...A Half Ruined Tower Of Antique Design. At Its Shattered Base You Spy An Alcove Or An Entry - This Is A Fine Place To Hide From The Weather - But It May Be Finer Still For...

A while back I started doing this thing. I started doing what amounts to my own illustrations for my D&D character's spellbook. On its face this project is the outsider art of outsider art. Take a rarefied hobby and combine its internal logic with your own ersatz art skills & this is the kind of thing you end up with. Above you see the old staple - Magic Missile. In D&D and it's likenesses there's the little scribble of a note, that one little mention - a spell in the Wizard's spellbook takes up a number of pages equal to the spell's level. This is one of those legacy rules that you can kind of see having come from a place of trying, desperately trying, to mitigate the overwhelming superiority of the Magic-User.

"Make them have to have expensive books! That'll keep them from overwhelming the entire milieu of monsters with lightning bolt-laden fireballs!"

Carrying around an expensive book grants you unimaginable powers eh?  I see the wish fulfillment in that don't you?  Game books aren't cheap.  They're big and they're sometimes illustrated so insipidly that you'd maybe be ashamed to be seen with one in public.  Maybe.  Something in the illustrations - something in them limits, bounds - it paints the game into a kind of corner of cliche.  But that's a topic for another time.  

Let's talk about spellbooks.  For me the price of entry into the world of the Wizard was never anything short of the great complexity that spellcasting characters were prone to.  Give your game books a look & you'll notice that half of the player's guide is a list of magic spells.  Sometimes more.  That's the steep cost of entry - knowing well all these spells & then meta-gaming the setting & the referee enough to know which of the scores of spells you'd be best learning.    

And nothing is to prevent your magic from failing spectacularly - or from failing to properly anticipate the day's difficulties.  Your Shield spell might be right up on your lips, ready to go, and then no-one casts a magic missile anywhere near you.  This, following your own pretty deep dive into a set of supplemental rules that occupy at least half the book!  

It's easy to be critical, and criticism, even when it comes from an admiring place of love is always redolent of some kind of hostility.  My love is for This Thing Of Ours - my hostility?  It's for failed die-rolls and ugly monster-stat blocks with fine-print spell-lists.  It's for the complexity that these systems offer while still being rote and even prosaic, routine.  

There's something unsettlingly tragic about a system of magic that isn't magical, that's been made mundane.  

So I thought about a spellbook.  Making this was fun.  I ended up considering, while I put together the materials, the ideas that would go into them, I ended up considering - what would it be like to have these spells?  I mean, to know them and to be able to throw them in the world.  Imagination.  That's what This Thing is all about.  What would it be?

The first magic to give me pause was Charm Person.  The old reliable standard that, if you could use, if you could make it work, in this world we live in - you'd be just the worst.  The Worst.  

"Weren't you and your pals just trying to kill me?"  

"Oh, not us, we're your friends, We're not like the Others."

So yes, magical gaslighting is a thing that got invented by the early practitioners of our hobby.  Let's continue onward, past that.  I mean, if I had that ability I don't think I'd use it.  

Maybe for money.  Maybe. 

The first magic spell my character got that actually scared me - that I realized I would never use was See Invisible.  If there were, let's say, magic forces in the world, invisible powers, ghosts, spirits - they're all around aren't they?  Who even knows what type of awful stuff is all around or even what type of invisible spirit things are rubbing all up and on you.  On a bet I wouldn't cast this spell.  If my life depended on it I don't know if I'd take that chance.

This is what's missing.  When you make the game about knowing all the spells in a book and mastering which will be useful in a given scenario.

A lot of things are gained - that's how a lot of people really like to play & I know, I know - something in critical discussion always seems to carry a fragment of contempt - but there's not any here.  We Do This Thing different.  When we do it.  

What I found to be missing was creation.  Making things up - working within a framework of physical laws rather than a framework of strict orthodox rules.  

So I made my own game.  

What I tried addressing in doing so were my complaints with how the fantastic is sometimes made to seem mundane.  I wanted, above all, to have Wonder & Adventure as the foundational experiences beneath the whole project.  Here's how I did some of that.

• Spellbooks - there's a few, I make them.  If you make one I'll probably try and print it for you.  Most of the ones I've made are physical objects that have been handed out to players.  They're intentionally strange, intentionally unique.  
• No Spellbook - I took the long, long list of alphabetically indexed & level organized spells that all my favorite games had and then I discarded them.  What I tried to do instead is form a system for making your own magic.  In 11 pages I was able to pack in a vast variety of magical spells - many more than you'll find in another game.  Because My Game Is Best.
• Letting It Flow - Some ideas are held back at the table, some notions are never approached - the strict laws of the system seem to be a hedge to imagination rather than an aid to its exercise.  So establishing that the book is just a book - that the Players have Agency, power over the game itself - that remains the mountaintop I'm trying to climb to.
• Making the Stories Cooler - And on this topic I've more to say at a later time.  

Of course - this is just Magic.  Not the whole thing by a long way.  But I have a lot to say - about how these things are done & from whence these schemes emerged.