Spells By Any Other Name Would Cast As Harsh.
POWERS ENUMERATED:
OLDTECH & FANTASCIENCE
These are the accepted and known secret sciences, indistinguishable from magic, that promise mastery over worlds of matter and mind.
By Source
UVG 2E
What is a spell?* Is it an old ritual for jump-starting an autogolem? Handed-down sacred physics? Or actual instructions for summoning powers from beyond the frontiers of reality? Few care.**
These spells leave a lot of precise definitions up to you. They are listed with a generic name, some alternative names, a description of their Range [R], Target [T], and Duration [D]. Casting a spell is normally not risky for someone who has some idea of what they are doing. Overcharging a spell, however, is risky. Possibly risky enough to detonate a wizard’s head.*** One might offset some dangers with magic drugs, a sacrifice, a special item, or a higher level.
*”It is a power,” hisses the catspaw.
**”We care, we care very much,” grumbles the vaseface.
***”Not much of a wizard if they do that,” purrs the catspaw.
READER: The UVG 2E spells listed here are ADJUSTED. Each has a Power [P] rating added, which also doubles as the number of life points each spell costs. Conveniently, every spell listed in the UVG 2E was of the 1st (thus lowest), power.
Alter Self
Inner Beauty Manifest, Mind Over Body
P: 1 R: touch T: self D: 1 hour
The wizard’s mind resculpts their features. They can resemble a specific person, provided the wizard has studied them up close, or a general type. No abilities are altered.
Alternatively, the wizard can choose to gain gills, low-light vision, or another minor natural ability at the GM’s discretion.
Overcharge: the effects are permanent.
Animate Corpse
Artificial Post-Mortality, Wake the Shell
P: 1 R: touch T: corpse D: permanent
In 1 hour, a target reasonably intact human-sized corpse rises as a post-mortal zombie (p.209). The corpse is animated by a soul fragment and shreds of residual personality. It obeys simple orders given by the wizard, but must be reminded every 6 hours (or more frequently in a chaotic environment). A wizard can control a number of post-mortals equal to their Level without risk of rebellion.
Overcharge: the corpse awakens instantly. Alternate: awakens as a higher-level or specialized post-mortal.
Burdenbeast Modification
Art of Carriage, Usha’s Useful Mutation
P: 1 R: touch T: creature D: permanent
The wizard modifies a human-sized or larger creature to carry an additional sack of goods. The ritual requires 6 hours and a sack of beast egg masses (€500). Unwilling targets get a save.
Cerebral Purge
Harsh Awakening, Reality’s Cold Knife
P: 1 R: 10m T: creature D: 0
The wizard uses a telechronic wave to purify the target’s brain of any impurities—drugs or mind-altering spells. The target loses 1d6 Life and their recent memories become fuzzy. Unwilling targets get a save.
Overcharge: The target loses 2d6 Life and forgets what happened in the last hour. Unwilling targets still save.
Dissolution and Resolution of the Spirit
Fey Slumber, Hard Reboot
P: 1 R: touch T: a willing creature D: 1 day
The wizard dissolves a creature’s spirit, leaving an inert shell or pseudocorpse. After 1 day, the spirit ‘reboots’, wiped clean of spiritual parasites, daemons, code-worms, or mind-affecting spells.
Overcharge: The target is inert for a week. The reboot also repairs physical injuries and ailments.
Dryland Sculpture
Utilitarian Livingstone Bungalow, Rite of Coral Form
P: 1 R: touch T: 5m diameter area D: permanent
Over 6 hours the wizard coaxes a livingstone brick (1 stone) to grow into a dryland coral form of any shape they want within the target area. Hemispheres are popular. Don’t forget a door.
Entropic Reversal
The Untiming Charm, Zundan’s Awakening of Aways
P: 1 R: 3m T: object (tool or machine) D: 0
The wizard draws a 1 meter diameter chronomantic circle around the target object. When the drawing is complete, a flash of para-entropy restores the object to perfect function and decays everything else within the circle. The ritual takes 15 minutes.
Overcharge: allows a 10 meter diameter circle.
Floating Disc
Shield of the Righteous, Mage’s Mule
P: 1 R: 30m T: point D: 1 hour
The wizard creates a concave disc of stuckforce 1m in diameter. The disc hovers, can be pushed at a walking pace, and can be tilted to create an almost impenetrable barrier. The disc vanishes if it is more than 30m from the wizard.
Overcharge: the disc can be up to 5m in diameter and moves at the wizard’s spoken command.
Gem Bomb
Jeweler’s Fireball, Uzud’s Exploding Flower of Stone
P: 1 R: touch T: gem D: 0
The wizard carves an explosive forcefield into a gem worth at least €20. It explodes on impact, dealing 2d6 damage to all nearby.
