Okay. So. This is the thing I was lamenting about in the Tavern. It's something that grew out of what I had mentioned some months ago in IRC, when we were all sipping wizzourd bourbon and talking about magic systems.
The thrust of it, at that time, was about blurring the lines about what is and is not a god, in a somewhat traditional D&D-style polytheistic game. And thinking back to the Merlin sort of aesthetic that I like so much, where a magician is not a
direct actor who is throwing fireballs and intoning grim Words of Deathslaying, but an
indirect actor who empowers and obstructs others, clearing a path for some other hero.
I got the notion: what if your spellcasters in this type of game were mainly focused around blessing and cursing, interacting with others? What if they could, from early on, do things like give someone else a spell they could hold on to and activate at need, or send thoughts to another person? And what if, for a spellcaster, gaining "levels" (or whatever) was largely about increasing the scale at which you operate (bespelling a family, or a town, or a nation) and being increasingly able to do such things from a distance? You'd be able to wield vast, global influence by giving instructions to trusted cat's-paws, and investing a portion of your power in those servants so they could better carry out your commands.
At some point, we would have crossed the line from sorcerer to god, and I think it's not necessarily clear where that line would have been drawn.
Here are my notes on the subject:
Quote from: powerI've got a stat here for magic-users, tentatively called "power." Power sets where you are on the continuum. Lower-power = more like a mortal magician, higher-power = more like a god.
Power should be "neutral";
- it shouldn't be always "better" to have higher power (although it may support a particular player's or character's plan to acquire more of it and become godlike).
- Wizards are "ground level", gods are "sky level", but game play and game mechanics should be interesting at both levels.
--- There should be situations where one might be more effective as a low-power wizard than a high-power god.
Low-power abilities should predict high-power abilities
- i.e., you don't suddenly become a god and get new tricks, you just get better at the ones you've had all along
- example: as a lowest-power magician, you've got an invisibility spell. You can cast it on your pal so she can infiltrate the castle. As you get more powerful, you become able to "give" that spell, in its dormant form, so your friend can save it for a time of need and activate it at her own discretion. Later still, you might be able to work on a larger scale, invisibly hiding an entire armada of ships for a surprise attack, or with greater potency, so when you hide the castle from the besieging army, it's not just an unseen castle, it's not physically present. At the highest levels of power, you've got really adept ability to grant magic to large numbers of underlings no matter where they are, so you might be the patron god of an international thieves' guild, whose members pray for your blessings, while you use them to capture arcane artifacts or whatever. Also, you may find that as a god, you're permanently surrounded by the effects you've relied upon most, so if you've been leaning on invisibility magic since you were a mortal wizard, you may have no visible form as a god, and be unable to manifest yourself visibly.
- it should be pretty common for low-power magicians to have some kind of telepathy power, where they project their thoughts into someone else's mind to communicate silently and/or at a distance
--- aside from being a useful type of spell to coordinate your allies (when you're a magician that relies on your allies, because all your magic manipulates their abilities), it presages gods' ability to hear and respond to prayers at a distance
Gods are not omniscient and gain no special knowledge for being gods,
- but their senses (sight/hearing) are expanded to help them operate at distance.
--- (Perhaps with high-power, you can choose certain types of events that you'll notice, wherever they occur
----- many gods would put "someone invoking my name" on this alert list, to be better able to respond to their servants' prayers, but they wouldn't have to do so.)
- gods' reach is long
--- lower power means you're more likely to have to be present in person to do something; with higher power you can leverage your spells from a world away
--- gods don't really need to be present for much (possible exception: interacting with each other?)
----- as power increases, gods have increasing trouble being "present" anywhere; they become "diffuse" and have trouble focusing on maintaining the physical body
Increasing power means increasing personal protection, as well
- with sufficient power, you have an increased lifespan and effectively cannot be killed
--- (but you can still be imprisoned for thousands of years, be tormented, go mad, etc., etc.)
here are some possible types of mechanics but I am p. sure I don't even like them
[ooc]Possible to run power on a scale of one to seven, where 1 = mortal schlub with a bit of hedge magic and 7 = a full-on god. From 1-3 you're a mortal, from 5-7 you're a god, and from 3-5 we start to blur the lines a bit and you may end up with one or two powers from the opposite end of the scale.
