The Gaming Den

Both the Wuvu-lu-aua writeup and the Lalahshi writeup involve magical disease control. My assumption was that disease is a classical Death magician thing, and IGTN's is that as microbial organisms, disease is a Life magician thing.

Now, I'm fine with the Life mages bossing the cholera around (and thus being able to both set disease on people and cure them) while the Death mages can only kill the cholera with necro-energy (thus curing people). That's congruent with both mine and IGTN's visions. My only concern is that people may find the aesthetics confusing at first, which is a minor matter at best.

But, I do think, since this assumption clash has occurred, we need to discuss how disease works in the setting, because there are many ways it could work. As an example of a weird set-up, Ars Magica uses the theory prevalent in Medieval Europe, where true diseases are caused by humor imbalances within the patient and false diseases (like the Black Death) are caused by Demons running around and blighting people.

My proposal is that we use the modern disease set-up, except without viruses (which are only questionably alive). Then we use the set-up where Life mages can boss around life, including diseases; and Death mages can kill living things with necro-energy, including diseases and people, but being killed with necro-energy is easy to mistake for sickness by the layman.

Sounds good. I figure that sanitation of one form or another is going to be pretty common, because "not dying of cholera" is pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs. Polio > Leopards. So for example, you're going to have pyromantic pasteurization (pass the mana through the milk before you leave it to sit and it won't get clumpy and you won't get dysentery). You're going to have water-based purification (allow only the pure mana to continue into your cup), and you're going to be dropping shields of air around people to keep spores from traveling from one person to another.

But yeah, using Life to push the cholera out of the water and using Death to sterilize the water sound like very reasonable applications.

To one degree or another, magic of any type is going to be bent towards climbing people up Maslow's hierarchy of needs:


Now, left to my own devices I am liable to do huge things on disease and epidemiology, because I really like that stuff. If I hadn't had limited word count, the Diseases section in Augmentation would have been 10 pages longer than it was.

-Username17

There's also a difference between infectious and degenerative disease (although they interact; infections can give you cancer, for example). Death curses could well cause degenerative diseases, while infectious diseases are Life.

IGTN wrote:There's also a difference between infectious and degenerative disease (although they interact; infections can give you cancer, for example). Death curses could well cause degenerative diseases, while infectious diseases are Life.

Sold!

Also, a thought just occurred to me: just because an organism is pathogenic doesn't mean it can't also be undead, and do different things in unlife and life. There might be, for example, a zombie plague that only occurs in Wuvu-lu-aua (or is benign everywhere else, but then becomes malignant if brought in), because the pathogenic agent is, itself, a zombie that needs to be there to reanimate.

I'm torn. On the one hand, creating a kind of vampire strep throat that preys upon the essential fluids of other strep throat and thus serves as a very specific antibiotic is kind of cool. On the other hand, I think we may want to steer clear of the idea that microbes get to have ghosts.

Unless it's the burning of ambient undetectable microbial ghosts that powers all Death magic. That might not be too bad.

That's an interesting take on midichloreans.

Don't forget that some viruses might (still yet to be proven) make organisms stronger through gene insertions.
Certainly not Death.

I motion that Death is replaced with Spirit, Soul, Necromantic, or Ghost. Death just doesn't seem to fit quite right with the direction its taking.

Vampire Bacteria FTW!

Should Viruses be Void?

CatharzGodfoot wrote:I motion that Death is replaced with Spirit, Soul, Necromantic, or Ghost. Death just doesn't seem to fit quite right with the direction its taking.

Ghost Type does have a certain appeal.



-Username17

How would that change the Lifarian League writeup (wherein they pretty much have all the powers of formaldehyde)?

Would they divert Death away with ghost wards, extend life with ghost binding, sterilize rye with ghost purgatives?

/edited to add

I agree that it's a better system where two elements aren't defined as polar opposites - opposites, paradoxically, end up with more ambiguity. E.g. the Skull of St Thomas Aquinas, which is Life when you smootch it for a blessing and Death when it's pendulating from Kali's garland - it's nicer when it's just Ghost all the time.

So yeah, I edited references to "Ghost" magic into Acatl and the Lifarian League. Possibly you can have a whole GitS thing where people's ghosts are quasi-real and interactable with separately from interacting with them.

I also like the idea of Lifarians keeping rye going by manipulating the ghosts of rye kernels so that they resist decay as if they were still alive. Things don't putrefy because their ghosts are present and strong.

-Username17

That would make eating preserved meat rather creepy.

'Why do you store your grain as kernels rather that flour?'
'We don't want it to give up the ghosts...'

Then a defiler comes along, defiles all of the grain for ghost power, and everyone starts tripping on ergot.