Vancian Magic and the Method of Loci

© Stuart Kolakovic, 2013

Vizirian closed his eyes. Once again he was walking down the hall towards the cloister.  He had spent much of his youth sitting on the circular bench in the middle of that small walled garden. Every few hours he would slide down the bench a few inches until every detail was ingrained in his memory.
Once the space had been recorded in his mind, he could populate it with things like this. The light that bled into the hall was purplish, electric, and nauseating. He reached the cloister and there it was just as he had built it from the old tome. As the structure rotated it shifted in shape. The theory of it had been lost to time, but practically all he had to do was complete the structure with the final words and it would rush out of his head and into reality.
Vizirian pointed. He said the words. Four goblins fell asleep, no saving throw. The cloister in his mind was once again empty; the spell let loose from his mind into reality.

And that’s how magic works in my campaigns.

It is generally assumed that magic users must train so diligently to use spells that they cannot spare any time to train in weapons or armor. It is never explained in the rules why spells must be learned and learned again.

The first thing an apprentice magic user must do is built a place inside their head that they have complete recall of. This mental location serves as a place that they can store the hyper-dimensional structures that are spells. This is similar to the memory technique the method of loci.

Spells appear in spell books as long instructions on how to weave these structures in space. Magic users prepare spells by following these instructions and building the spell inside their mind in the space they have created.

Higher-level spells are bigger and require bigger spaces. One of the things that magic users do when they level up is spend time in a place that is big enough to hold higher-level spells. Eventually high-level magic users will have an entire “memory palace” inside their heads where they can place spells. Magic schools contain rooms just for this purpose. To help anchor a spell in a magic users head the spell will replace some feature of the actual place that was memorized. For example a bush will be replaced by a light spell. A sleep spell will replace a fountain. A fireball spell will replace a large statue of a horseman spearing a lion. Magic schools will often commission sculptures and features designed to be the size of different level spells. High-level magic users may have to memorize gigantic spaces to learn spells like wish and forlorn encystment.