Reasons I'm conflicted about the above:
- one-to-seven scale seems a bit too pat
--- also it seems like this would imply that power 7 is "better" than power 1, and I don't want it to be better, just different
--- also makes the journey a bit linear, doesn't it?
- maybe it's better if power isn't a scale from low to high, but more like the sum of all the little spells and tricks you've accumulated
--- in this case, instead of the drawbacks of high power being tied to a high value (e.g., "at power 6+ you must X and can no longer Y"), it's little sacrifices you have to make along the way to keep accumulating new arcane whatevers
----- perhaps gods don't necessarily have to lose the ability to be physically present or to directly interact, but at some point you start to run out of better sacrifices to make in the name of power
----- in this way, increasing power could become a question of "how long is it going to stay worth it to me to continue making these trades", and could explain why some magicians stay at low levels of power[/ooc]
here are some basic questions about WHAT IS ANY OF THIS FOR? and no, I don't have answers to them yet
[ooc]what kind of game/setting would this even be used in?
are all of the players going to be magicians/gods ("power-users" is the dumbest-sounding term) and their mortal cats'-paws are all npcs? or is it worth it trying to run a mixed group here (and if so, how would you even make that work?)
I had an idea that, in addition to power running the scale from magician to god, maybe also:
- influence runs the scale from courtier to noble (or whatever)
- renown runs the scale from sellsword to general
so that, in addition to the magic thing, you've got other types of characters who also move between "ground level" and "sky level" within different types of spheres (a combat sphere, where you can wield military power with sword in hand or by commanding armies, and a political sphere, where you can go from being a diplomat or minor functionary to being a Duke/Duchess, Dude/Dudess, King/Queen, etc.)
- this would be tough to implement in a way that's really parallel, at the top end
--- a general, a queen, and a god all have some drawbacks and new challenges to manage, but although generals and queens have limitations and sacrifices, it's hard to imagine them on the level of the sacrifices (or the power!) we've laid out for magicians->gods already
what system do I use?
- oh my god I pretty much have to make up a new one to support all this bs, don't I?[/ooc]...
uh, so, there's my brainthinks on this topic
not sure where to go from there.
Fascinating brainstorming!
In a certain strange sense this is like a twisted version of the "quadratic wizard power" issue that plagues upper-level 3.X games, wherein Wizards Become As Gods, reframed from a bug to a feature.
Quote from: Luminous Crayonare all of the players going to be magicians/gods ("power-users" is the dumbest-sounding term) and their mortal cats'-paws are all npcs? or is it worth it trying to run a mixed group here (and if so, how would you even make that work?)
I had an idea that, in addition to power running the scale from magician to god, maybe also:
- influence runs the scale from courtier to noble (or whatever)
- renown runs the scale from sellsword to general
so that, in addition to the magic thing, you've got other types of characters who also move between "ground level" and "sky level" within different types of spheres (a combat sphere, where you can wield military power with sword in hand or by commanding armies, and a political sphere, where you can go from being a diplomat or minor functionary to being a Duke/Duchess, Dude/Dudess, King/Queen, etc.)
- this would be tough to implement in a way that's really parallel, at the top end
--- a general, a queen, and a god all have some drawbacks and new challenges to manage, but although generals and queens have limitations and sacrifices, it's hard to imagine them on the level of the sacrifices (or the power!) we've laid out for magicians->gods already
I think if you ran an all-magician group it would work well as a Republic Reborn style play by post with PvP, or some at-the-table version of that, where each player has a chosen nation or noble house or whatever that they're championing. This reminds me very much of Vance's Lyonesse, where both the villainous King Casmir of Lyonesse and the virtuous King Aillas of Troicinet have wizardly allies and mentors who are technically sworn to non-intervention but who are perpetually finding loopholes and indirectly influencing events. I think this works best if the Wizards are rivals - they might work together or form temporary alliances but they're very much independent of one another, not a bunch of guys in cloaks travelling together D&D style.
In the version where not everyone's a magician, I think the method of influence expansion you sketch there is absolutely vital - otherwise everyone is going to want to be the wizard. I think this would actually be brilliant in a game centered around what's sometimes called "domain management" - a game about the trials and tribulations of ruling a realm, rather than the usual murder-hobo fare.