Overcharge: it explodes like a Fireball.
Imbue Edge
Seka’s Spearcraft, Vorpalize
P: 1 R: touch T: edged weapon D: 6 hours
The wizard whispers to a weapon, imbuing it with cunning, lust, and humor. It deals +2 damage and can harm spirits, daemons and other intangibles for the spell’s duration.
Overcharge: on a critical hit, the target must save or die.
Knock / Lock
Locksmith’s Lament, Seal of Hashoon
P: 1 R: 10m T: lock D: permanent
The wizard summons a fragment of consciousness into a target lock. Overjoyed, the dimly sentient object burbles at the edges of the wizard’s mind, begging to please. It unlocks or locks itself. Magical locks save with a bonus equal to their wizard’s Level.
Overcharge: the door or portal is flung open or sealed, welded, or fused shut.
Linked Portals
Lesser Astral Voyage, Nilbreg’s Convenient Tunnel
P: 1 R: touch T: area D: 30 minutes
The wizard draws two circles of 3 meter radius in the air. The circles are linked by an astral unreality bridge. Anything that enters one hoop exits the other unchanged, but with its vector of motion altered by the hoops’ position. Two hoops positioned above each other let an object fall to terminal velocity.
Overcharge: the orientation of the portals can be adjusted at will. The portals can also be thrown up to 10 meters.
Magic Jar
Abned’s Bottled Ba, Crystalized Mind
P: 1 R: touch T: creature D: permanent
The wizard transfers an unconscious creature’s personality into a delicate crystal worth €1,000. The procedure erases the original personality. The process takes 30 minutes.
Overcharge: the creature’s personality is copied, not erased. There is a 50% chance of catastrophic ego conflict or moral partitioning.
Process Food
Generate Pink Slime, Maker’s Manna
P: 1 R: touch T: raw matter D: permanent
After a 1 hour ritual, the wizard turns a sack of inedible organic material into nutritious food (1 sack of supplies). Causes magic cancer if consumed for a prolonged period.
Overcharge: creates food from inorganic matter.
Raise Dead
The Seventh Abomination, The Dark Hakaba
P: 1 R: touch T: corpse D: permanent
After a 6-hour ritual, the wizard calls back a creature’s soul and binds it to its corpse, creating an undead abomination and a parody of life. If the creature has been dead for more than 24 hours, only echoes of its personality and memories (Ba) remain. This spell must be overcharged to call back the soul of any creature of worth and potency.
Overcharge: the wizard can give the raised creature one short command, which the creature will attempt to obey to the best of its abilities.
Recall Soul
Necroflare, Ka-Theft
P: 1 R: touch T: corpse D: 0
After a 1 hour ritual, the wizard calls back a creature’s soul, which erupts from the corpse as a coiling serpent of ectoplasmic fire. The soul can be captured in a golem, used to power obscene artifacts, or merely used for theatrical effect. This spell must be overcharged to call back the soul of any creature of worth and potency.
Overcharge: the soul is bound in a portable wispy globe for up to 3 hours.
Speak With Husk
Echoes of the Mind, Necrophone
P: 1 R: 3m T: corpse D: 10 minutes
The echoes of personality trapped in a corpse answer three questions posed by the wizard. The corpse can lie.
Overcharge: the corpse carries on a full conversation for the spell’s duration. It cannot lie, but it can evade.
Supplicate the Rotting God
Turn Back the Wheel of Love and Death
P: 1 R: touch T: corpse D: 0
The wizard sacrifices at least one sentient creature to restore one recently deceased creature to life. The total level of the target and the sacrifice(s) must be approximately equal. The ritual takes 1 hour per sacrifice and will go disastrously wrong if interrupted. The target is restored to life and a semblance of health for a year and a day.
Three-Point Immobility
Celestial Ladder, Craft Floating Platform
P: 1 R: touch T: solid object D: 1 hour
The wizard manually tethers an object to three physical points with strands of stuckforce. Once tethered, the object is immobile—even if suspended in mid-air.
Overcharge: the tether is permanent.
Toxin Render
Dwarf’s Diesel Distillation
P: 1 R: 10m T: toxic waste D: 1 hour
The wizard uses a 1 hour ritual to convince ambient noösphere-linked animalcules to gather a sack’s worth of toxic waste and convert it into usable vehicle or golem fuel. Corrodes engines if used for prolonged periods.
Overcharge: converts material that is not toxic or is not waste.
Yellow Foresight
Visions of the Cautious Merchant
P: 1 R: 1km T: 100m diameter circle D: 0
The wizard consumes a soap’s worth of saffron (€10) and meditates for 1 hour to scan auras in the target area. They get a general idea of the number of sentients and the general mood. If the sentients are very different from the wizard, reading the mood may be impossible.
