Magical Ways to Emulate Modern Techonology

K · Post by K » Thu Mar 05, 2015 9:18 pm

I know I make this response in every one of these threads, but here I have a little to add to: "high-level magic is going to be the game changer, not low-level nonsense."

The bit I'll add is to look at permanency. For example, permanent Animate Object can get you things as aristocratic as moving walkways and automated gates to things as egalitarian as trains. Sure, the price is high, but fucking trains were never cheap.

Permanent Wall of Fire could easily be the basis for steam heating an entire city. Gust of Wind is permanent 24/7 windmill power that you can even use underground. Wall of Force lends itself to building towers that don't need to obey normal building rules (even hanging in mid-air completely supported).

It's an old idea that monsters also form a strong basis for magi-tech. Traditionally, Brown Mold is how to make freezers in DnD modules. Green slime or some other ooze is for trash disposal. Cutting arms off trolls for stew has also been a traditionally gruesome food source.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:29 am

Usually I dislike anything that put undead into "DM use only, player industrial revolution shenanigans end badly" territory, but i must admit that Occluded Sun's life energy eating undead have a lot to recommend them.

Of course that doesn't mean that core "it's just planar energy" undead suddenly become unusable, they just get a pallet swap into magic AI/motor that can be placed into any suitable chasis, and the most suitable chasis for most purposes happens to be a corpse. Gin up some craft dcs for chassis construction, change the acquired type to the Book of Gears construct, and you have reasonable mass produced golems.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:51 am

Seerow wrote:The way I read Occluded Sun's post was that the desert was the site of an ancient city that was run on necromancy. So that desert, ie the old city and surrounding wasteland, are all one big adventure location.

Yes.

Also, it explains why haunted graveyards and crypts are so often depicted with twisted vegetation and trees and suchlike. A relatively small number of undead beings, confined to a small area, will only blight the life around them - the drain is relatively minor, and even though the effect is concentrated in the zone immediately around them, it's not enough to actually slay things. Merely make them chronically ill.

I think it also provides a good reason why lichdom is always so evil. It's not that the necessary rituals have to involve the mass slaughter of innocents or anything - there are a bunch of different magical methods of becoming an intelligent undead, most of which are ethically unobjectionable. But such a potent undead is inevitably a major drain on the life around it, and probably would need concentrated sources (i.e. intelligent creatures) to maintain itself. So you'd be maintaining your existence by consuming the lives of others.

What's worse, in this canon liches can't hide out in pocket dimensions or in buried tombs or something, quietly studying magic or whatever. They need to be relatively close to cities and such. So they're more like ilithids - except that they might be able to go inert if there's no convenient life, then come back when prey gets close enough.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 2:30 am

Now I'm imagining a lich who uses their magic to maintain vast fields of whatever rapidly-growing crop contains the most life essence and sleeping in a different place each night in a weird form of reverse crop rotation. Or who lives alone in a secluded area but teleports into various cities to take a stroll through the streets before heading home again (making sure to avoid hospitals or other places where people-of-little-life would be).

Hell, if it's not contagious, be a butcher. Oh, no, this cow is dead from lack of life. Probably the healthiest meat around.

K · Post by K » Sat Mar 07, 2015 8:21 pm

momothefiddler wrote:Now I'm imagining a lich who uses their magic to maintain vast fields of whatever rapidly-growing crop contains the most life essence and sleeping in a different place each night in a weird form of reverse crop rotation. Or who lives alone in a secluded area but teleports into various cities to take a stroll through the streets before heading home again (making sure to avoid hospitals or other places where people-of-little-life would be).

Hell, if it's not contagious, be a butcher. Oh, no, this cow is dead from lack of life. Probably the healthiest meat around.

That's the video-game answer.

The story answer is that things killed by life-drain would be rotted and unhealthy, living things subjected to life drain over and over would never recover and just get sicker and sicker, and any attempt to game the system by moving around a lot would touch off plagues.

BTW, the video game answer has already been used. Sorcerer Kings in Dark Sun had groves of magic life trees to offset their life-draining magic, and it was dumb.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:33 pm

Why, because life-drained meat would make you sick with all its lack of bacteria? Because "life-drain" on plants is secretly "poison aura + regen"?

Calling that "the story answer" is bullshit. I get that your story is based entirely around the premise that necromancy is badwrong and you have to punish any players who try to use it, as evidenced by your phrasing ("game the system"? Really? Do you call crop rotation "gaming the nitrogen system"? Do you call breeding cows "gaming the livestock system"?) but you should fucking know that there are plenty of potential stories where necromancy isn't arbitrarily punished because squick.

