Making a Fantasy Game (PhoneLobster, please stay out)

[Elennsar]

Since the Making a Fantasy Game thread is (or will) be bogged down in dealing with PhoneLobster's objections to everything Frank says, I'm making this thread in the hope continuing the part of the discussion that actually is producing actual discussion.

First priority:

Are we helping with Frank's project (the floating islands, the pan-asianness, the end of the Bronze Age stuff), or are we making a project that may involve Frank's help (something else)?

Second priority: Okay, what is the project exactly, now that we know which?

[Username17]

Sigh. Since the other thread was permanently thread crapped by bullshit, let's continue here:

Since there are skyships, are there beams of enchanted rock within it? Do you need an earth shaper on board to run it, or can they be automated?

The Skyships are based on blocks of rocks with chains hanging down from them to suspend the ships. The rocks only move because an earthshaper gets them to move. Navigation is handled relative to Redarkhan - kind of like the Astromicon from 40K. The Earthshapers can detect some special detectable rock there, and they make distance and direction calculations relative to that.

How small a scale can the floating rocks be made (earth shapers with levitation rocks)? Can they imbue floatiness on a whim, randomly destabilizing stone buildings if done right?

I figure the smallest ones to be mde to float should be about 1 meter cubed. Which is small enough that you could float on it Terra style, but not small enough that you could imbed them in your suit and fly like Magneto. Actually preparing them into floating form is a time consuming process, and shouldn't be of a whole lot of utility during a city siege.

What's next to work on?

Adventuring parameters. For example: let's say that you're a hero. You go into a Senician village and they give you a quest. You go off to accomplish that quest. The questions really are what the quest could be, what the difficulties in the quest would be, and what special skills the players have that make them be the ones that do it rather than a group of young men from the village with slings and spears.

I'm assuming for the moment that basic quests might include:

• Hostage Situation: Bandit, monster, or rival village has a prisoner the villagers want freed.
• Monster Patrol: Dangerous beast is on the loose and the villagers want it stopped.
• Investigation: A crime has been committed, and the villagers want the perpetrators tracked down and brought to justice.
• Relic Hunt: An important object has fallen into somebody's hands, and the villagers want it back.
• Territory fight: There is an area that the villagers believe should belong to them and they want you to capture it for them.

So there should be difficulties in the quest and skills in the characters such that the player characters are the ones who should be doing these quests and simultaneously the quests themselves aren't the 3-spell-shenanigans that item retrieval is for high level D&D wizards.

-Fran

[Elennsar]

Sounds like we have a relationship between "adventurers" and "villagers" not entirely unlike (in some aspects) Seven Samurai (why exactly this metaphor makes any sense is a mystery, humor me)...being an adventurer may not let you take on the whole village at once, but you can do plenty of nasty things to the village that they -can't- beat you for.

Sure, maybe a village could defeat you if they all mobbed you, but losing all the able bodied men in the village to defeat an adventurer is a bad trade.

[Username17]

Seven Samurai is a decent starting point for one of the biggest quandaries: why don't the villagers just do it themselves?

In Seven Samurai, many of the villains were just guys with spears - essentially no different from the villagers themselves. However, the bandits were willing to take casualties and the villagers basically weren't. If player characters have the bad assery to stay alive in harsher circumstances than villagers, hiring them out to go into harm's way makes a lot of sense.

Simply giving trained dudes a higher death margin or the more generous hero wound table from Mordheim would go a long way.

-Username17

[Elennsar]

Indeed. But they could easily still be similar enough in terms of how easily they can die that seven samurai against forty bandits all at once is a bad thing, and even not all at once might be dangerous (though we presumably want a better situation than that for TNE, that idea may still work).

Having heroes be able to laugh off common bandits means that its not much of a quest. That might be okay when we get to high level, but it probably needs to be important early on, and the idea that lesser foes can topple you may need to stay.

[TavishArtair]

Have you watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Frank? Because as far as I can tell the Redarkhans make their floaty rocks out of aetherium crystal.

[Username17]

I don't want to get overly into mathematical axioms round about here, but difficulty certainly means a lot of different things.

