beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Pathfinder has rules for magic tattoos, so I've been going through Ultimate Equipment looking for which items I would want on Permanently. They'd be expensive as tattoos, but difficult to remove.

I was thinking of one of the universal translator spells, but then I'm thinking, my English degree had a lot to say about connotation and how much meaning is carried by differences between synonyms. Do I really trust magic to do good translating? For a game, sure, because the GM probably doesn't talk Draconic neither and is unlikely to be putting poetry levels of meaning in. But to imagine as an actual way of living? Universal translator, no off switch, all day, every day. What meaning would be lost and how much could sneak past you?

So I am now very dubious about always on translators, where you dont even learn the language, just 'know' the meaning. Seems lossy.


One of the pages that try and explain how to optimise your character always recommends the same few items, reckons they're indispensible, so obviously those ones go to be tattoos. Then you can put actual item items on top and swap around what they do.

The tattoo rules can be read a couple ways though. The most favorable one says that because you can have tattoos in the ring slots you could use inscribe tattoo to make a magic ring, instead of getting forge ring separately.

I would get a ring of sustenance. But only if it tunes itself. It's not that I want to never eat again, just never end up short of nutrients. If the ring is feeding you and anything you eat on top of that is extra, you'd just get really big, or have to give up flavour forever. And you'd only know which one after you got the tattoo.

The best bit of the ring of sustenance is the sleeping only 2 hours bit. It's enough to have some dreams but if you get stuck awake you wont feel bad.


There are so many magic items that would be a world changer for reals but on the item list are just ways of avoiding minor equipment list acciuntancy.



So many spells are combat oriented and that seems such the most boring set of things to do. Inducing rapid entropy is just pushing stuff down hill. Making stuff is the really good trick.


The Robe of Useful Items has some interesting accountancy built in. It can have random scrolls in it. Or gems or gold. Which is one thing when you imagine finding one in a dungeon, but a whole weird other when you can make one robe with Craft Wondrous Items and either high spellcraft or a single spell. Like, could you just keep making Robes and hope you'd get new spells out of it? Scrolls come out that you didnt put in, could they be ones you couldnt put in? How about potions? You dont need the potion feat to suddenly have a randomly generated potion. It only costs 3500 gold pieces and a spellcraft roll of... 14 to 19? If you dont have Fabricate I think it's 19. Not a lot. And then you can make a magic item that randomly, if you roll right, makes other magic items.

That seems weird!

And do you ever make a profit on the thing? Like, if you add up all the patches, if you roll 4d4 and get 16 and they're all cool stuff, can you end up with more than 3500gp of stuff in it? Looks like. Minor scrolls might only be 25gp 1st level but they might also be 700gp 4th level. Doesn't take 16 of those to go over.

So a GM would play with it until it made sense. But the idea is you could really just... make all that. One robe, 4 days, tada.

... although why I'm calling any magic weird when it is made up stuff that can do literally anything I dont know.

... it feels like wishing for more wishes. like yes but no but.

oh well.



A Robe of Useufl Items *tattoo* would just be like, 4d4 random tattoos and a whole set of predictable one, all detachable, some of them possibly turning into living beings.

Permanent alive things.

That looked like drawings of themselves a minute ago.



If this is lowish level magic that seems weird.

But the combat usefulness is limited and it's all stuff you could do with a backpack and some shopping trips anyway, so, tada, lowish price.




I should probably try making story ideas instead of just browsing magic item descriptions, but, this is what I've got today.

Hope you all are well and having nice days.

Am currently wondering if the GURPS spell Spider Silk makes silk you could weave with.
Like it says duration one minute, so probably not, but if that's the duration you can shoot more web, maybe the web stuff lasts?
If not it just needs another spell.

