#magitechnobabble

[feyosha]

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

[feyosha]

Curse of Typography

Cursed with the gift of prophecy, but the prophecy is always a typo.

[holdharmonysacred]

Before I go I also want to say like. I think the F/Go animes’s method of adaptation of chopping the main story into just The Good Arcs is just fundamentally fucked in the long run. It’s just super inaccessible for any newcomers, and it’s really obviously a bunch of big giant ads for the mobile games rather than fun TV animes that can stand on their own, which is a MASSIVE shame because there’s clearly a shitton of talent going into these things. I say this as booboo the fool that wants them to skip even more ahead and turn LB6 into an anime, it’s great for merch collecting but like. Sucks ass when it comes to actual storytelling.

[mayasaura]

Tomorrow I'm starting Harrow the Ninth, so a short list of things I'm anticipating/hoping to see:

An evil Emperor. I wanna hate this man. Please Tasmyn give me an evil god emperor to hate I want to plot his downfall

Gideon's body. I just want to see her again, but if I can't have that I kind of want for it to be desecrated in some fun and exciting way. If Harrow can get a Hamlet moment with her my goth heart will sing

Lore. Why are the planets undead, and what was the Resurrection?

Necromancy. It's Harrow's book, so I'm hoping for a little more meat on that bone. I'm talking magitechnobabble, the denser the better. I can and will draw diagrams if I have to

Harrow introspective. And some retrospective on her pov on some of the events of Gideon the Ninth and their backstory. I want to hear what Harrow thought about how they "grew up in each other's pockets" and just how accurate Gideon's assessment that Harrow hated her at first sight was(n't). Did she talk to her parents' corpses when she was eleven and imagine they were listening? Did she ever go back to the Tomb?

Soup. This is one spoiler I do have, that there is soup. What the fuck does soup have to do with anything. Highly anticipating the soup.

What I'm anticipating but not hoping for is Harrow's death. Maybe it's asking too much but please not my baby

[jennawynn]

Jennaworks: Temporary Home

When starting a new D&D campaign, one of the most basic things you should have is... a group of players of appropriate size who have a schedule that allows everyone to gather semi-regularly. 

We did not.

We had a lot of players with interest, but several people had odd schedules or no free time or any  number of other challenges to a fixed schedule, so my challenge was to create a campaign that would accommodate as many people as possible. As I was out of work at the time, I had a lot of free time available for off-hours gaming. But I needed to work out an in-game way for players to be able to jump in and out of games as necessary. 

Enter Jebeddo Filchbatter Ku Ponivindel Boddynock Oneshoe Ningel, a gnome arcanist and resident of Bellbury. Poni, as he was called, was attempting to marry magic and science, creating a teleportation portal (the Quantum Riftshift Slipstream Teletransmitter, or QRST) that would make scrying and teleportation circles more accessible to people who could not cast the spells themselves. Unfortunately... it blew up. 

When the QRST exploded, it had a number of effects. For one thing, it killed Poni’s corporeal body and sent his spirit into the control rod of the QRST. It also destabilized the envirochronic resonance architecture which is magitechnobabble for ‘caused bad, ‘random’ mass teleportation.’ All the residents of Bellbury were instantly teleported to another plane, some with pieces of the QRST itself. In addition, several people (including all the original PCs) were teleported from their own hometowns to Bellbury. 

Having everyone be teleported in allowed me to let players be from literally anywhere they wanted. Originally, they were all from their own planes as well, but I later changed it because I wanted the players to be able to see the impact of their actions on the world and be able to amass allies through their deeds. That said, I did eventually craft individual countries for each of the players’ homeworlds, giving them an environment that created them and, in many cases, offered future plot bunnies for character arcs. 

