow mouths of the heads continued their last prayers.  But they came out as a high keening and would stop for nothing.  It is said, a whole army dropped its weapons and fell asleep at the dark prayer of one, that another caused a wind of fire, and a third had to be buried for it wouldn't stop raining for as long as it screamed.

Greater Kulning

When we saved the vis kvinna from the filthy pen, she was so happy she'd see her grandbabes again, she taught me the Greater Kulning.  Now, once a day, when I sing this sound, every animal comes from miles around.

It sounds something like this:

I Know What You Did and I Follow

If the caster makes a mask of the face of someone slain, for as long as they wear it, they will know which direction to take to find the killer.

It's said that the cruel lich of the North, Two-Thumbs-Digging, mistakenly performed this ritual on someone they had killed themselves and spent their last days paranoid, confused, and traveling in circles.

Mountain Ideas 2

I had great plans to post every other day while in the mountains.  Unfortunately, Google decided it didn't like that I was posting from a new location ( though I've posted many times from there before) and would not allow me to log-in without phone confirmation of my account.  Traditional security check via email confirmation would have worked, but Google insisted on calling or texting my phone and there is no cell coverage where I was at, so posting to my blog from the mountians is no longer possible unless Google changes its policy.  Sucks, but I wrote down all my ideas I had while hiking around and I'll just give them to you all in one dump:

Wound Map
Cast this spell on a bare back and fresh wounds will raise up (1d6 hp) rendering a map of the surrounding paths or passages.

Failed Spells
Trying to think up new spells, I kept coming up with crappy ones.  Then I thought, what if a spell scroll might be some wizard's attempt at a spell they wanted, but they never quite worked it out.  So, a scroll found in a dungeon might have a sort of abstract with a title and what the spell does, but when the player casts it, it does something less.  Not horrible, more annoying and useless.  For example, a scroll lists itself as "Astral Arm: a third, ghostly arm appears that can reach through walls. Lasts a day"  But on casting it, it is more like "Arm Growth: A lumpy, flesh protuberance begins growing out of the casters back.  It takes until that caster reaches the next level for it to fully grow into a crude arm with a thumb and 1d4 fingers.  Not useful for much-- add 1/3 to encumbrance and an extra save when falling as it scrabbles to catch hold."

Chaos Blade
This one is pretty obvious, so you might have seen it before.  This weapon is +2, but shifts form each time you go into battle

1. 1d6 darts
2. Bow and 1d6 arrows
3. 2-handed sword
4. club
5. glaive
6. dancing long sword

The bonus and the possibility of it dancing are good, but the fact you might end up with darts when you are fighting skeletons hopefully makes it less powerful as well as unpredictable.

Telecanter's Cold Camp
This blue fire casts barely any light and no heat at all unless the caster says "heat this"-- all other objects are unaffected.  Allows for preparing food, lighting torches, or keeping warm even in a field of dry kindling.

Rune of Recognition I
Cast the spell, tell anyone you wish to know the shape of your secret rune, and then later, you can make the shape of the rune from stone or sticks, draw it in the sand etc., and anyone told of the shape before hand will see it but it will be completely invisible to others.

Fugitive Blood Ritual
This necromantic ritual of last resort allows the caster to cut their own throat and let their blood pour from their body and escape.  The blood flows across the ground, through cracks, and hides until a later time to come back and re-invest the apparently dead body.  If the casters body is destroyed in the mean time the blood can persist for years looking for a blood-drained body to inhabit.

Corpus Fungus Ritual
This necromantic ritual of last resort causes the caster to swell with fungal growths and explode into  a shower of spores.  Anyone breathing the spores (fail saves) will, over the next few weeks, slowly turn into the caster.  Multiple versions of the caster can thus result (treat as clones).