Vance's vision actually gives me an idea with how to deal with the "is this really parallel?" issue. Maybe as wizards gain power and become closer to gods, while their power increases so do the restrictions placed upon them. Perhaps while a low-level wizard can't do too much, he or she's pretty much free to operate as they please. At the upper level a wizard can turn armadas invisible and curse whole kingdoms with drought, but they're bound by a progressively stricter code that defines what they're permitted to do or not do in any given situation - a divine "prime directive," as it were. There could be elaborate rules governing where and how and in what manner upper-level wizards can interact with mortals and with one another. Those who break the rules basically invite retribution from all the other wizards - they all drop whatever they're doing, put aside their differences, and hunt down the rogue wizard.
In the Lyonesse books, codes of non-intervnetion are there explicitly to safeguard against a mass wizarding war, but there could be other reasons, too. Perhaps high-level spells weaken the boundary between this world and the next and let demons or souls of the dead or some other otherworldly malignity into the world (this is actually sort of what happens in the Cadaverous Earth), so they have to be used very carefully, and uses that go against Divine Law/Wizard Law are punished.
Or there doesn't even need to be a formal prescription against powerful magic - perhaps it's more like the laws of physics. Maybe while high-level spell-working are increasingly powerful they carry progressively bigger risks as well - like, OK, you can bring that army back from the dead, but that means the kingdom's crops are all going to die this year, as part of some magical conservation of energy principle.
Another way to help balance high-level wizard powers against the "secular" powers of high level warlords and the like would be to attach great costs to magical workings, costs that such mundane individuals might help the wizard meet. Maybe a big magic-working unfortunately requires 100 human souls, or the heart of a dragon, or the blood of a usurper, or some other specific thing. This is the logic of a lot of real-world religions, after all: to get stuff from the gods you have to give them things in return.
Quote from: SteerpikeIn the version where not everyone's a magician, I think the method of influence expansion you sketch there is absolutely vital - otherwise everyone is going to want to be the wizard. I think this would actually be brilliant in a game centered around what's sometimes called "domain management" - a game about the trials and tribulations of ruling a realm, rather than the usual murder-hobo fare.
The rough aesthetic I had in mind was something Game-of-Thronesy, insofar as you've got kings and generals and warlocks and sellswords and spies, who all work with shifting allegiances, different types of power (political, military, magical), and at different levels of influence.
Of course, if you're using that as your baseline, it certainly doesn't hurt that you've got an assumed risk of betrayal at every corner. That by itself does interesting things to magic users whose M.O. is to give power away to their carefully chosen representatives, because now everything a magician does is shaded by issues of trust and suspicion. Which I like.
QuoteVance's vision actually gives me an idea with how to deal with the "is this really parallel?" issue. Maybe as wizards gain power and become closer to gods, while their power increases so do the restrictions placed upon them. Perhaps while a low-level wizard can't do too much, he or she's pretty much free to operate as they please. At the upper level a wizard can turn armadas invisible and curse whole kingdoms with drought, but they're bound by a progressively stricter code that defines what they're permitted to do or not do in any given situation - a divine "prime directive," as it were. There could be elaborate rules governing where and how and in what manner upper-level wizards can interact with mortals and with one another. Those who break the rules basically invite retribution from all the other wizards - they all drop whatever they're doing, put aside their differences, and hunt down the rogue wizard.
This is sort of what I had in mind-- in that I want lower-powered magic users to be much freer and gods to be much more hamstrung-- but I don't want to do it by "prime directive". I want to make it fundamentally metaphysical, rather than political among gods. (Though political conflicts and agreements among gods are probably where pantheons come from, in this system?) I think this needs to be taken back to the issues of what's lost as you gain power, where new magical revelations are paid for by gradual loss of self. Obviously there's still a lot to be figured out in terms of specifics, here.
QuoteOr there doesn't even need to be a formal prescription against pwoerful magic - perhaps it's more like the laws of physics. Maybe while high-level spell-working are increasingly powerful they carry progressively bigger risks as well - like, OK, you can bring that army back from the dead, but that means the kingdom's crops are all going to die this year, as part of some magical conservation of energy principle.
This is a pretty solid possibility! I like it better than the "you need rare components to work powerful magic" route (just because I feel like it's been done, really) as a basic balancing element. Although I probably will end up doing a bit of the latter, as you note, to give mundane people a way to serve their gods. (There's a holy crusade to kill the necromancer and break his staff, because your god needs the essence within the staff released but can't interact with the physical plane anymore to do it himself.)
