Describing the Interior

Main Room

You open the door into a tidy, well-kept scroll storefront. The counter is across the room from you, with the proprietor seated behind, smiling, with a book in hand. Another room is cordoned off behind him by shelves of scrolls and writing implements, though peering through reveals it to simply be a storage area. The displays continue on your left and right, showing a variety of scrolls, with a table in the center displaying what seems to be popular products. Stairs ascend on your left, with a door underneath that likely leads down another flight. The room is lit in a cozy amber. A rush of aromatic incense bristles your nostrils as you close the door behind you, though the scent quickly settles to a warming spice.

Upstairs

The top half of the stairs creak as you leave the meticulously maintained storefront and step into the owner’s living area. The room is claustrophobic in its mess. A single bed sits crooked on a mismatched rug, beside a fireplace and surrounded by a lone desk and hastily arranged storage units. A garden of small exotic plants overgrows in the corner across from the landing. You can quickly identify several of them as spell components. Stacks of books litter what few corners remain. Candles are likewise burning atop the desk, crates, and any other free space the owner could find.

Basement

The basement’s blue luminescence contrasts with the candlelight above. Stepping from the stairs and onto the paved stone brings your foot into a puddle of electric blue. You reflexively pull back, and your eyes trace along various other puddles and mushroom patches, all of the same hue and smelling strongly of ink. Their light fills the room in an eerie glow. It washes over chaotic placements of tables and boxes, all draped in unraveled parchment scrolls. And in the floor of the room, carved into the stone, is a teleportation circle. It is drawn in the same blue ink, though the space for a destination sigil sequence is marked only with the smudges of past uses.

Some Homebrew Spell Scrolls

Scroll of Traced Translation

A rolled sheet of magical parchment, enchanted with magical ink. It holds no text, but traces of ink drift slowly across its surface like raindrops.
When placed over another text, whether written, carved, or otherwise, the scroll’s ink moves to duplicate the writing beneath it. Anyone who views the scroll’s text can read it in a language they understand, as if affected by Comprehend Languages.

Sending Scrolls

Two paired scrolls with intricate, matching border patterns. Each pair is marked with a unique border that binds them together.
The two scrolls are magically linked to reflect each other’s state. Writing on one manifests on the other, but so does any damage to the paper.

Scroll of Ghostly Reach

A single page of parchment showing a black circle, eight inches in diameter. The circle’s ink seems to bleed inwards and concentric rings of arcane text surround the central shape.
When held to a solid surface and activated, the scroll adheres to the surface and ink fills the circle. The ink collapses into a black void that penetrates barriers by opening a portal to the other side, allowing creatures and objects to pass through as if it were as thin as the paper. This effect lasts for 1 minute, after which the portal closes and the scroll is destroyed.
The ink cannot be seen through and 2 feet of rock, 2 inches of any metal other than lead, or a thin sheet of lead will block the effect.

Scroll of Silent Tongue

The scroll depicts a magical formation, though the text is blurred and indistinct. When used, the ink coalesces into the verbal components of the spell being cast.
The scroll can be consumed as part of the casting of a spell, replacing any verbal component the spell might require.

Scroll of Equivalent Cost

Diagrams of chemical and crystalline compositions cover the scroll’s page, interwoven with arcane circles and text.
The scroll can be used as part of the material components of a spell, replacing an amount of them equal to or less than the value of the scroll.
Various qualities of the scroll are sold and each quality is sold for more than its effective value.

Scroll of Potent Infusion

The page shows concentric runic circles. They seem to move when the parchment is turned as if they have depth within the page.
The scroll can be consumed as part of the casting of a spell. The spell’s effect is enhanced as if it was cast using a spell slot of one level higher, though the level of spell slot used is unchanged.
The infused spell cannot be of a higher level than the user can normally cast.

Swiftscroll Case

A scroll case of clean, hardened red leather, capped with white gold at either end. The same leather forms a loop that can be worn as a belt or sling.
The scroll case’s interior connects to an extradimensional space that allows the case to hold up to 20 scrolls while never weighing more than 2 pounds.
Retrieving a scroll from the case requires an action, but the case provides the specific scroll that the wearer is reaching for.
The case otherwise follows the same rules as a Bag of Holding in terms of damage, being tipped out, and interacting with other extradimensional spaces.

– by Troy McConnell
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