Week 7: The Weird Stuff

We’re getting deeper into the weeds, now.

Clinging Blade

You enchant a flat metal object – such as a sword – so that it adheres to whatever you touch it to, or releases again, at a command. The spell’s name suggests that was intended to make it easier to carry knives and other bladed objects, but a good supply of spare metal parts could potentially allow for myriad creative uses – albeit ones vulnerable to disassembly by anyone else who knows the spell or the command word.

Frames of Death

For those burdened with the gift/curse/weapon of the Evil Eye, this enchantment is a potent magnifier. You erect one or more gates or doorframes, often of hewn stone, and attune them to your power in a series of ceremonies. Thereafter, if you meet someone’s eyes through the space of these frames, each gate doubles your Eye’s power. When combined with a modified version of the Gate Sail that allows two-way vision, this can become a potent long-range weapon.

Ward of Snade the Pood Beast

Snade is a wandering godling of chimerical form. You can call upon its power to attract one sort of “beast” and repel another (of roughly equal mass) in equal numbers – for example, keeping one tiger at bay for each panda that answers the call. Some scholars theorize that this invocation is one of the oldest spells known to humanity, and is responsible for driving the domestication of various animals, from cats to elephants.

Wall of Distraction

This favorite of illusionists allows you to use your craft explicitly for entertainment: you place an image on a wall as if painting a fresco. Experienced illusionists can extend the apparent depth of the wall to produce three-dimensional images, cause their images to move, and even produce sounds and smells to accompany the image. An optional ritual can render the illusion permanent.

Primal Prayer Bear

You summon a living embodiment of human faith: a Primal Prayer Bear. The Bear can speak and understand all known languages and has an awe-inspiring voice whether it speaks in a whisper or a shout. It appears for the duration of one religious ceremony, from a five-minute koan discussion to a full day of fasting and chanting, and during that time it both participates in whatever role its summoner assigns, and guards the ceremony from outside disruption. Those who try to enter the area it protects with ill intent find themselves confronted with wrathful, snarling ursine visages and then lacerated and bludgeoned by overwhelmingly powerful claws.

Death’s Death’s Proud Bear

This supernatural ursine summon is a closely-guarded secret because the bear it summons is literally capable of slaying a death. If called just as someone or something is drawing their final breath, the Bear appears, snatches the death that just arrived for that person, and carries it away to places unknown and better unasked-about. Even better, although the person so protected is still wracked and ravaged by whatever poison, wound, or disease was about to do them in, they are functionally immortal until the next dusk, dawn, high noon, or midnight. At that point, some sort of cosmic something is reset and a new death will be assigned to their case as appropriate.

Spirit of the Spirit

After trapping a ghost in a magic circle, you use this complicated weaving to draw out and distill its fundamental essence: the ghost’s ghost, as it were, after the original ghost has been slain. In astral terms this manifests as a rippling sphere, shining with the pure pseudo-color of one particular emotion. This does not move, communicate, or take any sort of action, and only mildly impacts the mood of living mortals in the area. Spirits nearby are affected dramatically, though, and divination or sensory magic in the area tends to be skewed beyond all usability.