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Jun. 13th, 2015 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSometimes I spend a daft amount of time fiddling around in GURPS books and character builders and then decide that no, my idea was fine in the first place, not reshaped to fit their rules.
I dreamed some characters that get jewels that symbolise the magical power they get in exchange for an offering. Offering to who or what? That part can be fun. So I look up Roman gods and goddesses. Trivia is interesting. Minerva is who sprang to mind for the whole mind control college. Janus is who the me-alike always ends up with. Divination and Gate spells, more or less. Would have to be Clerical magic because straight up Magic requires spells from 10 colleges before you can learn the prerequisites for Gate spells, far too varied for what I have in mind. Except the more I poke the more I mean visions if the deity sends them and just the Create Gate spell, but leading deity only knows where. Kind of like the TARDIS deciding the destination, you're putting your destination in the hands of a power with a viewpoint very different from your own. Also one who isn't exactly clear on the whole life/death distinction, since they can still see you either way. So she has one power she can do deliberately, the Gate spell, and it can go absolutely anywhere, just if she wants to go anywhere particular she's more likely to get there in a car. Even if the somewhere particular is, for instance, another dimension, or one of the hell or heaven realms. Choosing in advance is somewhat contrary to the spirit of the thing. Work thy will.
This also means it's religiously fraught if she chooses not to go through a particular gate, possibly for reasons of being full of fire, or similar. She has to assume her deity has something in mind and she's missing something obvious that would make it a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
That's not a PC power, as such, it's in the hands of an NPC / the GM. Putting a points value on it is... tricky. There's the Unpredictable modifier on Snatcher, that's -25% and means you don't know what you're grabbing or from where. That's an Advantage, not a Spell at all. So the gifts of the gods are in this case Advantages and would need tweaking to have a Pact modifier or similar to explain she needs to keep up with her Disciplines of Faith or be otherwise in good standing for it to work at all.
I don't think I want to mess with time travel in this setup. Paradox central. So it's kind of like Jumper (World) with New Worlds enhancement, and maybe Tunnel so people can follow you, 190 points. But that's specifically for parallel earths, which is cool but maybe doesn't cover the whole heavens and hells thing. Also if you put Unpredictable on top then instead of getting a Gate you could leave open and come back through you get the plot of Sliders, where there isn't and never will be a way home. Not the thing.
Also Warp is the separate ability to just teleport anywhere within a world, and it doesn't list Tunnel on that one at all. Being able to go somewhere you can't see is +50% though so it ends up being a completely different 190 point advantage.
Gifts of the gods would be super powerful like that.
Probably it's just a Clerical spell, and probably it's like the Spirits magic suggestion where you're not in fact learning the spell, you're learning how to ask the deity to do the spell. That way it's actually super cheap and easy to improve on, but the consequences of failure are... super interesting. I guess because it implies you just irritated a god. So getting more skillful at the 'spell' is actually just learning to pray in ways less likely to annoy anyone. and then, if the deity feels like it, they let you go places do things.
They're getting a lot out of this arrangement. Someone who goes running around for them having adventures. And all the little prayer person is getting is ability to go where they're sent.
Interesting character, but possibly not to play.
And why would they need to get more powerful? I need to do some math on the costs of Gate spells. They say the cost depends on the relevant Teleport or Plane Shift version. Every Plane Shift is a different spell. Teleport needs Magery2 and Teleport Other M3, but Plane Shift needs M2 and Plane Shift Other M3. That seems to make some assumptions about ease of access to other dimensions that doesn't feel right for what I had in mind, which was vaguely here-now urban fantasy with, like, narnia wardrobes set to random. And then Create Gate itself requires M3, so it's a very powerful gift.
I don't think I want to use GURPS rules to structure this.
Maybe she gets Teleport Gates at first offering and then later in life Planar Gates? Then running around hells is notably harder than running around earth. Which feels more right.
You can get in a whole lot of mischief with Teleport gates set to random. A *lot*.
Especially if you can anchor your randomly generated gates so you can keep your favourites.
I don't think a chaotic god of beginnings and endings would be massively pleased with being used as transport infrastructure though. Even if travel agent is the most obvious way to make money off that gift. I had in mind something more like teleport rescues.
Gates that can go anywhere, whether by landing there or just sitting waiting to be opened, are such bountiful plot generators that the two longest running SF series used them. Doctor Who goes anywhere in space and time, with occasional parallel universes, and Stargate goes anywhere in space, with occasional trips in time and parallel universes. Writers really like parallel universes. Sliders and Fringe went there most that I know of, Sliders as its primary plot generator having a high numbers multiple of universes, Fringe having just the two ish connected ones. Fringe makes less sense to me. Like, multiverse theory is cool, but why would it stop at two? It's not the road not taken, just a road.
