Abracadabra, zickity zells, I summon a podcast of our favorite spells! That’s right, this episode is just us nerding out about the spells we like most from speculative fiction. No critical analysis to be found here, just wholesome magic content. Okay fine, there’s a little critical analysis. But only a little, as a treat.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Paige. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[Intro music]Wes: Hello. You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is:
Oren: Oren.
Wes: and…
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And here I am, and because magic is real, I have cast ‘Conjure Coffee’ at 6:40 PM, and I’m excited about it. It’s my cantrip, I’m pretty good at it. But…oh no. Does anyone know what cycle the moon is in? Because I think I failed to make it decaf. So in case anyone has a sleep spell handy, this is going to be a pretty wild ride.
That’s okay though, because I really think we should talk about spells today and I’m all juiced up and want to talk about magic. [laughter] I just thought it’d be fun. We should razzle-dazzle, talk about our favorite magic spells. And, quick disclaimer, maybe a favorite spell is like a spell with a known name or it’s just this magical spell effect. It doesn’t matter. Anything that is magical and spell-like qualifies.
Chris: Wes, I think your magic system needs to be more rational.
Wes: Oh no. I refuse. My magic system is loosey goosey. Pew pew! Sparkle!
[laughter]Oren: Wes, we don’t do fun topics here at the Mythcreants podcast. We spend half an hour telling you about how all your favorite writers are giving you bad advice. I’m pretty sure that’s what we do here.
Wes: The odds of us making some points about that during this podcast are high, so let’s launch into it.
Chris: Yeah, can we help ourselves for one episode? [laughs] We’re not tearing apart some really popular work that some listener loves.
Oren: Well, if you will excuse me for a minute, I would like to argue what the definition of a spell is. I’m gonna go first.
Chris: No, I’m going first.
Oren: You’re going first?
Wes: One other quick caveat. You cannot say that my favorite spell is Earthbending because I will draw the line there. [laughter]
Chris: What? You said anything goes and now it can’t be Earthbending.
Wes: I know. I contain multitudes of hypocrisies. I’m prepared to suffer for it.
Chris: Okay. So is elemental magic out then? Do I have to name the Dragon Dance or something?
Wes: I feel like if you said, “Okay, I really love the elemental magic system of Avatar, and my favorite spell effect within the bending is when you can do this thing.”
Chris: So it’s just too general. Earthbending is too general.
Wes: Yes. That honed-in specificity is what I’m most excited to hear about.
Oren: Nobody’s a prescriptivist until the categories go wrong. And then suddenly…
Wes: Exactly. [laughs] Here I was, I was so prepared to just roll with everything and then I failed.
Oren: All right, Chris, you wanted to go first. What do you got?
Chris: [in a mysterious voice] I put a spell on you, and now you’re mine.
Wes: [laughing] Oh, that’s perfect!
Chris: So, if anybody’s not familiar, Hocus Pocus. And it’s of course a good spell because it involves a very charismatic actress singing and a bunch of people dancing.
Oren: What is the actual effect of that spell?
Chris: It keeps them dancing at the party so nobody can leave the party. They have to keep dancing until they drop. I’ve actually seen that in some other works too. I saw that in one of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales. There’s some other places where you see spells where people have to keep dancing and it’s just kind of creepy and cool.
And it’s actually very convenient for Hocus Pocus because it explains why all of the kids’ parents are busy and can’t help them save the day. Of course, somehow every single parent in town decided to go to this party. The movie is…you know, it’s Hocus Pocus.
Oren: It was a happening party is what that was.
[laughter]Chris: But no, it’s obviously the best part of the movie and it’s a fun spell.
Wes: I think that’s such a good example of a fun spell because it’s like, “Hey, dancing is really fun.” And somebody is like, “Wait a sec. Let’s have Bette Midler, as a witch, put a special spin on that.”
