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beccaelizabethMagically speaking a lot of TV characters are one trick wonders.
They have a very limited list of spell effects, and they use them in ways that may or may not get clever.
Usually it's the same FX over and over with little to no consideration of logical effects, like when the heat and cold guns get used but somehow throw people across the room instead of making them shatter cold or burn ward hot.
Magic users of the library and wide ranging spell effects sort have the opposite problem, like the Staff of One, can only cast things once. Even when you can see applications for the same spells in future, they don't use them. Sometimes the text gives a reason, like why they're not going to combine their powers after the First Slayer incident, but mostly they just... don't do the thing. They do another thing. That they have just learned. That usually looks cooler.
The second sort is not much like RPG magic.
But the first sort is very much like, albeit probably even more limited.
It's magic as tech vs magic as narrative, to some extent. The wide ranging spells tend to express emotion and work through the personality driven plot of the week. Narrative functions. The narrow spells are, basically, guns but cooler.
But even there the tricks only get elaborated on if they're core cast and get any narrative need to do so. Like the way martial artists only have training sequences if they need to refocus or return to their roots or... fill in extra time in an episode... or demonstrate something that's going to be key later, like gun on the mantlepiece of techniques. But learning it usually represents some kind of character moment. Because you don't need to show it if they're just the same person but more damage.
So, I can think of a bunch of ways to retool character powers for a xover 'verse, but giving them the tricks and giving the story any reason to need them are really far apart.
Like: Highlander style Immortals, if you take the Immortality out, still have tricks.
Connor could breathe underwater. Cassandra had her Voice. The rest are less clear cut. But Duncan and Connor both cut through things that shouldn't be possible to cut, architecture and statues mostly. Things you can't put a sword through and still have a sword.
So you could have a martial artist who could do the Sharp Thing, but then why would they?
It's pretty cool being able to turn your sword into a light saber, it's just, at what point does it tell us something about who they are as a person?
But I was reading Pathfinder for ideas and Sorcerer bloodlines are like a whole ton of ideas stacked together. You can easily get a series out of that. Especially if they don't know what blood they have and it develops over time so they don't know the cause-effect and everyone is arguing whether their nature is determined by their inheritance or by how they use it. There could be fully demon looking dudes who are still struggling to use bad powers to good effect. Lots of fun.
And I was thinking about Seers, and TPTB, and the whole thing where seeing the future isn't seeing what to do about it. Like: There's a Terry Brooks book where a dude dreams the future on the regular, but his whole reason for being is to make sure none of it happens. And the bad things keep trying to persuade him that just this once it'll work out better if he lets the dream happen. So if a Seer gets visions, maybe they're tasked to stop them, or to make them happen, and they don't know which. They just try it a few times and see how things work out. Kind of like Tru Calling has team avert death and team make death happen? I haven't watched that for ages, I don't remember how that worked out. But! I was going to give Doyle and Cordelia one eye each, because her eyes get sold as a Seer and he uses W&H style donation technology to give her back some vision with his own. And then they're literally seeing the same thing from different angles, and they could have great big arguments about how to deal with it. Like, only once on Angel did they screw up and help the wrong side, but the visions are only that clear because that's the story they want to tell. Give them a few more ambiguous ones and let them choose sides. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they disagree, sometimes it works out poorly and sometimes they can't really tell. Seer stories! About applying judgement and trying to work out how to help and who to help, not just blindly following orders. You don't know the agenda of TPTB, why trust them?
So if you go with Doyle's background as a demon and the Sorcerer idea of powers coming from bloodlines, maybe he's getting visions from his demon side. And maybe they're meant to be marching orders. And we know they hurt. So... what if they don't hurt if you do what the demon ancestor wants? Work towards the eventual domination of the earth and your headache goes away! Temptation, much?
But also a reliable guideline once you figure it out. Steer into the pain for great justice? Not actually cool.
... if demon doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, then it goes murky again. Like, there's not just two sides on this board. So this demon's agenda lines up with ours today, how about tomorrow?
