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Player's Guide
Chapter 5: Spells
Your Spellcasting Style
Source
Advanced Player's Guide pg. 211
If you're playing a spellcaster, it can be fun to consider your personal spellcasting style. Casters of different traditions have the biggest gulf in how they cast spells, but there's also differentiation between—and within—classes!
Preparing Your Spells
Source
Advanced Player's Guide pg. 211
If you prepare spells, consider what it looks like as you do so. Typically, arcane spellcasters consult their books, self-reflect, or otherwise study; divine casters pray to fill their heart with spells that will serve their deity; occult casters attempt to decipher cryptic messages, often while referencing occult texts; and primal casters might seek natural places to contemplate their magic, such as a grove or underground cavern.
Spontaneous spellcasters, not needing to prepare, tend to wake up with their magical reserves restored. This might be a refreshed or vivacious feeling, a teeming thrum throughout the body, or even a sense of impending dread or awe.
Casting Your Spells
Source
Advanced Player's Guide pg. 211
For one spellcaster, casting a spell is a stressful, painful process. For another, it's a moment of triumph as they outsmart their enemy with just the right trick.
The Spell Components sidebar describes how spell components might impact the way you cast spells. Think about what they might mean for you. Do your verbal components use your own voice? Resonate out with a different timbre due to the magic in your words? Resemble the voice of your deity? For somatic components, what gestures do you make? They could be abstract, like forming quick sigils that look like hand signals. Or maybe they're direct: pointing your finger or raising a fist. The particulars of material components are abstracted, so you can customize those you like best for your spells.
Spell Components
The rules about how spell components work when casting are located
here
. But it can also help to understand what these components might mean to spellcasters.
Shouting out
verbal
components forces magic out into the world via a word laden with magical power. Spells that require only a verbal component tend to be direct and forceful, such as
power word kill
or
power word stun
. Verbal components are especially unsubtle, so spells that benefit from stealth, such as
invisibility
, might not have any verbal components in favor of having somatic components, material components, or both.
Somatic
components, such as twisting your hand in a complex gesture, shape magical energy into directed forms. While verbal components bring forward powerful forces, somatic components compel those forces to obey the spellcaster's wishes. Spells that have only somatic components typically have a physical effect or require touching a creature.
Material
components aren't ubiquitous like somatic and verbal components. They're used primarily for spells with physical effects, especially ones with a longer duration or that alter or control a large area, such as walls or zones of dangerous terrain. A
material component pouch
typically contains everything you need. This doesn't mean the materials are interchangeable, though—one spell might need powdered iron and another a particular gemstone.
Certain spells have
focus
components, objects of concentrated power that don't get used up in the same way that material components do. Essential for shaping and attuning the magic of the spell, these might be intriguing and elegant items in their own right.
Refocusing
Source
Advanced Player's Guide pg. 211
Your class briefly describes what you need to do to
Refocus
, such as communing with a familiar for the witch or meditating for the monk. Start out with some idea of what this looks like for you, and refine it during play. What you need to do to Refocus is broadly defined to allow a variety of methods that make sense in the story. One witch might share a treat to commune with their familiar, while another might endure a lecture from their familiar on their patron's virtues.