This week for Magic Mondays we bring you a masterclass in runic array design.
This week we show you the Aspect of Woudas array.
Notation: Apply the effect of a Created, Sustained Fire that excludes Heat onto Humans within an area 100 times greater than the area of the array.
Description: The Aspect of Woudas array is an instructional array far more than it is a practically useful array. After all, how many times will you need to encase people in fire that don’t give off heat? However, what it can do it show folks how you can use complex arrays in order to achieve a goal you may not have thought possible. It also serves a secondary purpose in that it can be used as a template for other complex arrays you might have in mind.
The key thing to remember about complex arrays is that the secondary array (the one inside the main array) takes the place of any normal rune in a locus and is treated as such. This means that you can use other runes to affect or even modify the secondary array. Here we used a Contain and Gargantuan rune to specify the size over which the effect must happen, but you could easily have used size runes to modify (rather than affect) the secondary array to increase or decrease the amount of fire you wanted, or time runes to speed up or slow down the flames. You could even have been much ambitious and use a Transmute rune to transmute a material(s) into the entire effect.
The bottom line is that if you can do it with a normal rune in a normal locus, you can do it with a secondary array.
The other useful thing to remember is that it is the effect of a secondary array that is affecting the centrum (or other locus), not the runes inside. In other words, work out what the secondary array does and then apply that to what it is affecting. In this case, the secondary array creates an continuous fire that produces no heat. So if you apply that to humans, it means that all humans within the area specified by the array are on fire but the flames produce no heat. This is important, because if it were the runes and not the effect that affected the humans in the array’s area then the Create, Sustain and Exclude Heat would all have been applied to humans which would have meant this array created frozen human popsicles.
Lastly for this little masterclass, you can swap out the secondary array here for any array you want and have the array do all sorts of things. Arrays are, by their very nature, quite flexible, so the only limit is your imagination.
If you want to get more arrays, check out our Journal of Array Design over on DriveThruRPG, now also available as a deck of magic cards.