beccaelizabeth | Entries tagged with thaumic and vital

Today I spent a bunch of hours fiddling around figuring out maximums for what you could learn at wizard school.
To train intensively you need HT 12 or Fitness at a level that makes up the difference.
So even if I had Magery this Intensive school would not let me in.

Then I got kind of :(

Except the design of it is just a plot bunny generator, and I already knew what kind of students end up at the new place instead. Wizard school did not do reasonable accommodation so deaf students or people too short to use a six foot staff were out of luck. Other traditions were more about the three foot wand, the sort that uses Smallsword skill, but if you can't also fence they're not going to be impressed either. So the plot happens where a bunch of people approach magic from different angles, because they have to, because the regular ways don't work for them.

Also the high intensity training means if you're ill you fail a unit. There's no margins. You can't catch up, just start over. Pretty stupid, doesn't account for being a person. But Healing magic might be what makes the mess, the idea that there's nothing can't be fixed in a few seconds. No accounting for off days because it's supposed to be easy to fix up.

But they've got nothing for mental illness, so, another course structure is needed.

Finally the whole thing, the intensive training, it's like that because they've been at war a really long time. Scholars get pushed along a prescribed path that makes them valuable in that war. It's a heck of a lot of rote learning individual spells and a shortage of time for basic Thaumatology. Like, the library is there, if you want to put the hours in, but the courses are not.

So the plot location is somewhere established when a mage is big into research and the why of things, and frustrated with the entire training regime, which was set up at least a generation ago on the theory it was a short term emergency and has been scrambling to cope ever since.

So they're going to be relearning some foundations, understanding the why as well as what, and that means they can adapt.

So the rigid institution that screens out so many only exists to make the plot place look good.

Plot people are also the 'or we could try not having a war' set. Like okay there are demons and undead for reals, but have we tried understanding their side?

... I feel this is likely to generate much plot.

So now I just have to get on with thinking of it.

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.

Today I did two loads of laundry, including drying, ate twice, with varying degrees of success, and fiddled with my plot a bunch.

When I tried to fill in an outline for Dana's story I realised how much of the middle is something something profit. I need all the information to come together to give Dana a plan, but that means I need a lot of people to have some reason to talk to them, which is most of the something something. And then there's all sorts of fun gathering characters at STAR labs, magical edition, but at the moment they've no reason to be in this story, because it's not their knowledge that's key. So I either need a different set of characters or a subplot.

Discovering such things is what outlines are for.

It's still a bother.

So I put it aside to ponder and went and played with GURPS spell lists to get a better idea of what my mages can do. ( Read more... )

So, poking rulesets and thinking about my wobbly worldbuilding, that was my afternoon.

It's not clicking right now, but it is how all the characters end up talking to each other so far, so maybe I can see another way to get them to talk if I shake it a bit more.

The other thing is I realised almost all the spells I'm properly familiar with are not Scholar's magic in this scheme, so I'll have to read and think on the colleges I don't much use.

which should be fun.

... if I could concentrate this much on things actually useful, so much so different...

Today I read that a three foot wand could use Shortsword or Smallsword skill
so I went over to tumblr https://beccaelizabeth315.tumblr.com/ and queued all the smallswords I could find
and that not being enough I searched the V&A website for more.

I still didn't find that one perfect sword that's in my head, basically diamond jewellery but with very pointy steel attached.
... diamond cross section blades screw the search results. also pinterest gums up any search really really hard.

I love swords from the era where they were on the one hand as perfectly made as historical blades ever got to be but on the other pretty much ornamental. They got the metallurgy and design licked just in time for almost everyone to stop carrying them. So when people did, they went all out on the shiny.

And that makes them so great as magical artefacts. Like, to have a Staff spell cast on them they'd have to be made of once living material, mostly wood or bone. Sadly magery and metallurgy seldom mix. But you could mix your media and set bone in a channel and get the same spells on. Strengthen it with a few enchantments. Set powerstones in the hilt. And that's where the bling gets practical, because a mage with one stone has a maximum, an upper limit on their power reserve based on the cost of the gem, which can be broadly guessed by appraising it. Yes, the details matter with gemstones, but still. A mage with gems all over everything, multiple, very large and shiny gems, can still only use one powerstone, and would bork the recharge time to be carrying more than one, but, you'd never know which one. And sure, you could spend all that money on a single bigger powerstone, but the biggest powerstones are simply unlikely to exist. They're certainly going to be harder to get hold of than some gemstones of variable quality. But if you're carrying something that maybe might be a powerstone of a size to tip the combat, you're ever so much less likely to have to prove it.

So you get gentleman dandies, peacocks, strutting their gem studded stuff, with at least one spell to their name, trying to make like they're gifts to wizardry.

