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Effect: Two dice are placed in a cup, shaken (not stirred) and turned on a table. When the cup is lifted, the dice show the exact number of eyes predicted.

Working: The dice are magical. I have discovered in ancient tomes a rare kind of earth magic, that allows a spell to be cast on a die, by which a slight magic gesture with my knee can make the die show the number it has been hexed to show. It can also show it's polar opposite.

Problem: It would seem that casting this spell on two or more dice could mean, that undesirable results occur beacause of the interference of the two magic fields. The spell utilises a certain magic object, a "mojo". The shape and size of this mojo affects also the shape and size of the magic field. Does anyone have any experience with these things, especially what mojo to use to avoid too much interference? Dimensions, potency and such?

- S

Can't you just roll the dice under 2 separate cups, keeping them far enough apart so they don't interfere with each other ??

How about giving one to each of two spectators and having them rolled separately?

Barry

Do they need to be tipped out?

This got me thinking. Ummm, yes they will interfere with each other. I guess you can perhaps roll the 1st die into the cup, they note the result. No heat is on the dice of course, so just switch them out. Use the other one and note the thing again.

However you can produce another similar effect in 13 steps. That will require more dice. ( This approach might be better for stage really, cuz no one will just up and inspect your dice ) .

Contrabass101 wrote:
Working: The dice are magical. I have discovered in ancient tomes a rare kind of earth magic, that allows a spell to be cast on a die, by which a slight magic gesture with my knee can make the die show the number it has been hexed to show. It can also show it's polar opposite.

Oh wow. I think we should petition to have all threads use this kind of obfuscation rather than the "r*** e**** m*****" type of method hiding. This is masterpiece of prose.

Lets see if I can answer in kind...

From the fact that you can exact an opposing outcome I assume that you have placed the magic on the dice themselves, making them respond accordingly to the magic beneath the table. This magic can however cause the dice to affect each other, a fatal attraction if you will.

if your routine would suffice for a single outcome with the activity of the knee, there are non magical elements which respond to this magic, albeit in one direction.

To this end, I once made a ball respond to a magic cup by enchanting it with a steel guitar string. Alas the ball was too bouncy and would often return to the source of the magic after falling a short distance, but in principal I think it's still sound.

-Stacy

Thanks for all the replies.

Stacy, it seems like a possible solution. I worry that the magic will not be powerful enough to be reliable, because of the table. But it would take some testing to confirm that.

- S

The4thCircle wrote:Oh wow. I think we should petition to have all threads use this kind of obfuscation rather than the "r*** e**** m*****" type of method hiding. This is masterpiece of prose.

Thanks a lot, by the way

If the magic resides in the knee you should be able to use that magic to initiate the hex rather than having the hex constantly. This way the hex in the dice shall not conflict.

Note the difference between the use of magic and hex.

A_n_t wrote:If the magic resides in the knee you should be able to use that magic to initiate the hex rather than having the hex constantly. This way the hex in the dice shall not conflict.

Note the difference between the use of magic and hex.

As I was reading the initial post, this was what I thought.

Working the tat, as it were.

This is not related to the question, but do you seriously believe everyone is out to find magic secrets? They aren't. They have their own lives and their own concerns. This is a magicians forum and we should ask our fellow magicians (since that is all that are on here) our questions clearly.

TonyB wrote:This is not related to the question, but do you seriously believe everyone is out to find magic secrets? They aren't. They have their own lives and their own concerns. This is a magicians forum and we should ask our fellow magicians (since that is all that are on here) our questions clearly.

Actually having thought about it I'm inclined to agree. The people who come here purely looking for explanations of how illusions are done probably don't care about the kinds of things we're talking about. Mention of secret loads or magnets, palms, shells, TTs and double lifts don't interest them. The terms are ordinarily obfuscated to turn away non-magicians, but non magicians are actually more likely to post "How did Dynamo put the phone in the bottle!?!?!" and then never come back when we refuse to expose the method.

It could also be argued that obfuscation makes it harder for beginners who actually want to learn the fundamentals to understand the posts. That said some incredible effects can be achieved with the most basic beginners techniques, simply by applying good scripting misdirection and framing, so possibly even giving away the little things could have a knock-on effect. It's an interesting thought, but this probably isn't the thread in which to discuss it...

-Stacy

Don't be such a spoilsport, we, and anyone with half a brain for that matter, know what is being referred to here. It's just a bit of linguistic fun.

Moby Dick is a bit of linguistic fun (actually quite a lot of linguistic fun). This is just double-talk.

I remember, back in the day, when everyone talked about lemons and aardvarks.