As long as the QRST was broken, the teleportation happened ‘randomly’, allowing players and NPCs to be teleported to Bellbury or back home depending on whether they were available to play. If a player needed to leave mid-session, *poof* they were taken ‘back home’. All random teleportations worked the same way- you teleported into the town square of Bellbury and teleported out to your last location that you were pre-teleportation... which meant a lot of the NPCs started dying because they were teleported off trains, boats, or in dangerous situations. 

To teleport intentionally, Poni could self-target pieces of the QRST arch or use his sensor plate to target particular people based on items personal to him. It’s a bit of a tweak to the canon use of scrying and teleportation, but it’s my world so :P 

The target of the teleportation would appear in the archway and a person could step through the portal to be teleported to that location, or Poni could be placed through and everyone touching his control rod would be teleported together. Because the archway was broken, the magic was wild and uncontrolled and it would end up sending the group to nearby locations instead of that particular spot. 

The early sessions were often macguffin sessions- teleport in, find the piece, teleport out. Eventually they had a choice to make- continue trying to find the pieces to fix the QRST and bring all surviving citizens of Bellbury back at once, or target particular people to save. The Moonstreams (Cae, Eloise, and Misha) were all saved individually, and, besides Vardalon, were the only ones to be saved in this manner.

Vardalon was a sort of introduction/tutorial to Poni’s targeting feature. His girlfriend, one of the first randomly saved citizens, begged the group to find her love. This gave me the opportunity to set up the future moral quandry between saving individuals who might be important or allies vs saving everyone. 

Eventually the players learned that the longer they took to find the pieces, the more people would die. I created a spreadsheet with random names and assigned values to them, giving a rough estimate of people to die each day. A large chunk died the first day- teleported directly into dangerous situations. Each day another section of the ~300 citizens would die as they starved or were attacked by monsters as they tried to find civilization. The last, largest group were those that would be alive no matter how long it took- those who teleported into relative safety. If you survived 20 days, you were likely to survive 50. 

In the end, it was only this group who survived. There was a small chance that the players could have saved more, but the circumstances were mostly there to give the characters reason to want to hurry and guilt over their decisions to screw around or seek individuals.

By the end of this arc, we had managed to get plot hooks for each of the player characters and settled into a manageable size group with relatively complementary schedules. The random teleportation was no longer necessary, so when they pieced the QRST together, there was a magical explosion that disabled the teleporter, permanently killed Poni, and brought all the survivors back to Bellbury... as well as trapped the PCs there. 

[feyosha]

We don’t really work like that; that’s more the purview of the likes of, say, @wizard-council-bureaucrat. We’re more about how you use it.

To illustrate with the example of Soul Drain:

Are your casting components made out of the correct materials (bone, mummified flesh, vinyl, etc)? How’s the line work on your sigils and glyphs (did you use the good chalk?). Are you making sure to keep the outputs of one Soul Drain at least 4 meters away from the inputs of any others? (I would say try it and see but you won’t live to see just don’t do it) When was the last time you checked your staff for cracks? (it’s like falling from a 6’ ladder; most common and most boring way to die on the job site)

We’re about how you do it.

And frankly we’re mostly concerned with making sure you don’t accidentally die a boring death.

If you wanna attempt Apotheosis we won’t stop you. We will tell you when what you’re about to attempt has been attempted before and resulted in a smoking crater. Less cop, more caution sign.

Wizards are not naturally immortal, in fact creating their own form of immortality is their graduate thesis.

[feyosha]

Attention Science Enthusiasts and Chem Majors!

Reference for the non-chemists:

Alkaline Metals: putting water on these will set them on fire. Combines explosively with Halogens to produce salts, which are largely impervious to heat.

Halogens: corrosive as fuck. Includes Fluorine and Chlorine. Combines explosively with Alkali Metals to produce salts, which are largely impervious to heat.

Mercury: thanks to Cooper Pairs and Quantum Weirdness, is liquid at room temperature despite being heavy as Lead. Turns Aluminum to mush. Will drive you mad.