Baking a wedding cake is difficult because most people can't do it. On the other hand, if I gave a "make a wedding cake" quest to someone properly skilled, I would be surprised and offended if they didn't succeed in doing it. The only questions really would be how long it took them and how awesomely they completed it.

Building a Pyramid is difficult because it takes a metric fuck tonne of man hours to do it. On the other hand, it really doesn't take much in the way of super special talent or skill. You just put a lot of effort into it and eventually you finish.

Winning a game of Russian Roulette several times in a row is difficult, because there is a very real and substantial chance that you'll fucking die, even though there's no skill or pride in accomplishment.

Painting a masterpiece is difficult because not only can people who aren't master painters not do it in the first place, but because the vast majority of things that even a master painter puts his hand to won't end up as masterpieces.

---

What is important is that whatever the quests are, that there are good solid reasons why the following criteria are met:

• Those quests given to the player characters are not done as well or better by random dudes already in the village. No quests to milk a dude's cows when he obviously has way more cow milking skill than you.
• Those quests given to the player characters are not performed in a manner so trivial that it is not worth spending time in the evening talking about it (which does not mean that there is necessarily even a chance of failure if the characters use all of their relevant abilities).
• Those quests that the players have a substantial chance of failing won't end the game or the universe if they are failed.

So for example: finding a lost child on the moors and bringing them back may not be terribly difficult for a Senician who can detect life that is touching grass. The team can magically triangulate on her location and walk over to her. And indeed, it's just a child. The team boar riding rakshasa can ride her down and drag her off if it comes to that, but the team would presumably want to take her home more gracefully than that.

That's a reasonable quest despite the fact that there's no really chance of "failure" at all. It's a place holder, but it showcases talents the team members have that villagers don't and it's a character developing opportunity. An essentially identical quest where the end result was to find a missing key on the moor wouldn't really be worth talking about unless something else was going on because it would just be a matter of using divinations over and over again until you found it, walking over and picking it up. There'd be no real interpersonal communication going on and thus no reason for us to "give a damn."

A quest doesn't have to have the outcome be in doubt so long as the method of achieving that outcome is in doubt.

-Username17

[Username17]

Have you watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Frank? Because as far as I can tell the Redarkhans make their floaty rocks out of aetherium crystal.

Yeah, but it was a hugely long time ago. Reagan was president of the United States. But if I recall correctly, it's pretty similar, yeah.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

Have you watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Frank? Because as far as I can tell the Redarkhans make their floaty rocks out of aetherium crystal.

Yeah, but it was a hugely long time ago. Reagan was president of the United States. But if I recall correctly, it's pretty similar, yeah.

-Username17

Considering that the Redarkhan make aetherium crystal floaty rocks, it's obvious they can make larger ones, but what's their lower limit on size? Because given that, it seems eminently plausible that an individual Redarkhan skymage of significant enough power would have a magic amulet, or if that's not big enough, a floating nimbus stone surfboard. Who owns the aetherium anyways? In this hypothetical, would an individual skymage be able to own his skyboard, or is every bit of aetherium without exception viewed as Guild property, and it would be viewed as "official issue."

[violence in the media]

I dig the stone surfboard idea. That sounds cool.

[Username17]

I was wondering about that. If the floating islands are low enough that they get rained on, then that implies streams and maybe a river or two. That's going to create a very spectacular waterfall when it leaves the island. If you did things right, you could park your floating island so that its waterfall drains directly into a reservoir in the land below. Then you use the reservoir to feed irrigation and drinking water for the villages below.

The islands I had originally penned in at about 3000 meters in elevation. That would put them about the high end of the Sierra Madre. The actual area right under them is pretty much dense rain forest. It's not the best growing area because it's partially overshadowed and sometimes things fall on it. So I don't really see why people would put any of the villages right under neath any of the three major cities.

I'm flexible on that elevation though. It might be better to drop it down to more like 1200 meters so that people on the ground could see it better. In either case though, it's going to be low enough that rain will hit it from time to time. In any case, the largest city has ~700,000 people at its seasonal height, so I don't see it having to be more than 5-8 kilometers on a side, and it's going to have some gaps in the middle. The ground directly below it will definitely get water and sun enough to grow trees.