Overcharge: consuming a dangerous amount (€100) of saffron lets the wizard implant a positive attitude into a few sentients.
ERK
Strewn among the … leftovers? Ruin? Picnic? Are cryptic things that interface with the hud in your heart, whispering access to technologies you never dreamt of.
“Magic spells,” gibbers the daemon, all careless glee.
You intuit that you can store one of these … powers … in your inventory as a spell or a metaphysical device. Each of them costs … 1 life to activate. What does that mean? How do you know this? Why is that knowledge fading? Quickly, you grab one … perhaps it will be useful?
There are the powers already described and the powers only implied.
The powers described in the document salvaged from the ends of time now make themselves known.
Anti-Babylon
Universal Translation Protocol
P: 1 R: close T: 1 creature or object D: 1 hour
There is a unified source code underlying reality. This spell lets the user communicate successfully with another entity: plant, animal, mineral, or data store. Entities without senses may have little to say.
Overcharge: All objects within arms’ reach. Or short-range communication at a distance.
Damp Mass
Nosigoro Logistical Augment
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 sack D: 1 day
A sub-reality field halves the object’s interactive mass. An object of 100 kilos acts like one of fifty.
Overcharge: The mass is halved again. Or it affects an object of twice the size. Or it lasts a week instead.
Egregious Topology
Fractal Phase Shift
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 hand or stone D: 1 minute
Irrational post-realistic mathemagic pushes an object into an anakata superposition with common matter. An item can pass through a door, a hand through a box lid.
Overcharge: Affects 1 person or sack.
Essence Sift
Abstracted Attractor
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 stone or bottle D: 5 minutes
By articulating the names and locations and velocities of one substance, it is drawn out of a mixture. Salt filters from water, organics rise from soil, water precipitates from air. The finer the name and knowledge, the more perfect the sift.
Overcharge: Two substances are drawn out at once. Or a sack’s worth of substance is sifted over half an hour.
Motor Fixative
Rental Upskill Initiative
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 creature D: 1 day
Temporarily burns an observed practical skill into a brain. After watching a swimmer or flyer or gunner in action, the creature can perform the same.
Overcharge: It lasts a week instead.
Reason’s Harvest
All-Library Interface
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 item or book D: 1 minute
The harvest protocol skims the ambient infotronium cloud of an object—essentially, it copies a book’s worth of information directly into the user’s mind.
Overcharge: Ten books’ worth, but this is painful.
The spells implied in the document salvaged from the ends of existence now are made known.
Hlod Person
Dyslexic Demon’s Binding, Leshnik’s Unforseen Constriction
P: 4 R: close T: a person D: 1 hour
Wave your hand like the six-times folded frond and watch your target become as a log of wood. Hard, stiff, unmoving, receptive to carpentry.
Overcharge: The change is permanent.
Nihil Est!
Life’s End Made Present, Hadi’s Self-Immolation Binding
P: 8 R: touch T: a sentient target D: 1 year
Between one step and the next, you flicker between existence and non-existence, you age a year and a creature you touch disappears into the nothing of wormspace for a year. No save.
Overcharge: you age seven years and a kilometer diameter sphere centered on your soul disappears into the nothing of wormspace for a year. Overcharge again to remain behind to watch the sphere disappear.
Dangerous: no matter how powerful you are, this spell imperils your existence.
Pyreball
Instant Incendiary, Damora’s Placid Inferno
P: 6 R: touch, or as thrown T: 10m diameter D: a day, then instant
You take a ball-sized burning ember from a pyre or bonfire and speak the placatory formulas to trap the entire fire within. When the ball strikes a hard surface (or is struck), all the trapped fires suddenly erupt, dealing 5d6 damage to all creatures caught in its blast radius. The ball dissipates harmlessly after a day.
Overcharge: the ball deals 10d6 damage or its fires keep for a month.
Tragic Missile
Antipersonal Guided Force Bolt, Cupid’s Cranial Penetrator
P: 2 R: roughly 30–50m T: anything with a mind D: instant
You visualize a channel connecting the local ambient energy fields with the soul-personality dyad of an entity you can see or imagine. Once you release your visualization, the energies fly into the nexus of that entity’s mindspace, like a noöspheric homing missile. The effect is quite painful, dealing 2d4 damage plus 1 damage for every level, charisma, aura, and thought point of the target. Yea, the stronger they are, the harder tragedy strikes. The missile leaves no mark.
Overcharge: You visualize three channels at once, striking a single target thrice or three different targets.
Our Golden Age
The twenty magical spell albums recorded as the Canon of the Cat by the Perfect Companion Yon IIIc.
