I lost a run the other day to a series of events, one of which included me (in-game) finding and eating enough psychedelic fungus to trigger a shift in reality, which transmuted all smoke in the universe and any created thereafter, into acid. Like carbolic acid, not the fun drugsy kind.
Acid, naturally, eats through all creatures and materials in the game world, including many things you'd consider otherwise invulnerable, until it evaporates - into flammable gas.
Therefore any time an object or material caught fire (which is often, with or without player interference), it would quickly consume anything below it for several meters while feeding itself with flammable gas and spreading to any new flammable materials it uncovered.
Also, as someone who didn't understand this, most of the crazy stuff you get right away. I think because it sort of looks like Terraria I thought a lot of stuff is crazy high level items but it's not.
That's just the beauty of its spell system, found yourself a trigger spell, double cast, and chainsaw? Well now you have a gattling wand. Want to impose 4 billion damage onto your archenemy? One simple spell may do the trick
Have you tried closing and re-opening your spell book?
What's the uptime on your portal?
Apple-wood makes really good wands for illusions.
Oh, the staff? Built it myself. Hexacore silicon based crystal lattice CPU (Casting Power Unit), 4 billion RAM (Refined Arcane Modules) with an upgraded SSD (Swift Spell Deck) that can hold 2 trillion sigils. Yeah, of course it has RGB aura effects.
"Gods, I swear you fix one thing in a ritual, two more take it's place - my teleportation no longer puts me in the ground, but now my clothes arrive backwards and occasionally I'm upside down - didn't even touch those bits of the spell!"
"Gods, I swear you fix one thing in a ritual, two more take its place - my teleportation no longor puts me in the ground, but now my clothes arrive backwards and occasionally I'm puside down - didn't even touch those bits of the spell!"
Some smartass drew a penis into the runes for the ritual circle during development by mistake. We tried removing it once we noticed it, but then the whole spell broke so we had to leave it in.
"Woah! You can't just cast any spell you find laying around. You have to create a virtual world first, then cast the spell. That way if shit goes pear shaped, you just pull the plug and the world vanishes. Can you imagine if you got a grimoire labeled 'Summon Frog', but it actually summoned a plague of frogs? Do you know even who wrote the book? Bro. Virtual World."
Whoa. That is 100% my new favorite campaign setting idea. A wizard's virtual test world, with all sorts of crazy random nonsense happening, and then one day the inhabitants find out he's going to reset the virtual world.
Or just plug it into a running campaign:
A wizard was using another smaller plane of existence as this, but they have somehow become unable to close it again and the party need to venture inside to fix it so he may safely close it again!
"Magic missile is just a teleportation spell to a gun range. Create food and water? Teleportation. Teleport? Believe it or not, a hack of disintegration"
We found a race condition in the teleport code. Turns out the efficiency curve for the restoration magic that undoes the disintegration in real time has a parabolic mana requirement related to mass, but disintegrate has a caterneric curve. For human sized stuff they match up, but if you try to teleport something of sufficient mass the restoration starts to draw a disproportionate amount of mana and the whole thing falls apart.
How we found out? We knew from the start there would be a discrepancy. Early testing pointed to this problem. And we warned every superior up the chain. But in the end we were ordered to just put a warning on the scroll.
We were only taken serious after a junior magician thought it was funny to teleport an elephant into their observatorium before exams and neglected the warnings. That is how the Mana Void of Barkley Academy was formed.
The superiors were out for blood when the first court summon scrolls appeared, using competitors teleportation technology. That was until we gave them a copy of our manilla scroll holder full with communication of them neglecting to heed our warnings.
Charles Stross' Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.
You know fun fact I learned recently from a let's play: tentacles only refer to the appendages which end in suckers, but along the rest of their length, have no suckers. The other appendages are called arms. So, octopuses actually have no tentacles, they have arms. Squids have 8 arms, and 2 extra tentacles, which are the long ones that have little spade shaped sucker hands on them. So, probably when you pictured tentacles, you were actually picturing cephalopod arms.
This series seems to check more boxes than I thought I had...
i'm adding it to the top of the list. Except i don't have a list, so I'm creating a list and adding it to that and therefore it automatically finds itself at the top of it.
So that explains the apparent undead working for them...I only read the first book or three and it's been a minute. This is the sign for me to go back and finish the series.
"No, we don't ever touch the old Seance. The wizards of old wrote it a long time ago and the last time we changed a word it stopped summoning demons in jars and started summoning them in rectal cavities. Just leave it alone."
Oh no. Do you mean Midnight for each monestary locally, or do you mean when it's midnight at our prime monestary that it is cast? Three are in the time zone an hour ahead, and seven are an hour behind! They need to happen simultaneously for it to work!
Still better than the spell that needs to be cast at local noon. They synchronized those by having each monastery create and then destroy an invisible copy of the sun whenever they cast it. You don't want to know how expensive to maintain that is.
I'm really liking the idea of the day-to-da experience for a working mage in the magical standards agency responsible for keeping all these things in order. An even more arcane IEEE, if that's possible.
Spells extracting energy from another magical system MUST send a request for draw before beginning extraction.
High-capacitance spells SHOULD respond to all requests with positive authorization if sufficient capacity exists, but MUST reply in some way.
We're a little worried about what happens when the astral calender hits the new millenium but no ones figured out how to insert another date rune without causing the whole magic circle to start smoking alarmingly.
"I copied this spell from an overflowing stack of tomes. I think it was originally meant to cleanse all living things from religious stonework, but I changed some of the constants now it works as disinfectant."
Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn't have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.
These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it's easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.
Debugging spells isn't like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.
But most wizards just go with the ol' "add print statements everywhere" method of debugging.
"Glorfinx's Globular Glassblower" still shouts "HERE!" at max volume when it walks past a wet dog because he never removed the printf rune after he fixed a bug relating to dripping fur.
Oh but the fireworks of Ericas "broader detect magic" became so popular that she actually added back all the spark colors for all the moral edge cases!
We now have novice wizards playing around with exactly how angry they need to be and how gaudy their robes need to be to get the different signals triggered...
