Inspired loosely by taichara's Spell Shard Tables. You can dissect, copy, and improve this generator here.
Showing posts with label wizards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wizards. Show all posts
a system for duels
With a bit of adaptation, this can be used for wizard duels, trials by combat, attempts by nobles to ruin each others' reputation, and so on; you just need a situation in which two roughly evenly-matched parties fight with skill, a personal sense of the other as an opponent, and the real possibility of harm.
My quick combat system is designed for combat as war - a disaster that can be prepared for and used for leverage, but in which no interesting tactical decisions take place. This, by contrast, is meant to be "combat as sport" - a fair fight won by whoever can outthink their opponent.
You'll want either a standard 54-card deck of playing cards or the minor arcana of a tarot deck, sorted by suits. Each player adopts a suit (including a Joker each of playing with standard playing cards) as their hand; the remaining two suits (removing the Pages if you're playing with a tarot deck) are shuffled together into a prize deck. Each player adopts one of the shuffled suits to represent what they have at stake (if you're playing with standard playing cards it's probably most convenient to match red with red and black with black; if you're playing with tarot cards, assign according to whatever feels most symbolically apt.)
Each round, turn over one card from the prize deck. This represents the possibility of qualitative injury to the party who adopted that suit as their stakes; that player is defending this round and the other player is attacking. Each player places one card from their hand face-down, then both are revealed.
If the defending player's revealed card is higher in value, nothing happens. Put the prize card into the reshuffle pile.
If the attacking player's revealed card is higher in value, they injure the opponent in the way prescribed by the card. Put the prize card into the discard pile.
If both cards have an equal face value (not including surrender cards, per below), both parties receive the injury. Put the prize card into the discard pile.
If one party plays the surrender card - either a Joker or a Page - then that player has surrendered and the duel ends. Depending on how overwhelmed the surrendering party is and how honorable their opponent is, they might choose to take mercy or not, but either way once one party has surrendered you are no longer in a duel.
Players can verbally communicate with each other between rounds (that is, after the cards they placed have been revealed, but before the next prize card is revealed.) Once the prize card is revealed, players can no longer verbally communicate with each other until they reveal the cards they have placed to attack or defend.
Once player's hands are exhausted, reshuffle the reshuffle pile into the remaining cards of the prize deck, and return the cards the opponents have played to their hands (minus the highest-value card they played that round.) Keep going. Play continues until death, surrender (including mutual surrender at some predefined point), our outside interference (which this minigame does not model.)
Inigo, playing hearts and defending diamonds, is dueling Count Rugin, playing clubs and defending spades. The prize card for the round is revealed: it's the 6 of Diamonds! That means the Count has spotted an opportunity to jab out Montoya's eye and each is making a snap judgment about how much to prioritize enabling or preventing this and how much instead to care about preserving superior positioning.
Inigo looks at his hand and tries to remember what Rugin has played already, hoping to place a card just slightly higher than Rugin does. He places a 5 of Hearts face down, and Rugin places something unknown. They turn them both over - Rugin had played the 4 of Clubs! Well played, Inigo! His eye is safe and at little loss.
Below are three example stakes - one for a physical combat, one for a duel between mighty wizards, and another for scheming aristocrats trying to destroy each other's reputation. Players and GMs are encouraged to create new versions of these, especially bespoke versions that relate to the particular contest that might emerge between two particular opponents.
