Writober! Skull! Shadowdark Post-a-Day In October

This month is a new Drawtober: 31 drawing prompts related to the Shadowdark RPG, 1 a day, each day through October. But I’m borrowing the daily drawing prompts for a series of writing prompts. They’ll usually be short. Today’s prompt is “Skull”.

The Skelloc goblin tribe’s shaman have a particularly insidious special power: They can take the head of a sentient foe any goblin defeated in the past hour and tap into the tiny bit of life energy still there to store any spell the shaman knows for a single use in the skull. This process shrinks the head to half size and also removes the skin and muscle leaving just the skull. It takes an hour and the shaman must make the spellcasting check as the hour finishes. If the shaman fails the skull is wasted, they lose the spell for the rest of the day, and they take 1d4 points of damage.

But if successful, the skull can then be used by the shaman or any other goblin of the tribe. As an action, the goblin crushes the skull and activates the magic at that time as if they just cast the spell, but with no further spellcasting check. A creature may only possess one such skull per level–otherwise the magic of the skulls dissipate.