And then you'd get some with one gem, just the one, sitting in the obvious place on the sheathed wand. And everyone is left to wonder, is that all they can afford, or is that just all they need?

And all of them are dangerous, but danger looks fabulous.

Add to this that every gentleman at least in theory serves a Lady, and wears her sign somewhere, and Ladies favour signs from their side of the magic and the natural world
and you get a lot of gentlemen in flowers.

And this is an aesthetic of wizardry I've not seen, but it seems like fun.

With that as the standard presentation, gentlemen Scholars, in their off white robes, carrying six feet of oak, and with chunky tough powerstones if any, are going to stand out. Even if the robes are mostly because the Clean spells is too enthusiastic for dyed cloth to last. They've all put years in to study, and if they keep wearing the robes after, that's like saying that's all they need. Which most of the time would be true. But it would also be keeping a collective identity instead of showing the signs of diverse interests, so as with any uniform, it warns that messing with one is messing with all. So being encouraged to change out of the robes might get politically complex...

But still, basically smallswords. So sharp, so pretty.

I've been thinking about magic, again again. I get like that when I feel like I can't get things done in brickspace life, so, a lot. But I'm also attempting plot in a magic using 'verse, so, some understanding of system and reach required.

I've previously done endless spreadsheets to figure that, by the GURPS rules for study hours in character point equivalents, a mage can learn between 5 and 19 character points a year, depending how much is job, how much study by yourself, how much taught.
It can actually be as low as 2.5 if you only have a job and don't study, but, GURPS does reckon you get 2.5 CP every year from just doing a job, so that's nice, even if you do have to put them all into job related skills.
I didn't include Intensive because that's boot camp and the rule book is pretty clear there are very limited opportunities for that, but with sixteen hour days of twice as effective study and no weekends or holidays in the base assumptions you get about 58 CP a year *without* the Magery boost, which is enough to boost your basic stats, let alone your skills. However such courses are very much assumed to run for much less than a year, so, not so much likely.
Studying things that are not magic caps at a lower level, because Magery gives you a percentage boost to speed of learning magic. At Magery 0, or for things unmagical, between 5 and 13 CP a year is the best you get.
GURPS assumes college gives you 10CP a year, which isn't what I get from doing the math on actual courses, that comes out way lower with holidays and fewer teaching hours. But it's in that range of theoretically possible.
Magery gives the boost to learn spells up to 19 a year, and if you're learning that fast, you have enough Magery to learn any spell in existence.

I have previously got that far and noted that 19 spells gets you to Resurrection by the longest chain, so who would even need more than a year? That's spectacularly complex magic, and world changing, and you can do it as a freshman, if you can power it. Seems a little wonky.

But today I was thinking, there's 850 odd spells in my GURPS spreadsheet, and I haven't even added the gender spells from that one Pyramid. I invented a bunch of elemental spells last time I was poking those colleges, for things that should be logically possible cause they are in other elements. The Fire college looks kind of rubbish compared to a decent TL8 flamethrower, let alone grenades, and nobody has invented a magical nuke, even assuming the power requirements would be spectacular. You can't even say it would unbalance the game, because see real nukes. Plus every single Shapeshift spell is a separate spell, so if you want to be a wolf and an owl you learn it twice, and that's just for starters.

So if a magic user is zooming along a particular prerequisite chain to achieve a specific thing, they can do it in a year. But if they want to learn Magic, in general, they've got their 19 a year and like 900 options in front of them. Anyone spending a solid year thinking of nothing but magic kind of has to want one of the other very badly. So you'd get mages who really wanted That One Thing, like for example raising the dead, but you'd also get mages who just have to know how it works, and would feel like a smart kid with a university prospectus and only the one lifetime to go around.

( Read more... )

Game balance as a concept, making sure all the character classes are going to be useful, kind of makes magic not special by design. I mean, the same number of points in any other skill would add up as useful, if designed properly. So that leaves you stuck wondering why risk it.

Plus the entire reason the real world shifted to boom sticks instead of archery was the same amount of time going in *didn't* get you the same amount of skill or ability to hurt people coming out. Archery takes a lifetime investment of regularly maintained work and minimum stats, like magery. Firearms have some chance of hurting the enemy if you know which end the boom goes out of. They can be used at default, and spells cannot. It would take some spectacular advantage to magic to make it worth the time.

And the kinds of things we can't so at all with science tend to dip into the Restricted section, like Mind Control or Necromancy.

Or any variety of shapeshifting. Got to admit, many people would put in the time to be able to be a cat. Or whatever else.

( Read more... )

I'm trying to figure plot structure for the long and rambling world exploration I poured into Scrivener the other day. But I'm on here instead of in Scrivener, because it has so many buttons it feels too important for scribbly bits. Which is sort of opposites of what it's trying, but I'll figure it later.

