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Isn't the point of all the weird magic systems in UA that magic systems have a shelf life, and all the old ones ran out? So the old adepts should be stuff like witches and whatnot? Or is that just the rituals?
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May 23, 2010 21:47
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:52 |
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Squidster posted:What prevents an Entropomancer from putting on a blindfold, hijacking a bus, and driving it into highway incoming traffic? The other adept major charges seem like they would be a huge challenge and great story to obtain, but the chaos dudes seem to have it pretty easy. Yeah the charge economy is different for each class, I think for instance the Entropo and Epideromancers actually have a list of major charge powers that are souped up versions of their significant charge abilities, but the archaeologists and the narco-alchemists just get a bunch of really powerful suggestions. Sargeant Biffalot fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 26, 2010 |
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May 26, 2010 23:22
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homerlaw posted:Every so often I delve into terrible places, and sometimes I find wonderful things, like these rumors. RPGNET_forums_UA_rumours.txt >You're not supposed to use cellphones while up in the air, right? They tell you it's because they want your full attention in a crisis or someshit, but there's another reason, too. When used thousands of miles above the earth, cellphones pick up certain kinds of... emanations. Call a number-- any number-- and just listen to the background noise. I swear to God, I heard my mother. She died when I was thirteen. >Due to a sinister plot by occultists at the US Mint, tarot cards are no longer an effective divination tool. They've been replaced by the issuing of the commemorative states quarters--one simply empties out one's pockets onto a hard, clean surface. Each coin is common and yet rife with symbolism, and their order, location and proximity to each other and other denominations of coin provide an intricate chart of your past, present and future. >Ever wonder why celebrities always seem to have such extreme, mercurial personalities? Its because they're natural magnets for demonic possession. Think about it: lots more people desire fame than actually achieve it. Many of those people are obsessed with the prospect of living the movie or rock star life. Those that actually do achieve that level of fame immediately become targets of the ones who died obsessing over it. Demonic possession is (mostly) to blame for all of the celebrity drug and sex scandals you hear about every day--even the more bizarre rumors about bulimia, anorexia, etc. That's also why so many celebrities run to the arms of quack religious fads--they're just trying to make it stop and trust the folks who say they can. >There's bank somewhere in Oregon where you can deposit memories, keeping them safe until you need them again. Someone is planning to rob this bank. >If you kill and eat a swan, you gain part of the Queen of England's power. >Picasso's Guernica is a powerful artifact which caused the US to lose the Vietnam War, as it channeled the psychic energies of protestors from its temporary home at MOMA. The cover-up of the UN reproduction during Powell speech about Iraq was an attempt to counter its powers - but since the original was now in Madrid, it backlashed on their Spanish allies instead. >Some religions write down prayers to their gods on small pieces of paper and burn them as offerings. If you unroll a cigarette made by a certain large American corporation, and carefully examine the underside of the paper, you will find a prayer written in sanskrit. Do I need to spell it out for you? >"Warning: Every year, the equivalent of a small town of people dies from smoking." So, which town is it that's shunting their deaths onto smokers? >Y'know those Tibetan prayer wheels? The ones you spin to say the prayer? Well, have you ever looked at the edge of a Windows install CD? Its the same principle; each iteration of Windows has a more refined version of it. What does the ritual do? I don't know Ancient tibetan Bon pictograms. But I do know AOL has the counterspell.
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May 26, 2011 19:27
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Interesting book review on the whole punctuation enables silent reading in modern times thing here, which points out that being able to read silently was a mark of great intelligence in the early days of scriptua continua, and that doing so wouldn't be as immediate as modern sight reading, it'd be more like a musician being able to work out how a piece should sound in their head.
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Nov 24, 2011 22:13
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A lot of the more self-destructive original adept schools were described as being like junkies who would go on big magical benders which they know are delusional and bad for them, in the expectation of at some point breaking taboo and trying to go straight - Oneiromancy and dispomancy being the most extreme, but entropomancy and epideromancy were also described in the fiction as working this way. The new schools all lean more towards the cliomancy/plutonomancy side of things where they are like conspiracy theorists who don't want to and can't break out of their worldviews, so it makes sense that they would, like them, have less extreme requirements that someone could stick to for years on end.
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Apr 14, 2017 10:02
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:52 |
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The problem is each school weighs the worth of charges differently - majors for dipsomancers and cliomancers are huge things you need to quest for which can change the world, for entropamancers and epideromancers they are relatively obtainable but have a limited array of more personal effects. If you wanted to change to a four charge system you'd have to rejig everyone's costs. Of course, since there are no set major spells or rituals, you could give them variable potency and flavour - maybe only minor and significant charges are fungible, "major charge" actually covers the whole spectrum of stronger forces above that. So the Sea of Tranquility and Gorham's Cave both have a major charge but if you want to mess with people's ideas about prehistory you need the latter. Lichtenstein posted:
Agrimancy is lame as is but would be great in a hard reboot UA as the last modernist magic school, barely hanging on with a casting penalty and only available by apprenticing to the few remaining masters. Mechanomancy doesn't really make sense in that slot any more because the cultural loss it's meant to reflect - the rise of consumer goods and the decline of individual tinkering and craftsmanship - has to a degree been reversed by the rise of hacker culture/makerspaces/etc, hobbyist computer/drone stuff, arguably the home computing revolution in general. There's no reason there shouldn't be new spontaneous mechanomancers. On the other hand the idea that if you want to learn agrimancy you have to seek out some 200 year old wizard confined to an increasingly isolated family farm, surrounded on all sides by hostile agribusiness macrofarms, concerned that his failing magic won't keep him alive for much longer - that's got resonance. But the book presents it as a new school which is less interesting.
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Apr 15, 2017 13:15
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