I don't know Dark Sun but I honestly don't see why it's so very dumb to go "I require the abstract life energy of things around me to keep doin my moving-around-and-thinking thing, so I will go ahead and do that in a sustainable non-murder fashion." when I'm pretty damn sure you require various proteins and vitamins and shit to do the same and I presume you're in favor of getting those through a repeatable non-murder method.

Edit: Sorry, that was unreasonably defensive. Not sure what prompted that. I stand by the content of my argument, though.

K · Post by K » Sat Mar 07, 2015 11:51 pm

momothefiddler wrote:...) but you should fucking know that there are plenty of potential stories where necromancy isn't arbitrarily punished because squick.

Necromancy is magic + squick. Otherwise, it'd be something different.

If it was drawing heat from things or dealing with planar energies, it'd be elementalism or cryomancy or pyromancy or entropy sorcery or something else, but it's not those because you want the symbolism of death in your magic (hence "necro"). Death is rot and poison and pain and terror and awfulness, and that's why you want it instead of something else.

You don't get to be as cool as death and not get the other symbolic trappings attached to death. Symbols just don't work that way, and the magic in stories works entirely by symbols, and thus non-starter for kid-friendly necromancy.

momothefiddler wrote:... I presume you're in favor of getting those through a repeatable non-murder method.

You presume wrong, sir. I'm 100% behind gaining nutrients through a process that requires the death/murder of plants and animals. Keep your weird vitamin supplements and protein-substitute shakes to yourself

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 12:08 am

K wrote:Death is rot and poison and pain and terror and awfulness, and that's why you want it instead of something else.

??? Those are all very much traits of life, and saying that (for instance) rot is death is amazingly anthropocentric.

...and if your magic is anthropocentric, I guess that's fine. I admit to having enjoyed stories with such magic, but in general I vastly prefer my magic to have rules and patterns instead of conforming to how you feel about things a bunch of other people have thought and said and written.

This applies especially in games. I'm in a game right now where the MC is rapidly throwing the entire setting into the fire because this piece of a demon that broke off in a dude is growing into a new demon without consuming anything and my response is "what can i do with that" and he's all "nothing! because... reasons!" to the point where, at the moment, we have:
1) Pieces of this demon's horn were left in the corpse, which was ground up and incinerated (by NPCs no less).
2) Every single piece seems to be growing into a whole new demon.
3) Fire does not stop this process, and indeed, accelerates it.
The simple fact of the matter is that the entire state (likely the entire continent) is now fucked because he'd rather have "no this is bad you can't do anything with it" than consistent function. He doesn't even know what I want to do with it; he's just reacting to my zombie-powered infinite energy generator.

And your hamhanded attempts to make new rules so that necromancy keeps being "bad" in the way you envision it rather than any consistent ruleset based on death or even anti-life remind me of that and make me hesitant to play games with you.

I get the distinct impression that if you were writing, say, biology, you'd be all "mold is bad and means bad things and if you get it in your body you die" and if I discovered penicillin you'd immediately patch it because that's not how mold ought to be in your mind (despite the fact that I have no way of knowing exactly what you think mold ought to be until you spot-nerf what I've found).

K wrote:You presume wrong, sir. I'm 100% behind gaining nutrients through a process that requires the death/murder of plants and animals. Keep your weird vitamin supplements and protein-substitute shakes to yourself

Okay, so we have a different understanding of what entails murder, but I maintain that you most likely attempt to gain your nutrients from the death of plants and non-human animals rather than from humans and I don't see the difference beyond the fact that the lich's existence takes less work and has an AoE modifier and yours is targeted and thus selective.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 12:50 am

momothefiddler wrote:
And your hamhanded attempts to make new rules so that necromancy keeps being "bad" in the way you envision it rather than any consistent ruleset based on death or even anti-life remind me of that and make me hesitant to play games with you.

I accuse YOU of having ham for hands.

Western culture defined necromancy, and I am simply not arrogant enough to push some alternate definition. Symbols resist change, and it's particularly hamfisted to attempt to push a version of "necromancy" that isn't squicky. Lots of RPG designers and fantasy novelists have tried, and they paid the price in people not giving a shit (see Dark Sun).

