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beccaelizabethI keep reading spell lists to get some ideas for what people could Want bad enough to make Pacts for.
Modern medicine covers a lot of the most obvious, though magic does it faster and more elegantly, plus more thoroughly sometimes.
But for spells for my own list right now I keep on coming back to building.
I guess I want my space colony even if I'm using magic to build it.
Gate college can cover Stargate use but the FP cost is tremendous. But there's Tech spells that convert power to magic, so you'd have the same Stargate requirements with a few extra steps in there. Probably not efficient. But still. Stargate.
If you had only fractions of a Gate, not a magical one but a tech one, then you've got a chance to rebuild it with Tech spells. Not a high chance, unless you already understand it, since you'd be at big penalties for your Schematic spells, but a chance. Salvaged tech would give up its secrets quicker. And you don't need the raw materials to build more, just power and magic.
Honestly the whole Create Earth branch of spells ought to change the world. No more mining, just power for the replicators, which happen to have names and a daily schedule. ... not getting enslaved would be a really high priority for magic users. Way too useful the lot of them. But anyone that can Create Earth is a bit of study away from Stone Missile or Entombment and those are a Problem for any enemy. Well, for sufficiently small numbers of enemy. Being outnumbered gets through eventually.
The whole Sufficiently Advanced Technology thing is what is most tempting. Like, humans will probably figure out how to make topsoil and clean air and effectively terraform places, but the spells in the main spellbook have that covered as a thing one can do in an afternoon. I mean you'd need spectacular amounts of power and there's a maximum amount a human can channel, or a circle of humans, but still, way faster than currently plausible tech. But advanced bio and nanotech? Can probably do it. Without a human fuse in the circuit. So like, are we imagining spells that are only a tech level or so up on us?
A mage wouldn't need much by way of startup capital, I'm thinking. I mean, they've got their own energy and they've got magic, so as long as they have somewhere to put the things they can make with magic, and nobody taking them away, they've got Stuff pretty easily. Some games consider this a game breaker and keep nerfing the spells. Oops you can't make gold because We Say So. Others see that's an economy breaker. Many gold will eventually exceed the need for gold. But many iron? Copper? Lithium? I have no idea what modern tech even uses but I know some of it is mined in relatively few places. Having your own spell to mine it all? Nifty.
And the Plant spells... there's a spell to extract pure chemicals from plants, without all the fancy tech in between. You have to know about the chemical, but you can just take the plant and turn it into whatever. And there's another spell to take plants and turn them into other plants once they're already grown? And basically you could have a weed farm that was literal weeds right up until a spell before harvest. Plus there's a Harvest spell. After all the spells for plants growing healthy and fast. Any improvement in agricultural technology changes the world, so these spells put together? Gets you an agricultural tech level beyond the modern.
You'd need space for the plants to exist in, but with Earth and Plant spells at your disposal it would not need to be... at all suitable. Just an area to exist in.
I am pretty bored of almost all the Artillery possibilities. Battle spells have very little finesse. Not interesting.
But using magic to mimic a tech level or two up from ours? Building and growing things with magic? Now that's interesting.
But I'm interested in how it compares to existing methods. Like, there's a maximum amount of stuff a single person can do, but since factories we've made spectacular strides in how much can get done by putting all the people's efforts together. Magic has a lot of limitations on it that make it difficult to scale up the number of people working together.
... Technomancer has magic factories though.
... and we're inventing all these rules.
But it appeals a lot more than existing stuff because you don't need to be a bazillionaire before you can get things done, you just need to understand stuff. And up to a point you don't need to persuade even a second person to agree with your plan, you just think it do it.
Which is also the drawback, obviously.
I want to build a space colony with a castle and a community center and a lot of homes built to the best standards copied from the coolest places. That's pretty expensive, but with magic it would be expensive in time and people, and without magic it would be expensive in stuff and money.
Either way you need a place to put your stuff.
