It might be a delayed Magic Mondays, but don’t think we wouldn’t let you go a week without your weekly magic fix.
This week we show you the Kaín’s Canteen array.
Notation: Create Water in shape of a disk as wide as the array and 1/10th the array’s diameter in height if there is not enough water to fill said space.
Class: Utility
Description: Most often in life it is the simple things in life that matter most, and what is more simple and what matters more than good old water? The world’s surface is most made of it as are we and so we need a lot of it quite regularly in order to survive and thrive. This array goes a fair way into ensuring you are always well hydrated and never far from a good cup of clean, clear water.
They say that necessity is the mother of all invention, but in truth it is laziness which pushes us to invent new things in order to make life easier, less complex and less harsh for us. The Kaín’s Canteen array is a perfect example of it. With the Water rune, anyone and everyone has access to as much water as they could want, when they want it. The issue is that drawing an array every time you want a glass of water is tiresome, time consuming and just plain old boring. Yet we do need to drink and we don’t want to drink stale, old water.
The Westerners in their hot and harsh deserts came up with an elegant solution, as they so often do. At the bottom of a flash or canteen they would draw this array and then simply go about their business. The heat of the desert and the movement of the canteen would impart energy into the array and create a little bit of water. Every so often all you need to do is invert the canteen (while the lid is on, clearly), and with no water on the array, it would create a stream of water until the canteen has been filled.
Repeat this whenever the canteen runs out of water and there you have your very own decanter of endless water.
While Middelburg is not as hot as the western deserts, the same principle applies and so you will see many constables, soldiers and craftsmen (those professions which keep a man duly occupied and on the move) carrying a canteen with this elegant little array at the bottom. Many footmen are also keen admirers of the array as it gives them a little bit of comfort on long, difficult jobs, especially those that require staking out an area of hours, if not days on end.
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.