Keepsafe Lizard
A wizard casts this spell and whispers something to any normal lizard.  The wizard then completely forgets that information, it is excised from their mind and exists only in the lizard.  The lizard can be told to return in days, weeks, or years.  It will then disappear into the wild and find the caster again, wherever they are, at a random time within the time frame given.  Allows wizards to hide information that may be coerced or ensorcelled out of them.  They can't even tell an enemy when the lizard will return because they aren't sure themselves.

Bloodgift Swarm
A swarm of insects is summoned to draw blood from the caster.  The caster can decide how much or little (up to their HD -1 hp).  The resulting engorged swarm must be kept somewhere dark and protected, under a hat or in an empty scroll tube are common places.  A swarm can be kept thus indefinitely, but the donated life is slow to replenish (half hp regen).  Then, when needed, the caster can command the swarm to give their blood to any target-- restoring that same amount of life to them. 

Spell-Type Category Research
A wizard that knows 7 spells of a "type" can do research that, if successful, will improve all spells of that type.  Types could be spells involving a particular substance, like fire, be a particular effect, like a bolt, or affect certain creatures like, insects.  This is why the original wizards had so many spells in the same category-- Bigby's hand spells, for instance, because they specialized in them and became experts in that type of spell.
  
Rune of Recognition II
The caster draws this rune anywhere they wish, but usually in their spell book or in a forbidden area of their lair.  And any person that looks upon the rune will be recognized as such later by the caster.  Just by looking at their eyes, the caster will know they have looked upon the forbidden rune and been where they shouldn't have.

That's it for now.  Hope you are staying cool and having fun gaming with friends.

Crude Magic

The idea of a teleport spell that doesn't cleanly and efficiently move you from point A to point B, but instead swaps chunks of the ground you are standing on got me thinking what if spells in general were more clunky?

How about a magic missile that requires you to carry around a full-size golden arrow and then throw it at your target to activate the spell.  Afterwards you have to go retrieve the thing.

This is similar to requiring material components or making spells more ritual-like.  But I'm also interested in making them weirder, and not so clean and science-like.  

Maybe putting creatures to sleep means your party will be awake all night because the sleep of your own party was used in an exchange. 

To charm someone you need to get them to eat some food you prepared (that sounds familiar did I blog about that before?).

To read languages means you gain the ability to use that language like a native but can only speak that language for the duration.

To shrink yourself creates a pile of fatty, excess meat that awaits your transformation back to normal size.

To fly actually summons two invisible angels that pull you about on invisible cords.  You must speak the language of the angels to navigate or there is no telling where they may decide you need to go.

Continual light requires clenching a bit of coal and fat in your fist, continuously.

Okay, got to get back to work.  Leave your examples of weird, messy, unexpected versions of traditional D&D spells below.

Vancian Spell Ideas

Our brains are weird.  I haven't even been thinking about spells recently but trying to fall asleep the other night Vancian spell slots popped into my head and a tumble of ideas:

With most of the spells I've come up with I've tried to build a cost into the casting of them, so that level might not matter as much. But the ultimate built-in cost of a spell might be a permanent limit on casting it: 

1. The spell you can only cast once.  What spell would be interesting or good enough to mess with if you can't cast it multiple times?  Maybe they are spells with permanent effects and the power is based on the level you cast it at.  Like a permanent Palimpsest Pack.  Do you want to have two packs at second level or wait around until 5th foregoing all the convenience the spell would give you now for more convenience later?

Then I thought what if there was a limit to how often spells could be cast at all, by anyone? 

2. The spell with 1d4 castings per campaign.  You might call them Grand Dweomers or something.  What the heck would be powerful enough to be so limited?  Maybe a gate to another plane or mass charm type spells or zombie armies.  In a way this is like an artifact with limited charges and would have the same potential for plots and quests.

The Vancian system, by definition, is one spell-one slot, but what if it wasn't? :

3. Spells that cost variable slots.  Rather than having weak monster summoning and strong monster summoning, what if a spell was just a type of reaction and the caster decided how many slots to use up in memorizing it.  Traditionally some spells scale with level, but these would only scale if you decided to use up more spell slots. This would take more bookkeeping, though, so your MU player knows they have 1 2 slot magic missile and 1 3 slot magic missile, or whatever.

