Use this spell when you need an autonomous tool with a narrow mandate: a daemon, scheduled worker, watcher, or persistent background agent that repeatedly executes one precise task. It is prototype territory because the hard part is lifecycle control, observability, and safe cancellation, not the single action itself.
Teleport is FULL-CONTEXT migration, not partial transformation. The defining characteristic is that EVERYTHING must move together and keep working: data, dependencies, auth, traffic routing, background jobs, secrets, and human workflows. The old system must remain recoverable until the new one is proven. This spell IS: Database migrations (RDS→Cloud SQL, self-managed→Atlas), cloud provider moves (on-prem→AWS, Heroku→K8s), environment promotions (staging→prod), account/tenant consolidations, platform migrations (Jenkins→GitHub Actions, SendGrid→SES), identity migrations (AD→Azure AD), cluster upgrades with relocation
Use this spell when you need a tireless helper that organizes, tidies, triages, and maintains without requiring your constant attention.
Forcecage creates a pre-tested containment boundary around a subject that has not yet run. It is not about stopping, pausing, or muting something already in motion. The cage is built first, self-tested, then the subject enters. The operator watches from outside and decides whether to release.
Use this spell when a system has truly died — crashed, deleted, corrupted beyond repair — and needs to be rebuilt from whatever remains. Distinct from Speak with Dead, which queries dead systems for knowledge; Resurrection actually revives them.
In D&D, Perception is the raw ability to notice things: the hidden door, the faint sound, the detail that does not belong. Unlike Investigation (which follows evidence methodically) or Insight (which reads subtext), Perception is about the initial act of noticing. The real-world version is detail-catching: spotting the typo in the contract, the anomaly in the dashboard, the one metric that moved when it should not have, the thing that is present but no one is looking at.
Use this spell when sensitive information must not cross boundaries — between agent sessions, between tasks, between tenants, or between domains with different trust levels.
In D&D, Mirage Arcane goes beyond Hallucinatory Terrain — the illusory terrain actually has substance. You can walk on illusory bridges, feel illusory walls. The real-world version is the deep simulation: digital twins, high-fidelity synthetic environments, test harnesses so realistic that systems under test cannot distinguish them from production. Mirage Arcane is the most dangerous illusion because its power is in being indistinguishable from reality. That same power makes it the most useful for stress testing, training, and scenario planning — but it requires the strongest labeling discipline.
Lesser Restoration = one thing is wrong, fix it directly (reset a flag, clear a cache, remove a curse). Greater Restoration = many things are wrong because they decayed together over time, and fixing one thing without fixing the others will fail.
Use this spell when you need everything knowable about a person, company, library, framework, concept, or system — not a quick answer, but a deep dossier.
Use this spell when you need an autonomous tool with a narrow mandate: a daemon, scheduled worker, watcher, or persistent background agent that repeatedly executes one precise task. It is prototype territory because the hard part is lifecycle control, observability, and safe cancellation, not the single action itself.
Dream is asynchronous insight delivery timed to the receiver's readiness rather than the sender's convenience. It covers overnight reports, pre-meeting briefings, dawn digests, and other messages that should arrive as ambient context before work begins. The spell's magic is timing plus framing: the receiver wakes up to the answer, not a pile of raw events. It works best when the message feels prepared, quiet, and exactly on time. It fails when it becomes another noisy alert stream wearing a moonlit costume.
Feather Fall is the spell for bad situations that are already in motion. A deploy is going sideways, a service is thrashing, a queue is backing up, or an integration is failing faster than the humans can think. Instead of pretending you can teleport back to normal instantly, you slow the fall: circuit breakers, degraded modes, load shedding, safe defaults, and graceful shutdown paths. The point is not elegance. The point is buying time without multiplying damage. A good Feather Fall plan makes failure survivable and visible enough to recover from.
Use this spell when you need to cleanly shut down, disable, or remove active AI tooling — the reverse of Detect Magic.
Calm Emotions suppresses strong feelings, ending fear and charm effects. The real-world version is de-escalation: drafting responses that lower the temperature in a heated thread, designing cool-down protocols for conflict situations, or reframing inflammatory language into productive terms. This is the spell for when the conversation has gone off the rails and someone needs to be the adult.
Charm Person is about ONE-TO-ONE interpersonal communication where warmth, honesty, and respect for autonomy are the primary constraints. It is not about persuasion tactics, conversion rates, conflict mediation, public performance, or operational coordination. The spell succeeds when the recipient feels respected even if they say no.
Use this spell for lightweight indicators: status pips, progress markers, heartbeat widgets, and ambient observability that help humans orient quickly. It is not a full dashboard strategy; it is the small visual cue that says where to look next.
Use this skill when the words are legible but the meaning is trapped inside an unfamiliar dialect, format, or community.
In D&D, Mirage Arcane goes beyond Hallucinatory Terrain — the illusory terrain actually has substance. You can walk on illusory bridges, feel illusory walls. The real-world version is the deep simulation: digital twins, high-fidelity synthetic environments, test harnesses so realistic that systems under test cannot distinguish them from production. Mirage Arcane is the most dangerous illusion because its power is in being indistinguishable from reality. That same power makes it the most useful for stress testing, training, and scenario planning — but it requires the strongest labeling discipline.
In D&D, Arcana is knowledge of magic, its traditions, symbols, and mechanisms. The real-world version is deep technical literacy: understanding how software architectures work, what protocols do at the wire level, how APIs behave beyond their documentation, and what the actual mechanisms are behind the abstractions everyone else takes on faith.
Mending is surgical repair of a known-working artifact that has a specific, identifiable break. It is NOT: - Triage/diagnosis: If the problem is "API is throwing 500s, figure out why" — that's investigation, not mending. Mending requires the break to already be identified. - Formatting/cleanup: If the data is correct but looks messy (sort keys, normalize indentation) — that's formatting, not repair. - State reset: If a flag is stuck or an alert needs clearing — that's an operational toggle, not a file repair. - Refactoring/redesign: If the system is "fundamentally flawed" and needs redesign — that's rebuilding, not mending. - Comprehensive cleanup: If there are "years of orphaned records" across tables — that's a data integrity project, not a surgical fix.