I know of kids stories that have gone into spirit realms, and horror series that go into the whole hells and heavens thing. But very specific hells. Christian hell, Christian heaven, probably not meant to be multiple. But then Buffy referred to hells plural, as places demons come from, and places souls can get sucked into. But when Angel et al went there they were more like an alien planet? Having watched Star Trek it's hard to go along with demons in a hell dimension that just kind of hang out and live their lives and dance and yet get called demons. I mean maybe they're been reborn in a harsher place, but they seem like free willed entities who can learn, and rather unlike damned souls, so it just doesn't fit quite a lot of versions of 'hells'. And it didn't even call it a hell, just a demon dimension. But the place Lindsey went was def a hell, with the whole eternal punishment riff. But then jailbreaks were possible.
So I'm wondering how far you could get with a multi hells system where you'd be all saving people from hells and seeing what some versions of heaven were like and sometimes landing somewhere that seems reasonable and turns out to be a trap. It'd be kind of Star Trek in the seeks new worlds way but also hella moralising cause you could have specific punishments waiting to trap people doing specific sins. Probably not walking on the flowers, but that manner of thing.
The Spirits and Religions books mentioned that hells and heavens have, like, entrance criteria. Hells seem easy to get into, hard to get out of. Heavens set a particular bar for entry, but also don't seem to have much getting out of them again. So if you've got a plane jumper visiting and coming back, that's a pretty big difference in how things work. Also, if you've got multiple pagan religions and gods who bestow spells for loyal followers, maybe you've got multiple afterlives or summerlands or local version heavens too. So some of the 'sins' of some religions would be the virtues of others, and you'd have to decide who was risking what afterlife and how.
Like, if you have a whole bunch of planets and gates that link them, you only have to decide how people react to each other. If you have a whole bunch of heavens and hells you have to decide how the whole life after death thing works.
GURPS Spirits and Religion both mention the possibility of apotheosis, of PCs gaining enough power to become gods. Dead PCs can become spirits, spirits can keep growing if followers offer enough fatigue and they learn how to keep hold of it, they then have a gigantimous power source to do a lot of spells with. They still have to learn the spells though. I sort of doubt ghosts have ghost spell books, so probably studying them from book is no longer an option. They'd need teachers, and they'd need to survive getting taught. The whole of In Nomine is about competing spirits, not necessarily starting as dead people, but with mechanisms for competing with other spirits to receive worship aimed at a particular concept. Or, obviously, get ripped up and absorbed by other spirits, who want the worship aimed at the concept of you. Trying to get that concept worship juice would require acting and thinking in specific ways, so whoever the PC started out being, the quest for power could change them. Like the GURPS mechanism for being 'corrupted' by using spirit magic, if you channel power from a particular concept, you get more like that concept. Even if you are also a spirit. And then the biggest spirits who are almost pure Big Idea wouldn't be very much like a person any more. So the story would be about trying to get big and powerful enough to do the things you want to do, say look after your worshippers, without losing the parts of you that want to do it, or forgetting why you care.
But then there's the afterlives assorted spirits promise. How do they even manage? They hang around and pick up a new spirit, okay, but then what? How do spirits have real estate, let alone real estate with entry requirements?
But then if you look at the GURPS spells and imagine pouring in spectacularly huge amounts of power you can have all kinds of anything anywhere. Spells for endless food or illusion servitors, all simples. So you'd find a bit of spirit world real estate and pour in a whole lot of magic, and then maintain it with your worshippers power, and have whatever world you want. But only for as long as you can find alive people to pour in that energy.
But another approach involves the Gate spell itself. If other-plane real estate is pre existing, and you open a gate to it, you could just make the gate only allow through people who fit particular criteria. The Gate spell description says "This spell may also be used to enchant a permanent gate, in which case a few more considerations become important. The caster(s) must specify if it will be always open, always closed, or open and closed when certain conditions are fulfilled (opens only on the hour of the full moon, opens only when someone utters a password, etc)." The etc would have to stretch a long way to cover what I have in mind. But with other people with their own spell sets, say a mind reader and someone with connections to spirit magic, you could summon up spirits, see if they fit particular criteria according to your mind reading, and let them through the gate if they pass. And then they could... hang out in a new place being spirits? I don't know, there's probably a few more layers of spells required in there.
There's a Gate spell called Sanctuary that creates a pocket dimension and furnishes it and stuff. It has prereqs in a bunch of colleges including Illusion & Creation. It's making a world of your own. Who you invite into it would then be the complex bit. And, obviously, powering it.
I just have in mind as a story seed someone looking at this gate to a pristine empty world, and instead of just thinking 'space colony', they ask "How do you make a Heaven?"
