Building

I keep reading spell lists to get some ideas for what people could Want bad enough to make Pacts for.
Modern medicine covers a lot of the most obvious, though magic does it faster and more elegantly, plus more thoroughly sometimes.
But for spells for my own list right now I keep on coming back to building.
I guess I want my space colony even if I'm using magic to build it.

( Read more... )

I am pretty bored of almost all the Artillery possibilities. Battle spells have very little finesse. Not interesting.

But using magic to mimic a tech level or two up from ours? Building and growing things with magic? Now that's interesting.

( Read more... )

Every time I circle back to this I keep coming back to
I'd want to build my own place and choose my own people and set up my own rules and say now everything works right
but the story doesn't work that way
the story is
people suck, so we went far away
but it turns out we are people, so we suck
now what do?

It just seems a lot more manageable when you can reduce the scale.

Also pretend the existing problems don't matter because they are Far Away and therefore Small?

But a Stargate to other worlds would mean genuinely more resources. Not just shuffling one planet around, shuffling between multiple planets. It might stop us using more planets than we actually have. Or it might turn into people doing things the easy way because hey, dump the garbage through the Stargate, nobody needs to notice a problem.



But. I started out thinking about magic.
Magic also makes genuinely new resources, because it posits a form of energy that has no practical limits in the game and can be converted into matter whenever you will it. Which changes physics quite considerably. Even if you're tapping another 'dimenion' for it, that's... a lot.

And what would I do with it?

Roughly the same things I'd want to use tech for.
Build a nice new community somewhere.

That's not generally what RPG spells are optimised to do.




So now I'm thinking about settling down and doing GURPS maths on how much $ it takes to establish a colony.

... not wildly productive neither.

oh well.

Atmosphere

Would Purify Air work to lower atmospheric CO2 levels?
It certainly does when trying to breathe in a confined space.
So that should be a yes.
So then the questions are
how many how large Purify Air spells before they make a useful difference
and
are they more efficient than plants that way?

(Plant magic has potential for epic rewilding. That could be fun. Like that Doctor Who episode which is otherwise ugh, trees everywhere.)



The more I think on it, the more I'm thinking Young Wizards style interventions, not D&D stuff at all.

Time travel suckage

I am pretty obsessed with time travel stories
but
I am very, very, tired of certain patterns in them.

Like, I have all these elaborate plans for saving characters at the last second or secretly having faked their deaths, yes, so time travel fixit fics are of win.

But I cannot be having with those stories where
someone who is struggling to rebuild their life after trauma
works hard, does all the right things, really tries
and then the story tells them that secretly the only way to get better
is to have the bad thing never have happened.

I just... I've seen stories that were very explicitly that, the only way to be okay is to undo the original bad
and I hate that.

The difference is which direction people go in to like stay? And live?

Like, if the story has someone travel forwards, and get new opportunities, and make friends, and build a life
then yaay
that's recovery!

Got to love that, the basic idea there is a future.

But if someone goes back, and stays...
look, I know they're applying magic, but if you have some character die, and there's a big funeral, and they're really definitely dead, and then someone walks out of their own life to be with them?

There's a real world version of that, that people mostly do not come back from.

So like, I can understand wanting to fix things, but deciding to live in the past or among the dead is not the fix, it is the problem.



Also if you apply a layer of time travel logic you get people choosing to unmake their friends and loved ones and, basically, the entire planet, for however many years, with no way of knowing how that works out until they do it
often in exchange for one person.

Just trash free will and causality, erase the lives people chose for themselves, just to wedge this person back into it.

And it's not necessary? Not for the sake of the lost.

Like I said, I like planning how to rescue ghosts. But then you bring them home and show them how the world is in your now. No twisty temporal messes, no fuss, just alive.

But no, people want to change their own pasts and have the bad have never happened
meaning they want to unmake themselves.

That is not okay. That is not an okay story. That is again looking at trauma and deciding the only way out is to not be you.

Screw all of that.




So I like using time travel like it's never-too-late space travel that can dive in to the burning building or whatever
but I kind of hate using it to change the whole history
because what kind of use is that story?

Exploring alternate stories is interesting, yes, but doing so as time travel keeps things so past focused everything just loops around impossibilities instead of seeking a way out.

We need the story with a future in it. For every one.




... so I might need to stop reasing about time travel...

The Expanse

I have watched one disc of The Expanse season one and it is very stylish
real physics! variable gravity! ... really a lot of blood...

It isn't the kind of story where things get resolved every week
and it has layers of grimy nasty
but it also has a lot of complex worldbuilding going on and layered characters
and really stylish visual design
though the colors on jy tv are odd, since everything works except human skin tones.

So far my only complaint is I'd rather follow different characters around
but as long as I'm in the mood for this kind of body count
this is good to watch.