- Recently finished reading Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld, which follows the adventures and misadventures of Cugel the Clever on his Oddysey home.
- Cugel is an unscrupulous rogue, whose wit saves him from a variety of terrible fates, often damning his companions.
- Though not a wizard, he is able with some difficulty to learn some simpler spells, given access to the written spells.
- The description of magic is very evocative, with the words of incantations being excruciatingly hard to learn, desperate to get out, and liable to punish the tiniest mistake in pronunciation.
- So while early versions of D&D took the "cast and forget" part of Vancian spellcasting, the unpredictability of the magic is much better embodied in systems which allow for spell failure results, such as DCC and Mörk Borg.
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