Thanks for looking this over!
Another thought on a "mixed" game of magicians and mundanes: maybe the players play as Wizards and their catspaws. So, on the one hand, they have their Wizard character who is the sort of "god's eye" character looking over everything and meting out spells and blessings, but then they also have their "street-level" character(s) who represent their Wizard's mortal agents.
I would link the concept of Power with that of free will: as the wizard ascends toward godhood he must give up some of his free will for each parcel of Power. He won't ever completely lose it, but inevitably finds it ever more difficult to act directly.
Quote from: Steerpike
Another thought on a "mixed" game of magicians and mundanes: maybe the players play as Wizards and their catspaws. So, on the one hand, they have their Wizard character who is the sort of "god's eye" character looking over everything and meting out spells and blessings, but then they also have their "street-level" character(s) who represent their Wizard's mortal agents.
AFAIK in the Ars Magica RPG the players are supposed to take turns so that for each adventure scenario only one of them is playing his/her magician PC while the other players play the mundane PCs. The other magicians are assumed to be staying in their dens engaging in very time consuming research & experimentation work that is mechanically necessary to increase one's knowledge.
Quote from: Lmns Crnblurring the lines about what is and is not a god
I don't want to be all "hey, now I'll talk about my own stuff!" because a lot of this idea is not really applicable to Asura at all, but this particular concept here definitely
is, so I wanted to at least mention it.
Quote from: Lmns CrnPower should be "neutral";
- it shouldn't be always "better" to have higher power (although it may support a particular player's or character's plan to acquire more of it and become godlike).
- Wizards are "ground level", gods are "sky level", but game play and game mechanics should be interesting at both levels.
--- There should be situations where one might be more effective as a low-power wizard than a high-power god.
This kind of confuses me. I can get behind the idea of "Mo money, mo problems" as a game theme, and there are certainly plenty of examples in fiction and real life where someone doesn't want a certain amount of increased power because of the costs of it-- increased risk, responsibilities, or whatever. That said, I think that in terms of absolute capability, more power
has to be better, or having no power is the same as the same as having all the power-- and that is pretty unworkable.
So, I'd personally abandon this idea, or at least rework it into something more overtly along the lines of "more power lets you do more stuff but the risks are also greater." Sort of like how in Dresden FATE if you have a high Conviction you can channel a
lot of power into your spells, which is great, except that means that's all the more that can go wrong if you botch the roll to control all that power. I'll mention Asura again because certain high-level powers that let you incur a whole lot of Dissonance have a similar risk-reward tradeoff. So, a mechanic like that could work well, I think, and it would let you have consequences and risks to being powerful and whatnot but also some sort of "absolute bonus" to having more power that is kind of important to make things make sense when you go about mashing everything into an RPG system. Along these lines, I'll just add that I'm pretty steadfastly against any sort of power tradeoff that grants the character various powers but has a price in "free will" or the like that ends up disempowering the
player.
My impression was that by "neutral" LC was sort of talking about the idea that greater powers require not just greater risks but sacrifices of a certain sort - like, for example the invisibility thing: "Also, you may find that as a god, you're permanently surrounded by the effects you've relied upon most, so if you've been leaning on invisibility magic since you were a mortal wizard, you may have no visible form as a god, and be unable to manifest yourself visibly." So the god still has greater capabability than his low-level wizard form, but has lost certain capabilities as well.
Reminds me of a great character from China Miéville's Iron Council, a monk named Qurabin dedicated to "The Moment of the Hidden and the Lost," who can gain occult knowledge - even big, cosmic secrets - by trading away aspects of his/her personality. By the book's end Qurabin has lost his/her gender, native language, a whole bunch of memories, and eventually his/her eyes but gains all sorts of mystic knowledge as a result.
I am enjoying this. I'm on mobile, so not as loquacious as I could be. But I like the very arthurian/rare magic feel. It would do well if certain dynamics actually were supported by powerful forces, say the way city states and greek gods worked.
1) what kind of system is this going to be in the non-magical phase? In the Cosmology phase? This helps me understand how the magical phase, as they are puzzle pieces. The way magic grows and changes and effects stuff is better understood in context.