And then personal pain or lack thereof isn't a good guide to the morality of an action, and demon isn't a complete description.
So you've got two Seers with exactly matching visions, but different perspectives on them. And Cordelia gets offered a way to do better and not hurt any more. And whose agenda is that? And it's arguably what leads to her change in perception of the visions, because when they hurt you want to make that not happen so you want to make the visions not happen, but then when they stopped hurting she got shown a vision of her near future and deliberately set out to make it happen, even though that is not a good idea for any other vision she's ever had. So try that story again with the aversive attractive stimuli on top of the actual moral evaluation of the vision content.
But there was also the time the vision line got hacked? More than one assignment on the line?
If they're used to seeing the exact same thing but start seeing different, how would they react?
Also, throw in a Seer with a different Power behind their visions, and they know they do not have matching agendas. But there will be times the apparently necessary courses of action line up.
Or, one set of visions can be averted, but the other will always happen, you can only change the meaning. You have to scramble sometimes to make the hidden changes, but it can be done. So they get the truth vision, and scramble to come up with a plan, and think they've got a good one, but then the liar vision comes back with 'guys I saw a plan!' and it's their plan they've been making, and if they do what they'd planned they do exactly what demon vision says they should be doing. Which by this point they have established is usually Bad. But the thing they saw looked pretty bad too! What do!
And there will be people trying to eliminate demons, because demons, and people trying to eliminate those who don't use their powers to support their bloodline, because bloodline, and it can all be a grand mess of fighting.
And that's just with three characters with powers so far.
Also, say there's someone doing the racist Pureblood thing, really invested in the idea of a human magical bloodline that is true and pure and super important. But they're dicks to magical creatures, because creatures. Beings or beasts, it's all one to them, they're human supremacists and therefore arsewipes.
But then you prove their bloodline isn't purely arcane, because human magic is rare as rare, it's much more likely they're one of the other sorcerer bloodlines.
And they'd get totally cranky about that and deny it, probably, but it's a start.
Only it's a start on the racism thing, like proving everyone is mixed race, and I don't think that's the key angle here.
They'd still say they were the superior beings, disability discourse, saying everyone else is disabled so of course they're the most best to be the boss of everything.
It'd just prove they had disabled people in the family, and purebloods react by disowning those. Blergh.
And if you're playing in a magic 'verse then everyone usually has magic? Like, there's Xander, yeah, but even he had a couple of magic incidents. Nobody significant is just bringing guns to the arcane fight. Or swords even.
... Hawkeye. Has the super power of noticing things, no magic. And is plain disabled. This story needs a Hawkeye.
It's why it matters that all the members of the Justice League have different sources for their powers, some just get born that way and some get chosen and some choose, tech and magic and training. Focus too hard on one set and you end up arguing which accident of birth matters rather than if birth really ought to make you most powerful.
I mean, the pureblood vs muggleborn argument kind of leaves the opinions of muggles nowhere, which isn't terribly democratic.
You could make the magical 'races' be each descendants of one particular mage who Learned A Thing. A bit like McGuire's Firstborn each define their race, but with more choice in it. I mean, if you hand humans a power to remake themselves, some of them are going to make themselves dragons. You know who you are. Or centaurs, or unicorns, or... all sorts, really. You don't have to start with sapience in any other form, but once you've got advanced biotech via magic, you get every form imaginable. And some that weren't, especially if the spells go wrong.
You don't have to start with a fully stocked Otherworld if you get mages powerful enough they can just make one. Then you end up with a lot of pocket universes run by magic users who have exempted themselves from certain rules, by a variety of routes.
If Highlander Immortals were all studying magic, there's one out there five thousand years old, having had time enough to learn pretty much everything.
Or if Merlin, now made of magic and no longer mortal, just... kept making stuff up.
Or kept having children. Highlander Immortals can't, and the story effects are... interesting. Because sure they get all that sad face angst, and reasons to treat students as adopted children, except for when they're clearly very much not, but. Immortals who can have children? Whose is that greek myth adjacent series where gods are still having children? Like that. Descendents and powers EVERYwhere.
