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Magic works on a principle of "Mana." And I don't mean videogame Mana, I mean in the traditional indigenous Polynesian sense of respect and obligation elevated to the level of metaphysical importance. When you challenge someone and win, you accrue Mana through your show of strength. When you have someone at your mercy and spare their life, you gain Mana from their them owing you their life. When you generously share your wealth, you gain Mana through others' accumulated debt to you. With sufficient Mana even the elements themselves will respect your wishes. That being said, actually using your accumulated Mana to do stuff diminishes it and uses some of it up, as you're calling in your debts and having it repaid.
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May 3, 2022 15:41
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| # ? May 12, 2024 23:00 |
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Flower magic. Turns out flowers are magic and each type of flower can be used to do one very specific spell, but you can breed new flowers to get new spells. That's what happened during the tulip mania of the 1600s.
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May 3, 2022 16:04
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EVIL Gibson posted:This and every addiction-themed magic system in this thread is the premise of how magic works in Unknown Armies. I honestly think this was one of the best takes on magic in a modern real world setting, I even have a copy of the gamebook myself.
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May 3, 2022 16:17
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Asterite34 posted:Magic works on a principle of "Mana." And I don't mean videogame Mana, I mean in the traditional indigenous Polynesian sense of respect and obligation elevated to the level of metaphysical importance. When you challenge someone and win, you accrue Mana through your show of strength. When you have someone at your mercy and spare their life, you gain Mana from their them owing you their life. When you generously share your wealth, you gain Mana through others' accumulated debt to you. With sufficient Mana even the elements themselves will respect your wishes. That being said, actually using your accumulated Mana to do stuff diminishes it and uses some of it up, as you're calling in your debts and having it repaid. This but mana is unleavened bread and you have to carb up before a wizard fight
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May 3, 2022 17:26
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Magical aptitude is passed down genetically so all of the major magical families are all horrifically inbred to keep the magic gene strong. Outsiders born with the magic gene are begrudgingly allowed into the fold, but are generally disliked. The inbreeding causes severe mental and physical weakness among wizardkind, to the point where they need to wear open robes and have disappearing spells ready in case they poo poo themselves in public. The wizards have untold magical powers but their lacking intelligence means that most of their time is wasted on self destructive, or otherwise just plain stupid stunts and hobbies due to their odd and cruel "traditions". Your average wizard lives and dies not noticing that the average commoner lives a far more comfortable and safe existence than he or she ever will. e: I've just been told some transphobe hack beat me to the punch on this. Who What Now posted:This but mana is unleavened bread and you have to carb up before a wizard fight This but mana is MTG mana and you need miles and miles of real estate to just cast a fuckin fireball or summon a skeleton.
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May 3, 2022 19:11
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Radio waves can be channeled into fireballs if you have the right arrangement of metal fillings.
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May 3, 2022 20:14
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There's a long list of words written in an ancient language that cause magical effects simply when spoken aloud and using a wand to focus the effects of the spell. The words are relatively easy to pronounce and any idiot can do it if they get their hands on a wand, which has resulted in the world being destroyed multiple times in the past due to how easy it is to abuse this system once knowledge of it inevitably leaks to the greater public. Yes, I based this system on how magic works in Harry Potter.
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May 3, 2022 21:12
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All words are antimagical and our development of language has forever cut us off from being able to perform it.
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May 3, 2022 21:15
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"Magic" involves making events happen that are possible but improbable. The more improbable they are, the more magic you need to spend. Consider the odds against a given event, and then sacrifice an outcome that is as unlikely. If you want an event where the odds of it happening are 1 in 1,125,899,906,842,624, then all you need to do is mentally fuse your target event with the sacrificial event, and then make the sacrificial event happen. Take a roll of 50 pennies, slice it open, and hurl them to the ground before you. There are 2^50 possible arrangements of heads and tails, so the odds of you getting any one specific result are 1 in 2^50. And since you've just generated an event where the odds of it happening were 1 in 1,125,899,906,842,624, your target event will happen... as long as the odds of it happening were less than that. And as long as none of the pennies have been used for this before. You can only use a given penny for this, once. As per Doctor Manhattan, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts." How unlikely is it that the particles in a body would randomly move in ways such that the person comes back to life? That's not a fifty-cent miracle. It's not even a hundred-dollar miracle. Want to try a thousand-dollar miracle? Eventually someone realizes that you can randomize tiny sections of your hard drive and sacrifice those instead. A byte is 8 bits, a kilobyte is 1024, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes... at odds of 1 in (2^3)^((2^10)^(2^10)), anything can happen.
