Creative use of magic.

[Old timer]

This idea for a thread was inspired after some creative use of magic in my recently completed rune quest campaign, and i was just wondering what other experiences people have had with their magic using player characters being creative with their magic's?.

In said campaign, players were in a hard fight with the antagonists of the campaign, as all the main warriors of the group were pretty much of equal skill as their opponents, and most blows were being parried or evaded, or the group being out manoeuvred. This battle was being fought in a old stone building, and the second sorcerer of the group (there were two players with sorcery using characters) decided he was going to slow this annoying antagonist down, so he used form/set stone around the feet of said antagonist, who suddenly found he could not move, as his feet were now encased in stone, and he was promptly hacked apart by the parties warriors.

This is so far one of the most creative use of the form/set spell i have had in one of my games, as usually such spells are used to create walls or open up gaps.

 

[Richard]

One of my favourites from an old RQ3 campaign:
A party of adventurers pursue a raiding band of Keishlan (Think vaguely Mongolian) nomads into the arid steppelands and lose them. They become completely lost. Even with the help of their faithful hound they can't sniff the way home. Hunger, and especially thirst, start to take their toll and it's beginning to look like curtains in the wild for this relatively new band of heroes. The sorceror has Fly but can't manage to move much more than a backpack at walking speed. Then he has a stroke of pure genius. He cats Fly on the faithful hound who he ties onto the end of a length of rope. The party hunter casts Farsee on the dog. The party Shaman casts Beastspeech for some elementary doggy chat. By following their talking dog kite they finally find water and make it home.
Had the additional benefit that any raiders finding them would probably have died laughing!

 

[alex_greene]

Why couldn't the party hunter have cast Farsee on himself?

 

[PhilHibbs]

Casting Fanaticism on mounted opponents is a classic, as they usually will not benefit from the increased attack skill as they are capped by their Ride skill.

 

[ThatGuy]

I saw a blacksmith character keep very close to professional and cultural guidelines. He didn't really have any offensive magic, and common only. But he did have "ignite" and "chill" for his forge.

And he caused mayhem with that one ignite spell. It is opposed, but so are a lot of offensive spells, and he would just light everything on fire.

And he was creative about how he did it. Light the rope of the climbing enemy...just as they were reaching the top, so that they fell to their deaths. Or light opponent's breeches on fire. Or hair.

It was great.

 

[Simulacrum]

One of my favourites from an old RQ3 campaign:
A party of adventurers pursue a raiding band of Keishlan (Think vaguely Mongolian) nomads into the arid steppelands and lose them. They become completely lost. Even with the help of their faithful hound they can't sniff the way home. Hunger, and especially thirst, start to take their toll and it's beginning to look like curtains in the wild for this relatively new band of heroes. The sorceror has Fly but can't manage to move much more than a backpack at walking speed. Then he has a stroke of pure genius. He cats Fly on the faithful hound who he ties onto the end of a length of rope. The party hunter casts Farsee on the dog. The party Shaman casts Beastspeech for some elementary doggy chat. By following their talking dog kite they finally find water and make it home.
Had the additional benefit that any raiders finding them would probably have died laughing!

Love that. Whole new interpretation of a"dog on a string"

 

[Richard]

For Alex: He could cast it on himself, and did I believe, but height (I think they had 100M+ of rope between them!) gave a distinct advantage and the sorceror couldn'y Fly an entire human. The dog stayed aloft even when the Farsee ran out as the sorceror could extend the duration (It was a bit different from MRQ2 in that regard)...

Like the Ignite and Fanaticism tricks! It wasn't too hard to find an attack spell to ruin poor old spellcasters, what with them needing to make concentration rolls and all.

 

[Vagni]

One of my players in my Viking campaign cast a the seidr curse 'Evil Eye - Damp Touch' on an unfriendly PC at the Spring Assembly. The curse was that no fire would stay lit when he went near it.

As this NPC was doing the rounds of all the various family booths to try and gain support for his law suit against the PC's he ended up putting half the fires out at the assembly and became quite unpopular. This actually helped the PC's by ensuring he wasn't able to gain too much support from other families.

He never did figure out what was going on! :lol:

 

[DamonJynx]

In my Elric campaign one of the guys made quite clever use of runes. He inscribed a couple MP's worth of air into a Skull so it would float under his control and then inscribed some runes of heat so that when it hit someone it did heat damage, essentially giving the sorcerer a ranged attack that didn't cost a heap of CA's.

Another one is what I'm going to do to players and that is use the runes of water and air to dehydrate/asphyxiate them, that should be fun!