Oren: I also just like any excuse for characters to sing. I like musicals. And I like spec fic musicals, and there aren’t that many of them, and the ones that exist are often pretty bad. So I like any magical reason that the characters have to sing.
So if it’s to cast a spell to make you dance forever, great. If it’s because someone summoned a very fancy musical theater demon. Sure. Great. Whatever. As long as they have to sing, I’m into it.
Wes: Definitely.
Chris: Alright, Oren.
Wes: Yeah, Oren, what do you got?
Oren: So I actually really like Luz’s light rune spell from The Owl House. Not really a big fan of that magic system in general, but…so Luz is a human. And everyone else in the magical area that she ends up going to—cause it’s portal fantasy—is non-human. I think they call themselves Witchlings, which is very confusing because they’re also witches as a profession. And then there are demons who can also be witches, but they’re basically elves. They look like elves, they look like humans with pointy ears.
So basically everyone else in that setting can just do magic naturally and Luz can’t because she’s a human. So she starts trying to learn magic and she has this really cool sequence where she takes video of another character casting a light spell and slows it down and plays it frame by frame, and notices that at one point during the spell, this magical rune appears. And realizes that rune is actually the key to the magic.
And no one else notices this because to everyone else, this is such a basic component that they don’t look into it, because they don’t need to. Because they can cast magic naturally, so who cares? It doesn’t really matter to them that these runes are underpinning what they do, because it doesn’t affect them.
But Luz needs the rune to do magic. And so she does this cool sleuthing to figure it out. And then once she has it, I really like the extrapolation that if she makes the rune bigger, it has a more powerful effect. So she can make a brighter light by drawing a larger rune. And it’s just kind of cool that she has a notebook full of runes. I think that’s neat. I like notebooks full of runes.
So it was a cool spell. It’s part of the ‘a little magic goes a long way’ school of thought, where she doesn’t have a ton of magic, so she uses her light spell in creative ways. At least for a while. It’s not long before she gets a million other spells, but at first it’s just this light rune spell that she has. And I just found that very interesting and I was way more interested in Luz’s magic than in all of the other really OP mages that are running around in that show.
Wes: That’s cool. Yeah.
Oren: Yeah. I thought that was really neat.
Wes: Especially the process of her figuring that out. I really like that.
Oren: When I saw they were doing that, I was like, “Oh, that’s super cool.” Like, I’d been kind of bored with the episode until then. And then I saw her start to play the spell at freeze frame. And I was like, ooh. And I just sat up and took notice. And it was very cool.
Wes: I’ll go next. I’m generally a big fan of polymorph spells. Chris, since you brought up Hocus Pocus, tied for my favorite moment in that is when they turned the boy into the cat, because that chant they do, it’s like, burned into my brain. It’s the best chant.
It goes, “Twist the bones and bend the back. Trim him of his baby fat. And give him fur, black as black. Just. Like. That.” It’s so menacing and awesome. [laughter]
And I also like in Willow, when the evil queen turns the entire army into pigs is a great moment.
Chris: Oh yeah, and Willow’s trying to change Raziel back into her original human form, but keeps changing her into other animals instead.
Wes: Yup. [laughs] Polymorph is fun. I mean, just the shape changing aspect of it. My one gripe is that I do kind of wish stories and/or games would play more with how taking on that drastic form—assuming that you retain your mind and personality—would mess with your senses of perception.
And I’ve never thought about this more than when I was playing Dragon Age: Origins as a mage character with shape changing. And I think the top tier spell for that is you turn into a swarm of insects. And I’m just like, “Okay, wait, hang on. Where is my consciousness located?”
[laughter]Wes: How am I possibly responding to my environment right now? This doesn’t make any sense to me.
Chris: Yeah. But I’m sure in a video game there’s UI constraints. But if you didn’t have those, and you were writing, you could do some really cool stuff with that. And have a character that’s like, the best type of polymorph. Because the character has some really nice abilities like flying around and being hard to hit, but also, it would be hard to carry objects like that. So it has very specific strengths and weaknesses that make it feel different.
