Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 11:19 am

The Astral Plane
“What would you do if there was a world realer than our own? What if there was a world that was less?”

Parallel to our own world is an ethereal and largely empty world full of magical energy. It is called the astral plane, and it is physically inaccessible and invisible save through the use of magic. However, shadows of things in the real world are cast into the astral one. These multicolored images are called auras, and those with the ability can divine a considerable information about objects, events, and people in the material world by observing them. Auras are important not only because they reveal secrets about the world, but also because magic works through auras. If someone casts a spell, it must pass into the astral plane, through auras, and then back into the material world.

The rules of magic are different than the laws of physics, and the connectivity of auras is not the same as physical contact or gravitational pull. Auras are connected because of association, in both a proximal and metaphorical sense. If a man touches a doorknob, a piece of his aura will linger on the aura of that doorknob for a brief period. If the same man feels strong emotions about touching that doorknob, the aura connection would last longer, and the colors of that aura would appear brighter to observers. If the same man touched the doorknob with an injured hand, the blood on it would keep an associated aura for longer still.

Auras extend outward from all creatures and objects, and hover in the air around places with significant emotional importance. The astral plane appears smoky and colorful – like a rave with fog machines and laser shows. But auras are also semitransparent, like water with coloring swirling in it, and with astral sight one can see through objects to limited degree. Auras are wholly insubstantial even on the astral plane, and they bar passage no more than does a cloud of smoke.

Paths of Magic
“And I did it my way.”

There are a lot of ways to make magic work, and in 2075 a lot of them are in use. In the first couple of decades after 2020, there were literally thousands of systems people put forward to try to use and explain magic. But the fact is that a lot of those attempts did not work, and many of the proposed systems worked a lot less well than others. In the decades since, most of the magical theories have been discarded by the vast majority of people. Darwinistic selection of successful theories over unsuccessful ones has been pretty total in most of the world. When magic is demonstrable, the people whose techniques actually work can demonstrate that. But while many people believe that there is a one true path somewhere out there, there is no agreement as to what that path actually is. In 2075 there are about two hundred distinct systems of magic that are in wide spread use, and while various advantages and disadvantages have been shown for doing magic one way or another, all of the ones that are considered major do produce results.

Following a magic path is an artistic philosophy and a technical discipline, using distinct physical metaphors to describe magical effects and the causes of those effects. Very importantly, these metaphors actually work, but only for the people who actually use the magical path. Followers of other paths need to approach magic with their own path-relevant physical metaphors in order to get magical effects to work. For example: followers of the path of Dagon hold that Thaumaturgy is a lot like swimming; and Dagon cultists train to become better at Thaumaturgy by practicing swimming. Followers of the path of Lakhota Shamanism say that Thaumaturgy is a lot like cooking; and Lakhota shaman train to become better at Thaumaturgy by curing meat. Both of these techniques work, but mixing the systems does not. If a Dagon cultist spends a lot of time getting really good at making sausage, they will get no better at Thaumaturgy; if a Lakhota shaman spends a lot of time getting really good at swimming, he won't become any better at Thaumaturgy either. Mixing and matching magical paths does not normally produce a working whole, and people who try to make paths that use the bits that work from several paths end up with a failed system in almost all cases.

The immiscibility of magical paths has led to a balkanization of culture in much of the world. In the Union Territories, wizards mostly follow the paradigm of Wicca; and in neighboring Quebec, wizards mostly follow the paradigm of Goetism. And in the areas that are on the border, people don't have syncretic paradigms, because syncretism does not work. Wicca espouses a fair amount of philosophical and cosmological ideas that permeate cultural discourse in the Union Territories, and Goetism espouses very different philosophical and cosmological ideas that are culturally important in Quebec. Importantly, spirits that conjurers call up are also aligned morphologically and philosophically with the magic paths that they are associated with. Dagon cultists summon void beasts, who look like tentacled horrors and describe themselves as void beasts; while Goetic wizards summon angels and demons, who appear as winged or cloven hoofed demihumans and describe themselves as demons and angels. A Goetic wizard cannot summon a void beast or a demon that looks like a void beast, nor can a Dagon cultist summon an angel or a void beast that looks like an angel. The dimensions they come from appear to be different, and any particular path of magic only summons things from one other dimension.

