This is going to be a long post. I'm tired of these spells and I'm going to push through them to the last spell (though not in one post). America is off for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, so there won't be comments on these posts anyway. Let's just get the bathwater done with so we can throw it out and keep the baby.
Reincarnation: A spell to bring a dead character back to life in some other form. The form in which the character is Reincarnated is dependent upon his former alignment (Law, Neutrality or Chaos). Use a random determination on the Character Alignment table, and whatever the result is, the reincarnated character is that creature and must play as it. If he comes back as a man, determine which class, and roll a six-sided die to determine which level in that class, and similarly check level for reincarnation as an elf or dwarf.
Naturally, we don't give a page number for the Character Alignment table, why would we? We passed it in an earlier post, it's on page 9 of men and magic. I suppose the value of the spell is that chaotic persons who die have a 1 in 22 chance of becoming a dragon (there are no numbers on the table), but also an equal chance of getting saddled with ghoul, medusae (there's a party contributor), vampire, wight or "evil high priest", which I assume is... a "men"? (geez, the word "human" existed in 1974, would that really have been so hard? So you have 2 chances in 22 of coming back as a human, though one of them instantly grants you high priest status, which is funny, since usually when you reincarnate you have to go back to the beginning.
I'll be honest, I've never understood this spell, even with its appearance under the druid in the AD&D Players Handbook. I've never had a druid in any campaign that progressed to a level that could use the spell, nor have I ever had a party with a dead character set out to make use of it. Yet I've always left it as is with the appreciation that perhaps, one day, a player of mine will demonstrate some value in it.
Still, as written here, it actually functions. The results, whatever the dead character's alignment (and we presume it doesn't have to be a player character), would likely just produce chaos in most cases, but what the heck, there's room in the setting for chaos. I think, though, that the difficulties of having your character transformed into a chimera, with three heads, and quite large, would make getting an ale in town a bit difficult. Most likely a non-player character would then attack the party (assigning a very strange value to the spell), while a player character might just say, "Oh fuck it, kill me." I suppose, if I ran this rule (and there's no way I ever would, personally), and the player wanted to stay a vampire, and obey the rules, and not feast on the rest of the party, I could run that. But even if the vampire was the weakest character in the party, thereafter sessions would always be "the vampire show," and I would imagine the other players would get tired of it.
Invisible Stalker: The conjuration of an extra-dimensional monster which can be controlled with merely a word from the Magic-User who conjured him. The Invisible Stalker will continue on its mission until it is accomplished, regardless of time or distance. They cannot be dispelled once conjured, except through attack. Details of the Invisible Stalker itself will be found in the next volume.
This "auto-assassin" produces a few conundrums. Because the actual creature is going to turn up later, in the next book, I'd rather discuss what it does and how much power it has as a monster. Here, it's just relevant to say that as a "spell," it's essentially a walking deus ex machina, a magic that is immune to dispel magic. It does anywhere, does anything, solves any problem... and though only a "word" is needed, since a "mission" can't be conveyed in any way by a single word, we must assume the actual knowledge of the mission is managed through some form of telepathy.
In which, why must a word be spoken at all? What possible addition does that give the spell? That if the mage is bound and gagged, it can't work? The way it's written, it seems to suggest ease of use, however: that "merely" is meaningless if the spell can't be used if the mage is silenced, while as I said, one word hardly lays out a comprehensible battle plan.
The spell is, in a "word", godlike. And who best to use a godlike spell than the dungeon master, nyet? With any spell in the game, we must first and always ask the question, "Is this something the DM should be allowed to use, ever, against the party." The answer here is clearly "No." A creature that cannot be dispelled, never stops, never tires, never loses the trail and executes tasks across arbitrary spans of geography and duration is not a game element, it is a narrative ultimatum, and an ultimatum wielded by a DM is indistinguishable from fiat. It pretends to be available for mages, but it's real function is undoubtedly to signal that consequences can arrive from no where and no, you don't get to know why the invisible stalker appears.
