Little things
Oct. 20th, 2026 06:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethNot doing much. Bit of reading, bit of research, not much writing. The more research I do the more I find Problems and Pitfalls to the main plot idea, which is what you want in a plot, but it isn't always going from building regs to actual drama smoothly.
Got some Halloween stickers. Because I stopped and thought about where I could put things before I bought a Halloween top hat skeleton statues. ... I am still thinking about the statues. I mean technically I could put them on the windowsill but. Stickers are good.
Looked in a pencil case I haven't used lately, discovered Mystery Stickiness. Which is still not resolved, but. Only one pen in there was a different sort of pen than I usually get, and when I pulled it out with a dettol wipe, sure enough, weird sticky ensued. It was printed with a shop name and phone number in white and the white smeared right off on the wipe. It's like the slightly soft pen sweated the writing right off. Sad and sticky. So I wiped it real good until nothing was coming off it any more and put it in the kitchen to deal with later. I put it in a different holder than I meant to and then just decided to leave it for a bit because if stickiness damage then damage done. The rest of the pencil case is probably still at least slightly sticky so mystery unfun cleaning awaits for later.
The internet needs to know, obviously.
The more I read about ... anything I start reading about lately, the less surprised I am about things failing. Like we're in a very Find Out phase of history. Here are consequences and new knowledge and regulations that were written in blood and fire, and oh now everything has to be changed to work with the new knowledge. Makes sense, important stuff, but, so many complex ways to fail are now known in such detail, and fixing them is going to be harder than starting over, except we're in the middle of things so we can't stop the world to start over.
Like hospital roofs. I was annoyed that the old promises to make new hospitals came to next to nothing, but then I read a thing in passing where a hospital was all, Good News, that new building we've been trying to do for twenty years is really happening this time, we've just got to move all the departments, demolish a big enough area, build a multi storey car park, get a new electricity substation for all the power the new build will need, and the. start building Real Soon Now! ... and they actually meant it about good news, they've got the whole plan lined up now, it's just like... the opposite of dominos. Everything has to happen in order. Which at least beats the days when everything has to happen first.
So the observed problem is: roof made of roof fall down material, disaster any day now, needs fixing. But the real world solution can't involve stopping the hospital or people die. And also can't involve building a new hospital without finding somewhere to put it. And that means finding somewhere that can handle the traffic flows, without mixing up things that shouldn't mix, and that's a huge twirly problem. And so site wise they need to either make a whole new hub with new roads to go with it, or figure out how to knock down and rebuild something they're still using. Which is. Hard.
And there are so many other ways older buildings are unsuitable! We are so much closer to failure modes than we usually think. New tech levels very unevenly applied and knowledge needs shuffling around to mix the reliable things in properly.
So I been thinking all this, but being me I've been thinking it through a filter of What If Endgame Adventurer Money, like you can found a kingdom with all that, surely you can magic wand fix these complex snarls.
And no you cannot, because even huge money (individual) is not much money (one entire country or county even). It might be huge money to a town but there are so many flow problems to solve to get a town to work properly.
And when you have huge money and want to get the world to work on better principles then you kind of want to do the old school thing of building a model and showing everyone it works best, but that might just suck the resources ie staff out of everywhere else?
And! Also! It isn't the most effective use of your leverage.
If you spend all your money on one project then you have one project that succeeds or fails.
But if you put your money in diversified investments and then use only the spare bonus interest to hand out like scholarships and bursaries and grants, With Conditions, then you get everyone competing to meet your conditions, they want your shiny money so much, they change their project to be attractive to your shiny money, they do it even before they've got a penny of your shiny money and if they don't get it anyway they'll keep the conditions in place so they can show they're a real good choice to the funding round next year, they'll dance to your tune to the mirage of money. Jam tomorrow can change so many projects. Widely diversified projects, that have other sources of funding and don't fall down if you juggle things. So you get your influence and priorities and choices spread over so many more things. And, sometimes, even pay for a good project. Something that has nice outcomes that you wanted. Just as a partnership, preferably with somewhere bigger that can just nudge their plans along a bit to make your money go further.
