A bit of time ago few friendly people got together to brew spells based on music track titles much in the vein of the two spell supplements written for Lamentations, each of them offered small number of tracks from which everyone randomised one to act as a spell prompt.
This is what I got:
"Seven Diadems of Stillborn Bones - performed by Winter Lantern"
Not all spells and rituals are easy and convenient, the power often being derived from the difficulties the caster needs to go through and the amount of effort invested into completing the evocation. Furthermore rituals and evocations are most often performed and concocted based on one's desires rather than from a purely utilitarian angle.
This spell is no different.
Seven Diadems of Stillborn Bones
A tale of midwifes, magic that lead to the burning of the stillborn in regions where it is common for rulers to have several consorts, this ritual might have first been conceived as a grief-striken attempt to regain what was lost via an unorthodox combination of differing rites.
The name of the ritual is directly derived from the involvent of the magi performing it slowly gathering up bones of stillborn or miscarried babies, enough to craft seven small circlets fit for a newborn's head.
The magi is then to fashion the seven diadems out of the remains, whispering pleas and reassuring words to them as they weave the frail bones together.
On the seventh night since the crafting of the diadems, they are to be washed clean much in the same way a newborn baby would be and then wrapped in warm cloths to be stored away in a small cradle specifically made for them.
The cradled bundle of circlets is then to be sung lullabies to and looked after for seven more days, and at the end of the seventh day the magi will hear a baby's cry from the cradle.
The baby will in time grow up just as any other normal child would, but will never quite be, nor understand what it is to be, human. They will speak of lost relatives like they had met them and will know of people that have very clearly lived in the past like they are acquintances.
This spell must be cast three times for the ritual to take effect. Once during the crafting of the diadems, once while washing them clean, and once mixed in to the lullabies sung to the cradled bundle. Any possible mistakes or accidents with the ritual are only discovered once the bundle is unwrapped on the seventh day when the magi hears the cry of a newborn from the cradle.
Miscasts
- Writhing fleshy mass that only remotely resembles a fetus trashes around underneath the wrappings, ready to assault and run away from the magi when they go to inspect the results of the ritual. It will return to haunt the PC for the rest of their life as it slowly grows into a full-fledged monster.
- The magi was the final piece of the ritual, still missing. Their soul is sucked out of their body and moves to inhabit the newborn baby bundled up in the cradle as their old body slumps to the ground.
- As the magi goes to inspect the cradle, it feels like a horse kicking it's way out from inside their chest as several pairs of their rib bones suddenly go missing. After meaty crunching from the cradle as the magi lays on the floor wrecked in pain, a newborn baby with striking similiarity to them begins their bubbly laughter while suckling on one of the magi's rib bones. The PC is reduced down to 1hp and they lose [level]d4 max hp as what was missing from the ritual is forcibly taken from them to supplement it's completion.
- There is no baby in the cradle, what instead is unwrapped are the diadems. Fused and with strands of flesh and skin grown around them with a tiny beating heart sitting inside the tangle of stretched out skin.
- There is something wrong with the baby and it will only live up to the age of three. Extracting whatever knowledge they hold from beyond the grave could prove difficult before their death.
- The magi forms a mother-like bond to the newborn baby, and will not do anything that might cause harm to come unto their new child. They will provide for the child and raise them as their own, overlooking any strangeness that anyone might point in the child.
Cradle carved in boxwood
from the Industrial arts of the Nineteenth Century (1851-1853)
by Sir Matthew Digby wyatt (1820-1877)
- Writhing fleshy mass that only remotely resembles a fetus trashes around underneath the wrappings, ready to assault and run away from the magi when they go to inspect the results of the ritual. It will return to haunt the PC for the rest of their life as it slowly grows into a full-fledged monster.
- The magi was the final piece of the ritual, still missing. Their soul is sucked out of their body and moves to inhabit the newborn baby bundled up in the cradle as their old body slumps to the ground.
- As the magi goes to inspect the cradle, it feels like a horse kicking it's way out from inside their chest as several pairs of their rib bones suddenly go missing. After meaty crunching from the cradle as the magi lays on the floor wrecked in pain, a newborn baby with striking similiarity to them begins their bubbly laughter while suckling on one of the magi's rib bones. The PC is reduced down to 1hp and they lose [level]d4 max hp as what was missing from the ritual is forcibly taken from them to supplement it's completion.
- There is no baby in the cradle, what instead is unwrapped are the diadems. Fused and with strands of flesh and skin grown around them with a tiny beating heart sitting inside the tangle of stretched out skin.
- There is something wrong with the baby and it will only live up to the age of three. Extracting whatever knowledge they hold from beyond the grave could prove difficult before their death.
- The magi forms a mother-like bond to the newborn baby, and will not do anything that might cause harm to come unto their new child. They will provide for the child and raise them as their own, overlooking any strangeness that anyone might point in the child.
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| Cradle carved in boxwood from the Industrial arts of the Nineteenth Century (1851-1853) by Sir Matthew Digby wyatt (1820-1877) |
