magic words

bibliomantic generation of spells and grimories

2022-07-07

Updates:

• 2023-08-12: Add Black Beauty, because SPORTS HORSE
• 2023-01-30: Add Jack London table.

Contents

1. Contents
2. Preface
3. Magic Words
4. Mixing and Matching
5. Cut-up
6. Word analysis
7. Grimories
8. Appendix: Other Grimories
   • Alice in Wonderland
   • Frankenstein
   • Dracula
   • The King In Yellow
   • A Study In Scarlet
   • Call Of The Wild / White Fang
   • Black Beauty
9. Resources

Preface

This is a response of sorts to Spell lists suck. Here are some magic words. by LS Whelan of paperspencils.com. (Links to references can be found below.)

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how you can use bodies of text to create random spells and magical effects.

Magic Words

The core argument of the original post, which resonates well with me, is that spell lists can feel static, boring, and altogether unmagical.

They can make magic feel mundane. Habitually perusing your spell list for something you think will be reliable and useful the next day does not create a sense of wonder and awe.

I enjoy it much more when magic feels unpredictable, unreliable, a little bit dangerous, and a little bit untamed.

LS’s initial solution, which I will refer to later as Solution 1, is to allow remixing known spells. The canonical examples are “fairy fire” and “unseen servant”, which yield novel combinations like “unseen fire” and “fairy servant”.

This is neat!

Pulling at this thread a little more reveals Solution 2, which is the fact that you can source your “magic words” not just from existing spell lists, but from nearly anywhere.

This is where bibliomancy¹ factors in.

Mixing and Matching

Solution 1, if you squint your eyes until your vision blurs, looks kind of like just re-discovering random tables.

Which is fine. Lots of systems use random tables to generate magical effects with varied to great results.

I’m going to pause here only long enough to share a mix-and-match alchemy system that I love and that I am using in my current campaign with my artificer.

It is the Naively Simple Alchemy system from foreignplanets.blogspot.com, and it works like this:

1. Basically any creature or substance can be rendered into an oil (an adjective) or a powder (verb/noun).
2. An oil and a powder can be combined into a potion using a catalyst and alchemy supplies.

That’s basically it.

The catalyst provides a thematic effect in the same way that grimories do as described below. And the oil and powder provide the potion’s main effect.

Here’s what my artificer so far has had the opportunity to discover:

The only potion I can really remember them using so far is sudden duplicity which on the fly I decided allowed them to cast a version of mirror image.

Oh, and amorphous grab was kind of a weak hold person, with tentacles!

This system is great. My player is having a blast collecting as many oils and powders as they can, and making weird potions. And then we get to have fun figuring out what they do.

I look forward to the day they brew a potion of night chicken.

Cut-up

Anyway. Bibliomancy.

Solution 2 shows us that we can source our magic words from any body of text.

This provides us as many opportunities as there are texts out there to create thematic grimories. That is, different spellbooks each with their own flavor.

I’ll be using Moby Dick² as the base text for the following exercises.

Here’s a snippet of the result of pasting the text into the cutup machine³:

already ship that the The captain him skeleton had its But sneaks my his lashes the and Pequod sea top reeled his afraid the on attendance soul and attendant dipped to warped enchanted very Before evaporates the Tisbury heathenish them this the Libra him he sprang turn command

Mmmm, jumbled word soup 😋

Let us extract a few choice words.

• skeleton
• sneak
• command
• soul

Just a few words will get you far. The number of pairs in a set of size n is equal to n(n-1) - n. So 4 words will get you 9 spells. 10 will get you 80.

Not all of them will be winners, and some of them will be redundant.

1. Skeleton Sneak: You can make bones invisible and less prone to rattling.
2. Skeleton Command: Point at your victim and command its skeleton to leave its body.
3. Skeleton Soul: Your soul calcifies and becomes hard as stone and refuses to leave your body. You can miraculously escape death once.
4. Sneak Skeleton: Subtle bones… Weighted dice… You can nudge fate in your favor.
5. Sneak Command: Plant a hidden suggestion in writing or in your speech.
6. Sneak Soul: Summon a shadow spirit to envelope and obscure you.
7. Soul Skeleton: Conjure a spirit from the bones of its remains. You may ask it 3 questions.
8. Soul Sneak: Have an out of body experience and fly around
9. Soul Command: Issue an order to a ghost that it must obey.