Game mechanically, each path has a skill associated with each type of magic, and it is that skill that determines how many dice the character uses when they employ that type of magic. Further, each path of magic has a stable of available summoned creatures. Game mechanically, this works out to each path providing access to five spirit types, each associated with one of the five types of spells, and providing a short list of optional powers available to the spirits they summon. Any time a Goetic wizard summons a Fire Spirit it is a “Fire Demon” and it looks like a Goetic fire demon, and it has access to the Goetic Demon Power List for optional powers. Goetic demons are different from Wiccan spirits not only in appearance, but also in available types (there are no Wiccan fire spirits) and in available optional powers.

Traditions
“It was good enough for our ancestors.”

Many magical paths are based heavily on ancient culturally appropriate magical practices. Magical paths that make claim to being “the same” as the magic used by people in the past are called traditions of magic. Users of traditional magic are given traditional names, be it “shaman” or “priest” or “medicine man”. Traditions are strongly associated with moral and ethical systems, which are by their very nature contentious. Most traditions are quite polarizing, with people strongly in favor and strongly opposed to individual traditions. A follower of a tradition that the speaker does not like is likely to be called something derogatory like “savage” or “cultist”. Some traditions even seem to revel in their outsider status and adopt names like that for themselves. Several of the island nations that appeared in the twenties have magical traditions that are explicitly opposed to the rest of the world and their practitioners don't seem to mind being called nasty names. Dagon cultists call themselves “cultists of Dagon”, and considering the pro-piracy stance of the Dagon-dominated countries, no one is moving to change that designation any time soon.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 8:12 pm

That's a reasonable explanation for the concepts you've already expressed... there's still a few weird things about it, though.

I mean, I could see a shaman of whatever type literally cooking up some magic... it conjures up ideas of cauldrons and herbs and eye of newt and whatever. On the other hand, I can't really see what sorts of rituals that a cultist who gets his magic from his superior swimming ability would even do. The one makes sense to me, and the other does not... accordingly, I'd recommend that whenever you're presenting sample magical paths that involve skill choices that don't seem to have anything to do with magic at all, you should at least briefly mention the kind of ritual that actually connects the two concepts; otherwise, you're not really giving a very good explanation of the idea at hand.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:34 am

Lifting weights does not help you while playing baseball, but lifting weights helps you play baseball better.

For a cultist of Dagon, being better at swimming helps them feel the currents and eddies in the aether, and gives endurance to the muscles that they use to pull magick from the void. They don't actually swim to perform every-day magic (although being submerged in water might make certain rituals easier).

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:36 am

Endovior wrote:I mean, I could see a shaman of whatever type literally cooking up some magic... it conjures up ideas of cauldrons and herbs and eye of newt and whatever. On the other hand, I can't really see what sorts of rituals that a cultist who gets his magic from his superior swimming ability would even do.

Similarity is part of association, so I suppose being able to swim better gives you an affinity to the swimming spirits you summon. This could stand to be more explicit, though.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:06 am

A Man In Black wrote:
Endovior wrote:I mean, I could see a shaman of whatever type literally cooking up some magic... it conjures up ideas of cauldrons and herbs and eye of newt and whatever. On the other hand, I can't really see what sorts of rituals that a cultist who gets his magic from his superior swimming ability would even do.
Similarity is part of association, so I suppose being able to swim better gives you an affinity to the swimming spirits you summon. This could stand to be more explicit, though.

