(no subject)
Jan. 14th, 2018 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I did two loads of laundry, including drying, ate twice, with varying degrees of success, and fiddled with my plot a bunch.
When I tried to fill in an outline for Dana's story I realised how much of the middle is something something profit. I need all the information to come together to give Dana a plan, but that means I need a lot of people to have some reason to talk to them, which is most of the something something. And then there's all sorts of fun gathering characters at STAR labs, magical edition, but at the moment they've no reason to be in this story, because it's not their knowledge that's key. So I either need a different set of characters or a subplot.
Discovering such things is what outlines are for.
It's still a bother.
So I put it aside to ponder and went and played with GURPS spell lists to get a better idea of what my mages can do. Healers and Scholars and Elementalists are three different sets of mages, who mostly don't talk to each other. Morgan and Wells, local versions, are a Healer and a Scholar, and both know bits of elemental magic that others more or less look down on them for knowing, but they thought they could learn a lot from each other, so they got the land and set out to make STAR.
Thing is, GURPS magic has such complex prerequisite chains, I wasn't sure you could do things that way. Not and have functioning colleges left.
But I tried separating out living magics for Healers, animal plant body control etc, and removing elemental magic to be its own thing, and I set aside illusions to be NPC magic suitable for spirits, and that still left ten colleges and years and years of study. ... Making and Breaking is down to one spell, but that still leaves Enchant possible. Probably not Suspend Magery though... nope, that needs two spells from ten, Suspend and Drain Magery, Curse and Bless all go impossible that way. Lots of other meta spells work though. And everyone everywhere learns one or two Healer spells, Lend and Recover energy, so that counts for college counts. So Scholars could be snobs about elemental magic and barred from learning Healer magic and still have enough spells to be going on with to think of themselves as proper wizards and keep having more to learn for years.
But the advantages of even just a little elemental magic would be huge, so it seem unlikely as a setup. But a way for STAR labs to zoom ahead fast.
It's daft and artificial at the moment, and as gender and class things go not at all intuitive, but it seemed fun when I was setting things up.
It also means that the magics I have in the first chapter are going to seem impressive to outsiders but not classy to Scholars. All that Earth magic, not a Gentleman's pursuit.
But how would that stand if there's power in it?
Also, there's definitely some enchantments that use basic elemental magic, most significantly Purify Water, so at some point there were people doing large scale civic work who knew both. Unless I make it a whole different mechanism, like spirits, elementals set to work direct. Lost knowledge or parallel systems with possible slavery, which makes more story...
So, poking rulesets and thinking about my wobbly worldbuilding, that was my afternoon.
It's not clicking right now, but it is how all the characters end up talking to each other so far, so maybe I can see another way to get them to talk if I shake it a bit more.
The other thing is I realised almost all the spells I'm properly familiar with are not Scholar's magic in this scheme, so I'll have to read and think on the colleges I don't much use.
which should be fun.
... if I could concentrate this much on things actually useful, so much so different...
When I tried to fill in an outline for Dana's story I realised how much of the middle is something something profit. I need all the information to come together to give Dana a plan, but that means I need a lot of people to have some reason to talk to them, which is most of the something something. And then there's all sorts of fun gathering characters at STAR labs, magical edition, but at the moment they've no reason to be in this story, because it's not their knowledge that's key. So I either need a different set of characters or a subplot.
Discovering such things is what outlines are for.
It's still a bother.
So I put it aside to ponder and went and played with GURPS spell lists to get a better idea of what my mages can do. Healers and Scholars and Elementalists are three different sets of mages, who mostly don't talk to each other. Morgan and Wells, local versions, are a Healer and a Scholar, and both know bits of elemental magic that others more or less look down on them for knowing, but they thought they could learn a lot from each other, so they got the land and set out to make STAR.
Thing is, GURPS magic has such complex prerequisite chains, I wasn't sure you could do things that way. Not and have functioning colleges left.
But I tried separating out living magics for Healers, animal plant body control etc, and removing elemental magic to be its own thing, and I set aside illusions to be NPC magic suitable for spirits, and that still left ten colleges and years and years of study. ... Making and Breaking is down to one spell, but that still leaves Enchant possible. Probably not Suspend Magery though... nope, that needs two spells from ten, Suspend and Drain Magery, Curse and Bless all go impossible that way. Lots of other meta spells work though. And everyone everywhere learns one or two Healer spells, Lend and Recover energy, so that counts for college counts. So Scholars could be snobs about elemental magic and barred from learning Healer magic and still have enough spells to be going on with to think of themselves as proper wizards and keep having more to learn for years.
But the advantages of even just a little elemental magic would be huge, so it seem unlikely as a setup. But a way for STAR labs to zoom ahead fast.
It's daft and artificial at the moment, and as gender and class things go not at all intuitive, but it seemed fun when I was setting things up.
It also means that the magics I have in the first chapter are going to seem impressive to outsiders but not classy to Scholars. All that Earth magic, not a Gentleman's pursuit.
But how would that stand if there's power in it?
Also, there's definitely some enchantments that use basic elemental magic, most significantly Purify Water, so at some point there were people doing large scale civic work who knew both. Unless I make it a whole different mechanism, like spirits, elementals set to work direct. Lost knowledge or parallel systems with possible slavery, which makes more story...
So, poking rulesets and thinking about my wobbly worldbuilding, that was my afternoon.
It's not clicking right now, but it is how all the characters end up talking to each other so far, so maybe I can see another way to get them to talk if I shake it a bit more.
The other thing is I realised almost all the spells I'm properly familiar with are not Scholar's magic in this scheme, so I'll have to read and think on the colleges I don't much use.
which should be fun.
... if I could concentrate this much on things actually useful, so much so different...