4. Spells that cost variable slots II.  Another way to think of spells that have different slots costs is if spells were like computer algorythms: some might be more efficient than others.  So you find magic missile that costs 2 first level slots to memorize but you've heard of a version that only requires 1.  This would tend to make wizards weaker because the most common spells would probably be weaker than traditional in this kind of campaign.  It would fit the idea of wizards scouring old libraries for spells well, though.

5. Spells that increase in price.  You could have a cool spell that requires higher level memorization slots as the caster increases in level (you could also ratchet it up on each use but I'm averse to so much bookkeeping). So, either Cool Spell costs you 1 first level slot at first level and 2 at second level and so on, or it costs you 1 first level slot at first level and then 1 second level slot at second level and so on.  This is kinda topsy turvy because it means these spells would be cheaper for lower level wizards (while possibly having the same effect) but maybe that could still fit demon or fae magic.  It could be an interesting reason powerful mages seek out weaker ones: to cast these for them.

6. Contingent spell slots.  What if you could keep 2 lower level spells "on hold" in 1 higher level slot and then pick which one, but only one, to cast later?  Why would you want to ?  Well maybe the lower level spells are utility spells of some sort and you don't know what you'll need in the next adventure.  It would allow the caster to sacrifice some firepower for flexibility.  This breaks the definition of a Vancian slot technically if not in spirit.

7. Multi-Slot Rituals.  Spells so powerful they require more than one caster are a cool idea that show up in the literature a lot, but not really in old school D&D.  What if you made a spell and said it requires X number of slots.  You could treat this unit, "slots," as first level slots so a ritual of 4 could be prepared for and cast by 4 first level mages or 1 5th level mage, using all their available first level spell slots. You might also convert slots by multiplying by level.  So that same ritual could be cast using 2 second level slots or 1 4th level slot.  Starting to get mathy, but if you wanted a world that had a lot of social, multi-caster magic I think you could do it with little trouble.

8. Multi-Spell Requirements.  What if to cast a certain spell you had to have other spells in memory?  That latter spell would have to be pretty good to be worth it.  The list of spells needed might make sense, for example a low level fire spell and and a low level wind spell required to make a high level firestorm spell.  If you had all powerful spells assembled from lower spells you might be able to do away with levels all together.  The lower level spells could be consumed or not.

9. Research branches.  This isn't related to slots so much as learning new spells.  What if you could only learn spell C after you've learned spells A and B?  These could be like branches of magic: fire spells or charm spells for example.  I suppose this could be a way to limit caster power without requiring levels at all as well.

10. Sacrifice spell slots for Permanency.  First edition made you lose constitution points and only allowed a greatly curtailed spell list to be cast permanently.  What if you made it much simpler: cast a spell at its level and then lose that spell slot permanently (even if someone dispels the spell).  That would be interesting and cause for some tough decisions I'd think.

11. Sacrifice spell slots for Psionic Powers.  If spell slots represent some inherent mental capabilities, what if you could sacrifice them for psionic abilities?  See this post.  You could use some kind of conversion like that mentioned in #7 and have each slot raise your power by one.  Would losing 2 first level spell slots permanently be worth having precognition that allows you to see the future several months ahead?

12. Spell slot fingerprints.  You might have players roll up a pattern of slots their wizard will be capable of memorizing at character creation.  This would make magic use more like a genetic ability.  Maybe wizard A has few low level slots but can hold more 5th level spells than anyone around while wizard B can hold tons of low level spells but few higher level.  I guess this would give MUs something like a Dragon ball Z power level.  It would make some mages much weaker at start than they already are for a payoff later that is already hard enough to achieve for old school play, though.  It also goes against the idea that through learning and practice you increase your ability to work with difficult magic.