That seems really dissociated right now. It's cool mechanically, but I have no idea how it works in-game.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:15 am

Relating to Tech instead of Magic, but this video is rather relevant to the Tech side of things:
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-t ... t-language

If we're gonna make statements about the hardware of the future-world, we should be able to make some statements about the software of the future-world as well.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 7:55 am

That's an interesting talk, but programming languages are largely irrelevant - the differences he lists are just not things the story is interested in. When someone sits down and works on a Large Program, it's going to look, from the average player's perspective, about like it does today. Maybe the UI is different, maybe you use AR or VR metaphors instead of today's menus, maybe you control vim with brainwaves, whatever. In any case, the hacker still goes off somewhere with a bunch of drinkable stimulants, and comes back a while later with a declaration that the code has been written. What he does in the meantime is just not interesting enough to non-coder players, and not going to be detailed or modeled well enough to satisfy coder players.

The interesting question as far as software is concerned is what it looks like to the average user. The stuff that coders use is going to be a mix of things that lag behind design-wise because they are still around from the previous generation and adaptations of the metaphors used for all large programs at the time (Look at Eclipse and Visual Studio for modern ones, emacs and vim for heavily refined old-school stuff). What I really don't know is what the standard metaphors as of 2070 will be, or even what the generation of 2040 will look like. it's pretty obvious that touchscreens and tablets will be a big deal over the next couple decades, but equally obvious that they won't eliminate an interface that lies on the table at hand height. What a direct neural-controlled UI is going to look like is really hard to predict, and AR and holograms will let small devices have really big "screens".

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 11:32 am

Some questions about auras:
-Is it possible for a non-magical individual to drink a potion/use an item/have a spell cast on them that will allow them to perceive auras temporarily?
-Can auras be filmed, measured or otherwise observed using technological means?
-Are auras an objective phenomnia? ie. if two mages observe the same object with mage vision, do they see the same patterns in the aura?
-Does the doorknob leave a piece of its aura on the man when that man touches the doorknob?
-What happens to the aura of an object that's been destroyed?

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:22 pm

zeruslord wrote:TWhat a direct neural-controlled UI is going to look like is really hard to predict, and AR and holograms will let small devices have really big "screens".

With the DNI, I can imagine programming taking the exact form that "Bob" argues will never happen: almost entirely text-free full-sensory 3D VR construction.

You could say that it would follow paradigms like FP or OOP, because you'd be dealing with imaginary physical objects that could be decomposed or composed to an arbitrary degree of abstraction, but the current concept of paradigms would be almost meaningless.

The language in which a specific program is written also becomes meaningless. An IDE would be a full sensory metaphor that can abstract any language away entirely, and which exists to optimize use of the programmer's subconscious. With enough AI, it could even work as an intelligent decompiler.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:00 am

You could say that it would follow paradigms like FP or OOP, because you'd be dealing with imaginary physical objects that could be decomposed or composed to an arbitrary degree of abstraction, but the current concept of paradigms would be almost meaningless.

I really don't see us moving into a truly immersive simulationist VR environment because the idea of Object Oriented programming actually having anything to do with actual objects is the purest of bullshit. The vast majority of OO code is Java business systems operating on "objects" like orders and payments that just don't have a physical manifestation, and that' not changing any time soon. Imaginary physical objects really will just get in the way of the business coders, let alone people trying to manipulate machine internals. Total immersion is really only going to be useful for its own sake - telepresence, gaming, try-before-you-buy, that sort of thing.

The language in which a specific program is written also becomes meaningless. An IDE would be a full sensory metaphor that can abstract any language away entirely, and which exists to optimize use of the programmer's subconscious. With enough AI, it could even work as an intelligent decompiler.

uh, that's really not going to happen without some huge improvements in the compiler space. What you're proposing is a programming language. It's weird, and it's not like anything anyone takes seriously these days, but it is a language of its own. It's vaguely possible that you will manage to write a programming language for which a particular immersive VR metaphor more-or-less models language concepts.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 12:21 pm

Lokathor wrote:Relating to Tech instead of Magic, but this video is rather relevant to the Tech side of things:
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-t ... t-language

