Hmbown
- 451 skills
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- 21 hours ago last updated
- ▌ Mini Bomb · hmbownUse Mini Bomb when the right move is a small indirect strike: you know where the effect needs to land, but a straight-line shot is blocked, too predictable, or aimed at the wrong surface.
- ▌ Rock Cube · hmbownUse Rock Cube when the best move is to place a visible obstacle that changes movement, timing, or attention.
- ▌ Sanctuary · hmbownUse Sanctuary when you need to convert part of the board into a protected work zone for stabilization, care, or careful execution.
- ▌ Time Bomb · hmbownUse Time Bomb for deferred actions, scheduled checks, or payloads that should go off later instead of right now.
- ▌ Wood Aura · hmbownUse Wood Aura when the operator can afford to hold ground, slow the exchange slightly, and benefit from a protective layer that regains strength if the field stays stable. Wood Aura is a regenerative defense: it favors disciplined positioning, recoverable processes, and stable footing over speed. Instead of merely eating one hit, it encourages Hermes to root the work in dependable ground, recover after contact, and outlast pressure through steady reconstitution.
- ▌ Fast Gauge · hmbownUse Fast Gauge when the loop itself is healthy but too slow, and you need quicker draws, shorter iteration, or faster feedback.
- ▌ Killer Eye · hmbownUse Killer Eye for tripwires, passive monitors, and sightline-based alerts that should fire only when the trigger is real.
- ▌ Bane · hmbownBane curses targets, making them worse at everything they try. The real-world version is systematic weakness analysis: finding every crack, bad assumption, and failure mode in a plan, architecture, or argument. Unlike Vicious Mockery (which delivers the critique sharply), Bane is comprehensive and methodical — it maps the full attack surface.
- ▌ Fear · hmbownFear makes targets run from danger. The real-world version is structured pessimism: pre-mortem analysis, worst-case scenario generation, and risk amplification exercises that counteract the natural optimism bias in planning. Fear is the antidote to "it'll probably be fine."
- ▌ Dream · hmbownDream 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.
- ▌ Knock · hmbownKnock is specifically about restoring legitimate access through authorized channels. It is NOT about: - Performance optimization (slow queries, throughput issues) → different spell - Removing safety controls (approval gates, compliance checks) → different spell - Simple bug fixes (typos, wrong ports) → different spell - Breaking constraints (resource limits, CPU throttling) → different spell - Security analysis (encryption schemes, certificate inspection) → different spell
- ▌ Light · hmbownUse this cantrip when a system, process, or codebase has blind spots that need illumination - not detection of hidden things, but creation of visibility where none exists.
- ▌ Sleep · hmbownSleep = temporary, reversible suspension with guaranteed state preservation. The target stops acting but wakes up intact. No data loss, no corruption, no permanent change.
- ▌ Arcana · hmbownIn 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.
- ▌ Attune · hmbownIn D&D, attunement is how you bond with a magic item so it works specifically for you. The real-world version is workflow profiling: the grimoire interviews you about your stack, your systems, your automation surface, and your priorities — then generates a personalized spell loadout, category weights, and domain vocabulary so routing, optimization, and every subsequent spell invocation is tuned to your actual work instead of generic defaults.
- ▌ Awaken · hmbownAwaken gives a non-intelligent system a usable voice without pretending the underlying system became sentient. The real move is to wrap a thermostat, spreadsheet, legacy database, shell script, or crusty internal tool in a conversational or agent-like interface that exposes what it can already do. Good Awaken work turns buried affordances into accessible ones. Bad Awaken work hallucinates capabilities the substrate does not have. The spell is strongest when the wrapper is honest about its limits and preserves the original system's safety boundaries.
- ▌ Nature · hmbownIn D&D, Nature is knowledge of terrain, weather, plants, animals, and the natural world. The real-world version is understanding systems that emerged rather than were designed: markets, social networks, organizational cultures, open-source ecosystems, user behavior patterns, and any complex adaptive system where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
- ▌ Symbol · hmbownIn D&D, Symbol inscribes a powerful glyph with a predefined effect — death, fear, sleep, stunning — that triggers when conditions are met. Unlike Glyph of Warding (which protects a specific place or object), Symbol marks a conceptual boundary with a named policy. The real-world version is semantic policy tagging: marking a database column as PII so access triggers audit logging, tagging a deployment as HIPAA-scoped so changes require compliance review, or labeling an API endpoint as rate-limited-aggressive so traffic spikes trigger automatic throttling. The symbol is the policy, and the policy enforces itself.