I don't know which one it would be like though.
Plant spells logically ought to be useable to make plant fibers, but Shape Plant specifies it's for Carpentry or Artist Woodworking, which is not the same thing at all.
Plant Growth can make a month's worth of plant, but not process it.
There's a Create Paper spell, but that doesn't necessarily need matter to start from. Is a pretty good spell though. Fabric would have more complex structures, maybe I could make it one up from there?
... it says papermaking can use Artist Woodworking. That's an application of the word I'd not thought of.
Join Plants specifically says it can be used to turn a braid of ivy into an ivy rope. Presumably other plant matter too. But you have to start with the plant.
Plant to Object can turn any plant to any object, but needs to start as wood to make wood, so you can't make a club from leaves. Which is ridiculous and I'm sure I can think of ways around it if I ponder. ... also now I'm thinking of fun with amber. Starts as a plant stuff...
But Plant to Object is definitely fancy enough to make fibre, since it mentions hemp rope.
Again, need to start with plant.
Those were mostly from the Plant Spells supplement.

When they make stuff it mostly stays made. Not the tree bark armour though, that magics away as quick as it appears. So I guess the useful in combat stuff has fancy rules.

But it still seems like spider silk should be like paper, and exist once it is made.

The Hair Growth and Haircut spells seem like the most obvious ways to get fibers. Haircut can be used to sheer sheep, per the description. Hair Growth sounds like it's thinking of humans only. It says it makes hair grow a million times faster, so you get an inch of hair in five seconds. That seems less fun than it could be.
But if it grows a million faster then would a sheep need shearing a million times a year? Because that would be like every 30 seconds. Six inches of wool? And it's 1 to cast 1 to maintain, which means even at average skill you could do that several times a day, but at high enough skill you could just do that continuously. All wool all the time, shearing it quick enough being the only obstacle, and Haircut spell is only 2 energy. That is a lot of wool. A Lot.
And there's no reason to limit it only to sheep.
Unless it is meant to be a humans only spell. But Haircut explicitly isn't. So.

The Making and Breaking college has spells to Dye, Knot and Fasten, but not specifically to weave. Copy ought to do just as well for printing on fabric as paper.
Animate objects on the loom might actually be simpler than direct creation, but it's a sight more exhausting than weaving by muscle power.
The Repair spell could certainly take worn or chopped up fabric and fibre and turn it into as new fabric, but is a lot of bother for that.
And Rebuild can make anything up to and including a starship from any shattered part, which one must assume is overkill for even fancy damask, so if you got a strip of fabric it would give you back a completed original bolt... but if you got a strip of dress you'd get a dress again.

I don't think any of the spell descriptions mention how to get leather, with or without starting matter.

But many things make permanent things so an upgrade on spider silk is logical.



I realise wondering how magic would effect the economics of fibrecraft is rather besides the point, seeing as it's all made up, and there's not really rules because it's unlikely to come up under adventuring conditions, but fibre, cloth, and clothing was so essential to the economy, and indeed survival.

And wearing a spidersilk gown would be really cool.



But there's ways of calculating how the Plant spells increase yield on a particular bit of land. I haven't seen the math on animals. And the wool thing ought to be very interesting. Especially if easy magic can make giant piles of wool but only really difficult magic or actual skill can turn it into stuff.

Still seems like fabric should be closer to the paper spell than the rebuild a starship one.

But the weird trades that spellcasters would have to do to get their materials made into things they want...

Today's distraction is
what would I actually do with magic?

Because a lot of the spells are combat oriented meaning they're mean and rude.
I refuse to do mind control.
I don't see the problem with necromancy if it's just messing with old bones, but mind control messes with free will, so big nope.
I won't do fireballs. I'd study some fire college to get Extinguish, and Fireproof, but I'm not interested in blowing stuff up for reals.

I like the beginner spells in Pathfinder that can clean and do the laundry and such. It takes more prereqs in GURPS but I'd like cleaning spells.
Healing magic is awesome, but I have met me, and it requires interacting eith humans.
... I'd probsbly learn it to fix myself up and then... hope no one needed it? Like being a first aider when the announce goes off... which reminds me, currently on more than 25 years of vaguely intending to do a first aid course.

... possibly not healing magic then.

The plant spells are game changers, world changers, in a low TL setting, and pretty damn impressive now. You can double the yield. You can get things ready to harvest in much shorter time spans. You can harvest with a spell instead of a field full of upset overworked humans! Big big changes!

... but I'm not a big fan of plants either, because allergies.



Today I'm thinking, architecture.

I think there's a sequence of spells in GURPS that would let you pirate a building.
( Read more... )

Okay so everything that seemed clever in my head yesterday already feels like I forgot half of it
but
I have read about orcs being basically fungus
(Warhammer)
but I was thinking
what if basically lichen?

