This week for Magic Mondays we bring you a magic trick that is sure to make audiences fall flat on their faces.
This week we show you the Pocket Staff array.
Notation: Create, if no Iron is present, Wood in the shape of a pillar with a diameter equal to the array’s and with a length thirty times the array’s diameter.
Description: This is a very simple array that just creates a rod of wood if there is no iron present. Simply, easy, straightforward… and utterly useless unless you know how it is to be used. Like most arrays, the ingenuity in the design of the array is only expressed once you marry the magic to the machine. Arrays are powerful, yes, but with the simplest of technologies they become something special.
Runists are rarely creative and imaginative people and the name of an array always points towards its intended use. “Pocket Staff” then should tell you plenty. Clearly, the array creates the staff, but where does the pocket come into the equation? Well from a pocket watch of course!
In the Runed Age, this array first gained fame in Middelburg shortly after the grand old clocks were reduced down to small watches on chains that a gentleman could keep in his pocket. So not too long ago. Of course, being a gentleman with enough money to buy and maintain a pocket watch, he would go to soirées and parties and get-togethers with other likeminded and wealthy individuals… who always have enemies. Unfortunately, getting a weapon into into of these elegant occasions were more difficult than robbing a bank.
Well, almost.
Pocket watches have always been allowed, because they are such a status symbol. While a poor assassin cannot afford a true pocket watch, the outer casing is simple enough for a common smith with time on his hands to reproduce. Inside this empty steel shell would be the Pocket Staff array. Once inside the soirée, the assassin had merely to open the faux-watch’s casing and out would pop a wooden staff ready to be used as a weapon and even easier to dispose of.
While the household guards have long since started inspecting pocket watches, this array and the faux-watch casing it resides in have found some traction among the footmen of Middelburg who find it an easy and accessible weapon to be used in ambush or as a last resort. At the very least, no one will know your pocket watch isn’t real and it does look darn fashionable.
If you want to get more arrays and incantations, check out our Journal of Array Design over on DriveThruRPG, now also available as a deck of magic cards.