Just from reading the summary I can tell the video is going to be bullshit. Of course we have new programming languages, new concepts, new paradigms and new operating systems. But no matter how good they are, they won't be widely adopted until they have a full set of standard libraries and even then they have to battle against a myriad of already entrenched solutions. Look at the examples: Clojure? Clojure is a Lisp. It's newness is that it runs of the extremely fast JVM and can reuse java code. Of course the language itself is old. That is the entire point. Scala? Scala is Java with less typing. Again, that is the entire point. And what's new about Ruby is not what you can do with it (namely the same as with every language) but in the focus on programmer productivity and metaprogramming. All of these languages are "we can do better than that" languages and the innovation is not in the syntax or underlying mechanisms but in the interfaces, either to the underlying layers or to the programmer (or both).

F# of course is Microsoft's version of Haskell, and for someone to not be able to realize the potentially revolutionary concept of a purely functional language (especially when we are hitting a ceiling on CPU clock speeds) and to yet have the gall to give talks about programming languages is truly awe-inspiring.

That said, if you want something to talk about the software side of things I can suggest several concepts:

Software is dead
Software is slow. Software does not cut it. If it is important it uses tailored hardware. And if you want to be important you better do too.

Decently designed hardware will be faster than software by at least an order of magnitude. If your icebreaker, black hammer or autopilot is implemented in hardware it will probably let you beat the shit out of anything running on software. Under this paradigm software is what you use for toys. This also means that you can have old guys in tinkering shops designing chips for you to use. You can have copy protection, virtual drugs and one-of-a-kind programs. Most importantly, your programs can have a price attached to them, which probably insures companies still make programs.

Many-Core has arrived
Multi-core was yesterday. Today's CPUs have a thousand cores. Tomorrow's will have a million. Program running too slow? Throw another ten thousand cores at it.

This concept assumes that we find a decent way to make highly multithreaded programming work and scale decently and that Moore's law continues to hold steady, except for physical limitations in clock and signal speed. Under these assumptions computing power scales linearly with size, power draw and most importantly cash (as opposed to logarithmically, which is what we have right now). That means mainframes are dead. Programs will be written in software and thus be essentially free. That in turn means software companies are dead or else they are small and to client-specific jobs.

We have solved Memory
Storage is cheap you say? How about free? Your fucking Mail account comes with Yottabytes worth of storage.

What happens if we get a breakthrough in storage technology and we can suddenly store everything? Internally system architecture is going to radically change. Caching everywhere, giant data structures, anything to avoid computing overhead. That applies to your computer, to the company server and to the routers for the global net. Externally on the other hand it will all appear quite similar to what we have today, except with functionally unlimited storage and the expected advances in computing speed. But where we used to have log files we now have full playbacks. Where you used to be able to smuggle some important company files out on a memory stick you can now bring the entire history of what has ever been done in that company. As a result, organisations will strictly limit the availability of data, even at the cost of employee productivity. Essentially, if you share a secret you risk sharing it with the world, forever, with no chance of ever getting it back. And the only way to contain those secrets and still get work done are small, manyually selected and tightly controlled teams. It will be heaven for hackers, social hackers and data thieves.

Rise of the expert systems
Remember Prolog? It's kinda like that, except we didn't go deeper, we went broader.

Prolog is a declarative programming language. You state facts and the system infers answers. If we could make something similar work with, say, threedimensional pathfinding, you'd have a a game pathfinding AI. Add knowledge about traffic laws and you get a route planner. Add sensors and you get an autopilot. Add objectives and you get a traffic control systems. All you need is a common interface (to modularize your setup) and a way to simplify the number of calculations needed. One breakthrough and get system that can calculate your family tree, plan your vacation and run an invasion. On the other hand they will still fail horribly at anything than can not be broken down into nice little equations, such as social interaction, security and politics. Again, ample opportunity for criminals there.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 12:38 pm

zeruslord wrote:I really don't see us moving into a truly immersive simulationist VR environment because the idea of Object Oriented programming actually having anything to do with actual objects is the purest of bullshit. The vast majority of OO code is Java business systems operating on "objects" like orders and payments that just don't have a physical manifestation, and that' not changing any time soon.

