The Magic of Silence ...

The magic of Silence, and other cool utility spells for creative casters!

Before we begin: public voting has opened for RPG Superstar! You can vote here through July 16, and though I can’t divulge any information about my submission “that could be considered as adding to, expanding upon, or clarifying the content” of my monster, I’ll simply point out that there’s only one rakshasa entered in this year’s contest …

My first Pathfinder character, Saimei, was a rogue archer. His job — my job — was to stand in the back and shoot volleys of deadly arrows. Playing a martial combatant was a great fit for someone new to the game: rolling lots of dice, hitting lots of things.

But I quickly became enchanted by our party’s wizard, Kura Yami, who could murder enemies with her mind.

Seriously, WTF?! Here I am firing arrows at imaginary monsters with a shortbow — like a tengu schmuck — while one of my fetchling teammates is creating illusions that, if the GM rolls his monsters’ saves badly enough, kill our foes on the spot by conjuring an image of their deepest fear and exploding their minds?

So that’s what really hooked me on this hobby: magic.

And it wasn’t the blasting spells like fireball and lightning bolt that so entranced me, though it’s cool to do a bunch of area damage. It was the utility magic: tricks that a clever caster can use to solve problems both more and less mundane than, “A bunch of evil oni spirits are trying to murder us! Quick let’s murder them first.”

Like how to cross that deadly chasm when our ropes won’t quite stretch across it.

Or how to clean all this blood off our clothes before our audience with the queen.

Or how to send a secret message to our powerful ally on the far side of the planet.

Or how to quiet an annoying mouth breather sitting behind me in the meditation hall.

OK, perhaps that last one seems obviously specific. Earlier this month, I spent eight days at a silent meditation retreat in Northern California, sitting quietly on a cushion for most hours of each day and gaining several multiclass levels in monk. Irori be praised!

(My own irl character build, determined at some point by my wife, is bard with a druid dedication. High charisma, plus knows stuff about trees and cats.)

On the topic of charisma, please earn yourself a Hero Point by mashing that heart button up top. I have no idea what it accomplishes, besides flattering me!

I’ve been to silent retreats before, and there’s always a point — before I’ve fully harnessed mindfulness to quiet my brain’s ceaseless cacophony of stray thoughts — where my mind start grasping at remembered Pathfinder materials, hoping to quench its boredom.

Seriously, there’s not much offered at a meditation retreat in terms of entertaining content for an understimulated mind to latch onto, besides everybody’s favorite game show, “I Wonder What They’re Serving For Lunch Today?!?!”

At some point during the week, before I had achieved enlightenment and was still merely a breathing mass of earth element resting atop a pillow, I started to ponder the depths of the spell Silence.

One complaint about Pathfinder’s transition from First to Second Edition is that spells aren’t as powerful as they used to be. I think this complaint is both factually valid, and beneficial to the game.

In First Edition, you could cast Silence directly on an enemy, who had to pass a Will save or become the center of a 20-foot emanation of magical silence that no sound could either penetrate or emerge from. Successfully drop Silence on an enemy spellcaster who needs to speak command words in order for her magic to work, and you win the encounter.

In Second Edition, the spell is more restrictive: it can only be cast on a willing creature, and at Level 2 the spell only silences that particular creature. Mainly it pairs well with another Level 2 spell, Invisibility.

However, once you heighten the spell to Level 4, it regains almost all of its former glory:

Besides being useful for sneaking around, or shielding your party from a gibbering mouther’s aura of confusion, or teaching a lesson to your annoying bard who won’t stop playing awful songs on his lute (as long as you can trick the bard into being a willing target), a 4th-level Silence spell can also now be used to defang an enemy spellcaster: you cast Silence on your party’s monk, and send him in to grapple the caster!

In fact, many of my fondest Pathfinder memories involve the creative use of utility spells:

• Dag the skald punk rocker using Unseen Servant to deploy his trusty assistant and best friend Roadie, who single-handedly sherpa’d Dag’s instruments and personal library across most of Golarion.

• Elysii the sorcerer using Prestidigitation to conjure a puppet show that reenacts the party’s terrible tactics in a recent combat with a glass golem where Elysii was called upon to save everyone’s sorry asses.

• Artemis the barbarian wizard using Bullhorn to calmly inform enemies deeper in the dungeon, “Just so you know, my friends and I are coming down there to destroy you.”

That last spell, by the way, comes from Pathfinder’s 2021 hardcover, “Secrets of Magic,” which introduced a boatload of quirky new spells. Here are some of the more interesting ones I’ve come across in the pages of that wonderful book:

• Gravitational Pull aka get over here, you fool

• Healing Plaster aka just rub some dirt in it

• Phantom Crowd aka see everyone agrees with me

• Replicate aka the guard we knocked unconscious will vouch for us

• Seashell of Stolen Sound aka here’s what he’s been saying behind your back

• Sonata Span aka we can traverse this canyon upon my sooooooooooong

• Soothing Spring aka everybody into the hot tub!!!

I look forward to exploring these and other cool utility spells with an as-yet-unborn Pathfinder character, or perhaps in my mind on Day 3 of a future meditation retreat.

• THE MINI AND THE DICE

Speaking of spellcasters, those two CNC-cut wooden minis are actually dual aspects of one character: Kimiko the kitsune, in her humanoid and tiny fox form.

For our “Heart of Darkness” campaign where we played through a modified first volume of the Serpent’s Skull AP, “Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv,” my friend Rusty designed and cut a full party’s worth of minis using the gear at his local high school’s wood shop. Kimiko was Rusty’s arcanist PC in that adventure, another squishy stand-in-the-back type who would sprint towards danger whenever Rusty saw an opportunity to cast Color Spray.

As for those pearly white dice with the curvy script? I don’t know where they came from, but I assume they’re hand-me-downs from our OG GM Jason who passed along a bunch of gear when he bequeathed the Gamemastering duties. Tough to read on occasion, but possessing a certain charm. A bit like Jason.

• PARTY DYNAMICS

Here’s your chance to cast Glibness on yourself and then bullshit your way into the comments section below.

This month’s prompt:

If you were building yourself as a real-life PF2 character, what class (and multiclass archetype, if needed) would best describe you?

I mentioned above that I’m a bard with druid dedication. But I also statted up my wife’s character sheet a couple years back for her birthday. She was a wizard-rogue with levels in the arcane trickster prestige class and a cat familiar. I even designed her irl miniature in Hero Forge!

Well that’s it for this month, shhhhhhhhhhh. And so, as I whisper at the end of every Pathfinder module I run: this has been Ambush Tactics. I’ve been your Game Master. I hope you had a fun time.

Adventure!