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Create some utility spells.

S

Sauceplease

Magic users in fiction tend to use a lot of flashy stuff like fireball or force fields. I'm trying to brainstorm spells that would be more useful outside of combat instead of in combat. These should generally be low-powered spells or otherwise entire settings can be broken. Here is what I have conceived so far:

  • The user magically draws a circle. That circle generates light and sound for 60 seconds. After that minute is up, everything up to 3 meters above the circle is annihilated. Effectively a great waste removal spell that can't be used combatively.
  • Dimensional storage, or effectively having a hyperspace arsenal that you can put things into and pull things out of.
  • A spell that allows you to track anything you've touched just by thinking about it. This includes people and animals. Makes finding stuff much easier.
  • The ability to freeze objects (but not people) in time. Essentially what Clockblocker does in Worm. It means you can hold many objects in place without touching them.
  • Some type of micro-telekinesis or metal manipulation to make home improvement much easier.
  • A pocket universe that a person can enter. Within the pocket universe, a person is 100% safe and they can teleport back to the real world (same location). One minute within the pocket universe equals 1 second in real life. The pocket universe is primarily for sleeping and meditating.
  • A way for a person to briefly travel to one of their fantasy worlds and fully examine it.
  • Some type of HUD effect that allows a person to see the physics effects on objects and shows the trajectory of an object you're about to shoot or launch.
  • The ability to send your consciousness up to 10 seconds backwards in time. This prevents oopsies.
 
Hearth Magic
1. Familiar Flame - The user designates a Fireplace, oven, stove, furnace, or other natural or man-made structure where a fire can be kept burning. Once they start a fire in it they imbue that flame with a bit of their magic and create a Familiar bond with it and channel other spells with it. It is said the strength and variety of the spells that can be cast using this method depends on how long the user can keep the flame fed and alight. A Familiar Flame can be transferred to a lamp or torch for easier movement or management. So long as it exists, the mage can sense their flame, determine how much fuel it has, and even empathically look through it to see the surrounding room.

2. Self-Fueling - Grant your Familiar Flame a bit of telekinesis so that if you keep a supply of wood or fuel near it's fireplace it can pull the fuel in to feed itself. It can also clean it's area and dispose of ash or soot.

3. Magic Cooking - Your Familiar Flame can now cook meals if supplied with ingredients, though it is limited by what it would be able to cook normally in it's area, and it kind of depends on the cooking skill of the mage. Still, it's usually able to perfectly cook up stew, grill meat or vegetables, bake bread, brew tea, or simply boil water to kill microbes. Coincidentally, the Flame can now consume various bits of food scraps like egg shells, discarded vegetable bits, meat trimmings, etc with no problems.

4. Hot and Cold - Your flame can now alter it's radiated temperature or even invert it entirely, allowing it to keep a room at just the right temperature or even cool or freeze things to make ice. Doing so changes the color of it's flame, changing to a snowey white when cooling things. It still burns fuel normally while doing so.

5. Fire Teleport - If you are away from your home and your Fireplace is big enough to walk through, you can conjure a portal at your location that leads to your Fireplace, letting you transport yourself home. You can have your Flame not burn you or anything you allow to travel through. Keep in mind that others can attempt to follow through the portal and if they have protection from fire it can't stop them. Not only that but wind, water, or magic that puts out fires can also go through the portal. If your Flame is extinguished, the portal closes.

6. Storied Flame - Your Familiar Flame can create illusionary images or sounds to help with storytelling or demonstrations.

7. Roaming Stove - This depends on where your Familiar Flame is housed, but you can have your flame's fireplace or stove teleport to your location or return to it's original place. Effectively letting you bring your house stove to you instead of portalling to it.
 
A clone that had all of your abilities, but only worked while you were asleep or were away would be a neat ability. It would make doing routine tasks a lot easier and it also gives you a personal bodyguard.

A spell that automatically cooked things for you or cleaned things for you would also make my life much easier.
 
There's a whole host of pseudo-psychic abilities that are great for social maneuvering, politicking, or investigation work that have minimal combat capabilities. Speaking to ghosts, postcognition, psychometry...
 