If you want to create a coherent magic system based on playable rules, you are going to have to admit that the language of symbols is not something you can fuck with. You can make the sun a life-giver or a destroyer, but not a bringer of homework. You can make trees into symbols of strength or a symbol of resources, but you can't make trees into a symbol for third-rate cinema. You can make the ocean a symbol of life or possibility, but not a symbol for buttplugs.

Stories communicate through symbols and RPGs communicate through stories. This means that a poor understanding of how symbols work and what symbols your audience identifies with makes for shitty stories and RPGs.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 1:17 am

The definition you just quoted is "the supposed practice of communicating with the dead, especially in order to predict the future."

Whatever a lich is doing, that isn't fucking it.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 1:47 am

Grek wrote:The definition you just quoted is "the supposed practice of communicating with the dead, especially in order to predict the future."

Whatever a lich is doing, that isn't fucking it.

Read the pages of linked results and not just the first 16 words.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 2:20 am

K wrote:Western culture defined necromancy

I read every page linked by the first page of that search and the only one that even discussed power related to death as a concept vs "those who have died" was urban dictionary. You have a point with symbols but that's a terrible piece of evidence for it.

Going by that page, necromancy is magic regarding dead people, and I'm reminded of a blog post I read recently where Hades wasn't this scary malevolent murderous dude - or poisonous or withering or whatever. He was just the guy in charge of all the dead people. And when dead people are still people (or you have the person and the body still; they're just separate now), then it's all the same as with live people. He's somewhere between a monarch and a warden. That's all. Similarly, people who have magic to deal with dead people (and corpses) but not with Death itself don't have any inherent squick to them. I mean, in some fiction (and much reality) people are scared of dead people and assume they're malevolent, but that is definitely not one of your unalterable symbols, because in a lot of cases it's just like oh this dude is dead now but he's still the same dude. Fuck, while I'm referencing Hades, what I've read of Greek mythology seems to indicate that the underworld was just a place and the only reason to go to great lengths to get someone out is because you didn't want to be separated from them (and for some reason you didn't want to join them; maybe it's not a very nice prison idk).

K wrote:I am simply not arrogant enough to push some alternate definition.

I am confused.

K wrote:Symbols resist change, and it's particularly hamfisted to attempt to push a version of "necromancy" that isn't squicky. Lots of RPG designers and fantasy novelists have tried, and they paid the price in people not giving a shit (see Dark Sun).

If you want to create a coherent magic system based on playable rules, you are going to have to admit that the language of symbols is not something you can fuck with. You can make the sun a life-giver or a destroyer, but not a bringer of homework. You can make trees into symbols of strength or a symbol of resources, but you can't make trees into a symbol for third-rate cinema. You can make the ocean a symbol of life or possibility, but not a symbol for buttplugs.

Stories communicate through symbols and RPGs communicate through stories. This means that a poor understanding of how symbols work and what symbols your audience identifies with makes for shitty stories and RPGs.

If you want playable rules at all, you will either have to keep those symbols completely out of player hands or resolve them into something. If you say "everyone in this world reacts to necromancy as squicky", that's fine. If you say "necromancy is the power of dealing with the vengeful dead, with rotting corpses, with decay and pestilence", then you'll get most players to have that squick themselves and that works too. But you cannot for any reasonable set of rules say "necromancy is dark squicky things" and expect your player to know what is allowed. Especially in D&D, necromancy has (tries to have) a clear set of rules and effects. If you do A, B will happen. That's how magic in D&D tends to work in general, because it's expected that people be able to use it as a tool. It's not unreasonable, then, to see Occluded Sun's "animate dead drain the life force of things around them" as a complete statement and to act as though that's the actual rule, not "I don't like non-Evil necromancers and if you try to get good things out of necromancy I will fuck you over" as though it's a goddamn gygaxian genie.

Point is, you can talk about symbols all you want, but at some point someone's going to use their life-giving sun powers to grow vines that strangle someone, or they're going to use their resourcey tree powers to collapse a gold mine or they're going to use their possibility ocean powers to flood an inventor's workshop, and at that point you do not get to respond "No, that's not what that symbol is, the person is empowered by the sun and kills you/the trees split open the earth to uncover even more gold/the possibility of the ocean completes all the unfinished inventions" because that is just you being an ass.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 5:06 am

K wrote:Symbols resist change

And yet, if you ask a random person on the street what "Necromancy" is, they're probably going to talk about zombies or something.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 6:08 am

Wikipedia says necromancy started out as dead-talking, but Christian mythology said you couldn't do that because God wouldn't let you, so they must be talking to Demons.

