I hate how boring magic is in these games. It's barely above "at least you tried" level, restricted entirely to hindering enemies and helping allies.
It's only fair to directly compare it to AD&D as the entire purpose was to create a ruleset designed for cRPGs instead of tabletop, yet Sawyer completely failed. Sawyer is good at identifying problems, but pretty shit at fixing them.
Pull up a list of AD&D 2E spells including splatbooks, there's
hundreds of different spells.
In a way, AD&D spells were created the same way a theoretical world with actual magical studies would be created. There are many, many authors and not every spell is meant to be -- on some level -- equivalent to others of the same tier. Many spells are completely situational,
which makes sense as wizards would create spells for their specific purposes and perhaps teach them to wizards who study under them.
This is, I assume, a mostly complete list of spells for AD&D 2E:
https://regalgoblins.com/spells.php
It includes PHB, splatbooks, UA, and his own homebrew spells -- sources for which are on the card itself.
There are probably more level 1 spells listed than there are spells in pillows entirely.
Picking a random level 1 spell
Patternweave allows the caster to make sense of apparent chaos. The caster can see such things as pottery shards reformed into a whole pot, shreds of paper formed into a page, scattered parts as a working machine, or specific trails appearing out of overlapping footprints.
After casting the spell, the mage studies seemingly random elements-broken bits of glass, shreds of paper, intermingled trails, etc. The items to be studied must be tangible-coded flashing lights, garbled speech, or thoughts of any kind cannot be studied.
The wizard must study the random elements for one round, after which the DM secretly makes a saving throw vs. spell for the wizard. If the saving throw is failed, the spell fails. However, if the saving throw is successful, the caster sees in his mind the pattern these objects form. If the items studied are truly random, no information is gained.
After the caster has visualized the pattern, he can attempt to reassemble the parts into their original form. This requires another saving throw vs. spell to determine whether the mage remembers sufficient details to accomplish the task. The amount of time required and the quality of restoration vary according to the complexity of the pattern. Reassembling a shredded map may be easy; reassembling a broken clock is significantly more difficult; rebuilding a shattered mosaic is extremely difficult. In any case, the wizard can make only a reasonable copy of the item. He can use this spell to restore works of art, but they will be worth only a small percentage of their original value.
This is an interesting spell. It is incredibly situational, yet could easily have many uses throughout basically any campaign you can think of.
PoE has nothing like this because magic is focused entirely -- and only -- on combat. How silly, do wizards do nothing but fight? They don't research, travel, cook food, grow plants, etc?
Ironically, one of the major issues with pillows is that it has no soul.
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To be entirely fair, white march saw some usage of spells(and magical items) in dialogue/text encounters. I remember being able to use Eder's shield to put out flames because it was enchanted to be able to cast some frost spell.
