beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2018-08-15 04:35 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2018-08-15 04:35 am
Magic through the looking glass
So I was twiddling with magic systems, ways to make the magic work different in different connected planes.
Aspected mana would do some stuff, like only air spells working in the air elemental plane, but then you couldn't Gate out because Gate is not an air spell, and elementals couldn't get in without being summoned, which is probably what you want. Same like demons, you could make it so there's mana too limited to sustain a Gate, which would make going to hell a one way unless you've got friends back home. Or you could make the mana levels really low, make magic difficult for everything and everyone.
But I was thinking a bigger change. Something to do with time.
Your average mage in normal mana conditions recovers 1FP every ten minutes. Sooo... I was thinking, if my characters went through the looking glass, and suddenly found Infinite FP Exploit, so they could do absolutely anything, not need to save up a powerstone to keep the power pooled, just let it flow. ... and then discover that whatever they cast, they just time traveled relative to their living plane at a rate of ten minutes per 1FP.
Someone who knows Recover Energy could get that down to 5 or 2 minutes, but not closer. And they'd need skill 15 or 20 to do that, which is quite a lot.
For small achievable spells it would look like an area of Very High Mana, and that would be a simples way to make a really magic rich but difficult realm, given the VHM approach to all fails are crit fails and crit fails are BOOM. A mage who spends FP to cast a spell on his turn gets those FP back at the start of his next turn. So a mage could cast a lot of spells very fast. But they'd be small spells, smaller than his personal store of fatigue. And if they found themselves through the looking glass and were like wahey magic here is so easy, they could burn up hours very very quickly. And then they'd start thinking...
See to keep it game balanced it should be only as fast as slow and sure enchantment. Unlimited power is available for that, at the rate of 1 point per day. But for one, by the time you discovered that, you'd be gone weeks or months from the realm of life. And for another, that is way less fun than having a really tempting realm. Because if it has the speed of Quick and Dirty enchantment but the unlimited power of Slow and Sure? Somebody is going to jump in and try that.
So then you make the drawbacks substantial.
Like a whole realm that thinks you're fun to play with.
And possibly areas where time is just running away with you anyway.
Like, if there's an ongoing spell, how far around the caster does time go wonky? Because if it goes wonky within the realm for every individual then every time someone casts a spell they either turn into a statue for a minimum of ten minutes or disappear and reappear. But if everyone's pulled along by anyone's magic then it only takes one really ambitious person and you don't have to cast to travel. Hmmm, an entire realm that is going a minimum of twice as fast as the living realm would be interesting. But if it's all eddies and whirlpools and everyone pushing their own bit their own ways then that gets way more chaotic and able to eat characters.
So I dreamed this set of rules, ish, and dream me discovered things had gone a Bit Far when I first looked out onto the kingdoms of the world, discovered a shocking thing (the exact same guy was the official announcer of every kingdom we looked at, so this one guy had taken over the media, medieval style), turned around to check with my friends if we think pointing this out is a plan, and then when I turned back saw the kings had aged into very elderly persons indeed. That wasn't even a hundred years in one night territory, it was faster. Bit of a problem.
In the dream the solution was calling for Merlin, who could take my hand and get me out. Seems like that one ought to be tricky.
So if there was an entire kingdom in the mirror plane using magic to make all the cool stuff, time there would run at a very distorted rate compared to the living realm. Like, would holding a Created Object make time ten minutes per round while the spell is on? Would any maintained spell? That would be ridiculously fast. Everyone would look immortal and unchanging from the outside, because hardly any time ever passes in there. Not optimal for them. But in a world of magic that's that easy would anyone mind? World of illusion, just hit fast forwards and have anything you can imagine.
... it is very fast if it's continuous. And puts no cost on anyone new trying it. It needs to eddy.
But it can't be one at a time because you'd never hit anyone else with a spell you cast if you suddenly went slow at casting, or you'd hit them but then be entirely vulnerable.
You'd need a time map that was kind of like a gravity map.
I just want to use it to mess with my characters. Because I've got someone who can make a door, especially if there's a real door to use, but someone has them captured so obviously they'd need an area where the effectively teleport version of doors doesn't work. They drop them and their friend in a jar with a lot of counterspells on it. But our gate maker still has some options.
They could report directly to their deity, but they don't like to for the same reason you don't bring your every problem direct to the CEO, with intensifiers for degree of admiration akin to having a crush on them. Also it might be awkward to bring a friend to meet god. So. Somewhere else.
The always available somewhere elses are the Shadow and the Mirror.
