#if some batshit D&D wizard rules make this completely Normal (TM) then ignore me

[icenineporcupine]

On the casually insane antics of Illusionist!Gale…

I don’t usually wax poetic about the blorbos on main, but I keep thinking about one specific aspect of Gale’s act II romance scene that makes me completely feral.

Sure, it’s impressive that he can project a pretty aurora into the sky, and recreate his rooms in Waterdeep from memory. And maybe somebody with better knowledge of 5e spellcasting rules has a really mundane explanation of this and it’s nbd (if so don’t tell me XD)…

… but purely based on what we’re being shown, Gale just blithely conjures an illusory copy of The Art of the Night — and with enough detail — that he can then use it to simultaneously cast a second spell (when he has Tav place their hand on the diagrams in the book) that transports two souls into the Weave? And is presumably maintaining concentration on both? While also blowing Tav’s mind?

It’s one thing to be able to cast/maintain two spells at once; but that’s not even the whole of it; he’s casting the second spell using materials he imagined into existence with the first…

Maybe my Tav and I are just hopeless smitten nerds (we are), but that’s some Inception, dream-within-a-dream fuckery. Gale mentions he can’t create such elaborate illusions very often, and it’s fair to assume that he was referring to the scale or the grandeur of it; but the multi-channel processing is so much more galaxy-brain, imo? And at that level of detail?? Babygirl’s got photographic memory in that terrifying tadpoled head of his, on top of raw magic talent.

And let’s not even get into the combat implications of being able to just pull entirely functional spellscrolls out of thin air, even if only on occasion. At that point, what’s the actual difference between illusion and reality? God!Gale may not be an emotionally healthy ending for him, but with illusory talent like that, it’s easy to understand how quickly the lines blurred for him—even without a heavy helping of hubris dumped on top…

[Karlach voice, rubbing the back of my neck] Anyway, what were we talking about….?