History Main / TrackingSpell

* ''Literature/{{Tempest}}'': In ''Tempest Rising'', the titular half-mermaid makes her first foray into the deep ocean to look for Kona. Her magic allows her to see a trail in the water like a silver thread, which she follows to Kona's home.

* In the crossover of the ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline'' universe with ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight'', Fanfic/FateRevelationOnline, one of the magics taught is tracking through the use of runes or dowsing.

Your heroes need to track down a villain, or a villain needs a way to locate the heroes, or a character has gone missing and needs be tracked down but the trail is colder than an ice queen in a blizzard. High tech solutions either don't exists in this setting, or would be useless, as would normal tracking techniques. What are they to do?

* In ''Webcomic/{{Castoff}}'', tracking spells work better if you have more information on whoever you're looking for - but they don't work on the dead at all. This is because they track the target's aura, their "themselfness", what makes them unique. Since Zera can't track Arianna, he presumes she's dead and the woman we know as Arianna is an impostor. Then again, when Arianna can't track Vector and Frankie, she simply tracks someone else she thinks would be with them, and it works, despite Arianna barely knowing the guy. Afterwards she theorises that Frankie may have no aura because he's a robot, but has no idea why Vector would be untrackable, and decides the spell must be faulty.

* ''VideoGame/WarCraftIII'': The Faerie Fire spell reduces the target's armor and makes it visible to the casting player (even through the Fog of War) until the effect wears off.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Castoff}}'', tracking spells work better if you have more information on whoever you're looking for - but they don't work on the dead at all. Since Zera can't track Arianna, he presumes she's dead and the woman we know as Arianna is an impostor. Then again, when Arianna can't track Vector and Frankie, she doesn't interpret it that way (or at all), she simply tracks someone else she thinks would be with them, and it works, despite Arianna barely knowing the guy.

* ''Series/LegendOfTheSeeker'': In "Bounty" Sebastian the mapmaker creates a map which serves as one by getting Richard's pendant from a bounty hunter after him when it's lost. He grinds it up and mixes this with the ink used for making the cap. When it's made in a magical machine afterward, Richard's shown on the map as a glowing gold dot, since an item the target had is [[SympatheticMagic connected to them somehow]].