#nitrocellulose

Been working on this telemaster build for almost a year now, and ive been waiting for the right weather conditions for the nitro lacquer to flash off correctly! Today was that day!! 21°c 37%air moisture and somehow for the first time in weeks NO BUGS OR POLLEN!!

The second pic reflects the real color the best and is before lacquer

Started with a white heavy base coat, then i sanded it smooth (which was a breeze because of highly intuitive paint from northwestguitars.com )

Rosewood strats L to R: "Ashton" 1960 ash refin; "Jessy" '60 relic; "Candy" '62 reissie MIJ; "Mary" '66 relic, Lefty to Right Hendrix tribute; "Anna" '65 Lefty relic ; "Old Blue" '70 relic. Each with their own personality, all fun to play!

As per the oft-quoted fire triangle, a fire requires oxygen, heat, and fuel. Assuming the air in your world is anything like the stuff we’re used to, the atmosphere will be about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, so that takes care of the oxygen. Your sorcerers have somehow tricked the laws of physics into letting them heat things up at will, so that gets heat out of the way too. There might be a few ways to provide the necessary fuel, and these range from “downright practical” to “fraught with danger” to “inescapable doom.” Let’s consider each in turn, and then you can pick what you like best for your story.

Before we begin, there are a few world-building things we’ll need to take into consideration, specifically regarding the mechanics of how sorcery works in your story. I’m going to assume that sorcerers are not immune to fire/heat, and engage in otherwise normal behaviors like breathing oxygen in order to survive. If this is correct, then you’ll need to keep in mind that creating a large amount of fire around them could consume all available oxygen and cause them to suffocate. If the sorcerers can happily dance a jig in a bonfire without a care, then asbestos/fiberglass/nomex clothing + oil = scary flaming fire mage.

Some other questions you will need to answer for yourself might include:

Is there a limit to how much energy a sorcerer can put into an object, or how quickly?  If they can only heat things to 100 °C at a rate of 1 °C per minute, then nothing I suggest here is going to work.  If they can heat things instantly to millions of degrees, then we have some more options.

Does the sorcerer need to touch the object being heated, or maintain line-of-sight, or simply know that the object exists? Super-heating an object while still holding it could be problematic, but you’ll need to figure out how they are transferring energy if you opt for non-contact heating.  “Magic!” is certainly an answer, albeit not a very detailed one.

Now, onward to the burning!

For the downright practical route we can look to stage magic and theatrical flame effects, as there are many illusions that require a performer to produce fire out of nowhere. While propane is usually used for impressive plumes of flame, the storage and delivery systems are generally large, heavy, and not very portable. When a magician only needs a small amount of fire, the fuel of choice is nitrocellulose.

Cellulose is a sugar polymer (polysaccharide) made by chaining together glucose molecules, and it is the primary component of cell walls in green plants. As it is the main component of things like wood pulp and cotton, it is used to make things like paper and cloth, and with a little bit of chemistry it can be turned into something that burns with great enthusiasm. Any source of cellulose (tissue paper, cotton, string, etc.) can be nitrated by exposing it to concentrated nitric acid, converting it from (C6H10O5)n to (C6H7(NO2)3O5)n. The process itself is extremely dangerous and should not be attempted in an uncontrolled setting, and the resulting nitrocellulose, while moderately stable, is also known as gun cotton for a reason. It is used in stage magic because it is easy to ignite with a small flint-wheel mounted on a ring, it burns very quickly with a highly visible flame, and it produces a relatively small amount of heat, allowing performers to ignite it in their hands without suffering from thermal burns. Your sorcerers could carry around a supply of nitrocellulose and then heat it up to the ignition temperature whenever they needed some fire, but they would need to be fairly careful to avoid accidentally igniting the rest of it.

Moving on to fuels that are potentially fraught with danger, we can perhaps make better use of your sorcerers’ ability to magically heat objects at will. While I definitely would not recommend the use of liquid fuels like oil – they spread far too easily and the fires would very quickly get out of control – something like paraffin candle wax might work nicely. It should be readily available and easy to carry, and it could be cut into small chunks that your sorcerers could throw wherever they needed fire. The auto-ignition temperature is somewhere between 200-350 °C and the boiling point is slightly above 370 °C, and if magical heating can reach these temperatures then it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to toss a wax cube into the air and have it explode into a large ball of flame. You might run into trouble if you used too large a chunk of wax, as fast heating could cause molten/flaming wax to fly in all directions and start collateral fires or cause nasty burns to anyone in the vicinity.

Finally, we must discuss one option that can only lead to inescapable doom – using the air itself to achieve similar effects. Neither nitrogen nor oxygen will burn under normal circumstances, but if you’re willing to go to extremes and your magical heating doesn’t have an upper limit, there’s some weird chemistry and physics that starts to happen at ridiculously high temperatures. Let’s consider what would happen if your sorcerers started heating the air around them (and for a loosely related and more thorough treatment, see Randall Munroe’s Hair Dryer What If?). Once the air reaches about 525 °C it will become incandescent and glow a dull red, though it won’t be very visible until much higher temperatures. Between 1000-1500 °C it will be yellow- or white-hot, and the nitrogen will actually start reacting with oxygen to give various NOx species. This was the basis for an obsolete method to produce nitric acid, and the toxic fumes would not be great for anyone nearby. If you were to continue upwards to 30,000 °C you would start dissociating nitrogen molecules into individual atoms, and by 60,000 °C chemical bonds essentially cease to exist. Up over 100,000 °C you can start to ionize the atoms into a plasma by sheer thermal energy alone, but by that point (or significantly sooner) your sorcerers would have been well and truly cooked; furthermore, releasing that kind of energy into the environment would look a lot more like an explosion than a fire, assuming anyone survived to see it.

Given those options I might suggest carrying around a few extra candles, but if your sorcerers are in need of flames and must decide between the clothes on their backs and the air around them, setting fire to themselves is probably the more survivable option.  You could also have them magic up some phlogiston, but I’ll leave the use of superseded scientific theories up to you.

~J