Spells and Spell-Casting

Contents

Introduction

There are three ways creatures in SAGA's universe can generate magical phenomena with their minds: sorcery, psionics, and wizardry. In each case, neurons generate electrical fields that interact with a maeon wind. In sorcery, the spinal cord and motor control portions of the brain generate the required electrical fields as the sorcerer sings, chants, dances, or gestures. A sorcerer might make spirit matter furniture. He chants as he creates and shapes the gray, sparkling material. He may have a spiritual belief in the power of chanting and his state of mind. Or he may know perfectly well what is occurring in the base of his brain. In psionics, a genetically-engineered neural network within the mind generates the required electrical fields automatically. The psionic may be unaware of her own ability, so that it occurs at random, or she may have control over it, so that it feels as if exercising the ability is as natural as moving her arm. In wizardry, synaptic patterns are implanted in the brain by the wizard when he experiences certain sights and sounds in a specific order. Later, the wizard signals the neurons whose synapses have been affected and they generate the required electrical fields to initiate a magical effect.

A spell is any magical effect generated by a biological neural network. The two magical phenomena underlying spell-casting are the creation of conjured matter by electrostatic fields in the nervous system and the generation of space bridges by dweomer fields by exploiting tunnel trapping. Of the three classes of spell-casting, sorcery is an art, psionics is an inherited ability, and wizardry is a science. Wizards train for years to acquire their abilities. They are fully aware of what they are doing, and of the science upon which it is founded. Sorcerers train for decades to acquire their abilities, and may have no understanding of the physical phenomena that underpin their powers. Psionics have their power from birth, although they may need to practice using it in the same way that we must practice to learn to throw and catch a ball.

A psionic has a permanent neural network in her mind that generates a particular magical effect. The psionic does not work to acquire this neural network, she is born with it, or comes upon it by some accident or operation. Nevertheless, practice with this inherited neural network improves the precision and power of psionic spell-casting.

A sorcerer is someone who has trained his brain to generate magical effects by concentrating upon the generation at the time it is desired. Most sorcerers generate one effect at a time, and they use the same part of their mind for each effect. It takes decades for the most talented sorcerers to attain a level of proficiency adequate to earn them a useful living with sorcery, so sapien sorcerers are rare, while elf and black-orc sorcerers are common.

A wizard has separate sections of her brain, each of which she can instruct to generate a magical effect once, but the time is of her choosing, and these sections can be instructed again, after they have generated their effect. A gifted sapien can become a wizard by the age of twenty-five, provided they start training their mind by the age of ten. A wizard divides a region of her brain called the cantusarea into spell slots, each of which a she prepare to cast a spell. Casting a spell consists of the wizard triggering the spell slot, the spell slot itself generating the magical effect that defines the spell, and the wizard subsequently guiding these effects.

One of the most prominent magical phenomena is the space bridge. A space bridge consists of two flat surfaces, of identical size and shape, such that, when a sub-atomic particle, or a photon, or a chemical atom passes through one surface, it emerges through the other. The simplest space bridges are those through which only sub-atomic particles, photons, and chemical atoms, but not chemical molecules, will pass through without damaged. These bridges are called atomic, or class one, bridges. Chemical matter is atomized when it passes through an atomic bridge. Spirit matter and conjured matter is broken down into their constituent maeons. A molecular, or class two, bridge, is more difficult to make than a molecular bridge. Chemical molecules pass through a molecular bridge without damage, but not spirit matter or conjured matter. A spirit, or class three, bridge is still more difficult to make. Both chemical and spirit matter will pass through a spirit bridge without damage, but not conjured matter. The conjured, or class four, bridge allows all types of matter to pass through without damage, and is by far the most difficult to make.

In the Celesti Sector, sorcerers, psionics, and wizards are all capable of making atomic bridges. Of all the magic-using creatures, only the very occasional sorcerer can make molecular bridges, and no creature has ever made a spirit bridge. Molecular and higher class bridges are made by daemons, who are experts at the task, gods, who are competent at it, demi-gods, who are sometimes capable of it, and a minority of demons. Travel through a molecular or spirit bridge is called gating. The gods can gate armies through bridges, and supply them also. This ability gives them the advantage in any conflict with any opponent that lack the ability to gate. Modern wizards, however, believe they are on the verge of learning how to make molecular bridges, and if they do so, the discovery will upset the balance of power between gods and sapiens.

Casting Solenoids

When neurons fire, they generate electrostatic fields. When neurons fire in just the right way, these fields can catalyze the arrest of negative maeons. These maeons combine to form conjured matter atoms that thread their way between the neurons. If the neurons coordinate their firing in just the right way, they can create many toroidal conjured atoms flush up against one another to make a tube a fraction of a millimeter in diameter, with all the maeons circulating in the same direction. This structure of conjured atoms is called a casting solenoid.

A casting solenoid is at the heart of every spell. The first thing every spell does is make one. Within the solenoid is a dweomer. When the dweomer reaches a critical strength, the north halves of tiny, short-lived space bridges appear within it. These bridges are casting bridges. They are similar to space tunnels. They are micrometers across, and endure for a few milliseconds. They appear and fade in such great numbers that they form an enduring cloud within the solenoid, called the local cluster. The south halves of the casting bridges form another cluster, outside the brain, called the remote cluster.

The remote cluster starts off just outside the spell-caster's head, along the axis of the casting solenoid. If the dweomer in the solenoid grows stronger, the remote cluster will move farther away. Strengthening the dweomer requires that the solenoid be enlarged with more conjured atoms. When a solenoid is enlarged in this way, it is called a targeting solenoid. Take any wizard spell with an ordinary solenoid, give it a targeting solenoid, and you increase its level by one.

Casting bridges are the connection between the brain of a wizard and the outside world. A spell's effects emanate from the remote cluster, and are controlled through the local cluster. Spells proceed in steps. The solenoid makes something happen at the remote cluster, the wizard does something to the remote cluster, the solenoid makes something else happen at the remote cluster that has been made possible by what the wizard just did, and so on.

Spell Bridges

The first thing that the remote cluster does in many spells is create a spell bridge. The spell bridge is a space bridge that starts off as a short space tunnel, a millimeter long or less, that by chance appears within the remote cluster in just the right orientation and location and then becomes trapped. The dweomer within the remote cluster preserves the tunnel long enough for a sheath of conjured matter to start forming around its edges. This sheath grows and forces the bridge to expand until it reaches the normal diameter for the prevailing maeon wind. Both halves of the spell bridge appear flush up against one another, separated by the thickness of their sheathes. Space tunnels are so rare within chemical solids and liquids that it is far more difficult to create a spell bridge in these materials than in air. Making a space bridge in air is a first level spell. Making one in water is a ninth level spell.

Once the spell has created a spell bridge, the remote cluster distributes itself in and around the sheath of the south half of the spell bridge. You will recall that the remote cluster is made up of the south halves of space bridges. These south halves are all southerly magnetic monopoles. They are attracted to the north half of the spell bridge, and repelled by the south half. The spell bridge is a vehicle for the effects of a spell, and is left over after the spell has done its work. The spell-caster can do what she pleases with such bridges. They are normal bridges, meaning that they will last eight hours in a 1-Y maeon wind. For more about handling space bridges, see our description of the Space Bridge spell.

The spell bridge has an intimate relationship with the spell. Most often, this relationship is exclusive, meaning that no other bridge has any relationship to the spell. But it is possible to affect other bridges by placing it near a spell bridge. And example of such a spell is Tuning, where a spell bridge extends or expands the longevity or size of another bridge. With some added complexity, it is possible for a spell to incorporate an existing bridge into its operation, and so use that bridge as a source of magical effects. For example, a variant of Surrounding Sponge uses an existing space bridge between the spell-caster and a friend to generate a ball of sponge at the remote half of the existing bridge. The wizard Hocus Pocus used this spell to block the door at the top of the steps in the rescue of Justine Tukenmaken.

When a spell incorporates a pre-existing bridge into its operation, and so generates its effect at the remote half of the pre-existing bridge by contact with the local half, we say the spell has an indirect spell bridge. Any spell that uses a spell bridge can be modified to use an indirect spell bridge by increasing its difficulty by two.

Targeting Solenoids

Spells like Choke and Beguile us a targeting solenoid to place their remote cluster in the right place for the spell to have its effect. The remote cluster moves away from the spell-caster at a constant speed, usually between 1 m/s and 10 m/s, along the axis of the solenoid. Hitting the target is a matter of direction and timing. The ultimate range of the targeting solenoid is the distance it can move in a hundred seconds.

Unless otherwise stated in the spell descriptions, a targeting solenoid starts up with a word (verbal control chosen at the time of preparation), and the spell takes effect with a gesture (somatic control). The wizard tries to set the spell off just as the remote cluster is passing through the target. With the simplest targeting solenoid, she has no way of knowing when this is except by dead-reckoning of the time elapsed since the solenoid started up. Likewise, she has no way of knowing whether she has oriented the targeting solenoid correctly other than by dead-reckoning. This dead-reckoning is accurate only after many hours of practice with each spell slot in turn, determining the orientation of its solenoid with respect to her head. Target practice with a spell slot is called calibrating the slot. Calibration is performed with spells such as Calibrate.

To determine whether or not a wizard hits a target with a targeting solenoid, we use SAGA's missile combat system. Once a wizard has calibrated a spell slot, he is proficient with it as a missile weapon in the same way that a fighter becomes proficient with a bow after sufficient practice. Once proficient with a spell slot, the wizard has firing accuracy equal to his fighter level minus his armor burdening, just as for a fighter firing a bow. It may be possible for wizards to become accurate at casting spells in the safety of their own laboratories, but the accuracy we are concerned about is the accuracy a wizard can achieve when his enemy is firing arrows at him, or charging him with a sword. In the extremity of combat, the wizard's firing accuracy is given by his fighter level and armor burdening alone.

Each spell with a targeting solenoid has an extent in meters. The remote cluster moves away from the spell caster by one extent per second. If the extent is one meter and the range of the target is ten meters, the remote cluster takes ten seconds to reach the target. The maximum range of the spell is one hundred extents. The wizard's to-hit roll is one greater per each full extent of the range. Each spell has an accuracy as well, which we subtract from the to-hit roll. The accuracy is a measure of how easy this particular spell is to aim.

The missile combat system specifies many adjustments to the to-hit roll, depending upon the movement and size of the target, and the rate of fire. The adjustments for rate of fire do not apply to spell-casting, because the spell's rate of fire is fixed at the time of preparation. But the adjustments for size and movement do apply. For example, a wizard with fighter-level 3 casts Choke at a man standing 10 m away. Choke's targeting extent is 1 m. Its target is the man's lungs. The entire man is like a 1-m diameter target, and his lungs are like a 50-cm target. Her to-hit roll is 1 + 10 (10-m range divided by 1-m extent) - 3 (fighter level) − 5 (spell accuracy) + 5 (50-cm target) = 8. If she hits, this means she has set the spell off in the man's lungs. If her target were a horse, her to-hit roll would be 5 less, because a horse's lungs are twice as big as a man's in every direction (they are like a 1-m diameter target).

An adult sapien presents the same area as a 1-m diameter, and is the default target in SAGA's missile combat system. No adjustment for size needs to be made when the target is an adult sapien. We see in the previous example that the 5 we add to the to-hit roll for the 50-cm diameter target is balanced by the 5 we subtract for the accuracy of the spell.

A Wizard must account for all movements of a target, not just movement across his field of view. A bow shot is not sensitive to movement of the target towards or away from the attacker, because the arrow crosses the intervening space and will strike anything in its path. But a targeting solenoid strikes in one place only, so movement towards and away from the wizard is just as effective at spoiling the his aim. For example, a wizard with fighter level zero casts Beguile at a woman bobbing her head before him one meter away. The targeting extent of Beguile is 50 cm. His to-hit roll is 1 + 2 (1-m range divided by 50-cm extent) + 10 (target is 25-cm wide) − 10 (spell accuracy) + 4 (alternating motion at two head-widths per second) - 0 (fighter level) = 6. The woman stops moving her head for a few seconds and he takes his chance immediately. His to-hit roll is 2. The spell is already active in his mind, but it must cross the intervening distance, so she has to remain still for 2 seconds for him to hit. If he fails, he can try again ten seconds later, although if she notices the attempt, she is likely to take evasive action. If she moves back to 3 m and jumps about randomly and vigorously, she raises the to-hit roll to 1 + 6 (3-m range) + 10 (25-cm target) − 10 (spell accuracy) + 40 (erratic movement ten head-widths per second) = 47.

When a spell has an area of effect, this increases the size of the target. If we want to hit an adult sapien with a spell that has a 10-m radius of effect, the target becomes a 9-m radius around the sapien's body. The large size of the target area makes it easier to hit one particular enemy. But these spells do not have the accuracy of spells with less dramatic effects. The avalanche growth of conjured matter that gives rise to the large area of effect tends to move the remote cluster around at random before the growth is complete. Thus the accuracy of most area of effect spells is zero. For example, A wizard with fighter level two wants to stop a ship coming into harbor. He stands upon the shore. When the ship is 500 m away, he casts Grand Flash, with its 10-m targeting extent. The remote cluster moves away at 10 m/s and after 50 s it is at its maximum range of 500 m. During this fifty seconds, the wizard is counting to himself, hoping let the spell off at the correct range. The ship is 32 m long. His to-hit roll is 1 + 50 (500-m range divided by 10-m extent) - 2 (fighter level) - 25 (32-m radius when counting the masts is 32 times the width of a sapien-sized target and we have +5 to hit per doubling in width) − 0 (spell accuracy) = 24. He cannot hit the ship, but he can get close enough to scare it. When the ship comes within 300 m, his to-hit roll is only 4, so he is likely to score a good hit. At 200 m, he can put the Grand Flash right on the aft deck in 20 s.

Adventuring wizards often have some skill as archers and get by well enough with dead reckoning. Because there is no outward sign of the spell's location, targets get no warning of the approach of offensive spells, and this is to the wizard's advantage. Town wizards, meanwhile, are not in the habit of hitting moving objects with targeting solenoids, and are unlikely to be able to make effective use of spells like Enveloping Sponge, which might otherwise give them a feeling of security when walking around the streets at night.

For those who want to be sure of hitting their target, a targeting solenoid can be equipped with a tracer. The tracer is a white sparkling light at the location of the remote cluster. The light is accompanied by a crackling noise. The light and sound are inseparable given the manner in which the light is generated. The remote cluster creates small quantities of spirit fluid, some of which is annihilated by the remote cluster bridge themselves. Any spell with a targeting solenoid can be given a tracer by adding one to its difficulty. The tracer will be visible up to the maximum range of the spell, and for that purpose it tends to grow larger as it moves away. The accuracy of a spell increases by 10 when it is equipped with a tracer. For example, A wizard on the shore casts a variant of Grand Flash with a tracer. This variant is difficulty three. He must have wizard level five to cast it. But now he can hit the ship with a roll of 14 at range 500 m.

One disadvantage of the tracer is that it gives the target warning of the approach of the spell, and the target can take evasive action. Erratic movement at 3 m/s increases the wizard's to-hit roll by 12, and the tracer is a motivating sight. For example, a town wizard casts Enveloping Sponge with a tracer upon a robber in his house. The spell has difficulty three, but that's no problem because he is wizard level ten. But he has never been in a fight before. The robber is 3 m away across the drawing room. The wizard has fighter level −5. The extent of the spell is 5 m. When the robber sees the spell coming, he tries to evade it. The wizard needs 1 + 0 (extents) − 0 (spell accuracy) + 8 (target moving erratically at 2 m/s) + 5 (fighter level −5) + 2 (dexterity) - 10 (tracer) = 6. Without the tracer, he would need an 8, assuming the robber did not try to evade him in any way.

Another way to increase the accuracy of a spell is to combine it with some of the functionality of the Scan spell. If the attack spell allows the remote cluster to pause during its outward journey, and when paused to convey information about the material in its vicinity, the spell's accuracy increases by 5 and its difficulty by 1. A variant of Choke equipped in this way would allow the caster to determine if the remote cluster were in the flesh of a target or in the lungs. If we allow the remote cluster to convey information as it is moving, and to slow down at times, and speed up again, the accuracy of the spell increases by 10 and its difficulty by 2. These spells will take slightly longer to cast because the remote cluster slows or pauses on the way, but on the other hand the wizard does not have to be so careful about when she initiates the spell, so she could initiate it sooner, perhaps even before her previous attack has completed. Thus we assume all these variants have the same casting time, which keeps things simple in combat.

Bridge Rings

A bridge ring is a ring of mithril-plated metal with a groove on the inside. In a 1-Y maeon wind, such as that of Clarus, the ring is 1 cm in diameter to accommodate a normal space bridge. In stronger maeon winds, a wizard's bridge rings would have to be proportionally bigger. The groove secures a bridge inside the ring. The body of the ring protects the sheath of the bridge and allows the wizard to handle the bridge easily. The surface of the ring, being mithril-plated, acts as a catalyst for the generation of magical materials. Bridge rings cost about one gold piece each. When placed upon the end of a one-meter rod, the bridge ring completes a device called a conjuring wand. A conjuring rod allows a wizard to create structures of conjured matter far more quickly than he would by waving a bridge around with his own hands.

When a spell uses a bridge ring, the casting spell bridge appears somewhere within arm's reach of the wizard's head, in a place well-known to the wizard through long hours of practice. Because the two faces of the bridge are pressed against one another, they are hard to see. But you can feel them with the tips of your fingers. The surface of the sheaths are slippery but firm, and the bridge is always oriented the same way. Some spells, like Poison Cloud, require that the wizard separate the two halves of the bridge with his fingers and place each half in its own bridge ring. If he puts his finger through either bridge during this procedure, the bridge will atomize his flesh into carbon powder. Even when the bridge is inside a ring, the wizard must still take care. Wizards tend not to wear rings at all, so as to avoid putting a live bridge ring on their finger by accident.

Some wizards grow long nails on one or both of their hands so as to allow them to hold naked space bridges at the risk only of their nails. Others wear gloves with extended fingertips. Most rely upon their bare fingers alone, for difficult though it may sound, the act of grasping a spell bridge and placing it in a bridge ring is one that becomes effortless and instinctive after enough practice. An experienced wizard can do it in a few seconds even while walking in the dark.

To hit a target with a spell based upon a bridge ring, the wizard can throw the bridge or propel it with a sling. We use the missile combat system to determine if the wizard hits the target. The bridge ring is like a stone in terms of its range and extent. Wizards have tried many devices to increase the range and accuracy of attacks with bridge rings. There are mithril-coated arrow heads, for example, but these tend to bury the spell bridge in the ground or in wood, smothering the spell. Many wizards learn to use a sling, so they can fire bridge rings over fifty meters. Here are four advantages to using a bridge ring.

1. The spell does not require a targeting solenoid, which makes the spell simpler. As we discuss in the Variants chapter, a targeting solenoid always adds one to a spell's level of difficulty.
2. The mithril coating of the bridge ring is an excellent catalyst for the generation of magical materials. To generate magical materials without a bridge ring adds one more level to the difficulty of a spell. The ring-free version of the second-level spell Surrounding Sponge is fourth level.
3. The bridge ring holds the spell bridge and preserves it, which allows the spell to have latency. The wizard can cast the spell, prepare the bridge ring, and trigger the spell's effects some time later. All spells that use bridge rings have a latency of at least four hours. By increasing the difficulty of such spells, you can increase their latency, as you will see in our table of variants.
4. The wizard does not have to be the one who throws the bridge ring. A fighter can throw it for her, and fighters are usually far more accurate in throwing things or firing them from slings.

To get a spell with a bridge ring to act at a distance, the wizards, or anyone else for that matter, throws the bridge ring at the target. That's how Slice acts at a distance. It's a third-level spell that can be cast by a fifth-level wizard. The Targeted Slice spell is fifth level, and requires the wizard to be ninth level. There are three advantages to targeting solenoids.

1. Throwing a bridge ring limits the range of a spell to thirty or forty meters. If the spell has a large area of effect, like Grand Lightening, it is impractical to throw a bridge ring because you can't throw it far enough to stay out of the way of the spell's effect. A targeting solenoid grows less accurate with distance, but can act easily at hundreds of meters.
2. The act of generating the spell bridge and placing it in a bridge ring extends the casting time of the spell from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds, and makes the act of casting obvious to bystanders. The targeting version of a spell requires no action on the part of the wizard other than that he trigger the spell with some gesture, and then look in the direction of the target.
3. Some spells, like Slice, do better if oriented properly. The targeting solenoid gives the caster control over the spell's orientation. Otherwise, the caster must throw the bridge ring and somehow make sure that it is in the correct orientation when it arrives at its target.
4. A targeting solenoid's remote cluster will pass right through an atomic space bridge, such as a Invisibility or Vaporizing Barrier, which means such barriers serve a wizard by blocking arrows while allowing spells with targeting solenoids to come out.