Wes: It very much does. I can’t remember which Goosebumps book, because there were like a billion Goosebumps books, but I think there was one where the main character ages really fast overnight, and wakes up in a teenage body.
And I remember R.L. Stine did a really good job having this internal monologue reflect how he kept knocking things over and tripping because his feet and hands were just big. He suddenly went from a nine-year-old to a seventeen-year-old’s body. And I appreciated that so much. And I just feel like polymorph type spells have excellent opportunities to take advantage of that, because you have unlimited potential in what you could turn into, or you could turn someone else into, and I think it’s just a fun spell for that reason.
Oren: That’s basically the premise of the Animorphs series.
Wes: Yes, exactly.
Oren: It’s like, how deep can we get into the polymorph concept? And the answer is extremely.
Wes: Extremely deep.
Oren: The weirdest one in the entire series, cause I’ve read the whole thing, is—cause they have a two hour limit on how long they can stay in any given form before they’re stuck, which is used to create dramatic tension and to explain why one of them has to be a hawk for the first half of the series. So they have this limit and one of the characters gets stuck as a caterpillar.
[laughter]And it’s like, “Oh no.” And it seems like that’s basically the end. And the way they get out of it is, she spins a cocoon and turns into a butterfly and that resets the timer.
Wes: [laughing] Oh yes!
Oren: And it’s like, okay, at first I thought that was a little contrived. But then I looked up a little bit more about how caterpillars turn into butterflies and how it involves turning into soup.
Chris: Yup. They melt into a goo.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s like, well, inside that cocoon is just soup, so that doesn’t make any sense. They have wings as caterpillars, they have internal wings and those melt too, into soup. So I’m willing to concede that that might activate the morphing technology that they have.
[laughter]That story also did really deep dives into stuff like, where does all your extra mass go? If you turn into a small dog, and you’re a human, where’s the extra 150 pounds? And it’s like, “Oh, well, it’s hanging out in hyperspace. Which is usually fine unless a ship flies by at the wrong moment.”
[laughter]And it also does lots of interesting stuff with the instincts or the innate animal mind of whatever shape you take. And some of it is definitely based on some probably outdated ideas of how animals work, cause these books were written in the 90s, but for the most part, it held up pretty well, I thought. I don’t remember if it did alpha wolves, cause they do turn into wolves at some point and it’d be nice if they didn’t. But for the most part, I thought it worked pretty well.
I also really like the polymorph spell because my favorite D&D build is a Buff Sorcerer who can twin polymorph spells onto two of their friends and turn them into either giant apes or T-Rexes, depending on the mood. [laughter] It’s like, you’re a T-Rex now. Enjoy that for a while. It’s fun.
But you know, you have to be level eight for that to work. I can’t turn you into a T-Rex unless you are eight levels of self-actualized. Because otherwise, I could hire two peasants from the village to come with me and turn them into T-Rexes. It’d be great.
Chris: I wish instead, there was some writing to the effect of, well, if you turn peasants into T-Rexes, you probably shouldn’t trust them as T-Rexes. You can turn them, but the T-Rexes might eat you instead.
Oren: Then they might develop class consciousness and realize that as an adventurer, you are an enforcer of the bourgeoisie. Oh dear.
Wes: Oh no.
Chris: Another one I like, I think this is in The Witches, is a spell that traps people into paintings.
Wes: Ooh.
Chris: It’s just cool and creepy, but also creates an interesting effect where you see a painting, and like, somebody is suddenly moving when you look back. But also, you can kind of imagine that person’s reality inside of the painting. Also, for the next commenter who points out a typo in one of my blog posts in a really smug way. Just—in painting. There you go.
Oren: Get in the painting
Chris: Sorry, new moderation system.
[laughter]Oren: I always wonder what is life like for someone who is stuck in a painting or is a painting? What do they perceive? I have always wondered that. Or like, any setting that has talking photographs or talking artwork, I’m like, are you conscious? Are you aware that you inhabit a flat plane? I have so many questions.