(Or it might not work that way at all, I've been reading things and drawing conclusions but what I am mostly becoming aware of is vast vistas of ignorance. Everything is so much more complicated once one starts to look.)
Big money is good at getting things to happen.
And yet, so many things need to happen.
I think there's a weird step in these plans where money is imaginary. Investments aren't in Things or even Companies in a concrete sort of way, they're just in Money Go Up. You can do ethical diversified business investments but the point is to make the money still be more money later. Which isn't like spending money. Like it is but it doesn't seem to turn into more money because there's more stuff, it turns into more money because everyone did a think and decided this number shall go up.
I'm not very good at getting my head around that part. It's all tulips to me.
So. I headed this entry Little Things. But whenever I start looking into little things they seem to connect up into much big things. That only sort of work. Which is a puzzler given how much Doing Things everyone does all day.
If I use Pathfinder rules I can put gold in and get kingdoms out.
The real world seems to do its best to only put the idea of gold in, and get a line on a graph out.
But the actual need remains.
Writing about magic school has all these systems things crunch together and actually be rather difficult for Pathfinder style magic to deal with. I mean you can Miracle up a building but you'd better have someone in the process who understands the building code and what it's for, and a Miracle doesn't necessarily have listed building planning consent. You can start putting Teleport Circles in to get people around but it becomes another set of flow problems. I once worked out that a Stargate can at maximum safe speeds move around about as many people as Heathrow airport, though obviously that had a lot of assumptions being rather handwavey. But you can't fit all the world's trade through Heathrow Airport. You can't fit Britain through Heathrow Airport. So how much help is it to you really, when you want it for something other than adventure team sized plots?
And the ability to teleport would be a nightmare for safeguarding. You'd have to do such expensive things even just to make sure no one could teleport in to a single dorm. All the fences and ID checks in the world rather assume it's difficult to, like, fly. Or at least noticeable. But magic makes it neither difficult nor noticeable. So how do you account for that?
So much more expensive magic, just to maintain conditions that are vaguely as secure as people with no magic would have.
Complex systems problems.
... that end up looking very much like Scholomance, so, nice to see other authors are also thinking things through, when I feel like I'm overthinking everything...
Then if you add say Tieflings or another minority who have heightened risk of racist attacks... well now the security problems are myriad. And probably insurmountable if you have lovely big historic school campus in the heart of the community. Try securing sports fields, even without inter school sports matches.
Not that I think the wizard school lady was thinking of real world communities that have to get extra government funding to combat the threat of for instance arson, but ending up all secret, secure, and segregated, is one solution to the problem. But one with several layers of problems if you want to raise good citizens. Or keep them safe from problems from the other direction, the ones that boarding school minimum standards about contacting the outside world are meant to help with.
See the basic problem with worldbuilding is you have to build a world, and it turns out those things are complex.
And I didn't want to do metaphors for real problems that invisible real communities, so the logical thing for the story people to do is ask Jewish schools how they handle things, and do community outreach and stuff. Work together on a new campus that works for everyone, sort of thing. But I have the knowing of Pathfinder rules, not actual people, so swiftly the story gets out of my range.
And all this is dramatic for the well meaning protagonists to find out the hard way. They just wanted to do a nice safe school for the kind of people who turn up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer only to get dragged back to their home dimension or solve the 'problem' by not really being mixed race. They turn up on Angel to have racism directed at them and die heroically. But if they existed in a real world you'd want them to get GCSEs and a nice start in life same as everyone else. Also the ageing tables in the Pathfinder rules imply that there are populations that need a consistent longer time to learn the same things a 15 year old human has learned. That's simples, special educational needs but this time if you identify them correctly they just need an extra five years to catch up to everything, you can do a school optimised for that. But as soon as you set up said school somewhere actual organisations think like they do in Buffy and Angel? Horrible consequences. Drama. Fighting. Big failure of attempts at integration.