Which makes it a bit of a joke, along the lines of the 19th century parlour game that was literally played in the dark, "the midnight caller," words chosen to impress fear, discomfort or a sense of terror. "Oooooooo... the invisible stalker's gonna getcha!"
Yeah, fuck you Gygax. Because we know it has to be you. No one else could be more in the dark than you, with an idea like this.
Lower Water: Utterance of this spell causes the water level in a river or similar body of liquid to drop 50% of its depth for ten turns. Range: 24".
The physical spells are always trouble, especially when they receive as little explanation as this. Pray tell, what is a similar body of "liquid" to a river? We can't be talking about some other liquid than water, given the title of the spell, so are we talking just brooks, creeks and estuaries? Because lakes and ponds, while also made of water, are in no way like a river, any more than a bookcase, which is made of wood, is like a rowboat, made of the same substance. And what about an estuary? I assume the spell affects the water at whatever level it is at this moment, depending upon the tide; which raises the question, can any tide be affected? Can an expanse of the ocean be lowered, since it too is affected by a tide?
But then, if we widen it to include ponds and lakes, we must then also include marshes, inlets, bays, gulfs, seas, whole oceans... where exactly do we draw the line. Within the 24" range, I should hope — which I'm fine with, as it creates the effect from the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments... though I can tell you as a DM that issues arise when boats moving along the unaffected section go over the falls into where the water is lowered. And I don't see any rules for managing those situations included here.
Still, the beginning of the White Box does make it clear that DMs are expected to build from the work provided here. It just wasn't quite made so clear that it was going to be this much work. We assumed the authors might do more than the tiniest bit: the description given for lower water is just 27 words.
Two more things: first, is there a reverse? Doesn't say so, but "raise water" would seem worthy of a 6th spell... on the other hand, raising a circle 480 yards in diameter within a large river, say the Mississippi, half again the depth of that river, in an area where the land itself was mostly just a foot or two higher than the water level, would not only create an immediate catastrophic disaster, the affected water would create a hydraulic event that would disasterously flood the river for the next hundred or so miles, at least. So maybe, on second thought, a reverse of the spell might not be best.
The other question is frivolous, but goes to the simplification imposed by the drop in the water by "50%." Assuming we use a fairly wide definition for the spell, so that it includes, say, a well, surely more than half the level of the water can be reduced, right? I mean, we'd lowering half an entire river... if we count the ground water as an underground river, rationally it should go down at least twice the depth of the well water, allowing us to shut off the water altogether, though for only 100 minutes (10 turns). But then, suppose I want to apply the 6th level spell to a goblet of water. You're telling me that a spell of this power will only remove 4 fl. oz. of water? That's all. And not even forever? I don't know... seems pretty cheap for 6th level.
Part Water: A spell which will part water up to 10' deep for a maximum of six turns. Range: 12".
Even better. 18 words used.
I'm not clear on the difference between these two spells. Lower water brings the level down to half, putting the water... where, exactly? While part water (no description of the effect is given at all) presumably does not "lower" the water at all, but piles it on both sides of the... wait, it doesn't say how far apart the "parted" area is? Are we talking 10 feet apart? A hundred feet? The aforementioned film seems to suggest it's a good two or three hundred yards wide.
I notice there's no length for the part, either. Can we part the Red Sea? The North Sea? The Caribbean? Hello? We could use some limitations here. It doesn't even matter that the spell lasts long enough for us to actually traverse the Caribbean... just the process of temporarily subdividing the Caribbean for an hour would contribute to disasters of every kind. What is the effect of this spell on hurricane gestation, or an active hurricane. What if a ship sails over the brink? Smash, I assume, but what are the rules of the ship seeing the sudden hole appearing in the sea and heaving to before going over? And if the sea is "parted", and the water heaped up, does it create a swell that produces a tsunami hither and yon? That's what an earthquake does, and without dimensions, moving this amount of water around would create exactly that kind of disaster.