- ▌ Eyebite · hmbownIn D&D, Eyebite lets you focus on one creature per turn and inflict sleep, panic, or sickness through sustained eye contact. The real-world version is targeted capability reduction: focused analysis that identifies and disables specific functions of a system, service, or adversary. Feature flagging a dangerous capability off. Selectively throttling a misbehaving API consumer. Disabling specific attack vectors during an incident. Eyebite requires sustained focus on a single target — it is not a broadcast weapon.
- ▌ Heroism · hmbownIn D&D, Heroism grants temporary hit points and immunity to fear — you do not become stronger, you become harder to stop. The real-world version is the preparation ritual: the pre-presentation pep talk, the pre-launch checklist that calms the team, the structured confidence-building exercise before a difficult conversation. Heroism does not change your abilities. It changes your relationship to the fear of using them.
- ▌ History · hmbownIn D&D, History recalls significant past events, legendary figures, and ancient knowledge. The real-world version is temporal investigation: git blame across the entire project, reading changelogs to understand why a decision was made, reconstructing the sequence of events that led to a production incident, or understanding organizational context that explains why the code looks the way it does.
- ▌ Insight · hmbownIn D&D, Insight detects lies and reads true intentions. The real-world version is subtext analysis: figuring out what an email actually means, what a stakeholder's real objection is, what a user's bug report is actually describing, or what the unsaid concern is behind a seemingly simple question. Insight does not read minds — it reads signals that are present but not foregrounded.
- ▌ Mending · hmbownMending 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.
- ▌ Message · hmbownMessage is the cantrip of communication: a Slack ping, webhook event, push notification, terse status note, or tiny machine-to-machine update. It is for fast, targeted transfer with almost no ceremony. The skill is less about eloquence than precision under tight payload and attention budgets.
- ▌ Mislead · hmbownMislead is defensive deception: honeypots, canary tokens, decoy endpoints, fake datasets, and other convincing false presences that reveal who is snooping. The goal is not to trick legitimate users for sport. The goal is to create an instrumented fake that attracts unauthorized curiosity while the real system remains elsewhere. This makes the spell powerful and ethically sharp-edged. It needs explicit boundaries, isolation, and a clear monitoring objective before it should be deployed.
- ▌ Scrying · hmbownUse this spell when you need to see what is happening right now on a distant system rather than reading stale logs or cached reports.
- ▌ Seeming · hmbownSeeming is coordinated appearance change at scale: mass theming, batch rebranding, global copy tone shifts, and UI-wide presentation updates. The underlying structures stay the same. The spell is about coherent surface transformation, not structural reinvention.
- ▌ Sending · hmbownUse this spell when you need to dispatch a message — the agent determines the right channel, formats for that medium, and sends with the user's approval.
- ▌ Shatter · hmbownShatter is proactive, controlled destruction for learning. You are the attacker against your own system. The goal is a brittleness report with remediation priorities.
- ▌ Silence · hmbownUse this spell when you are drowning in notifications, verbose logs, irrelevant alerts, or context that does not serve the current task.
- ▌ Stealth · hmbownUse this skill when the goal is to gather context or make progress quietly without unnecessary noise.
- ▌ Tongues · hmbownTongues is universal translation across languages, formats, and protocols. It can mean English to Spanish, JSON to XML, REST to GraphQL, Python to JavaScript, or one team's business vocabulary to another team's schema. The spell is not just about swapping tokens. It is about preserving meaning while crossing into a different representation. Good Tongues work makes both sides feel native. Bad Tongues work creates a smooth-looking mistranslation that fails at the edges.
- ▌ Enthrall · hmbownEnthrall makes an audience hang on every word. The real-world version is structural engagement: opening hooks that stop the scroll, narrative arcs that sustain attention, and pacing that makes people stay until the end. This is presentation design, content structure, and the craft of making something worth finishing.
- ▌ Glibness · hmbownGlibness makes everything you say sound utterly convincing. The real-world version is rhetorical polish: taking a position and presenting it with maximum confidence, fluency, and persuasive structure. This is the skill of the trial lawyer, the pitch artist, the keynote speaker who makes mediocre ideas sound inevitable.
