Daily magic, a thread for common non-adventuring magic.


Homebrew and House Rules


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This thread is for magic that common peaceful life people will find as well as magic found in the natural world, or in other words, the magic to flesh out worldbuilding instead of adding to character sheets.

To start, a short discussion of magical flora.
Plants often use colors and smells to attract or repulse. In a magical world this can be achieved with illusion magic, thus plants using illusions is probably the most common magic used by plants, and plants can use illusions in a wide variety of ways. Plants can add color or even make their entire blooms pure illusion with only the core pollen and stem as real, others might produce smells, but notably is the ability to produce light, which is heavy used in my world for underground flora in place of standard coloration since colors are usually not visible underground.

Plants can also use magic for defense. Protective magic against invasive insects and animals, energy resistance for surviving forest fires or blizzards, enchantments to encourage creatures to go elsewhere, etc.

Items
The below are not really specific items as much as materials that lots of items can use for specific effects and ideas on how they might be used.

Infusing magic. The idea with infusing magic is that someone with even a minor ability to move magic around can focus magic into an item where it stays temporarily but fades over time, thus a temporary magic effect can be achieved. Usually this does nothing noticable aside from a very faint detectable trace of magic, but some materials and substances will activate when infused with magic. It is assumed in the below notes that most people, if not everyone, can infuse magic into things with minimal training, making infusing magic common even among the lowest common folk.

This fills a bit of a gap between proper magic items that are permanent and expensive and the mundane. The below are the magic materials most people see when they see magic items.

Glowpaste
This substance is made from glowing magic plants. When a bit of magic is applied, the paste glows for hours. It can be used for all kinds of things.
-It is often used in signs, especially in places with an active nightlife or underground.
-Many organizations use it in tattoos.
-Glowpaste can also be infused into threads, making it easy to produce embroidery or even whole cloth that glows. A very common use therefore, is in heraldry and badges to make them stand out and be easily visible.
-This also makes jewelry from decorative knotting more common, as the threads can glow giving interesting patterns.
-Glowpaste is also often used in signal flags.
-Additionally,glowpaste is often set under gems in jewelry to backlight the gems.

Generally, glowpaste can come in many colors by slightly changing the formula or base components, but each formulation only comes in a single color. Some colors are therefore more expensive than others. Since plants usually use colors to stand out, the rarest colors are those that blend in, like greens, teals, and yellows.

Color-shift paint
This paint is made from plants that change their color. It is rarer than glowpaste and more difficult to utilize as the one infusing the magic into it must have a clear vision of the color and pattern for the paint to display. When out of magic, the paint often has a horrible tan or brown color, the splotchiness of which is a sign of how well made the paint is, and kften lokks old and run down without magic to produce a vibrant/image. Poorly made paint will often have visible variations in the vibrancy of the color and be less accurate to image envisioned by the infuser.

Often used in theaters, dining halls, and social spaces, the colors are altered to suit the mood desired or to change the scenery.

Some armors are painted with this, allowing the color to be adjusted for ceremonies and parades, but a rare few, mainly scouts, will use it to camouflage their armor. Practice armor often uses stripes of the paint so they can be used for team identification in practice battles.

The lower end of nobility will use clothes with color change paint so they can give the appearance of having a larger wardrobe than they actually have.

Aromaticas
These items, often pebbles but occasionally made into a paste or clay to shape into small figures or artistic shapes, and often religious symbols, can be infused with magic to produce a smell. Often used like incense or perfume. Perfume versions are rare though, as the most common and easiest smells to achieve are naturalistic smells such as pine tree or lemon kind of smells, which are good for smelling clean or invoking religious mood, but the more flowery, pleasant, and sexy smells are much harder to produce and thus more expensive.

Alright, tell me what you think and feel free to add your own!

Dark Archive

I like the notion that magic to create a thing is much harder (and requires higher levels spells / is more expensive) than magic to steal a thing. So instead of creating an alchemical dye or alchemical fragrance, the craftsmage would instead find a flower or feather or stone that has the exact hue she wants and drain the color from it, leaving it bland and colorless, and the removed color available to be transferred to another object. The same would apply to scents, removing the fragrance (and flavor, in the process) from a lemon or handful of pine-needles to give something a lemony or 'fresh pine' scent. That sort of transfer could be done with alchemy or cantrip level magic, and be much more accessible than more powerful transmutation magic.

And I definitely like the idea of lower tier nobility (or actors troupes, or thieves guilds that need a lot of different colored outfits for impersonation, etc.) keeping someone with this sort of ability, whether low level 'practical magic' or alchemy, on retainer to make their wardrobe seem bigger than it is. Sort of the fantasy world equivalent of that Grisha 'tailor' in Shadow & Bone whose sole job was to keep the queen looking fabulous with her powers.

One thing I'd like to see is alchemical treatments that can make small items of bone or horn or coral as durable as iron, something useful to people who live in areas without significant sources of wood or forged metal, such as underwater, the deep deserts, or the arctic. Snowcaster elves, among others, could use some sort of low-level magical process to give the antlers of caribou the strength and durability (and mechanical equivalence) of bows crafted of wood by elves in more temperate climates.

And on the subject of Snowcaster elves, I'd love for them to have a means, perhaps again, alchemical, to reverse the polarity of siccatite from 'cold' to 'hot,' so that the small amounts of cold siccatite they manage to find or barter for, they can change to function as a heat source, in their wood-free northlands. While hot siccatite itself is hot enough to burn exposed skin, pounded into thin wires and inserted into bone or horn ornaments like rings, toe-rings, ear-cuffs, circlets, gorgets, etc. would allow them to create bone jewelry that stays warm and help stave off losing fingers, toes and ear-tips to frostbite in the bitter cold of their northern climate.

A similar 'practical magic' spell of transmutation that 'unmakes' a stone that has formed under heat and pressure (to an extent, being hard to hold and prone to rattling around if not kept contained), radiating all the heat and pressure slowly over time and serving as a heat source, but being melted into slag over the duration. The size and weight of the stone would determine the duration, so that a large block of marble could radiate heat like a stove for weeks, as could even a small diamond (as much more heat went into it's formation, although that would be notably costlier!). The spell would fit the transmutation school, and even be considered a spell of chronomancy, since it's basically making time flow backwards for the target stone, as it 'unravels' back into the heat that went into it's formation.

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