| physical | wizards | nobles | |
|---|---|---|---|
| K | major unknown stakes (this round determines the fate of the next two prize cards) | ||
| Q | unknown stakes (this round determines the fate of next prize card) | ||
| J/Kn | positioning (winner recovers best card played so far to their hand, loser recovers worst) | ||
| 10 | instant death | mind control, geas, or become undead servant of opponent | death of most loved person |
| 9 | mortal injury | disintegration and erasure from history | fatally poisoned in embarassing way |
| 8 | loss of limb (attacker's choice) | astral banishment (can no longer planeshift, scry, or dream) | title stripped |
| 7 | ability to use dominant hand | True Name changed to something embarassing | spouse seduced and permanently turned against them |
| 6 | eye gouged out | mental trauma from banishment to Hell Dimension (returns after 1 second in our plane and 1000 subjective years) |
major public project collapses in disaster |
| 5 | loss of limb (defender's choice) | amnesia | spouse seduced in one-off dalliance |
| 4 | ability to use non-dominant hand | next project embarked upon will be disaster | office lost |
| 3 | sprained ankle | acquire vestigial twin loyal to opponent | uncool misdeed exposed |
| 2 | cosmetic injury to whatever most vain about | hiccups or lisp acquired | acquisition of painful venereal disease |
| 1 | cool scar | can never shower again (great excuse if you didn't want to anyway!) |
cool misdeed exposed |
This minigame is Mosaic Strict. Game mechanics are almost exactly those of Goofspiel, with the exceptions that prizes aren't added up for points but represent particular diegetic stakes.
Tlön: janissary and public magician lodges
All of these magician lodges are active in Mlejnas, some more widely across Tlön. Although I (or others?) may turn some into GLOG wizards at some point, they’re meant to be easily implemented with common classes across editions.
Of the various magician lodges of Tlön, Janissary Lodges are personal possessions of the state (in this case, the senatorial government of Mlejnas,) as are their members. The conditions of their servitude are given by the lodge charter and oath of service, both ancient, and in practice the lodges regard themselves as powers equal to the senatorial families, their charter with the state rather than any individual family ensuring their independence, proud of their status as skilled elites. For all that, to serve in either is to live a short life of obedience into an inevitable painful death. Peasant youth doing their service years in the city may be assigned as adjuncts to Janissary Lodges, but actually joining is voluntary.
Although they appreciate their de facto independent status, it suits their partners in the senate as well: the College and SIDCEG exercise powers too dangerous and necessary to be exercised by any but slaves, or to be entrusted with any one family among others.
The College is charged with defending Mlejnas against plague, undead, and other demonic incursions; in doing so, they wield the tools of the three learned professions: physick, priest, and lawyer. Through physick they exorcise with knife, fire, and alcohol (especially the tiniest demons, who can only be seen through magically ground glass.) Through priestcraft they wield moral authority, confidence, and placebo. Through the legal authority of the state they issue injunctions and negotiate plea bargains, mostly through surrender of their own bodies.
Continuing on in bodies progressively surrendered to charred ash and minds surrendered to nightmare, Collegiates are regarded as heroes and feared as creeps. Voluntarily letting demons of various sorts consume their being, the immortality they seek only comes in knowledge of service and in the cybernetics they lovingly pass down from mentor to initiate. A Collegiate at the end of her career (perhaps ten years in) is an iron lung on wheels, connected by tubes and gears, flickering with imprisoned ghosts. Modern craft has lost has lost the way of making such wonders, and for the shells of a fallen member the College will fathom any depth.
Per its charter, the College reserves the right to exercise, with an i, vast emergency powers in the event of plague or other relevant event. So far the College has certainly never used such powers to liquidate opponents, wall them within infected areas never to be seen again, offered as ransom in the manner of the Exorcists themselves, or the like.
Like the College of Exorcists, the SIDCEG carries out important lawsuits by the state against nontraditional criminals. As a loyal province of Tlön surrounded by other loyal servants, Mlejnas would never go to war. However, sometimes disputes with other loyal servants reach a legal impasse, or they refuse to respond to a proper legal injunction, or to pay damages the Imperial Carpet would most certainly award were it not centuries incommunicado.
Tlön has no swords, but in Mlejnas plasma rifles fulfill a similar purpose - a noble weapon with no peaceful use, not to be wielded except by the warrior elite. (The regular police, colloquially referred to as the “army” and commanded when necessary by the Group, wield appropriate civilian-commoner weapons such as spears, axes, and billy clubs. Some cliff people and other bandits will operate plasma rifles, but this is regarded by all respectable parties as proof of their disrespect for decorum.)
