Spell seed: KEEP MAGIC CIG AM PEEK.

KEEP MAGIC CIG AM PEEK – Google Docs

KEEP MAGIC CIG AM PEEK

 

It’s a minor little bit of palindrome magic: if you have the raw power to do it, light a cigarette and mutter this while you stare at the burning end.  The esoteric result is that while you do it you get at least a little resistance to anti-magical effects or attacks. It won’t save you from a powerful draining spell for very long, but if you’re running across a magically-drained area, you can get to the other side with no more than maybe the thaumaturgical equivalent of chapped lips.  If you have magical ability, of course. And can run while staring at a burning cigarette, which not everybody can do. Still, it’s a useful enough bit of hedge magic, normally.

Continue reading Spell seed: KEEP MAGIC CIG AM PEEK.

Spell seed: Catsight.

Catsight – Google Docs

Catsight

This is a scrying spell that takes advantage of a strange, and only half-understood, mental-spiritual gestalt that seems to exist among all domesticated cats.  Simply put; when you get enough cats together within one area, they create a shared network that a trained mage can exploit. Put even more simply: a mage that casts this spell can freely look through the eyes of any and all cats within a mile of his location.

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Spell seed: Hacked.

Hacked – Google Docs

Hacked

Hacked is a subtle, but potentially deadly spell: when cast on a person, it makes him think that he’s deleted a comment on social media without posting it, when in reality he’s just hit Enter. The spell also alters the victim’s short-term memory so that he does not actually remember writing the comment in the first place. If the victim is not currently posting on social media when Hacked is cast, the spell stays in place for eight hours, then dissipates. Continue reading Spell seed: Hacked.

Spell seed: Anser Reformabit.

Blame this.

Anser Reformabit

Despite its name, this spell works on any sort of poultry. When cast, it transforms the victim into a variety of carnivorous dinosaur, depending on the rough size of the poultry in question:

  • Duck-sized: Microraptor (How it kills you: swoops down from the sky and goes for the eyes)
  • Chicken-sized: Hesperonychus (How it kills you: swarms with about a dozen other Hesperonychus and worries its prey to death)
  • Goose-sized:Compsognathus (How it kills you: stalks from the trees and leaps from behind)
  • Swan-sized: Velociraptor (How it kills you: standard disembowelment with its sickle-claw)
  • Emu-sized: Troodon (How it kills you: inventively. Usually with sticks and sometimes a handy vine or two)
  • Ostrich-sized: Deinonychus (How it kills you: RAWR [chomp])

Continue reading Spell seed: Anser Reformabit.

Gaming spell seed: noclip.

noclip

This particular spell is infamous for the sheer number of aspiring mages that it’s put into involuntary psychiatric care.  The basic effect is simple: invoke this spell, and for the next minute or so (technically, for as long as you can hold your breath) you can move through walls, float in the air, sink under the ground, that sort of thing.  It doesn’t give direct protection from injuries, but obviously being able to duck through a concrete wall is going to make it easier to not get shot.  If the spell ends while the subject is inside a solid object, the spell shoves the subject to the closest open area; if in a liquid, the subject is now immersed in it.  If the subject is merely suspended in mid-air, the subject falls.

So, why the psychiatric care? Because noclip hurts people’s brains, that’s why.  The more you know about either magic or physics, the more disturbing this spell gets. Repeated use of the spell – as in, more than once in a very long while – puts the subject at risk of entering a dementia spiral of increasing detachment followed by self-destructive behavior as his psyche unsuccessfully tries to process the spell’s effect on reality itself.  It would appear that only the gods themselves can safely handle God Mode…

Spell Seed: God Mode.

Spell: God Mode

Well, it’s not always a spell. Depending on the universe, it’s a spell, a miracle, an alchemical centering ritual, a psionic mnemonic exercise, a reasonably benign bit of hyper-geometry… whatever fits the local supernatural paradigm, really. To activate it, the spellcaster has to jump up twice, crouch twice, shuffle to the left, shuffle to the right, shuffle to the left again, shuffle to the right again, and – this is the important part – be able to metaphysically perceive the two glowing spheres of light that have just manifested in front of the spellcaster.  If the caster touches the sphere on the left, and then the sphere on the right, congratulations: he is now immune to all forms of damage! For about one minute, at the end of which the caster is knocked absolutely unconscious for the next day. Continue reading Spell Seed: God Mode.

(Generic) RPG Spell seed: Horatio’s Stereoscopic Infallible Viewer.

Blame this.

Horatio’s Stereoscopic Infallible Viewer

This spell was designed by ‘Horatio,’ who was one of those interesting mages.  Thoroughly interested in mind and body spells, it was… and ‘it’ is used deliberately; Horatio had a habit of switching bodies like some people switch shirts. Ethically, mind you: the mage was rather good at jump-starting a recently-deceased corpse and getting everything running again properly. Or possibly ‘is:’ nobody’s heard from it recently, but that could just be Horatio not bothering to tell anyone, right?

Moving along… you need three targets for this spell. Preferably, they should all be from the same species (high-intelligence ones are not preferred), and as closely related to each other as possible (kittens or puppies from the same litter are typically ideal).  One target is designated as the ‘archer:’ the other two are ‘scouts.’  The caster takes up residence in the brain of the archer, and can cast spells at whatever both ‘spotters’ can see, with difficulty and range based off of the archer’s location.  That’s one of the advantages of this spell.

The other? Well, it’s almost impossible to get any kind of mystical ‘lock’ on the actual caster this way, so a lot of counterspells and other defensive magic won’t work on spells cast this way.  Essentially, you could still deflect a fireball cast using this method, but, say, fending off mind control attempts is a bit harder to successfully do, and trying to trace the spell back to its owner is going to be pointless; you’d just bounce from brain to brain to brain, and none of them will have the information that you need anyway. Or be able to comprehend it, probably.

As you might imagine, this is a fairly useful spell.  It’s also insanely dangerous: simply kill one of the targets of it, and the caster is going to get immediately thrown out of the link – and probably have a stroke in the process.  And the longer the caster stays in the linked minds, the harder it is for the caster to break the link consciously.  And, of course, you need a serious amount of magical energy to even create the link in the first place.  This is barely within the capabilities of a senior journeyman mage; and while easier for an archmage, one wouldn’t cast it frivolously.  Even Horatio only used this spell once it got the hang of on-the-fly reactive healing spells…