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Cam in Ghost House
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Sounds inconvenient, though possibly better than not being able to go anywhere ever.

Next.

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Negotiations.  This is another casual chapter; it's not immediately obvious why those weren't put next to each other.  There are suggested page numbers for untethering spells, for the most convenient possession spells for bribery (balancing being pleasant for the ghost against the comfort and safety of the host), for an exorcism spell that can be performed fast, for something to give a ghost a little zap of pain.

There are several pages of what appear to be completely mundane cooking recipes, with which to bribe possessors.

"Push and pull (carrot and stick, if you will) are both essential.  However, a light touch is required with negative motivation; spirits are much less stable than their living counterparts, as a rule, and it's quite easy to ruin a working relationship with only a little sharpness.  Often, all that is necessary is to remind the spirit that your support and continued presence relies upon his or her cooperation.  Gently, gently:  that's the way.

"But this fragility is also to your benefit—of course one may motivate ghosts with messages conveyed to living persons, or with sensory experiences, but even a little expressed sympathy, costless to you, can sometimes get you what you want.  The offer of a hug to a possessor about to leave his or her host has more than once been the act that convinced a spirit to work with me.  But perceived insincerity or aggression is intensely detrimental; use careful judgement."

She notes emphatically that work and entertainment should be kept separate, when it comes to ghost relations.  The spell on this page to put a ghost in more extended pain may be amusing to some, "but even those who find joy in these things should really know better than to sling it out on a spirit from whom they want something.  It does not help.  Only fools do this."

(Though she does mention that she suspects that if both you and the ghost believe in free love, this could be useful on both the sensory-bribery and social fronts.  She has not personally tried it although she knows of spellcasters who have; it seemed to work pretty well for them although you have to be mindful of keeping your hosts cooperative, if you don't have lots of options handy.)

There's also a warning about lying to ghosts.  The ability to visit a Ghostly Land and happen across another spirit with a language in common—potentially at any time—rules out nearly all of the most elaborate deceptions one might otherwise attempt.  Of course the risk with lesser fabrications is not so high; one can often lie to ghosts about their geographically-distant relatives quite safely.

Ultimately, interacting with people is a skill you have to develop over time—whether those people be dead or living.  Go with what works best for you on a personal basis, she instructs.

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This lady is a fucking sociopath. Wow. Is there more said here on how possession works?

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All the ones referenced here have the approximate structure of drawing some diagrams or placing some objects on the floor, and then having the host-to-be stand in a certain spot and perform an incantation.  They're also all time-limited, lasting between hours and a week.  None of them seem to allow the host to take actions while the ghost is in residence, seemingly including by communicating telepathically with the relevant ghost.  But 'Possessing' is its own entire chapter of spells; he sees one on an opposite page where both parties can share at least some control.

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So it's not something ghosts ever initiate by themselves?

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If he wants to have a guess at that he may need to skip ahead and read the rest of this chapter.

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No, no, he's going in order.

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The last chapter of the "Background' section is Locations of Note.  Mostly it seems to be a Yellow Pages of ghost tether spots, centered in the Midwest US but with occasional forays into Europe.  Here's a ghost who knows a lot about math; these ones are good at composing music and have done so for spells before; this one rewards in mysterious ways any impressive and interesting magical accomplishments brought before them; this one loves to know what's going on and will do useful tasks for anyone who brings them sufficiently detailed world news.

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..."mysterious ways"?

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Those are the words it says on the page, yeah.

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Incredibly unhelpful, wow. He does make a note of the world news ghost.

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The first 'Application' chapter is on Scrying, and the next is on Divining.  They're strictly lists of spells with no introduction, but there are commonalities within each chapter and differences between them.

Scrying spells, it seems, let the caster receive direct sensory information about a distant place.  The material components they're focused around are consistently man-made.  Here's one that uses a mirror to see the view at a specified latitude/longitude/direction; here's another that uses spectacles to see through the eyes of someone wearing an Imbued handkerchief.  The last third or so of the spells are for warding against Scrying; some of them are broad and somewhat weak, with descriptions noting they might fail under certain circumstances; others target specific previous spells and prevent them from working on a given target (person, location, etc.).

By contrast, Divining spells give the caster information that's more specific and less observational, and the ingredients involved are by and large from the natural world.  There's the helicopter seed spell from earlier; there's one to learn the weather in a chanted location by setting up a circle of objects and seeing which one a stick points to; there's one for describing the effect of a future spell which is yet to be written into magic.  In spite of this, there's a notable absence of anything which provides concrete information about the future.  The closest anything gets is conditionals:  'if this narrow and precisely-defined set of actions were to occur, then what would the natural result on this specific axis be?'  Useful for avoiding disaster in spellcrafting, not so much for fortune-telling, getting the next set of lottery numbers, or predicting the next hot news item without already knowing what you're looking for.  And there aren't any wards, in this one.

 

They aren't explicitly labelled as such, but there are some spells in both chapters that might serve as the tracking spells Jeremy mentioned.  In particular, there's a Divining spell which will arrange a set of scattered cabbage seeds into a map of sorts, wiggling them into positions corresponding, to scale, to the locations of every instance of the same object.  It wouldn't align with anything, if one placed an actual map underneath it, but it gives an idea of the number and spread.  And there are Scrying spells which target objects with the right sort of specificity to complement that.

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Cam can't actually think of a situation where he would really want to know the weather in a faraway place and consider his best route to finding out to be casting this spell, but it's perhaps at least a useful proof of concept. Maybe one day he will really want to know the weather on Mars. It could happen. Unless the spell is designed in such a way as to exclude Mars.

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The spell actually has the chanting in the format of, for example, "The Frazier House, Forks, Clallam, Washington, United States of America, North America, Earth."  Apparently you can get somewhat more or less specific at the beginning, though this may throw off results; it doesn't say what happens if you go broader than planet.

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Huh, does it have instructions for if you would like to be specific but the places aren't named to quite that granularity? Like latitude and longitude?

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"Use every applicable Place Name, in order from smallest to largest.  Focusing too narrowly will give poor results (for example, any particular inch may have no rain in it at a given moment, even during a storm), and focusing too broadly will give contradictory ones (as the weather may not be the same throughout it).  Repeat the list a total of three times."

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.......can you just... name a place and have that be its name, or is that cheating like the thing with the stair board.

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Doesn't say.

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Aaand what happens if you fuck this one up by, say, naming a place if that turns out to be cheating.

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Doesn't say!  The book as a whole has been really silent on the subject of what happens if you mess things up.

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Is that one of the things that the what-happens-if-you-cast-this-spell spell can help with?

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There's a what-happens-if-you-cast-this-theoretical-spell-that-doesn't-actually-exist-yet spell, and a what-happens-if-you-perform-this-action-in-the-context-of-this-spell spell.  Doesn't immediately seem like there's one for his use case.

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Reciting a nonce address doesn't count as an action to perform in the context of a spell?

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He can try it if he wants!  The examples given are both hand motions.

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"Hey, do you happen to know what happens if you name a place that did not have a name before, for the weather spell, and if not do you reckon this spell would work to find out? I don't have an application in mind but..."

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