Read Magic: Return to the Memory Palace

I hated read magic when I was a kid.  Read Magic was the first chink in the armor, the first time I doubted the infallibility of the The Dungeons and Dragons. I did not understand the rules of Dungeons and Dragons very well.

Before reading The Dying Earth all I thought about spells as just some special written words that you memorize and then repeat to cast the spell. Then you forgot them!? And also if the spell wasn’t in your spell book you couldn’t read it? And if you got a scroll you didn’t know what spell it was?!

Some people think of read magic as a spell that is essentially used to read sloppy handwriting. This was not satisfying to me when that was how I thought of the spell worked. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has made this interpretation explicit in its rules, which is disappointing.

I refused to think of it as anything other than a cheap way to gimp magic-users. It was the thing that sowed the seed of discontent in my young heart (even though I always ignored the spell I was still offended on some deep aesthetic level). Read magic is probably what drove me to experiment with GURPS. 

Then I read The Dying Earth and started thinking of Spells as intricate devices you assemble in your mind. Now spells are hyperdimensional structures that a magic-user can unravel to produce a given effect when brought into the physical world. A scroll is created when a magic user instead of assembling the spell in his head creates the hyperdimensional structure within the two-dimensional plane of a piece of paper. This takes one week and costs 100 gold per spell level.

Read Magic creates a double artificial mind palace outside the magic-users mind. The first mind palace functions the same as the magic-user’s. Spells from spell books can be transferred there safely. Spells from scrolls can be copied without unraveling. The second mind palace is different. It provides a glimpse of a potential future in which the spell has been cast. The magic-user can observe the effects of the spell without triggering the original spell structure or affecting the prime material plane. At its heart read magic is a divination spell.

Sometimes when Vizirian came to this place he imagined he was in the mind of a dead god. It was formless and void as if someone had sat down to commit the moment before the birth of the universe to memory. There was no time dwell on the profound immensity however. His party was waiting back below the fallen tower of Zenopus and they needed to know what was written on the scroll.
 The scroll hung before him in the air towering over him. Here it appeared as a giant twisting knot. Looking at it he perceived things he could neither articulate nor understand. Vizirian paused before he willed the structure into the other chamber the one that was less like his mind than even this one and somehow more like the external world yet wholly alien. Then he did it. It was indescribable and bizarre. But then it came to him, Ahh yes, Magic Mouth.

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.