I have a daydream where the Stargate program gets declassified and they announce they mostly found empty worlds. Empty, terraformed, worlds. Which they've surveyed well enough they're pretty sure about the empty part. And so there's 126 worlds being opened for colonisation. 127 if you count the one that already exists, which, this being my daydream, is probably a mutant homeworld. The SGC would still be in charge of which groups get to go through the gate, and assuming there's more than 126 of them they'll have to have several selection processes and some minimum criteria for going, but just... imagine if humans suddenly had 126 times more real estate handy, and could set up 126 completely different sets of rules on them, and the only real limits to getting there was everyone having to fit through the Gate on the way there. Which would be like trying to colonise the universe through Heathrow Airport.
... I did some maths with a lot of assumptions in it once, came out within spitting distance of Heathrow Airport's numbers, figured I might as well consider it equivalent, and promptly forgot the numbers and most of the assumptions. But we know how long the Gate can stay open, and we'd have to plan to have every straggler through with a safety margin, and then switch to a new destination. So it wouldn't be the same as being a round thing open 24 hours a day. But you would have to fit everyone through that one opening. So you could math it as how many people could walk through that space. Or you could figure out some kind of transport system to send people through faster. You'd have to take into accound that nothing from one side can see the other. Unless you were using the capacity for signals to travel both ways, then you could have like a false image heads up display made with cameras on the other side. And computer controlled vehicles could maybe go fast? And you could put tracks in, though obviously not for the first journey, and lining it up exactly precisely with a whole wormhole in the middle seems tricksy.
Stargate dimensions is a recurring thread on Gateworld. Answer keeps coming back 22 feet / 6.71m external diameter, 88 cm ring, 4.95m internal diameter. Or 16 feet inside / can fit through the insides. Some variaton on internal measurements, 22 feet is from DVD commentary and all agreed. Oh wait, apparently Omnipedia says 20 feet, so not agreed. Possibly because the location gate and set gate are different sizes in reality, even though gates are supposed to be standardised in universe. Let's go with 16 feet insides. I think that's smaller than I concluded last time I looked it up, I remember thinking a standard shipping container could fit through it sideways, so I must have imagined 22 feet was its insides. Ah well. Plenty of space to fit it through lengthways, as is traditional anyway. They're 8 feet wide but you couldn't put two next to each other because circular gates.
There's a reddit thread that reckons 6 people can walk through the gate side by side just barely, 5 comfortably. We usually see like four, obviously. ... the reddit thread is a blast, people are being all 'you could put them on slides' and 'keep the outgoing gate horizontal and move the arrival gate steadily, just drop everyone through' or 'but use Wraith technology and just send them on hard drives'. First post dude's numbers are coming up short of Heathrow. Ah, match Heathrow from years ago, it has just been getting busier.
... this is not a productive use of my time.
... I realise this particular rabbit hole isn't very relevant to anything, I just looked it up and... now I'm reading wikis.
There are 1,987,690,320 possible Stargate addresses on a standard Milky Way gate. As many of them connect today as the plot needs. But. So many.
I mean you could stack all the franchises and give them all a gate address and say every alien exists somewhere. And that's without planets that don't have gates.
Every time I circle back to this I keep coming back to
I'd want to build my own place and choose my own people and set up my own rules and say now everything works right
but the story doesn't work that way
the story is
people suck, so we went far away
but it turns out we are people, so we suck
now what do?
It just seems a lot more manageable when you can reduce the scale.
Also pretend the existing problems don't matter because they are Far Away and therefore Small?
But a Stargate to other worlds would mean genuinely more resources. Not just shuffling one planet around, shuffling between multiple planets. It might stop us using more planets than we actually have. Or it might turn into people doing things the easy way because hey, dump the garbage through the Stargate, nobody needs to notice a problem.
But. I started out thinking about magic.
Magic also makes genuinely new resources, because it posits a form of energy that has no practical limits in the game and can be converted into matter whenever you will it. Which changes physics quite considerably. Even if you're tapping another 'dimenion' for it, that's... a lot.
And what would I do with it?
Roughly the same things I'd want to use tech for.
Build a nice new community somewhere.
That's not generally what RPG spells are optimised to do.
So now I'm thinking about settling down and doing GURPS maths on how much $ it takes to establish a colony.