Ah, but object-oriented programming is all about encapsulation and abstraction - of freeing the mind from details so you can focus on the bigger picture. If you think of VR as visualisation I can see it being extremely useful. Objects in VR would be code modules, their apperance defined by visualisation rules and their physical properties defined by metrics and interfaces. Connecting VR objects means connecting interfaces. Moving objects means running them on different hardware. At the highest level you'd plug a default perimeter defense system into your existing base control system. Move the parts around until the color indicates none of them is resource starved, then switch to terrain analysis view. Note that the southern sector blinks orange. Zoom in. You are now manipulating patrols, gun placement and so on. Notice a hill blocks some of your cameras. Pull back the fence slightly, move a camera to the hill, reroute patrols. You are not green. Zoom out again. Adjust neighbouering sectors if necessary.

Heck, we could do this today, except we'd need all those visualisation rules and processing overhead just to project a 3D environment we can't decently manipulate. But given advances in processing power and a neural interfaces those points become moot. It would probably suck for creating something from scratch. But deployment and modifcation should work fine in VR.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 1:55 pm

The Tradition game mechanic creates a correlation, not a causation, between a mundane skill and a school of magic. In many cases I think it makes sense to say "Because I'm good at astral magic, I'm good at swimming" rather than "Because I'm good at swimming, I'm good at astral magic."

Casting spells may not be anything like swimming. But if a Songs of the Deep mage learns astral spells by swimming out into the ocean and treading water for days until dehydration and fatigue give him hallucinations, then as a consequence of having learned astral magic she will be an excellent swimmer.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 2:54 pm

zeruslord wrote:I really don't see us moving into a truly immersive simulationist VR environment... Imaginary physical objects really will just get in the way of the business coders, let alone people trying to manipulate machine internals. Total immersion is really only going to be useful for its own sake - telepresence, gaming, try-before-you-buy, that sort of thing.
The language in which a specific program is written also becomes meaningless. An IDE would be a full sensory metaphor that can abstract any language away entirely, and which exists to optimize use of the programmer's subconscious. With enough AI, it could even work as an intelligent decompiler.
uh, that's really not going to happen without some huge improvements in the compiler space. What you're proposing is a programming language. It's weird, and it's not like anything anyone takes seriously these days, but it is a language of its own. It's vaguely possible that you will manage to write a programming language for which a particular immersive VR metaphor more-or-less models language concepts.

Yeah, I'm not talking about something that will really happen. I'm talking about programming in a cyberpunk game that already assumes full immersive VR, direct electronic mind control, and "anchors" that can abstract away any user interface into a single consistent metaphor.

The proposed IDE would effectively be in a language (in the sense that a language that compiles to C as an intermediate is a language and not C). The distinction here is that it would also automatically translate C programs, FORTH programs, Java programs, and ML programs all back into the same language (or at least allow you to operate on them the same way), without losing meaning, when you want to edit them. The IDE language would be different for every individual, because it would rely on the inner workings of her subconscious.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 5:57 pm

You're looking for something like SimuLink. Which is already a real thing that powers real-world devices. (or LabView)

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:02 pm

Murtak wrote:*complaints and talking about languages*

No, he goes over all that in the video. He even talks about F# and functional programming as being key. "new paradigms" are something he says won't be invented, because a new one hasn't come out in decades and each one takes away something from the programmer's toolbox (infinite space, goto, implied goto, free mutability), and we've little to nothing left to take away. And, since we don't have any new game-changing revolutions showing up any more, then the conclusion is that eventually programming will stabilize into a single language the same way math and science and engineering have each stabilized into common languages. It's a fair argument, even if it's not perfect.