It goes a bit X Men at that point, obviously.
But X Men tend to focus on the fighting not the boarding school standards and infrastructure.
Also, these days, you could get a lot done remotely. You'd have kids on video calls with horns or whatever and it's an even chance if they've got non human heritage or a filter on. You could set up classrooms with a great big video projector wall and do joint lessons and joint projects, treating it like a window, ish. Or at least you could with magic and illusion spells. Make the kids all part of the same community. It should work great.
But with people interested in making it not great, you have to worry about so many things. Creeps and ddos attacks and actual violence.
So you've got ongoing drama, but a really difficult solution. Seeing as it is all stuff the real world hasn't sorted out yet, but with horns on this time.
... the header Little Things is no longer relevant here. Except they could be quite little tieflings. The ageing rules may or may not elaborate on when they get their innate magic, but some of those once a day spells be Difficult in a youngling...
So I tag this plot bunnies but it is entire plot warrens and as complicated as my imagines can make it.
I should write some of it up, but so far I have got as far as the first two characters meeting and taking a tour of a school, so I have quite a lot of doings between there and here.
But different communities would have tried different solutions to all this already in a world that had these options.
Which is the other place the story gets stuck, Pathfinder Earth fundamentally couldn't end up looking like ours, if all the powers of Golarion have been interested since 1918. But the conceit of that adventure path was that it had all secretly happened here. You can only get that with some imperative that keeps it all secret. Which is a problem with a lot of urban fantasy, but. Big complicated.
Hospital building to world building, gold pieces to endowments and grants, schools for tieflings and targets for bigots, all wrapped in so many systems of real world rules and regulations... start with any one piece and the threads go out and out everywhere forever. Everything is complex in so many ways.
Okay, not getting new solutions right now so I'll go away.
It's interesting following each thread out through the existing rules and complications though.
Just need to be better at that...
Got some Halloween stickers. Because I stopped and thought about where I could put things before I bought a Halloween top hat skeleton statues. ... I am still thinking about the statues. I mean technically I could put them on the windowsill but. Stickers are good.
Looked in a pencil case I haven't used lately, discovered Mystery Stickiness. Which is still not resolved, but. Only one pen in there was a different sort of pen than I usually get, and when I pulled it out with a dettol wipe, sure enough, weird sticky ensued. It was printed with a shop name and phone number in white and the white smeared right off on the wipe. It's like the slightly soft pen sweated the writing right off. Sad and sticky. So I wiped it real good until nothing was coming off it any more and put it in the kitchen to deal with later. I put it in a different holder than I meant to and then just decided to leave it for a bit because if stickiness damage then damage done. The rest of the pencil case is probably still at least slightly sticky so mystery unfun cleaning awaits for later.
The internet needs to know, obviously.
The more I read about ... anything I start reading about lately, the less surprised I am about things failing. Like we're in a very Find Out phase of history. Here are consequences and new knowledge and regulations that were written in blood and fire, and oh now everything has to be changed to work with the new knowledge. Makes sense, important stuff, but, so many complex ways to fail are now known in such detail, and fixing them is going to be harder than starting over, except we're in the middle of things so we can't stop the world to start over.
Like hospital roofs. I was annoyed that the old promises to make new hospitals came to next to nothing, but then I read a thing in passing where a hospital was all, Good News, that new building we've been trying to do for twenty years is really happening this time, we've just got to move all the departments, demolish a big enough area, build a multi storey car park, get a new electricity substation for all the power the new build will need, and the. start building Real Soon Now! ... and they actually meant it about good news, they've got the whole plan lined up now, it's just like... the opposite of dominos. Everything has to happen in order. Which at least beats the days when everything has to happen first.