SIDCEG members, among their other magical training, learn to bond with their mounts, most typically emus. Sometimes this process goes wrong and the human body goes forth into the wilderness to live as a bird, while the bird body is possessed of a particular form of rationality. These could in principle serve as especially qualified mounts, but in fact they are the souls of initiates who failed their most important test, and so are unceremoniously sold to private menageries. Other initiates who prove especially skilled in bonding may be assigned an even more fearsome beast to bond with and bring to warintragovernmental settlement actions, or to serve as liaisons with other ecological communities in the region covered by the Carpet.
“Public Lodges” aren’t a formal arm of the state, at least in the same way Janissary Lodges are. While they are still mostly weirdos, though, they still operate as a part of the normal public world. You can bring a lawsuit against a Public Lodge and they’ll grumble (or laugh) and send their lawyers.
The Cyclopædists are masters of illusion and hronir, the phenomenon of objects found because they are imagined first. They work across Tlön to expand the collective mythopoetic project describing the fanciful world of Anglo-America, or Tierra. To do so is at once the peak expression of the Sublime Philosophy and, some say, its undoing. For to describe another world, an imagined world, not just with one’s family or lodge is to engage in imposing the mind upon this world, the finest idealism one can manage, even more so than the Cartographic Commission that the Cyclopædia in some ways resembles. But at the same time the people of Tierra as described by the Cyclopædists are mostly benighted fools unaware of the Sublime Philosophy and subscribing instead to some variant of the Nine Coins heresy; and, some worry, the base materialism of these people has infected the structure of Tlön itself. Is perhaps it not the case that issues like the water reservoirs, absurdly affecting men even though they are not part of the continuously observed social world, are a result of the incursion of Tierran metaphysics? Cooler heads point out that water reservoirs ARE plainly part of the continuously observed social world, and that some magicians can speak to them showing their status as observers as well - but then, the incentives are always there to attack the Cyclopædists. Protected by Imperial law though they may be, their function is often one of social criticism.
After all, whisper opponents, don’t the Cyclopædists have a great deal of latitude over the world they’re spinning? When one of the baseball-capped mythopoets describes the inbreeding, cultural chauvinism, and eventual downfall of the Ptolemies, isn’t that just a metaphor to criticize the Core-Cadet Houses? When one tells the story of Spartacus or Turner, isn’t that just a metaphor encouraging the bondsmen of the real world to rebel? When they tell the story of Hitler or Croesus, military leaders so confident their nations would destroy all enemies and destroyed only themselves, is this not just a very thinly-veiled analogy with which to cast unpatriotic doubt on Mlej or even the Imperial Carpet itself? Cyclopædists only slyly reply that Anglo-America is quite real, as real as Tlön, but they tend to do with such a smirk that this is almost some sort of metaphor as well, or undermine it with a comment like “as real as this!” as they cast some cheap glammer.
In addition to parlor tricks and insubordination, Cyclopædists also maintain an interest in finding out hronir or dream-ghosts. The most prized dream-ghosts are isekai, whole (?) people (?) imagined (?) into being from Tierra itself, and who tend to end up in unenviable roles like messianic figure or zoo exhibit. But the Anglo-American Archives also maintains an interest in investigating ruins, by far the best place to find hronir, both sending their own members and sponsoring expeditions to find what can be found. Sometime the Archives even prefers not to send a Cyclopædist on such missions, to avoid biasing the results.
Back in the heights of the empire, some aristocrats decided that passing down their enormous wealth and notorious names to their children wasn’t enough: they wanted to pass down other powers and aspects of their identity as well. They stole blood from the First Folk, gave spit samples to Stalactomancers beneath the red earth, and submitted their internal organs to haruspicy. Through this and other bioengineering projects they achieved their dream: they became true superior beings, and their children acquired their magical powers - along with their memories.
To maintain such feats in these latter days, against the effects of mutation and diffusion of patrimony, without the biochemical wonders of the past, required centuries of inbreeding. The “core” line of a Core-Cadet House consists of true-bred descendants, close to catatonic, who mumble carefully recorded prophecies and memories from long ago, and have to be assisted with their core responsibilities - eating enough to remain alive and having sex. The “cadet” part of the family consist of the children of a “core” member and an outsider, and it is these that serve these families as matriarchs, senators, and other leaders. Cadets are themselves sterilized in order to preserve the scarcity of the bloodline, and so nouveau riche are continuously being brought in in alliance.