And the immortals themselves either having to keep track of their every descendant forever, or just accepting that a certain percentage of whoever they meet is probably related to them, and yet dating people anyway.
... ew, but, immortality stories in SF go there. Actually still ew. So, this would be a great reason for infertile immortals, otherwise ew.
But there's magic, so logically no reason to stop having children. Potentially with other species. And leaving magic genes all over the genome.
Like you'd only have to start with one magic user who did a bunch of Shapeshifting to animal forms and... Sword in the Stone looking dodgier by the minute... poor squirrel girl...
But then you end up with magical races because one ancestor couldn't keep it in his pants.
... now I'm thinking how many fish descendants a dude could have. Many. Many fish.
... my face is doing a thing I don't know an emoji for... o.0
So like, imagine you have Merlin, actual original issue as far as anyone knows, move into your house. You have to make a lot of decisions about him and his conduct for maybe 1500 years. Including if he has sex and if he has children. And then how many children his children have. And how many generations he knows about. And also where Merlin's powers came from in the first place. A quick google suggests his dad was an incubus, which is... interesting. Other sources suggest an angel, of course. The 1998 series makes him be made by Queen Mab, a child of the fey. It's also fun making him related to dragons. But there's not a lot of agreement, just that he's special. He could be any bloodline if you want to go there. He could be a child of the force, or literal embodiment of magic.
He could also be son of any wanderer who didn't happen to leave his name, and have a whole lot of story grow up around him. Honestly that would be more interesting to me.
Maybe he doesn't know himself. He probably can't ask his mum lately.
Probably.
But if you have a regular guy wandering around, able to change his age at will, being a people for a thousand years... he either has kids by now or a reason he doesn't. Like sexuality. A personality reason being far more interesting than a handwavey magic.
I want to write a mansion full of people like the Hyperion should have been. Just bring new people in every week and have the story elaborate and get populous.
But I'm also interested in what you do with the bad guys After.
I mean in a story with enough magic there's actually no point killing them, they'll be back anyway, going to the underworld is just slightly more complex than going to jail. So what do you do? Send them anyway, let the gods sort them out? Build a jail that's supposed to keep them down longer? Either way, eventually they get back out. And yeah, you can have the same fight over again, but what do you do that actually works?
Applying best practice principles to reduce re-offending seems like it would be new to the genre.
But you could set up a place to be like magic school for bad guys. Not to teach them to magic better, to teach them to be better neighbours. Maybe you can kill them, but what's the consequences? Maybe you can take their magic, but what's the consequences? If their only schooling is vocational and magic oriented, they're suddenly dumped out of earning a living, so what do they think they'll do? Having read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic set After... actually fanfic as a genre is very porn so some of those suggestions are almost certainly less likely than fanfic thinks. But. Don't the good guys have a whole wanting to help people thing? Some adult education could definitely help.
And I remain convinced that a decent humanities education could avert many dangers.
So I want to do the Hyperion, but collect bad guys too. Spike and Harmony and Lindsey just for starters, but on purpose and not ever giving up on them.
It would be very difficult. It is unhelpful if your people eat your people.
But it would be plentifully rewarding.
I mean if you have a battle and both sides try and kill each other then you end up with less people in total and less people on your side. But if you have a battle and incapacitate each other and then do some teaching until you can get along okay, suddenly your side has so many more people.
Civilisation.
So, I'm still stirring this idea
... and have for some reason almost dropped the idea that had most of its plot and a cast and a worldbuild and everything
... so this is not the most useful thing I could be doing.
But it is an excuse to gather all the 'bad guys' in one place and see what could happen
which sounds like fun.
And a way of throwing competing agendas in.
And I want to write someone who wants to rule the world, without them being evil. Because wanting civilisation to work is not evil. And being born secretly the rightful king is not the only way to end up on a throne without being a bad guy. Not even a good one. So. Rule the world, by making it work.
