D&D General A Trip Back In Time: On The Utter Weirdness of Old Spells

[Lanefan]

I ask the players to make a note next to unidentified items indicating dungeon room number or page number to help me deal with that.

Works if you're running a prewritten module. Not so useful if, like me sometimes, the "module" is a map and a few scratch notes and I'm making the details (including treasure) up as I go along.

 

[Lanefan]

Part Water; Lower Water
Water Walk
Speak With Dead; Raise Dead
Create Food & Water

Other than Part Water, which I've maybe seen cast three times in my life, these are staple spells that get used whenever the situation requires them.

 

[Byrd]

Other than Part Water, which I've maybe seen cast three times in my life, these are staple spells that get used whenever the situation requires them.

True.
I was leaning more into the Biblical inspiration/aspect.
Guess I should have been clearer about that.

 

[Lanefan]

True.
I was leaning more into the Biblical inspiration/aspect.
Guess I should have been clearer about that.

Ah. Got it.

 

[Azzy]

Works if you're running a prewritten module. Not so useful if, like me sometimes, the "module" is a map and a few scratch notes and I'm making the details (including treasure) up as I go along.

Yeah, if you're winging it, that wouldn't be an option. I tend to do more prep work.

 

[Pauln6]

Part Water; Lower Water
Water Walk
Speak With Dead; Raise Dead
Create Food & Water

---
But my all time favorite, straight outta a fairy tale: Sleep-Curse (BECMI: Dawn of the Emperors Box Set)

View attachment 447412

Plus water to wine? Did I imagine that an example of the commune spell was manifesting as a burning bush?

 

[Gorg]

How about Dolor. A fairly high level spell, meant to force summoned creatures to do your bidding- by making them feel bad.

 

[Blue]

Along with Bee, I can't wait until we get to some of the other more obscure Unearthed Arcana (or 2e Tome of Magic) spells. I'm thinking Bluelight, There/Not There, Murdock's Feathery Flyer, etc.

Oh man, I had one caster who made heavy use of There/Not There, and a party that was used to it. The details are super fuzzy, but I remember running across a There/Not There bridge over a chasm with our eyes closed for some reason to escape more powerful foes, maybe to not allow it to change for each person. Was that part of the spell?

 

[haakon1]

The other thing we did is develop the idea of item numbers, where every item found (magical or not, if it has a value) gets its own unique number This way, when we're talking about some half-forgotten item from five or ten real-world years ago that a character still has we can be sure we're talking about the same thing; a lesson learned the hard way back in the early days!

I control the character sheets (homemade in Word), with a Magic & Special Items section. It includes what it does (that they know of) and where it came from (so I can look up the properties of the mysterious spear from A21 in the TOEE Air Node). It serves the same purpose as an item number.

One good thing about this approach (number or notes) is that it stops duplication of magic items (how do you both have the same spear?) that we’ve suspected in the past.

And the notes are fun for “ah, remember when”.

 

[haakon1]

Sleep Curse sounds cool. Very fairytale. I like that kind of thing.

It seems clearly intended to be an evil NPC casting it to set up a thing the party encounters, from the era when adventures were often designed with strict adherence to rules, and explanations thereof for the reader.

Or for a friendly TPK if players bit off more than they can chew, lett7ng a new party or NPC rescue them later with no real harm done.