I tend to like magic with a bit of flair to it

- Spell that makes music which causes cleaning supplies to dance along in a way that tidies up your house in the process
- Spell that points a loaded revolver at the local fertility god until they make the crops grow faster
- Spell that summons a council of mystic tigers to do your taxes
- Spell that constructs an altar out of cow bones, makes it rain blood, and summons wraiths from the deepest abyss to dance in a ritualistic circle, shaking the earth, and causing the sky to part and reveal the underlying structure of existence, wretched and glorious, from which a slice of cheese will lower in a beam of divine red light
 
ScorpioSting said:
There's a whole host of pseudo-psychic abilities that are great for social maneuvering, politicking, or investigation work that have minimal combat capabilities. Speaking to ghosts, postcognition, psychometry...
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Or one of my favorites from NEO:TWEWY: The ability to remind people around you of something provided you can conceptualize it well enough and they have any memories of it to recall in the first place.
 
Nails or nails?
A basic spell which involves confusing the universe with by explaining in True English that nails are nails and that it shouldn't.
Very popular spell among apprentice witches and warlocks who want longer nails.
It's also a spell frequently confused with their counterpart, resulting resulting in them getting nails instead of nails. Which is handy whenever you are out of nails, but not so handy when you don't want to lose your nails.
 
That is a nice rodent you are carrying.
Did you come here to send a message.

Snail Mail is a scaled down version of one of the forbidden spells Of Which We Do Not Speak.
Snail Mail is inevitable, like it's unmentionable counterpart.
Snail Mail makes it a law of time itself inevitable that a valid target will hear your message.
It doesn't matter if you can't speak, your voice will carry.
It doesn't matter if they are deaf or plugging their ears, you will be heard.
It doesn't matter if both you or the other are in caved-in on different planets.
Necromancers even claim that immediately killing the doesn't even prevent it, though there is no way to ethically reproduce these claims.
One time it even arrived before it was send, no one wants try to replicate repeat that set of events.

No one can intercept Snail Mail. No one can change Snail Mail once it is send. No one can Listen in on it or predict it beyond the knowledge that it will arrive, eventually.
It will arrive slowly most of the time, never when you expect it but always sometime.

And the only things you need are; Something precious which had an empathic link with the recipient to sacrifice, knowledge of forbidden magic and restricted knowledge of unspeakable things and if optionally membership of the council.

Looking at you I can tell that you don't want the law abiding council mage is probably not what you are looking for.
Is that Rodent someone's pet?
 
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A cheap teleportation ritual which incidentally kills living beings it's used upon, expediting shipping & sterilization.

(Kudos to Alexander Wales.)
 
Abandon Aches
-This spell causes you to not feel a certain wound/pain for the spells duration. It does not remove the cause of the pain.
Bring Boat
-This spell raises a boat of thin stone from the ground, the boat is not very good and is quite fragile but it will float for a time.
Clean Clothes
-This spell instantly cleans and dries any clothes you are wearing
headaches.
Dream Deathless
-This spell will entrance a single target into a slumber that they cannot awake from for a day and night
Endear Endurance
-This spell gives one the endurance they require for a task as long as they do not give and could normally accomplish this task with enough time.
Find Ford
-This spell will point you towards a good spot to cross a river.
Grow Quarters
-This spell will cause the local plants in an area to grow into a structure that will protect from the elements. The type and amount of plants will decide how good of a quarter this spell will produce.
Hide Hint
-This spell removes all smells from one target.
Instill Initiative
-This spell will make the target not doubt their next course of action
Jostle Juice
-This spell will extract juice from any plant matter
Knit Knots
-This spell will mend any breaks in a piece of fabric
Trace Tracks
-This spell will cause tracks and other marks of passage to be more easily noticed by the user
 
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A spell that changed the color of objects.

A spell that would accurately answer any yes-or-no question.

A spell that showed you the future of your relationship with a specific person.

A spell that showed you the precise time a person would show up.

A spell that allowed you to grab things within a painting or through a monitor or tv screen.

A spell that turned rocks into bullets (you choose the caliber).

A spell that converted your urine into petroleum or gasoline.
 
Leila Hann said:
If by "fiction" you mean "roleplaying games and works based on them," sure. Otherwise I really don't think this is the case at all?
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For fiction you have to rule out works D&D was based on as well if you want to exclude flashy magic. Things like the Bible, Orlando Furiouso, Conan, Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Tolkien.