Or have fun trying.
They have a very limited list of spell effects, and they use them in ways that may or may not get clever.
Usually it's the same FX over and over with little to no consideration of logical effects, like when the heat and cold guns get used but somehow throw people across the room instead of making them shatter cold or burn ward hot.
Magic users of the library and wide ranging spell effects sort have the opposite problem, like the Staff of One, can only cast things once. Even when you can see applications for the same spells in future, they don't use them. Sometimes the text gives a reason, like why they're not going to combine their powers after the First Slayer incident, but mostly they just... don't do the thing. They do another thing. That they have just learned. That usually looks cooler.
The second sort is not much like RPG magic.
But the first sort is very much like, albeit probably even more limited.
It's magic as tech vs magic as narrative, to some extent. The wide ranging spells tend to express emotion and work through the personality driven plot of the week. Narrative functions. The narrow spells are, basically, guns but cooler.
But even there the tricks only get elaborated on if they're core cast and get any narrative need to do so. Like the way martial artists only have training sequences if they need to refocus or return to their roots or... fill in extra time in an episode... or demonstrate something that's going to be key later, like gun on the mantlepiece of techniques. But learning it usually represents some kind of character moment. Because you don't need to show it if they're just the same person but more damage.
So, I can think of a bunch of ways to retool character powers for a xover 'verse, but giving them the tricks and giving the story any reason to need them are really far apart.
Like: Highlander style Immortals, if you take the Immortality out, still have tricks.
Connor could breathe underwater. Cassandra had her Voice. The rest are less clear cut. But Duncan and Connor both cut through things that shouldn't be possible to cut, architecture and statues mostly. Things you can't put a sword through and still have a sword.
So you could have a martial artist who could do the Sharp Thing, but then why would they?
It's pretty cool being able to turn your sword into a light saber, it's just, at what point does it tell us something about who they are as a person?
But I was reading Pathfinder for ideas and Sorcerer bloodlines are like a whole ton of ideas stacked together. You can easily get a series out of that. Especially if they don't know what blood they have and it develops over time so they don't know the cause-effect and everyone is arguing whether their nature is determined by their inheritance or by how they use it. There could be fully demon looking dudes who are still struggling to use bad powers to good effect. Lots of fun.
And I was thinking about Seers, and TPTB, and the whole thing where seeing the future isn't seeing what to do about it. Like: There's a Terry Brooks book where a dude dreams the future on the regular, but his whole reason for being is to make sure none of it happens. And the bad things keep trying to persuade him that just this once it'll work out better if he lets the dream happen. So if a Seer gets visions, maybe they're tasked to stop them, or to make them happen, and they don't know which. They just try it a few times and see how things work out. Kind of like Tru Calling has team avert death and team make death happen? I haven't watched that for ages, I don't remember how that worked out. But! I was going to give Doyle and Cordelia one eye each, because her eyes get sold as a Seer and he uses W&H style donation technology to give her back some vision with his own. And then they're literally seeing the same thing from different angles, and they could have great big arguments about how to deal with it. Like, only once on Angel did they screw up and help the wrong side, but the visions are only that clear because that's the story they want to tell. Give them a few more ambiguous ones and let them choose sides. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they disagree, sometimes it works out poorly and sometimes they can't really tell. Seer stories! About applying judgement and trying to work out how to help and who to help, not just blindly following orders. You don't know the agenda of TPTB, why trust them?
So if you go with Doyle's background as a demon and the Sorcerer idea of powers coming from bloodlines, maybe he's getting visions from his demon side. And maybe they're meant to be marching orders. And we know they hurt. So... what if they don't hurt if you do what the demon ancestor wants? Work towards the eventual domination of the earth and your headache goes away! Temptation, much?
But also a reliable guideline once you figure it out. Steer into the pain for great justice? Not actually cool.
... if demon doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, then it goes murky again. Like, there's not just two sides on this board. So this demon's agenda lines up with ours today, how about tomorrow?
