In need of small magical talents

katfireblade

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I'm hoping you lovely people will help me brainstorm. I...can ask to brainstorm here, can't I?

I need magical talents, and I'm coming up short. The focus of most books is the big talents, the ones that can literally move mountains and shake worlds. I need small ones, mostly harmless, and bonus points if they're somewhat goofy.

Some examples:

  • Fire powers that can only light candles and warm tea.
  • The ability to control and influence frogs.
  • The ability to change one's hair color and style.
  • Making the sound of laughter bubble out of the ground.
  • Making small colored lights.
  • Shifting the weight of small objects, like a cookie.

And so on.

I'd really like other heads to help me out; I've been pondering this for days without coming up with much. I'm hoping a little crowdsourcing will jiggle something loose? Any help at all will be appreciated.
 

Enlightened

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Jaymz Connelly

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The ability to make sure your bread rises perfectly all the time.

The ability to keep milk from going sour.
 

frimble3

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The ability to talk to cats. You can get them to listen if your talk is interesting enough. The ability to get cats to actually obey is major magic, well beyond the grasp of most magic users.
 

Bacchus

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I would like the ability to re-heat a cup of tea/coffee in such a way that it doesn't taste re-heated, or the ability to re-heat a pie without the crust going soggy in the microwave or overly crisp in the oven.

One small magical talent I would love to have would be the ability to make the pencil/screwdriver/nut/bolt/spanner/screw that I HAVE JUST PUT DOWN but cannot for the life of me find somehow waggle or sing so that I could find it again without swearing.

The only pseudo magical ability I seem to have is the ability to open a packet of medicine at the "wrong" end where the instructions are folded over the contents every single damn time!

I have yet to find a practical use for this.
 

waylander

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The ability to find missing keys - would be very useful in our household
 

Conrad Adamson

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It would help to know what level the technology is so we could guess what things are in the environment to be affected. Medieval? Renaissance? Industrial?

- Control over only minor muscle groups of others, such making another person's eyes lose focus
- Ability to cause minor vibrations, which could cause an intense ringing by vibrating the inner ear bones
- Ability to disrupt vibrations in the air, causing sound to greatly dampen in room sized area
- Ability to make ground water rise
- Ability to make hair roots loose, causing the hair to fall out
- Ability to get wood buildings to reject nails and/or screws
- Ability to make wood swell, leading to ability to make doors swell to effectively make them very difficult to breach
 

konstantineblacke

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The Dungeons and Dragons Player's Manual is a great resource for things like this. (also the Dungeon Master's Manual).
 

Lissibith

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The ability to keep cooked food at the perfect temperature for up to 8 hours. Only works on what the person considers "food" (so a vegan might not be able to keep a steak warm, while a particular friend of mine would not be able to use it on anything with mushrooms in it if he had this magic :D)

Dowsing -- different-level abilities could find different things.
 

shortstorymachinist

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The ability to converse with the spiders in one's home. I've always wished I could draw up a roommate contract with the little guys I find.
 

katfireblade

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Try using Websites that have these. You can modify your own from them.

Harry Potter: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_spells

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/indices/spelllists.html

Thanks for these; I hadn't found them yet. But I have scoured several other places that, if you're doing your own magical research, might be usful. Once again, though, the focus is on big magic, which is normally quite useful.

All of the Magic: http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Magical_Powers
Top 100 Superpowers: http://www.ign.com/lists/super-powers
Superhuman Abilities and Features in Fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superhuman_features_and_abilities_in_fiction

You might read some lighter fantasy. These sound like some of the lesser powers from Piers Anthony's Xanth universe.

Xanth is one of the inspirations for my "small powers." But I haven't read the books in years. I went looking for a list of magics or even a halfway decent fanwiki, but I have been frustrated. Apparently it is not currently in favor with a large crowd. Can't say I'm surprised.

It would help to know what level the technology is so we could guess what things are in the environment to be affected. Medieval? Renaissance? Industrial?

*facepalm* See what happens when Ipost before bed? I forget stuff.