13. Non-Slot spell limits.  The system of how many spells of which level you get per caster level is one chart I always have to check.  I would prefer something simpler.  You might use other numbers to limit spells cast per day.  How about: Int points, Int bonus points, Con points, HP, or even XP.  This is basically the simplest possible spell point system.  Of course you'd have to figure some conversion factor for high level spells or just convert all the traditional spells into your new units (e.g. magic missile = 1 Int point cost).  Using attribute points would result in much fewer spells.  HP would scale with level but change the tone of magic to one of strength as power rather than knowledge.  XP might be the most interesting possibility, it goes up but then whipsaws back down when you use your powers.  You would probably want to use your spells as little as possible.  That seems very like a Sinbad movie.

One of the criticisms Vancian magic gets is that it makes magic like bullets, but what if we embrace the idea of spells as ammo and see where it goes:

14. Shift spell type.  Just like you can load blanks in a revolver, you might allow for memorizing different types of spell "ammo."  Then you wouldn't need an illusionist class, for example, just make every spell also available for memorization as an illusion.  You could have other types of spell ammo, like fire, shadow, or poison instead of having to invent many different but similar spells for pyromancers and shadow mages the way 2e did.

If we think of spells as ammo you might wonder what the gun is:

15. Wands and Staves as foci.  Rather than giving magic items limited spell casting ability make them true focuses of power.  So, any caster without a focus has all spell range, duration, damage at 1/4, with a wand, 1/2, with a stave normal.  And these items could have requirements as to materials or value in your campaign.

16. Wands and Staves as spell slot holders.  Rather than charges you must place at the creation of a magic item, what if these had slots just like those in a wizards brain?  So a wand might have 5 slots and you could put whichever 5 first level spells in it each day that you wanted.  It could be interesting to have a campaign based on this, where no person is capable of holding spells in their head, only loading them into magic items.  Finding more powerful items would be a big goal.  Also, can non-wizards release the spells?  That would create an even differently flavored magic campaign.

17. Multi-spell memorization packages.  What if you could quickly learn certain combinations of spells together?  This is like a banana clip.  It is similar to #8 above but meant to be an advantage.  It would probably only matter if you are a stickler for memorization times or conditions.  Might still be cool to have a magic statue in a dungeon that dumps 6 spells in your brain when you touch it, or maybe fills any empty slot with the same spell-- all of a sudden you have 10 more magic missiles.

18. Quick Swap spells.  Related to the last idea. Think of the way some FPS limit the kind of weapon or grenade you have and when you encounter a new one you have to decide which to keep.  What if you approached the statue in the dungeon and you could have a cool new spell only if you dumped one you had memorized.  This would be more interesting if you allow players to scribe brand new spells into their spell books from their minds.  Heck, what if you could swap with nearby casters.

19. Spell Slaves.  If spells were that easy to swap from caster to caster a powerful mage could keep a bunch of lower level "clip" mages around to grab spells from their memory when needed.  Why not just have all those noobs cast one their own, though?  Hmm, maybe the spells become more powerful when cast by a higher level caster or maybe they involve control of summoned monsters or something that the big wiz doesn't trust to the minions.

20. Spell Entities.  What if spells are not used up but must be removed from memory and stored elsewhere to allow for other spells to be memorized?  This would make spells more like pokemon.  It would also make wizards much more powerful if they could repeatedly cast something like magic missile (and it just returns like a boomerang).  Well, unless those kind of direct damage spells became much more rare in the world.  This kind of campaign/wizard would be more interesting if the DM really put pressure on storage and safety of those spells not in your brain.

Okay, that's all I got.  I'd be supremely surprised if a lot of these haven't shown up before.  But maybe one or two are new to you.  I think the multi-slot rituals and the slot-sacrifice permanency are actually things I might try in my game.

Five Weighty Spells

Palimpsest Pack
Load yourself to your limit with bags and goods and cast this spell. The pack will disappear into the luminous aether and return whenever you call it, requiring a turn to materialize.  You can cast the spell multiple times (one pack per level).  Wear a normal pack as well and carry all the comforts with you into the wild.