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May 3, 2022 21:23
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Parahexavoctal posted:Eventually someone realizes that you can randomize tiny sections of your hard drive and sacrifice those instead. A byte is 8 bits, a kilobyte is 1024, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes... at odds of 1 in (2^3)^((2^10)^(2^10)), anything can happen. Eventually someone creates a random number generator with a large enough spread that they become a god.
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May 3, 2022 21:32
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Parahexavoctal posted:"Magic" involves making events happen that are possible but improbable. The more improbable they are, the more magic you need to spend. This is a really good one
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May 3, 2022 21:33
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Literally A Person posted:Every time you cast a spell you lose one digit. You get 10. That's it. I would not waste it on identifying an item. Disagree. Being able to identify would be an invaluable boon to archaeology. It would also wreck the art world when famous paintings were exposed as fakes or forgeries.
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May 3, 2022 21:44
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BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:Mana is stored in the balls Das Boo posted:For women it's the tits and we call it TP. wheels of times did this already
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May 3, 2022 22:19
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Anyone can do magic but the effects are very weak. Usually not worth doing expect at scale or for situations where the margin of error is razor thin. A ward against fire will only reduce the risk of your house burning down by 0.02%. But when every building in the world has a 0.02% reduced change of burning down it actually matters. Now imagine the impact of tattos that ward every so sligthly against cancer and the most common causes of premature death. At the other end of the scale when you are doing neurosurgery, the tiniest mistake is deadly. So ofcourse you say the incantation of artemis to keep your hands steady. For this reason the foremost masters of magic are usually found among economists. The revoutionary techniques of the red necomancer Karl Marx is still studied in many realms. His tomb is still guarded by the ghosts of workers killed in work accidents that he called into eternal service with his dying breath. Their grusome visage alone is enough to scare away any would be Vandal. Today the arcane and blasmephous rites of financiers who tear and pull at the threads of fates are feared by the wise.
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May 3, 2022 23:17
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ChubbyChecker posted:wheels of times did this already BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:Magic is stored in the balls and tits but each is a half of the same coin. Ball magic is imprecise and aggressive while tit magic is accurate and supportive. True magic harmony is only possible when the two are used together. Sadly, ball magic was tainted by Loose Nutskin during the last turning of the Wheel and all who wield it are destined to go insane from the evil churning in their balls.
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May 3, 2022 23:26
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goatface posted:All words are antimagical and our development of language has forever cut us off from being able to perform it. this is basically zen buddhism
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May 3, 2022 23:43
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Magic is understanding that everything in the universe is just the dream of an unconscious sleeping God, with everyone being bits of the Godhead going through the dream world bound by physical law in the same way you go through a dream bound by dream logic you don't question or acknowledge as nonsense. A Magician is a bit of the Godhead basically being a lucid dreamer, manipulating the narrative because it's all in your head anyway. The danger is pushing things too far and accidentally "waking up," popping you out of the shared dream-existence as you realize you're not real.
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May 3, 2022 23:43
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super sweet best pal posted:Disagree. Being able to identify would be an invaluable boon to archaeology. It would also wreck the art world when famous paintings were exposed as fakes or forgeries. "Is this an actual artifact, or just a rock?" "... it's a rock." "drat. Well, how many fingers do you have left?"
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May 4, 2022 00:41
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if you think you can make better magic than Jack Vance i wish you good luck op
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May 4, 2022 00:43
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Asterite34 posted:Magic is understanding that everything in the universe is just the dream of an unconscious sleeping God, with everyone being bits of the Godhead going through the dream world bound by physical law in the same way you go through a dream bound by dream logic you don't question or acknowledge as nonsense. A Magician is a bit of the Godhead basically being a lucid dreamer, manipulating the narrative because it's all in your head anyway. The danger is pushing things too far and accidentally "waking up," popping you out of the shared dream-existence as you realize you're not real.  this his how real magic works. I suggest reading the works of aleister Crowley if you would like to improve your magic masturbation techneques and ascend beyond the veil
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May 4, 2022 00:46
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Every time you do magic it upsets the transdimensional machine elves because shaping reality is union work and you aren't a member.
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May 4, 2022 00:52
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The only magic is time manipulation of inanimate matter. In theory, one could cast a fireball by pulling a piece of flung magma from a volcano eruption in the past or future into the present. Centered in a society with a rich oral history but no writing. So you have to learn about where in history these things took place by talking to someone who was there or has used that moment in time to conjure something from there before.
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May 4, 2022 01:26
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Applewhite posted:This is a really good one Thank you. I've had it bouncing around in the back of my head for quite a while, and I didn't have any particular story I could use it in. It feels sort of John Constantine-ish.