... aaand I just found a warhammer wiki and they're ahead of me, unsurprisingly, what with probably being in the back of my mind since I was reading White Dwarf in the 90s.

Warhammer orkoids are a biological symbiosis of fungus and animal, and they grow from spores, so once they're in an area they keep growing again.

That's neat, but also mean.

But I was thunking lichens as a model fo cooperation with thaumosynthesising life forms.

Like the simplest way to splics magic on to existing biological systems is to make it glow, and use photosynthesis. Orcs as big fungus systems containing algae would make orcs green, and if those algae are teamed up with dimly glowing light spells, well... that would be kind of cool. But if the orcness of orcs is a while symbiotic system then that could explain how they make half orcs with anything. ... as it does in Warhammer. ... I realise ideas don't stop being cool when they stop being original, but I thought I was doing more of the thinking and I'm frustrated now.

The photosynthesising step isn't the only way to incorporate magic though. Magic can recharge your fatigue directly, thus provoding cellular energy that usually requires food, and there are food spells that make you not need to eat, as well as ones that make food from raw magic. Light is the simplest spell in a lot of chains, but food spells exist. So simple thaumobiology would exploit simple spells, but complex beings could just, like, make bodies. Which is really expensive when ghosts do it but also those bodies wear off so they seem more like ullusion/creation spells than food/healing spells. To make stable long lasting biological matter there'd be processes rather like food or healing spells, only small and ongoing.

... like monsters that regenerate.

And some systems would be magical from the get go, but others would be partnered with thaumobiology despite starting out as organic chemistry.

So like lichens they'd provide a safe structure for some other micro organism that provides it with necessary energy or energy producing compounds.

If such an organism could be created by infection you'd get something kin to werewolves or vampires, though both those have specialisations not necessary to the theory. Infectious zombies would also make sense. And of course higher undead, the more intentional, fewer side effects kind. Like wraiths, or liches.

... yes I made all this up to make a pun on lichen lich...

( Read more... )

If there is an undead king
and he gets killed
wouldn't there just be another one that exact minute?

like, isn't that how kings work?
king is dead, long unlive the king?

like there might be a crowning sort of ceremony to do too
but
in theory
it gets transmitted instantly

so if you kill the king of an undead army
it shouldnt
you know
help.

although one wonders about lines of succession amongst the undead.

like, okay, possibly they're a sort like vampires where they choose to make more like them and certain games calls that generations and childer
but the classic undead king is more of a lich
and they make themselves
out of ordinary humans who just dont feel like all the way dying.

but if the power is inherited
especially if it is, like kingship lately, passed by primogeniture
but across a lot more generations than usual
due to the king being
undead
for
ages

well, some dude would wake up undead.




... I'm not saying what the world needs is fic like the Night King meets King Ralph, just, you know, logically
especially in a setting which has dedicated years to figuring out who precisely is the legitimate next ruler
such a thing could come up.




... or like it don't make you personally undead, it just means you just inherited power over an undead army, including power to raise them.
... ways to become a necromancer: inherit from your great great great great great great great great great...

I 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.

( Read more... )

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.

( Read more... )


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.

I'm a bit frustrated with my story making brain today because I keep thunking on problems of the wizarding world, specifically, how many wizards there are, and how many babies they have each.

Like, the pureblood wizards were worried about blood status because they wanted wizard babies who grew up in a wizard culture. Which is reasonable, but the people being loudest about that stuff tend to be, like purebloods, very rude about every other sort of culture. Lots of racists worrying about their people not having enough babies, lots of bad eugenics stuff going on when you worry about heritability of ability.

Except, it's also a disability story? ( Read more... )


I always want to yell at Buffy though. She goes on about how hard it is to be the Slayer and have all this demon stuff happen to her. But it happens to Cordelia? And a lot of other girls? Their town has a death rate? Because of this exact stuff? So Buffy is in neither more nor different danger than the next girl, if the next girl is Chase. The only difference is she has the power to survive it and fight back.

( Read more... )


Nope, still awkward.


Like you need to tell the story where the less able are just as worthy and valuable and entitled to self determination
but
I'm interested in the story where the more able are proving those things
but typically that, you know, works? Without an argument? Because they are powerful and can sort it out themselves?