Baba's Ox
Cut the ox's throat and cast this spell before the last drop of blood drains from it.  It will pull loads silently while needing no water, no food, no rest, and no sleep, for as many days as you are powerful (level).  Peasants consider this evil.

My Pretties
Cry "Take These!" to call small creatures forth (1d6 per level) which will each take a few items from you (up to 7.5 pounds) and then scatter back into the landscape.  Cry "My Pretties!" to call them back and retrieve your items.  These creatures-- monkeys, opossums, raccoons, bats, rats, cats, anything that can grasp or bite-- will shadow you along your path as quiet as their kind, until called again.

Burdensome Kiss
Cast the spell and kiss someone within an hour.  That person will then feel the weight of all you bear for a week.  They will also know what you did.

Gold adds Light to the Air
A solid gold model of an object is made and the spell cast on it.  The original, will be light as a coin and perfectly balanced.  Hide the golden model somewhere safe.

Mysterious Miracles

Jeff asked a question about cleric spells on G+, the normal Vancian system being too much like "a snap-your-fingers-and-God-comes-running affair."

I agree wholeheartedly, and if you've been following my blog you probably know I have my players draw dominoes to see if petitions for aid are answered.   I've spent a lot of brain cycles on this, trying to make it simple enough for even new players.  And just when I think I have the system as simple as it is going to get, I find I'm not really satisfied with it.

Sure, the ways of the gods, or your ancestors, or your totem, are mysterious.  They know more than you and are wiser.  How can you know whether a petition will be answered or not?  But as a mechanic it really sucks when in the heat of need, your petitions go unanswered again and again and again.  I've seen more players disappointed than helped by this system.  And I'm pretty sure my players have little interest in playing the class because of it.  So what to do?

A New Approach
I want to keep the mystery in divine aid, but not in whether prayers will be heard or not.  So maybe I can shift the mystery to how prayers are answered.  What if I made a more general spur-type chart of aid granted?  Clerics will get a certain # of petitions answered a day, but how they are answered is up to the divine power (or in this case our interpretation of the chart).

This will require more work, but could be potentially cool.  I'd want the aid to come in a form that fits the power where possible; Zeus tends to send lighting & thunder, the wolf totem- a wolf.  But I'd also like to have a bit of choice for the petitioner so that the miracles will fit them, maybe they like little animals coming to their aid, maybe they are more of the persuasion of melting enemy faces off.  Either way, pc clerics would begin to resemble distinct saints as they grew in power.

I need to think more about how I'd construct this "Aid Granted" chart, maybe for any dangerous situation it would have general entries of the type: "smite enemies," "escape granted," "unharmable," "hidden," etc.  I guess it takes away some of the strategy if miracles just become get-out-of--jail-free cards.  Then the player's choice becomes: when do I ask for help because I can only ask a few times.

Another possibility that could work in tandem with the mysterious miracles above are random boons clerics would get at the beginning of each game session (this idea comes from Jeff's question).  This would make for miraculous powers that are more useful and tool-like for players-- "I've been granted the ability to walk on water, lets go to the sunken dungeon!"  But I would want a big list, at least 100, so that it would always be fresh and interesting.  Probably should have room for the flavor of their divine power too.  Hmm, I wonder if I could just use my Spell-Like Effects spur for these boons.

Spell Research for Players

Here's an idea to get players more involved with investigating new spells: reveal the actual spell info to the player as they successfully learn more and more.

It's not as exciting as a player coming up with their own spells, but not everyone wants to get as creatively invested.  It could also be good if you want more control over the spells that will be possible in your campaign, or even if only a single caster can know any one spell at a time (wasn't that Mr. Rient's idea?).

(Why make players go through the process of research if you already have a list of spells?  Well it can still be engaging as a mini-game, especially if you have some kooky random failures possible during research.)