I think that among the paragraphs you put down, "many core" in some form is doable, but "solved memory" has a lot of weird implications that aren't helpful.

"Expert Systems" are a wonderful explanation for how Drone AI works, and for why drones are limited in what they're deployed to do within society. Otherwise, drones would be everywhere for everything and there'd be little need for people (the cost of feeding a person for 18 years to get an adult human being far greater than the cost to build a drone).

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:20 pm

Grek wrote:Some questions about auras:
-Is it possible for a non-magical individual to drink a potion/use an item/have a spell cast on them that will allow them to perceive auras temporarily?
-Can auras be filmed, measured or otherwise observed using technological means?
-Are auras an objective phenomnia? ie. if two mages observe the same object with mage vision, do they see the same patterns in the aura?
-Does the doorknob leave a piece of its aura on the man when that man touches the doorknob?
-What happens to the aura of an object that's been destroyed?

Yep, clearly I'm going to need a whole section on exactly how auras work. Here's a closely associated section, spellcasting:

Channeling
“Putting the abra in abrakadabra.”

Causing effects through the use of spells is called channeling. This is because spells demonstrably produce more energy than the caster expends, and it is presumed that conservation of energy is maintained by channeling energy from the astral plane into the material world. Energy in the astral is very hard to measure, and there is no compelling evidence that this explanation for the effects of spells isn't true, so that's what the physicists go with. Conservation of energy is a system that works so well that Physics is not going to abandon it just because magic is weird.

The methods of channeling are very different from one path to another. Some stress magic words, while others stress kinetic actions. Spellcasting always makes noise and requires reasonably free movement of both hands, though the path followed may shift the precision requirement from vocalization to hand gestures. For example: a goetic wizard needs to recite exacting magic words but their hands wave around fairly randomly while channeling, but a Lakhota shaman has specific dances to perform but can sing or hum improvisationally to channel.

Channeled spells can do many things, but they are apparently limited by laws that are every bit as involute as the laws of physics. These laws are very different from the laws that govern mundane interaction, which is the source of much of the utility of magic, but they do still exist. What those laws are is a big topic for argument in magical theory, but players of Asymmetric Threat should keep the following limitations in mind:

Spells Are Not Intelligent. A spell can select a target by a specific kind of aura, but it can't make a decision or interpret data. A spell could tell you where something is, but not how it works.
The Future is Uncertain. Divination exists, but the answers it gives are not guaranteed to occur. Magic can show you the present path of a moving ball, but it cannot tell you whether a bat will strike it.
Spells Cannot Target Without a Link. If there is no aura connection between the caster and the target, there is no spell. Once the spell has been targeted, it can have indirect effects in the physical world, but the point of origin must have an aura link to the caster.
Physical Things Cannot Be Sent Through a Link. The target of a spell can be moved, and information can be transferred across a link, and energy can be channeled to the target of a link, but matter and energy cannot be sent either direction through a link.
Spells Cannot Create Life. Magic can move things around, but is limited to physical and temporary animation. This extends to restoring life to the dead. Magic can call up ghosts and magic can animate a corpse, but magic cannot return a dead body to a living being.

But equally importantly, magic horrendously violates many of the normal rules that govern the material world, and those violations are important for deciding when to use magic and when to use technology:

Magic doesn't care about the speed of light. When magic is used to teleport the target of a spell, it moves instantly. Not at the speed of light, but literally instantaneous shifting of location. Spellcasting takes time and sorcery cannot move things very far, so the overall distance moved over time is not unfathomable, but the actual travel takes zero time. The casting of a spell and its effect at the other end of a link are simultaneous, and the channeling takes precisely the same amount of time whether the link is across the room or across the solar system.
Magic doesn't care about conservation of energy. This one is debatable, in that the general assumption of magical theorists is that channeling draws energy out of the astral plane. But from the standpoint of an individual wizard, casting a spell gets you more energy than it costs.
Magical transformations can be undone. You cannot unburn a piece of paper, but if you dispel the magic on a frog it can turn back into a prince. Magic can open a passage in a wall and then close it up seamlessly, leaving no residue for physical observation to perceive.
Magic can destroy information. While science can display a picture of whatever is behind an object in front of an object, this sort of invisibility is limited and causes distortion when the observer changes position. Magical invisibility, by contrast, can make things literally undetectable to sight by allowing all light to pass through.