- ▌ Identify · hmbownIdentify is static analysis for operational understanding. It answers "What is this?" by inspecting structure, naming, dependencies, and runtime touchpoints. It does NOT search for artifacts, debug failures, monitor systems, verify claims, or modify code.
- ▌ Medicine · hmbownUse this skill for live system triage: interpreting logs as symptoms, prioritizing immediate stabilization, and applying treatments for known failure modes. It is about keeping the patient alive first and only then planning deeper corrective care.
- ▌ Religion · hmbownIn D&D, Religion is knowledge of deities, rites, prayers, and holy symbols. The real-world version is understanding belief systems: organizational cultures, team values, community norms, ideological frameworks, and the unstated axioms that a group treats as sacred. Religion explains why people in a group behave the way they do when the behavior does not follow from rational incentives alone.
- ▌ Survival · hmbownUse this skill when infrastructure is degraded, tools are missing, quotas are tight, or normal comforts are gone. It prioritizes minimal viable progress, conservation of scarce resources, and practical fallback routes through hostile conditions.
- ▌ Teleport · hmbownTeleport 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
- ▌ Athletics · hmbownUse this skill when the job is mostly about sustained force: large batches, exhaustive passes, long-running jobs, or load that needs to be carried without dropping it. It is the right metaphor when the answer is more throughput, sturdier batching, and disciplined endurance.
- ▌ Confusion · hmbownConfusion makes targets act randomly and unpredictably. The real-world version is chaos engineering: injecting controlled randomness, unexpected inputs, and edge cases to discover how systems behave when things go wrong. This is fuzzing, monkey testing, and the art of breaking things on purpose so they do not break by accident.
- ▌ Deception · hmbownUse this skill to generate believable synthetic artifacts for testing, demos, adversarial exercises, or rehearsal environments. The goal is plausibility under inspection by software and operators, not manipulation of real users or fabrication of evidence.
- ▌ Forcecage · hmbownForcecage 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.
- ▌ Foresight · hmbownForesight produces bounded forecasts with explicit uncertainty to guide decisions. It is NOT: - Preflight checks: Verifying prerequisites before executing a known action (disk space, backups, connection strings). Those are safety gates, not forecasts. - Diagnosis/Debugging: Finding what's broken right now (null pointers, deprecated APIs). Those are root-cause analyses, not predictions. - Monitoring: Watching real-time metrics or alerting on thresholds. Those are observability tasks, not forward-looking estimates. - Reconnaissance: Gathering facts about competitors or systems. Intelligence gathering feeds foresight but isn't foresight itself. Key distinction: If the user wants to know "what will likely happen if we choose X," use Foresight. If they want to know "is it safe to run X now," "what's broken," or "what are they doing," use a different spell.
- ▌ Mage Hand · hmbownUse this skill for small, careful remote manipulations where dexterity matters more than force.
- ▌ Polymorph · hmbownThis spell is about representation change, not: - Naming changes (same structure, different identifiers) - Execution changes (same code, different runtime) - Architecture changes (new system design) - Duplication (same thing, different place) The key test: Can you point to a source artifact and a target artifact where the same information is expressed in structurally different ways? If yes → Polymorph.
- ▌ Acrobatics · hmbownUse this skill when the work is a choreography problem: brittle sequencing, async handoffs, or constrained flows that must stay upright end to end. It shines on API dances, dependency ordering, and recovery logic where grace matters more than brute force.
- ▌ Feeblemind · hmbownIn D&D, Feeblemind crushes a creature's Intelligence and Charisma to near-zero — leaving them alive but barely functional. The real-world version is deliberate capability reduction: putting a system into safe mode, stripping an overpowered tool down to basic functions, reducing attack surface by removing features. Feeblemind is not punishment — it is the recognition that sometimes a system at full capability is more dangerous than a system at reduced capability. Restricted shells, read-only modes, feature-stripped emergency interfaces.
- ▌ Heat Metal · hmbownIn D&D, Heat Metal makes a metal object painfully hot — the creature holding it must either endure the pain or drop it. The real-world version is deliberate friction injection: making a deprecated API progressively slower, adding escalating CAPTCHAs to suspicious traffic, increasing the cost of a bad behavior path until the actor self-selects out. Heat Metal does not break the tool. It makes continuing to use it more painful than switching to the alternative. This is the spell behind deprecation-by-discomfort, progressive rate limiting, and sunset friction curves.