... not wildly productive neither.
oh well.
Modern medicine covers a lot of the most obvious, though magic does it faster and more elegantly, plus more thoroughly sometimes.
But for spells for my own list right now I keep on coming back to building.
I guess I want my space colony even if I'm using magic to build it.
Gate college can cover Stargate use but the FP cost is tremendous. But there's Tech spells that convert power to magic, so you'd have the same Stargate requirements with a few extra steps in there. Probably not efficient. But still. Stargate.
If you had only fractions of a Gate, not a magical one but a tech one, then you've got a chance to rebuild it with Tech spells. Not a high chance, unless you already understand it, since you'd be at big penalties for your Schematic spells, but a chance. Salvaged tech would give up its secrets quicker. And you don't need the raw materials to build more, just power and magic.
Honestly the whole Create Earth branch of spells ought to change the world. No more mining, just power for the replicators, which happen to have names and a daily schedule. ... not getting enslaved would be a really high priority for magic users. Way too useful the lot of them. But anyone that can Create Earth is a bit of study away from Stone Missile or Entombment and those are a Problem for any enemy. Well, for sufficiently small numbers of enemy. Being outnumbered gets through eventually.
The whole Sufficiently Advanced Technology thing is what is most tempting. Like, humans will probably figure out how to make topsoil and clean air and effectively terraform places, but the spells in the main spellbook have that covered as a thing one can do in an afternoon. I mean you'd need spectacular amounts of power and there's a maximum amount a human can channel, or a circle of humans, but still, way faster than currently plausible tech. But advanced bio and nanotech? Can probably do it. Without a human fuse in the circuit. So like, are we imagining spells that are only a tech level or so up on us?
A mage wouldn't need much by way of startup capital, I'm thinking. I mean, they've got their own energy and they've got magic, so as long as they have somewhere to put the things they can make with magic, and nobody taking them away, they've got Stuff pretty easily. Some games consider this a game breaker and keep nerfing the spells. Oops you can't make gold because We Say So. Others see that's an economy breaker. Many gold will eventually exceed the need for gold. But many iron? Copper? Lithium? I have no idea what modern tech even uses but I know some of it is mined in relatively few places. Having your own spell to mine it all? Nifty.
And the Plant spells... there's a spell to extract pure chemicals from plants, without all the fancy tech in between. You have to know about the chemical, but you can just take the plant and turn it into whatever. And there's another spell to take plants and turn them into other plants once they're already grown? And basically you could have a weed farm that was literal weeds right up until a spell before harvest. Plus there's a Harvest spell. After all the spells for plants growing healthy and fast. Any improvement in agricultural technology changes the world, so these spells put together? Gets you an agricultural tech level beyond the modern.
You'd need space for the plants to exist in, but with Earth and Plant spells at your disposal it would not need to be... at all suitable. Just an area to exist in.
I am pretty bored of almost all the Artillery possibilities. Battle spells have very little finesse. Not interesting.
But using magic to mimic a tech level or two up from ours? Building and growing things with magic? Now that's interesting.
But I'm interested in how it compares to existing methods. Like, there's a maximum amount of stuff a single person can do, but since factories we've made spectacular strides in how much can get done by putting all the people's efforts together. Magic has a lot of limitations on it that make it difficult to scale up the number of people working together.
... Technomancer has magic factories though.
... and we're inventing all these rules.
But it appeals a lot more than existing stuff because you don't need to be a bazillionaire before you can get things done, you just need to understand stuff. And up to a point you don't need to persuade even a second person to agree with your plan, you just think it do it.
Which is also the drawback, obviously.
I want to build a space colony with a castle and a community center and a lot of homes built to the best standards copied from the coolest places. That's pretty expensive, but with magic it would be expensive in time and people, and without magic it would be expensive in stuff and money.
Either way you need a place to put your stuff.
