Glogtober Day 3 Again: Tomes the electric boogalooing

You can only hold so many spells at in harmony within your body before you explode. The smarter you are, the greater capacity your mind has for holding spells hostage within your brain.

Holding these spells in harmony within yourself is more commonly referred to as having memorized them. You know them, you can recall them and cast them instinctually, quickly and without struggle.

You can cast any other spell that you've mastered, but it's a slower process. Wizards know waaaay too many spells. Nobody has a brain capable of holding all the spells even your most underachieving Wizard probably knows. Which is why they use what the Talentless have come to think of as spell books¹. 

These spell books act as a portable spell repository for the Wizard. At any point, they can take a few minutes and transfer spells from their own brain into their spell book and vice versa so that they can be as prepared as Wizardly possible in any given situation. 

Of course, only Wizards have mastered this narrow niche of the Art, other practitioners have to make do with several other methods. 

To fully memorize a thing within the mind is to cultivate a familiarity with it that is unmistakeable, to be so intimately acquainted with the thought that you could instantly tell if any minute detail were just the fraction of a hairs width deviated from the truth. This familiarization is comprised of 1) Seeing, 2) Feeling, 3) Knowing and 4) Encompassing. Lesser Practitioners try to make up for their failings by imitating this process with various tchotchkes.

The first such crutch used by these lesser Practitioners are actual spell books. These are magical tomes that develop a personality of their own and act as a pseudo familiar to the Practitioner and hold extra spells. The Practitioner reads the desired spell from the pages of the book and casts it ever so slightly faster than someone who has never cast the spell and is just seeing it for the first time.

The next crutch, marginally more effective, is a totem of sorts. An object with the spell inscribed on it in a language² that makes sense to the Practitioner. If the Practitioner can both see the transcription and feel it in their hand then they will be able to cast the spell two orders closer to the speed of the casting of a memorized spell.

The last verified, and most effective, crutch used by Lesser Practitioners of the Art is the magical tattoo. Ware those who bare ink on their skin for they sling death and greater horrors from beyond the veil at whim. If they're visible to the Practitioner at the time of casting, these tattoos can be Seen, Felt and Known by their bearer which allows them to cast magic nearly as fast as a Wizard can get off a memorized spell. Fools will tell you that getting such a tattoo on the inside of your body would allow you to Encompass the spell and be the equal of any Wizard, but that's idle tongue wagging and nothing of import.

1. Quick digression here - spell books are actually magically preserved and glamoured brains; actual brains from magical creatures, other Wizards - anything/anyone that shows a propensity for talent with the Art. Wizards obviously learned the hard way that the small folk were not peachy keen on them carrying around brains kept in suspended animation, still warm and glistening with the fluids from the corpse they'd been stolen from. For obvious reasons, long ago Wizards came together and all sacrificed just a bit of themselves to hide this fact from the Talentless. When a Talentless person watches a Wizard rifle through the pages of their spell book, searching out the perfect spell? This is just a glamour, the Wizard is actually probing through the folds of a brain, squeezing his fingers through the gore, "reading" the spell similar to how a blind man feels his way along a corridor. 

2. Common choices for this language are 1) The Secret and Sacred Language of the Art itself, which was stolen from the Library of the Blinded Seer in 1367 ID³, 2) Draguille, literally translated as the Serpents Tongue, a language lost to time, exclusively used by the Great Wyrms of ages passed, 3). A shorthand known only to the Practitioner.

3. In the Time of Darkness, a notation that refers to the years prior to the introduction of the Art to the Peoples.

Make the rules reward the gameplay you want to see. This entire blog post was written because spell casters tattooing/scarring/branding spells into their body a la Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat is just too cool and something I want to feature heavily in my revision to CHAFD