The Shadow is death, more or less, and very easy to get into, just not always particularly obliging on the getting out parts. It's a very Lawful realm indeed, and if you can weather the Judgement and still be deemed one of the living, it works out fine. ... pretty big If if you're using the shadow to escape whatever your captors have planned for you. You can probably skip the torture parts. That might be nice.
But the Mirror is just the other hand of everything. The opposite, the inverted. It's everywhere there's a reflection, and in most cases that includes your eyes. You can always get in.
It just means letting your mirror selves out.
Now leaving your moral opposites in a jar waiting to maybe be torture does not seem much like a team good guy thing. But what if they could ask first? A certain kind of good guy would think that was All Sorted. ... it's just the mirror version they let out would then be the kind of person who would not ask.
A reasonable amount of thinking about this would suggest your mirror self is going to be a nightmare.
But again, jar waiting to be tortured, and with a friend. So. They take the out.
Which leaves their opposites to be rescued, of course, because it's no fun unless they end up in the heart of team good guy ready to deceive them.
But then it's a lot more fun if the ones who escaped into the Mirror plane can't just hop back immediately.
And one way to do that would be to mess with time.
Could be overkill. Could just have them running around in a nonsense world trying to stay alive while their opposites try to do terrible things and we learn how well their friends really know them. I mean, if they have tattoos it ought to be obvious which side they are.
... but there's studies where if someone ducks behind a counter and a whole different human stands up, a great many people will simply not notice. So, humans are not the world's most observant beings, and will accept, with unease, quite a lot.
... I tried to look up the counter thing and ended up finding a version where the experimenters walked through the middle of a conversation with a door to switch out people, which is even more thematically appropriate. Change blindness, found it on https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/20-psychological-studies-_n_4098779 linking to a pdf I haven't read. I know some of the other experiments on that list have turned out to mean something different than initially thought or just left a bunch out of their write up. Couldn't find much because whatever I type about psych studies google keeps telling me about the milgram experiment. Which is kind of dark. But I only spent a couple minutes on this. So, onwards.
... now I want to run the change blindness test on autistic people to see if it gets the same numbers...
... too many variables though, if someone tried to stop me in the street I'd probably not notice them anyway...
https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/influential-psychological-experiments/ is interesting too.
Okay, so now I've rabbit holed away from the initial thought.
Which was: change up the rules of a plane and watch things go spectacularly wrong for your characters. Always fun.
Aspected mana would do some stuff, like only air spells working in the air elemental plane, but then you couldn't Gate out because Gate is not an air spell, and elementals couldn't get in without being summoned, which is probably what you want. Same like demons, you could make it so there's mana too limited to sustain a Gate, which would make going to hell a one way unless you've got friends back home. Or you could make the mana levels really low, make magic difficult for everything and everyone.
But I was thinking a bigger change. Something to do with time.
Your average mage in normal mana conditions recovers 1FP every ten minutes. Sooo... I was thinking, if my characters went through the looking glass, and suddenly found Infinite FP Exploit, so they could do absolutely anything, not need to save up a powerstone to keep the power pooled, just let it flow. ... and then discover that whatever they cast, they just time traveled relative to their living plane at a rate of ten minutes per 1FP.
Someone who knows Recover Energy could get that down to 5 or 2 minutes, but not closer. And they'd need skill 15 or 20 to do that, which is quite a lot.
For small achievable spells it would look like an area of Very High Mana, and that would be a simples way to make a really magic rich but difficult realm, given the VHM approach to all fails are crit fails and crit fails are BOOM. A mage who spends FP to cast a spell on his turn gets those FP back at the start of his next turn. So a mage could cast a lot of spells very fast. But they'd be small spells, smaller than his personal store of fatigue. And if they found themselves through the looking glass and were like wahey magic here is so easy, they could burn up hours very very quickly. And then they'd start thinking...
See to keep it game balanced it should be only as fast as slow and sure enchantment. Unlimited power is available for that, at the rate of 1 point per day. But for one, by the time you discovered that, you'd be gone weeks or months from the realm of life. And for another, that is way less fun than having a really tempting realm. Because if it has the speed of Quick and Dirty enchantment but the unlimited power of Slow and Sure? Somebody is going to jump in and try that.
So then you make the drawbacks substantial.
Like a whole realm that thinks you're fun to play with.
And possibly areas where time is just running away with you anyway.