In practice, you won’t create an exhaustive list of all possibilities like this. At least, you probably won’t give your player this list. It will probably serve you better as more of a fun creative exercise, or to spark inspiration. Who knows what weird fun might come from being able to make bones invisible? Or what of its inverse, the ability to make all bones in an area glow?

No, in actuality, you would let a player discover, choose, or roll for ‘magic words’, and then work with them to decide on what the spell means instead of defining all possible outcomes ahead of time. Because that would leave you with just another spell list, which we already agreed is boring, and which is what we’re trying to avoid here.

Now let us choose a few more words and arrange them into pairs.

1. dip / ship
2. soul / captain
3. warp / skeleton
4. enchant / sneak
5. lash / before
6. evaporate / sea
7. reel / heathen
8. spring / fear
9. turn / attend
10. command / attendant

When you’re doing this, you will likely create a lot of {verb|adjective} {noun}.

Roll d10 for a pair as is. Or roll twice for a random spell, combining a left hand term with a right hand term.

Some of these work and some of them don’t. (What is dip ship??) Some of these are reasonable. (command attendant) And some of them need to be nerfed (evaporate sea).

Word analysis

Temmon’s Bibliomantic_Oracles library makes it both quick and easy to do analysis on texts for top/unusual nouns/verbs/adjectives.⁴

Following are the top 20 unusual words from Moby Dick.

You can roll for adjective noun, verb noun, or verb adjective noun. Or whatever.

Examples:

• hail mystic coffin
• heave fiery sperm
• endless shark
• whale whale whale

Grimories

What we created above is a grimorie, a spellbook with a theme. Casting a spell from a grimorie probably creates a theme related side effect. The smell of brine, and the haunting cry of a distant whale. Or can only be opened after performing a theme related ritual. You cannot cast from the grimorie until you burn a lamp of whale blubber, and wrap the book in oiled leather and submerge it in sea water.

You can use this same process with Dracula for a gothic horror grimorie. With the Lovecraft corpus for a cosmic horror grimorie. Alice in Wonderland for surreal madness.

Appendix: Other Grimories

As with Moby Dick, below are the top 20 unusual words from each work.

Alice in Wonderland

Frankenstein

Dracula

The King In Yellow

A Study In Scarlet

Call Of The Wild / White Fang

Black Beauty

Resources

The original blog posts

• https://www.paperspencils.com/spell-lists-stuck-here-are-some-magic-words/
• https://www.paperspencils.com/magic-words-in-practice/
• http://builtbygodslongforgotten.blogspot.com/2015/09/are-magic-words-hiding-in-your-crappy.html
• http://blog.d4caltrops.com/2015/09/putting-user-back-in-magic-user.html

Modern takes on spell generation

• Maze rats is the quentessential spell everything generator: https://questingbeast.itch.io/maze-rats
• In a recent update, Abenteuerspiel provides the option to roll for a ‘verb noun’ ritual, or to roll for verb and noun separately: https://terriblybeautiful.itch.io/abenteuerspiel
• Abenteuerspiel character sheet where you can generate rituals: https://dozens.itch.io/abenteuersheet
• Errant has good spell generation, and an exceptional list of grimories: https://errantrpg.carrd.co/#sorceries / https://errantrpg.carrd.co/#grimoires
• Novel spell generation from Tibbius: https://litavag.carrd.co/
• The “four by five” magic system for Fudge: https://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/4by5.html

Cut up and bibliomancy

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique
• https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?keywords=cut+up+solo
• https://write.tildeverse.org/dozens/cutup-technique-exercise-00001
• https://languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.php
• https://github.com/Temmon/Bibliomantic_Oracles
• More about Bibliomancer: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54134398

Other

• Naively Simple Alchemy: https://foreignplanets.blogspot.com/2020/07/naively-simple-alchemy.html