Another question is: are the floating blocks that form the basis for the island are impervious to water? If they are not, then the land below will get muddy rain. If they are, then a bowl shape will make the island into a swamp. About now I'm wishing I knew more about geography.

I think we're looking at roughly bowl shaped with a river running through it and over the side. I say that because I personally live in such a city right now.

In this hypothetical, would an individual skymage be able to own his skyboard, or is every bit of aetherium without exception viewed as Guild property, and it would be viewed as "official issue."

My original thought was for the low end to be about a 1m, 6 tonne cube. This would allow for people to make Terra style flying by standing on a flying rock rocks, but not Magneto-style "I fill my suit with flying sand and fly" suits. That being said, I do like the idea of a flying surfboard.

Perhaps a compromise, where the larger things are required to persist, but that you can make a smaller object that will float as long as you keep moving it. So you can ride on a flying stone surfboard, but when you let go of it, it will plummet like a rock.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

My original thought was for the low end to be about a 1m, 6 tonne cube. This would allow for people to make Terra style flying by standing on a flying rock rocks, but not Magneto-style "I fill my suit with flying sand and fly" suits. That being said, I do like the idea of a flying surfboard.

Perhaps a compromise, where the larger things are required to persist, but that you can make a smaller object that will float as long as you keep moving it. So you can ride on a flying stone surfboard, but when you let go of it, it will plummet like a rock.

-Username17

Would the stone surfboard be a piece of magical technology that anyone could use, or is it intended to be a conduit for the power of the skymage?

[RandomCasualty2]

My original thought was for the low end to be about a 1m, 6 tonne cube. This would allow for people to make Terra style flying by standing on a flying rock rocks, but not Magneto-style "I fill my suit with flying sand and fly" suits. That being said, I do like the idea of a flying surfboard.

Well one thing to do is to make flying islands not really fly. At least not the material. A flying island material could just be immune to gravity. Which means that basically once you move it somewhere, it stays there unless some force moves it. Flying islands might also have a separate magical means of propulsion, but that doesn't have anything to do with the floatstone or whatever.

This would prevent people from just filling their suits with it, because that would mean that you'd still have to provide propulsion. So you can't fall, but you can't fly either. So if you jumped up you'd just pretty much hang there in midair unable to move or anything. It might actually not be a bad way to imprison people by suspending them in midair until you pulled them down, but it wouldn't be practical for adventurers unless they had other means of flight.

[Judging__Eagle]

Epiphyte!

These marble rocks has it.



It's a blue, jelly-like substance, called epiphyte, whose properties defy the laws of gravity. It was first shown in Metabarons, it's the key to the great and massive Metabaronic fortunes; since well, you can coat space-ships with this gravity-defying material, and run around through solar wells without worrying about stuff.

It does not however do anything other than defy gravity. It doesn't allow you to move around, or even go up, or down. You need to apply thrust to get movement, however not fighting gravity does tend to be helpful.

Yes, that pic is the aftermath of a battle. A small group of besieged troops used Epiphyte coated marble blocks as weapons and cover in order to get into melee range of a massive force of enemies that had well, they're essentially space marines, but without melee-training, or being super-human, or being really morally dedicated (think more human troops in 40k armour with bolters, than full-on acid-fanged Spess Mehrens).

One of the characters in the series is shot full of the stuff when he was a fetus; and he floats, so his father nearly kills him since he's unable to fight or be trained to fight normally.

Then again, everything from Jodorowsky is fucking brilliant. Even the dumb things, or the copying of Dune.

[MartinHarper]

Well one thing to do is to make flying islands not really fly. At least not the material. A flying island material could just be immune to gravity.

Problems:
1. I land on a flying island. It is immune to gravity. I am not. I therefore exert a force on it. It therefore starts accelerating downwards. Therefore you need to tie a helium balloon or a rocket to the island to counteract that.
2. Rotation of the planet. Things that are immune to gravity will experience a centrifugal force away from the planet's center, and be hurled into space. Of course, you can have a non-rotating planet and have the sun rotate around the planet, but this is just the kind of nonstandard planetary physics that Frank doesn't want.