Spell Slots

With long hours of hard work, wizards create new neural pathways leading deeper into their cantusarea, and so are able to create new spell slots. The newest spell slots are more difficult to use than the older ones. The newer slots can be used only for easy spells. For a table of spell slots available by wizard level, see here.

In the long term, spell-casting damages a spell slot. Conjured matter created slices through neurons each time the slot casts a spell. When a spell gets out of control, maeon loops multiply rapidly in the brain. With care, a wizard can hope to cast a thousand standard spells out of a spell slot before it becomes unusable, or scrambled.

Back in the early days of spell-casting, wizards were severely limited by the damage their spell slots suffered from spell-casting. Long before a wizard could get familiar enough with a spell slot to use it to cast a really difficult spell, he would find his familiarity outweighed by the poor state of the slot. Since then, wizards have developed ways to make spells less harmful. As we have said, you can cast a thousand standard spells out of a spell slot before it shows signs of damage. For the next one hundred standard spells, the damage caused to the slot effectively adds one to the level of any spell prepared in it. For the next one hundred spells, the damage adds two to the level, and so on.

For every standard spell, there is a one-hundred use variant that does the same thing, but is one level less difficult. There is a ten-use variant that is two levels less difficult, and a one-use variant that is three levels less difficult. It takes a seventeenth-level wizard to cast the standard, ninth-level Slay spell, but an eleventh-level wizard could sacrifice one of his two best spell slots to cast the one-use variant of Slay, and get the full effects. There are also spells that are less damaging than standard spells. A ten-thousand-use variant is two levels more difficult, and a one-hundred-thousand use variant is four levels more difficult.

Spell Preparation

A wizard prepares a spell in a spell slot through the same neural pathways that he uses to trigger and guide the spell. The process takes an hour, regardless of the spell's level, and begins with the wizard sending a strong neural signal to the spell slot that erases any previous preparation of the spell slot. Wizards prepare spells by speaking words called charges and looking at pictures called runes. Sometimes they make gestures, or think certain thoughts as well. All these actions are designed to make their brain send the correct signals to the spell slot so that its neurons will be prepared to cast a spell. Many wizards smoke tobacco while preparing spells. They find that it improves their concentration. Others burn incense.

It is possible to prepare a spell without the help of charges and runes, by direct preparation. The wizard closes his eyes and imagines hearing charges and runes. The spell must be designed for direct preparation, and this always raises the difficulty of the spell by two levels. Nevertheless, a fifth level wizard can prepare directly any spell that is normally first level.

Wizards need uninterrupted concentration while preparing a spell, because any distraction or sound can corrupt the signal they send to their spell slot, and so corrupt the preparation. The wizard is unlikely to know about any such corruption until the time of casting. A wizard can always cancel a spell by erasing its spell slot. The magical activity of the spell will stop immediately. Cancelling a spell does not cancel the effects it has already generated. Conjured matter created by a spell will not dissipate just because the spell that created it has been cancelled.

A wizard cannot prepare a new spell in a spell slot until all the conjured matter created by the previous spell has dissipated. He must wait until the spell slot is cleared. The clearing time of spell is the time it takes a spell slot to clear after all magical activity has stopped. A spell that creates conjured matter, for example, might stop creating conjured matter after ten minutes, and take four hours to clear after that. The fact that the conjured matter created by the spell persists for ten days is irrelevant to the clearing of the spell. The wizard can cancel an active spell at any time, but the spell slot still won't be ready for another preparation until the clearing time has transpired. Almost all practical spells have a clearing time of four hours, but spells used during practice tend to have short clearing time, as well as being gentle on the spell slot and easy to prepare.

When a spell slot casts a spell, the synaptic connections between its neurons change as a result of the electrical activity of the spell. The slot cannot cast the same spell again, nor any other spell, until it has been prepared anew. If a wizard has one spell prepared in a spell slot, but would like to change the spell, she can do so by erasing the old spell and then preparing the new one in its place. Even if she is satisfied with the spell in one of her spell slots, she may decide to prepare it anew after several months or a year have gone by, because the neurons of a spell slot do not retain the spell indefinitely.

While the number of spells a wizard can have prepared at one time is equal to her number of spell slots, the number of spells she knows how to prepare is limited only by the capacity of her memory. Once a wizard learns how to prepare a spell, we assume she never forgets. Many steps in the preparation are shared by other spells, and there are many ways to prepare the same spell. As we said in our Introduction, a contender wizard can prepare a spell only after answering some questions put to the contender by the dramaturgist.

Spell Controls

To cast a spell, a wizard sends a trigger signal to its spell slot along the same neural pathway she used to prepare the spell. The trigger sets off a sequence of electrical activities within the slot. These activities are for the most part autonomous, but are sometimes punctuated by guide signals delivered along the same neural pathways. Just as a wizard uses sounds, images, and gestures to prepare a spell, he uses the same devices to trigger and guide the spell. The triggers and guides together are called the spell's controls. A somatic control is a gesture that the wizard experiences with his own nerves, and the spinal cortex sends the required signal to the spell slot. A visual control is something he sees, which could also be a gesture of his own body, so that the required signal is delivered by his eyes. In verbal control, he speaks a word, and his ear sends the signal. In direct control, which is the most difficult, he recalls a particular memory, or speaks a word in his mind, and his conscious mind sends the signal to the spell. Take any spell with verbal, somatic, or visual controls, and replace them with direct controls, and you and you add one to the level of the spell.

Spells Practice

A spell-caster must practice with each spell before he can use it effectively. Many spells are difficult to use. They require the spell-caster to learn new coordination of mind and body. A spell that is difficult to use may be easy to prepare, or hard to prepare. The level, of a spell is a measure of how difficult it is to prepare, not how difficult it is to use.

For each spell that is difficult to use, there is a related practice spell that wizards can cast to teach themselves how to use the spell. These practice spells tend to lack the potency of the original spell, but have the benefit of being far less damaging to spell slots. Practice spells like Calibrate are so important that whole classes of spells require their use. All spells that use targeting solenoids require a wizard to cast Calibrate, so a wizard must be able to use Calibrate before she can use any targeting solenoid spell properly. A contender must be able to answer all of Calibrate's questions before her wizard can use any targeting solenoid spell.

Spell Difficulty

Each spell has a level of difficulty, which we usually shorten to level, but sometimes we say difficulty in order to avoid ambiguity. A spell's level is an indication of how difficult it is to prepare so that is can be cast, not how difficult the spell is to manage once it is cast. On Clarus, with its maeon wind of one Yardley, the level of each spell is as we give it in the lists that follow. In stronger maeon winds, spells are easier to prepare, because the preparation can be adapted to make use of the stronger wind. In weaker winds, spells are more difficult to prepare, because they must generate the same effect with fewer maeons.

The effects of many spells are increased in proportion to the strength of the wind. Furthermore, a spell-caster usually becomes accustomed to working in the wind of his own world, so that when he travels to another world in which the wind is stronger or weaker, he must learn to work in the new wind. In a particularly weak maeon wind, all spells will be more difficult to use, irrespective of experience.

The Maeon Wind Strength and Spells table gives the number of Claran days for someone who has worked magic in a wind of 1 Yardley only to learn how to work magic in a different maeon wind, assuming five hours a day of practice. The table gives the increase in spell difficulty over the difficulty observed in a 1 Yardley wind. This increase applies after the time to adapt. The time to adapt is only one day for subsequent journeys to the same maeon wind. The forth column gives the deepest bridge that spirits are able to generate in the given maeon wind. If the bridge is between two worlds, use the average of the maeon wind strengths of the two worlds to determine the deepest bridge possible. Between Olympia, maeon wind 2.0 Y, and Terra, maeon wind 0.0 Y, the average is 1 Y, so the agents of the Gods can make spirit bridges between the two.

Sale of Spells

The cost to a wizard of casting a spell is not only the price of materials, research, and assistance, but also the damage the spell causes to the spell slot she uses. As mentioned above, conjured matter created by spells cuts through the neurons of a spell slot. Despite the utmost care and the use of low-damage spells, damage slowly accumulates until the slot is scrambled. A wizard can open up new spell slots in his spell-area, but the slots in which he has best ability to prepare spells are the first ones he made. As he becomes more skilled, he is able to prepare higher level spells in his existing slots, and additional lower level spells in his new slots.

Clearly it behooves a wizard to keep his oldest slots in good condition, or else he will be unable to prepare higher level spells. Thus a first level wizard will be reluctant to cast a thousand spells each out of his two original spell slots, even if he earns twenty thousand gold pieces doing so. If he sacrifice his original spell slots, he would still be able to cast only first level spells when he attained third level. Most wizards make their living casting spells and manufacturing magical mechanisms for other people. The standard rate for casting a spell depends upon the level of the spell, as shown in Price of Wizard Spells.

To raise their wizard level, most wizards practice with a wide range of spells, casting each many times. Adventuring wizards get away with a fraction of the practice that peaceable wizards must put in to increase their skill. A peaceable, or town, wizard can hope to raise her skill every three years after casting several hundred spells as part of her practice. To earn money, the same town wizard can cast in the same period several hundred spells for pay without unduly scrambling her spell slots. Successful town wizards earn something like 1 kgp per level per year. Of this sum, 50% is spent upon equipment, materials, research, and assistance, leaving them with 500 gp per level per year in profit (before taxes).

Most wizards hire assistants, or adjutants, to help with their business. Adjutants are to wizards what nurses are to doctors. They are trained in colleges associated with those that train wizards. It takes three years to train an adjutant. Freshly graduated adjutants earn something like 300 gp a year. The main difference between an adjutant and a wizard is that a wizard can cast spells and an adjutant cannot. Would-be wizards who fail to make spell slots, and so must abandon their ambition, can get jobs as adjutants.

Sorcery Spells

Unlike wizards, each sorcerer has his own particular abilities. One sorcerer might specialize in the creation of large and long-lived space bridges. Another might be an expert at creating balls of conjured sponge and annihilating them. Another might be able to make long-lived spirit matter quickly, so as to erect forts and castles in a few days, such labor as might be done by a hundred men in six months. We can't enjoy sorcerers in our silly adventure game unless we have rules to govern their powers. It would be impossible to allow a contender character to be a sorcerer unless we had rules to limit their powers and permit the contender to consider how best to use his ability.

Our rules for sorcerers are based upon our rules for wizards. First, we say that no sorcerer can do anything that would be impossible for a wizard to do, even if the wizard had greater ability or knowledge. That is to say, sorcerers are bound by the rules of magic just as wizards are. A sorcerer might be able to make a molecular bridge, but so will wizards, some day in the future, when they figure out how to do it, and at that point the molecular bridge will be something you can make with a ninth level spell, and maybe after another few decades of work, a fifth level spell.

Sorcerers have sorcerer level in the same way that wizards have wizard level, as we state in the rules. An n'th level sorcerer can cast n spells in a row, without any rest. We can think of a sorcerer as a wizard with only one spell slot, who can can cast spells without preparation and with no clearing time afterwards. Instead of clearing time, the sorcerer's spell slot gets fatigued. The sorcerer's effective level is equal to his sorcerer level when he is not fatigued. With each spell he casts, regardless of how humble or mighty that spell may be, his effective level drops by one. When his effective level drops to zero, he can cast no more spells. Each hour of respite from spell-casting raises his effective level by one. Just as a wizard of level n can cast spells up to a certain difficulty, as given by the table here, so a sorcerer with effective level n can generate magical effects equivalent to a wizard spell of difficulty the same difficulty.

Each sorcerer must perform certain actions to exercise his full power. Some sorcerers sing. Some chant. Some rely upon precise gestures. Some execute elaborate, whole-body movements like short, choreographed dances. Some imagine certain colors and sounds, and this imagining is sufficient. Sorcerers are most likely to use mimic the actions of their teachers, but in theory each sorcerer can develop their own spell-generating actions.

Fighting while casting reduces his effective sorcerer level by five. Running might reduce it by three. If a sorcerer can stop fighting for five seconds, and has the ability to cast spells in such a short time, he can cast at full strength and then go back to the fight. Thus we see that sorcerers can indeed fight and cast spells, but they have to design their fighting style around their sorcery to make it work.

To illustrate how we handle sorcery in a player character, here are dramaturgists's note on the advance of one such character. "Sorcery works as follows. He can cast any conjured or spirit matter wizard-like spell, one spell at a time, no preparation, casting time as wizard spell, singing and movement required to act at full potential, difficulty as if his sorcery level were his wizard level. No clearing time, with each spell he casts, his effective sorcerer level drops by one. An hour's rest restores it by one. Just recently, he has learned how to make a targeting solenoid. Cannot cast spells like Annihilation or Flash. But he can do Choke. Fighting while casting adjusts his effective sorcerer level by −5 so long as he continues to fight, running is a penalty of −3, riding −2, walking −1. Thus he can cast consecutively, with no rest between, 2 fifth-level spell, 2 fourth-level, 2 third-level, 2 second-level, 2 first-level spells. After that he needs nine hours rest."

No sorcerer can cast all spells available to wizards. Instead, the many spell functions available to a wizard are divided into abilities. The Example Sorcerer Abilities table lists examples of sorcerer abilities. A sorcerer of level −3 is one who has just acquired the spell bridge ability. He can cast the Space Bridge Zero spell. At first level, the sorcerer acquires another ability. That is the beginning of all known forms of sorcery. At fifth level, they choose another, and at tenth, and every five levels thereafter, so that a twentieth level sorcerer has five abilities in addition to the spell bridge ability. For example, a third-level sorcerer used his spell bridge and conjured matter to make spying eyes in Bandit Hunting. At fifth level, this same sorcerer added the creation of spirit matter. At tenth level he added the targeting solenoid. In another five levels, he might choose to add the annihilation of conjured matter, so he can cast Targeted Lightening. Or he might choose the sparking annihilation so he can cast Flash.

Ambitious black-orc sorcerers are known for choosing bridge tuning early on, and concentrating upon this for their entire lives, hoping to make a molecular bridge. We invite the dramaturgist to devise rules that give such specialists a chance of learning to generate a magical effect that is beyond the ability of wizards in Clarus. The Advanced Conjured Matter ability includes: making conjured matter that is slow to annihilate, making conjured matter that is immune to annihilation, making conjured matter that is more dense, and making conjured stone. All these are forms of conjured matter available to Ursian wizards no earlier than the year 2460 AE.

Psionic Spells

In a psionic creature, a genetically-engineered neural network within the mind generates a spell effect automatically. The neural network will tire afterwards, requiring some time to recover before it can cast again. Each effect is similar or identical to a possible wizard spell, or variant of a wizard spell. The network generates only one effect, but with practice, an intelligent psionic can make slight alterations to the effect. If a psionic can generate two effects, that is because it has two psionic neural networks, not because it has a dual-use network. Psionic networks are never dual-use.

Many creatures in the Creature Guide have psionic powers. The aquavir casts Beguile. There are psionic sapiens also. They were created by genetic engineers in the Dark Ages on Clarus. A dangerous psionic sapien might be someone with Slay as their psionic ability. This person might not know about their ability at all. Instead, they kill people, or nearly kill people, by accident, when they are angry. As time goes by, they might discovere that they have such an ability, and learn to control it in the same way that we control our urge to hit people when we are angry.

Another psionic might be able to create a ball of lightening. At first, the ball might be small or often fail to ignite. But after practice, the psionic is able to generate a large ball at long range. It is conceivable that she could create a ball of conjured sponge and refrain from annihilating it, and so learn to cast Surrounding Sponge, when her ability is Lightening Ball.

We offer no further rules to accommodate psionic contender characters. We suspect that psionics will be more interesting as non-player characters. Indeed, there is some scope in psionic powers to include effects that might be inexplicable or even unbelievable, so long as the details of the effects remain vague. A psionic might, for example, have the reputation for being able to infect people nearby with her emotions. How she does this could remain a mystery. It could be that she disturbs the emotional parts of the mind, making them more likely to accept a new emotion based upon the smile on the psionic's face. Or it could be that the psionic is simply charming and has no power at all. We already have spells like Fear, which invoke a strong emotion in the recipient.

Magical Materials

Almost all magical materials created by wizards have a longevity that is constant to within 10% for the matter produced by a single spell. Uniformity of longevity is essential to the integrity of magical structures. When 1% of the material within a structure has dissipated, the structure is likely to be weakened beyond utility. Such dissipation will occur along lines that match the manner in which the material was laid down. An entire layer in a conjured wall may decay hours before the rest of the wall, leading to the top portion detaching itself and floating away. To the first approximation, therefore, the longevity of materials created by wizards is the time before which 1% of the material has dissipated. Some of the material may remain intact for up to twice that length of time.

Wizards create substantial volumes of conjured and spirit matter by starting with a tiny piece called a magical seed, and growing the seed by maeon combination in a bath of cold maeons. Cold maeons combine at the surface of a growing magical seed in the same way that ions combine at the surface of a growing chemical crystal. There are two stages to the creation of conjured matter: seeding and growth. A wizard can make the seed with a magical catalyst, or out in thin air. A wizard can produce cold maeons with a magical catalyst, or using the surface of the expanding matter. Both seeding and growth are easier with a magical catalyst.

When a wizard produces the cold maeons with a magical catalyst, such as a bridge ring, the maeons drift over to the surface of the growing material and combine. Growth like this is called cold growth. It is the easiest type of growth to bring about, and the easiest to control. A conjuring wand is a metal or wooden rod with a bridge ring on the end. The rod allows the wizard to move the bridge around quickly so as to build up conjured structures more accurately and quickly than would be possible with a hand-held bridge.

When a wizard produces the cold maeons using the surface of the expanding magical matter, circulating maeons at the surface create a dweomer that catalyzes maeon arrest, and thus produces the cold maeons. These cold maeons appear at the surface of the matter, and combine immediately. Growth like this is called avalanche growth. Avalanche growth is the fastest way to make magical matter, but the most difficult.

Conjured matter is easier to make than spirit matter. Not only does it contain a thousand times fewer maeons per cubic meter, but the arrest of negative maeons is much easier to bring about than that of positive maeons. Conjured matter, however, has longevity measured in hours, while spirit matter has longevity measured in years. The conjured matter that wizards make is by default completely transparent, but with a little extra effort it can be given a variety of colors. The spirit matter that wizards make is always sparkling gray. The refractive index of pure spirit or conjured matter is within a few parts per million of that of free space (compare to three hundred parts per million for air). When created on the surface of a planet, both spirit and conjured matter are permeated by the local atmosphere, and therefore take on its refractive index.

Both conjured and spirit matter, as created by wizard spells, are chemically inert. They are resistant to heat and cold. Conjured wood makes a good hearth in a campsite, but after a few days, the conjured material beneath the coals will start to crack. Conjured wood used as a road surface will wear beneath cart wheels and show grooves and pits within a few months. When water enters holes in spirit stone and freezes, the cracks in the stone will open. Both conjured and spirit matter are electrically and thermally insulating, but when created by wizards, they are invariably mixed with air, so that their insulating properties are similar to those of immobile air.

For each type of conjured or spirit matter, there exists a reference spell. This spell is not one that any wizard is likely to cast, but it serves as a baseline from which we can develop more practical variants. The reference spell for each type of matter produces its matter at the rate that is least difficult for a wizard to achieve and with the longevity that is least difficult to achieve.

We summarize the reference spells in the Reference Spell Characteristics table. It takes the wizard twenty seconds to cast these spells: two seconds to activate the solenoid, and eighteen to grab the spell bridge and slide it into the bridge ring. In the paragraphs below, we define exactly what we mean by density, longevity, rate, and quantity.

Density: The conjured and spirit matter produced by the reference spells has density 1 μg/m³, with the exception of the sponge, which is one tenth as dense because it is mostly air. Because the positive maeon of spirit matter is one thousand times lighter than the negative maeon of conjured matter, the force exerted by the planet upon spirit matter is one thousand times greater per microgram. Wizards can increase the density of conjured and spirit matter also, but this is much harder to do than increasing the quantity, longevity, or rate of production. The first spells increasing the density of conjured matter are developed in Ursia in 2480 AE, and those increasing spirit matter density are developed in 2490 AE. Each factor of three increase in density increases the difficulty of the spell by one.

Longevity: The longevity of magical matter depends upon the coherence of its maeon resonance. Increasing the longevity by a factor of ten increases the level of the spell by one. We can continue this process until we reach the maximum longevity provided by contemporary spells. This maximum is ten thousand hours for conjured matter and ten million hours for spirit matter. Decreasing the longevity below that of the reference spell is possible, but does not reduce the difficulty of the spell.

Rate: The maximum rate at which matter is produced is limited by the maeon wind strength and by the efficiency with which these maeons can be used. Increasing the rate of production by a factor of ten increases the difficulty by one. Spells attain the highest rates of production by avalanche combination along a surface perpendicular to the maeon wind. No spell can produce magical matter faster than maeons can be delivered by the maeon wind. Decreasing the rate of production below that of the reference spell is possible, but does not decrease the spell difficulty.