Delving deeper into the secrets of channeling pushes a person farther away from humanity. Simply being able to use a spell causes a character to gain magical Stress. Being the subject of an ongoing spell is also stressful, and while a character is affected by a temporary spell effect they gain Temporary Stress.

Spell Targeting
“That voodoo that you do so well.”

Spells do not travel through normal space. In fact, they don't “travel” at all. A spell is cast into an astral aura that is touching the aura of the caster and the spell targets something that is linked to that aura. A caster cannot channel into something merely because they know where it is or even because they can see it if their aura can't touch a linked aura. Aura linking happens because the material things that cast those auras as shadows into the astral plane come into physical or emotional contact. Auras that are separated gradually delink, and as time goes on it can become quite difficult to find the link between two auras.

Channeling by bringing the caster's aura into direct contact with the aura of the target is called “direct casting”, although the actual process is the same as any other casting through an aura link. By touching (or bringing one's aura to touch) the target, the caster doesn't have to figure out what portions of available auras are linked to the intended target. For channelers unproficient with psychometry, this may be the only option. A subset of direct casting is “marking” – the practice of casting into objects that have recently been in physical contact with the channeler. Objects that are specially prepared to have mystical or emotional significance to the caster to hold the direct link longer are called “markers”. Even a channeler who has no psychometric experience can still throw a marker and channel a spell to target the marker where it lands.

People who are more heavily magical have larger auras. Characters who have more total Stress from magical sources are able to “reach” farther with their auras. So people who know more spells and have bonded more fetishes can use direct casting on targets that are farther away. Disrupting the magic being used by others requires targeting their aura, so spell defense can be provided from farther away when the caster has more magical Stress. The distance that a character's aura reaches is their “magic range”. Temporary Stress does not count for this purpose, and players are not expected to recalculate their magic range on the fly.

Cultural Impact of Marking: In most of the world, touching magicians or allowing magicians to touch one's body is considered dangerous and foolhardy. The handshake has been largely abandoned in much of the world, being replaced by the East Asian bow in much of North America and Europe, and by an analogous gesture of mutual adjacent finger snapping in most of Africa. Handshakes still occur, but in a world in which people can literally curse a person through one, they are not generally done with new acquaintances. Handshakes denote a level of trust that is more appropriate for family and close friends, and offering a handshake to a stranger is regarded as rude and threatening.

Whenever space ships travel outside the gravity well, one of their more ubiquitous pieces of cargo is the box of markers. These can be used to conduct instantaneous communication between Earth and her colonies, and can also allow magicians on Earth to conduct channeling work on space stations or other planets. Markers also come back to the home world so that magicians in space can channel home.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:29 pm

Magical invisibility, by contrast, can make things literally undetectable to sight by allowing all light to pass through.

OK, let's just get this over with now . .
Mage casting invisibility on himself.
All light passes through him.
Is he blind or can he see?
Does he freeze to death?
What spectrum of light are we talking about?
Infradead?
Ultraviolent?
Radar?
X-Ray?

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:41 pm

Everybody here is discussing graphical programming. Let me tell you one thing: it's not going to be how all programming works. It will be used for some things, but not all of them. On that list in the wikipedia article, every single one is very, very high-level, and not a single one is self-hosting (compiler for the language is written in the language and it can compile itself). Well, except maybe befunge, but fuck befunge.

Graphical programming languages are brilliant when you're putting together systems where someone else has already done the hard parts. For example, in the drones example Murtak lays out, once you have code to talk to the drones, and once you have code to figure out where the terrain is and compute lines of sight, drag-and-drop drone placement is possible and awesome. But someone has to write all that code first, and that requires a lower-level language.