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May 4, 2022 01:29
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Magic which is so rudimentary that it is indistinguishable from basic technology
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May 4, 2022 01:39
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Like you just cast a spell to conjure something that looks like an old nokia brick phone and that lets you communicate over long distances
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May 4, 2022 01:39
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You would have spells like... Extract Cash Using a credit card as a reagent, extract cash from any nearby ATM up to a maximum determined by your character's Credit Score. or Banish Darkness Produce a flashlight from within your robe to assist your party in seeing through the night. Lasts for 6 hours.
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May 4, 2022 01:42
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deep dish peat moss posted:You would have spells like... 
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May 4, 2022 01:54
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deep dish peat moss posted:You would have spells like... Sounds like WOD Hunter. Just plain Jane af.
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May 4, 2022 01:55
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Parahexavoctal posted:"Magic" involves making events happen that are possible but improbable. The more improbable they are, the more magic you need to spend. You know that very very popular house rule in D&D where you can attempt a skill check attempting something incredibly unlikely to succeed but it does as long as you roll a nat 20? The knock on, in-world effect of that actions attempted by sentient being has a probability floor of 1 in 20. Nothing anyone does can be less likely than this. I always thought it would be very very funny to have a villain in a D&D campaign that realised that and did all kinds of insane exploits.
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May 4, 2022 02:04
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I cast my little spell by waving my little stick around
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May 4, 2022 02:05
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i could tell you how literal actual magic works but the truth is that knowing how it works doesn't matter, you're already magic. you're magic, dog
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May 4, 2022 03:08
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Applewhite posted:As any true fantasy connoisseur can tell you, the key to writing a popular fantasy novel isn't well-developed characters, a satisfying story arc, or detailed worldbuilding. The key to a popular fantasy novel is a unique magic system that nerds can obsess over and work into their fanfictions. pretty sure it was another Sanderson series, but i forget the name, but they would consume tiny amounts of minerals that would grant different powers. I thought that was pretty cool, and unique. like one would let you push (force powers!) away, and one would let you pull (more force powers!), and like levitation. and uhh.. reflexes and other stuff. They were like assassins, or something. Not really "adult" novels, but good for a quick break from reality. It might of been Brent Weeks. Or the Dragon Knight which was a silly series, and he'd have to write mental equations on his mind blackboard. Like grass + fire = smoke cloud or some stupid poo poo. i love me some unique magic systems. blight rhino fucked around with this message at 03:27 on May 4, 2022 |
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May 4, 2022 03:23
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That loving Sned posted:The number 1 reason magic should not be used, it's the gig economy for pixies Pixies are actually responsible for casting spells but they drain your life, your training is communication with them. Wizards only look old cause they're 35, but can converse with fairies.
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May 4, 2022 05:26
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Asterite34 posted:Magic is understanding that everything in the universe is just the dream of an unconscious sleeping God, with everyone being bits of the Godhead going through the dream world bound by physical law in the same way you go through a dream bound by dream logic you don't question or acknowledge as nonsense. A Magician is a bit of the Godhead basically being a lucid dreamer, manipulating the narrative because it's all in your head anyway. The danger is pushing things too far and accidentally "waking up," popping you out of the shared dream-existence as you realize you're not real. Yeah I read all the books in morrowind too.
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May 4, 2022 05:32
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I’m watching Scanners again, a movie with a thalidomide based magic system.
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May 4, 2022 06:54
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Lego voodoo magic. You build a facsimile of the thing you want to do something to out of lego, then do the thing to the lego. The more accurate the lego build is, the better the spell the works. If you use illegal moves the spell rebounds on you instead.
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May 4, 2022 08:38
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Applewhite posted:Suzanna Clarke also did a great job in Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I just finished it a couple days ago and now I don't know what to with my life. read her other book, Piranesi
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May 4, 2022 09:38
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:read her other book, Piranesi I actually read Piranesi first then remembered Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell had been sitting on my shelf for ten years.
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May 4, 2022 12:32
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Wizarding power is directly linked to "bad" cholesterol levels. In the summer of 1997, the two greatest wizards of all time, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole and Chris Farley, fought an epic duel over the Pacific Ocean. Israel perished, but Chris Farley was mortally wounded in the battle, and succumbed himself some few months later.
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May 4, 2022 14:38
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For however much energy a spell must conjure to be cast it consumes a set amount of blue liquid that must be in the wizard's stomach. You don't need to be smart or anything, just have as much blue liquid in your stomach as possible. Once cast, the blue liquid disappears from your stomach as it is turned to energy. The liquid can be anything as long as it's blue (blueberry juice, anti-freeze etc.) The only skills and abilities that matter are stomach size, shotgunning liquids without gagging, and ability to suppress vomiting.
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May 4, 2022 15:15
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