Quantity: The amount of matter produced by a spell is limited by the endurance of the mechanism that produces cold maeons. The mechanism degrades as it operates. The surface of a magical catalyst gets contaminated by unwanted magical matter. The expanding surface of material growing by avalanche gets less perfect as it grows. Increasing amount produced by a factor of ten increases the spell difficulty by one. Decreasing the quantity below that of the reference spell is possible, but does not reduce the spell difficulty.

By modifying the reference spells, you can create variants that are more practical. A variant that allows the caster to stop-and-start the production of magical matter has level one greater than the original, as does a variant that does not require a bridge ring catalyst. A variant that allows the spell-caster to alternate between one type of matter and an easier type has level one greater, provided both types use the same polarity of maeon. A variant of a conjured matter spell that allows the spell-caster to vary the color of the material from transparent through a range of solid colors has level one greater than the original.

It is possible to add to existing conjured and spirit matter by bringing cold maeons into contact with them. To add to a conjured wood structure, just cast a conjured wood spell that uses a bridge ring as a catalyst for growth. The bridge ring is surrounded by cold maeons appropriate for making conjured wood. Place the bridge ring near the conjured wood, and the wood will start to grow. In this way, conjured and spirit materials can be joined, expanded, and repaired seamlessly.

Here we present the reference spells for the conjured and spirit materials freely available to Ursian wizards before the year 2450 AE. We name each reference spell after the material it creates. Other materials are possible, such as spirit metal and conjured stone, but these are freely available only after 2450 AE. In our descriptions, we assume a planet like Clarus, where maeon repulsion is 10 N/μg (conjured matter), maeon attraction is 10 kN/μg (for spirit matter), gravity is 10 m/s/s, and maeon wind is 10 Y. The physical properties of each material are implied by its name. Thus conjured wood is hard, tough, and rigid like wood, but you can bang a nail into it.

Conjured Fluid

Conjured Fluid: 1 μg/m³, level −6, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured fluid can have momentum of several hundred kg m/s per square meter of generating area. It is possible to fill a sail with such fluid.

Conjured Sponge

Conjured Sponge: 0.1 μg/m³, level −5, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured sponge is conjured wood with nine tenths of its volume taken up with cavities. Typical spong has cavities one or two millimeters across. It has the resilience and porosity of a well-dried marine sponge, meaning that the cavities are connected to one another by channels, and it is possible to suck air through the sponge. Thus a creature surrounded by sponge can breath through the sponge, although effort is required to do so. Conjured wood with such cavities is easier to make than conjured wood with no cavities. Indeed, it is possible to expand the remote cluster of a space bridge and create conjured sponge in all places at once and independently within the volume of the remote cluster, as in Deafen.

Conjured Rubber

Conjured Rubber: 1 μg/m³, level −4, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured rubber is sticky when fresh, adheres to chemical and conjured matter, but does not adhere to spirit matter. It flexes by up to 100% without tearing. Conjured rubber is penetrating and patient in its growth. Its penetration is limited only by how far it has to travel from its point of origin. Its patience is limited only by its longevity. Rubber stops growing when its surface has advanced away from its point of origin by a distance equal to the radius of the sphere of rubber that the spell would generate without obstructions. This radius is called the penetrating range. Spells like Choke make use of the penetrating power of conjured rubber.

Conjured Wood

Conjured Wood: 1 μg/m³, level −3, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured wood is like pine wood, including non-homogeneous stiffness. But it does not expand with heat or moisture, nor does it burn.

Conjured Cloth

Conjured Cloth: 1 μg/m³, level −1, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured cloth is like a wool blanket in its flexibility, strength, and thickness, but it is a slightly better insulator than wool, and it is fire-proof. It is half a centimeter thick.

Conjured Rope

Conjured Rope: 1 μg/m³, level 1, 1 μg total, 1 ng/s, 6 min. Conjured rope has the stiffness, strength, and thickness of hemp rope. It has tensile strength 1 kN/cm² cross section, and it extends by 1% of its original length per 10 N/cm² tension. It is so springy, therefore, that it does not make very good climbing rope. When a conjured rope is stimulated at the ends by the correct dweomer, it generates a tension of up to 10 N/cm², and will contract to as little as half its normal length. It has the capacity to do one Joule of work per cm³ before it is exhausted (1 J is the amount of work done by a 1 N force exerted over a distance of 1 m).

A curious thing about conjured rope is that it does not get thinner when it stretches, nor does it get thicker when it contracts. Conjured rope recovers from exhaustion by substituting fresh cold maeons into its atoms. Restoration takes 10/M hours in a maeon wind of strength M, or as little as an hour in an ample supply of cold maeons. An ample supply of cold maeons can come from a spell or from a large body of gold. Wizards use conjured rope to make magical machines (see Trap). Demons, daemons, and most dragons use materials similar to conjured rope for their muscles. These materials can be much stronger than conjured rope, and they can store far more energy. Nevertheless, they can take a long time to recover from their exertions. Most divine dragons must rest for one hundred hours for every hour they fly, unless they have a pile of gold to provide them with cold maeons, in which case they can recover in only ten hours per hour of flying.

Wizards can make superior forms of conjured rope to act as muscles for animations. These forms are called conjured muscles. For each factor of three increase in tensile force, the level of the spell required to make the muscle increases by one. For each factor of three increase in work capacity, the level increases by one. But an increase in work capacity is always accompanied by a proportional increase in the time taken to recover from exhaustion. The rate at which all forms can recover energy from fast or slow maeons is the same.

Spirit Fluid

Spirit Fluid: 1 μg/m³, level −7, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit fluid is a sparkling gray fluid. When spirit fluid is brought into contact with conjured matter, the atoms of the two substances dissipate. The cold maeons thus released have a tendency to combine and annihilate one another, releasing heat, light, searing ultra-violet rays, and penetrating x-rays. Some of the cold maeons might re-combine to form spirit and conjured matter. If the cold positive maeons form spirit fluid, they will initiate the annihilation of more conjured matter. If the contact is initiated in precisely the right way, the process of annihilation generates more spirit fluid, and the annihilation proceeds through the entire body of conjured matter at 10 m/s. This process, called avalanche annihilation, turns the conjured matter into a white-hot bolt of lightening. Air within the conjured matter gets super-heated and bursts outward. A moment later, when the lightening vanishes, air rushes back into the heated space with a clap of thunder. The spells Lightening Ball and Annihilate use avalanche annihilation with devastating effect.

Spirit Sponge

Spirit Sponge: 0.1 μg/m³, level −5, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit sponge is sparkling gray spirit stone with cavities in the same way that pumice-stone has cavities. The cavities are microscopic, and make up nine tenths of the volume of the material. Unlike conjures sponge, the cavities in spirit sponge are isolated from one another, so that air does not pass through the material. When immerses in water, the cavities fill by gradual seeping of water through the thin cavity walls. A raft of spirit sponge will float many hours before it starts to absorb any significant quantity of water. With maeon attraction 10 kN/μg and gravity 10 m/s/s, a cubic meter of spirit sponge has weight 1 kN and a cubic meter of water weighs 10 kN. So a 3 m×3 m slab of spirit sponge, 10 cm thick, can act as a sturdy raft for three people, as in Canoe.

Spirit Rubber

Spirit Rubber: 1 μg/m³, level −4, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit rubber sticks to spirit matter only, but is most effective at bonding spirit matter together and patching holes in spirit matter. It is useful for making gloves to climb up and down spirit matter ropes, which are otherwise so slippery that it is impossible to use them. Even a pair of tacky leather gloves can obtain hardly any grip on spirit rope. Also, walls of spirit stone are difficult to climb because the material is slippery to the hands, but with a thin pair of spirit rubber gloves, which might be made to last for a year, a thief can scale a spirit stone wall more easily than a normal wall.

Spirit Wood

Spirit Wood: 1 μg/m³, level −3, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit wood is like conjured wood except it is sparkling gray and has weight. It is great for boats because it does not rot, does not expand in moisture, and can be made in a seamless hull that lasts for many years. It is not, however, in wide use as a boat material, because you need some magical means on hand to patch it if it breaks. Spirit wood may be chemically inert, but it is no stronger than ordinary wood. It can crack and be punctured. Nothing sticks to it except spirit matter: nails go in but slip right out, rivets make holes that leak. The only way to repair spirit wood is by patching it with new spirit matter.

Spirit Stone

Spirit Stone: 1 μg/m³, level −2, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit stone is as hard as glass. It is the compound that coats the surfaces of mithril. It is as strong as limestone, but is one third as heavy on a planet with magical attraction 10 kN/μg. Like stone, it is strong in compression but tends to break by fast fracture when in tension. Spirit stone is widely used by wizards and sorcerers to make houses, fortresses, and furniture. Because a wall of spirit stone can be made in stages, with each stage building upon and melding with the last, the resulting wall can be smooth and seemless, and therefore almost impossible to climb. Spirit stone does suffer from erosion and wear, to the same extent as limestone. So after a hundred years, a spirit matter wall will provide cracks and finger-holds for the expert climber, but still be superior to the average block-made limestone wall.

Spirit Cloth

Spirit Cloth: 1 μg/m³, level −1, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit cloth is like conjured cloth in its thickness, flexibility and strength. It is rain-proof and never gets water-logged. It gives protection from the Slice spell. It is slippery to the touch. As a material for use by non-wizards, spirit cloth is hard to repair. It does not hold a thread at all well, so a wizard must patch it with more spirit cloth. Although it is rugged and water-proof, it is heavy, and so is rarely used for tents that must be carried. Spirit cloth robes are, however, popular among wizards, and are distinctive because of the way the weighty fabric hangs upon the body. Although spirit cloth is heavy, it has hardly any mass, so it does not restrict movement as would a wool cloak of similar warmth.

Spirit Rope

Spirit Rope: 1 μg/m³, level 1, 1 ng total, 1 pg/s, 100 hr. Spirit rope can hold 2 kN per cm² cross section, making it twice as strong as conjured rope. It extends by 1% of its original length per 100 N/cm². It is more springy than hemp rope, but not too springy. Its elasticity makes it less likely to snap, so it is good for climbing. It has the further advantage of being weather-proof and chemically inert. Its drawbacks are that it is slippery and heavy. It ties good knots with itself, but you must wear gloves made of spirit matter to grip it properly. A 10-m length of 2-kN test spirit rope weighs 10 N on a planet with magical attraction 10 kN/μg. Unlike conjured rope, spirit rope gets thinner when it stretches.

Magical Devices

A magical device is something that generates a temporary magical effect. A luminous stone is a magical device. The light it produces grows dimmer with time. A diamond sparkling in the maeon wind is not a magical device. It will always sparkle in the maeon wind. An adamantine sword with a coating of spirit stone to protect its edges is not a magical device.

Many of the spells we list below create magical devices. Luminous Stones creates a shining stone. Hot Stones creates a heat-producing stone. The Thaumaturgical Forge allows a wizard to make magical capsules. At the heart of a capsule is a network of gold threads. A well-known capsule is the thunder-egg, which generates a Lightening Ball. A capsule produces its magical effect only once. Its activity is fueled by the spells cast upon its mechanism at the time of its creation. Their mechanisms can be re-cycled if they survive their single use, which is unlikely for a Thunder Egg, but likely for a Surrounding Sponge Egg. A magical devices can contain multiple capsules that are used one after the other until all are exhausted. A Wand of Lightening is such a device, with ten Targeted Lightening charges. A capsule that generates a spell of level M costs what a wizard would charge to cast the same spell twice in person, plus the cost a Thaumaturgical Forge spell, which is difficulty three. A thunder-egg is around 150 gp (double the 63 gp for a Lightening Ball spell, plus 25 gp for Thaumaturgical Forge). A Wand of Lightening is around 3000 gp.

The Animation I to V spells create animated machines all the way up to intelligent creatures. The use of these spells requires a laboratory and an weeks or months of work by the wizard or his adjutants. But the homunculi wizards make and train as their companions have the potential to last for hundreds of years.

Another class of magical device is the magical amplifier. A magical amplifier is a device that is activated by the casting of a particular spell upon its mechanism. When this activating spell is cast, the amplifier creates a magical effect that would be more difficult to produce directly with a spell. For example, a 1-5 Vacuum Thruster Amplifier receives a first-level version of the Vacuum Thruster spell and creates the effect of the fifth-level Vacuum Thruster II spell. Magical amplifiers tend to use plenty of mithril, at a cost of $1k/g, long-life conjured matter, spirit matter, and gold thread. Some stop working after a year, others might work for a thousand years, although wizards have not been around that long. They are time-consuming to make, and require many spells to be cast in their construction. A ten-year M-N amplifier costs 10 × (M − N)² × P_M, where P_M is the cost of an M-level effect and N is the level of the spell that must be cast. The 1-5 Vacuum Thruster Amplifier costs 10 × 4² × $6.3k = $1M. A magical amplifier with a hundred-year working life cost three times as much.

Magical amplifiers are worth purchasing if an organization wants to do the same job over and over again for years. A 1-5 amplifier that generates a fifth-level luminous stone effect with a first-level activation spell. The amplifier costs the same as 160 fifth-level spells, but it lasts for 10 years and can be used roughly ten thousand times. With care, the organization can get ten thousand fifth-level spell effects for the price of ten thousand first-level spells cast by wizards, which comes to $11M ($10M for the spells and $1M for the amplifier), or $1.1k per spell. This compares well to the $6.3k it would cost to pay for one fifth-level spells cast by a wizard. Magical amplifiers are popular among novice wizards because they allow second-level spells, such as Surrounding Sponge, to be cast be the novice wizard. A Wand of Surrounding Sponge is a 1-2 amplifier that costs only $16k, and allows a first-level wizard to generate a useful spell that she would otherwise have to wait until third level to cast.

Another type of magical device is the magical generator. A magical generator is a device upon which a spell has been cast, and within which it continues to act, for weeks, years, or decades, depending upon the generator. Magical amplifiers accept a low-level spell and generate a higher-level effect. Magical generators accept one or more high-level spell and generate a low-level effect a many times. In twenty-fifth century Clarus, the cost of creating luminous stones with a magical generator is roughly double the cost of doing the same with a magical amplifier and a wizard to cast the spells.

Spell Variants

When you start with one spell and obtain another spell from it in simple steps, the new spell is a variant of the original. We do not attempt, in the following pages, to present anything like the full range of spells available wizards. We merely present a small selection from which variants can be obtained. The spells we present may be attractive to adventurers, but there are many variants that wizards will find immensely more practical than the spells we provide. The Spell Variants and Difficulty table presents the most important ways we can vary a spell and shows how these variations affect spell difficulty.

The mass, production rate, and longevity of magical matter all interact with one another when producing variants of such spells as Surrounding Sponge, Grand Surrounding Sponge, Conjured Wood, and so on. If we want twice the diameter, we need eight times the volume. If we want eight times the material to appear in the same amount of time, we need eight times the production rate. So if we want twice the radius of effect for Surrounding Sponge, and the same time taken to appear, we have both 10 &time; rate and 10 × mass, so the difficulty of this larger variant is 2 greater: +1 for 10 × mass and another +1 for 10 × rate. Because Surrounding Sponge is difficulty 2, this variant will be difficulty 4. Grand Surrounding sponge is radius 20. It is difficulty 5.

When combining two effects, the minimum difficulty of the combination is one greater than the higher difficulty of the two spells. When we combine a spell of difficulty 9 with one of difficulty 1, the result is difficulty 10, not 9.05. Better than this combination is to choose a spell of difficulty 4 to combine with the spell of difficulty 9, for the result will still be difficulty 10. If one spell has difficulty zero or lower, increase its effects until it reaches difficulty one, or just treat it as difficulty one for the purpose of the combination. In all cases, you can substitute for the formula some estimation of the final spell level that seems reasonable to all players.

To illustrate variation, we will show how to arrive at the Circle spell from Space Bridge and Conjured Wood. The Circle spell produces a space bridge 32 cm in diameter that lasts for four minutes and provides a sheath of conjured wood to protect the space bridge. We begin our journey of variations with Space Bridge, a first-level spell that produces a bridge of diameter 1 cm and longevity 10 days. It can also make a larger space bridge, with longevity smaller in proportion to the larger area. A 32-cm bridge has longevity 14 minutes. The Conjured Wood spell is level −1 and produces 1 m³ of conjured matter in 20 minutes. The circle spell needs only a hundredth as much conjured wood, but it needs to create the wood one hundred times as quickly. The wood does not need to last ten hours, either. It could last a hundred times less. So the conjured wood part of the spell looks to be around level -2. Let's remove the bridge ring from the spell, making it level -1. When we add its effects to that of the Space Bridge, we treat the Conjured Wood variant as level 1 and get level √(1²+1²) = 1.4. Let's cut down the longevity of the bridges by a factor of three, making them last 4 minutes, and say Circle is level 1.

When casting spells on other planets, where the maeon wind strength is greater or less than the 1-Y we assume in all our spell descriptions, a wizard will find it easier in stronger maeon winds and harder in weaker winds. But it will take him a week of practice to get used to the new wind strength. Suppose a third-level wizard goes to Olympia, where the maeon wind strength is 2 Y. On Clarus, he was unable to cast the difficulty-three spell Slice, but after a week of practice in this double-strength maeon wind, he finds he can cast a simpler version of the spell that takes advantage of the stronger maeon wind. Not that he still cannot cast the original Slice spell. He must both practice in the stronger maeon wind and develop a variant that takes advantage of the stronger wind. This variant will not work in a weaker maeon wind.

We encourage wizards to apply the existing spells in new ways. The names we have given to the spells often indicate the spell's most obvious adventurer-application, but a wizard can use a spell in any way he likes. For example, the Choke spell could be used to catch a rabbit. We encourage wizards to make liberal use of variants. If a contender has answered the questions for one of the standard spells given below, and composes her own variant of that spell using the simple variations given in the table above, her wizard can use the new spell after she answers only one question posed by the dramaturgist. The dramaturgist must, however, approve the variant. It may be that there exists a simple variant of the standard spells that is so formidable that it upsets the balance of power between fighters, thieves, and wizards. Clearly, we have tried to set the difficulties of spells to preserve that balance.

Spell Descriptions

We begin the description of each spell with a spell summary table, which lists the most essential The spell. These properties are the level of difficulty, the casting time, the area of effect, the range at which the area of effect can be placed, the duration of the effect once it has started, the components required to cast the spell, and the whatever movements, sounds or devices are needed to control the spell once it starts.

To represent forces in our spell descriptions, we use the Newton, where one Newton (1 N) is the weight of one hundred grams (100 g) grams of chemical matter on a world with gravity ten meters per second per second (10 m/s2). We assume the spell-caster is on a planet like Clarus, with maeon wind strength, M, of one Yardley (1 Y). We assume the planet has maeon repulsion, R, equal to ten Newton per microgram (10 N/μg) of conjured matter, which corresponds to a magical attraction of 10 kN/μg of spirit matter (positive maeons have one thousandth the effective mass of negative maeons, but the same magnitude of magical charge in each maeon). We begin the description of each spell with a spell summary table, an example of which we present below.

The controls of a spell are its triggers and guides. The components are any material accessories the spell requires. A common spell component is a bridge ring. A bridge monocle is a holder for a bridge that places the bridge in front of the eye. Some monocles have a lense that gives the wizard a fish-eye view through the other half of any bridge in the ring.

On worlds where M and R have other values, some spell effects will change in proportion. Magically generated heat and light powers, and magical material production rates, are proportional to M. The lift generated by conjured matter, and the weight of spirit matter, are proportional to R. The longevity of space bridges is independent of M and R, provided M is greater than 0.1 Y. We express time in seconds, hours, days, and years. A day is twenty-four hours, and a year is 400 days.

Spell Prototypes

We encourage wizards to invent new spells, by applying the Laws of Magic, writing a description of her new spell in the form we use here, and making the case to the other players in her group, and the dramaturgist, that the spell is consistent with the existing laws, does not add a new law, and does not upset the balance of power in the game by being assigned too low a level of difficulty. If all players and the dramaturgist agree to the new spell, it becomes a prototype spell. The wizard who invented the spell can cast it, but no other wizards. After some time, when impact of the spell is better understood by the players, the spell might be accepted as an established spell, and so be available to other wizards. The spell might be accepted as established with modifications, such as an increase in its level of difficulty. Until the spell is established, we treat it as one that our wizard has a special gift for casting. It may be that the prototype spell is level three, but after some time, we decide it is better as level six. The ability to prepare and cast this sixth level spell as if it were a third level spell becomes a special ability granted to the contender wizard.

We anticipate that new spells will occasionally provide contender wizards with special abilities, and we accept this as part of the game. To compensate non-contender characters for this advantage given to contender characters, the dramaturgist can give non-contender wizards special abilities also. A non-contender wizard might be able to cast Lightening Ball, a fifth level spell, even though she is only a fifth level wizard, and would normally be able to cast only up to third level spells.