And then personal pain or lack thereof isn't a good guide to the morality of an action, and demon isn't a complete description.
So you've got two Seers with exactly matching visions, but different perspectives on them. And Cordelia gets offered a way to do better and not hurt any more. And whose agenda is that? And it's arguably what leads to her change in perception of the visions, because when they hurt you want to make that not happen so you want to make the visions not happen, but then when they stopped hurting she got shown a vision of her near future and deliberately set out to make it happen, even though that is not a good idea for any other vision she's ever had. So try that story again with the aversive attractive stimuli on top of the actual moral evaluation of the vision content.
But there was also the time the vision line got hacked? More than one assignment on the line?
If they're used to seeing the exact same thing but start seeing different, how would they react?
Also, throw in a Seer with a different Power behind their visions, and they know they do not have matching agendas. But there will be times the apparently necessary courses of action line up.
Or, one set of visions can be averted, but the other will always happen, you can only change the meaning. You have to scramble sometimes to make the hidden changes, but it can be done. So they get the truth vision, and scramble to come up with a plan, and think they've got a good one, but then the liar vision comes back with 'guys I saw a plan!' and it's their plan they've been making, and if they do what they'd planned they do exactly what demon vision says they should be doing. Which by this point they have established is usually Bad. But the thing they saw looked pretty bad too! What do!
And there will be people trying to eliminate demons, because demons, and people trying to eliminate those who don't use their powers to support their bloodline, because bloodline, and it can all be a grand mess of fighting.
And that's just with three characters with powers so far.
Also, say there's someone doing the racist Pureblood thing, really invested in the idea of a human magical bloodline that is true and pure and super important. But they're dicks to magical creatures, because creatures. Beings or beasts, it's all one to them, they're human supremacists and therefore arsewipes.
But then you prove their bloodline isn't purely arcane, because human magic is rare as rare, it's much more likely they're one of the other sorcerer bloodlines.
And they'd get totally cranky about that and deny it, probably, but it's a start.
Only it's a start on the racism thing, like proving everyone is mixed race, and I don't think that's the key angle here.
They'd still say they were the superior beings, disability discourse, saying everyone else is disabled so of course they're the most best to be the boss of everything.
It'd just prove they had disabled people in the family, and purebloods react by disowning those. Blergh.
And if you're playing in a magic 'verse then everyone usually has magic? Like, there's Xander, yeah, but even he had a couple of magic incidents. Nobody significant is just bringing guns to the arcane fight. Or swords even.
... Hawkeye. Has the super power of noticing things, no magic. And is plain disabled. This story needs a Hawkeye.
It's why it matters that all the members of the Justice League have different sources for their powers, some just get born that way and some get chosen and some choose, tech and magic and training. Focus too hard on one set and you end up arguing which accident of birth matters rather than if birth really ought to make you most powerful.
I mean, the pureblood vs muggleborn argument kind of leaves the opinions of muggles nowhere, which isn't terribly democratic.
You could make the magical 'races' be each descendants of one particular mage who Learned A Thing. A bit like McGuire's Firstborn each define their race, but with more choice in it. I mean, if you hand humans a power to remake themselves, some of them are going to make themselves dragons. You know who you are. Or centaurs, or unicorns, or... all sorts, really. You don't have to start with sapience in any other form, but once you've got advanced biotech via magic, you get every form imaginable. And some that weren't, especially if the spells go wrong.
You don't have to start with a fully stocked Otherworld if you get mages powerful enough they can just make one. Then you end up with a lot of pocket universes run by magic users who have exempted themselves from certain rules, by a variety of routes.
If Highlander Immortals were all studying magic, there's one out there five thousand years old, having had time enough to learn pretty much everything.
Or if Merlin, now made of magic and no longer mortal, just... kept making stuff up.
Or kept having children. Highlander Immortals can't, and the story effects are... interesting. Because sure they get all that sad face angst, and reasons to treat students as adopted children, except for when they're clearly very much not, but. Immortals who can have children? Whose is that greek myth adjacent series where gods are still having children? Like that. Descendents and powers EVERYwhere.