- ▌ Mind Blank · hmbownUse this spell when sensitive information must not cross boundaries — between agent sessions, between tasks, between tenants, or between domains with different trust levels.
- ▌ Perception · hmbownIn 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.
- ▌ Persuasion · hmbownUse this skill when the problem is not information scarcity but alignment, framing, or buy-in.
- ▌ Raise Dead · hmbownIn D&D, Raise Dead brings a creature back to life but with penalties: reduced ability scores that recover over time. Unlike Resurrection (full recovery), Raise Dead returns the target in a weakened state. The real-world version is partial recovery: bringing a service back online in degraded mode, recovering a database with known gaps in recent data, or restoring a system from an older backup knowing that some recent state is lost.
- ▌ Regenerate · hmbownIn D&D, Regenerate regrows lost limbs. The real-world version is reconstruction: rebuilding lost data from backups and surrounding context, regenerating a deleted component from its tests and documentation, or reconstructing a corrupted file from its known structure and partial content. Unlike Resurrection (which brings back a fully dead system from artifacts), Regenerate is for systems that are alive but missing pieces.
- ▌ Suggestion · hmbownSuggestion is about the craft of the single nudge — not campaigns, not arguments, not automation. It produces one carefully placed prompt at the moment a user is most receptive. The planted idea must be reasonable and defensible. If the user would feel manipulated upon learning how it was designed, the spell refuses.
- ▌ Cure Wounds · hmbownCure Wounds is the hotfix spell: immediate triage to stop bleeding and restore function. It is NOT root-cause analysis, refactoring, redesign, or long-term remediation. The goal is the minimum viable fix that stops the damage NOW. Deeper investigation comes after.
- ▌ Faerie Fire · hmbownFaerie Fire marks things that are already known. It does not search, discover, explain, translate, or fix. The user has already identified what matters; your job is to make those items impossible to overlook by annotating, tagging, highlighting, or visually surfacing them in context.
- ▌ Hold Person · hmbownHold Person = hard freeze. Nothing moves. In-flight operations stop. Requires authority. Used for security incidents, fraud, compliance holds, misbehaving systems. Sleep = graceful suspension. State is preserved and queued. Operations resume automatically. Used for maintenance windows, temporary pauses, planned downtime.
- ▌ Legend Lore · hmbownUse this spell when you need everything knowable about a person, company, library, framework, concept, or system — not a quick answer, but a deep dossier.
- ▌ Longstrider · hmbownLongstrider is the optimization spell for systems that already work. It makes the path shorter without changing the destination. It cares about sustained pace, not flashy one-off benchmarks.
- ▌ Magic Mouth · hmbownMagic Mouth is trigger → message. The entire craft is specifying the trigger boundary, the message payload, and the suppression/escalation rules. It is NOT: - One-time messages: "Send a Slack message now saying X" (no trigger, no automation) - Full chatbots: "Build a conversational AI that understands context and handles open-ended questions" (requires NLU, dialogue management) - Monitoring dashboards: "Set up Grafana with real-time graphs and trend analysis" (visualization, not message routing) - Silent traps/wards: "Revert changes silently and log who tried" (defensive code manipulation, not messaging) - Encryption: "Encrypt a message so only the recipient can read it" (cryptography, not event-driven delivery) - Multimedia presentations: "Play a 20-slide deck with animations and narration" (media playback, not conditional messaging)
- ▌ Major Image · hmbownIn D&D, Major Image creates a multi-sensory illusion — visual, auditory, thermal, even olfactory — that persists and can be animated. It is convincing enough that creatures must actively investigate to see through it. The real-world version is the interactive prototype: the demo that makes stakeholders ask 'wait, is this real?' The answer is no, but the conviction is the point. Clickable Figma prototypes, scenario simulations, pitch decks with working demos, preview environments with synthetic data. Major Image is the spell that sells a future state before it is built.
- ▌ Performance · hmbownUse this skill to turn dry technical material into a polished demo, narrative walkthrough, or audience-aware presentation without dumbing it down. It focuses on pacing, reveal order, and memorable framing so the work lands in the room.
- ▌ Thunderwave · hmbownUse this skill for intentionally theatrical or forceful actions, but only behind explicit confirmation and a hard safety boundary.
