OD&D Jon Peterson Shares Aronson's Original OD&D Illusionist

Ralif Redhammer · Mar 7, 2019

Neat! One of my brother's earliest AD&D PCs was an Illusionist.

Color Bomb, a hyped-up version of Color Spray, never made it to official release, if I recall correctly.

AmerginLiath · Mar 7, 2019

As versatile and potentially powerful as Magic Users were, I could never bring myself NOT to play an Illusionist when I wanted to play what we now call an arcane spellcaster in my 1st Edition days when I could, because they just the right amount of flavor baked in (without constraining the player’s imagination — similar to the ranger and to a lesser degree the druid).

mach1.9pants · Mar 7, 2019

Nice, one of my fave classes BitD. Gnome illusionist MC thief

mach1.9pants · Mar 7, 2019

Nice, one of my fave classes BitD. Gnome illusionist MC thief

mach1.9pants · Mar 7, 2019

Nice, one of my fave classes BitD. Gnome illusionist MC thief

Aaron L · Mar 8, 2019

Ralif Redhammer said:
Neat! One of my brother's earliest AD&D PCs was an Illusionist.

Color Bomb, a hyped-up version of Color Spray, never made it to official release, if I recall correctly.

I was going to comment on Color Bomb; I've never heard of it before and was wondering what it could do. It sounded awesome, and an upgraded Color Spray type spell sounds cool. At first thought it brought to mind an area effect Chromatic Orb.

I've had a Gnomish Fighter/Illusionist character gestating in my mind for a few years now, just waiting for the next 1st Edition campaign I get to play.

Aaron L · Mar 8, 2019

The Peterson article provides fun insights into the origins of the Schools of Magic in D&D. I've always liked these groupings, and most of them make sense, but the one School of Magic that has always baffled me is Evocation/Invocation (later called just Evocation.)

In D&D, Invocation/Evocation has always primarily been magic that creates destructive energy forces, which has absolutely nothing to do with what those words actually mean.

Evocation comes from the Latin evocatio ceremony, a ritual performed before attacking a city to "draw out" the city's tutelary deity (its "patron god") and promise it a better cult back in Rome (so as to weaken the city by removing its divine patronage, to excuse the Romans from sacking any temples in the city, and, more practically, to provide a psychological advantage to the Romans by convincing the citizens of the city that their god won't be there to protect them anymore), and the corresponding invocatio ritual would then later be performed to re-plant that deity in a new temple in Rome. Similarly, the word invoke now means to "summon" the spirit of God (the invocation at the beginning of a church service is commonly a reading from the Bible meant to put everyone's mind in a reverential mood) or to do the same with an idea or memory, and evoke means to "summon up" a thought or a feeling from inside yourself. So, the words now mean essentially the same, the only difference being whether the thoughts or feelings originate from inside (evoke) or outside (invoke) oneself: invoke means to summon in, evoke means to summon out.

So I've always wondered: how did these terms come to mean such totally different things in D&D, and therefore filter from there into wider fantasy writing? In the minds of almost all D&D players Evocation now means to create Fireballs, not to call up a feeling or memory. Did the D&D writers just pick a "magical" word at random for this group of spells? Because the names of all the other schools of magic make basic sense. Enchantment/Charm spells affect the mind; enchantment comes from the root word chant, meaning to speak ("enchant" basically means "to affect with words") and the terms enchant and charm have long meant to affect the mind, thus enchantments and charms are spells that use words to affect the mind; Transmutation has always meant to change one thing into another, Illusions are fake images and sounds, Necromancy originally meant to summon up the spirits of the dead to get advice from them ("-mancy" originally meant "a technique for divination") but it became a general term for any magic that affects the dead, etc.

Anyone have any ideas about this? It's always kinda bugged me.

Personally, I'd call the school something like "Visication" which would mean something like "to summon energy or force." But I'd need to be better at Latin to come up with a more accurate name.