Toning all this down, it's evident that the designers could only see "water" as a blue line on a map, not as a hydraulic system. Every feature on a Chainmail miniatures map would be small enough to itself limit the dimension of the spell. This would mean that so long as I only use these spells on such combat setups, a lot of them are perfectly fine.
But it's more than made clear that the White Box wanted to create a campaign concept also... and presumably assumed that the users would somehow limit themselves anyway. It suggests an extremely incestuous, closed group, with few outsiders, and few voices that were ready to just accept everything on precedent. Which is the first, best argument for this thing never being published, since publishing was sure to explode that closed mindset. Creating rules for your friends is one thing, but when you publish for readers... the truth is they rarely cooperate.
Projected Image: By means of this spell the Magic-User projects an image of himself up to 24" away, and all spells and the like used thereafter appear to originate from the Projected Image. Duration: 6 turns. Range: 24".
Fundamentally, the projection itself is not a problem, and has an immediate practical use. You can't kill the mage speaking before you, because this is a projection. Since it lasts an hour, it likewise has the benefit of really being able to mess with the listeners, who might not for quite a while have reason to physically contact the image projected. It doesn't state, and it should, that the projection is non-corporeal. If it is corporeal, then how would that work? Can it "get in the way" of others, thus functioning as an obstruction? Granted, that would be interesting. Knowing one way or the other would be beneficial.
Too, I can see a party mage employing this. I would. It's a great form of distraction, wherein I make noise across the square while the real me is functioning over here. If only the description actually stated that the projection can speak or make noise, or behave as though it were a real person (which I assumed it did with the last paragraph, above this one). If not, then the spell is next to useless, casting a projection of something that can't trick a witness for more than a couple of seconds. That wouldn't be much of a 6th level spell.
Note that the spell plainly states that all spells only "appear" to originate, which can only be interpreted as not actually originating therefrom. That's fine when the range of the spell is also 24", but what if the range of the spell is far, far less? It must be noticed when the caster's image at the far limit of its range turns around to cast some spell, part water for example, 12" behind the image. Still, a lot of the spells also have a 24" distance, so that's sort of okay... provide the projected image at the extent of its range doesn't want to appear to throw any spells ahead of itself.
Yet, interestingly, where the spells "appear" to originate from seems to be the only thing the designer here is interested in. True enough, if the projection and I align ourselves at two points of a triangle, to cast the spell at the third point, that would misdirect an enemy regarding where I was standing. There's value in that. Not for a campaign, of course, but certainly for a Chainmail tabletop wargame setting.
In retrospect, this aspect repeatedly reveals the lack of campaign thinking altogether. On a table top, even the invisible stalker makes sense, because then the spell is limited to taking out one enemy opponent, or protecting the caster. It can't be overpowered because on a battlefield, it's of limited use. But the "campaign setting" ruins this, because the choices expand unfathomably... to a point where something like a stalker attains deity-status, while projected image, as written, becomes soft and flimsy. Thus, applied to a game setting as I'm doing, and as players do who claim to be running the White Box "rules as written," it's plain that the rules oscillate wildly depending on which of the game's identities we apply.
Anti-Magic Shell: A field which surrounds the Magic-User and makes him totally impervious to all spells. It also prevents any spells from being sent through the shell by the Magic-User who conjured it. Duration: 12 turns.
Sure. Don't have a problem with it. The limitation is sensible, given the benefit. Something that works.
Death Spell: An incantation which kills from 2-16 creatures with fewer than seven hit dice. The creatures must be within an area of 6" x 6" to come under the spell. Range: 24".