Spell Series

The Space Bridge spells are a series Space Bridge I, Space Bridge II, Space Bridge III, and so on. The first produces a space bridge of longevity 10 days and is first level, the second produces a space bridge of longevity 30 days and is second level, and so on. Examples of other series of spells are Luminous Stones and Hot Stones. We describe a series of spells by describing the first in the series, and saying how subsequent spells in the series improve upon the first. We don't bother to have a separate entry for Luminous Stones II, which is one level higher than Luminous Stones I. We also have shorter series of spells, like Flash and Grand Flash, or Lightening Ball, Targeted Lightening, and Grand Lightening.

Evolution of Wizardry

Around Claran year 1800, in the depths of the Dark Ages, a group of sapiens, inspired and instructed by elf sorcerers, discovered how to make space bridges with their minds. They were the first wizards. Their method was unlike sorcery, in that others could learn to do the same thing in almost exactly the same way, so that the skill could be taught in a matter of years rather than decades.

For the first fifty years, wizards had only one ability, that of making atomic space bridges a few centimeters across that lasted for days or weeks. Their spells were the ancestor of Space Bridge. This single power they used to good effect. A space bridge provides a means to atomize pressurized water. With the help of dwarves, wizards constructed enormous flame throwers for use in battle against orcs. Smaller versions of these devices, similar to the modern Fire Lance, were already known black-orc and elf sorcerers. The flame throwers were terrifying and impressive, but sapien generals at the time valued the space bridge for communication and spying even more than for its flame throwers. From their earliest days, with the help of dwarves, wizards learned of and sought after way to make devices that would increase the power of their spells. In modern times, such devices are called magical amplifiers.

Around the year 1850, wizards learned to make conjured matter with the help of mithril-plated bridge rings. The result was Surrounding Sponge. Around 1900, wizards learned how to annihilate conjured sponge. The result was Lightening Ball. Both these spells were devastating in battle. But the twentieth-century version of Lightening Ball was a far more complex and difficult than its modern descendant. The modern version is difficulty five, while the version of five centuries before was difficulty nine. In modern Clarus, there are only two thousand wizards. Of these, perhaps two hundred can cast a ninth-level spell, and almost all of these are elderly. But in the twentieth century, wizards were in great demand. They were both respected and well-paid. For every young sapien who aspired to be a great warrior in the war against the orcs, there was another who aspired to be a great wizard. Elderly wizards taught these aspirants the art of spell-casting. A mere hundred years after the birth of wizardry, there were ten thousand wizards on Clarus. Most of them had proven themselves in battle, and there were a thousand in the prime of life who could cast the ninth-level Lightening Ball spell. Given that there were, at that time, in the middle of the Dark Ages, only ten million sapiens alive Clarus, we see that fully one in every thousand of them was a wizard, while now, in the twenty-fifth century, there are fifty million sapiens and only one in twenty-five thousand is a wizard, and of these, the majority are not soldiers.

Wizards made two other important advances in around 1900. They learned to make conjured wood and they developed the targeting solenoid. Within a few years, they were using targeting solenoids to create lightening balls at ranges of several hundred meters, as in the modern Targeted Lightening. The were using conjured wood to throw up palisades, lay down road surfaces, and erect shelters on the battle field.

In around 1925, wizards learned to make spirit fluid, the simplest form of spirit matter. The annihilation of spirit fluid by an atomic space bridge was put to use in the Flash spell. Spirit sponge followed soon after, as used in the Canoe spell. By the year 1950, wizards were using conjured wood to protect the edges of two enlarged space bridges to make the Circle spell. Armed with these atomizing bridges, wizards suddenly became deadly opponents in hand-to-hand combat. At the same time, the targeting solenoid gave rise to the Beguile spell, which allowed wizards to influence the minds of other sapiens without leaving any evidence of their doing so. A series of spells applying targeting solenoids to individual combat, such as Choke, further enhanced the reputation of wizards as dangerous and beyond the law.

By the year 1987, sapiens had won their war against the orcs. The Reconciliation Treaty was being drafted. Wizards were no longer needed for battle. Because of their growing power, they were feared and distrusted by their fellow sapiens. In many nations, casting spells or teaching wizardry required a license granted by the state, and such licenses were granted only in the service of the state. By the end of the twentieth century, no more than a thousand wizards existed on Clarus. Two hundred and fifty of these joined together to found a nation of their own in the desert south of Varay. They called their nation Ursia. They learned to make spirit stone and they used it to erect the first buildings of their city. They learned to make magical lights, and they used these to illuminate their new streets at night.

From the start, the Ursian wizards feared invasion. Their city was five days march into the desert, near a small oasis not large enough to sustain even a thousand people. But with the help of summoning from Olympia, an Endan army could cross this desert easily and take the city. Thus a group of wizards worked for a decade to figure out some means by which Ursia could be protected from armies supplied in this way. Their conclusion was that the best way to stop armies supported by summoning was to stop the summoning itself. They designed and build a network of machines that created pulses of magical energy, called bridge suppressors, that would prevent summoning within a hundred kilometers of their city. In the longer-term, Ursia went about making alliances with several gods friendly to their cause, such as Aries, and providing these gods with the money to buy the temple plots surrounding their city, so as to have them forbid summoning by any invading army. But the bridge suppressors remain the most trusted means for protecting the city from invasion.

Wood and water are scarce in the desert. To provide heat for cooking, they developed hot stones. By the end of the twentieth century, all kitchens in Ursia were equipped with hot stones. The wizards of twenty-first century Ursia were studious and hard-working. They spent their time in laboratories. They were not daring warriors like the wizards of the Dark Ages. But they simplified the existing spells, expanded the selection of variants available, and made steady progress in the development of new effects. Around 2100 they made the first machines with muscles, sensors, and neurons of conjured matter, as in Trap. Around 2150, they developed the Thaumaturgical Forge and within a few years had created the first thunder-egg. By the year 2200, the hot stones of the Ursian kitchens had been replaced by imported charcoal, as other nations paid higher and higher prices for all the luminous stones, thunder eggs, sponge eggs, and hot stones the Ursian wizards could make.

Around 2200, wizards learned to make spirit rope. This material was a popular export for a few decades, but was eventually replaced in sapien nations by superior versions of non-magical rope. In 2250 they started making spirit cloth, and this too was popular for several decades as an exotic material for the wealthy sapien to wear. It remains popular among wizards as a material for laboratory coats. It is water-proof and resistant to fire, acid, and the expanding edges of wayward space bridges. About the same time, wizards discovered how to cause a space bridge to expand rapidly by replacing its conjured sheath with spirit matter, creating the first Slice spell.

Around the year 2300, wizards were making the first calculating machines out of spirit matter neurons. With knowledge obtained from the dragons, they learned how the minds of gods and demons were fashioned by the Illuminati, and they created intelligent homunculi with the Animation spells. When Endor invaded Ursia in 2364, homunculi carried the spell bridges that created the walls of conjured matter that rose in the path of the Endan armies. The Endan soldiers mistook the creatures for monkeys. In the twenty-fourth century, it was the ambition of most Ursian wizards to fashion and train a homunculus to serve as companion and adjutant. This fashion faded in the twenty-fifth century: sapien adjutants proved to be far less expensive and more capable. But many of the homunculi created during the twenty-fourth century are still surviving and can be seen about the city.

Around the year 2350, Ursian wizards learned how to use an existing bridge to bring about a magical effect, in a process called indirect casting. The simplest form of indirect casting is the Tuning spell, which allows a wizard to extend the longevity of an existing bridge. This humble spell had far-reaching effect upon the economy of Clarus, for it allowed the wizards of Ursia to create a network of space bridges spanning the continent, in banks, government offices, dwarf cities, in the hands of remote and secretive wizards, and carried by wealthy travelers, so as to allow any and all of them to talk to one another at any time. This network of space bridges is now called The Net, and it has been of immense value in commodities trading, currency exchanges, and in the sharing of human knowledge. Another application of indirect casting is Indirect Sponge, or Indirect Lightening, in which the distant half of an existing space bridge is caused to generate conjured sponge or lightening by the action of a spell bridge held against its rim.

After the Phoenician War of 2364, the Ursian government adopted a policy of funding magical research and keeping the results of that research secret so as to allow it to be used with surprise in war. In 2450, state-funded wizards discovered how to make spirit metal. Although most wizards in Ursia know of or suspect its existence, the spells for making it remain a state secret. The Ursian government gave a large quantity of spirit metal to the dragons in a top-secret deal by which they received three molecular bridge tuners from some other sector of the galaxy. A box made of spirit metal has the property of rejecting magical fields that exist outside, such as the pulses of magical energy emitted by bridge suppressors. Thus the Ursians are able to suppress the summoning of their enemy, while permitting themselves to summon within enclosures made of spirit metal. This fact is unknown to Ursia's enemies, even after the Ursian-Endan Wars of 2484 and 2485.

In 2460, a wizard at the Vatzit University discovered how to make conjured matter that was slow to annihilate. Instead of exploding in a burst of light and heat, with the annihilation propagating at 100 m/s, the annihilation proceeds at 1 m/s. Being surrounded by such annihilation would be hot, bright, and loud, but not fatal. By 2470, Ursian wizards had advanced this development to the creation of conjured matter that did not annihilate at all. But the difficulty of making such conjured matter remained high.

In 2480, the Ursian military research wizards figured out how to increase the density of conjured matter, so as to give it more lift per cubic meter. The technique provides a factor of three increase in density for an increase in difficulty of one. Many observers of the war believe high-density conjured wood was applied in the Ursian flying fortresses of 2485. In 2490 they will discover how to make spirit matter of higher density, in 2500 the secret to making conjured stone, and in 2510 they will develop the molecular bridge.

The list of spells we provide in this Laws of Magic page are a good basis for adventuring wizards in the decades 2470 to 2500. For each century we go back in time before 2450, add one to the difficulty of all spells, until we get to the decade in which one of the effects required by the spell was first discovered. Before that decade, the spell is unavailable in Ursia, although it will be available to wizards who have traveled backwards in time, as hundreds of wizards have done over the centuries, and therefore available to secretive wizards many centuries before their discovery in Ursia.

First Level Spells

Balloon

Balloon fills a cloth balloon with conjured fluid. It is a variant of Conjured Fluid. It is triggered verbally, then provides verbal stop-and-start for the creation of fluid for the next ten hours. The fluid provides lift of 10 N/μg and has density 1 μg/m³. The wizard fills a balloon with the fluid. The balloon must have a flap in the top that the wizard can open from the basket below (by a string, for example). To decrease lift, he opens the flap, and allows fluid to escape to decrease the lift. To increase lift, he starts up production of conjured fluid with a verbal control and allows the fluid to rise into the balloon. The production of conjured fluid can continue for up to ten hours, provided the spell bridge survives that long. With this spell, a silk balloon, and a wicker basket, a wizard can take a himself and a few friends for a balloon ride. The spell creates enough conjured fluid to lift 2500 N and still have 500 N of lift to use for control of elevation during the ride. Of course, there may be no wind blowing in the direction the wizard would like his balloon to go, but waiting until nightfall, when many local currents change direction, can often solve his problem, as can changing altitude to enter a different air current. To get an idea of where the currents are flowing, and how fast, an arrow with a smoke streamer may be fired from the balloon basket. An alternative to drifting with the wind is to propel the balloon through the air using large conjured wood oars (such as might be made by a Conjured Structure). These may be worked like oars in a row-boat. They are so large that they get a good grip on the air around the balloon and propel it against the wind. Rowing a balloon is hard work. The entire resistance of the balloon in the wind must be overcome to make progress. Nevertheless, a sturdy rower can keep a balloon going at a few kph for a few hours.

Questions: How could a first level wizard keep a balloon flying indefinitely? Does the bridge ring itself fall or float when you release it? Does the lift generated by the balloon depend directly upon the strength of the maeon wind? Does it depend indirectly upon the strength of the maeon wind? In a wind of 2 Y, for how long could you create fluid without casting another spell? What other spell might you cast?

Beguile

Beguile uses a long-lived, re-usable, targeting solenoid to direct a remote cluster into the brain of a target creature, and deliver an electric stimulus. This stimulus can disturb the subject's thinking. The wizard can deliver one such stimulus per ten seconds. Although each stimulus affects only one subject, each separate stimulus can be used upon a separate subject. The spell is triggered verbally, and is ready to use in twenty seconds. It lasts for one thousand hours (forty days). Because of the spell's long duration, many wizards have it working continuously. The target is the creature's head, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The casting solenoid moves the remote cluster at 50 cm/s. Wizards are trained to use Beguile in combination with tone of voice, pitch, cadence, loudness, clever logic, impressive words, and disturbing eccentricities, so as to extract obedience from the subject of the spell. Beguiling takes two forms: fast or slow, called command and hypnotize respectively. An attempt to command requires ten seconds of conversation with the subject. If successful, the subject will obey a single command issued by the wizard, provided that its execution takes less than ten seconds and does not go against the subject's nature. If the execution is against the subject's nature, the attempt to command is deemed to have failed. If it requires longer than ten seconds, the subject will act upon the command for ten seconds and them stop. An attempt to hypnotize requires one hundred seconds of fluent conversation with the subject, during which several stimuli are delivered by Beguile to the subject's mind. A hypnotized subject will make a subconscious commitment to obey a single command given by the wizard, under the circumstances specified by the wizard, provided the execution of the command, when the circumstances arise, takes less than ten seconds and does not go against the subject's nature, and provided that these circumstances arise within one hundred hours of the hypnosis. An attempt to beguile presents the subject with an intelligence hazard of level 15. The subject must roll 1d20 greater than or equal to 15 - INT - al, where INT is his intelligence and al is his adventurer level. If the subject exceeds the required 1d20 roll by 5 or more, then he recognizes that the wizard is attempting to Beguile him, and he can take action to prevent further attempts to do the same, simply by avoiding conversation with the wizard.

Beguile is the first in a series of spells. Beguile II has the same duration and effect, but raises the level of the intelligence hazard to 17. Beguile X raises it to 23.

Questions: You wish to command a third level adventurer with INT=0. She is standing one meter away from you. What roll does she need to make to avoid your command? What roll must she make to notice your attempt. An enemy wizard his hiding his head behind a barrier of conjured rubber. Is possible to command him? How long is it from the moment the wizard decides to command a subject with Beguile to the moment the spell delivers its impulse to a target three meters away? If someone attacks the wizard, under what circumstances would the wizard be able to command him to stop? Is it easier to command an ogre or a sapien?

Calibrate

Wizards use Calibrate to determine the direction and response times of targeting solenoids in each of their spell slots. Every 10 s for the 8-hr duration of the spell, the wizard can reset the targeting solenoid and set the remote cluster moving at 1 m/s. When he gestures, a small flash of light appears at the remote cluster. The flash is made by a tiny amount of spirit fluid annihilating a tiny amount of conjured fluid. The wizard takes a hollow sphere, called a calibrating ball, the size of the target he is thinking of hitting, and tries to make the flash of light appear within it. Calibrate is simple in its effect, but sophisticated in its internal workings. It is ten times less damaging to the brain than a standard spells. Unlike most spells, casting time has a short clearing time: only one hour.

Questions: Why is Calibrate designed to be less damaging than standard offensive spells? How many Calibrate spells could a wizard expect to cast from one spell slot before it showed signs of damage? Why might a wizard use a mirror in conjunction with his calibrating ball? What would be the level of a one-thousand-use variant of this spell? Why is Calibrate more convenient lasting 8 hr than 1000 hr?

Canoe

Canoe creates one cubic meter of spirit sponge in a hundred seconds. The sponge is gray and sparkling. Its surface is smooth but undulating to the touch. Beneath the surface are close-packed air bubbles a millimeter in diameter. The wizard pushes the spell bridge into a bridge ring. When the spell commences, the bridge ring starts to produce ten liters of conjured sponge per second. The sponge falls from the ring and hardens within a few seconds, filled its air bubbles. The spell allows the wizard to stop and start the creation of the sponge, so as to allow the creation of a complex structure such as a canoe.

A practiced wizard with a conjuring wand can fashion a canoe four meters long, one meter wide, and half a meter deep, with 10-cm thick walls and three wells that serve not only as seats, but also as reinforcement for the walls, which will be forced together by water pressure if the canoe is heavily laden. This canoe is not as sturdy as one made of conjured wood, but it can be made in five minutes, is immune to annihilation, and lasts for four days. The spirit sponge has the weight of balsa wood, so a wizard could also make a simple circular disk of conjured sponge, and so fashion a raft. The raft will be able to carry several people.

Questions: A wizard wants to make a very large raft of spirit sponge, to act as a base for a house-boat. He wants the raft to be ten meters on each side and one meter thick. He is prepared to spend a thousand seconds making the raft and he wants it to last for ten thousand hours. He prepares a variant of Canoe that does exactly what he wants. What is the difficulty of this variant?

Choke

Choke is a variant of Conjured Rubber. It starts with a targeting solenoid, triggered verbally. When the wizard gestures, the spell creates a normal spell bridge. On verbal control, the bridge sprouts a ball of conjured rubber. The ball expands at 1 μg/s and grows to 1 ug (1 m³), or until it encounters a solid obstacle. The spell is called "Choke" because its most striking application is as a means to choke a victim by making the conjured rubber ball appear in her lungs. The target is the creature's lungs, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −5 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +5. If the wizard hits the subject's lungs, she is subject to a shock of formidability 2 and power 0. If the she takes the shock, the space bridge appears in her lungs. She will cough, because the bridge sheath will tickle her lungs. At any time up to two minutes later, the wizard can cause the conjured rubber ball to appear around the bridge. If released in one of the subject's lungs, it will fill that lung, and then the other whenever the trachea opens. The rubber keeps expanding as far as it can, on all fronts, until its longevity expires six minutes later. The victim must lie down and remain calm, or she will suffocate.

Questions: Is it more effective to release the ball of rubber when the victim has a full lung of air, or an empty lung of air? You have struck down an adversary with a choke spell. Hardly able to breath, he pleads for mercy. Does choke allow you to negate its effects? How would you use Choke to capture a crow without harming it?

Circle

Circle is triggered verbally. It creates spell bridge, which it tunes to a diameter of 32-cm. The bridge has longevity four minutes (4 min). The spell-caster can separate the two halves of the space bridge, or place them flush against one another in any orientation he chooses. The sheath of the bridge is enclosed in a tough, thick layer of conjured wood. The wizard can choose to have any or all of the surfaces of the bridge covered over with conjured wood. He can place is hand in the wood as it is forming, so as to make a handle by which the bridge can be picked up. The wood produced by Circle is transparent. In the buckler arrangement, where the bridge halves are aligned and flush up against one another, the entire bridge will be invisible. In a mirror arrangement, where the halves are separated and each held by their own backing, the bridge will be visible because what you see looking through one half is what you see looking out of the other. There are many mirror arrangements. Each provides its own optical effect. In combat, it is best to support the Circle bridge gently so that its sheath can rebound from weapon blows. Because nothing but light rays and chemical gases can pass through the bridge intact, the bridge halves are dangerous weapons. They will vaporize any part of an opponent's body that they touch, and degrade any metal. With a mirror arrangement, each half of the spell bridge serves as a weapon with power 20, defense 5, and encumbrance 200 g. With the buckler arrangement, the halves together serve as a single weapon with the same characteristics. The level in using the Circle bridge in combat arises from the need to support it gently to keep it safe from destruction. The mirror arrangements are unlikely to lure an opponent into striking at one of the mirrors. It is obvious to see that the wizard is holding a space bridge. The buckler arrangement, however, is invisible. An unsuspecting opponent might stab right through it. His weapon would lose its edge and become a mal-formed rod of metal. If the weapon is made of adamantine, which is coated with spirit matter, it will generate white sparks as it passes into the bridge and lose its shape. The metal will, however, still be adamantine, and could be re-forged into a magical blade. We use the Circle spell as a complex example in our discussion of variants.

Questions: If you take a buckler arrangement and flip one of the halves so that it faces the other way, what does the combination look like? Can either arrangement be used to protect a wizard from a Choke spell?

Deafen

Deafen is a variant of Conjured Sponge. It starts with a targeting solenoid, triggered verbally. When the wizard gestures, the spell's remote cluster spreads out to fill a sphere of radius 30 cm, and within this sphere it creates transparent conjured sponge of longevity six minutes in all places that are not occupied by solids or liquids. The spell is called "Deafen" because its most striking application is as a means to encase a victim's head. Because the target is the creature's head, this introduces a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. When used in such a fashion, the victim is presented with a shock of formidability 2 and power 0. The conjured sponge allows air to pass through slowly, but sound is so muffled as to be barely audible within the sphere, and likewise the voice of the victim will be barely audible outside the sphere. Furthermore, sponge forming within the ears of the victim further quietens sounds coming from outside. Breathing through the spong is difficult. The victim cannot run for more than thirty seconds without fainting. When the spell first takes effect upon a person, material will start to form in his throat and nasal passages. This causes an immediate cough, which disturbs further formation within these passages. Nevertheless, some such material remains in the throat and nose, causing irritation for the next six minutes.