- ▌ True Seeing · hmbownUse this spell when the surface presentation is misleading and you need to see what is actually there — beneath the marketing, the abstractions, the outdated docs, or the complexity.
- ▌ True Strike · hmbownUse this spell for preflight certainty: dry runs, validation checks, dependency verification, and rehearsals that make the next deploy, query, or command much more likely to succeed. It trades a little time up front for fewer blind swings and fewer expensive misses.
- ▌ Bestow Curse · hmbownBestow Curse saddles a target with a lasting disadvantage. The real-world version is constraint injection: deliberately adding friction, limitations, or handicaps to see how a system, process, or team adapts. This is the skill of resilience testing through artificial adversity — bandwidth throttling, feature removal, resource reduction.
- ▌ Charm Person · hmbownCharm 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.
- ▌ Clairvoyance · hmbownIn D&D, Clairvoyance lets you place an invisible sensor in a location you know, seeing or hearing through it. Unlike Scrying (which follows a specific target in real time), Clairvoyance is a point-in-time snapshot of a place. The real-world version is remote system inspection: checking the state of a production environment you cannot SSH into, reading the public-facing state of a competitor's deployment, or gathering the current observable state of a system through its exposed interfaces without modifying it.
- ▌ Detect Magic · hmbownUse this skill when you need a fast, structured scan for where the real magic is hiding in a repo, workflow, or system.
- ▌ Dispel Magic · hmbownUse this spell when you need to cleanly shut down, disable, or remove active AI tooling — the reverse of Detect Magic.
- ▌ Etherealness · hmbownEtherealness is observational only. It answers "what is happening?" or "what would happen?" without changing anything. The system under study continues normally; you add a ghost layer that watches, mirrors, or dry-runs without becoming part of the live mutation path.
- ▌ Feather Fall · hmbownFeather 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.
- ▌ Healing Word · hmbownIn D&D, Healing Word heals at range with a bonus action — fast, remote, and efficient but less powerful than Cure Wounds. The real-world version is the remote quick fix: a one-liner command, a config change pushed through a dashboard, a quick Slack instruction to the person on-call, or an automated rollback trigger. You do not need to be deep in the system to apply this fix.
- ▌ Hold Monster · hmbownHold Monster is Hold Person scaled to larger targets. The real-world version is the emergency circuit breaker: halting an entire service, freezing a deployment pipeline, or stopping a runaway process at the infrastructure level. This is the big red button — it stops everything, and it should only be pressed when the alternative is worse.
- ▌ Intimidation · hmbownUse this skill when a message must sound serious because the situation is serious: security findings, compliance obligations, deadline-backed escalations, or non-optional remediation notices. It is about calibrated force, not bluster; the tone should match the facts and consequences.
- ▌ Invisibility · hmbownInvisibility is operational quieting: trimming unnecessary logs, reducing exposed surface area, cleaning transient traces, and avoiding needless broadcast. It is not about doing forbidden things unseen. It is about keeping ordinary work from becoming gratuitously loud or overexposed.
- ▌ Nondetection · hmbownUse this spell when a system, file, or workflow is leaking more information than it should — metadata, tracking parameters, unnecessary data collection, or identifiable fingerprints.
- ▌ Plant Growth · hmbownPlant Growth is for projects that need cultivation more than force: SEO programs, communities, product adoption, content ecosystems, or early-stage platforms. It assumes the system can grow, but only if fed in the right places and at the right pace. The spell favors compounding loops over campaign spikes.
- ▌ Resurrection · hmbownUse 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.
- ▌ Silent Image · hmbownIn D&D, Silent Image creates a purely visual illusion — no sound, no smell, no substance. It looks real but falls apart if you interact with it. The real-world version is the static design comp: a high-fidelity visual mockup that shows exactly what something will look like but does nothing when you click it. Figma frames without prototyping links, screenshot mockups, rendered previews, static architecture diagrams. Silent Image is faster than Major Image because it skips interactivity. Use it when the only question is what does it look like.
- ▌ Calm Emotions · hmbownCalm 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.
- ▌ Disguise Self · hmbownDisguise Self changes how something is said, never what is said. The input content is already correct — only the delivery surface needs adjustment. If the user wants to change facts, add new information, transform code implementations, or produce multiple versions at once, this is NOT this spell.