I have a character, Dana, and a place she starts, this world being bored and lonely, and a place they finish, a whole other world with magic and so forth where they get a found family and them trying to put their love life in order ends up changing the world. At one point they have to control the choosing of the next Queen in order to have a chance to get their husband back. It gets a bit epic.

And I read enough fanfic I keep thinking of it in terms of pairings, how I'd tag it if it went on Ao3, which due to my habit of lightly sanding the serial numbers off to populate a world it pretty much could. But then the story goes Dana & Rip (or Rip/Dana unrequited), Dana/Valor, Dana/Cold/Heatwave, Dana/Eo!Wells, Dana/Sara, Dana & Kira from a whole other canon. Maybe some others if I get bored and they're pretty. Which... isn't how series go on Ao3 at all. Like, you either pick one endgame pairing to keep going through all of it, or everyone there for the romance gets annoyed in turns. Love triangles with lots of angsty choosing, or preferably endgame OT3, sure, but not just a whole string of relationships while they figure out what they want.

( Read more... )

I think that's because Dana's basic problem isn't romance, it's more ... how to structure their found family so it's stable and long lasting and doesn't mind them wandering off on adventures for ages at a time. ( Read more... )

I think the first bit of the story starts when Dana realises that there is a baby on the way and figures they have about six months to persuade the mother they should be part of the kid's life. So they set out to be Respectable. In a whole new society in a whole new fantasy world with magic and very different arrangements for some things. Bumping into different definitions of Respectable can keep the story going for ages. ( Read more... )

I think that bit of rambling told me where one novel starts and ends. Covers five or six months, main tension between Respectable Expected and what protagonist actually wants, kind of sticks with a main romance but without that being the point exactly.

Don't know if anyone will want to read it.

I mean the trying to be impressive involves a lot of messing around with magic and rifts and demons and stuff, so it will also have a plot sort of plot, but knowing what the characters actually want is what to hang the adventures on, so.

Shall see if I actually get anything written.

I have been reading Many Things, and my head is all sloshing with facts.

I can see things that happened to ship design over the roughly five hundred years I've been pulling ships from wiki at random, but that isn't the most best way to learn things, and I have minimal understanding of which whats were for why, though y'all have been very helpful.

Ships have lots of different optimization sliders, and many bits of history happened to ships that would rather have been somewhere else.

But if I'm going to design ships for magical reasons then the magic needs defining before figuring the other settings makes sense. ( Read more... )

Real ships are complicated, and needing to make up rules for how your magic interfaces with the physical constraints just makes it much more complicated.

So I still have no idea what size or shape an adventure party would set out in.

But I know more about how much I don't know.

I've been trying to figure out where to start my stories about a character I'm probably calling Dana, who is a full time carer with a part time English degree who inherits a share in the mysterious family company and finds out it trades across the multiverse.

The problem is that where you start it plus the genre it seems to be sets up different promises for the reader.

( Read more... )

So I reckon the beginning is not all the finding what they didn't want, but finding the work only they can do, and then following them around as they do it.

... it's just the before of that has lots of interesting too...

I have had four hours sleep and am not best pleased with being awake.

also I need a tag for this magic world I made with vaguely GURPS rules where 'demons' are thaumaturgic or thaumic elementals. It's the one with the gender system that has nothing to do with bodies, where everyone is default assigned Person and can be binary later if they like.

I think I've been typing the notes in word and saving it local. I tired, journal can have this piece.

There's two sorts of magic, vitality and thaumaturgy. Vitality covers colleges to do with living things, so healing and necromancy, but also animal, body control, plant.

Particularly skilled adepts can go into the earth or become one with trees. So, Willow wouldn't just reach through the earth to get a particular flower and feel it is all connected, under certain circumstances she'd go into the whole plant system.

But it's a particular test of skill to see if they come back.

( Read more... )

A lot of RPGs use mana and chi as words for game mechanisms that measure magical energy and life energy. It makes me kind of uncomfortable, but when I went looking for alternatives I got reminded all over again that English is at least three languages in a coat. English has been mugging other languages for parts since forever, and every word has traces of conquest in it, but swallowing these two whole and spitting out the actual cultural context seems a bit much.

I think I'm going with thaumic, as in thaumatology, measured in thaums ala Pratchett.
Also vitality, vital energy,probably measured qualitatively so it's flowing well or badly, positively or negatively inclined.
That's mixing greek and latin pasts into the mix, but if the Healers use Latin and the Scholars' works are literally all greek to them, that's got potential for story in it.

( Read more... )

This seems like an overly complicated system of magics, but I'm used to comics where people can do very similar things through power sources ranging across everything GURPS can throw at them.

Distinct traditions with distinct histories and as far as they know sistinct power sources is a great way to leave loopholes, contradictions, and other sources of friction.

And yet I keep fiddling with rules and phrasing, instead of writing fiction.