Which associated necromancy with summoning up great evils while interfering with the dead. That in turn caused all the evil dead type myths to become a part of necromancy, actual medieval explanation for bad things being that a Wizard did it.

Then later folk tried to do science on it, it didn't work, and that was that. From there it's all con-men selling necronomicons to people looking for hidden truths, and eventually D&D.

So hard-core Christians (and old movie or pulp fiction fans) should know of necromancy as demon-summoning and possession problems, and everyone else has just heard of it through the culture of D&D, or hasn't heard of it at all.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 1:22 pm

momothefiddler wrote:
K wrote:Western culture defined necromancy
I read every page linked by the first page of that search and the only one that even discussed power related to death as a concept vs "those who have died" was urban dictionary. You have a point with symbols but that's a terrible piece of evidence for it.

There are 139,000 pieces of evidence there. Read past the first page like someone who is actually trying.

The point here is that necromancy is defined in Western culture and well-known by your RPG audience. Trying to make a tame version that's not squicky means that people won't like it because it won't fit their expectations.

It also means that you, as a designer, are crap because you were too afraid to use a different word. You could have named your negative energy manipulation power anything else, but you cheated and chose "necromancy" because you wanted to cool flavor that your audience associated with the word. You wanted the cool factor of liches but you didn't want to actually use them as squicky undead which is the part that makes them cool.

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 4:21 pm

Wasn't healing magic part of Necromancy back in 2eAD&D (and presumably before, but that's before my time) until they split it away in 3e because reasons?

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 5:28 pm

Fwib wrote:Wasn't healing magic part of Necromancy back in 2eAD&D (and presumably before, but that's before my time) until they split it away in 3e because reasons?

Yes it was.

Despite K's insistence that necromancy by icky and bad, there isn't anything that actually forces you to do so with it besides possibly popular conception. Of course going by that logic all elves should be Legolas and spears were never used in any important roles in history past stone age hunter/gathers, so there's that.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:25 pm

Previn wrote: Despite K's insistence that necromancy by icky and bad, there isn't anything that actually forces you to do so with it besides possibly popular conception. Of course going by that logic all elves should be Legolas and spears were never used in any important roles in history past stone age hunter/gathers, so there's that.

So you'd accept Elves that were cannibal space whales? How about Elves that were living magma samurai with mechanical hands? How about elves that were shapeless tentacled ice masses with a penchant for alchemy?

Or are you the kind of person who actually uses words to communicate ideas to people, and is not afraid to coin a new word when you create something new?

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:42 pm

Words shift meaning over time.

It's kind of weird that you're insisting that the modern usage of Necromancy is the only acceptable usage because meanings shouldn't change.

In totally unrelated topics, I could see these being decent elves.

And of course...

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:44 pm

K, you are going to need to link to actual fucking web pages, not Google searches, if you want specific extra-biblical definitions of necromancy that include "and is badong, and always backfires if anyone ever tries to exploit its properties to achieve a not-badong effect". Because that - and nothing less - is what you are demanding.

I looked as far as page 3 of the Google search, and while a number of the examples were "magic, expecially evil magic" that's really nothing like as specific as you seem to think. Heck, one of the definition pages had an example sentence where a family decided to call in a necromancer to deal with a ghost in their house.

It is fucking dumb to demand that necromancy magically change its own rules just to satisfy your hate-boner for characters using squicky powers to good ends. "Western culture" really doesn't seem to give that much of a shit. As well argue that by NOT allowing your on-the-surface-squicky necromancy to be used for good, you are a bad designer for deliberately ostracising the demographic of people who want to have obviously evil powers but want to still be the hero. People who, shock and alarm, want the cool factor of dangerous squicky death magic without the having to be unplayable and evil.

And your examples of "elves that aren't elves" are transparent strawmen. Even if you were right about necromancy having to be "evil death magic that always backfires if used for good" or whatever, stripping the "always backfires" property in favour of an actual fixed rule set that satisfies "evil death magic" under all circumstances is a much fucking smaller change than making elves who are Warhammer Fantasy Battle elves instead of LOTR elves. Let alone the already-linked example of making elves who are Craftworld Eldar.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 9:55 pm

Magic which deals with the dead and the dying is "special" in all cultures and all times, for fairly obvious reasons. Sometimes smithing of metals or using one color or another is taboo and frightening, but dealing with the dead always is. So the thing where Redhurst Academy has necromancy as just a dorm coequal with seven others was actually very strange and bad.