Each afficionado of magic albums has their favorite. However, few would dispute that the twenty albums recorded as the Canon of the Cat by the Perfect Companion Yon IIIc in Crawling Throne magazine are a good place to start.
- The Healing Fantascience
- Creative All-Chemistry
- The Awakened Sphere
- Biomechanical Perfection
- The Cosmic Logos
- The Existential Void
- The Flying Serpent
- The Golem Crucible
- The Hard Light Wall
- The Iron Symphony
- The Necrolexicon
- The Master Force
- The Mother Electric
- The Oldtech Key
- Delusion Songs
- The Tree of Life
- The Gates of Erebus
- The Correct & True Apocalypse
- Summoning the Omnipresent Epicenter
- The Broken Soul
These albums and some of their most famous spells are described in detail on the following pages. Even Dalgba Dhol, the undying editor of Crawling Throne,agrees confirms that folk traditions have created many more spells than even such a compendium could hope to cover.
ALBUMS WILL BE ADDED AS THEY ARE TRANSLATED FROM UB0.93c
The Veda of the Great Healer Arkhiatros
aka The Healing Fantasciences
“Death is a malfunction,” said the ageless leech Ziva Lunga.
At least, that is how her fragmentary words are translated today. After the Great Forget only the most arrogant charlatan would claim to know now all the wonders of the iatric mediwizards.
Anne Astec
Iatric Priest Painkiller
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 creature D: a day
Overrides a creature’s pain response, providing relief from pain and burdens. Wait, did the scribe mishear “anesthetic”?
Overcharge: It lasts a week.
Burden Share
Sanator’s Empathy Ritual
P: 1 R: touch T: 1 creature D: several hours
The caster taps into a creature’s essence to transfer one of its burdens—fatigue, injury, anxiety, or other affliction. This burden transforms into a spiritual stone, a healer’s burden, which passes into another nearby creature. It has a slight negative impact on abilities, but causes no permanent damage and dissipates normally with rest.
Overcharge: The ritual takes several minutes, but inflicts minor damage to both parties.
Metempsychosis
Serapefti’s Ka-Ba Translation
P: 6 R: touch T: 1 patient and 1 host D: 1 day and night
Transfers a patient’s essence into a new physical host. A perfect replica of the original body is ideal, but alternate hosts such as crude golems, animals, crystals and even vats of memory liquid can suffice. Changing forms may result in temporary psychophysical stress.
Overcharge: Attempt to overwrite the mind of a non-compliant host. Alternatively, reduce the psychophysical stress of transfer.
Open Person
Hsu Doru’s Preparatory Ritual
P: 6 R: touch T: 1 standard human™ D: 1 hour
Activates a standard human™’s construction seams to painlessly unfold them like a flower for easier medical treatment. An open person may seriously injure themselves if not careful (3d6 damage per action). Treatments on an open person are significantly easier, the price of medical spells is halved.
Overcharge: The individual organs are unraveled and suspended in a protective ectoplasm. Activity in this state may be lethal (save or die). Treatments are trivial, medical spell prices are quartered.
Parasoma Transference
Hsu Doru’s Life Shunt
P: 2 R: touch T: 2 creatures D: instant
Manipulates the underlying energy patterns to transfer life from one creature to another, or directly from the caster’s reserves.
Overcharge: Amplification restores an additional 1d4 life per point transferred.
Primary Desenescence
Wissa’s Fountain of Youthification™
P: 6 R: touch T: 1 creature D: a week
Restores a creature to its biological state of a year earlier, while preserving most of its current memories.
Overcharge: Restores a creature to its state of six years earlier.
Real-time Rebuild
Zdarovar’s Rapid Healing
P: variable R: touch T: 1 creature D: minutes
Invokes the oneiroi Quiscus and Sanatus to reach into a creature’s essence and replace damaged code with a pristine version. This painful process deals damage equal to the spell’s power.
Variable: (2) removes cosmetic blemishes, (4) flushes toxins or afflictions, (6) restores a damaged organ to factory settings, (10) regrows a limb, (16) regrows a head or torso, (25) rebuilds a whole body from dust and fragments.
Overcharge: The healing process is accelerated to just a few seconds, but this doubles the pain experienced by the target.
Restorative Slumber
Medeorite’s Healing Dream Ritual
P: 2 R: touch T: 1 creature D: 3 days and nights
The caster’s dream-form leads the patient into a deep, healing sleep. While asleep, the patient appears lifeless. After the spell concludes, the patient awakes rejuvenated, with one attribute restored or one burden lifted.
Overcharge: Restore an additional attribute or lift a second burden. Alternatively, reduce the patient’s slumber three-fold.