By comparison, most of the code we'll actually be dealing with (dicking around with peoples' wifi in realtime, exploiting low-level errors in opponents' ICE during hacking runs, crashing peoples' brains through their DDs) is very, very low-level. It will be on the level of individual bits and bytes. We're talking exploiting buffer overflows, arithmetic errors, improperly configured user interfaces, auth token forging, that sort of thing. Graphical programming simply doesn't work on those domains.

What I can believe is that DNI would give us a new, high-power interface to our code that we can't describe. The whole "Describe to a blind man the color blue" thing. Trite, but accurate.

FrankTrollman wrote:Spells Are Not Intelligent.

Do you want to be able to chain spells together? If so, spell computers could be possible, albeit unwieldy. For example, a detection spell triggering a telekinesis spell when it detects something could give you something comparable to a mechanical calculator.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:46 pm

Things like these are perfectly possible in SR already.
Combined/Stacked spell-lock/anchor or however it's called . .

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:11 pm

How big is a big aura (inches, feet, miles)?
You imply that a magician can basically target anything his aura touches. Is that correct?
Are handshakes gone, or are they a sign of real trust? If auras reach a long way, how does not touching help (or is that superstition)?
What sorts of "something" can magic locate (keys/my keys/my car keys/money/hundred dollar bills/buried treasure/lost treasure/a gun/a not-toy gun/a working gun)?
Is fetish the same as marker? You only use the term once, so it's ambiguous.
Can you build a magic defibrillator, or does that fall under creating life?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:38 pm

i think auras extend only some cm from the body, but parts of it linger on stuff you touch, which can then be used to cast at you . .

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:09 pm

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:16 pm

fectin wrote:You're looking for something like SimuLink. Which is already a real thing that powers real-world devices. (or LabView)

Ugh. I have Simulink bundled with Matlab. Not exactly the full-VR subconscious-interfacing metaphor I was talking about.

Lokathor wrote:"new paradigms" are something he says won't be invented, because a new one hasn't come out in decades and each one takes away something from the programmer's toolbox (infinite space, goto, implied goto, free mutability), and we've little to nothing left to take away.

Just out of curiosity, since I don't think he mentioned it, what does logic programming take away?

And why does functional programming take away assignment? Doesn't every functional programming language include assignment operations? I thought that the key to functional programming was having first-class functions.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:44 pm

Lokathor wrote:And, since we don't have any new game-changing revolutions showing up any more, then the conclusion is that eventually programming will stabilize into a single language the same way math and science and engineering have each stabilized into common languages.

But we do. Strictly speaking of course we will never get anything new unless we drastically change the underlying hardware, since all software boils down to executing a limited number of commands on that hardware. But that is a trivial truth. New languages or even new ways of using existing software let us use that same hardware much better. Erlang showed us that you can have ridiculous error tolerance. Haskell showed us that you can provably correct software. Ruby showed us that you can write (some) programs with 5% the code it used to take. And all of those are relatively new.

As far as I can see we are only getting more and more programming languages. If you want to extrapolate from current trends to write your fluff I suggest you move away from a unified single language and towards tons of specific languages with common interfaces.

Lokathor wrote:I think that among the paragraphs you put down, "many core" in some form is doable, but "solved memory" has a lot of weird implications that aren't helpful.

For what it's worth, I consider many-core to be a horrible paradigm for the setting. You really want there to be a difference between shoddy and expert systems, and functionally unlimited processing power completely kills that. Program ratings don't even make sense when you can just throw more hardware at the issue, deck ratings can't really be limited and corporate hosts should really have a rating of infinity.

I suggest software is dead, for all the reasons already is mentioned. Expert systems and unlimited memory can be plugged in, if desirable. But many-core will probably kill a part of your setting that you really don't want to be killed.