Dimethyl Cadmium: 2 methyl’s on a Cadmium! A Metal, directly on Carbon Functional Groups! Carcinogenic, Teratogenic, Neurotoxic, Lipophilic, with both acute and chronic effects, this shit will wreck your cellular machinery like an industrial mining apparatus turned on a neighborhood brownstone.

Azoazide Azide: hello yes I would like to order 14 Nitrogen atoms, but, can they all be exclusively single bonded in a second-order Azide? Whaddya mean it’s the least stable molecule ever fabricated? What do you mean it self-immolates in isolated conditions?

Sand: it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

[REDACTED]: goo

[feyosha]

BTW Animal genomes are shorter than Plant genomes because The Plants have. Pieces. Of us. We need the Pieces. We cannot make them ourselves, our DNA is too short so we have to. Shove the. Plants. into our bodies. Through this hole in our face. To get the missing Pieces. Of us. That the Plants make. Hope this helps.

[feyosha]

Feels good to get back to the drafting table

[feyosha]

Relevant Spell List:

Embiggen: for when you only want to make part of someone bigger

Healing Word: just in case you overdo your Embiggen

Disable Semen: stay safe y’all

Cure Disease: see above

Hitachi’s Sphere of Power: conjures an invisible sphere of powerfully vibrating force. Adjustable.

Animate Rope: the classic

Animate Tongue: don’t know what you’re doing? This spell does!

Invert Genitalia: bottom surgery at sorcery speed

Lesser Telempathy: now you can let your partner know what you want while your mouth is busy!

Greater Telempathy: what feels good for you feels good for me too!

Amazon’s Clapback: turn a booty clap into a 15-foot cone of percussive force damage. 4d6 no save, lost dex roll falls prone

Crimew’s Polymorph: transform into a tCatHackerGirl

Sullivan’s Polymorph: transform into a large hairy beast with long powerful arms and a huge unit

Guillermo’s Greater Polymorph: allows the caster to modify any number of elements of their appearance in monsterfuckery ways such as but not limited to: eyes like black pools, long nimble elegant inhuman fingers, decoratively sharp teeth, decorative fins, tails, etc.

Johnsonville Slugger: transform your shlong into a shilleligh. 1d8 bludgeoning 2 handed

Ghost Hand: an extra hand. It’s handy.

Summon Tits: make your breasts arbitrarily large

Banish Tits: make your breasts arbitrarily small

my horny ass could NOT be a wizard

[feyosha]

Unsafe

Spells and Artefacts

• Lantern of Diogenes (lamp): Forces the bearer to relentlessly detect and forcefully reject falsehood. Extended exposure may cause Apostasy, Atheism, Antiauthoritarianism, Public Nudity, Obscenity, Poor Grammar, Debasement of Currency, and Ostracism.

• Curse of The Chinese Room (spatial curse): Renders the inhabitants unable to subjectively comprehend language. They retain the ability to respond coherently, and will continue to do so, disguising the Curse. They will effortlessly answer questions and converse, despite having no subjective clue what is being said, even by them.

• Laplace’s Demons (set of figurines): “Observes” all quantum mechanical interactions within its sphere of influence, collapsing waveforms and rendering local Reality Classically Deterministic. Exposure to this “Determinism Field” interferes with cognition in higher mammals and with cellular metabolism in all living organisms, as chemical equilibria are shifted by Entropy behaving Classically

[feyosha]

The Glass is always all-the-way full. Sometimes there’s more air, sometimes more water, but it is de facto always full.

If you had a glass that was actually half empty, like, with absolutely nothing in the second half, the half empty part would fill with air within milliseconds with a loud bang. At least, assuming the water was in the bottom half of the glass.

If the water was in the top half of the glass, it would probably destroy the glass, to be honest.

Am I making any sense? I have illustrations around here somewhere… that might help…

Randall Monroe does a better job of explaining what’s going on here than I can, so I’ll just leave a link here for the curious.

But yea. Glass is always completely full.

