Sortilege Spell (The Presdigitation of Divination)

[Lysander]

As far as I know there's no simple spell to allow minor stage magic forms of divination:

Sortilege
Divination
Level: Brd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: 10 ft.
Target, Effect, or Area: See text
Duration: 1 hour
Saving Throw: See text
Spell Resistance: No

Sortilege is a form of simple divination used for practice and entertainment. Once cast a sortilege spell allows you to divine trivial pieces of information for one hour. The types of knowledge that can be gained are minor and have severe limitations.

A sortilege spell can be used to learn what is written on a card hidden from you, learn the sequence of cards in a deck, guess a number or a word a person is thinking, predict how a pair of dice will roll, read a page in a closed book, and other similar tricks. The major limitation of sortilege is that your target must be willing part of the spell. A person must think of a word for you to read in their mind, a hidden page must not be genuinely guarded, and the complexities of chance and clash of wills in gambling prevents being able to use sortilege to cheat others for profit. Sortilege is purposefully showy and any trick performed requires a sweeping arcane gesture towards your target.

[criticalstriker]

This is really cool. Not much else I can say, honestly. It seems like a very well balanced cantrip. About the only thing I would say is to remove the showy requirement. Having a stage magician just sort of touch his temple, and guess your card seems like it would be a cool scene. But, (if you don't mind, of course) I'll almost certainly be using this for both my characters, and as a DM :smallbiggrin:. Cantrips are such useful little role playing tools...

[deuxhero]

I like. I posted Presdigitation for illusions (I can't find it though) a bit back. I wonder if there could be a Presdigitation equivalent made for every school.


edit: Found it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126202). (beware the thread is very much dead)

[DracoDei]

Just make sure it doesn't overshadow Message.

[Lysander]

About the only thing I would say is to remove the showy requirement. Having a stage magician just sort of touch his temple, and guess your card seems like it would be a cool scene.

That's sort of how I imagined it. One hand on the temple, the other hand pointing to the card.



Just make sure it doesn't overshadow Message.

It won't. It only has a range of ten feet, and is limited to a single word at a time. I suppose it could be useful for utterly silent communication with a person standing right next to you. If I were the DM I'd force the diviner to spend a standard action on each word gleaned from thoughts. This sort of falls under talking is a free action though. It's up to the DM to impose a sensible limit.

[DracoDei]

Missed the range... yeah, that takes care of that, and you could even up it a bit if you liked.