doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Recently, one of the fellow players in my only game I don’t DM ran a one-shot involving a ride on a magical giant flying squirrel and his old man caretaker.
In the setup for that, he asked us questions to set the scene and lead in to the adventure. Things like, “what is your ritual at the end of the day?” And “What is your speaking stones conversation with your family like, what do you tell them? What is that relationship like?”
For my character, the pre-sleep ritual involves some simple alchemy, and he asked me what that looks like, what tools I’m using, what I’m making, etc.
Then he asked if I’d planned on scribing a spell into my spellbook, bc I’d mentioned that previously, and I said that was the plan, so he asked me how I arrange my space and where I keep my materials and all that.
Then, he asked the really interesting question.
“What does your spell inscription actually look like?”
I was delighted! I explained that my spells look like code and equations and diagrams, with instructions, similar to what an inventor might take in to the patent office in a movie. Like a mix of schematic, hermetic diagram, calculus work, and instruction manual form something very complex and advanced.
Then as we progressed he came back to me and asked what it looks like when I focus my thoughts and bend my will toward magical study, and as a Bladesinger I was inspired to describe it in terms of how my actual magic looks from my perspective.
My Bladesong isn’t magical shielding, it’s an Augmented Reality overlay showing me a dynamic layout of all creatures and moving objects, with boundaries and such for obstacles and annotations of size and distance, and intersecting lines as these many circles move, intersect, and change in various ways. I dodge an arrow because I can see the opportunity for a shot against me before the arrow is loosed, and I step to the side, shifting my angle of approach to my next target.
In rituals, I create, piece by piece, the most basic representation of this moving diagram in my mind. An encompassing circle, containing a small central circle, which is flanked by three other circles, and 3 lines which run perpendicular but don’t intersect within the circle. From there, I build the rest of the ritual geometry.
And now I wonder, what does your magic look like?
In the setup for that, he asked us questions to set the scene and lead in to the adventure. Things like, “what is your ritual at the end of the day?” And “What is your speaking stones conversation with your family like, what do you tell them? What is that relationship like?”
For my character, the pre-sleep ritual involves some simple alchemy, and he asked me what that looks like, what tools I’m using, what I’m making, etc.
Then he asked if I’d planned on scribing a spell into my spellbook, bc I’d mentioned that previously, and I said that was the plan, so he asked me how I arrange my space and where I keep my materials and all that.
Then, he asked the really interesting question.
“What does your spell inscription actually look like?”
I was delighted! I explained that my spells look like code and equations and diagrams, with instructions, similar to what an inventor might take in to the patent office in a movie. Like a mix of schematic, hermetic diagram, calculus work, and instruction manual form something very complex and advanced.
Then as we progressed he came back to me and asked what it looks like when I focus my thoughts and bend my will toward magical study, and as a Bladesinger I was inspired to describe it in terms of how my actual magic looks from my perspective.
My Bladesong isn’t magical shielding, it’s an Augmented Reality overlay showing me a dynamic layout of all creatures and moving objects, with boundaries and such for obstacles and annotations of size and distance, and intersecting lines as these many circles move, intersect, and change in various ways. I dodge an arrow because I can see the opportunity for a shot against me before the arrow is loosed, and I step to the side, shifting my angle of approach to my next target.
In rituals, I create, piece by piece, the most basic representation of this moving diagram in my mind. An encompassing circle, containing a small central circle, which is flanked by three other circles, and 3 lines which run perpendicular but don’t intersect within the circle. From there, I build the rest of the ritual geometry.
And now I wonder, what does your magic look like?