Really productive thing I'm doing today?

[beccaelizabeth]

I started out trying to understand the GURPS powerstone and staff rules for the standard magic system. Many hours later, I'm now poking around the internet looking for a six foot oak staff, a nice pretty crystal of appropriate value, and the means to stick one to the other.

... actually I'm still baffled, how do you get them to fit together? Many examples seem to be tied on or just slotted in. Would that actually stay put? Maybe there's something clever about the carving. And do you really want your powerstone all up on one end of the staff? It would lead to you thumping people with the expensive bit.

I only started out looking for $ costs for actual gemstones, because powerstones require a minimum cost of materials. Converting 2014 prices to 1402 prices would be a good trick though. Apparently in any era $1 in GURPS is roughly one loaf of bread. You can get a loaf for £1 in Britain, how much is it in America?

... this is what happens when I have nothing specific to do. Spend all day designing a wizard staff, including playing on the celtic knot generator. I need graph paper. I know I own graph paper, but I can't currently find it. But if I had graph paper the knot would end up looking substantially better.

I found some Bo staffs advertised with 'dragon' carvings on them, but the website picture is ridiculously tiny. They def don't look like dragons. One of them might be a phoenix. Or possibly a parrot. Do people carve parrots into martial arts equipment? Not on purpose, obviously, but they are a nice excuse for rainbow colors.

I've been thinking on wizard school, and GURPS rules for intensive training. It says you usually only get intensive training in the military, so basically it's boot camp. Handing out wands and going to wizard school gets you a very different feel of story than going to wizard boot camp and being handed six feet of oak.

After that the rules reckon Magery, the necessary prerequisite advantage to casting any spells, can be acquired in play, but it needs something a bit epic to explain how. Ordeals and quests and suchlike. So, what would they put new proto wizard recruits through, to get them to the point they can see the magic?

Comments

[elf]

To get the crystal to stay in the staff: You carve a cage out of the wood at the top of the staff, and you use steam/careful bending techniques to open it and slip in the gem; when the wood is dry, the gem will be permanently stuck there. There are other possibilities--carving a recess for it with an edge, and popping the gem inside--but that's more difficult. But wood is (somewhat) flexible; you can get it to "hold" things.

Or you can use glue/sap/tar etc. But carving the wood to hold the gem looks much cooler.

(One loaf of bread in the US is about $1.50 - $2.00, for anything worth eating. There are $1 loaves of bread, but they're low-quality.)

For ideas about mage-awakening ordeals, look for folklore about "shamanic initiation." (And skip all the results about "3-week intensive workshop for $1500.") Mircea Eliade wrote a lot about it; some passages from his books are online.

[philippos42]

Ooh, you could have them go and take peyote or something. Throw up, maybe hallucinate, be miserable!

Or you could have them do the skin-cutting to gain visions, or starvation, or....

Screw that, if it's a world with real magic, it probably doesn't need all that abusive stuff.