COGS and Gears - Zildor's scroll

Zildor's Scroll

Written in Dwarvish thought an unfamiliar dialect of it for Telene it contains three useful spells and notes on how to learn them, they are TRANSLATE as well as the apprentice spell of ENCRYPT MAGIC which renders the text in a spell book unreadable to any save the person who cast it and READ MAGIC a journeyman spell which allows the caster to read and understand any spell so protected as well as well as being a help in understanding magical writings of all sorts.

(Game note – The scroll is designed to assist the learning of the spells on it as such it gives a bonus of +20 to learn any of spells on it. The spell Translate is in the players hand book and the details of the others are as follows

Encrypt Magic

Base SP Cost: 30

Components: V, S

Casting Time: 10 second

Range: 10 feet

Volume of Effect: one volume of magical writing

Duration: Permanent

Saving Throw: not applicable

Additional Spell Point schedule: not applicable

This spell encrypts one volume of magical writing typically a spell book such that it can only ever be read freely by the caster of the spell. After it is cast to all others it appears just a mass of random characters from the script the spell book is written in. All attempts at decryption using mundane methods will fail and the most that can be learned is the origin of the script used to write the document. Particularly paranoid mages will of course use the script form a language different from the one the text is written in making even this limited amount of information an unreliable guide to the language the book is written in.

Read Magic

Base SP Cost: 40

Components: V, S

Casting Time: 10 second

Range: 10 feet

Volume of Effect: one volume of magical writing

Duration: 30 minutes

Saving Throw: not applicable

Additional Spell Point schedule:  one spell point per additional minute of duration to a maximum of four hours in any one casting.

This spell is designed to decrypt magical texts protected by spells such as Encrypt Magic and for its duration it renders such documents as readable as they would be if they had not been so protected. It also has the minor but still useful secondary effect of filling out all the minor abbreviations and omissions wizards typically use when writing spells even in plain text making them easier to understand by a small amount if you are trying to lean them typically a D4-D6 -1% )