This is fine too. The overpowered aspect is managed by the hit dice limit and the area of effect is plain and evident. By the time a character reached the necessary level to use the spell, however, it's usefulness is suspect. First, because there's not much game in pitting a 12th level wizard against 7 or less hit die monsters, so a lot of the time it's a dead spell slot. Alternately, if such monsters were to appear, they'd likely be in numbers of greater than 25 or 30, so that killing an average of 9 and a maximum of 16 would have dubious benefits. Still, though, it's a flat out attack spell, making it far more useful than part water, which one might never in fact use.
It is a point worth making with a fair number of the "useful" spells. Often, the DM has to create the obstacle intentionally so that the spell can be used against it, which creates a sort of null effect... which in fact isn't very interesting for the player. Once the lower water or part water is used to get to the other side of the river, which might just as well have had a bridge placed across it for all the "game" it provides when we know the caster has the spell available, it's just a thing that happens. There's no tension in it. Quite a number of spells that are positioned as apparent game changers often don't have much punch by the time the character gets to the level where they're useful. The importance for them, far more often, is as a one-off scroll that a lower level character gets to employ.
Geas: A spell which forces the recipient to perform some task (as desired by the Magic-User casting the Geas). Any attempt to deviate from the performance of the task will result in weakness, and ignoring the Geas entirely brings death. The referee must carefully adjudicate the casting and subsequent performance of the geased individual when this spell is used. Duration: Until the task is completed. Range: 3".
I didn't forget the underline under the second reference to "Geas"... the text did. It is annoying as hell that the spell reference in the same spell's description apparently needs to be underlined, even when mentioned twice in some cases.
This should be rewritten as, "A spell which forces the recipient to perform some task (as desired by the DM imposing the geas..." For it is, very obviously, a DM's spell. Players could use the spell to cause a bunch of non-players to seek out a McGuffin, but rarely would they choose to do so; how could you know, for one thing, that they'd have any real chance of success? How would you know that they didn't try to ignore the geas and just, in fact, died (since this is worded as an option, as opposed to simply saying, "it can't be ignored," the far more obvious design choice). And once Biff and Jimmy and Banhi and such all went off to get the item, the party has to sit here and wait for them to come back, which is what non-player wizards do when casting geas on the party.
In fact, then, unless you're using this 6th level spell to have the NPCs perform a task like, "walk up to that guard and punch him in the face," or "walk across that ice-covered pool and see if its solid," or "please open the chest in case its trapped," there's not much use for it. On the other hand, the DM can fuck with the party for six, ten or fourteen sessions, which makes it a GREAT spell.
Pointedly, were I to play in a campaign where the DM employed the spell, I'd simply say, "I'd rather die," actually meaning it, because I have no interest whatsoever in playing in any campaign where I don't have agency as a player. I'm willing to leave the spell in place for players to use (that's their choice), but I would never use this spell as a DM for precisely the reason given. It's a bad narrative device and I think any adventure I wanted the players to try could be managed well enough through other enticements than the use of a cheap, controlling spell.
Disintegrate: This spell will cause material of any kind — other than that of a magical nature — to Disintegrate. It will blast a tree, dragon (if it fails to make its saving throw against magic), wall section, or whatever. Range: 6".
I assume a snail can also avoid being disintegrated if it makes it's saving throw. I note that the tree, also a living thing, doesn't get one.
Because no definition is provided for what the spell actually does, er hem, again, "disintegrate" is a word coined in 1796 (cough cough, anachronism) that means to "separate into component parts, destroy the cohesion of;" by 1851, this was given an intransitive sense, "to break apart." It is undoubtedly not a coincidence that the word emerges about the time that artillery begins to expand into explosive grenades as opposed to mere cannonballs. A word was needed for things and people that were literally blown apart in a way that language had never needed to express before.
By this reading (and no other reading exists), the spell invokes violent obliteration, not tidy vanishing, which creates dust, fragments, perhaps a crater, the disassembled "parts" of the dragon scattered across everything, with no actual mass lost in the process. Since the time period in which the word gestated generally meant a considerable amount of extremely messy fallout, as it still does in war, it's not a nice spell, generally. If you don't want to be picking dragon off every coin in it's horde, you might want to think of another way of killing it. Plus, it would be fair if your pal Gregory were to turn to you and say, "Fuck, Zapan, now I need a bath! AGAIN! Stop using that spell!"