So the observed problem is: roof made of roof fall down material, disaster any day now, needs fixing. But the real world solution can't involve stopping the hospital or people die. And also can't involve building a new hospital without finding somewhere to put it. And that means finding somewhere that can handle the traffic flows, without mixing up things that shouldn't mix, and that's a huge twirly problem. And so site wise they need to either make a whole new hub with new roads to go with it, or figure out how to knock down and rebuild something they're still using. Which is. Hard.
And there are so many other ways older buildings are unsuitable! We are so much closer to failure modes than we usually think. New tech levels very unevenly applied and knowledge needs shuffling around to mix the reliable things in properly.
So I been thinking all this, but being me I've been thinking it through a filter of What If Endgame Adventurer Money, like you can found a kingdom with all that, surely you can magic wand fix these complex snarls.
And no you cannot, because even huge money (individual) is not much money (one entire country or county even). It might be huge money to a town but there are so many flow problems to solve to get a town to work properly.
And when you have huge money and want to get the world to work on better principles then you kind of want to do the old school thing of building a model and showing everyone it works best, but that might just suck the resources ie staff out of everywhere else?
And! Also! It isn't the most effective use of your leverage.
If you spend all your money on one project then you have one project that succeeds or fails.
But if you put your money in diversified investments and then use only the spare bonus interest to hand out like scholarships and bursaries and grants, With Conditions, then you get everyone competing to meet your conditions, they want your shiny money so much, they change their project to be attractive to your shiny money, they do it even before they've got a penny of your shiny money and if they don't get it anyway they'll keep the conditions in place so they can show they're a real good choice to the funding round next year, they'll dance to your tune to the mirage of money. Jam tomorrow can change so many projects. Widely diversified projects, that have other sources of funding and don't fall down if you juggle things. So you get your influence and priorities and choices spread over so many more things. And, sometimes, even pay for a good project. Something that has nice outcomes that you wanted. Just as a partnership, preferably with somewhere bigger that can just nudge their plans along a bit to make your money go further.
(Or it might not work that way at all, I've been reading things and drawing conclusions but what I am mostly becoming aware of is vast vistas of ignorance. Everything is so much more complicated once one starts to look.)
Big money is good at getting things to happen.
And yet, so many things need to happen.
I think there's a weird step in these plans where money is imaginary. Investments aren't in Things or even Companies in a concrete sort of way, they're just in Money Go Up. You can do ethical diversified business investments but the point is to make the money still be more money later. Which isn't like spending money. Like it is but it doesn't seem to turn into more money because there's more stuff, it turns into more money because everyone did a think and decided this number shall go up.
I'm not very good at getting my head around that part. It's all tulips to me.
So. I headed this entry Little Things. But whenever I start looking into little things they seem to connect up into much big things. That only sort of work. Which is a puzzler given how much Doing Things everyone does all day.
If I use Pathfinder rules I can put gold in and get kingdoms out.
The real world seems to do its best to only put the idea of gold in, and get a line on a graph out.
But the actual need remains.
Writing about magic school has all these systems things crunch together and actually be rather difficult for Pathfinder style magic to deal with. I mean you can Miracle up a building but you'd better have someone in the process who understands the building code and what it's for, and a Miracle doesn't necessarily have listed building planning consent. You can start putting Teleport Circles in to get people around but it becomes another set of flow problems. I once worked out that a Stargate can at maximum safe speeds move around about as many people as Heathrow airport, though obviously that had a lot of assumptions being rather handwavey. But you can't fit all the world's trade through Heathrow Airport. You can't fit Britain through Heathrow Airport. So how much help is it to you really, when you want it for something other than adventure team sized plots?
And the ability to teleport would be a nightmare for safeguarding. You'd have to do such expensive things even just to make sure no one could teleport in to a single dorm. All the fences and ID checks in the world rather assume it's difficult to, like, fly. Or at least noticeable. But magic makes it neither difficult nor noticeable. So how do you account for that?