So tech level is medieval to Renaissance--explanation is much of the world is renaissance, but this town is something of a "frontier" town. It's on the edge of known civilization, and beyond is nothing but deep forests, mountains, and a lot of unknown. So they have a strange mishmash of tech levels depending on what they can get. They also have a butt-ton of former criminals, pirates, and lots of people with checkered pasts looking to hide out or start over, treasure hunters interested in the surrounding ruins, and regular old "lived here all my life" townsfolk.

Does that help?
 

Enlightened

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Thanks for these; I hadn't found them yet. But I have scoured several other places that, if you're doing your own magical research, might be usful. Once again, though, the focus is on big magic, which is normally quite useful.

All of the Magic: http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Magical_Powers
Top 100 Superpowers: http://www.ign.com/lists/super-powers
Superhuman Abilities and Features in Fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superhuman_features_and_abilities_in_fiction

Thank you for the resources; I will take a peek at them. I think it is important to ask yourself if magic users, in your WIP, are super heroes (e.g. comic book heroes or super villains). Super heroes and villains don't always rely on magic. They can have a myriad of powers that are not explained by magic. If you want to adopt these abilities to your characters, you need to do it in a believable way; i.e. through having a strong magic system where the rules make it plausible this can happen.

The most powerful villain in the Marvel universe is Galactus, then Dormamu, then Thanos. How strong will your heroes and villains get, and can everyone, conceivably, survive having them in your WIP?

Harry Potter was great, because anyone could be beat (given the right circumstances). Flaws build character and reader sympathy. Brandon Sanderson said, in one of his videos online, that Superman movies, compared to Batman, always earn far less money. Batman can be injured, has faults, and what not. People like these traits more.

Common Man ---> Superman

Will your characters, with super hero or super villain skills, draw reader sympathy and interest?
 

MonsterTamer

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The ability to project rude noises behind another person - please give to a prim, etiquette conscious character, who cannot always control it.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Minor headache relief
Stop a small cut from bleeding
Keep cut apples and ther fruit from going brown
Chill wine
Focus on distance (for the nearsighted) — or vice versa for the farsighted
Make shoes fit — or not
Books always fall open to your place

Xanth is one of the inspirations for my "small powers." But I haven't read the books in years. I went looking for a list of magics or even a halfway decent fanwiki, but I have been frustrated. Apparently it is not currently in favor with a large crowd. Can't say I'm surprised.

The creep factor in the books became more and more noticeable over time.
 

Banshee_Lingers

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It sounds like you incorporate some elemental magic as well as some mental manipulation.

Some of the best sights I've seen are the superhero wikis from marvel or dc comics.

Things you can consider are what works within your world. You mentioned above that it is renaissance era. If someone works in a mine, maybe he/she can add more strength to the swing, or keep their muscles from weakening. It's a small thing, but helps the individual person.

If there are gardeners, maybe they have special talents amongst plants. The fruit and vegetables come out bigger and juicier or the plant produces a higher quantity of said fruit/veggie.

Keeping ones body warm during the winter could be a great ability. Wont freeze to death but you might starve to death if you can't find food. Ability to prevent rain water from landing on your body. Keeps you dry during storms and you never have to worry about wet hair.

Have you ever considered interviewing kids? They have the biggest imaginations and while some of their ideas will be childish (they are children after all), they don't have the boundaries we as adults do. Which means they have fresh eyes and will tweak what they see on tv or in games.

I wouldn't mind knowing if it's going to rain for sure during the present day. Weather reports aren't always accurate and they likely don't have a lot of that in rennaisance era. If someone knows it's going to rain, they can be prepared when others aren't. Could make a nice little romance scene where a guy has an umbrella for a lady to keep her dry.
 