So I keep finding interesting chewy bits
in a mouldy story
and it's frustrating and awkward.




I do not need to protect the rights of the aristocracy or worry about them dying out
I just keep on being interested in the stories of people who might need their rights protected and be in danger of dying out or losing their culture in the modern muddle
and some wizards very nearly almost resemble that.

If you turn them upside down, shake them, and ignore most of what falls out.


( Read more... )


Worldbuilding, I get stuck on it, but combining the logical world with the right assumptions about power and limits to make it work out that way and make it tell stories I think are interesting is just... a lot of moving parts.


I keep ending up with the unfortunate implications stuff instead.

Meh.

Today I found a Pathfinder spell called
Detect Anxieties
and I laughed
like
my dude, how long have you got?
although
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/detect-anxieties
"Instead of surface thoughts, the third round of concentration reveals the most pressing current anxiety of any mind in the area"
by one reading a really canny ruler would keep someone like me around so, for instance, 'have I locked the door' becomes the only thing anyone learns around them...

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.

( Read more... )



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. ( Read more... )

I bought the GURPS Worminghall and Back to School supplements and am still poking them
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3554615.html
but considering that I've been reading Harry Potter fanfic almost exclusively for a while now
you can guess what I'm thinking about.

Not that GURPS is a good fit for HP magic, if you can just pick up a word in a book and do a spell of it, but there's some suggestions for making school more exciting for mages by letting spells be cast from really early on in the learning process.

( Read more... )

So I've been wondering about the social structures of wizardry, and how much they'd be influenced by the nature of magic itself.

If magic is one in a million then you train everyone you can find. The group identification is wizard, or mage, or whichever term means you can do magic. But identifying as a separate country seems less likely, since inside Britain you can barely scrape together a school year between you, and globally you're a small town, maybe.

If magic is one in a million per year then you end up a town inside Britain. That's nice, lots of friends, but once you've got lots of friends there's room to decide to ignore everyone else. But how that relates to being British, for instance if you're raised thinking of yourself as British first or a Wizard first, that... could get interesting. ( Read more... )

It would depend a lot on tech level they want to maintain and where they get their food supply. I mean if they've got the magical equivalent of replicators then they just need enough people to learn the spells to keep it going. Magic has such different conditions and requirements they'd end up looking quite different to the here now.

Also magic can be tech level equivalent, with the healing spells and all. Sufficiently advanced technology. But then population to maintain tech level comes up again.

If every wizard learns every spell they have to live a really long time. ( Read more... )

With a span of 45 to 85 years just to learn everything, wizards specialise simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime.

And that's a version of Everything that is just spells. Potterverse canon has every student also learn Alchemy (potions) and Herbalism (Herbology) and ... I don't actually know, many related skills. If they're learning Runes for magical as well as historical or languages purposes then Symbol or Syntactic magic is another sort that works in their 'verse. And every sort adds a whole bunch of years before you could even in theory know it all.

Conclusion: wizardry is like science, too wide, everyone must specialise.

GURPS colleges of magic exist partly because wizards have to narrow their possibilities to extend their expertise, same like the rest of us.

Nobody knows 'magic', they all know a tiny bit of a corner of magic.

And that means they absolutely have to get some social organisation together, or entire colleges of magic could get lose from going out of fashion, and some spells would become impossible from losing the people who could teach the prerequisites.

Finding teachers at all would be a task and a half. The university model looks great, but every hour spent teaching means you're only putting 1/8 of an hour into studying the spell you are teaching, rather than an hour into a new spell. Every new spell lets you make a new and interesting set of changes to the universe. And along several different prerequisite chains some form of immortality awaits. How do you lure someone into teaching when they could be trying for that instead?

You've also got the problem of power. Casting ceremonially gives you a great big boost for that, but means you need lots of mates. ( Read more... )

So when I sat down I intended much less maths. I wanted to figure out a basic social unit for mages, if the limitations of their magic were where we start.

For most people the limit is span of control, which varies on way too many variables, but I learned it from... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006707.html Incident Command System, I think, with the phrasing Span of control coming from other posts. There the number is three to seven people, optimising around five.

