Monday, February 21, 2011

Monkey Scribe

Monkey Scribe

Level: 1
Duration: Instant, until written work is completed
Range: Touch

It is known that monkey scribed scrolls are the most potent.* This spell allows a magic-user to use a monkey (specifically a non-human great ape) to scribe mundane and magical writings. For spell books, a monkey scribe will copy the spells from a spell book to another as if they were the magic-user themselves, freeing the magic user for other tasks. The monkey becomes capable of understanding and speaking to the caster (with the casters intelligence and 25% of the time the casters personality and memory) for the duration of the spell and will calmly and diligently pursue his duties until finished. For scribing scrolls the monkey counts as the caster by proxy. The caster must be able to make the scroll himself without the help of the monkey for the monkey to be able to scribe the scroll. Scribing the scroll in this way makes the scroll more powerful as they max out any variables and offer twice the volume, range, duration and area of the spell. A factor of the spell is not doubled if it is already maxed out (for example in the case of variable duration, the max duration is used, and is not doubled). Variant: A GM may decide that humans do count as great apes for this spell.

*This idea came from the comments over at this linked post over at Telecanter's Receding Rules.

As I submitted this to Raggi for his spell contest this sucker is OGL so feel free to read and distribute with credit due.

3 comments:

Christopher said...

Wow, awesome spell. It will be interesting seeing players deal with the tradeoffs of obtaining and keeping a monkey and getting more powerful scribing. I'm going to have to put this somewhere my players will find it…

Thanks!

The Drune said...

I like this very much. Give a billion monkeys a billion years and they'd scribe all the spells in the Arduin Grimoire...

Telecanter said...

Awesome. Never enough monkeys in RPGs :)