Because the spell names a wall section, we may assume it can't do an entire wall... but we're stuck, again, with no real limitation to the spell's reach. Presumably, the entire planet would be a bad idea, so we're looking for some dimension smaller than Earth and perhaps about the size of a tree (a really good sized poplar, for example, like the ones just down the street from me that stand 60 feet high with canopies of 40 feet wide, would be larger than a dragon, even a very big one). Though, by my book, a part of a tree would be sufficient to rend it asunder, while the whole dragon wouldn't need to be disintigrated to kill it. So... it's really indefinable given the text. A section of wall could be three bricks. These aren't very useful examples, I must say.
Move Earth: When above ground the Magic-User may utilize this spell to move prominences such as hills or ridges. The spell takes one turn to go into effect. The terrain affected will move at the rate of 6” per turn. Duration: 6 turns. Range 24".
A "ridge" is pretty enormously large, particularly in places like the Appalachians or the Ozarks, where ridgelines can stretch out ten or twenty miles without interruption. In ranges like the Rockies near me, a ridgeline can run fifty miles. Additionally, a single hill in many parts of the world can easily be anywhere from two to six miles wide, depending on it's formulation. The city of Calgary surrounds a hill, Nose Hill, which is a big city park that's 4.3 square miles in area and stretches 2.5 miles wide.
It's very obvious from this that the writers of the White Box were located in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan, places where I have been and travelled around. It's pretty obvious that the designers were thinking of little bumps on a wargame map, with their minds affected by the little bumps of the sort of flatland-geography they lived in.
Imagine if you were able to move the Palatine Hill in Rome; it's just 50 acres, but the consummate resultant catastrophe would be incomprehensible, any time after the settlement of the city. Never mind a "death" spell, you're free to kill hundreds of thousands as you destroy the homes on the hill and then roll the hill onto the neighbourhoods beside it.
In short, there's no way at all to include the spell in any believable sense using "hill" and "ridge" as a measurement, which is perhaps the most egregious assumption I've yet encountered in these rules. And that really is saying something. Too, compare how much "earth" this moves to the amount of water moved with two other 6th level spells. Surely, it ought to be harder to move earth than water.
Control Weather: The Magic-User can perform any one of the following weather control operations with this spell: Rain, Stop Rain, Cold Wave, Heat Wave, Tornado, Stop Tornado, Deep Clouds, Clear Sky.
Without rules to impose weather, or define what weather is, or the effects of ending a cold wave, or what "deep clouds" refer to, this is a sloppy, silly, useless spell. The caster utterly relies on the DM to impose a form of weather that needs to then be changed... but though it is raining, "stop rain" doesn't making it warmer or cooler, it doesn't adjust humidity, it doesn't adjust wind speed, or how much cloud remains in the sky, or even if the rain doesn't just stop in mid air and become fog.
And, again, as stated above, for me to "stop tornado," the DM has to create one for me to stop, while if I can just "make tornado," the spell doesn't indicate in any way how I "control" it. Am I able to, again, just wipe out the city of Rome with it? A tornado is an unaccountable power to just hand to someone who can't even kill more than 16 monsters with seven or less hit dice. "Stand back, I'm going to slaughter everything in a path a mile wide." Hell, it doesn't even say how large a tornado it creates. A small tornado can be no more than a few feet wide and last for just seconds. Is this what's created? No idea.
Of course, there are endless problems with climatic zones, the availability of water in the air, air pressure, convective air movement... and a total ignorance regarding the area of effect that the spell can touch. As written, I can make it stop raining every where on the globe, just by saying so.
That, thankfully, is the last mage spell. I'm going to stop now and pick up the cleric with a new post.
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