Which coincidentally now I've done the digging for rules and maths is the number of mages a Master Enchanter can have in their circle at once.

( Read more... )

Then you've got a set of 13 as a basic unit of Enchanters. Grand Master, two Masters, five in each of their Circles, overlapping teaching hours so everyone gets 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job every day, with the Circles having extra job on the weekends. And each Circle is in some way different from the partner, because they know different spell sets well enough to teach each other. That might be a binary difference that a Grand Master can bring together somehow, or it might happen in many and varied combinations, shifting and changing when they've taught each other all they can. Brighter or more magically talented students wouldn't need to grind for as long before they could lead a Circle of their own, so people would join and leave at different times. But they'd all need to know matching spells to work an Enchantment together, so whether there's two sets or many colleges, each Circle would specialise in particular jobs, then get less distinct and more varied by the time they can be Masters. And Masters would be able to do things their students could not, more and more over time, so they'd want time off for their own projects. Slow and Sure spells might mean holidays, or they could work as a pair on new Quick and Dirty enchantments, but it would work best if their students had someone else to study with when they do. Like a Grand Master who knows all the spells they can work combined, and then some.

And this more or less flows from the GURPS rules for how to Enchant.

But Enchanters would organise differently from Ceremonial Magicians, because there's not that -1 per person for Ceremony. For Ceremonial Magic you want a huge great crowd that all know the spell.

And a lot of magic can of course be cast by a single mage. But learning it in the first place requires either a really long time or a teacher.

So. I guess I just spent hours typing about completely imaginary rules. But.

What if the two sorts of Circle were Light and Dark? And the longer they work together, the more they blur the lines, until a Grand Master can cast all the spells of both.

But people who are not Enchanters don't have that incentive to cross the streams, they might go deep into their own half of the binary instead.

( Read more... )


All these number rules are boring until they turn into ways people act.

... okay, they're probably still boring, and this didn't go in the direction I expected
but
rules can imply interesting social structures, and that part is fun.


I shall go do something else for a bit and maybe make another post
for the bit I sat down to write in the first place...

I have been playing with imaginary numbers and considering the social results again.

So, magic in Gurps, hours of study per spell learned, and the way extra magery makes you so much quicker.

Everyone they let in to magic college has magery 0. They can see magic and are technically a mage. Yaay.

But there's also people there studying up to 40% quicker (30 if you only have M3 in that universe, which was the assumption of my math.)

How do you schedule lessons so everyone can study?

At lower levels you'd have mixed Magery classes.

I did some maths and a M3 mage needs 17.5 days of 8 hour classes to learn a single spell. They are just that good. So to optimise use of teachers time, that's what you schedule. Do it across 28 days, four weeks of 5 days of lessons and some weekends and half days, and you leave enough time for M0 students to keep up. If they do the reading. For enough hours to round up to 12 hours a day studying. Every day.

So that means the most basic students, the ones who know there's an upper limit on what they'll ever be able to do, are having to study all the hours of all the days, while M3 gifted types can stroll it.

Resentment seems to naturally follow.

But on top of that there's all those hours the M3 can be pursuing their own studies. ( Read more... )

Going to effect how mages see themselves, each other, and the kinds of magic they do. How long someone had to study and if they needed a teacher? A hierarchy gets built in.

And if some colleges are simply not taught there, but make excellent prerequisites? There's another complex hierarchy to bump into.



Is fun.

http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10821

This theory explains there’s several interlocked economies in a high magic fantasy world and taking payment in each has risks. Food units are rations, gold and such only works where you don’t have to travel to spend it, and magic items are as dangerous as they are shiny, not least because killing people and nicking their magic items is what adventurers do. Having the most force so you can kill whoever for whatever is another kind of rich, and why saving up shiny might not be worth it, if it attracts predators. And favors are essential.

it makes a lot of sense. and I hadn’t thought of much of it before.



Now I want to express the assumption that $1 in GURPS is a loaf of bread in terms of calories as a fraction of daily needs. Loaf varies, how much you need to eat varies, it won't be tidy, but if a loaf is a ration then it has a logic.


D&D assumptions about the value of hold and how common it is pretty much make sense if everyone who gets the magic to try it just goes *tada, gold* for generations. Way more gold, buying way less.