[feyosha]

Atom: Uncleft

Atomic: Uncleftish

Beholding: Theory

Worldken: Science

Stuff: Matter

Firststuff: Elemental Matter

Bernstonish: Electrical

Lading: Charge

Foreladen: Positively Charged

Forward Bernstonish Lading: Positive Electric Charge

Backladen: Negatively Charged

Backward Bernstonish Lading: Negative Electric Charge

Farer: Ion

Samestead: Isotope

Roundabout Board of the Firststuffs: Periodic Table of the Elements

Waterstuff: Hydrogen

Sunstuff: Helium

Stonestuff: Lithium

Coalstuff: Carbon

Chokestuff: Nitrogen

Sourstuff: Oxygen

Glasswortstuff: Sodium

Flintstuff: Silicon

Potashstuff: Potassium

Ymirstuff: Uranium

Aegirstuff: Neptunium

Helstuff: Plutonium

Uncleftish Beholding

Courtesy of Mia McMahill. For more discussion, see the Wikipedia article.

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

At first it was thought that the uncleft was a hard thing that could be split no further; hence the name. Now we know it is made up of lesser motes. There is a heavy kernel with a forward bernstonish lading, and around it one or more light motes with backward ladings. The least uncleft is that of ordinary waterstuff. Its kernel is a lone forwardladen mote called a firstbit. Outside it is a backwardladen mote called a bernstonebit. The firstbit has a heaviness about 1840-fold that of the bernstonebit. Early worldken folk thought bernstonebits swing around the kernel like the earth around the sun, but now we understand they are more like waves or clouds.

In all other unclefts are found other motes as well, about as heavy as the firstbit but with no lading, known as neitherbits. We know a kind of waterstuff with one neitherbit in the kernel along with the firstbit; another kind has two neitherbits. Both kinds are seldom.

The next greatest firststuff is sunstuff, which has two firstbits and two bernstonebits. The everyday sort also has two neitherbits in the kernel. If there are more or less, the uncleft will soon break asunder. More about this later.

The third firststuff is stonestuff, with three firstbits, three bernstonebits, and its own share of neitherbits. And so it goes, on through such everyday stuffs as coalstuff (six firstbits) or iron (26) to ones more lately found. Ymirstuff (92) was the last until men began to make some higher still.

It is the bernstonebits that link, and so their tale fastsets how a firststuff behaves and what kinds of bulkbits it can help make. The worldken of this behaving, in all its manifold ways, is called minglingken. Minglingers have found that as the uncleftish tale of the firststuffs (that is, the tale of firststuffs in their kernels) waxes, after a while they begin to show ownships not unlike those of others that went before them. So, for a showdeal, stonestuff (3), glasswortstuff (11), potashstuff (19), redstuff (37), and bluegraystuff (55) can each link with only one uncleft of waterstuff, while coalstuff (6), flintstuff (14), germanstuff (22), tin (50), and lead (82) can each link with four. This is readily seen when all are set forth in what is called the roundaround board of the firststuffs.

When an uncleft or a bulkbit wins one or more bernstonebits above its own, it takes on a backward lading. When it loses one or more, it takes on a forward lading. Such a mote is called a farer, for that the drag between unlike ladings flits it. When bernstonebits flit by themselves, it may be as a bolt of lightning, a spark off some faststanding chunk, or the everyday flow of bernstoneness through wires.

Coming back to the uncleft itself, the heavier it is, the more neitherbits as well as firstbits in its kernel. Indeed, soon the tale of neitherbits is the greater. Unclefts with the same tale of firstbits but unlike tales of neitherbits are called samesteads. Thus, everyday sourstuff has eight neitherbits with its eight firstbits, but there are also kinds with five, six, seven, nine, ten, and eleven neitherbits. A samestead is known by the tale of both kernel motes, so that we have sourstuff-13, sourstuff-14, and so on, with sourstuff-16 being by far the most found. Having the same number of bernstonebits, the samesteads of a firststuff behave almost alike minglingly. They do show some unlikenesses, outstandingly among the heavier ones, and these can be worked to sunder samesteads from each other.

