Use these rules to augment any tabletop RPG / storytelling type game (e.g. Dungeons & Drapers).
I. Spells are woven by weaving words into formal verse. Every spell must describe an effect and name a target. Every particular combination of words only works once, ever. More complex spells require more elaborate verse forms.
CANTRIPS. Rhyming couplet, with any syllable count.
GLAMORS. Haiku.
ARS ELEMENTA. Heroic couplet.
MINOR CONJURATIONS. Limerick.
BEWITCHMENTS & ENCHANTMENTS. Heroic stanza.
DIVINATIONS. Couplet in trochaic octameter or hexameter.
HEALING. Rhyming triplet.
BLIGHTS & HEXES. English sonnet.
BLESSINGS & BUFFS. Italian sonnet.
WEATHERWORKING. Quatrain in dactylic hexameter.
DEMONOLOGY. Rhymed acrostic, naming the spirit.
SUBSTITUTIARY LOCOMOTION. Ottava rima.
TRANSMUTATIONS & TRANSFIGURATIONS. Fourteener triplet.
MALEFICIENT MINSTRELRY. Fornyrðislag.
ABJURATIONS. Skeltonics.
MAJOR CONJURATIONS. Villanelle.
NECROMANCY. Rondel.
MIRACLES. Ballade.
II. Magic may create unexpected effects. Spells that will cohere well with your wishes are:
A spell whose sound is an echo to its sense.
For the short spells, neat and polished.
For the long, mellifluous and fleet.
A spell that is skilfully sung or accompanied on an instrument.
III. How to cast a spell that fails to kindle, or twitches then dwindles, or blazes then mutates, or bewitches an ally, or spills into the world filled with glitches:
By using rhythms that stray from the metre without good reason.
By using rhymes that twist one word to the shape of another without good reason.
IV. The points II. and III. above hold for most of the central lands, but magic changes in the peripheries. It's said that the sorcerer minstrels of isles in the eastern reach employ a different art, called by some “the Open Field.”
V. It's said that the witch troubadours of the snowy wastes in the west ply yet another sorcery, emphasizing melodious pitch and repetition. Here is the template for their necromany:
The proforma for divination and temporal manipulation sounds more like:
These are the kinds of spells that create artificial beings:
It is said that for practitioners of this art, the longer the working, up to two minutes, the more intense its puissance. It is said that a well-woven enchantment must not only describe the desired effect, but also include circumstances and affairs, and indeed desires, not directly pertaining to the desired effect, in which the practitioner's magical desires will take root and from which they will draw nourishment. But this sounds dangerous indeed. How does world's magical energy recognise which desires are the root, which the stem, which the flower of the working? How do we ourselves? The truth is, the workings of this art are not well understood except perhaps by the witch troubadours themselves, and certain bears.
