Timewaster's Guide Archive

There's a tendency for magic systems to inflate as a story develops. (partially because it's more entertaining) If you don't have an active plan for how you're going to inflate (or at least deepen) your magic systems, it tends to be by reducing the impact of the costs- that is, mages start finding it easier to deal with being tired, to react faster, to cope with sickness better, etc...

The best way to do this is to start your characters in ignorance of significant parts of the magic system. It can also help you create intimidating villains, by letting you make the villain have more powerful magic than the hero. Brandon uses this technique himself a lot, and it's a general trope of "low" fantasy.

Ari- Eno kinda sounds like an Idea of the Day that Brandon had a while back, only it was the opposite. It was were if you cought a cold, then the cold would give you powers(because the virus wants you to live so that it can live). This made it so that the strongest people in the world are actually the weakest. And visa versa

As I said earlier, there's a certain amount of overlap inherent to science fiction and fantasy ideas. Didn't expect to be an example though. I picked the way Eno works because, as you'll eventually find out in the beginning of Dreamspace, everyone that wields Eno are men. (Likewise, Idamancers are women) The idea that fighting off physical sickness was the cost of the magic seemed amusingly appropriate, and offered a good opportunity to contrast some characters.

But yeah, "the weak become strong" is certainly a theme both systems share. Eno as a magic system is intended to reveal how characters deal with their shortcomings, while Ida is more revealing about how characters see the world, how subtle they are, and so on. One's an emotional crucible, the other's an intellectual one.

The name is for irony because instead of murdering his brother he is revenging him and everyone else.... and yes it is meant to be obvious... though i could spell it with as Kaine or something

Spellyngs don't tend to make much of a difference in my experience, unless they result in a new pronunciation. Just go with Cain. I think it's tricky using a "talking name"* for irony, and it would probably go over best if this Cain character instead fitted with the profile his name gave him a little- maybe he's so set on revenging his brother because he's ashamed of having wanted to kill him himself.

*ie. a name intended to and generally read to have a specific meaning, like Victoria Major might be someone who wins a great victory.

Quote from: Ari54 on November 14, 2009, 11:22:22 AM

Perhaps [Lerasium] could steal all of a person's powers, feruchemy and mistborn included? *shrug*

No, a previous annotation already said that Atium does for all the powers.  Unless you mean Lerasium could steal more than one power at a time.

Indeed. Atium can steal any power. I was proposing that perhaps Lerasium could steal all of the powers it was exposed to at once.

edit: Oh, and Peter: I had the same theory about Atium being an electrum alloy, but I thought that meant that Seers were actually just electrum mistings who could burn Atium because it was an alloy of electrum. I totally hope we find out more about alloys of Atium sometime, even if you can't spoil it for us. You tease.

The Lerasium-side effect of becoming a mistborn makes sense. After all, doesn't Atium make you an incredible killing machine (as Sazed mentions in one of the epitaphs).

But what this leads me to wonder is what Lerasium would do as a Spike. Since Atium does something specific in Allomancy, it stands to reason, that a Lerasium Spike would do something specific too. (Although you'd have to be pretty stupid to make a spike out of it instead of just burning it)

Perhaps it could steal all of a person's powers, feruchemy and mistborn included? *shrug*

I have One I'm ok with sharing.

Cannibalism. You eat human muscle, you get stronger. You eat a human eye, your vision increases. The amount by which your abilities increase is directly proportional to how  'fresh' the meat is.

Often, in their wills people will bequeath body parts to their kin.

Simple, yet creepy.

I think what I like most about this is that it gives me the opportunity to create a serial killer who is a hero.


So, answer me truly. Am I a bad person?

You're not a bad person, but you may be a horror writer.

Crazy science fiction based magic.  Some previous entity or culture setup guardian technology (think "memory of earth') that enforces a magic system in a more primitive society.  The trouble is that the bad guy (or simply misunderstood) was able to interfere with the system causing it to change magic systems once a week.

Great fun because you can use all the magic systems from your favorite books in one go. 

This is far in the future and our hero has to ransack a library to discover which magic system is in effect and how to use it.

Yeah, I have a draft with a scifi/fantasy crossover a little similar to this. I like the twist about the magic systems getting changed around by the villain though, that's neat!

Oh goody!  This should be fun.

I've got one I've been cooking up.  It's sort of a twist on the traditional four-elements systems....

The world is made of....lots of things.  But without Energy, these things have no shape and form.  Energy molds them together to make the world the way it is.  There are five Streams, and they all act in different ways:

Physical - the most noticeable.  Shapes physical objects.  Users are called Builders.
Temporal - Shapes time.  Users are called Timers.
Mental - Consciousness.  Thought. Sentience.  Users are called Thinkers.
Elemental - What the traditional 'four elements' fall under, like heat, cold, etc. Users are called Chargers, or Burners.   Or something.
Spiritual - The Energy of Energy.  Molds the other four Streams into a cohesive, collaborative whole.  Users are called Binders.

The individual strength in manipulating Energy is different for each person.  The less skill you have in a Stream, the harder it is to get better, but the shorter it takes...does that make sense?    The way someone uses Energy is they merge portions of each Stream together to get a certain effect.  Some mixtures have multiple effects; your Mental strength determines whether or not you get what you want.  Or something...still have things to iron out.  Basically, it's like mixing a formula.  Get it right and you do something.  Also, the general rule is that if you're using more than one Stream, you HAVE to have Spiritual too.  Same goes with 'linking' multiple people together to combine their strengths.


What do you guys think?

Sounds a lot like TOP from Wheel of Time- which is not necessarily a bad thing, that was somewhere between being a hard and a soft magic system. I assume you've got more rules to it than you've outlined? Because essentially what you've posted is more of a "theme" for a magic system than a set of rules governing its use.

Quote from: Ari54 on November 09, 2009, 02:29:36 AM

The basic rules are relatively simple: It's the ability to move and convert different types of energy at the cost of a little wastage- for instance using the wind to move objects around

Ari, what's the wastage in your system? Is it that some of the energy is permanently lost? I.e. you're using the wind to move things around, but it's not 100% efficient because you can't concentrate the wind on just the object? Or is it something more personal, such as your Idamancer's personal costs (fatigue, blood loss, memories disappear, somesuch)?

Part of the wastage is in the magic used to create Ida, (which I cannot talk about for spoiler reasons, but suffice to say there was a significant up-front cost) and part of it is in the fact that an Idamancer isn't 100% efficient. Unless she uses some sort of magical turbo-charging stunt, of course, which is known to happen in fantasy now and again.

So yeah, you get a weaker wind or tide when you mess around with kinetic energy. If you were to dance a flame across multiple candles, you'd need to give it time to build back up or you'd eventually kill the flame. I have a character who is adept at moving flames, and uses them as punishment.

Innate strength in Ida is about transmission efficiency, which improves to some degree with practice. The best Idamancers in Dreamspace achieve about 90% efficiency. Skill at Ida is the ability to move a larger amount of energy at once while maintaining efficiency, to convert energy types, and to move energy across multiple channels at once. There's also some neat pseudo-chemical themes to the magic, as they think of energy in terms of "elements". ie. chemical potential is called "earth energy", gravitational potential "air", kinetic "water"*, heat "fire", electricity "lightning", and magnetism "metal". Idamancers on Temeros haven't discovered nuclear energy just yet, but I imagine they would call it ambient energy.

*Which leads to some strange talk about wind being water energy moving through the ether and the entanglement of air and water, so that wind contains water energy and rain contains air energy. Pseudoscience is fun.