Wes: If I learned anything from that Supernatural episode, it’s that you’re just angry and wanting to murder whoever is looking at your painting.
Oren: Is the painting a three-dimensional area like normal, but you can’t leave the area that’s depicted in the painting? Is it like a Hollywood set? Like, if you walk behind the farmhouse that’s in the painting, is it just a flat plane? Like, there’s no farmhouse behind it, it’s just the facade of a farmhouse? I don’t know, but I want to.
Chris: So many questions. Which is one of the reasons why it’s a cool spell because it opens questions and makes it mysterious.
Oren: It also just has more thematic resonance than, like, “I banished them to the fire plane” or whatever. Cause like a painting is there, it’s a physical object that represents another world and it’s like, “Ha ha! I have turned artistic representation against you. Feel the forced perspective.” [dramatic magical sound effect]
Speaking of taking symbolism and turning it against your enemies. This is a spell-quote-unquote-ish? From the novel Spinning Silver, which I really, really liked, which is that the fairy king—I think they’re called Staryks, but they’re fairies, basically—the fairy king comes to the protagonist and is like, “I need you to turn this silver into gold,” and gives her some silver coins.
And she’s like, “Oh, okay.” And so she goes and makes some wise investments and it pays off. And so she comes back to the fairy king with gold and he’s like, “Alright, that’s pretty cool. Now do it again with more silver.” And she does that three times. And then it has the effect of giving her the supernatural power to turn silver into gold when she goes into the fairy world, which I thought was super cool.
I thought that was really neat. It also played into the plot really well. Spoilers for that book, if you haven’t read it, I probably should have put those earlier, but it’s a fairly old book by now. Then she gets into this deal with the king where he’s like, “You have to turn all of the silver in this room into gold by an arbitrarily short time, or I’m going to murder you.” And she’s like, “Alright, well, he never said I couldn’t take silver out of the room.”
Chris: That’s the best thing about fairies, the whole ‘technically accurate,’ by the word type of deals.
Oren: Yeah, I just found that very neat. At first it was just fun. It was unexpectedly fun for this character to be making investments to save her family, because if she didn’t do what this fairy king wanted, bad stuff was going to happen. It made for a very cool narrative.
And then of course there were a bunch of other POVs that were boring that shouldn’t have been the story.
Chris: Oren! We were trying to focus on cool spells. We had a good thing going.
[laughter]Oren: No. I can’t do it.
Wes: Can’t do it.
Chris: Alright Wes.
Wes: Steering us back in. D&D has like a billion spells, but I picked one that I really liked. It was kind of hard, but I really like the Rope Trick spell because I just think it’s funny. Most adventurers carry around some rope and it’s like, okay. Carry around rope, that’s great. And then the wizard is like, “Hey, yo, you got any rope?” And they’re like, “Yeah, of course, what are you going to do with it?”
And he goes, “Watch this.” And casts Rope Trick on the rope. The rope goes straight up into the sky to its full length. Then at the top, a tiny little pocket dimension opens up and the wizard’s like, “Hey, we can all go hang out up there for like an hour if you guys want. And no one will be able to attack us. It’ll be great.”
And so they all just climb up into some kind of weird, extradimensional space and you can pull the rope back up and hang out up there and just have a good time with your friends and look down on the world below. And it’s like, okay.
Chris: The funny thing is that a rope spell is used for a pocket dimension?
Wes: Yes, that’s actually one of my favorite parts. Aside from like, animating furniture or whatever, not a ton of spells focus on, “Hey, this normal thing right here. I’m gonna make it magic.” This one’s like, “Hey, that piece of rope there, I’mma make it magic.” I just think that’s very fun.
Chris: But in a very non-rope-related way.
Wes: In a very non-rope-related way. Like, you could just open a pocket dimension, and walk through it. But it’s like, no, you have to climb the rope.