There's not much left afterwards.

Historical Magic practice often appears to centre around several less flashy things:

Growing hair / prevention of hair loss.
Preventing or abating curses.
Cursing cattle or crops.
Conception or Contraception.
Healing.

Enchanting contraceptive amulets or brewing hair growth potions are the sort of thing.
 
Dahak said:
For fiction you have to rule out works D&D was based on as well if you want to exclude flashy magic. Things like the Bible, Orlando Furiouso, Conan, Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Tolkien.

There's not much left afterwards.

Historical Magic practice often appears to centre around several less flashy things:

Growing hair / prevention of hair loss.
Preventing or abating curses.
Cursing cattle or crops.
Conception or Contraception.
Healing.

Enchanting contraceptive amulets or brewing hair growth potions are the sort of thing.
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The OP didn't say "subtle," it said "utility." And also included things like light, matter disintegration, and telekinesis.
 
Leila Hann said:
The OP didn't say "subtle," it said "utility." And also included things like light, matter disintegration, and telekinesis.
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You were responding to "Magic users in fiction tend to use a lot of flashy stuff like fireball or force fields."

Since you snipped that out of the original post, one has to assume that is what you are complaining about.
 
fearsome hill said:
Find Ford
-This spell will point you towards a good spot to cross a river.
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This could actually be mildly hilarious if it will not find bridges. Only the nearest place where you can reasonably safely wade across a river or stream.

Just to point out the possibilities: If you stand on Blackfriars Bridge in central London and cast 'Find Ford', depending on which river it focusses on you will either be directed to Duxford Ford in (modern) Oxfordshire, about 65km as the crow flies and about double that if you follow the Thames (which only crosses to an island in the middle of the channel); or about 8km to Hampstead in the north of the Greater London conurbation, about half of which distance of which you will be walking along roads built over the River Fleet, which rises at two springs in Hampstead and discharges into the Thames under the Blackfriars Bridge.

More on-topic: Actual utility spells:
  • Find (Clean) Water
  • Find (Dry) Firewood
  • Block Drafts (closes small gaps around windows, doors, etc - especially useful for tenants in poorly-maintained rented accommodations)
  • Block Draughts (prevents bartenders filling beer glasses - especially useful to wives who think their husbands get drunk too often)
  • Obscure to Solicitors: render the home or property un-noticeable to persons attempting to sell door-to-door or evangelise
 
Mouse said:
This could actually be mildly hilarious if it will not find bridges. Only the nearest place where you can reasonably safely wade across a river or stream.

Just to point out the possibilities: If you stand on Blackfriars Bridge in central London and cast 'Find Ford', depending on which river it focusses on you will either be directed to Duxford Ford in (modern) Oxfordshire, about 65km as the crow flies and about double that if you follow the Thames (which only crosses to an island in the middle of the channel); or about 8km to Hampstead in the north of the Greater London conurbation, about half of which distance of which you will be walking along roads built over the River Fleet, which rises at two springs in Hampstead and discharges into the Thames under the Blackfriars Bridge.
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When i first thought of the spell i think i meant for it to not find bridges. The idea is that it would be used by people who couldn't use a bridge for any reason. Maybe they wanted to avoid a toll or robbery on the bridge, maybe they couldn't use a bridge for magical reasons or maybe they were an army marching and wanted to surprise the enemy.

Spell tax:
Reduce Rust: this spell turns any rust back into it's base metal.
Stay Storm: Any rain and wind in a small area around the caster stops.
War Words: removes fear and doubt from the caster

These spells were inspired by some of those found in the folk magic book "Magic Songs of the Finns" By Elias Lönnrot
 
Hmmm household spells- or well I guess just utility spells you say? HMMMM

Brighten/Darken Light: The caster may select a light(s) in their line of sight and can dim or brighten them!
Note: Dimming or Brightening a light may cause electrical light sources to break, exercise caution.
Note 2: Brightening a candle or oil light will use more wick/oil, while dimming holds the reverse property.
Note 3: Magical lights function similarly to candles and oil lights, but with mana instead.

Mend Burn: Reverses burn effects on target, such as burns from the stove or burn marks on metal!

Locate Trinket: Can find any small object that has belonged to the caster for more then a week.

Hmmm- Might get more in a little while- That's what I got for now!
 
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