Like, if there's an ongoing spell, how far around the caster does time go wonky? Because if it goes wonky within the realm for every individual then every time someone casts a spell they either turn into a statue for a minimum of ten minutes or disappear and reappear. But if everyone's pulled along by anyone's magic then it only takes one really ambitious person and you don't have to cast to travel. Hmmm, an entire realm that is going a minimum of twice as fast as the living realm would be interesting. But if it's all eddies and whirlpools and everyone pushing their own bit their own ways then that gets way more chaotic and able to eat characters.
So I dreamed this set of rules, ish, and dream me discovered things had gone a Bit Far when I first looked out onto the kingdoms of the world, discovered a shocking thing (the exact same guy was the official announcer of every kingdom we looked at, so this one guy had taken over the media, medieval style), turned around to check with my friends if we think pointing this out is a plan, and then when I turned back saw the kings had aged into very elderly persons indeed. That wasn't even a hundred years in one night territory, it was faster. Bit of a problem.
In the dream the solution was calling for Merlin, who could take my hand and get me out. Seems like that one ought to be tricky.
So if there was an entire kingdom in the mirror plane using magic to make all the cool stuff, time there would run at a very distorted rate compared to the living realm. Like, would holding a Created Object make time ten minutes per round while the spell is on? Would any maintained spell? That would be ridiculously fast. Everyone would look immortal and unchanging from the outside, because hardly any time ever passes in there. Not optimal for them. But in a world of magic that's that easy would anyone mind? World of illusion, just hit fast forwards and have anything you can imagine.
... it is very fast if it's continuous. And puts no cost on anyone new trying it. It needs to eddy.
But it can't be one at a time because you'd never hit anyone else with a spell you cast if you suddenly went slow at casting, or you'd hit them but then be entirely vulnerable.
You'd need a time map that was kind of like a gravity map.
I just want to use it to mess with my characters. Because I've got someone who can make a door, especially if there's a real door to use, but someone has them captured so obviously they'd need an area where the effectively teleport version of doors doesn't work. They drop them and their friend in a jar with a lot of counterspells on it. But our gate maker still has some options.
They could report directly to their deity, but they don't like to for the same reason you don't bring your every problem direct to the CEO, with intensifiers for degree of admiration akin to having a crush on them. Also it might be awkward to bring a friend to meet god. So. Somewhere else.
The always available somewhere elses are the Shadow and the Mirror.
The Shadow is death, more or less, and very easy to get into, just not always particularly obliging on the getting out parts. It's a very Lawful realm indeed, and if you can weather the Judgement and still be deemed one of the living, it works out fine. ... pretty big If if you're using the shadow to escape whatever your captors have planned for you. You can probably skip the torture parts. That might be nice.
But the Mirror is just the other hand of everything. The opposite, the inverted. It's everywhere there's a reflection, and in most cases that includes your eyes. You can always get in.
It just means letting your mirror selves out.
Now leaving your moral opposites in a jar waiting to maybe be torture does not seem much like a team good guy thing. But what if they could ask first? A certain kind of good guy would think that was All Sorted. ... it's just the mirror version they let out would then be the kind of person who would not ask.
A reasonable amount of thinking about this would suggest your mirror self is going to be a nightmare.
But again, jar waiting to be tortured, and with a friend. So. They take the out.
Which leaves their opposites to be rescued, of course, because it's no fun unless they end up in the heart of team good guy ready to deceive them.
But then it's a lot more fun if the ones who escaped into the Mirror plane can't just hop back immediately.
And one way to do that would be to mess with time.
Could be overkill. Could just have them running around in a nonsense world trying to stay alive while their opposites try to do terrible things and we learn how well their friends really know them. I mean, if they have tattoos it ought to be obvious which side they are.
... but there's studies where if someone ducks behind a counter and a whole different human stands up, a great many people will simply not notice. So, humans are not the world's most observant beings, and will accept, with unease, quite a lot.
... I tried to look up the counter thing and ended up finding a version where the experimenters walked through the middle of a conversation with a door to switch out people, which is even more thematically appropriate. Change blindness, found it on https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/20-psychological-studies-_n_4098779 linking to a pdf I haven't read. I know some of the other experiments on that list have turned out to mean something different than initially thought or just left a bunch out of their write up. Couldn't find much because whatever I type about psych studies google keeps telling me about the milgram experiment. Which is kind of dark. But I only spent a couple minutes on this. So, onwards.
... now I want to run the change blindness test on autistic people to see if it gets the same numbers...
... too many variables though, if someone tried to stop me in the street I'd probably not notice them anyway...
https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/influential-psychological-experiments/ is interesting too.
Okay, so now I've rabbit holed away from the initial thought.
Which was: change up the rules of a plane and watch things go spectacularly wrong for your characters. Always fun.