- ▌ Find The Path · hmbownIn D&D, Find the Path reveals the shortest route to a destination, even through mazes and across planes. The real-world version is wayfinding through complexity: navigating a sprawling codebase to find where a change should go, plotting the fastest path through a bureaucratic process, mapping the decision tree to get from current state to desired state, or finding the critical path through a project dependency graph.
- ▌ Investigation · hmbownUse this skill when a problem has clues, but they need to be connected into a causal explanation.
- ▌ Locate Object · hmbownIn D&D, Locate Object senses the direction to a specific object within range. The real-world version is artifact search: finding that config file you know exists somewhere, locating a document someone mentioned but did not link, tracking down the source of a data value through a pipeline, or finding where a specific resource is defined in a sprawling repository.
- ▌ Mirage Arcane · hmbownIn 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.
- ▌ Project Image · hmbownIn D&D, Project Image creates an illusory copy of yourself at a distant location — you can see through its eyes, speak through its mouth, and cast spells through it. The real-world version is remote presence: avatars, recorded video stand-ins, bot representations, asynchronous video messages. Project Image is the spell for being in two places at once — attending a meeting via avatar while working on something else, leaving a recorded presence in a channel, or deploying an automated representative that speaks with your voice and authority within defined limits.
- ▌ Zone Of Truth · hmbownEnter a mode where every assertion is backed by evidence, confidence is calibrated, speculation is flagged, and hallucination is actively resisted.
- ▌ Dancing Lights · hmbownUse 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.
- ▌ Dimension Door · hmbownDimension Door is the quick-switch spell: branch to branch, environment to environment, project to project. It is not a migration and it is not discovery. It assumes both endpoints are known, prepared, and close enough in shape that you can step across with only the context you actually need.
- ▌ Minor Illusion · hmbownMinor Illusion produces artifacts that are explicitly labeled as disposable and exist only to provoke reaction. If the artifact could be mistaken for finished work, you're casting the wrong spell.
- ▌ Planar Binding · hmbownUse this spell when you need to summon a powerful external entity - a third-party API, a cloud service, another agent - and lock it into serving your workflow under explicit terms.
- ▌ Stinking Cloud · hmbownIn D&D, Stinking Cloud fills an area with nauseating gas — creatures inside are incapacitated but the terrain itself is undamaged. The real-world version is area denial: making a zone, endpoint, or resource unusable to unwanted traffic without permanently destroying or modifying it. Rate limiting, IP-range blocks, honeypots, tarpits, geographic restrictions. Stinking Cloud is defensive — it protects a perimeter by making the area inside it miserable for intruders while leaving the underlying infrastructure intact.
- ▌ True Polymorph · hmbownIn D&D, True Polymorph is the permanent transformation — the target becomes something fundamentally different, and if held long enough, the change is irreversible. Unlike Polymorph (temporary disguise or adaptation), True Polymorph means the old identity is gone. The real-world version is irreversible system transformation: rewriting a service from Python to Rust so thoroughly the Python version cannot be recovered, migrating from SQL to a graph database with no backward-compatible schema, or restructuring an organization so completely that the old org chart is not just outdated but nonsensical. True Polymorph is the point of no return.
- ▌ Unseen Servant · hmbownUse this spell when you need a tireless helper that organizes, tidies, triages, and maintains without requiring your constant attention.
- ▌ Animal Handling · hmbownUse this skill when the system is not fully broken but behaves like a skittish animal: flaky CI, fragile legacy services, or moody dependencies. It focuses on coaxing, pacing, and stable handling rather than heroic rewrites.
- ▌ Animate Objects · hmbownThis spell transforms inert → reactive. It does NOT create new tools, train models, run one-off fixes, or build physical systems. The key pattern: existing artifact + trigger/watcher + bounded autonomy.
- ▌ Detect Thoughts · hmbownIn D&D, Detect Thoughts lets you read surface thoughts and probe deeper. The real-world version is intent analysis: figuring out what someone is trying to accomplish based on what they said, how they said it, and what they chose not to say. This is the analytical complement to Insight (which reads subtext intuitively) — Detect Thoughts is more structured and systematic.
- ▌ Enhance Ability · hmbownUse this spell to apply a temporary, task-specific boost: priming a reviewer with the right files, warming caches before a demo, or loading domain context before a meeting. It improves the next move by front-loading exactly the capability the moment requires, not by pretending the system is globally smarter.