Masters of Everon, Gordon R Dickson

I just gave up on reading this book, skipped to the end, and was not impressed.

It's about a man with a psychic big cat, except apparently it being psychic is meant to be a big reveal, rather than immediately obvious. ( Read more... )

Add to that an epic lack of female characters worth the name, and a main character who is a total dumbass and acts like nobody else has a brain yet is clearly really ridiculous, and I give up. I'm not the slightest bit inclined to read the middle of the book.

And that takes work, because who wouldn't want a psychic big cat partner of their very own?

If it takes being mind melded with an entire planet and quite possibly giving up on that whole individuality bit, me. Do not want.

Magic and demons and GURPS and math and fail.

I looked at an old entry on GURPS magic and I epic, epic failed at maths.
epic. fail.
my math is bad and I should feel bad.

now I have remembered how to math, that whole line of speculation is rubbish.
so I have private locked it so only I can see my fail.
I mean it remains an interesting what if, as in what if demons were a frequent result from magic, but my math missed some zeros somewhere somehow and then it's orders of magnitude more frequent than it should be.

one spell in two hundred and sixteen crit fails at high skill levels, or one in 108 at slightly lower skill. a critically failed spell does something you don't want to do. possibly painful or a problem for bystanders. but it's another roll of 18 on 3d6 to get a demon. so demon only happens when you roll six sixes in a row.

1 in 6*6*6*6*6*6 is one time in 46,656.

that's a lot more spells between demons than last time I worked it out, and I don't know how I failed so bad last time.

but of course I might be failing again.

ugh.


So then you have the opposite story problem, where it's really unlikely a given mage has accidentally a demon, so why would they even believe they exist?

( Read more... )

Yesterday I read GURPS Technomancer, which puts a Magic Comes Back event at the first nuclear bomb test and has a whole atomic horror thing going on. ( Read more... )

Technomancer had mages be something huge like one percent of the modern population, in some areas, or one in a thousand where it's rarer. On a planet that had discovered Cure Disease and potions of Youth and any number of agricultural spells, and was experiencing a demographic boom and a half. That is very plenty many students. And given urbanisation they're much more likely to meet, and with standardised printed grimoires and plentiful university courses they're going to be able to get trained. Whole different effect to the medieval stuff.

Medieval magic should still pretty rapidly change the world to look not medieval, unless mages are very scarce and cannot get the training. a society that only progresses as rapidly as our history did is one that found really large disadvantages really often. otherwise cure disease is more effective than antibiotics and the collected agricultural spells can feed a lot more people for a lot less work, even if magic cauldrons that create food aren't in common use.

you're pretty much left with war, out of the horsemen.

mage war is epic bad though. it might be plenty. and it would try and take out mages first.




anyway, demons not as much of a problem as previously calculated, what was I thinking, ugh.

(no subject)

What if all crit fails were entities?
Like, always a demon, but you don't know what point total or how long it is there for.
18 would remain the 200ish point permanent demon, but you could also get imps of much lower value, or a five minute summoning. ... though actually five minutes is a lot of combat rounds, I'm not sure how much practical difference that would be.

The kind of crit fails where if just does damage, backfires, hits a wrong target, only appears to work, or does a comedy fx curse instead of actual spell, those are good too though.

but

what if all always demons.
or elementals.
or undead.



... a five minute accidental reanimation would be pretty terrifying, and potentially just as bad when it wears off.

... a low point cost elemental might just be like a lighter flame, kind of hanging out on its own.


I just like the idea of a one in two hundred and sixteen chance of summoning a thing. but to make it survivable a lot of them would have to be pretty small things.