Questions: How might a victim remove the deafening sponge without the use of magic? How might we use a variant of this spell to enclose an entire person in conjured sponge? What level would this spell be?

Flash

Flash causes a blinding flash of light and a loud bang at the location of its remote cluster. The cluster is positioned with a targeting solenoid. Creatures with their eyes open within the area of effect are subject to a shock of formidability 1 and power 0, provided there is no object between their eyes and the center of the flash that will block its light. If they take the shock, they are blind for 1d100 seconds. The spell's space bridge, formed at a distance, is destroyed in the flash. The flash is caused by the annihilation of spirit fluid by the atomic bridge. The annihilation destroys the bridge itself. The spell-caster places the spell by waiting and gesturing, just as for Choke. The flash occurs immediately after the gesture.

Questions: A man standing next to you starts running away at 4 m/s. You trigger Flash immediately. Can you put the flash in front of him? What would be your to-hit roll? Does the gesture that provokes the flash work even in the dark?

Hot Stones

Hot Stones is triggered verbally. It creates a 4-cm diameter spell bridge. The wizard fits the two halves of the bridge into one bridge ring, which takes the usual twenty seconds, and allows the spell to develop for another forty seconds. She now pushes a cegotun stone 4-cm in diameter through the bridge over the course of the next minute. If she passes it through in ten seconds, it will generate one sixth as much heat. If she passes it through any faster than ten seconds, the stone itself is likely to be damaged.

The heat produced by the stone is 1 kW/Y at first, or 1 kW in a 1-Yardley maeon wind. After that, the heat production decays exponentially with a half-life of ten days. If left to sit in air, the stone will be red-hot after ten hours, too hot to touch after forty hours, and warm after eighty days. At its hottest, the stone will light fires even in the rain. If dropped into water, it cools immediately, but continues to generate heat at the same rate. A freshly-made stone, if dropped into a kettle containing a liter of water, will bring the water to the boil in six minutes.

Cegotun is a sintered combination of gold, tungsten, and clay dust. To make the cegotun stone, an alchemist passes the sintered stone through an atomic space bridge. The clay recombines to form a hard, porous, clay matrix. The walls of the cavities within the matrix are lined with gold. The tungston serves several purposes that alchemists are happy to explain, among which is improving the thermal conductivity of the clay matrix. When a wizard passes a cegotun stone slowly through an atomic bridge, the stone comes out almost exactly as it went in, making the stone atomic-bridge invariant. When the stone passes through the bridge of the Hot Stones spell, however, the cavities within the stone are filled with conjured matter that greatly amplifies the heat-producing power of the gold on the cavity walls.

A stone 4 cm in diameter weighs around 100 g and contains 20 g of gold. This gold would, under normal circumstances, produce 5 W/kg/Y, or 0.1 W in a 1-Y wind. But within the Hot Stone, this same 20 g of gold produces 1 kW, or ten thousand times as much heat. The spell changes the manner in which the gold in the stone interacts with the maeon wind. Un-assisted gold atoms capture hot negative maeons to produce conjured atoms within the gold. This process converts the kinetic energy of the hot maeon into heat, but at the same time renders the gold within the volume of the conjured atom incapable of stopping another hot maeon. After about an hour, the conjured atom decay, releasing a cold maeon, and now the volume of gold can once again capture a hot maeon. Within a Hot Stone, conjured matter in contact with the gold film of the cavities prevents conjured atoms from forming with in the gold. As a result, the gold atoms scatter hot negative maeons, absorbing half their kinetic energy, and so produces two thousand times as much heat. The hot stone produces heat, but it does not produce cold maeons.

The manufacture of a hot stone requires a skilled alchemist and an atomic bridge. A stone 4 cm in diameter contains 10 g of tungston and 20 g of gold. A stone 2 cm in diameter costs cost 2 gp. One Hot Stones spell can empower five such stones, each with heat-production of 100 W/Y. Although they are expensive, the cegotun stones can be re-used many times, provided the spell-caster does not pass them through the spell bridge too quickly.

Hot Stones is first in a series of spells. Hot Stones II increases the half-life of the heat generation to 30 days. Hot Stones X increases it to five hundred years. Although it is relatively straightforward to increase the half-life of a Hot Stone, increasing its power output per unit volume turns out to be very much harder, and is the subject of research. Alchemists have yet to design a bridge-invariant material that will resist cracking and melting when subjected to greater heat production. Until then, greater heat production is possible only with larger stones. A variant of Hot Stones that provides 3 kW could use a 4-cm bridge and a 10-cm rod of cegotun 4-cm in diameter. This variant would allow three minutes for the rod to pass through the bridge, and would be difficulty two for a half-life of ten days.

Questions: What happens if you break a hot stone in two? What happens if you put two half-size stones into the conjured rubber bundle? One half of a scrying eye lies beneath a hot stone. How would you use the other half of the bridge to control the heat output of the stone? How would you use Hot Stones and some kitchen equipment to measure the strength of the maeon wind? How might you use Hot Stones V to make a stove for your house? If you hire a wizard to cast Hot Stones VII and make you a 1-kW stone, what is the cost per kilowatt-hour of the heat it provides? You have only one cegotun stone with you, and you're on an adventure. You cast Hot Stones upon it one cold night, and boil water to make tea and put in your hot water bottle. In the morning it's hot, and you are carrying a 1-kW heat source in your pocket. You want to turn it off instead of throwing it away. How might you do that?

Luminous Stones

The Luminous Stones spell is similar to Hot Stones, except it uses diamond glass to produce a shining stone instead of cegotun to produce a hot stone. The details of casting the spell and its operation are identical to Hot Stones, except that the stone is made of a different material and the result is light instead of heat.

An luminous stone 4 cm in diameter produces 10 W of visible light when treated by Luminous Stones. The light power decreases exponentially with a half-life of ten days. On the first day, the stone is too bright to look at when held at arm's length. After three months, the stone still glows dimly in the dark. In addition to 10 W of visible light, the stone produces 5 W of near-infrared light and 5 W of ultraviolet. Depending upon the glass, these may or may not emerge from the glass. If the stone is placed in a pocket, all 20 W of radiation will be absorbed by the pocket and turned into heat, so a luminous stone is a good hand-warmer.

Diamond glass a mixture of glass, diamond, air, and a few other chemicals to give the glass color. To make diamond glass, an alchemist takes a slug of ingredients and passes it repeatedly through a space bridge until it attains its final form. The glass is filled with tiny bubbles of air, like ice on a pond. Particles of diamond are embedded in the walls of these bubbles so that they protrude into the trapped air. When a wizard passes a diamond glass stone slowly through an atomic bridge, the stone comes out almost exactly as it went in, making the stone atomic-bridge invariant. When the stone passes through the bridge of the Luminous Stones spell, however, the cavities within the stone are filled with conjured matter that greatly amplifies the light-producing power of the diamond on the cavity walls. Because of the bubbles, diamond glass looks milky white when it is not illuminating itself. Because the diamond particles are at all angles to the prevailing maeon wind, the light they generate is pure white. Most diamond glass contains dyes that give the light a warm, yellow color instead of the harsh white produced by the diamond powder. Also important is a dye that blocks ultraviolet light, because this light is tiring to the eyes.

Diamond glass does not require diamond as an ingredient. Instead, the slug with which the alchemists begins is a mixture of sand and charcoal. The charcoal is turned into microscopic diamond fragments through repeated and very gradual passage through an atomic bridge. The ingredients of a diamond glass stone are inexpensive, but the prodedure for making them is time-consuming and expensive. A 4-cm stone sells for 10 gp. Instead of one large stone, a wizard can use five diamond glass marbles, each costing 2 gp, and so make five luminous marbles shining with 1 W of light each, and with the same half-life.

Luminous Stones is first in a series of spells. Luminous Stones II increases the half-life of the light generation to 30 days. Luminous Stones X has a half-life of five hundred years. Although it is relatively straightforward to increase the half-life of a Luminous Stone, increasing its brightness is more difficult. The light-producing power is now limited by the performance of the diamond glass itself. Alchemists are at work designing better diamond glass that will provide more light. An easier variant is to increase the cross-section of the spell bridge so as to empower larger bodies of diamond glass, which then produce more light. A variant that produces 30 W of light with a 10-cm rod of diamond glass 4 cm in diameter would be difficulty 2 for half-life of ten days.

Questions: How might you use a scrying eye to control the light output of a luminous marble from a kilometer away? How might you use this spell to create a spot-light? Could you use a space bridge to increase the brightness of a luminous stone? If you put the light stone in your pocket immediately after you create it, how much heat will it generate? Does a luminous stone get hot? If you use red glass, does the light come out red? Design a flash-light suitable for a thief that uses a luminous stone. How much would you charge for your flashlight? How much would you expect to pay for a luminous stone made by Luminous Stones X five hundred years ago? A man comes to you with a curious request. He has a luminous statue made of diamond glass. He complains that the statue glows too brightly. He wants it to glow less brightly. Can you make it glow less brightly?

Scrying Eye

Scrying eye creates a spell bridge and tunes it to a diameter of 3 cm. The wizard fits the two halves of the bridge into separate bridge rings. A small flurry of invisible conjured fluid begins to flow from the north half of the bridge. The fluid adheres to itself a little more than that made by Conjured Fluid, so that a body of it clings to the space bridge, and its lift overcomes the weight of the bridge ring. The bridge ring floats in the air. It may be released to drift with the wind. The flow of conjured fluid can controlled so as to raise or lower the floating half. The spell also covers over one side of the floating bridge. This allows the spell-caster to give the floating bridge lateral thrust by blowing through the other half. Scrying is the name given to the act of looking at things through a space bridge.

Questions: Is the conjured fluid above or below the flying bridge? Is a scrying eye a normal space bridge? What would happen if you stuck your finger through a scrying eye? If you were using scrying eye to watch someone in a garden, could she detect the spell? Is there a limit to the distance between the two bridge halves? How does blocking off one side of the floating bridge allow the caster to give it a lateral thrust? Why not block off both sides of the bridge?

Sibilant Membrane

Sibilant Membrane places a sibilant membrane over one half of a space bridge. The membrane lasts for at least 30 days. When combined with the Space Bridge spell, Sibilant Membrane creates a walkie-talkie bridge (see below). At first it sounds easy to get messages through a space bridge, but if you give a bridge to a friend and use it to keep in touch while you travel, you will soon find that because the two of you are at different altitudes, or even different worlds, air is rushing through so quickly that the bridge is howling like a trumpet, and you can't hear yourself think, let alone hear your friend speak.

A walkie-talkie bridge solves the pressure-differential problem with what wizards call a sibilant membrane. A sibilant membrane encloses the bridge ring of one half of the walkie-talkie bridge. It is a strong, flexible skin of conjured rubber. It flexes out when the pressure on the other side is greater than the local pressure, and inwards when the pressure is less. Each membrane has a maximum and minimum pressure differential it can withstand. The membrane can break outwards, or it can be pressed into the bridge and be annihilated. Provided the membrane holds, however, it stops the flow of air. But it still transmits vibrations. It is made of a variety of rubber that is less flexible to slow changes in pressure than it is to fast changes in pressure. A person speaking directly into onto the membrane will be heard by someone with their ear to the other half.

Wizards quote the efficiency of the membranes they make by giving the square of the ratio of the distance a person can hear a word spoken through the bridge with the membrane around it to the distance the same person can hear the word when the membrane is absent. The first membranes, had efficiencies less than 1%, modern membranes deliver efficiencies as high as 50%, while withstanding pressure differences of 100 kPa.

Sibilant membranes are one thing that daemons and the gods cannot make easily. They were never designed to make such things, and they have neither the technology nor the understanding to go about making machines to make them. Consequently, there is great demand for wizards to provide sibilant membranes on Olympia.

For more discussion, see here.

Questions: Is a sibilant membrane more flexible with respect to sudden changes in pressure or slow changes in pressure?

Space Bridge

Space Bridge creates a normal spell bridge and allows the caster to tune the bridge to a larger diameter, but not a smaller diameter. Tuning is controlled verbally. The bridge can have diameter 1 cm and longevity 240 hr, or diameter 2 cm and longevity 60 hr, or diameter 4 cm and longevity 15 hr, and so on. The product of the bridge's surface area and its longevity is 300 hr-cm². When the bridge expands, its diameter grows at 1 cm/s. If undisturbed, the bridge will expire by contracting at a rate of 1 cm/s as well. If, as the bridge expands, it presses against a solid object, it will stop growing at the points of contact, not only in the half which makes contact, but also at corresponding points in the other half. The halves of a space bridge must have the same shape and size. Nevertheless, if placed flush against one another, the two halves can expand together so as to fill an irregular cross section. Handling a large space bridge is awkward. There is a danger of letting one's fingers slip into the bridge. Placing the bridge halves in a pair of bridge rings protects its sheath, making the bridge easier to handle. When enclosed in a bridge ring, a small bridge can be kept safely in a flat leather pouch.

Space Bridge is the first in a series of spells, and is also called Space Bridge I. Space Bridge II increases the longevity of the space bridge to 30 days at diameter 1 cm, and Space Bridge X provides longevity 500 years at diameter 1 cm, or five days at diameter 2 m. Space Bridge 0 creates a normal space bridge. It is the first spell mastered by wizards trained in the Pakesh School of Wizardry, and the first ability acquired by student sorcerers. It's difficulty is −3.

Questions: You cast two space bridge spells. One bridge you give diameter 1 cm and the other diameter 10 cm. Neither bridge is enclosed in a bridge ring. Can you pass the 1-cm bridge through the 10-cm bridge? What is the longevity of a 3-cm diameter bridge made with Space Bridge? What class is this bridge? How would you use Space Bridge and a ruler to measure the strength of the maeon wind? With the right enclosure for one half of the bridge, how might you use this spell to breath under water?

Tuning

Tuning creates a normal spell bridge, which the spell-caster places in a bridge ring. This is the tuning bridge. The spell-caster places the tuning bridge next to another, pre-existing space bridge, which we call the subject bridge. The spell is designed to tune the subject bridge. Only one half of the subject bridge need be at hand. The subject bridge can be in a sheath or it can be naked. The Tuning spell allows the spell caster to accommodate such differences. If the subject bridge is large, the spell bridge will not cover its entire sheath, but only a small section of it. The spell is still effective. The Tuning spell gives the subject bridge longevity 10 days at diameter 1 cm. The product of its area and longevity is 300 hr-cm². If the bridge is large, and the spell-caster wishes to reduce it, she may do so, but she cannot decrease the diameter of the bridge to less than the normal diameter. If she wishes to expand the bridge, she may do so. Both expansions and contractions occur at 1 cm/s.

Tuning is the first in a series of spells. Tuning II increases the longevity of the space bridge to 30 days at diameter 1 cm, and Tuning X provides longevity 500 years at diameter 1 cm, or five days at diameter 2 m.

Questions: How long can a first level wizard preserve a normal space bridge indefinitely with this spell? When must a tuning spell be used instead of a space bridge spell? What is the largest diameter bridge that can be created by this spell from a normal subject bridge? What is the smallest diameter bridge that it can create?

Second Level Spells

Blind

Blind is a variant of Deafen, in wich the conjured sponge is black so that the victim cannot see through. The target is the creature's head, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The spell presents the victim with a shock of formidability 2 and power 0, or else she is subject to the effects of Deafen as well as being blinded.

Questions: Could you use a longer-lived variant of this spell to make a temporary cast for a man with a broken arm?

Enveloping Sponge

This is a variant of Conjured Sponge. It is closely related to Surrounding Sponge, but generates one hundredth the mass of conjured matter. Unlike Surrounding Sponge, however, Enveloping Sponge does not need a bridge ring. Instead, it provides a targeting solenoid, and will envelope a man-sized target two meters away within four seconds of the wizard deciding to do so. Surrounding Sponge is designed to tackle a group of opponents, while the Enveloping Sponge tackles only one opponent. Enveloping Sponge is triggered verbally. When the caster gestures, the spell produces 1 ug of conjured sponge at 100 μg/s with longevity 6 min, and it does so without a bridge ring and guided by a targeting solenoid. Because conjured sponge has density only 0.1 μg/m³, the 1 ug can fill an open space up to 10 m³, or a 1-m radius. This is just big enough to allow the sponge to envelope a single target. The wizard must place the point of origin of the sponge within a 1-m diameter sphere centered upon the target creature if the spell ist to be effective. For the purpose of the missile combat system, the target is the size of an adult sapien body. Assuming the wizard hits his target, it is subject to a shock of formidability 3 and power 0. If the target does not dodge the shock, it is enveloped. Enveloped creatures are safe from assault, and have air to breath through the pores of the sponge, but must be strong and equipped with a sharp blade if they are to escape quickly.

Questions: You try to envelope a man ten meters away. What is your chance of placing the sponge where you want it? Two men are standing twenty meters away, one meter apart. You envelope one of them. Does the other one feel any effects from the spell? Can he rescue his companion? You envelope a cat that weighs 5 kg out in the middle of a paved square, twenty meters away. Why must you run to capture the animal? Can you cast Enveloping Sponge in the dark?

Fear

Fear delivers an electric impulse to the entire brain of the victim. This impulse causes the victim to be terrified beyond control for one minute. The spell subjects the target creature to a shock of formidability 3 which, if not dodged, will cause the victim to be overcome with terror for 1 min. The way the victim responds to this terror depends upon their temperament. Some people scream and curl up in a ball. Others run away shouting. Some stand immobile and wet their trousers. When the victim recovers, he will be dazed, but otherwise unharmed. The spell is triggered verbally and set off with a gesture. The target is the creature's mind, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10.

The spell works with its full force only upon mammals. The signal that causes fear has a particular form, and the spell generates this precise form. Why this form of signal causes fear is something wizards do not understand. Unlike Beguile, the Fear spell affects the entire brain. The fear-inspiring signal is spread over a volume slightly larger than a sapien brain.

Questions: Would it be harder or easier to hit a horse with this spell than a sapien? Can you reverse the effects of this spell?

Flare

Flare creates a bright light in the sky that descends at 1 m/s towards the ground, leaving a trail of black conjured foam behind it. The Flare is so bright that it will illuminate the ground beneath, even from a height of a hundred meters. During the day, the Flare is conspicuous for its trail of black conjured smoke. The wizard can choose the color of the light at the time of preparation, but not at the time of casting.

The Flare spell is similar to Fireworks, but does not permit variation or manipulation of the effect. The light is bright, but not as bright as that produced for an instant by Flash. A well-prepared Flash spell produces 1 kW of light for one minute. It is one hundred times as bright as a standard luminous stone. It is also noisy. The spell works by creating spirit foam, which passes through the space bridge as the bridge sinks. The spirit foam is what causes the bridge to sink, and the conjured matter is what causes it to float. The combination has weight but no mass, and so drifts exactly with the wind.

Questions: What would happen if you let this spell off in a cavern?

Grand Flash

Grand Flash is like Flash, only more powerful and faster-moving for longer-range attacks. This version of Flash is better for ship-to-ship combat. Its radius is 10 m. Anyone within this radius with their eyes open suffers a shock of formidability 1 and power 0. If they take the shock, they will be blind for 1d20 minutes.

Questions: After casting the spell, how would you determine if a creatures's eyes were open or not? If a target dodges the assault, could that mean they blinked?

Obscuring Cloud

Obscuring Cloud creates a cloud of colored conjured fluid. The spell-caster picks the color at the time of preparation. The spell creates 100 m³ of conjured fluid in one second. The fluid will fill a ten-meter square room. The source of the fluid is a spot chosen by the spell-caster with the help of the spell's targeting solenoid. The fluid lasts for a minute. It floats upwards. It is makes breathing difficult. It obscures vision.

Obscuring Cloud is a variant of Conjured Fluid. Its difficulty is −4 for Conjured Fluid, +2 for one hundred cubic meters instead of one cubic meter, +5 for making one hundred cubic meters per second instead of one liter per second, −3 for longevity forty seconds instead of ten hours, +1 for making conjured matter without a bridge ring, and +1 for the targeting solenoid.

Questions: A wizard composes a variant of Obscuring Cloud that affects a 10-m radius just as quickly, and endures for only ten seconds. What is the difficulty of this variant? Later in life, he is faced with a band of a hundred brigands on an open plain. He has prepared another variant of Obscuring Cloud. It covers a 50-m radius in ten seconds and lasts for ten minutes. What is the difficulty of the new variant? He casts the spell, but to his dismay, the cloud is ineffective. What did he fail to consider when he chose to cast this spell at the approaching brigands?