2) Recovery of energy and ability is one way to control magical power and it's use. If the Wizard types gain ability faster than they gain the ability to recover it; you'll end with wizards being more and more reluctrant to use their more powerful skills. And they'll hide what they do as muc as possible, so their rivals won't be sure what they have left. In other words, and this is only for conversational sense, If you took Vancian magic, and said that instead of getting all their spells back daily, they got 1/2 their level of total levels, rounding up, a day back, you'd have a completely different dynamic of what wizards want to cast.
A 5th level caster has 3/2/1 spells, or (3*1)+(2*2)+(3*1)=total spell levels avaialble to them per day, but since they can only recover 3 per day (2.5, rounding up), it would take over 3 days to recover all those. And so the higher power the wizard, the more this inequity grows, so they may have higher level ability....but they know if they use a powerful spell, or cast a lot of their magic, they'll be in a weakened state for a long, long time....
Again, vancian is only being used for the example.
3) and if you tie their ability to gain invulnerability with the ability to gain back more spells faster, you can let wizards take the risk of gaining spells/spell ability back faster in emergencies, but at the cost of some of their heightened vitality.....ooooh tough choices to have to make.
LC, if some of this stuff was integrated into my earlier thread of similar subject inspired by the same conversation, would you be terribly angry?
Oh, hey, life left me five minutes of breathing space! Time to reply:
Quote from: SALC, if some of this stuff was integrated into my earlier thread of similar subject inspired by the same conversation, would you be terribly angry?
You should know that I seldom actually use any of the ideas I come up with. I'd be pleased just to know someone was getting a bit of usefulness out of it. Let me know how it goes.
Quote from: LV1) what kind of system is this going to be--
Let me just stop you right there so I can say "I have no idea."
Quote from: LV2) Recovery of energy and ability is one way to control magical power and it's use. If the Wizard types gain ability faster than they gain the ability to recover it; you'll end with wizards being more and more reluctrant to use their more powerful skills. And they'll hide what they do as muc as possible, so their rivals won't be sure what they have left.
I dunno. There are some things I like about this dynamic but a lot of things I don't, and it's kind of a stock-standard way to run things at this point. I'd rather explore the spaces that haven't been thoroughly mapped yet, if you catch my meaning.
Maybe that means I have to make this idea into a "you are a wizard if you play this game" concept, to dodge the issue about how to balance supernatural shit against everything else. That'd be okay, I think.
Quote from: SPMy impression was that by "neutral" LC was sort of talking about the idea that greater powers require not just greater risks but sacrifices of a certain sort
Steerpike really gets me, you know.
Probably instead of phrasing that increasing your power should be "neutral", I should have phrased it as increasing your power should be "not without complicating disadvantages."
Quote from: STSo, I'd personally abandon this idea, or at least rework it into something more overtly along the lines of "more power lets you do more stuff but the risks are also greater." Sort of like how in Dresden FATE if you have a high Conviction you can channel a lot of power into your spells, which is great, except that means that's all the more that can go wrong if you botch the roll to control all that power.
Like Vreeg's comment, this is the sort of thing I want to avoid, in part because I feel it's been done. What I want is for increasing power to make certain things-- perhaps things you took for granted--
off limits. This is partly because it carves out a fictional space for sorcerers to need catspaws to perform tasks they can no longer do themselves-- and for gods to require mortal worshipers for the same purpose and reasons.
Or to think of it another way, the Dresden example you cite has powerful spellcasters run an increasing risk of
detonating (and taking out a city block by accident). By contrast, in the paradigm I'm exploring in this thread, magicians run an increasing risk of
fading away. Both are going to need to be carefully watched, but for very different reasons.
Quote from: GMI would link the concept of Power with that of free will: as the wizard ascends toward godhood he must give up some of his free will for each parcel of Power.
Nope! No "free will" tradeoff, because that's incredibly unsatisfying for players in role-playing games.
The quick-and-flawed metaphor for what I'm after is: if I were a hundred feet tall, I'd have power. I'd be interacting with the world on a totally different scale, and I could do all sorts of awesome things with my strength and size. But I wouldn't be able to enter my own house ever again, or play a guitar, or board an airplane, or peel an orange, because I'd be interacting with the world on a totally different scale.