Chris: But you need rope to do that spell.
Wes: Yes, you have to have some rope to enchant.
Oren: It’s a rope trick. Well, what’s that going to do? It’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll make the rope tie somebody up, or it’ll magically untie any knot or whatever.” It’s like, nah, pocket dimension. But you need to climb a rope to get there.
Wes: I think that’s also one of my other favorite parts is if no one knows what that spell is, you’re like, “Hey, I picked up this great spell, Rope Trick.” They’re going to think what you just said, Oren. Like, “Oh, okay. Great functional use.” Nope, you are way off, buddy. [laughter]
Chris: I don’t know how long a short rest is. Can you go up there and get away from fights?
Wes: I think that’s kind of the point of the spell is you could go up there for a short rest, but since the rope just goes straight up, some people will use it to go over a tall wall. You could just portal up and then swing across the wall.
Chris: Use a pocket dimension to get over a wall.
Wes: Exactly. But I’m a big fan of the spells that create increasingly weirder spaces for you to just hang out with your party members and eat some food and maybe take a nap. There’s so many spells that let you do that. And I think that’s really fun. The rope trick is the weirdest and that’s why it’s the best.
Oren: Right. You have Leomund’s Tiny Hut or whatever. It’s like, alright. So that creates a hut, and at that point, it’s reasonable to be like, alright, well, this is a place where you rest. But then you have Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, which is if you feel like wasting a higher level spell slot on a tiny hut. But you know, it also definitely gives you the impression of creating some kind of space that you’re going to hang out in. And it’s like nah, Rope Trick.
Wes: Rope Trick.
Oren: And it’s like, what is that? What is that? But I can’t be mad. Although I’ve also had a lot of fun with an Animate Rope item. Cause I would use that whenever the GM would be like, “Hey, okay, so only some of you can actually fly, how do you get over this obstacle?” and be like, “Well, allow me to show you this uncommon animated rope that I got.” Used that for a surprising number of instances.
Chris: My next favorite spell is the creepy possessed dancing dress in Legend.
Wes: Ooh.
Oren: I’m sensing a theme here.
Chris: [Laughs] What can I say? So this old movie, Legend, which has a young Tom Cruise in it. And it definitely looks like it was based on Zelda, because you’ve got, basically, Tom Cruise as a Link character that goes into the woods, and he’s given a sword and some armor and a gets a little fairy companion, and has to fight a big red dude. And his love interest wears, like, a Zelda outfit.
But there’s a sequence in there where the love interest, Lily, is in this bad guy’s castle lair and he wants to seduce her. So he sends a dress. And in the movie, it’s got a figure in it, but it’s like plain black and sparkly. So it has no face. It has kind of a form. And it shows up and there’s this dark waltz music, and it just starts dancing around and then gets Lily to dance with it. And then they merge and she’s wearing a cool dress. And now she’s…maybe evil?
Oren: She has a cool dress, so, does it matter?
[laughter]Oren: The scene where she dances with the dress is very interesting. And that whole movie is very fascinating from a production standpoint, because it’s a weird movie, it’s full of nonsense. Like they have this whole thing about how he needs to go get this sword. And then he just loses the sword at some point, and it disappears between frames and he just doesn’t have it anymore.
Chris: I looked back into how this was made. But you can tell that the screenwriter, the guy who made it, had some half-baked novel ideas that he had in his drawer, or something, that he just took out and made into a script. Because there’s just lots of weird things that happen in that movie that are clearly alluding to a much bigger, more complicated world or events that are never shown.
Like, one of the characters has a weird hand, like a demon hand or something like that. And there’s no explanation for why they have that. And other confusing things, like, it takes quite a while to realize that the elves age backwards.
Oren: That’s not part of the plot. It’s just there.
Wes: It’s just there.
Chris: It’s not part of the plot. You wonder for a while why the younger elves are commanding the older elves. And eventually it’s like, okay, I think they must age backwards.