Most samesteads of every firststuff are unabiding. Their kernels break up, each at its own speed. This speed is written as the half-life, which is how long it takes half of any deal of the samestead thus to shift itself. The doing is known as lightrotting. It may happen fast or slowly, and in any of sundry ways, offhanging on the makeup of the kernel. A kernel may spit out two firstbits with two neitherbits, that is, a sunstuff kernel, thus leaping two steads back in the roundaround board and four weights back in heaviness. It may give off a bernstonebit from a neitherbit, which thereby becomes a firstbit and thrusts the uncleft one stead up in the board while keeping the same weight. It may give off a forwardbit, which is a mote with the same weight as a bernstonebit but a forward lading, and thereby spring one stead down in the board while keeping the same weight. Often, too, a mote is given off with neither lading nor heaviness, called the weeneitherbit. In much lightrotting, a mote of light with most short wavelength comes out as well.

For although light oftenest behaves as a wave, it can be looked on as a mote, the lightbit. We have already said by the way that a mote of stuff can behave not only as a chunk, but as a wave. Down among the unclefts, things do not happen in steady flowings, but in leaps between bestandings that are forbidden. The knowledge-hunt of this is called lump beholding.

Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light.

By shooting motes into kernels, worldken folk have shifted samesteads of one firststuff into samesteads of another. Thus did they make ymirstuff into aegirstuff and helstuff, and they have afterward gone beyond these. The heavier firststuffs are all highly lightrottish and therefore are not found in the greenworld.

Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. That is, when a neitherbit strikes the kernel of one, as for a showdeal ymirstuff-235, it bursts into lesser kernels and free neitherbits; the latter can then split more ymirstuff-235. When this happens, weight shifts into work. It is not much of the whole, but nevertheless it is awesome.

With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. In the sun, through a row of strikings and lightrottings, four unclefts of waterstuff in this wise become one of sunstuff. Again some weight is lost as work, and again this is greatly big when set beside the work gotten from a minglingish doing such as fire.

Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.

Soothly we live in mighty years!

[feyosha]

Is there any regulations against having an explosive aura around your home? Like an aura that just explodes anyone who tries to enter without permission?

So far, no wizards have come close to my home. So no remains I have to clean up. Yet.

Well, we’ll have to do an inspection, naturally. We’re not so much about what you do as we are about how you go about it, you know? but here’s some things you can do in the meantime to help make sure everything goes smoothly:

How’s the line work on your sigils? You didn’t just freehand it, did you? You remembered to use the-(wait hold on let me check… my scrolls… here we go. ah yes) You used chalk containing Salt of Titanium, right? If you’re using that cheap Carbonate of Shellfish chalk you used in school you’re gonna melt your fucking doorframe. Don’t want that.

How specific were you in your targeting parameters? How did you define “anyone?” Don’t make me summon the ghost of Diogenes to teach you a lesson about the shortcomings of morphology based targeting parameters! He’s an ass and it’ll ruin your day. First of all any Wizard with a basic polymorph will be able to circumvent it if you made it too simple. Second, if you don’t restrain your semantic envelope, the spell will get… interpretative. That’s always bad. Ætheric background field operates on Monkey Paw logic. Do not invite interpretation.

How did you define your duration? Did you account for spariotemporal distortions from other nearby enchantments? Doesn’t do you any good if you explode people who broke in 2 weeks ago. And if you manage to somehow flip your past/future polarity and start targeting anyone who might break in… no.

We do not punish people retrocausally.

Got it?

(Ahem) anyway

So, I could drop by… hmm.

6th Saturday of the month work for you?

I’ll arrive around 11:75.

Bring a raincoat.

[feyosha]

Advanced Sigils of Tin