• Registered: 2015-01-24
  • Posts: 19

Topic: Spells as NPCs

I had an idea while reading Dying Earth and pondering the "Vancian" magic of D&D variants... The idea is not so much from Vance himself, but from Terry Pratchett, who apparently sought to lightly parody Vance's floridity... (I must also mention Jim and his magnificent Owls as an inspiration.)

So how about this...

Spells are alive. They are a form of life parasitic to the human mind or the written word.
They are not created by magicians. They are discovered, either in other magicians' spellbooks, or in drug-addles nightmares.

Some spells are tame, such as the much perfected Magic Missile. They are like reliable beasts of burden. But many of them are feral, and in their own right, quite intelligent! A powerful mage is often walking around with a quite literal demon (or two, or three) seething in his brain, waiting for the right moment to wrest control from him.

Reading a spellbook is never a riskless endeavor, as a feral spell might decide to JUMP into your brain - especially if you are not yet trained to handle one of its scope! (Save vs magic, or all your spell slots are occupied by a single instance of a, say, 9th level enchantment. That has its own ideas about what it wants of you. It may be useful. It is definitely dangerous.)

Feral spells cannot simply be forgotten to make room for new memorizations. They grab and pinch your brain and refuse to let go. You have to write them down (create a copy of them) to be able to forget them without casting.

Summon is ALWAYS feral. Most spellbooks have multiple instances of Summon written up, for virtue of most magicians not wanting to cast it.

EDIT: One more addition. An important one. Costly material components, special conditions and painstaking preparations are not necessary for the mere casting of a spell - they are necessary to control the forces thus unleashed...

Last edited by Lepus (2015-02-15 22:45:41)

  • Registered: 2015-01-24
  • Posts: 19

Re: Spells as NPCs

Speaking of which, I've recently spent some bored minutes watching cold war nuclear test footages. I think we often forget just how magnificent and terrible nukes are - most people tend to associate them more with painful 1950s cheese. A thermonuclear explosion is quite literally "summoning the Sun upon Earth"...

I'm wondering how it could be integrated into a weird adventure without being cheesy.

  • From: Los Angeles, CA
  • Registered: 2015-01-31
  • Posts: 8

Re: Spells as NPCs

This idea evokes, for me, one of the  only two concepts from Eberron that I thought was cool -- living spells.  Don't know if you ever looked at that setting, but living spells were oozes born from what was essentially a magical nuke (which kind of answers your second post's question).

Another way to use post-nuke ideas in weird fantasy would be to use the concept that summoning the Sun upon the earth affects space-time in a manner similar to the Sun, too... if ever so briefly.  So, there would be fluctuations in gravity, and perhaps effects that stretch backwards or forwards or sideways in time.

Last edited by King Truffle IV (2015-02-19 00:11:32)

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  • Registered: 2014-09-18
  • Posts: 141

Re: Spells as NPCs

Lepus wrote:

I had an idea while reading Dying Earth and pondering the "Vancian" magic of D&D variants... The idea is not so much from Vance himself, but from Terry Pratchett, who apparently sought to lightly parody Vance's floridity... (I must also mention Jim and his magnificent Owls as an inspiration.)

So how about this...

Spells are alive. They are a form of life parasitic to the human mind or the written word.
They are not created by magicians. They are discovered, either in other magicians' spellbooks, or in drug-addles nightmares.

Some spells are tame, such as the much perfected Magic Missile. They are like reliable beasts of burden. But many of them are feral, and in their own right, quite intelligent! A powerful mage is often walking around with a quite literal demon (or two, or three) seething in his brain, waiting for the right moment to wrest control from him.

Reading a spellbook is never a riskless endeavor, as a feral spell might decide to JUMP into your brain - especially if you are not yet trained to handle one of its scope! (Save vs magic, or all your spell slots are occupied by a single instance of a, say, 9th level enchantment. That has its own ideas about what it wants of you. It may be useful. It is definitely dangerous.)

Feral spells cannot simply be forgotten to make room for new memorizations. They grab and pinch your brain and refuse to let go. You have to write them down (create a copy of them) to be able to forget them without casting.

Summon is ALWAYS feral. Most spellbooks have multiple instances of Summon written up, for virtue of most magicians not wanting to cast it.

EDIT: One more addition. An important one. Costly material components, special conditions and painstaking preparations are not necessary for the mere casting of a spell - they are necessary to control the forces thus unleashed...




You should look at a LotFP supplement called The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions. In addition to being just a damn top-notch game supplement, it has the concept of spells actually being something like a spirit...or plasm, as the book in question calls them.