So much more expensive magic, just to maintain conditions that are vaguely as secure as people with no magic would have.
Complex systems problems.
... that end up looking very much like Scholomance, so, nice to see other authors are also thinking things through, when I feel like I'm overthinking everything...
Then if you add say Tieflings or another minority who have heightened risk of racist attacks... well now the security problems are myriad. And probably insurmountable if you have lovely big historic school campus in the heart of the community. Try securing sports fields, even without inter school sports matches.
Not that I think the wizard school lady was thinking of real world communities that have to get extra government funding to combat the threat of for instance arson, but ending up all secret, secure, and segregated, is one solution to the problem. But one with several layers of problems if you want to raise good citizens. Or keep them safe from problems from the other direction, the ones that boarding school minimum standards about contacting the outside world are meant to help with.
See the basic problem with worldbuilding is you have to build a world, and it turns out those things are complex.
And I didn't want to do metaphors for real problems that invisible real communities, so the logical thing for the story people to do is ask Jewish schools how they handle things, and do community outreach and stuff. Work together on a new campus that works for everyone, sort of thing. But I have the knowing of Pathfinder rules, not actual people, so swiftly the story gets out of my range.
And all this is dramatic for the well meaning protagonists to find out the hard way. They just wanted to do a nice safe school for the kind of people who turn up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer only to get dragged back to their home dimension or solve the 'problem' by not really being mixed race. They turn up on Angel to have racism directed at them and die heroically. But if they existed in a real world you'd want them to get GCSEs and a nice start in life same as everyone else. Also the ageing tables in the Pathfinder rules imply that there are populations that need a consistent longer time to learn the same things a 15 year old human has learned. That's simples, special educational needs but this time if you identify them correctly they just need an extra five years to catch up to everything, you can do a school optimised for that. But as soon as you set up said school somewhere actual organisations think like they do in Buffy and Angel? Horrible consequences. Drama. Fighting. Big failure of attempts at integration.
It goes a bit X Men at that point, obviously.
But X Men tend to focus on the fighting not the boarding school standards and infrastructure.
Also, these days, you could get a lot done remotely. You'd have kids on video calls with horns or whatever and it's an even chance if they've got non human heritage or a filter on. You could set up classrooms with a great big video projector wall and do joint lessons and joint projects, treating it like a window, ish. Or at least you could with magic and illusion spells. Make the kids all part of the same community. It should work great.
But with people interested in making it not great, you have to worry about so many things. Creeps and ddos attacks and actual violence.
So you've got ongoing drama, but a really difficult solution. Seeing as it is all stuff the real world hasn't sorted out yet, but with horns on this time.
... the header Little Things is no longer relevant here. Except they could be quite little tieflings. The ageing rules may or may not elaborate on when they get their innate magic, but some of those once a day spells be Difficult in a youngling...
So I tag this plot bunnies but it is entire plot warrens and as complicated as my imagines can make it.
I should write some of it up, but so far I have got as far as the first two characters meeting and taking a tour of a school, so I have quite a lot of doings between there and here.
But different communities would have tried different solutions to all this already in a world that had these options.
Which is the other place the story gets stuck, Pathfinder Earth fundamentally couldn't end up looking like ours, if all the powers of Golarion have been interested since 1918. But the conceit of that adventure path was that it had all secretly happened here. You can only get that with some imperative that keeps it all secret. Which is a problem with a lot of urban fantasy, but. Big complicated.
Hospital building to world building, gold pieces to endowments and grants, schools for tieflings and targets for bigots, all wrapped in so many systems of real world rules and regulations... start with any one piece and the threads go out and out everywhere forever. Everything is complex in so many ways.
Okay, not getting new solutions right now so I'll go away.
It's interesting following each thread out through the existing rules and complications though.
Just need to be better at that...
no subject
Date: 2026-10-20 02:06 pm (UTC)I love the idea of a whole plot warren, all twisted and tangled and interconnected.