Oren: I also really love whatever spell it is that makes the unicorns in that movie produce whale sounds. Some unicorns roll up and someone starts playing their recorded whale song, and I’m like, what?
Wes: Oh boy.
Oren: What is happening here?
Wes: You both are making me really want to rewatch this movie. It’s been like twenty years since I saw it.
Chris: You really should.
Oren: It’s very weird, but it’s not boring.
Chris: Tim Curry is also the big red dude. The antagonist.
Wes: I think Tim Curry is probably how the writer got away with the half-baked idea. It’s like, we’ll cast Tim Curry for it as the villain. And they’re like, okay, great. Sold. He can carry that movie. Of course.
Oren: Speaking of weird love interest things, my one D&D spell that I have on this list is called Love’s Pain. A.K.A. slay loved one.
Wes: Oh my god.
Oren: It’s a spell from the Book of Vile Darkness, which is for the most part, a very silly book that waffles between being over the top Snidely Whiplash, then just being kind of gross. I wouldn’t recommend it even if you were still playing 3.5, but it has this one spell called Love’s Pain, which does D6 damage per every two levels of the caster, standard spell.
But its twist is that it doesn’t do the damage to the target, it does the damage to the target’s closest friend or dearest loved one. And I love this for a few reasons. One, I love that the spell has to figure that out. Who is your closest friend? How do you quantify that?
Chris: I love the drama that could be created when the spell is cast, and it damages a different person than it’s supposed to.
Oren: It’s like, if you’re married and someone casts it and the spouse is like, “Ahh!” and then nothing happens. And it’s like, “Fred, you got something you want to tell me?” [laughter] Or does the spell always go for the person you think is your closest friend or dearest loved one? Or is there, like, a deeper thing? Cause sometimes we imagine relationships to be different than they are.
So are you going to find out that actually you have a much closer bond with this other person that you haven’t been appreciating, and then that will allow you to grow as a person? Does it prioritize platonic relationships, or familial ones, or romantic ones? It doesn’t say, it just says closest friend or dearest loved one. How does that work? Who knows? So many weird questions come up when you cast the spell.
Chris: I also just love the idea that as a villain, you would be facing off with some enemies and you would decide that the best tactic for you to use is to cast the spell on your enemy, knowing that somewhere, some person who you can’t exactly predict is going to get hurt. If you wanted them to get hurt, you could just hurt them, instead of casting this loved one spell on somebody else and then maybe it’ll get to the right person.
Oren: Look, you want to torture your enemy’s love interest or loved ones, but you don’t want to go and find them. This is a sixth level spell or whatever.
Chris: Okay. But does it also add a scrying ability to see its effect? Cause it wouldn’t be a very effective holding somebody hostage device if they can’t actually see its effect.
Oren: They’re going to have to take your word for it, okay?
Chris: It’s like, I swear. I swear that green fireball I just threw at you that didn’t seem to have any effect. It really did.
Wes: You’re tormented about what pain your loved one is in right now. I can see it on your face, don’t lie.
Oren: See, the way you protect yourself against that spell is by not taking ranks in the spell craft skill. Because if you have ranks in the spell craft skill, then you can be like, “Oh no, that’s the Love’s Pain spell. I saw the way that they cast it, oh no.” But if you don’t have that, you’re like, “Whatever, why should I believe you?”
[laughter]I also love a funny backdoor use of this, because in D&D, important people are usually high level, and therefore powerful and hard to deal with. If you can find whoever is a closest friend or dearest loved one of a high-powered character, this is just free damage that you can do to them from anywhere.
And they can’t retaliate unless they happen to know where you are. And D&D doesn’t have very many remote orbital nuke spells. Those are pretty rare in Dungeons and Dragons. And normally you have to do a lot of complicated combos, but no, this one just lets you do it. It’s like, all right, minions, go capture everyone this guy was friends with and I’m going to start casting this spell on them until I finally get to him.