Thanks for commenting, folks; hopefully it won't take me another week to respond to anything else!
Stock-Standard...dude, no one does this.
It was just a suggestion, so no skin, but...I do a lot of game design, and NO ONE does this. Maybe it seems a little obvious or the example I gave was, but I see very, very few games where the adduction of ability outstrips the ability to regenerate the resevoir. And it does not need to be vancian, as I said, that was just the example.
And the ability to increase their regeneration at the loss of their relative invulnerability creates the exact kind of game choice I thought fit in.
No stress, as I said, but I thought I caught one dimension, at least, of an answer.
Hold on, I've been unclear. What I mean is: magic being limited because you have to wait for your "mana" to regenerate. I'm trying to find other types of limiting factors besides "oops, I used up all my fuel."
Quote from: Lmns CrnWhat I want is for increasing power to make certain things-- perhaps things you took for granted-- off limits. This is partly because it carves out a fictional space for sorcerers to need catspaws to perform tasks they can no longer do themselves-- and for gods to require mortal worshipers for the same purpose and reasons.
Ok, I didn't really understand what you were going for before with 'neutral,' but it makes more sense now. You're essentially saying that as you gain higher level abilities you might lose some low level abilities, more or less.
The challenge in that kind of design is making sure those low level abilities lost are actual sacrifices and not just low level abilities that are kind of pointless and superseded anyway, I think, while simultaneously also not overreaching and not taking away so much that the character becomes unfun and pointless. Another potential hurdle as I see it is the line between what part of the PC's "support network" is controlled by the player and what is controlled by the GM-- too much player control and the entire thing essentially becomes transparent and the whole system is kind of lost, too much GM control and it becomes really disempowering because the player is essentially relying on the GM for the character to be able to carry out basic tasks that used to be within the player's own purview.
Kind of a tricky balancing act; I'd offer more suggestions but I don't honestly have them at this point. It does still sound sort of neat, though, if you can make it work.
Quote from: Lmns CrnOr to think of it another way, the Dresden example you cite has powerful spellcasters run an increasing risk of detonating (and taking out a city block by accident). By contrast, in the paradigm I'm exploring in this thread, magicians run an increasing risk of fading away.
I don't really understand what you mean by "fading away." If you mean "existence failure," then I don't see how it's fundamentally different from detonating. If you mean more the idea of one's consciousness fading away, this runs into the problems about free will that we both agree are bad. So... I don't know what it means, I guess.
Quote from: LordVreegNO ONE does this.
That mechanic is pretty much how AD&D worked, actually, with its super long spell memorization times for high level spells. So, it was a lot more commonplace back when AD&D was the game to play... of course, that was a long time ago.
Quote from: Lmns Crn
Hold on, I've been unclear. What I mean is: magic being limited because you have to wait for your "mana" to regenerate. I'm trying to find other types of limiting factors besides "oops, I used up all my fuel."
well, that makes more sense.
Spell success is another factor I like I see danced around above, BTW.
You could have a power spiral system, where you have maybe 8 types of magic, but a mage can only have up to 4 elements/types at a time, So when a magus 'ascends', they have to choose a type they are not using and have to lose a type they are, and they have to upgrade 4 types of magic before going to the next real level.
So, just off the top of my head, Death, Life, Water, Air, Earth, Fire, Plant and Time are your magi types, written in a circle. Maybe they have death, life, water, air, starting out, all at level one ability. The Magus Ascends, and gains Level 2 ability in Earth...But loses Death ability, as they are moving up the spiral. So now the magus has Level 1 in Life, Water, and Air, and Level 2 in Earth. When Next The Magus Ascends, they gain level 2 in Fire, but lose Life.
Once the Player has all 4 abilities at level 2, their next gain will be level three. So after a few levels, the Magus will have level 2 in Earth, Fire, Plant and Time....until the Magus Ascends, gaining level 3 in Death (going around the cycle), losing earth.
I'd prefer that all eight "magic types" (in Vreeg's example) were necessary for "well rounded" ability, that the diverse magical competencies (say summoning, transformation, divination etc.) were well divided among these fundaments, and that each ascension simply stripped a fundament away.
So for example resurrection requires high Life and Death and Time; while creating brand new life requires Air, Earth, Fire, Water and Life; and the various methods of magical murder involve Death and another element (Air to quell the breath; Earth to mar the flesh; etc.).
