Wasn’t the eye and hand of vecna things well before they actually created the backstory of vecna? Like his eye and hand were super powerful items, but that was it about the info on vecna. Or am I misremembering the sequence of events
No, Vecna is an anagram of Vance, as in Jack Vance the author of the Dying Earth series, which is where DnD lifted it's magic system from. Jack Vance is a white dude.
Fun fact! The requirement of preparing spells and then forgetting them after casting is called Vancian magic, also named after Jack Vance. In D&D you see this in spellcasters who need to prepare their spells, and lore wise it's how magic the gathering works.
In the dying earth books, wizards had to capture demons in geometric thought prisons. When you cast the spell you’re pointing the demon at one weak spot in the construction and out pops the spell effect. Then the demon is gone and you have to reseal a new one in.
Needless to say this was much more dangerous in the books than when it was borrowed for DnD. As a result wizards also carried guns for most of their combat needs. Guns usually don’t try and crawl out of your soul through your eyeballs.
I assume its something along the lines of imagine preparing your spells by separating the components or whatever into little sandwich bags and writing "fireball" with a marker on one, and "hold person" on another. As the wizard, you reach in, cast the spell, and next time you go to cast it, you see the bag is gone and, because youre smart and know how magic works, think "well, must have cast that one already... explains why everything is on fire"
Alternative explanation: Casting times for certain spells (like fireball) are several minutes to an hour. However, you can do most of the casting beforehand, and then in combat just nudge the last component into place or utter the final syllable or whatever, and the spell goes off — but now, you need to spend another 35 minutes preparing the next fireball. So, you can prepare so many spells first thing in the morning, and any time you have down time, but until you take the time to cast most of the spell “fireball”, you don’t have a loaded and prepped fireball ready to cast at a moment’s notice.
So each preparation is essentially like setting catapult or loading a crossbow, and you trigger the final piece any time later and behold, spell. (Only more effort and time involved to "reload")
IIRC that's the lore behind why that one summoner lady in Goblin Slayer speaks in that weird halting way. Having dozens of spells prepped and constantly making sure she doesn't accidentally just blow a fireball into a bar while ordering a beer
It's the explanation I've aways used before, when DnD had a real vancian magic system. Now, spell slots are more akin to generic mana, so I never used it anymore
This was essentially the assumed way it worked in 2e and earlier. When preparing spells, it took a certain amount of time depending on the level of every single spell you're memorizing. It wasn't until 3e that preparing spells just became a 1 hour to read your spellbook and refresh your memory kind of thing.
I think I saw a different explanation in an older supplement book. The actual spell is a longer ritual affair to cast, taking several seconds or minutes to cast. So to get around this Wizards go through and begins casting the spells they can each evening, only leaving out the last trigger phrase and/or gestures.
So they are essentially holding in a lot of rituals, being almost done. Personally I didn't like this much and instead imagine it slightly different where preparing spells is the caster gathering in raw magic, the wizard has to shape it into specific forms and sorcerers can keep it in raw form, as their natural ability attunes it to more specific forms when casting. Bards and similar, I see as more having learned only specific forms to store the raw magic as.
I still don't understand, because this isn't how magic works in D&D. You can cast the same spell multiple times without preparing it again. You just have to decide in advance what to study for that day to keep the procedure fresh in your mind.
That’s new for 5E, and not how it worked in previous editions. Previously you had to memorize each instance of a spell. So if you wanted to cast fireball twice, it was memorized twice separately. The new system is more flexible.
Youre trying to apply concrete logic, (as i did since i just learned this info today as well) to a loose magic system idea that generally only exists as neat lore and not very often plot relevant.
You can interpret forgetting the spell entirely or simply forgetting you used it. Forgetting entirely means going back to the spellbook (again using wizards with components as an example as its really the only logical case i see for this to work).
So sure, you have materials "prepared" for more than 1 fireball for the day. You cast it and forget the spell completely. You know you need to cast a spell, and you reach in and grab your next sandwich bag, on it reads "fireball; page 105".
Again, youre not an idiot, so you know these are the spell components and that is the page in your spellbook with the incantation.
Its why the wizards HAVE a spellbook to begin with.
It’s also more about “forgetting” how to cast the spell. That’s why your spell book is important. Magic was treated as essentially a living thing that literally flew out of your brain once used, so you had to look at your spell book to remember the method of casting it.
If you’ve ever crammed for a math exam then forgot everything after the test was over, it’s basically just that
Another poster commented that older editions were as you described. I just didn't understand with the current rules, especially when focuses replace 95%+ of material components. I only started with 5e a few years ago :)
In Dying Earth it's explained that casters can only fit so many spells into their head at one time. That magic itself is so alien to people that utilizing the spells frazzles it from your mind. Dying Earth was post apocalyptic in a sense. It was a fantasy world but it was our world at one point. The basis of magic was explained to be mathematics, but most casters hadn't even knowledge of algebra. Very cool and very inventive for its time.
In the dying earth books, wizards had to capture demons in geometric thought prisons. When you cast the spell you’re pointing the demon at one weak spot in the construction and out pops the spell effect. Then the demon is gone and you have to reseal a new one in.
Needless to say this was much more dangerous in the books than when it was borrowed for DnD. As a result wizards also carried guns for most of their combat needs. Guns usually don’t try and crawl out of your soul through your eyeballs.
The exact explanation depends on the setting, but in Forgotten Realms it's because spellcasting is an act of temporarily capturing a force of nature and then releasing it under specific conditions for a desired effect.
It's less that the mage forgets how to cast the spell as "It is not possible for the mortal mind to do it from memory." Cantrips, by definition, are spells that are simple enough to memorize.
They don’t forget the spell existed or that they cast it. It’s not amnesia. It’s just that the “spell” is not a normal thought or memory it’s magically charged and alive in a sense and far too big and complex to truly comprehend. When a wizard casts the spell the extra dimensional magical construct that gives the spell power is exhausted/expelled.
vanciian D&D magic, a spell is a living construction of energy within your mind that you need to work through until you can understand it, and then hold the epiphany of what it is in your mind, it's not just knowledge, its a living thing, and once expended, the knowledge is gone - the knowledge of how to recreate that living construct of arcane geometry in your mind isn't gone though
Always understood is at "magic is so complex that a mortal mind cannot truly retain it". So you prepare a spell, a process which would allow you to keep it temporarily in your mind, and once you cast it your mind is free of that burden. Of course, you still remember how to prepare the spell tomorrow...
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u/ecologamer Nov 09 '24
Wasn’t the eye and hand of vecna things well before they actually created the backstory of vecna? Like his eye and hand were super powerful items, but that was it about the info on vecna. Or am I misremembering the sequence of events