Incidentally, casting a spell that makes someone immune to gravity for X rounds is a fun way of killing them.

[RandomCasualty2]

1. I land on a flying island. It is immune to gravity. I am not. I therefore exert a force on it. It therefore starts accelerating downwards. Therefore you need to tie a helium balloon or a rocket to the island to counteract that.

Not always no.

In basic terms you'd have to apply sufficient force to sink it.

In scientific terms, you'd say that the island still has inertia and you must still exceed static friction to move the island. Likely the island itself would have some magically provided friction to make it difficult to move. Yes, theoretically you could pile tons of weight on it and eventually sink it. But the amount of weight that could be on it before it sinks could be anything you want it to be.

2. Rotation of the planet. Things that are immune to gravity will experience a centrifugal force away from the planet's center, and be hurled into space. Of course, you can have a non-rotating planet and have the sun rotate around the planet, but this is just the kind of nonstandard planetary physics that Frank doesn't want.

Too sciency. Don't think that hard.

There's nothing even to suggest that planets orbit the sun in D&D. The sun might orbit the earth.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I don't think the stone itself is in any way magical. Basically, the "sky" mages have figured out how to lock the stones into and more them along some kind of fixed universal coordinates. That's where the magic is, not in the stone.


Alternatively, a kind of 'ley line'-based geomancy could be cool. Something along the lines the mana ideas discussed in the early stages of TNE. That would force the magic into a more plot devicey state. Apologies to those who don't like magnetic trains.

[IGTN]

Immunity to gravity doesn't do what we want; the floating islands need a kind of friction, where their floating power exerts a force (up to a maximum) counteracting forces applied to them. If the force floating them doesn't vary, then they need to be perfectly balanced to not crash/float away.

Of course, if the force decreased with height, then more weight would merely cause them to dip lower, and less weight to rise, but it would reach a new equilibrium.

A restoring force that increases in strength as it gets further from a fixed position would also work.

So, a skyship unloads ten tons of grain onto a floating island. What happens to the island? Does it sink? Does it tilt? Does it dip down and then back up? Does it act like solid ground?

[Username17]

Magical mag-lev seems by fr the easiest, since there is a continuous force that pushes it upwards and increases in power if you pull it down, allowing it to achieve equilibrium very quickly when you add or remove weights from it.

Simply having something be unaffected by gravity causes all other forces that things are pushed upon to loom large. An object stays at rest not when the number or value of the forces operating on them is minimized, but when the net forces operating on the object add up to zero.

So having inverse square force holding something in place is good, because it means that the addition or subtraction of a force only moves its position slightly instead of moving its acceleration slightly.

-Username17

[MartinHarper]

Magical mag-lev seems by fr the easiest, since there is a continuous force that pushes it upwards and increases in power if you pull it down, allowing it to achieve equilibrium very quickly when you add or remove weights from it.

I'd agree with that. So, to clarify:

1) The 'flying' material is locked so that it has a preferred height above the planet's core. Presumably there is something special about the planet's core that allows this. You can't lock arbitrary pairs of objects together.

2) If the material deviates from its preferred height, a force is generated that tends to push it back to its preferred height. So, due to gravity, to get an island to float at 2000ft, you need to set its preferred height to 2100ft (say). As a consequence of this, when it is raining on the island, it hangs a little lower in the sky. Updrafts and downdrafts and landings and take-offs can also cause it to hang differently.

3) There is no force preventing horizontal motion in any direction. So you can fix a trapdoor in place by locking it to the core, but you can't fix a castle door in place by locking it to the core. This also allows people to skysurf and have ships and so forth. Flying islands will tend to move towards the equator, due to centrifugal force, and this is not opposed by the magi-maglev.

That all sound desirable?

[Username17]

3) There is no force preventing horizontal motion in any direction. So you can fix a trapdoor in place by locking it to the core, but you can't fix a castle door in place by locking it to the core. This also allows people to skysurf and have ships and so forth. Flying islands will tend to move towards the equator, due to centrifugal force, and this is not opposed by the magi-maglev.