At the highest levels of ascension you actually cannot perform some of magic's most miraculous feats: a Death Demigod might be able to bring you back from the dead, but would be too powerful (and thus too attenuated) to create life anew.
Gods are near-elemental, having perhaps two or three fundaments, while Reality's Sentient Conceptual Foundations have one fundament alone.
FUNDAMENTS
Foundations of reality and the substance of magical action
ELEMENTS
Material or "worldly" subset of fundaments
Constituents of life in order of priority
EARTH: flesh bone sinew; structure stability; human beings
WATER: humours; interconnection; "the status quo"
FIRE: motivation; power violence attraction; thesis
AIR: intellect imagination; inspiration invention; philosophy art
Sir Gules barges into your classroom, because you killed his brother and he wants your head. With EARTH you could burst his sword arm like a fleshy balloon. Ostentatious, inelegant. Messy. You're an esteemed wizard, your students are watching, word will get around. You could be more subtle. With WATER you might sap the strength from those arms, induce a coughing fit, blur his vision. No... He expects such tricks from a wizard. He would fight through it, and confront you though enfeebled. What if you drained his FIRE, sapped his will to fight? You killed my brother, but so what? What was he to me but an obligation and a burden?
A magus can likewise manipulate the events of history. Cause a renowned princess' beauty to waste away, destroying her family's hope of a favourable marriage alliance (earth or water). Twist the love of a lord for his kingdom into covetousness and self interest (fire). Intrude upon the thoughts of a master strategist with trivia and distractions, spoiling the morning's manoeuvres and costing him the battle (air).
With sufficient magical power, it even works on a culture-wide scale. WATER governs social bonds, hierarchies, mutual interest and trust. FIRE describes the common purpose. AIR describes society's capacity for inquiry, its expressiveness and attentiveness. Without WATER, people do not readily or comfortably associate with one another. Without FIRE they do not act upon collective belief or interest. Without AIR civilisation cannot adapt to changing circumstance. You can change a person's relationship to any of these cultural elements, or deform that culture as a whole.
A powerful magus, not yet semidivine, might be able to manipulate all of those things. A True God might not be able to alter even one.
All creatures comprise some combination of elements:
EARTH
primordials; walking corpses
EARTH/WATER
plants; fey; the tiny organisms which thrive invisibly in their trillions within human bodies
EARTH/WATER/FIRE
animals; many monsters
EARTH/WATER/FIRE/AIR
human beings; demihumans; the most dangerous monsters
EARTH/FIRE
golems and other simulacra
e.g. the fey
Many wrongly suppose that, because faeries scheme and argue and lust moreso than mortals, they must possess the same inner Fire and Air that compel human action. But though the fey are flexile and reactive they always revert to their original state. Faeries cannot change and better themselves, nor can they deteriorate. Even their passions are an empty simulation of Want.
as for the other fundaments...
LIFE, DEATH, TIME, [WHAT?]
[ooc]/hijack[/ooc]
uh,
eh
oh, LC, at least there are good responses. count those darn blessings
Quote from: LordVreeg
oh, LC, at least there are good responses. count those darn blessings
What happened here was this: I made two posts' worth of information about a potential setting this could be used in, and then I changed my mind and redacted my own suggestions because I decided they weren't quite what I wanted them to be.
I absolutely wasn't making a comment on anyone else's ideas in those two missing posts, and it didn't occur to me to think that my dummy-text could be interpreted as a lack of approval. Terribly sorry about that misunderstanding!
Aww man now I'm curious!
I'll repost it, when I've had a little time to refine it.
There are two, actually: a sci-fi flavor, and a fantasy flavor.
Quote from: Lmns Crn
Quote from: LordVreeg
oh, LC, at least there are good responses. count those darn blessings
What happened here was this: I made two posts' worth of information about a potential setting this could be used in, and then I changed my mind and redacted my own suggestions because I decided they weren't quite what I wanted them to be.
I absolutely wasn't making a comment on anyone else's ideas in those two missing posts, and it didn't occur to me to think that my dummy-text could be interpreted as a lack of approval. Terribly sorry about that misunderstanding!
always ok, man. Thanks for clearing.
I was also noting that at least you got some good, thoughtful responses...