I have a daydream where the Stargate program gets declassified and they announce they mostly found empty worlds. Empty, terraformed, worlds. Which they've surveyed well enough they're pretty sure about the empty part. And so there's 126 worlds being opened for colonisation. 127 if you count the one that already exists, which, this being my daydream, is probably a mutant homeworld. The SGC would still be in charge of which groups get to go through the gate, and assuming there's more than 126 of them they'll have to have several selection processes and some minimum criteria for going, but just... imagine if humans suddenly had 126 times more real estate handy, and could set up 126 completely different sets of rules on them, and the only real limits to getting there was everyone having to fit through the Gate on the way there. Which would be like trying to colonise the universe through Heathrow Airport.
... I did some maths with a lot of assumptions in it once, came out within spitting distance of Heathrow Airport's numbers, figured I might as well consider it equivalent, and promptly forgot the numbers and most of the assumptions. But we know how long the Gate can stay open, and we'd have to plan to have every straggler through with a safety margin, and then switch to a new destination. So it wouldn't be the same as being a round thing open 24 hours a day. But you would have to fit everyone through that one opening. So you could math it as how many people could walk through that space. Or you could figure out some kind of transport system to send people through faster. You'd have to take into accound that nothing from one side can see the other. Unless you were using the capacity for signals to travel both ways, then you could have like a false image heads up display made with cameras on the other side. And computer controlled vehicles could maybe go fast? And you could put tracks in, though obviously not for the first journey, and lining it up exactly precisely with a whole wormhole in the middle seems tricksy.
Stargate dimensions is a recurring thread on Gateworld. Answer keeps coming back 22 feet / 6.71m external diameter, 88 cm ring, 4.95m internal diameter. Or 16 feet inside / can fit through the insides. Some variaton on internal measurements, 22 feet is from DVD commentary and all agreed. Oh wait, apparently Omnipedia says 20 feet, so not agreed. Possibly because the location gate and set gate are different sizes in reality, even though gates are supposed to be standardised in universe. Let's go with 16 feet insides. I think that's smaller than I concluded last time I looked it up, I remember thinking a standard shipping container could fit through it sideways, so I must have imagined 22 feet was its insides. Ah well. Plenty of space to fit it through lengthways, as is traditional anyway. They're 8 feet wide but you couldn't put two next to each other because circular gates.
There's a reddit thread that reckons 6 people can walk through the gate side by side just barely, 5 comfortably. We usually see like four, obviously. ... the reddit thread is a blast, people are being all 'you could put them on slides' and 'keep the outgoing gate horizontal and move the arrival gate steadily, just drop everyone through' or 'but use Wraith technology and just send them on hard drives'. First post dude's numbers are coming up short of Heathrow. Ah, match Heathrow from years ago, it has just been getting busier.
... this is not a productive use of my time.
... I realise this particular rabbit hole isn't very relevant to anything, I just looked it up and... now I'm reading wikis.
There are 1,987,690,320 possible Stargate addresses on a standard Milky Way gate. As many of them connect today as the plot needs. But. So many.
I mean you could stack all the franchises and give them all a gate address and say every alien exists somewhere. And that's without planets that don't have gates.
Every time I circle back to this I keep coming back to
I'd want to build my own place and choose my own people and set up my own rules and say now everything works right
but the story doesn't work that way
the story is
people suck, so we went far away
but it turns out we are people, so we suck
now what do?
It just seems a lot more manageable when you can reduce the scale.
Also pretend the existing problems don't matter because they are Far Away and therefore Small?
But a Stargate to other worlds would mean genuinely more resources. Not just shuffling one planet around, shuffling between multiple planets. It might stop us using more planets than we actually have. Or it might turn into people doing things the easy way because hey, dump the garbage through the Stargate, nobody needs to notice a problem.
But. I started out thinking about magic.
Magic also makes genuinely new resources, because it posits a form of energy that has no practical limits in the game and can be converted into matter whenever you will it. Which changes physics quite considerably. Even if you're tapping another 'dimenion' for it, that's... a lot.
And what would I do with it?
Roughly the same things I'd want to use tech for.
Build a nice new community somewhere.
That's not generally what RPG spells are optimised to do.
So now I'm thinking about settling down and doing GURPS maths on how much $ it takes to establish a colony.
... not wildly productive neither.
oh well.