There is one other part of the family: the founder. Haunting their dreams, trying to exercise control, flashing up in memory: the founder is intelligent in some ways but a slow or at any rate stubborn learner, and bewildered by the modern world. Most cadets learn to ignore them eventually, most of the time. Because of their psychological rigidity and seeming incomprehension at any forms of domination other than the most direct, one can safely dismiss any possibility that these ancient beings are directing their families behind the scenes.
religion in Tlön and Mlejnas
There are no big salvation religions on Tlön.[1] What there are are cults, understood in the nonderogatory sense; mythopoesis, which is sort of like worldbuilding; and rites, which are just traditional actions that are taken and don't require a lot of belief. Additionally, there is petitioning for hronir or dream-ghosts, which might be compared to prayer - you're asking for something - but is probably a lot closer to The Secret or the like - the mechanism is that the universe is responding to what you're consciously or unconsciously thinking about.[2] Finally, there are various altered states of consciousness, but just like American culture thinks of some of these under various banners (religion, recreation, increasingly mental health with stuff like light mindfulness) so does Tlön and Mlejnas.
[3] Yes, this does mean that people can know about religious and political doctrines from "our" world; no, this does not mean they take them any more seriously as plausible methods of worship or organization than we would most fictional works, even if they take the project as a serious religious and cultural one. Isekai dream ghosts from Earth sometimes do appear and try to proselytize these, but the fact that these usually end up in miserable failure only reinforces that they're ridiculous. Of course, maybe your character sees things differently.)
Mythopoesis and family cults
Mythopoesis involves describing and elaborating another world; the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia is merely the largest, most public, and most prestigious of these projects.[3] Almost every family in Mlejnas (other regions differ) has at least a cult of its ancestors and a mythopoetic tradition internal to itself; these are not to be shared with outsiders and, in fact, if you know enough about someone's family mythopoesis you can curse them. Married couples construct a private mythopoesis that is only shared with them and certain health specialists from magician lodges, which may diagnose problems with their children as stemming from mythopoetic errors - defects from inconsistencies, weaknesses from lack of elaboration, and of course curses from inappropriate sharing.
Each family also has a very large blanket representing every member as a section - newly expanded for children, cut off and the sewn into for husbands, and delicately cut off and used for garments in the Laughing House for the dead. (It is in fact individual disclosure from someone who is part of the family garment that allows mythopoetic curses; hearing it second-hand doesn't count. What's more, hearing it under duress doesn't count. However, even this kind of second-hand sharing is seen as highly socially inappropriate, very similar to how we would see the sharing of revenge porn.) Those who share family mythopoetry and expose the family to
curses are ritually expelled in highly emotional rituals - pelted with
dung, their section of the blanket cut off, never to be accepted in polite society again. (This may be how you became an adventurer.)
Magician lodges
Magician lodges are understood as a substitute family, and in fact when someone joins one, the lodge pays their family a dowry. Each magician lodge has its private mythopoesis, private rites, often has a private cult, and so on, which must not be shared with outsiders. (While sharing familiy mythopoetry results in shame and expulsion, revealing the secrets of a magician lodge typically results in being tortured to death and put on public display somewhere in the desert, your spirit warped into some kind of awful monster.) In Mlejnas, magicians are generally understood as so far outside the normal system of family life and reproduction that they are seen as being genderless regardless of anatomy, though many magician lodges have been implanted from elsewhere and have different ways of looking at this. (If you feel uncomfortable with your gender identity and/or role, you can probably find a magician lodge that more closely matches what you're looking for... but you can probably also get that through moving to the city of Mlej, where middle-aged people are mostly foreigners and have all kinds of conceptions. Joining a lodge means cutting all pre-existing ties, being subjected to far worse hazing than you're likely to get from your family for just about anything, and engaging in a variety of dangerous and dubious practices. Don't join unless you want spiritual limit experiences and/or power.)
Most magic-using classes are part of magician lodges, but not always - particularly skilled hronir-seekers may be diviners or illusionists, and disciplines like astrology, dowsing, and engineering are understood as difficult skills to master but ones that can be practiced by the general public. Mythopoetic curses can be practiced by anyone. There may also be weird stuff like the bacteria-drinkers.