Poison Cloud

Poison Cloud is triggered verbally and produces a normal spell bridge with a reinforced sheath. The wizard places each half in a separate bridge ring. An atomic space bridge atomizes chemical matter that passes through it. A cloud stone is an 8-mm diameter cylinder, up to 30 mm long. When solid, the stone is harmless, but once atomized, recombines to form a cloud of gas. By far the most famous use of this conversion of solid object into gas is its use to generate a poisonous cloud. A cloud stone can be dropped through any space bridge to have its effect, but the trick is to allow the spell-caster to push the stone through at a timely moment without any risk to himself. If the stone is pushed through an unadorned space bridge, the resulting cloud will explode in the spell-caster's face as well. Poison Cloud provides a wrapping of impermeable conjured rubber to enclose one half of the bridge, wrapping itself tightly around the bridge ring and holding the cloud stone inside, ready to be pushed through. The spell-caster then tosses the other half of the bridge, enclosed in the second bridge ring, to the place he would like the cloud to appear, and pushes the stone through by slapping the first half against his hand. The gas cloud appears with a loud bang, filling a five-meter radius in the blink of an eye. The space bridge is destroyed in the process, which further protects the spell-caster. The spell-caster does not have to cast the bridge and create the cloud immediately. He has up to one hour to execute the spell.

Cloud stones can be purchased with a variety of effects. Each stone has its own cost and effect upon those who breath its gases. All creatures within 5 m must dodge a shock of formidability 2 or be caught in the cloud. Those within 10 m must dodge a shock of formidability 1. Anyone caught in the cloud must avoid a hazard of level 20 or breath the gas of the cloud (20 - al on 1d20). A smoke stone has no harmful effect upon those in the cloud, but the smoke is gray and opaque. A confusion stone gives mammals who it in psychedelic hallucinations so intense that their level of proficiency in all disciplines is reduced by 5 for 2 min. A sleep stone leaves its victims unconscious for 20 min. A death stone costs 100 gp, and causes heart failure in 20 s. A smoke stone costs 1 gp, a confusion stone 2 gp, a sleeping stone 5 gp, and a death stone 10 gp.

Questions: How might you turn an opponent wizard's Circle spell against him with a cloud stone? Is a cloud stone molecular bridge invariant? You are being followed by a party of bandits along a ridge. Looking back, you can see them. They are two hundred meters away. How might you use Poison Cloud against them without allowing them to catch you up?

Scan

Scan is similar to the first level spell Beguile. Instead of delivering an electrical stimulus to the remote cluster, Scan does the opposite: it allows the matter at the remote cluster to deliver an electrical stimulus to the neurons in the spell slot. The remote cluster can appear in any type of matter. By means of the electrical signals relayed back to the spell slot, the wizard gets subtle, but direct, information about the material enclosing the remote cluster. She can determine the density (g/cm³) to within a factor of two. She can say whether the matter is made up of chemical, conjured, or spirit materials, or a combination of the three. Once the wizard has received such information, which takes ten seconds, she can reset the targeting solenoid, and hit another location, just as with Beguile. The remote cluster is one centimeter across per meter range. The spell reports the average properties of matter within the cluster. When used immediately in front of the wizard's eyes, the remote cluster is a millimeter across. At this range, the wizard can inspect the interior of intricate devices.

Questions: A large space bridge stands blocking a corridor. Through it you can see the surface of another planet, and a statue. Can you use a sensor spell to find out what the density of the statue? How might you use this spell to distinguish between a god in a human body and a real human?

Surrounding Sponge

Surrounding Sponge is a variant of Conjured Sponge. It is closely related to Enveloping Sponge. Surrounding Sponge generates ten times the mass of conjured matter at ten times the rate, but it has no targeting solenoid, and so requires a bridge ring. The surrounding spells are designed to tackle a group of opponents, while the enveloping spells tackle only one opponent. Surrounding Sponge is triggered verbally. It produces 100 μg of conjured sponge at 100 μg/s with longevity 6 min. Because conjured sponge has density only 0.1 μg/m³, the 100 μg can fill an open space up to 1000 m³, or a 6-m radius sphere. Once the spell bridge has been placed in its bridge ring, the wizard has two minutes in which to trigger the production of sponge by verbal control. Once initiated, the production cannot be stopped.

The spell can be used to surround people with sponge. The spell-caster throws the spell bridge into the midst of his enemies. All within 5 m of the bridge ring are subject to a shock of formidability 2 and power 0. Anyone who does not dodge the assault is surrounded by the sponge and constrained. Constrained creatures are safe from physical attack, and have air to breath through the pores of the sponge, but must be strong and equipped with a sharp blade if they are to escape quickly.

After casting the spell the wizard has four hours in which to trigger the generation of sponge. Note that this four hours precedes the clearing time of the spell. The wizard's spell slot will be clear four hours after she sets off the Surrounding Sponge.

Questions: If someone throws the bridge ring for you, will the spell still work? Could you throw the spell bridge through a large atomic bridge and then set off the spell? What is it about sponge that makes it easy to use in this sort of spell? Can you cast Surrounding Sponge in the dark? You throw the bridge ring at an adventurer. He catches it firmly in his hand. Will the spell still work properly?

Will-o-Wisp

Will-o-Wisp creates a dim sphere of light that the spell-caster can move towards and away from him at 5 m/s. When the spell-caster turns his head, the light turns about him, possibly moving much faster than 5 m/s. It can be used to make light, or to generate heat, or to imitate a real Will-o-Wisp. The sphere is as bright as ten candles together and generates the same amount of heat, which is to say roughly 0.2 W of light and 500 W of heat.

Questions: This spell does not allow the caster to vary the light intensity of the sphere. What would be the difficulty of a variant that allowed the caster to control the brightness of the light?

Third Level Spells

Animation I

An animation is a creature made by spells. See Animations for more information.

Questions: Where does the energy for an animation's muscular work come from? If you transported an animation to another planet with no maeon wind, would it function?

Asphyxiate

Asphyxiate uses a targeting solenoid to place a collar of conjured rope around the target creature's neck. This collar has a total volume of ten liters (10 l), and is about 15 cm thick around an adult sapien's neck. The target is the creature's neck, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −5 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +5. Assuming a hit, the target is subjected to a shock of formidability 4 and power 0. If the target takes the shock, the collar forms around his neck. The spell-caster has one hour in which to utter the final verbal control that causes the collar to tighten and do 6D10 of damage to the subject by asphyxiation. The total tensile stress in the collar is 2 kN. This is so powerful that it is likely to break the neck of an unarmored person of average strength.

Questions: Is asphyxiate more dangerous than choke to a human with no dodging points? A variant of Asphyxiate uses direct control only. What is its level? Describe a circumstance in which it would be superior to the standard Asphyxiate.

Circle II

Circle II is a variant of Circle that lasts four times longer. The same prepared spell will produce either the mirror or buckler arrangement, and gives the spell-caster the option of covering the front of the bridges with conjured wood or leaving them exposed.

Questions: What happens if you take a buckler arrangement with exposed bridges under-water? What happens if you take a mirror arrangement under-water?

Confusion

Confusion can cause any mammal in a 5-m radius to suffer a ten-point drop in their intelligence (INT −10), although they remember being more intelligent, so the result is inactivity and indecision for one full minute. Each mammal in the area of effect is subject to a shock of formidability 2. If the victim cannot dodge the shock, it will be confused for a minute. A targeting solenoid determines the center of the 5-m radius. The spell works by making a remote cluster of thousands of space bridges and then driving these bridges randomly in a cloud that extends to five meters. Each remote bridge delivers an erratic signal that causes confusion. Aside from the sudden, strange behavior of people in the area of effect, the spell gives little sign of itself. There is no hiss or flash. Aside from the wizard saying a word, making a gesture, and blinking, the wizard shows no sign of casting the spell. This is the sort of spell that makes people suspicious of wizards, and makes wizards unwelcome in so many places that have had experience of them.

Questions: Would this spell work upon someone you see behind a barrier of conjured wood?

Conjured Structure

Conjured Structure generates ten cubic meters of conjured wood in a manner convenient for building a small hut, at a rate of one cubic meter every ten seconds. The spell is triggered verbally, provides its own conjured wood seed, then grows the wood with cold maeons made at the bridge ring. The spell provides no start-and-stop, but you can stop production by moving the bridge away from the existing wood. Whether you are making wood or not, the spell continues to make cold maeons, so it continues to use up its capacity to make wood. The spell allows a quick-moving and well-practiced wizard to make a structure, especially if the wizard has a conjuring wand, in which case the entire structure takes one hundred seconds to create. Slower variants of the same spell are easier to use. For a description of such a variant in action, see here.

Questions: What difficulties would you face making a shack on sandy ground? A variant of this spell allows you to make the same structures, but colored instead of transparent. What is its level?

Fireball

Fireball provides a conjured rubber bag attached to a 2-cm bridge ring. The wizard pours ten liters of water into the bag before it seals itself, and places the spell bridge halves in the attached bridge ring and another ring. Within ten hours of casting the spell, she squeezes the bag, which bursts the membrane across the local half of the spell bridge and forces the water through. As the water passes through the bridge, it turns into 10 m³ hot hydrogen gas (H₂) and 5 m³ of hot oxygen gas (O₂). This consumes 100 MJ of bridge energy, which promptly destroys the bridge. As the bridge collapses, it annihilates a small quantity of spirit fluid, which generates a spark that sets light to the hydrogen gas, creating the fireball after which the spell is named.

The flame of the fireball itself is a faint violet color if the water is pure, or yellow if the spell-caster uses saltwater. The 100 MJ of heat is sufficient to heat the air in a 3-m radius by 1000 °C. Everyone within 3 m of the remote half of the bridge is subject to an assault of formidability 2 and power 4D10. Everything in the 3-m radius that would ignite at the touch of a match will ignite and burn fiercely. The spell-caster, meanwhile, is protected from the blast by the conjured rubber bag, which will often fill with hot burning gas that passes through the bridge before it closes completely. The bridge has sufficient .

The Fireball has latency twelve hours, which is greater than the normal four hours associated with spells that use bridge rings. This ten hours allows the wizard to set up the Fireball and use it as a trap, or take time over placing the remote half of the bridge.

Questions: If you cast this spell on a planet with maeon wind strength 0.5 Y instead of 1 Y, what effect would this have upon the Fireball spell? You cast the spell and set it off six hours later. When is your spell slot cleared and ready for another spell?

Hold Portal

Hold Portal creates a disk of sticky conjured rubber 3 m in diameter and 10 cm thick. The spell-caster places the disk with the help of a targeting solenoid. The solenoid activates creation of the disk as soon as it encounters a solid or liquid object with density greater than around 100 kg/m³ (air is 1 kg/m³ and water is 1000 kg/m³). The disk spreads out across the surface of whatever object this might be, filling in crevices and spreading to nearby objects. The rubber is flexible but sticky, and so binds together all the surfaces that it covers. If cast over a closed door or gate, the rubber will bind the door shut. In the case of a wooden door in a wooden wall, the door will resist a force of 10 kN before the rubber starts to tear.

Questions: How might a first-level wizard create this same disk of rubber with a first-level spell? What benefits can you see to this lower-level version of the spell?

Rectangle

Rectangle is like the first-level spell Circle, only the bridge is a rectangle 150 cm by 90 cm. Like Circle, Rectangle comes in two forms, which the spell-caster chooses at the time of casting. One form is the shield, where both halves of the bridge are combined into one, and the other is the mirror, where they are separated. See Circle for an explanation of each form. When the mirror halves are used as weapons, each half serves as a weapon with power 25, defense 5, encumbrance 500 g, and difficulty 8. The encumbrance is due to the opposition of air to the movement of the sealed rear-sides of the Rectangle. Aside from the 5 extra points of weapon power when compared to Circle, the Rectangle spell offers far superior protection from missiles. The shield form allows its user to see in front of them, while remaining behind an atomic bridge that atomises all incoming matter. An arrow will turn to dust and a lump of deformed metal as it passes through. The momentum of the metal will be spread across the conjured wood behind the space bridge. The person holding the shield will feel a jolt, but will otherwise be unharmed.

Questions: You are standing on plane. Several men are approaching from a kilometer away, and you do not want them to see you. How can you use rectangle to make yourself invisible to them? Can you see them?

Silent Flash

Silent Flash is a silent variation of Flash. Because it is silent, it is more formidable, while retaining the same blinding effect in a five-meter radius. The remote cluster first creates a shell of conjured sponge, then detonates the flash within the shell. The light comes out, but the sound is greatly muffled. Instead of a shocking bang, the sound is reduced to a mere clap. Creatures with their eyes open within 5 m of the flash are subject to a shock of formidability 2 and power 0, provided there is no object between their eyes and the center of the flash that will block its light. If they take the shock, they are blind for 1d10 minutes. The ball of conjured sponge is broken up by the expansion of gases created by the flash.

Questions: Why is it not possible, on a magical planet, to make a bomb with this spell, in which trapped gases explode outwards, causing damage?

Slice

After a verbal trigger, the spell creates a normal space bridge. The wizard fits both halves of the bridge into a ring. Within the next two minutes, he issues a verbal command and the spell bridge expands, just for an instant, to radius 10 m, and then collapses. The process takes no more than a few milliseconds. The advancing edge of the bridge cuts deeply into chemical and conjured matter. Spirit matter, however, is resistant to it. Half a millimeter of spirit cloth is enough to stop a Slice spell. The edge of the bridge flows around obstacles and expands behind them to cut into other targets. Everyone in its path is subject to a shock of formidability 2 and power 6D10 (rolled separately for each subject).

After casting the spell the wizard has four hours in which to trigger the annihilation, so he can use it next to conjured matter to make a trap. Note that this four hours precedes the clearing time of the spell. The wizard's spell slot will be clear four hours after she sets off the slice.

Slice is the by-product of research into making higher class bridges. Researchers devised a way of stripping the conjured matter sheath suddenly from an atomic bridge. Those who survived the first experiments reported that bridges treated in this way, far from collapsing immediately as expected, expanded to a great diameter, and then collapsed. Currently, researchers are attempting to preserve the expanded bridge by enclosing its edge in a spirit sheath. No progress has been made, and the research is dangerous for two reasons. First, you are dealing with slicing bridges, and second, the gods do not want sapiens to develop higher class bridges, and have no scruples about sending assassins after anyone who tries.

Questions: How might you cast slice upon enemies that surround you, but avoid it yourself? What happens to the bridge ring? Is it better to have the bridge ring horizontal or vertical when the slice goes off? The slice is too fast for the eye to see, but what would there be to see if it were slower? Why were the researchers trying to strip away the conjured matter sheath and replace it with a spirit matter? There is a variant of this spell that uses a targeting solenoid and no bridge ring. How is this spell superior to the standard Slice spell? What is its level?

Thaumaturgical Forge

Thaumaturgical Forge is used by thaumaturgists to concentrate the maeon wind and allow them to make spell capsules. A thaumaturgical bowl is a device used by thaumaturgists to concentrate a maeon wind. The device is a bowl 20 cm across, made of several hundred intricately carved, thin-walled, 1-cm square bridge rings held together by miniature hinges. The bowl is accompanied by a flat, square plate set with a matching set of square bridge rings. With all the bridge rings filled, the bridges on the square plate gather the maeon wind and direct its maeons towards the bowl center. The bowl is placed beneath a work surface. The maeon wind above the bowl center can be as much as fifty times greater than that which is normal on the planet surface. A thaumaturgist uses Thaumaturgical Forge to fill the bridge rings of a thaumaturgical bowl. The spell starts with a normal space bridge fitted into a circular bridge ring. This bridge is called the seed bridge. The thaumaturgical bowl is flattened out by laying it upon the square plate. The hinges allow this to be done. The bridge rings in the bowl are now flush up against their partners on the flat plate. You lay the seed bridge against each of the several hundred pairs of square bridge rings in turn, and generates a space bridge within each pair. With a little physical encouragement, the two halves of each bridge thus generated separate and expand into the members of each pair of bridge rings. Allowing five to ten seconds for each bridge, the whole process takes about an hour. Most thaumaturgists cast the spell and then leave their adjutants to lay down the bridge rings. Once you have set down the bridge rings, you curl up the hinged set of bridges into a bowl shape once again. Thaumaturgical bowl operates for four hours, providing amplified maeon wind in an area one or two centimeters across at its center. This area is called a thaumaturgical forge.

Gold placed in a thaumaturgical forge expands to hundreds of times its normal size. Negative maeons passing through gold have a tendency to stop and envelop gold atoms. This displaces millions of neighboring atoms. A negative maeon will remain around a gold atom for an hour or so before breaking away. The absorption of negative maeons by gold generates heat. A 4-cm cube of pure gold is too hot to touch on most magical worlds. In the amplified wind of a thaumaturgist's bowl, gold not only heats up, but also expands dramatically with absorbed maeons. The thaumaturge works with gold-mithril alloy threads. These expand in the forge to hundreds of times their normal diameter. While they are thus expanded, the thaumaturgist joins threads into intricate structures, attaches levers, gears, and other parts as required. Within minutes of their removal from the forge, these components will start to contract. Within an hour they will be back to normal size, hundreds of times smaller in each dimension.

A spell capsule is given the power to generate magical effects by means of charging spells. These implant arrangements of spirit matter in the gold. When triggered, these arrangements generate weak electric currents in the conducting threads of the capsule. These currents catalyze the generation of conjured matter, just as neural currents generate conjured matter in a wizard's spell slot. The conjured matter goes on to generate the capsule's effects. Most capsules are single-use, and are destroyed by casting their spell.

Capsules are most often named after the wizard spells whose effects they imitate. Not all spells can be implemented as capsules. If a capsule generates the same effect as a spell of difficulty d, we say it is level-d capsule. It takes one Thaumaturgical Forge spell and two spells of level d to make a level-d capsule. The cost of a level-d capsule is the cost of the third-level Thaumaturgical Forge spell plus the cost of the two level-d charging spells (see Spell Prices). A level-2 capsule costs around 57 gp when you buy it direct from the maker.

A common form of spell capsule is two close-fitting metal half-shells containing the capsule's mechanisms. The outward appearance is that of a capsule small enough to hide in the palm of one's hand. Such capsules come in a variety of shapes, the most common being a cylinder two centimeters long with rounded ends. To activate such a capsule, one pulls apart the halves of its enclosure. The capsule's components are mounted inside one half. A miniature lever, button, or dial may protrude from the components, allowing the user to control the capsule's effects. One of the most popular thaumaturgical devices among adventurers is the thunder-egg. A thunder-egg is the size of a chicken's egg, and made of metal. It is heavy, and easy to throw. You pull a pin out from the end to prime the egg, and then throw it. The spell effect is Lightening Ball, and it is triggered by the impact of the thunder-egg on any hard surface. After you prime the egg, you must be carefull not to give it a sharp impact, or it will go off. Some thunder-eggs allow you to replace the pin. Thunder-eggs sell for around 150 gp.

Questions: How do the space bridges concentrate the maeon wind? How must you orient the flat plate?

Vacuum Thruster

This spell uses bridge energy and the principles of space bridge thrusters to allow a wizard to fly around with one or two companions on a bench, with the help of a metallic contraption. Vacuum Thruster creates a spell bridge and tunes it to a diameter of 12 cm, which the wizard uses to make a space bridge thruster. The wizard separates the two halves and places them in a vacuum thruster mechanism. The best vacuum thrusters are usually made of brass, and cost about 100 gp. It consists of a chamber, a lid, a pump, and a bleed valve. The wizard keeps the inside of the chamber immaculately clean and oiled. He places each half the bridge into its own 12-cm diameter sharp-edged depression, and makes sure the contact between the bridge sheath and the base of the depressions are well-oiled. He makes sure that he has oriented the bridges so that when he holds his hand over one half of the bridge, he can see it when he looks into the other half. He closes the lid. The lid has a few holes to let air inside, while still protecting the bridge. A thin copper tube leads from the center of one of the depressions, out of the bottom of the chamber, to a lever-operated vacuum pump. The wizard starts to pump the air out from beneath one half of the bridge, and therefore from beneath both halves, because the undersides are connected in the same way as the upper sides. Inside the chamber, the bridge is sucked down tightly into the two depressions. When he has pumped most of the air out of this small, disconnected space, there is no air pressure pushing down on the bases of the two depressions. But there is air pressure pushing up on the underside of the entire chamber. Assuming the pump gets most of the air out from beneath the bridge, the force imbalance will be equal to the atmospheric pressure times the combined area of the two bridges. This area is 200 cm², so in atmospheric pressure 100 kPa we have a 2 kN force, enough to lift 200 kg in standard gravity. If the wizard wants to decrease the force, he lets a little air into the space beneath the bridges through a bleed valve.