This is one I would like to do away with. While the horizontal preference of a stone can be very much less than its vertical preference, it should probably still have one so that rocketry effects of people getting onto and off of the islands wouldn't meaningfully move them around. The idea is that they should be treated as functionally stationary rather than as air hockey pucks.

Changing the vertical and horizontal preference of a stone should require the direct intervention of a sky mage.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

This is one I would like to do away with. While the horizontal preference of a stone can be very much less than its vertical preference, it should probably still have one so that rocketry effects of people getting onto and off of the islands wouldn't meaningfully move them around. The idea is that they should be treated as functionally stationary rather than as air hockey pucks.

Well seriously, just because islands float doesn't mean they have to be easy to push. A guy pushing on an aircraft carrier won't meaningfully move it.

[virgil]

Meh, I'm kind of iffy on the the surfboard technique. I can imagine someone making a 'jetpack' if they do it right, especially if they try and mix magic to get the motive force for greater speed/maneuverability.

Territory fight quests seem like it would be difficult if done in D&D. There're no guidelines for when a force decides to back down. Would you need something akin to diplomacy for organizations, or would you have the territory opened up long enough for the villagers to fill up and defending it is like defending a castle (better to starve it out on an army scale)?

[TavishArtair]

In this hypothetical, would an individual skymage be able to own his skyboard, or is every bit of aetherium without exception viewed as Guild property, and it would be viewed as "official issue."

My original thought was for the low end to be about a 1m, 6 tonne cube. This would allow for people to make Terra style flying by standing on a flying rock rocks, but not Magneto-style "I fill my suit with flying sand and fly" suits. That being said, I do like the idea of a flying surfboard.

Perhaps a compromise, where the larger things are required to persist, but that you can make a smaller object that will float as long as you keep moving it. So you can ride on a flying stone surfboard, but when you let go of it, it will plummet like a rock.

-Username17

Sure, that could work. You could also say that it is difficult to correctly mine a surfboard-shaped aetherium crystal floatstone, even for earth mages, so most floatrocks are aggregate aetherium-and-stuff, so as to avoid damaging it. Thus, the surfboards are mostly the possessions of people who are very experienced in this sort of thing and a personal affair in construction, like Jedi lightsabers except with transportation in mind.

If going with a surfboard that drops when unattended, I would be more inclined to say that it careens in a somewhat more graceful pattern towards the ground, coasting downwards on currents before eventually smashing into something, and say that the skymage upon it quite literally causes it to "surf", instead of crashing. It would have enough levitation in it to not go on a direct course to earth, but not enough resistance to gravity to actually remain in place, and with control this is transformed into something that can drift or soar as appropriate, but without control it rapidly spirals into a fall. And for some reason as I type this my mind's eye is capturing Mario from Super Mario World bouncing on his flying cape, except with a surfboard. Go figure.

[Manxome]

Well seriously, just because islands float doesn't mean they have to be easy to push. A guy pushing on an aircraft carrier won't meaningfully move it.

Anyone have sufficient physics experience to calculate how much mass these would need to have in an earth-like atmosphere to not move around much? I don't have a good intuition for this.

Keep in mind that unless civilization spans the globe, some islands are presumably on the periphery of civilization, which means pretty much all traffic is going to be going to or coming from the same direction--which means it will be accelerating in the same direction relative to the island, whether it's taking off or landing. So you may need to worry about cumulative effects of thousands of people repeated over generations, rather than just a handful of ships taking off at once.

Might be worth considering the effects of wind, too. These might do very interesting things in a hurricane.

And of course, whether there is a horizontal restoring force or not has big implications for whether you can use this stuff to build a ship that moves without actually having a sky mage on board.


Tangential question: when sky mages move these blocks around, do they do it by directly applying force, or by magically changing the anchor point and then letting the restoring force do its thing? The exact prerequisites for changing an anchor point may have a very big impact on how fast and maneuverable you are. Maybe more powerful mages can make things move faster because they can set the anchor to a point that's farther away from themselves?

Is restorative force proportional to mass, or do big blocks take longer to correct? Can you designate multiple anchors for a single rigid body (or different parts of that body) to get a larger net force on it?