That crystalises the same problems as the space colony in whole different ways.
Whole lot of stories in that.
I dreamed some characters that get jewels that symbolise the magical power they get in exchange for an offering. Offering to who or what? That part can be fun. So I look up Roman gods and goddesses. Trivia is interesting. Minerva is who sprang to mind for the whole mind control college. Janus is who the me-alike always ends up with. Divination and Gate spells, more or less. Would have to be Clerical magic because straight up Magic requires spells from 10 colleges before you can learn the prerequisites for Gate spells, far too varied for what I have in mind. Except the more I poke the more I mean visions if the deity sends them and just the Create Gate spell, but leading deity only knows where. Kind of like the TARDIS deciding the destination, you're putting your destination in the hands of a power with a viewpoint very different from your own. Also one who isn't exactly clear on the whole life/death distinction, since they can still see you either way. So she has one power she can do deliberately, the Gate spell, and it can go absolutely anywhere, just if she wants to go anywhere particular she's more likely to get there in a car. Even if the somewhere particular is, for instance, another dimension, or one of the hell or heaven realms. Choosing in advance is somewhat contrary to the spirit of the thing. Work thy will.
This also means it's religiously fraught if she chooses not to go through a particular gate, possibly for reasons of being full of fire, or similar. She has to assume her deity has something in mind and she's missing something obvious that would make it a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
That's not a PC power, as such, it's in the hands of an NPC / the GM. Putting a points value on it is... tricky. There's the Unpredictable modifier on Snatcher, that's -25% and means you don't know what you're grabbing or from where. That's an Advantage, not a Spell at all. So the gifts of the gods are in this case Advantages and would need tweaking to have a Pact modifier or similar to explain she needs to keep up with her Disciplines of Faith or be otherwise in good standing for it to work at all.
I don't think I want to mess with time travel in this setup. Paradox central. So it's kind of like Jumper (World) with New Worlds enhancement, and maybe Tunnel so people can follow you, 190 points. But that's specifically for parallel earths, which is cool but maybe doesn't cover the whole heavens and hells thing. Also if you put Unpredictable on top then instead of getting a Gate you could leave open and come back through you get the plot of Sliders, where there isn't and never will be a way home. Not the thing.
Also Warp is the separate ability to just teleport anywhere within a world, and it doesn't list Tunnel on that one at all. Being able to go somewhere you can't see is +50% though so it ends up being a completely different 190 point advantage.
Gifts of the gods would be super powerful like that.
Probably it's just a Clerical spell, and probably it's like the Spirits magic suggestion where you're not in fact learning the spell, you're learning how to ask the deity to do the spell. That way it's actually super cheap and easy to improve on, but the consequences of failure are... super interesting. I guess because it implies you just irritated a god. So getting more skillful at the 'spell' is actually just learning to pray in ways less likely to annoy anyone. and then, if the deity feels like it, they let you go places do things.
They're getting a lot out of this arrangement. Someone who goes running around for them having adventures. And all the little prayer person is getting is ability to go where they're sent.
Interesting character, but possibly not to play.
And why would they need to get more powerful? I need to do some math on the costs of Gate spells. They say the cost depends on the relevant Teleport or Plane Shift version. Every Plane Shift is a different spell. Teleport needs Magery2 and Teleport Other M3, but Plane Shift needs M2 and Plane Shift Other M3. That seems to make some assumptions about ease of access to other dimensions that doesn't feel right for what I had in mind, which was vaguely here-now urban fantasy with, like, narnia wardrobes set to random. And then Create Gate itself requires M3, so it's a very powerful gift.
I don't think I want to use GURPS rules to structure this.
Maybe she gets Teleport Gates at first offering and then later in life Planar Gates? Then running around hells is notably harder than running around earth. Which feels more right.
You can get in a whole lot of mischief with Teleport gates set to random. A *lot*.
Especially if you can anchor your randomly generated gates so you can keep your favourites.
I don't think a chaotic god of beginnings and endings would be massively pleased with being used as transport infrastructure though. Even if travel agent is the most obvious way to make money off that gift. I had in mind something more like teleport rescues.
Gates that can go anywhere, whether by landing there or just sitting waiting to be opened, are such bountiful plot generators that the two longest running SF series used them. Doctor Who goes anywhere in space and time, with occasional parallel universes, and Stargate goes anywhere in space, with occasional trips in time and parallel universes. Writers really like parallel universes. Sliders and Fringe went there most that I know of, Sliders as its primary plot generator having a high numbers multiple of universes, Fringe having just the two ish connected ones. Fringe makes less sense to me. Like, multiverse theory is cool, but why would it stop at two? It's not the road not taken, just a road.