That being said, being frightening and special and even taboo doesn't make it bad. Some cultures put people who handle the dead as the lowest of the low, and that's where we get the Eta and shit. On the other hand, I'm a doctor, and I handle the dead and the dying all the time and am afforded a good deal of respect because of it. The handling of the dead is not a thing entrusted to "normal" people, but whether it is a duty given to priests and sages or to criminals and slaves is extremely context dependent. Basically you can't make a universal declaration for how a necromancer should be viewed, because the anthropological veto ensures that anything you claim can be countermanded by several solid examples.

At the core, you can say with a fair certainty that a Necromancer should properly be frightening to a wool merchant or a potter. But whether that's because he's a kill-on-sight monster or because he's essentially the tribe's shaman is an equally valid construction. Necromancy could be a low-caste familial duty, or it could be the restricted province of priests and kings.

What's always super lame though is when people try to claim that necromancy is always bad, but there's a special kind of other magic that's exactly like necromancy but reserved for the great and the good. That's trying to have it both ways, and it sucks. If you want to have good and bad necromancers (which in a kitchen sink setting you definitely do), the correct way is to have necromancy be a "great responsibility" that the wicked and undeserving can use anyway at great personal cost. So Baelnorns and Undying are bullshit, but Vampire Princess Miyu is awesome.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:45 pm

Omegonthesane wrote:
It is fucking dumb to demand that necromancy magically change its own rules just to satisfy your hate-boner for characters using squicky powers to good ends. "Western culture" really doesn't seem to give that much of a shit. As well argue that by NOT allowing your on-the-surface-squicky necromancy to be used for good, you are a bad designer for deliberately ostracising the demographic of people who want to have obviously evil powers but want to still be the hero. People who, shock and alarm, want the cool factor of dangerous squicky death magic without the having to be unplayable and evil.

And your examples of "elves that aren't elves" are transparent strawmen. Even if you were right about necromancy having to be "evil death magic that always backfires if used for good" or whatever, stripping the "always backfires" property in favour of an actual fixed rule set that satisfies "evil death magic" under all circumstances is a much fucking smaller change than making elves who are Warhammer Fantasy Battle elves instead of LOTR elves. Let alone the already-linked example of making elves who are Craftworld Eldar.

The example is a Craftworld Eldar. It's not an Elf. Literally. With words.

Words matter. The writer of the Eldar knew that people would think he was shitty if he tried to write "Elf' next to the picture of an Eldar. That's why he took his race with some similarities to elves and made a new name for what he was doing. That's what designers do when they don't want people to laugh at them for bad design.

Second, I invite to to read this thread again and then realize that I never said that necromancy should be unplayable. The fact that you are strawmanning while accusing others of strawmanning is ironic, but not helpful.

Third, I invite you to read more than 3 pages about necromancy. Reading 0.02% of the results is poor scholarship in any context. In fact, read up on RPG necromancy if you need the field narrowed down a bit (only 167,000 entries there).

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:49 pm

K keeps saying that Dark Sun was a failure and no one cared. I was pretty sure that Dark Sun was a blockbuster success that spawned legions of supplements, adventure paths, and tie-in novels, plus a die-hard fanbase that tries to update it to every new edition. Now, it's possible that I'm being deceived by the fact that every goddamn thing in 2nd edition got ten million supplements whether anyone bought them or not, and that my dad personally happened to have 3 dark sun adventures in his closet. But I really don't think so.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 11:08 pm

Orion wrote:K keeps saying that Dark Sun was a failure and no one cared. I was pretty sure that Dark Sun was a blockbuster success that spawned legions of supplements, adventure paths, and tie-in novels, plus a die-hard fanbase that tries to update it to every new edition. Now, it's possible that I'm being deceived by the fact that every goddamn thing in 2nd edition got ten million supplements whether anyone bought them or not, and that my dad personally happened to have 3 dark sun adventures in his closet. But I really don't think so.

Dark Sun produced 31 book products total.

By comparison, Forgotten Realms produced 32 products in just 1989 and 1990 combined. On average, maybe ten products a year for over 20 years and over ten video game adaptations.

One of those is a success. The other is not.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Sun Mar 08, 2015 11:17 pm

Come on, an RPG line running to 31 books is a success by pretty much any measure.

According to this list of Shadowrun books by edition Shadowrun 1e only had 29 books printed. So that would not be a success by your metric?