I have a player who wants to take Spirit evocation, as an idea, but neither of us are sure practically on what sort of spells it would let him evoke.
What does Spirit Magic let my player's character do? Are there examples?
We're playing a very investigative game, and both combat and non-combat magic is relevant.
Best Answer
There's two ways to understand your question: as a request for example spells, or as a plea for help because you don't really know what Spirit does. There's no exhaustive list of example Spirit spells, and besides, working from a list of spells is the opposite of how the DFRPG magic system works. So I'm going to answer the latter interpretation of the question: what is Spirit? Once you've got that, then you'll be able to just make up spells and you won't need examples.
The whole point of the magic system in DFRPG is to imagine spells and then decide how to make the rules do that. To do that, you have to understand what an Element (YS p. 253) means so that you can picture the magic. If you can't together imagine what kind of magic a Spirit Evoker does, then you don't have any hope of making the magic system work. You have to start from the other side of the question: have an idea of the kind of spells and magic you want to do, then figure out whether that's Spirit or something else.
I won't cut-and-paste the copyrighted text of Spirit here, but I want to refer to it so go re-read it now. (It's page 255 of Your Story.)
First, you need to get an idea of what Spirit does. The description of Spirit talks about the sort of power it is, and has a list of things that wizards usually do with it. It's "raw" magical energy, linked to the wizard's soul and will. Its most obvious uses are creating and controlling light and creating kinetic/force effects. It's also the Element of the veil that Harry uses in the books, hiding himself and other things from the attention of others.
Second, you need to figure out what sort of spells you imagine being done with the Spirit Element. So think about that, and brainstorm some things you can do with the creation and manipulation of light and force, both blunt and subtle. (How to Brainstorm is useful here.) After brainstorming, look at the list you've brainstormed: that's a picture of what you think Spirit does. Now flip to page 293, "Example Evocation Spells", and comb through it looking for "Type: Spirit". (About half of them are Spirit Evocations.) Add those to your list. Now you've got a list of things that Spirit can do that includes both what you think it can do and what the game authors thought it could do. Mush that together, and you've got a fertile source of ideas for spells and off-the-cuff magic to make happen during play.
Now that you've got cool ideas in your head, now you can see what a Spirit Evoker does, and you're equipped for picking and choosing the magic rules you need to represent those spells.