I know of kids stories that have gone into spirit realms, and horror series that go into the whole hells and heavens thing. But very specific hells. Christian hell, Christian heaven, probably not meant to be multiple. But then Buffy referred to hells plural, as places demons come from, and places souls can get sucked into. But when Angel et al went there they were more like an alien planet? Having watched Star Trek it's hard to go along with demons in a hell dimension that just kind of hang out and live their lives and dance and yet get called demons. I mean maybe they're been reborn in a harsher place, but they seem like free willed entities who can learn, and rather unlike damned souls, so it just doesn't fit quite a lot of versions of 'hells'. And it didn't even call it a hell, just a demon dimension. But the place Lindsey went was def a hell, with the whole eternal punishment riff. But then jailbreaks were possible.
So I'm wondering how far you could get with a multi hells system where you'd be all saving people from hells and seeing what some versions of heaven were like and sometimes landing somewhere that seems reasonable and turns out to be a trap. It'd be kind of Star Trek in the seeks new worlds way but also hella moralising cause you could have specific punishments waiting to trap people doing specific sins. Probably not walking on the flowers, but that manner of thing.
The Spirits and Religions books mentioned that hells and heavens have, like, entrance criteria. Hells seem easy to get into, hard to get out of. Heavens set a particular bar for entry, but also don't seem to have much getting out of them again. So if you've got a plane jumper visiting and coming back, that's a pretty big difference in how things work. Also, if you've got multiple pagan religions and gods who bestow spells for loyal followers, maybe you've got multiple afterlives or summerlands or local version heavens too. So some of the 'sins' of some religions would be the virtues of others, and you'd have to decide who was risking what afterlife and how.
Like, if you have a whole bunch of planets and gates that link them, you only have to decide how people react to each other. If you have a whole bunch of heavens and hells you have to decide how the whole life after death thing works.
GURPS Spirits and Religion both mention the possibility of apotheosis, of PCs gaining enough power to become gods. Dead PCs can become spirits, spirits can keep growing if followers offer enough fatigue and they learn how to keep hold of it, they then have a gigantimous power source to do a lot of spells with. They still have to learn the spells though. I sort of doubt ghosts have ghost spell books, so probably studying them from book is no longer an option. They'd need teachers, and they'd need to survive getting taught. The whole of In Nomine is about competing spirits, not necessarily starting as dead people, but with mechanisms for competing with other spirits to receive worship aimed at a particular concept. Or, obviously, get ripped up and absorbed by other spirits, who want the worship aimed at the concept of you. Trying to get that concept worship juice would require acting and thinking in specific ways, so whoever the PC started out being, the quest for power could change them. Like the GURPS mechanism for being 'corrupted' by using spirit magic, if you channel power from a particular concept, you get more like that concept. Even if you are also a spirit. And then the biggest spirits who are almost pure Big Idea wouldn't be very much like a person any more. So the story would be about trying to get big and powerful enough to do the things you want to do, say look after your worshippers, without losing the parts of you that want to do it, or forgetting why you care.
But then there's the afterlives assorted spirits promise. How do they even manage? They hang around and pick up a new spirit, okay, but then what? How do spirits have real estate, let alone real estate with entry requirements?
But then if you look at the GURPS spells and imagine pouring in spectacularly huge amounts of power you can have all kinds of anything anywhere. Spells for endless food or illusion servitors, all simples. So you'd find a bit of spirit world real estate and pour in a whole lot of magic, and then maintain it with your worshippers power, and have whatever world you want. But only for as long as you can find alive people to pour in that energy.
But another approach involves the Gate spell itself. If other-plane real estate is pre existing, and you open a gate to it, you could just make the gate only allow through people who fit particular criteria. The Gate spell description says "This spell may also be used to enchant a permanent gate, in which case a few more considerations become important. The caster(s) must specify if it will be always open, always closed, or open and closed when certain conditions are fulfilled (opens only on the hour of the full moon, opens only when someone utters a password, etc)." The etc would have to stretch a long way to cover what I have in mind. But with other people with their own spell sets, say a mind reader and someone with connections to spirit magic, you could summon up spirits, see if they fit particular criteria according to your mind reading, and let them through the gate if they pass. And then they could... hang out in a new place being spirits? I don't know, there's probably a few more layers of spells required in there.
There's a Gate spell called Sanctuary that creates a pocket dimension and furnishes it and stuff. It has prereqs in a bunch of colleges including Illusion & Creation. It's making a world of your own. Who you invite into it would then be the complex bit. And, obviously, powering it.
I just have in mind as a story seed someone looking at this gate to a pristine empty world, and instead of just thinking 'space colony', they ask "How do you make a Heaven?"
That crystalises the same problems as the space colony in whole different ways.
Whole lot of stories in that.