And the immortals themselves either having to keep track of their every descendant forever, or just accepting that a certain percentage of whoever they meet is probably related to them, and yet dating people anyway.
... ew, but, immortality stories in SF go there. Actually still ew. So, this would be a great reason for infertile immortals, otherwise ew.
But there's magic, so logically no reason to stop having children. Potentially with other species. And leaving magic genes all over the genome.
Like you'd only have to start with one magic user who did a bunch of Shapeshifting to animal forms and... Sword in the Stone looking dodgier by the minute... poor squirrel girl...
But then you end up with magical races because one ancestor couldn't keep it in his pants.
... now I'm thinking how many fish descendants a dude could have. Many. Many fish.
... my face is doing a thing I don't know an emoji for... o.0
So like, imagine you have Merlin, actual original issue as far as anyone knows, move into your house. You have to make a lot of decisions about him and his conduct for maybe 1500 years. Including if he has sex and if he has children. And then how many children his children have. And how many generations he knows about. And also where Merlin's powers came from in the first place. A quick google suggests his dad was an incubus, which is... interesting. Other sources suggest an angel, of course. The 1998 series makes him be made by Queen Mab, a child of the fey. It's also fun making him related to dragons. But there's not a lot of agreement, just that he's special. He could be any bloodline if you want to go there. He could be a child of the force, or literal embodiment of magic.
He could also be son of any wanderer who didn't happen to leave his name, and have a whole lot of story grow up around him. Honestly that would be more interesting to me.
Maybe he doesn't know himself. He probably can't ask his mum lately.
Probably.
But if you have a regular guy wandering around, able to change his age at will, being a people for a thousand years... he either has kids by now or a reason he doesn't. Like sexuality. A personality reason being far more interesting than a handwavey magic.
I want to write a mansion full of people like the Hyperion should have been. Just bring new people in every week and have the story elaborate and get populous.
But I'm also interested in what you do with the bad guys After.
I mean in a story with enough magic there's actually no point killing them, they'll be back anyway, going to the underworld is just slightly more complex than going to jail. So what do you do? Send them anyway, let the gods sort them out? Build a jail that's supposed to keep them down longer? Either way, eventually they get back out. And yeah, you can have the same fight over again, but what do you do that actually works?
Applying best practice principles to reduce re-offending seems like it would be new to the genre.
But you could set up a place to be like magic school for bad guys. Not to teach them to magic better, to teach them to be better neighbours. Maybe you can kill them, but what's the consequences? Maybe you can take their magic, but what's the consequences? If their only schooling is vocational and magic oriented, they're suddenly dumped out of earning a living, so what do they think they'll do? Having read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic set After... actually fanfic as a genre is very porn so some of those suggestions are almost certainly less likely than fanfic thinks. But. Don't the good guys have a whole wanting to help people thing? Some adult education could definitely help.
And I remain convinced that a decent humanities education could avert many dangers.
So I want to do the Hyperion, but collect bad guys too. Spike and Harmony and Lindsey just for starters, but on purpose and not ever giving up on them.
It would be very difficult. It is unhelpful if your people eat your people.
But it would be plentifully rewarding.
I mean if you have a battle and both sides try and kill each other then you end up with less people in total and less people on your side. But if you have a battle and incapacitate each other and then do some teaching until you can get along okay, suddenly your side has so many more people.
Civilisation.
So, I'm still stirring this idea
... and have for some reason almost dropped the idea that had most of its plot and a cast and a worldbuild and everything
... so this is not the most useful thing I could be doing.
But it is an excuse to gather all the 'bad guys' in one place and see what could happen
which sounds like fun.
And a way of throwing competing agendas in.
And I want to write someone who wants to rule the world, without them being evil. Because wanting civilisation to work is not evil. And being born secretly the rightful king is not the only way to end up on a throne without being a bad guy. Not even a good one. So. Rule the world, by making it work.
Or have fun trying.