[laughter]Chris: I mean, imagine if the PCs got a hold of this and it’s like, “Okay, look, we could fight the big bad that the GM picked out for us. Or…we could search around for somebody else until we find somebody that we can use the spell on.”
Oren: You thought you were clever because you gave your villain a sympathetic backstory with their beloved aunt who raised them. And the PCs are like, “Alright, let’s go find that aunt.”
Wes: [laughing] Oh no!
Oren: Don’t worry. The aunt will be fine. It’s just such a weird spell. You would never actually use that spell. And I would probably never use anything from the Book of Vile Darkness, but of all of them, it was just so weird. I couldn’t help but love it.
Wes: All these spells are fine and good, but we truly know that the most favorite spell of all is of course, the beloved Fireball. Because nothing solves a problem like throwing a giant boiling ball of fire at it, and letting it explode and burn away all of your problems. Hey, there’s the villain, and the villain’s loved one. Two birds, one stone. Fireball.
But seriously, everything has Fireball in it. There’s some kind of cultural fascination with throwing a ball of fire. And I like it. What can I say? I like it.
Chris: It’s also probably a pretty easy special effect.
Wes: Yes. Chris nails it as usual.
[laughter]Oren: Some part of me just loves that it’s apparently D&D tradition that at third level you get two big area of effect damage spells. One of them is Fireball and one of them is Lightning Bolt, and Lightning Bolt is always worse. They’ve had five editions now to figure this out, and no, they refuse. We’re not going to balance Lightning Bolt to make it as good as Fireball. Lightning Bolt is the spell we put in there to trick you into thinking that there’s another third level damage option.
I think with that, we are going to have to end this episode of the podcast because we are all out of spell slots. Those of you at home if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com.
Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have a Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com.
We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro music]P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Idea for DMing: Let a PC cast Love’s Pain against the villain. After they roll the damage, smile coyly and tell the player that they take the damage.
One of my favourite magical effects is shapeshifting. It’s just so cool and versatile, there’s so many things that can be done with it. I too have often wondered about the sensory aspect – even just the physical feeling of having a differently shaped body. What does it feel like to have a tail, or a nose/mouth that extends out from your face, or to naturally walk on four legs? The thought fascinates me.
I imagined being trapped inside a painting to be the fantasy equivalent of Black Mirror’s “cookie” device.
I believe that rope trick is inspired by the “Indian Rope Trick.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rope_trick
The disappearing at the top of the rope is integral in some versions.
Fireball (5e D&D) is my 12-year-old’s favorite spell. It is totally overpowered compared to 1e D&D (specifically AD&D) where it could cause collateral damage like melting treasure. Evocation wizard reaches 5th level? Get fireball. Lore Bard reaches 6th level? Get fireball.
Also, the following meme:
An arrow may have your name on it, but Fireball is addressed “To Whom It May Concern.”
Fireball exists because magic spells in fantasy have to be at least as capable of what human technology of the time is capable of. Since incendiary advices existed for a long time by the time D&D came into the world, magic users had to have something that was like a magic bomb.
My favorite spells are those that solve the servant problem like Animate Dead. So many people are running off for jobs in the new factories, mines, and shops that is simply impossible to find staffing for your villainous lair these days. Animate Dead creates a reliable pool of skeletons and zombies to keep the place up and running even if a stray bone gets into the soup now and again.
You also definitely save on rations – skeletons don’t eat and zombies shouldn’t have anything with salt…
My favorite spell is “Command Word” it’s when you can force a person to do something but it has to be one word. I pick “auto-defenestration”.
What if there isn’t a window nearby? ;-)
There’s always a window nearby if you run long enough.
Fireball spells sound cool.
Regarding D&D spells, my favorite is Reincarnate. It’s such an incredible RP opportunity! And I’m a sucker for random effects. Unfortunately, I’ve never had the occasion for it to be used on me.