Anyway, let the player see a list of possible spells they can choose to research. They'll have to make a decision based on just the name.  Maybe you'll allow them to research incrementally into different spells, finding out a little more about each one before sinking all their time and money into learning one.  Maybe you'll allow them to try casting a spell before it's fully researched, but if you, the DM, carefully craft the spell ahead of time you can make this very risky.

Let's take the Fortunate Punishment as an example.  And I should pause to say the last time I wrote about this spell, I made it seem like I invented the spell in the comments (hell, I didn't remember if I had, or one of my players, or . . .).  But it was actually invented by the brilliant Stuart. So thanks to him, and sorry about that, sir.  Now the example:

If each line of text corresponds to 100gp, or maybe a week of research, then giving players just a list of titles would prevent them from knowing even how much work they have to do to unravel that spells mysteries.  If you want to be easier on them you could start with the whole spell text blurred out.  In the case of our example it would mean about 5 successful steps to know everything about the spell.  Each week, or research roll, or however you want to do it, you show the player the next image with another line clear.
Now, this would take a lot of work on the DM's part to make each reveal dramatic or a tease.  But then, you could probably even take the standard spells and hide range, material components, and casting time, to be dramatic too, depending on the spell.

Spell Reseach Costs - Fillable PDF

I didn't know that OpenOffice could create fillable pdfs!  Well, now I do. I swear this hobby is turning me into a more efficient office drone.  Anyway, if you want to give something simple to your players so they know what choices they have in dealing with spell transcription and creation you could give them something like this:

This does assume a quill of some sort and ink, but heck you could say that is just normal equipment if you don't want to get fancy.  Then fill in whatever values you want for money and time.  The last entry, new spells, has an extra box in case you want to require the use of a library or guild resources.  The last box should be a percentage chance of succeeding at creating the new spell.

You could do this for potions too, I suppose.

Visual Spell Transcription Rule

I want to make how spell transcription works in my world clear enough that players start making decisions and goals based on that knowledge.  What do you think of this:

I might add a little text under it.  The quill and the vial mean that it requires blood and feathers from a creature of HD equivalent to the spell level, per Talysman's awesome idea (in the comments).  I might say to my players: "more and more powerful creatures," because they don't know what "hit die" are.

One thing I want to add but don't know how to rule on is for creating an entirely new spell.  I don't know what it should cost.  I don't want players to have to wait for 7th level either, a S&W style campaign will be near its endgame by then, no?  Besides one of the coolest things about D&D were all those named spells. I want my players to create some spells.

But, do they need access to a library?  Access to a tower (but that would, again, be endgame, no?)?

Update: 1) I'm confusing my systems, S&W goes to twentieth, oe is the one capping out around 10th.  Odd that some of my conceptions of the game I want to play are sliding more and more toward some of the original aspects of those rules.

2) I'm thinking it should be cheaper to put a spell into a book than the other way, to encourage players looking for more, but I'm not sure.

Update 2: How's this for a second draft (I changed everything to sp because of my game's silver standard):

Canopic Kiss

How about the opposite of my last post's idea of a spell.

Canopic Kiss
With a kiss a mage "hides" a bit of lifeforce with the kissed (1 hitpoint).  The mage may kiss as many individuals as s/he has lifeforce (hitpoints).  As long as the kissed remain alive the mage will be unkillable.  If wounded, the kissed will go into a coma at the last bit of lifeforce (1 hitpoint left).  The mage will know whether any of the kissed are living, dead, or in a coma, but not necessarily where they are.

