Blade Maidens: What Fools These Mortals Be – 14

Illusion magic, fittingly, is always a tricky proposition. The amount of sustained effort maintaining anything more involved than a stationary object is significant, and exponentially more difficult if you’re conjuring sounds to accompany your visual spell work.

As embarrassing as it is to say, outside of very situational circumstances I would always recommend more mundane means of disguise. Make-up, prosthetics, camouflaged clothing. All of these require no effort beyond the time spent preparing them properly with no risk of vanishing and leaving you drained of energy in the process. While tales of illusory spells and crafty mages looking to exploit unsuspecting victims are popular amongst the citizenry, they remain just that: tales.

In order to conjure convincing illusions for more than a minute or two at a time, a far greater reservoir of magical energy than even the esteemed Archmage of Freehold Academy is capable of mustering. Dragons, perhaps, or chosen vessels for the divine could manage such a feat theoretically. But given their rarity and lack of stake in mundane affairs, the chances of you suddenly staring down your arcane duplicate are essentially nonexistent.”

– A passage from Rollo’s Arcanistry Manual