As the thruster does work lifting a load or pushing a cart, air molecules enter the top surfaces of the bridge, and leave again with extra kinetic energy bestowed by the movement of the bridge. Any energy the thruster provides must come out of the bridge energy. Because the bridge is constrained, it cannot supply energy by contracting. Now the Vacuum Thruster spell starts to do its part. When the bridge contracts, it pulls upon its sheath, and the sheath supplies the energy by absorbing it from the maeon wind. The sheath can supply up to 10 kW (10 kJ/s). Likewise, when the thruster absorbs energy, such as it would when lowering an object to earth slowly, the bridge cannot absorb this energy by expanding. Instead, it presses against the sheath and the sheath absorbs the energy by supplying it to the maeon wind. Thus the sheath is a conduit for absorbed and supplied energy between the bridge and the maeon wind. The total energy the sheath can transfer is the thruster's capacity. The sheath can transfer up to 10 MJ without any risk of dissipation. After 10 MJ, sudden collapse of the bridge becomes increasingly likely.

Transferring energy to the bridge uses up thruster capacity, as does transferring energy from the bridge. Thus the capacity of the spell is consumed both by raising a weight and by lowering a weight. The energy received by the bridge as it lowers a weight is discarded, and this act of discarding energy uses thruster capacity. Unfortunate though this loss may be, the sheath arrangement provided by the Vacuum Thruster spell has the great advantage of being rugged and reliable. Furthermore, the sheath vibrates within the thruster mechanism, generating a sound that communicates its condition to the wizard. This sound is called the thruster's whistle. When the sheath is not transferring energy, the whistle is a barely-audible low tone. When supplying energy, the tone rises. When supplying too much energy, the tone is a piercing whine. When absorbing energy, the tone also rises, but has a different quality easily recognised by the wizard. When absorbing too much energy, the whistle is a grinding screech. As the sheath capacity is used up, its quiet whistle drops in pitch. Thus the wizard receives ample warning of loss of capacity, and is well aware of how severely he is loading the thruster at all times.

Variants of Vacuum Thruster are easy to compose. In particular, many vacuum thruster mechanisms have depressions for bridges of two sizes, so they can accommodate smaller, longer-lived bridges or larger, shorter-lived bridges. A thruster with 17-cm diameter depressions outside of deeper 12-cm depressions will accept bridges that last for only four hours, but generate a combined thrust of 4 kN.

Questions: Where does the energy of the spell come from? Explain how the passage of molecules through the bridge must consume transport energy exactly equal to the net work done by the air on the bottom side of the chamber. If the thruster raises you by 200 m how much capacity is consumed? What is the fastest rate of ascent for which this spell can maintain constant bridge energy when lifting a 2 kN load? What happens to the thruster bridges if you exceed this rate of ascent? How high can this spell lift a 1 kN load? A wizard flies just above the ground against wind resistance of 200 N. How far can he go before he uses up the capacity? How fast can he go?

Fourth Level Spells

Annihilate

This spell turns its bridge ring into a initiator of avalanche annihilation of conjured matter. The wizard throws the bridge ring at a body of conjured matter, says his control word, and the annihilation begins. The annihilation will rush through up to a million cubic meters of conjured matter, proceeding at 10 m/s to a maximum distance of 100 m from the bridge ring. Anyone within 5 m of the annihilated matter is subject to a shock of formidability 3 and power 6D10.

Questions: What does the bridge ring do to initiate annihilation? You discover the body of a man killed instantly by this spell. How was he killed? The wizard who developed this spell paid with his life for his accomplishment. All his hair fell out, he grew weak, and died. What happened to him, and why?

Bridge Suppressor

Bridge Suppressor sends out a magico-dweomer pulse roughly every ten seconds that reduces the class of all bridges within its area of effect to atomic bridges. The mechanism is simple: a bridge ring with both halves of the casting bridge inside it makes a super-large conjured atom. The atom is wrapped around the bridge ring, and grows until it becomes unstable and disspates. The dissipation transmits the pulse and some cold maeons. After the pulse, another atom forms, and so on. The pulses are approximately periodic, but each one occurs at random because the particular conjured atom used by the spell has a significant variation in its longevity, at random from one atom to the next, in a process similar to that of maeon decay. The average time to the next pulse is ten seconds, and the standard deviation of the time to the next pulse is five seconds. It takes divine tuning agents several seconds to tune an atomic bridge into a molecular bridge, so this spell makes transport by molecular bridges impractical within its range.

There are a whole series of bridge suppressor spells, of different ranges and durations. In all cases, the optimal shape of the bridge ring used in the spell is a toroid of inner diameter equal to half its outer diameter. This toroid is supported on three or four metal pins that cause minimal disturbance to the growth of the conjured atom. The apparatus must be kept from sudden shocks so as to avoid knocking the metal torus off these pins. The energy of the pulse generated by the decay is proportional to the volume of the dissipating atom, and the volume of the atom is proportional to the volume of the toroid. The spell is effective in places where the pulse has energy greater than a certain threshold. This threshold does depend upon the bridge to be suppressed, and who or what is tuning the bridge, but we have kept things simple with a binary cutoff in our spell description.

As the energy of the pulse propagates outward in all directions, its power per unit area will decrease as the square of the range. This dictates that the range is proportional to the radius of the bridge ring to the power 3/2. To increase the range by a factor of ten, we must increase the diameter of the bridge and the apparatus by a factor of 10^2/3, or 4.6. To increase the diameter of a space bridge by a factor of 3 usually requires the addition of one to the difficulty of the spell. A factor of 4.6 would add one and a half. In this case, we must not only increase the diameter of the bridge by 4.6, we must also increase the rate of generation of some conjured matter. The result is that the Bridge Suppression difficulty increases by two for each factor of ten increase in range, or one for each factor of √10.

To increase the longevity of a space bridge by a factor of ten requires that we increase the difficulty of creation by one. Thus, increasing the duration of Bridge Suppression by a factor of ten also adds one to the difficulty of the spell. Decreasing the duration to one hour reduces the difficulty by one, but further decreases bring no advantage.

Questions: Confirm that the range of this series of spells is proportional to bridge radius to the power 3/2. What is the difficulty of a spell that suppresses to a range of 3 km for a year?

Circle III

Circle III is a variant of Circle that lasts sixteen times longer. The same prepared spell will produce either the mirror or buckler arrangement, and gives the spell-caster the option of covering the front of the bridges with conjured wood or leaving them exposed.

Questions: What happens if you push the edge of one bridge of a Circle III into the open face of the second bridge?

Escape

Escape creates an invisible sphere of conjured rubber around the spell-caster that carries him away from danger quickly and sets him down a minute later wherever the wind is blowing. The spell-caster grabs the spell bridge from in front of her forehead. Conjured rubber begins to form around the bare bridge. She sticks the bridge to her back lets go of it. The bridge will stick easily to clothes or armor, and even to bare flesh. Conjured rubber forms behind her with a hiss, and rises upwards as it hardens. She jumps as high as she can and as soon as she can. The conjured rubber sphere forms so quickly that she will be lifted up and away. As soon as she is clear of the ground, the conjured rubber forms a floor beneath her and walls beside her. She must be sure she jumps high enough and soon enough or else the rubber floor will adhere to the ground and stop her from escaping. She accelerates upwards.

While aloft, the spell-caster is protected from missiles by at least a meter of conjured rubber in all directions. The only way into the rubber sphere is through a crude opening in front, which may by tall and narrow or small and circular, depending upon the execution of the spell. If she sits down in the cavity at the center of the sphere, she will remain upright because she is below the sphere's center. As the sphere descends, it begins to speed up. It will strike the ground at When the sphere hits the ground at 1 m/s it bounces. It may roll also. The spell-caster will roll with the sphere and then crawl out of the opening if she likes. Or she might choose to stay within the sphere to cast a few more spells at her pursuers.

The height to which the spell-caster ascends depends upon the size of the rubber sphere and the combined weight of her body and possessions. The size of the rubber sphere is affected by the speed with which she plants the spell bridge upon her back. The sooner she plants it, the bigger the sphere will be. The maximum size of the ball is 100 m³, which is sufficient to lift 100 kg. The sphere starts to disspate immediately after it is formed, losing 1% of its volume per second from the outer surface. The spell bridge is still active. The conjured rubber the bridge produces at this stage of the spell is fragmented. It rises to the ceiling of the cavity at the center of the sphere. But it is this continued production of conjured rubber that allows the spell-caster to control the descent of the sphere. When first uncovered, the bridge produces one cubic meter of conjured rubber per second. Each cubic meter produces a lift of 10 N. But this rate of production fades away over the course of a minute.

The ideal flight of the sphere is one that ascends to the height chosen by the spell-caster and descends at the speed chosen by the spell-caster. She controls the height by planting the bridge on her back at the right time. She controls the descent by freeing removing the same bridge from her back at the right time. Consider what happens when a 50-kg spell-caster creates a conjured sphere with lifting force 550 N. She weights 500 N (we assume gravity is 10 m/s/s). She accelerates upwards at 50N/50kg = 1 m/s/s for the first second. She loses 5 N of lift per second after that. After 5 s she is 12 m up. After 20 s she reaches her maximum altitude of 70 m and begins to descend. Without the help of additional conjured rubber, her descent will take 10 s and she will hit the ground at 14 m/s. So she uncovers the bridge when she reaches her maximum height. The cavity inside the sphere begins to fill with invisible, fragmented conjured rubber. She descends, but slows almost to a stop at a height of 37 m after a total flight time of 36 s. She covers the bridge. She ascends a little and uncovers it again. She goes up and down, slowly descending, until the sphere strikes the ground. If her initial lift ia 560 N instead of 550 N, she ascends for 24 s to 116 m and her subsequent descent becomes more difficult to control. With initial lift of 600 N she ascends to 410 m in 38 s. From such a height, it is hard to descend before the spell bridge's power to generate additional conjured rubber expires, making the descent dangerous. The sphere might strike the ground at 20 m/s, which would cause injury to the spell-caster, even though she is well-protected in a conjured rubber ball.

Despite the difficulty of controlling the flight, we assume that a wizard who uses it under duress has practiced with the spell enough times and will control the sphere correctly. The height can be up to 600 m and the flight time up to 60 s. The higher flights are not necessarily longer: they just involve a faster ascent and descent.

The Escape spell is a variant of Conjured Rubber. Its difficulty is −2 for the Conjured Rubber, +2 for one hundred cubic meters instead of one cubic meter, +5 for making one hundred cubic meters per second instead of one liter per second, −3 for longevity forty seconds instead of ten hours, +1 for making conjured matter without a bridge ring, and +1 for the special shape of the sphere.

Questions: As the great adventuring wizard Bolus says, "This is a great spell for escaping from hoards of armed me. But it's a dangerous one to use when there's a wizard among your opponents." Why is it dangerous to escape from a wizard with this spell? Suppose you are ascending at over 5 m/s with this spell. Can you assail your enemies on the ground with a Grand Flash?

Fire Lance

Fire Lance creates a space bridge resistant to pressure and combustion, and with increased of bridge energy to fuel the atomization of water. The bridge fits into a fire lance. A typical fire lance is a two-meter metal lance with a rod running down the center and a valve mechanism at the tip. Its purpose is to keep the intense heat of the flame away from its wielder. One half of the Fire Lance bridge is in the valve mechanism. The other half is at the bottom of a deep reservoir of water, probably suspended by a rope so it stays off the bottom. It takes some time to set up the fire lance, so it is as well that the bridge lasts for one thousand hours. When you turn a grip at the base of the lance, or slide the grip, or pull a lever, depending upon the lance, the valve in the tip opens, and water rushes through the space bridge. It is atomized on the way out, and the fire lance ignites the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to produce a jet of flame up to ten meters long, provided the remote half of the bridge is at least ten meters below the surface of its reservoir. The gases in the jet move at ten meters per second. If the water is pure, fresh water, the flame will be invisible in sunlight, and shine a faint violet in darkness. When it strikes a flammable object, this object will burst almost immediately into flame on its exterior, and non-flammable objects will glow red-hot within seconds. A fire lance is rarely used with saltwater, which generates a yellow flame, because the products of saltwater combustion are corrosive to the steel used in the lance.

The fire lance provides a slow leak of water that keeps the flame alive at the tip, so that the gas mixture ignites immediately you open the valve. You start the lance flame with a flame. The fire lance itself has to be made of hard metal, provide thermal insulation for its user, and be rugged enough for use as a staff in combat. A good fire lance costs 100 gp. Note that although it takes a wizard to create the space bridge of a Fire Lance, any trained soldier can use one.

Each liter of water vaporized by a fire lance generates 10 MJ of heat and consumes 10 MJ of bridge energy. The Fire Lance space bridge can provide up to 90 MJ for atomization. After that, it collapses. The maximum power of the bridge is 10 MW. A 1-s, 10 MW blast from a fire lance contains enough heat to warm 7 kg of skin and muscle by 300°C. When set up properly, and aimed with care, this blast will subject everyone in a 3-m radius at a range of 10 m with an assault of formidability 1 and power 4D10.

Questions: The fire lance is the weapon used by the much-feared Salamander Regiment of the Ursian army. How much does it cost the Ursian army to activate the one thousand lances of the regiment for a month? How much does it cost to equip them with fire lances in the first place? Why do the Salamanders pay more attention to the direction of the wind when they attack than the slope of the land? How fast would a wind have to be to make attack into the wind impossible for them? What type of clothing do you imagine they would wear? As a wizard, could you make yourself clothing that would help you be more aggressive with your fire lance?

Fireworks

Fireworks allows the spell-caster to put on a show of flashing lights, flares, bursts of streaming lights, and other such visual delights with loud noises. The lights are not as bright or as sudden as those created by the Flash spell, but their origins are the same. The remote cluster of the spell moves towards or away from the spell-caster at 5 m/s. At any time, the spell-caster can stop it moving, or set it moving in either direction. At any time, he can cause the remote cluster to produce a shower of pyrotechnics in bright colors. The quality of the display put on by a wizard using this spell depends upon his skill and experience. There are wizards who specialize in fireworks for celebrations. They can put on some remarkable shows lasting for tens of minutes by working together and by preparing many spells. The spell has many variants that excel at producing particular effects. The spell we list here is the general-purpose pyrotechnic display spell.

Questions: What is the fastest speed a trail of flames created by the spell could move? Will the firework displays pass through walls? Will they set fire to trees? Will they set fire to exposed lamp oil?

Indirect Sponge

Indirect Sponge allows the generation of the effect of Surrounding Sponge at remote half of an existing space bridge. The caster takes the Indirect Sponge spell bridge, places it in a bridge ring, and touches the rim of the existing bridge with the spell bridge, as in the simplest of indirect spells, Tuning. The formidability, power, and area of the spell are centered on the remote half of the existing space bridge as if that bridge were the remote half of a Surrounding Sponge spell bridge. The existing space bridge is not destroyed by the action of the Indirect Sponge.

Questions: If the remote bridge is on another planet, will the spell still work? If it does work, how might its effects be different, and why?

Mute

Mute is similar to Fear. The spell delivers an electric signal to the entire brain of the victim. The target is the creature's brain, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The spell subjects the target creature to a shock of formidability 5 which, if not dodged, will deprive the victim of his ability to speak for one day. They will be able to make noises with their mouths, but these noises won't be understandable speech no matter how hard the victim tries. When the victim recovers, he will be dazed, but otherwise unharmed. The spell is triggered verbally and set off with a gesture.

Questions: Would this spell affect an ogre? Would it affect a sperm whale?

Possess

Possess generates an intricate array of casting bridge clusters. The local clusters settle into sensory perception and motor control networks in the spell-caster's brain, while the remote clusters settle into corresponding parts of a nearby creature. The spell-caster is able to pick up neural activity in the creature's brain, and, if he is well practiced with the spell, he can share the creature's sensual experiences. The sensations thus delivered are feint. They are best experienced while relaxing with eyes closed in a quiet place. It is impossible to share nerve signals without diluting them, so a possessed creature feels its senses grow less acute. If the creature is familiar with possession, it will soon know what is happening, but there is very little it can do about it. (The way to avoid possession is not to stay still near a wizard for more than a ten seconds.) Once sensory contact is established, the spell-caster can go still further with the possession by attempting to influence the possessed creature's actions. These efforts are treated just like command and hypnosis attempts, depending upon how immediate or long-term they are. One such attempt can be made every ten seconds. No hit needs to be scored with a targeting solenoid, since the bridges are already in place.

Questions: How could you use a molecular bridge to dispel Possession? A variant of this spell lasts for sixty days. What is its level? How does Possession explain the fact that wizards like birds? 'Only time, death, or divine intervention will break possession.' Why is this true?

Targeted Sponge

Targeted Sponge 5-m ball of sponge that comes with Surrounding Sponge, combined with the fast casting and long range of Enveloping Sponge.

Questions: In the battle between Loose Lips and the Kamazi, Hocus the wizard could not cast Targeted Sponge, but if he could, would this spell have helped him? Can you think of a variant of this spell that would have guaranteed Loose Lips's escape?

Trap

A space bridge is generated and fitted into a bridge ring. The wizard is then able to make four conjured muscles, four conjured sensors, and a ten conjured neurons. The neurons are interconnected to perform a logical calculation based upon information provided by the conjured sensors. Their operation is strictly binary. The sensors are vibration-sensitive bundles of conjured matter. Enclosed in appropriate mechanisms, they can distinguish between audible tones (these mechanisms are one gold piece each). The conjured muscles are made of conjured rope. Each one has a volume of up to 100 cm³. They can be from 1 cm to 1 m long. Both ends of each muscle are fastened to their respective components in the trap by enclosing a pin or loop, which thus constrains it. Somewhere along the length of each muscle is a connection to a neuron. Consult the description of conjured rope given above for the force and range of the conjured muscle contraction. The outputs of the neurons may be fed back upon themselves to give memory to the network, while the initial state of the network may be set by the wizard at the time of creation. Here are some examples of machines that push the limits of the Trap spell complexity: when a door is opened without someone first whistling two tones in sequence nearby, the door will be barred shut from the outside when next it is closed; if a chest is tapped twice while a certain note is spoken, a latch is withdrawn and the chest may be opened. For more sophisticated magical machines, with spirit matter brains, see the Animation spells.

Questions: The trap lasts two days, but the clearing time for this spell is only four hours. How can that be? How much force can a 1-m muscle generate? What other forces can this muscle generate? What do the muscles and neurons look like?

Fifth Level Spells

Animation II

An animation is a creature made by spells. See Animations for more information.

Questions: Does an animation qualify as a spirit? Can you pass an animation through a spirit bridge?

Enslave

Enslave is a variant of Asphyxiate that lasts 100 hr instead of 1 hr, and allows the spell-caster to vary the force in the collar for the duration of the spell. As with Asphyxiate, the target is subjected to a shock of formidability 4 and power 0 when the spell goes off, and suffers 6D10 damage when the collar is tightened with maximum force. The target is the creature's neck, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −5 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +5.

Questions: Why is Enslave two levels more difficult than Asphyxiate? How might an enslaved subject escape the spell? An ogre has a neck twice the width of a sapien adult. It would be easier to hit, but why would the spell be doubly less effective? What would be the level of an Enslave variant effective against ogres?

Grand Surrounding Sponge

Grand Surrounding Sponge is a larger version of Surrounding Sponge. It produces up to 3 mg of conjured sponge in one second. The density of conjured sponge is 0.1 μg/m³, so this 3 mg is sufficient to fill a sphere 20 m in radius if the spell caster throws the bridge ring 20 m into the air. Anyone within 15 m of the center of the spell is subject to a shock of formidability 2 and power 0. Anyone who does not dodge the assault is surrounded by the sponge and constrained, as with Surrounding Sponge. On Clarus, where the maeon repulsion constant is 10 N/μg, the Grand Surrounding Sponge experiences a lift of 30 kN, which is sufficient to lift 3 tonnes on the same planet. This is so great a force that the sponge can tear the roof off a house. In an open space, the sponge rises with such speed that it creates a 30-m diameter vortex beneath it, with the air moving at 10 m/s. This vortex slows the upward movement of the sponge, while the upward movement of the sponge serves to suck air into the vortex. Within a minute, the sphere of sponge will break up and float away, but the vortex will continue spinning vigorously for another minute after the sponge has gone, especially over a smooth, flat surface like that of a pond. People stuck in a Grand Surrounding Sponge will end up being thrown to the ground as the sponge breaks up in its vortex, in which case they will suffer 6D10 damage.

Questions: Why is Grand Surrounding Sponge three levels more difficult than Surrounding Sponge?

Lightening Ball

This spell is a combination of Surrounding Sponge and Annihilate. It makes a sphere of conjured sponge 5 m in diameter, centered upon the bridge ring, and initiates avalanche annihilation. The annihilation spreads to the outside of the conjured sponge in a fraction of a second, and the resulting ball of lightening bursts out to a radius of 10 m. Anything flammable within this radius is ignited. The spell is easy for prescient creatures to anticipate, but difficult to avoid because it is so far-reaching. The wizard has ten hours in which to trigger the spell. After that, the spell expires. Anyone within the lightening ball is subject to a shock of formidability 3 and power 6D10. Lightening Ball is the effect made manifest in the popular adventurer's accessory, the thunder-egg.