What level would you make this?

ad arbitrium censoris

ad arbitrium censoris

For each oath and mark the Censor-Mage collects, a measure of lifeforce may be called upon by the collector.  An oath can only be made by a signitor free of mind.  A Censor-Mage may not lie about the ramifications of signing.  Each score of signators will result in another level of lifeforce.  If the Censor-Mage calls upon the lifeforce it is pulled equally and permanently from that score of signitors.  This accumulation of lifeforce lasts only one lustrum (5 years) at which point all obligations become null and void.
________________________

Thanks to mike in the comments to the last post for the idea.  So, your MU goes around signing people up to your worldview/quest goals.  They sign on and you get some hitpoints you can burn through in reaching those goals.  I'm thinking 1 hit point for 20 every signitors.  That way you sign up one serf and it's in his best interest to try and help you sign up 19 other folks to share the burden of that one hit point permamnently lost.  The hope is that the difficulty of getting someone to offer you some of their hitpoints will balance the powerful gain of hitpoints.
Using the hitpoints logistically I imagine being similar to splintering shields-- you get hit and you can decide to burn up one of these communal hit points or not.

With spells like this, that incorporate costs or difficult choices within them, I have no clue what level to make them.  What level would you make this?

Mad Lib Magic

Next time you or one of your players wants to make a new spell this might speed up the process. Answer these 20 questions before peeking below the picture:

1. Cool name for a wizard.
2. Color you'd paint your car if you could.
3. Something that moves through the air.
4. Horrible symptom you would never want.
5. Number from 1-9.
6. Funky football star name.
7. Adjective that would probably catch your attention.
8. Something difficult to get rid of.
9. Something you would never want to happen to your magic-user.
   
10. Your favorite biblical name.
11. Verb that would hurt if it happened to you (past tense).
12. Gross adjective.
13. Something that would freak you out if it surprised you in your bed.
14. Verb you would be embarrassed to do in front of others.
15. Pop star that goes by a single name.
16. Number from 1-4.
17. Body part it would be kick-ass to have another of.
18. Verb you wish you could do better.
19. Different number from 1-4.
20. Pet name you hate.

[ 1 ]'s Wrathful Vengeance

Your foe is struck by a [ 2 ] [ 3 ] and immediately has [ 4 ] for [ 5 ] rounds.

[6]'s Wonderful Ward

A wall of [ 7 ] [ 8 ] rises from the ground, encircles and protects you from [ 9 ].

[ 10 ]'s Acrimonious Avengement

Your foe is [ 11 ] with a [ 12 ] [ 13 ] and must [ 14 ] until exhaustion sets in.

[ 15 ]'s Inveiglement

You suddenly gain [ 16 ] [ 17 ], and this allows you to [ 18 ] with such facility that any hostiles in [ 19 ] miles will immediately call you [ 20 ] and follow you adoringly.

Have a nice, relaxing Saturday.

The Story of Cleric Spells

Back when I was trying to figure out how I would handle cleric spells in my campaign I made a chart of how first level cleric spells changed through the editions to help myself see what was going on. Delta has been posting some interesting stuff about how spells have changed through the editions so I dug out my chart, prettied it up, and offer it to you.


I ignored the druid spells that got pulled in during 2e, not because I don't approve of them functioning as generic priest spells, but to keep things clearer; druid had always been a separate archetype and so I keep those spells separate. There are probably errors.

The main thing I notice is the accretion over time of more spells. That makes sense. Wizard spells are more dramatic in that regard, going from 8 1st level spells to 45 by 2e.

Fairy Tale Spell Names

I was planning on doing more with magical effects charts but work sucked all my mental energy. What I do sometimes when I want to be creative but that muscle is tired is trawl through online books for public domain illustrations. I was going through an old book of Perrault Fairy Tales when I realized that some of the titles would make cool, almost-Vancian spell names. Then I poked around online looking for more possible examples. Here are the best I found:

• The Palace of Revenge
• The Prince of Leaves
• The Fortunate Punishment
• The Impossible Enchantment
• The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs
• The Bright Sun Brings It to Light
• The Crumbs on the Table
• The Thorny Road of Honor
• The Last Dream of the Old Oak
• The Story of the Wind
• Beauty of Form and Beauty of Mind
• The Storm Shakes the Shield
• Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to take the title most interesting to you and turn it into an actual spell.