Northborn Swordsman

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Here's a few:

-Rust prevention. An incredibly useful thing that would logically take very little power or ability. Pretty simple when you get down to it, you just need to stop small amounts of iron from oxidizing. Conversely, rust acceleration--there are so many ways in a Medieval-Renaissance tech setting that you can use this to be awful to people.
-Stripping the first few molecular layers from something. Slowly polish your silverware! Give all your enemies horrible, unexplained skin irritation! Ruin the seasoning on the chicken of that cook you hate!
-Messing with people's emotions by changing the chemical levels in their bodies. Whether that's funny or terrifying depends on how you use it.
-Capturing any sound from the environment and repeating it on command.
-Infusing moisture into objects or the air--conversely, removing moisture from objects or the air. Tavernkeeper too chatty? Give him some cottonmouth, that'll learn him!
-Aggravating small structural faults. That offensive pair of pants? Sure would be a shame if its seams just started to widen inexplicably, now wouldn't it? Tough too proud of his new dagger? Better hope there aren't any subsurface cracks...
-Summoning or manipulating teensy clouds of gas just large enough to create bad smells. Or good smells. Could be any kind of smell, really, but it was definitely the other guy who made it.
-Warping or discoloring reflections. Obviously this will be more effective and easier to hide if the reflection was a little off to begin with. Conversely, make reflections improbably sharp! Show those fools your ability to slightly disorient them!
-Increasing or decreasing activity in certain areas of the brain.
 

jjdebenedictis

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Giving someone a suddenly itchy bumhole.
Making their nostril start whistling.
The ability to shift a single lock of someone's hair into an awkward position.
Making a floorboard squeak spontaneously.
Causing bouts of hiccups. Or farts.
Teleporting a small bubble of pee out of one's bladder to someplace else. Maybe to somewhere appropriate for pee to be deposited. Or maybe not.
Provoking cats to fits of abrupt psychopathic violence.
Provoking dogs to howl enthusiastically.
Making a person think they just smelled a whiff of something extremely odd.
Making food taste vaguely wrong.

In other words, for the goofy powers, think about the sorts of pranks people play on one another, or the things that happen to us that are annoying or spooky. If humans have magic, especially if it's just a little bit of magic, then they would totally use it in situations where they want to get a laugh, or to be petty without getting caught, or to get themselves out of trouble in a pinch. Everything ethically-dodgy that we do, those people would do, except with magic.
 

Jason

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The ability to find missing keys - would be very useful in our household

Add my glasses, tv remote, and the grocery list I JUST WROTE DOWN and that’d be awesome! :)
 

frimble3

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All the stuff that sounds awesome in large, but is funny/useful in smaller doses.
Making a person feel itchy - amusing when it's done to one or two people. Useful/disastrous if done to a whole mob or army. Same with headaches.
Or, creating light - impressive as a giant, blinding ball of light, useful as a smaller reading light for sneaking into libraries, studies and such.
Weird one- make cooked animals appear to speak - sort of specialized ventriloquism. No actual purpose, but if you aren't sensitive, it makes for lots of leftovers. ;)
Also, the humorous side:
Rebel leader, from the crowd: "The king is a swine!"
Roasted boar, from the head table: "Hoi, don't you be blaming us, for the likes of him!"
Or: "Aye, he's one of us, get yer bloody spears, and the damned dogs."
 

frimble3

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Also, the ability to have thread just jump through the eyes of needles - useful at a time when all sewing is handwork.
Or, making undyed thread match whatever fabric you lay it on.
 

Conrad Adamson

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- Ability to manipulate currents of water. It's a lot easier to fish when you can cause one to be splashed up on the shore.
- Water to wine anyone? Or at least vodka.
- Ability to cause sneezes. One, two, or an anguishing session of hours of sneezes
- Ability to cause yawns.
- Ability to make ink run.
- Ability to move lines written on paper. Are you sure you signed to pay me 20 orens/denarii/marks? The contract says 50.
- Ability to convince dogs someone has a bounty of delicious meat in their pockets. It's hard to someone to arrest your protagonist when the nearest 20 stray dogs are surrounding and harassing the would be arrester.
- Ability to make someone experience an intense sour taste in their mouth.
- Ability to make bows unstring themselves.
- Ability to make eyebrows rapidly grow. This would have a greater disrupting effect on a female target.
- Ability to give someone the persistent and impossible to ignore need to clear their throat.
- Ability to cause the sensation of someone else picking your nose.
- Ability to cause piercings to suddenly heal but nothing large enough to be life threatening so no use in emergency life saving measures.