When the Lightening Ball occurs, the heat from the annihilating conjured matter causes the air within the ball to expand. It expands and presses outwards against the sponge that has yet to annihilate. Pressure builds up within the sponge. This pressure is great enough to open space tunnels above the ball, so that the lightening ball is accompanies by a column of hot gas and sparks emerging from space tunnels above. If a lightening ball is let off ten meters beneath the ground, those above the ground will see evidence of its occurrence in the appearance of such a column. If the lightening ball occurs deep beneath the ground, where space tunnels have no nearby place to which to vent the pressure in the ball, the ball will become a detonation. Its formidability does not increase, but its power increases by a factor of two to 12D10, and the ball will have the power to blow open doors and break down walls.

Questions: How would you expect the effect of Lightening Ball to depend upon the strength of the maeon wind? How would you expect its effect to depend upon the planet's maeon repulsion? If a man is chained up and subjected to a Lightening Ball, can he dodge it? Would a barrier of conjured wood stop the expansion of a Lightening Ball? Would a barrier of spirit wood stop it?

Shock

Shock is similar to Fear. The spell delivers a sudden, widespread electric impulse to the brain of the victim. The target is the creature's brain, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The impulse subjects the target creature to a shock of formidability 6 which, if not dodged, will knock it out for 1 min. When the creature comes round, it will be dazed, but otherwise unharmed. The spell is triggered verbally and set off with a gesture.

Questions: Would you see anything in the air if you missed your target?

Targeted Slice

The Targeted Slice is the same as Slice, but uses a targeting solenoid instead of a bridge ring. The targeting solenoid gives the caster control of the orientation of the slicing circle. By tilting her head, she can change its orientation. Most wizards prepare the spell so that when their head is vertical, the slice is horizontal. Anyone within 10 m of the spell center suffers a shock of formidability 2 and power 6D10.

Questions: Your enemy is summoning and ogre outside your fort. Your only remaining spell is Targeted Slice. The ogre will be able to smash down your gates. Would it be better to cast the slice upon the summoning bridge before the ogre arrives, or upon the ogre after it arrives?

Vacuum Thruster II

Vacuum Thruster II is like the third-level spell Vacuum Thruster except it provides bridge energy 100 MJ instead of 10 MJ. The force it generates with a 12-cm bridge is the same 2 kN as for Vacuum Thruster. The maximum rate at which it can deliver bridge energy is 10 kW.

Questions: A wizard mounts a Vacuum Thruster at the back of a small row-boat and sets off at full thrust with the help of this spell. With the full 2 kN force, the boat proceeds at 5 m/s. How far can the spell take the wizard across the water? If he turns around after an hour and goes back to his starting point, is the bridge energy of his thruster restored? Suppose the the water becomes calmer and the boat proceeds at 7 m/s with the 2 kN force. What might happen to the thruster bridges?

Sixth Level Spells

Destroy

Destroy is a compact version of Lightening Ball that works with a targeting solenoid. It creates a spherical shell of conjured wood, 3-m in diameter and 10 cm thick, filled with conjured fluid. Immediately the sphere reaches its full size, the spell initiates avalanche annihilation of the foam inside. The annihilation consumes the foam in an a millisecond, but takes a hundred milliseconds to consume the wood. For a hundred milliseconds, therefore, the heat of the annihilation is constrained within the sphere. It heats the contents to thousands of degrees Celcius in an instant. The pressure within opens up space tunnels to the atmosphere above the annihilation. The air and vaporized chemical contents of the sphere vent through these tunnels. By the time the annihilation consumes the wood, the pressure inside the sphere has settled to close to atmospheric. The target of the spell suffers a shock of formidability 7 and power 20D10. Now suppose you hit a person with this spell outdoors at night. The spell kills so quickly that the target hardly feels a thing. That is why the spell is so formidable. Assuming the target does not dodge the spell, it will appear to be enveloped in a flash of white light. Simultaneously, white flashes appear in the atmosphere above the target, constrained within a narrow inverted cone. Then the light is gone, there is a clapping noise, but not too loud, and two smoldering shoes on the ground.

Questions: The sphere filled with conjured fluid is unusual in that it is not homogeneous. How do you think the spell creates such a shape despite the fact that it does not communicate with the conjured matter after growth is initiated? What is the relationship between the internal angle of the cone we mentioned above, the diameter of the metallic core of a planet, and overall radius of the planet?

Atomizing Barrier

Atomizing Barrier is a variant of Space Bridge. It creates a space bridge. The two halves are immediately joined by conjured matter around their rims, and begin to expand. As they grow, the magnetic field they generate increases. In a 1-Y maeon wind, this field will reach Unless the space bridge meets an obstruction, it will expand to 2 m radius in 20 s and remain so for 32 hr before shrinking in 20 s. If the space bridge meets a barrier, such as a passage wall, it will mold itself to the wall and become securely fastened to it by conjured rubber. The same conjured rubber protects the rim of the space bridge from damage. The resulting surface is invisible, since the two halves are flush up against one another. It being an atomic space bridge, anything passing through it will be atomized. This presents a shock of formidability 1 and power 6D10 to anyone walking into it. Nothing may be fired through the barrier without being atomized. Spells such as Choke, Paralyze, Slay, and Flash will work through the barrier.

Questions: How would you destroy an atomizing barrier? How would you detect one?

Escape II

Escape II is like Escape except it will take the spell-caster and two or three companions as well. The Escape II sphere will carry up to 3000 N weight (300 kg). Also, the very outermost layer of the sphere does not disspate. The material beneath it dissipates in an irregular fashion, leaving the outer sphere attached to a shrinking inner sphere by several dozen randomly-spaced columns of intact conjured rubber. If the outer surface is struck by an annihilation spell, it will annihilate in a small area, but the annihilation is unlikely to spread to the inner sphere, depending upon exactly where the sphere is struck by the annihilation. As a result, the annihilation presents a shock of formidability 3 and power 6D10, followed by the annihilation of the entire sphere so that everyone inside plummets to the earth. If the spell-caster or anyone else in the sphere takes the 3 dp shock, this means the annihilation did not engulf the inner sphere nor even the entire outer sphere.

Escaping all together with this spell takes some practice. Everyone involved must jump at the same time, and jump close together. The spell-caster must be facing the others because the conjured sphere will grow from the space bridge he plants upon his back.

Questions: Can people escaping with the spell-caster fire arrows at pursuers on the ground?

Seventh Level Spells

Animation III

An animation is a creature made by spells. See Animations for more information.

Questions: How might you make a lair for your Type III animation in which its muscles will recover from exertion more quickly?

Indirect Lightening

Indirect Lightening allows the generation of the effect of Lightening Ball at remote half of an pre-existing space bridge. The caster takes the Indirect Lightening spell bridge, places it in a bridge ring, and touches the rim of the pre-existing bridge with the spell bridge, as in the simplest of indirect spells, Tuning. The formidability, power, and area of the spell are centered on the remote half of the pre-existing space bridge, as if it were the remote half of a Lightening Ball spell bridge. Because the Lightening Ball is created by the annihilation of conjured matter, the pre-existing space bridge will most likely be destroyed. Roll 1D10 and if the result is 3 or higher, the pre-existing bridge's sheath is annihilated and the bridge collapses.

Questions:

Paralyze

Paralyze is similar to Fear. The spell delivers a powerful electrical signal to the entire brain of the victim. The target is the creature's brain, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The spell subjects the target creature to a shock of formidability 8 which, if not dodged, will cause the victim to be paralyzed for ten minutes. The victim's lungs will still work, and her heart, but she cannot more her limbs or bend her torso. Unlike Fear, Paralyze works on all animals with brains, not just mammals.

Questions: Would Paralyze work on a demon?

Spirit Structure

This spell is similar to Conjured Structure except it makes a structure of spirit wood instead, and allows the wizard more time for the construction.

Questions: When might you be safer in a spirit structure than a conjured structure? Why do wizards prefer spirit wood, while others prefer ordinary wood?

Targeted Lightening

This spell is similar Lightening Ball, but works with a targeting solenoid and no bridge ring.

Questions: Why is Targeted Lightening two levels more difficult than Lightening Ball even though it produces the same effect? Suppose a wizard stands upon the sea shore and a ship sails past five hundred meters out, across the waves, going by at one meter per second across his field of view. The ship and its sails are thirty meters long, twenty meters high, and ten meters wide. He is fighter level ten. He decides to try to set fire to the ship's sails with a Lightening Ball. What is his chance of setting fire to at least a corner of a sail?

Vortex

Vortex produces 31 mg of conjured rubber in a sphere of radius 25 m. As we describe in Grand Surrounding Sponge, a sphere of conjured matter will tend to rise, but in doing so, air must rush beneath to fill the space where the matter used to be. When the sphere is large enough, a vortex always forms beneath the sphere. The pressure of the fast-moving air beneath the sphere drops and holds the sphere down. The conjured rubber will rise at one or two meters per second. The vortex builds up in less than a minute, and is of diameter 50 m. The velocity of the wind beneath the rising sphere of conjured rubber reaches 25 m/s. With the sphere of rubber out of the way, the vortex continues with its own inertia, slowing to a stop over the next two minutes.

Questions: How is the upward force on the sphere related to the pressure difference between the top and bottom sides of the sphere? How is the pressure difference related to the velocity of the air in the vortex beneath the sphere? Show that the velocity of the air is proportional to the square root of the radius of the sphere multiplied by the density of the conjured matter.

Eighth Level Spells

Enfeeble

Enfeeble is similar to Fear. The spell delivers a powerful electrical signal to the entire brain of the victim. The spell subjects the target creature to a shock of formidability 9 which, if not dodged, will cause the victim to lose 10 points of strength (STR) for an hour. This loss is sufficient to make it impossible for an unburdened creature to move more than twenty paces, and for a soldier in armor to collaps. The spell works on mammals only.

Questions: Is it easier to hit an ogre with this spell than a sapien?

Escape III

Escape III is like Escape II except the two halves of the spell bridge separate during the growth of the sphere. The two halves grow to a diameter of 2 m and form part of the floor and ceiling. Looking from below the sphere, people sitting on the floor inside will be out of sight. The space bridge in the floor provides a view out of the space bridge in the ceiling, and so hides the riders. (See Invisibility for more details fo this trick.) Neither will anyone below see the escape sphere itself, because it is made of transparant conjured matter. The spell allows direct control of further production of conjured rubber from the spell bridge. The spell-caster can control his ascent and descent easily, and the flight can last as long as 10 minutes. The Escape III provides the same protection against annihilation as Escape II.

Questions: What do people inside the sphere see when they look down through the floor?

Sixth Sense

Sixth Sense is similar to Scan, in that it allows the wizard to detect matter with remote clusters, but this spell fills the space around the caster to a radius of 2 m with six constantly-moving remote clusters that build up a picture in the caster's mind of the distribution of matter in that area. The spell takes many months practice to use effectively, but an accomplished user can detect a cat running past his feet with the spell alone. The wizard becomes almost impossible to surprise by anyone moving close to him. Even if he is asleep, the spell delivers a sharp warning to the brain if large movements take place near the wizard, and will wake him up just like a loud noise would wake him. The wizard can make his way through a forest in complete darkness. Because the remote clusters that provide the sixth sense are each the size of a grapefruit, it is impossible to distinguish small objects with the sense. The spell scans each point in the 2-m radius around the caster once every second.

Questions: Can this spell detect the presence of conjured matter? What is the minimum speed at which the remote clusters must be moving? Can a wizard combine this spell with Invisibility?

Grand Lightening

This spell is similar to Targeted Lightening. Its area of effect is twice as large, in the same way that the area of effect of Grand Flash is twice as large as that of Flash. The Grand Lightening affects a sphere 40 m in diameter. So large and area of effect precludes the spell-caster throwing a bridge ring. Even at range 40 m, the spell is intensely hot and loud. So Grand Lightening has a targeting solenoid and uses no bridge ring. Anyone within 20 m of the center of the spell suffers a shock of formidability 3 and power 6D10.

Questions: You cast lightening ball in front of a wizard. It turns out that he is holding a Rectangle in front of him, with both halves pressed together so that you can't see it from where you are standing. What effect will the space bridge have upon the Grand Lightening? Will it amplify or attenuate the shock of the attack? Will the space bridge increase or lessen its power? A woman next to the wizard crouches behind a large shield made of metal. Is she better off than the wizard, or worse off?

Ninth Level Spells

Animation IV

An animation is a creature made by spells. See Animations for more information.

Questions: Is a spell-casting animation more similar to a sorcerer, a wizard, or a psionic spell-caster?

Invisibility

This spell makes a wizard invisible. There are signs of his presence if we know what to look for, but to the first approximation, he is standing right in front of us and we cannot see him. The spell creates four triangular space bridges and assembles them together to make two pyramids. This particular variant combines four triangles, each with sides 2.3 m, 2.3 m, and 1.5 m, to make two pyramids 2.0-m tall and 1.5 m square at the base. Each half of a space bridge is a magnetic monopole, so we arrange the four bridges of each pyramid so that their neighbors are of opposite polarity. The magnetic attraction between the bridges binds them together, leaving a gap of no more than 1 mm between them, except at the peak, where there is 20-mm aperture, and at the corners, where the bridges are rounded with a 20-mm radius. Mounted just above the aperture at the peak of the pyramid is small space bridge held in place with conjured wood. The other half of this space bridge is mounted in a space bridge monocle. Conjured wood covers the interior of one of the pyramids so that the space bridges cannot be reached from the inside. Conjured wood covers the exterior of the other pyramid, so that the space bridges cannot be reached from the outside. We call the interior-coated pyramid the "mobile" pyramid and the exterior-coated pyramid the "fixed" pyramid. The edges of the pyramid, where two bridges come together, are each surrounded by a sheath of conjured wood, so as to protect them from harm. We make sure the arrangement of the four bridges is the same in both pyramids. If the bridges are 1, 2, 3, and 4 as we walk clockwise around the mobile pyramid, they will be 1, 2, 3, and 4 as we walk clockwise around the fixed pyramid as well. Furthermore, the faces are oriented so that light entering the mobile pyramid appears inside the fixed pyramid and light leaving the fixed pyramid appears outside the mobile pyramid. As a consequence, we will also have light entering the fixe period appearing inside the mobile pyramid and light leaving the mobile pyramid appearing outside the fixed pyramid. These arrangements complete the spell. The effects last for one hour. In the following paragraphs, we explain how the spell provides both invisibility and protection.

Suppose we place the mobile and fixed pyramids ten meters apart on a lawn. We fasten the fixed pyramid to the ground by leaning some rocks up against the base of its conjured wood coating. Meanwhile, the wizard herself stands inside the mobile pyramid. The interior of the mobile pyramid is coated with conjured wood, so it will rest easily on the wizard's head. She puts on the bridge monocle so that, with one eye, she can see out of the bridge just above her head on the peak of the mobile pyramid. When we look at the mobile pyramid, what do we see? When we look at the fixe pyramid, what do we see? If you think about these questions, you will come to realize that the wizard in the mobile pyramid is invisible to people looking at the mobile pyramid. Instead, she appears to be standing at the location of the fixed pyramid. By symmetry, we must also accept that what she sees looking around her in the mobile pyramid is what can be seen outside the fixed pyramid. She cannot see what is actually in front of her, because the space bridge walls of her mobile pyramid show her what is around the fixed pyramid. In order to see what is outside her own pyramid, she must look through her bridge monocle. In order to rotate the view of the monocle, she must rotate the mobile pyramid, which she can do by standing on her toes, raising it off the grass, and turning.

An observer near the mobile pyramid will see a small, floating circle two meters above the ground. They may notice, if they have good eyesight, or if the sun is particularly bright, four threads of varying colors emerging just below the dark circle and spreading out to the corners of a square on the ground. If the observer takes a careful look at the ground, they will notice a discontinuity in the grass: the grass they see within the square made by the four thread ends is the grass beneath the fixed pyramid ten meters away, not the grass on the ground in front of them. The wizard moves away, carrying her pyramid with her. Our observer sees the same square of grass moving over the lawn. Where it passes, there remains grass that he can kneel down and touch. The wizard stops. Our observer approaches and the wizard turns her mobile pyramid. The observer sees a square of grass rotate. He kneels down and tries to touch this square, but the tip of his finger is atomized by something invisible in the air. He recoils. The wizard moves off quickly, passing over a stone path. The observer sees the square of grass crossing the stone path before it proceeds across the lawn on the far side. Once the wizard is twenty meters away, the observer cannot see even this square. He turns around and sees, ten meters away, a wizard who is apparently walking, and yet staying in the same place. Stationary on the ground about their feet are several rock balanced on their sides. The observer approaches what he believes to be the wizard. The wizard has a contraption on her head that covers one eye, but with her other eye, she sees him and smiles. She stops walking and turns to face him. She reaches out to touch her, but his finger collides with something solid but invisible. His finger is bleeding from its earlier encounter with an atomizing surface, and blood drips down some invisible surface, supported in mid-air. He pushes with the palm of his hand and sees the rocks on the ground moving. But the wizard does not move. He pushes harder, until the invisible fixed pyramid comes free of its rocks and tips over. Now the illusion is compromised. He looks into the base of the fixed pyramid and sees out of the other pyramid. He puts his head inside and sees himself, but rotated by ninety degrees. He reaches out, but his hand once again touches an atomizing barrier. He pulls his head out carefully, stands up, and looks across the lawn. He sees a triangular shape on the lawn thirty meters away: on this shape is displayed a sideways view off the surface of the lawn near where he is standing.

Instead of leaving the fixed pyramid so near the mobile pyramid, the wizard is better off keeping the fixed pyramid in a secure and dimly-lit place. She ventures forth and watches the world through her monocle. Anyone attacking her must deal with the atomizing surfaces of her pyramid. Arrows entering the bridges will be atomized and their exhaust will appear in the fixed pyramid, only to drift out of the mobile pyramid soon after. The only way to threaten the wizard is with targeting spells or by slicing through the conjured wood that protects the edges of the pyramid space bridges. The mobile pyramid itself is dangerous to those outside it. Most adversaries a wizard needs to fear have prescience, which is to say, they have dodging points, so they are unlikely to put any part of their body through one of the bridges, and therefore unlikely to touch its edges either. The wizard can use the pyramid as a weapon, just as we describe in Circle. We leave it to you to figure out the weapon's combat attributes, but we suggest that the wizard could walk unseen through a crowd of people, deterring them with the atomizing surfaces of her spell.

Questions: The wizard in the mobile pyramid of the invisibility spell must breath. Where does the air that he breaths come from? Show how we can deduce the difficulty of the Invisibility Spell from that of the Rectangle spell. Spells like invisibility work well only if those they are trying to deceive do not understand how the spell operates, but are instead mystified and alarmed. How might someone next to the invisible wizard, who knows exactly how the spell works, swiftly reveal the wizard and expose him using nothing more than their bare hands?

Slay

Slay is similar to Targeting Slice with a targeting solenoid, but it is able to make a much smaller slicing bridge appear in soft or fluid chemical matter of density up to 1 g/cm³. The target is the creature's brain, introducing a to-hit roll adjustment of −10 for sapiens, which is balanced by the spell's accuracy of +10. The spell is designed to kill a creature by causing the slicing bridge to appear within the brain. When used in a target creature's brain, Slay presents the target creature with a shock of formidability 10 and power 10D10. When used outside, the slicing bridge expands to a diameter of 1 m. Inside the brain, the slicing bridge stops when it encounters the inside of the scull, so there is little outward sign of its occurrence. Depending upon the orientation of the slice in the skull, the victim might die instantly or after a few seconds.

Questions: Is this spell effective against demons? Why is it so much more difficult to prepare than Choke? Is it more difficult to use?

Tenth Level Spells

Tornado

Tornado produces 1 g of conjured rubber in ten seconds in a sphere of diameter 160 m. It is a larger version of Vortex. In order to get the full effect of the spell, the caster must throw the bridge right straight up in the air, or shoot it in a mithril-plated arrow head to a point thirty or forty meters above the center of the intended tornado. In ten seconds, the sphere is complete and invisible and begins to rise. As it rises, air rushes around and underneath. The velocity of the wind beneath at the edges of the vortex can reach 40 m/s. The sphere of rubber rises a one or two meters per second, sustaining the vortex with the work done by the planet's magical repulsion. From start to finish, the tornado will last up to twenty minutes.

Questions: Assuming that the duration of a vortex is a function only of the dynamic viscosity of air (that's the traditional viscosity divided by the density), the velocity of the vortex, and the radius of the vortex, use dimensional analysis to show that the duration is proportional to the radius multiplied by the square of the velocity. Given the earlier result that the velocity is proportional to the square root of the radius, show that the duration of a vortex produced by a conjured rubber sphere is proportional to the square of the radius of the sphere.

Eleventh Level Spells

Animation V

An animation is a creature made by spells. See Animations for more information.

Questions: Would an animation be able to enter a burning house and rescue your spell books? Could you control your animation with Possess?