Poetry Corner, finally cornered.

After months, perhaps years of neglect, I finally put some of my sister's great poetry into designs. Here are four of the most interesting. I hope you agree. Click on each to see a larger view.

Train Nomad   

Harmony

The Desert

Purity

Internet Art Collage

Here's something fun I made from art I found online, mostly from terragalleria.com and Deviantart.com. Click on a page to see a larger vesion.

The Language of Magic

As long as I've been alive, I've loved the idea of magic. The power, the thrill, the mastery, the mystery. Consequently I spent my formative years reading every fantasy book I could get my hands on. One notable thing, though, was that with one exception, no author ever spelled out what exactly the verbal component of a spell was, nor what magic runes looked like. That always rankled. I wanted specifics!

The closest to rules for magic came in the form of D&D, and although I admired it from afar, I never had a chance to play it. However, in the last six years I've collected almost all of the v.3 D&D books, and I came to the conclusion that they, too, missed an opportunity to specify what magic sounded like and what a mage actually said when casting a spell. So, I decided to do it myself.

Now that I have unlimited amounts of time I have embarked on a project to give voice to magic and to show an example of what a complete spell book might look like.

I listed all the spells in the D&D Player's Manual and the Spell Compendium. Then I had to figure out what a person would be saying in terms of content. The Transmutation spell "Mage Hand" which allows a magic user to move small objects I decided said, "move by my power". This would be the content of the spell.

Then I had to find a magical language which would be the actually spoken word. I decided to use the only explicit magical language I'd ever read of, from Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series, where wizards speak Magius, the language of magic.

That language, however, is only partially translated and has a small and incomplete lexicon. So, I have been making new words to go along with the verse of the spell. I'm literally creating a new langauge! Although it's really just a cypher of English.

Finally, I used Blambot's "Dark Arts" font to make a written version of the magical language, and the final result of all this is a table laying it all out.

Here is the first page which contains all of the level 0 spells.

And to complete the project, I'm also making an example of what a mage's spellbook might look like. It's composed of various layers, and the circles and glowing runes I pulled from redheadstock's Deviant Art page. The fonts vary, but I reused Blambot's Dark Arts and their Wizard Speak font.

Everything on the page has meaning: the top left rune is the spell level (0) in Wizard Speak. The script at the top is the written version of Magius. Below that (right) is the Magius translation and below that is the verse. On the left side is the rule book's description of the spell, and on the bottom right is the reagent used for the spell (if any) as well as any focus used. And of course, at the very bottom is the name of the spell. If you could highlight all the magic script and change it to a regular font, you'd see normal, readable prose. The rune in the center is the rune I chose to represent the Transmutation school of magic, to which this spell belongs.

Anywho, I know it's the ultimate in nerdishness, but it's a fun project. And a long one. I've now done all the level 0 and level 1 spells, and it's taken me two weeks. *whew. Only 859 more spells to go. Wish me luck!