"Civic" cults
The city of Mlej, like most major cities through Tlön, has a civic cult; these city cults are remarkably like sports fandoms in that (1) they have an anthropomorphic "mascot" figure at their center (2) they may be brought in to deal with athletic and other cultural events or contests (including lawsuits and diplomatic overtures) between other cities, as well as matters of formal civic events like the opening and closing of the senate, (3) they help organize the calendar, (4) they are the center of mass rallies and slogans at certain festivals.
The mascot of Mlej - who is also called Mlej - resembles an ichtyphallic, three-eyed cortical homunculus painted yellow and green, with long red and black hair that is woven into a bun in times of war and mourning and hangs loose otherwise. The Captain of the Senate (a position rotated between the matriarchs of the major families) marries him at the beginning of each year, and divorces him at the end at a humorous ceremony where each engage in staged bickering. (Prominent poets look with envy on the right to write these, which represents not only a display of wit but also one in which criticism of both the leadership of the city and city as a whole can be criticized - within, of course, certain limits.)
f.n.
[1] There is one arguable exception in the soteriological aspects of the the Sublime Philosophy. According to the Doctrine of Modal Realism, every possible world exists, according to the Doctrine of Counterfactuals of Freedom, transworld identity is established by being the sort of being who would act in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions. You will always be you and act in the way that you would, holding external conditions the same (after all, once we take away, that your internal character is all that's left.) Now, obviously, worlds full of good, kind, cooperative people are better places to be than ones full of inveterate jerks. But an inveterate jerk is likely to end up in a world only in proportion to how often inveterate jerks appear there. What this shakes out to is that there are an infinite variety of heavens and hells, of which Tlon (or Earth, and so on) is just one, and on average, the better version you are, the better the place you'll be reincarnated.
[2] You might ask if anyone has put these to an empirical test. Of course they have. While all acknowledge that the effects are probabilistic, researchers setting out to prove hronir have found it, while researchers subscribing to no-hronir Nine Coins Heresy have found evidence that this is all illusion. This itself is taken as excellent meta-evidence for the orthodox position, as is the difficulty of the later in accounting for printer glitches (see question 3), Earth isekai, and so on.
[3] Yes, this does mean that people can know about religious and political doctrines from "our" world; no, this does not mean they take them any more seriously as plausible methods of worship or organization than we would most fictional works, even if they take the project as a serious religious and cultural one. Isekai dream ghosts from Earth sometimes do appear and try to proselytize these, but the fact that these usually end up in miserable failure only reinforces that they're ridiculous. Of course, maybe your character sees things differently.)
Vancian memory palaces
Vancian wizards get their power from memorizing
tremendously complex spell formulae. Therefore, they use the gold
standard of memory techniques, the method of loci - placing memories within
the layout of a familiar building.
If
you want to memorize a deck of cards, any building will do. But you
wouldn’t store a spell in any building, any more than you (or a snobbier
version of you - wizards are infamous snobs) would hang the Mona Lisa
in an outhouse. It’s disrespectful, and degrades the potency of the
spells you house there.
Obviously,
this is one reason wizards power up by raiding tombs - big, dangerous
cavern networks brewing with magical energy tend to twist themselves
into geomantically potent shapes. Necromancers may find especially
useful models for their spell palaces in crypts, abjurists in
fortifications, transmutationists in ancient sorcerous factories.
Temples
and magical academies are of course built into shapes of puissant feng
shui, and access to wander and familiarize oneself with the deeper
levels is restricted to trusted senior members for this reason.
Potent
shapes for spell storage are hard to predict a priori, and even with
potent visualization techniques, it’s difficult to substitute a
blueprint on paper for familiarization with a physical space. (Though to
be clear: most spell books do include the relevant maps/blueprints,
geometrically transformed through codes that are as elaborate as the
wizard is paranoid.) Searching for ideal buildings in lucid dreams is a
popular option - and also a popular vector through which hostile
interplanar memeplexes come to set up shop in a wizard’s brain.
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