Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Summary:

Mystical technology from ancient times

Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Colin_Fredericks 31 Jul 2019 18:21

Existing items:

• The Travel Lattice - Industry - Fast, safe travel across the Great Basin
• The Red Space - Trickery - A dangerous place to hide or dispose of things
• The Universal Repositories - Communion - Sharing and preserving knowledge

Brainstorming some new ones:

• The Watching Wind - Mystery - The thing that makes scrying possible
• The Loom of Fate - Mystery - An inscrutable tracking and divining tool
• The Uncountable Spinners of Silver Cords - Self - Spiritual automata that temporarily tether souls to the Basin after death
• The Worlds Beyond - Self - Maybe these are actually all constructs designed to provide afterlives?
• The Dream Worlds - Communion - Maybe also built instead of natural?
• The Veil of Maya - Trickery - Which prevents everyone from seeing magic all the time
• The Ten Crore Stones of Death - War - Stones above the atmosphere waiting to be called down as meteors
• Ley Lines - Industry - Maybe the originals were built instead of being natural things
• Passion's Fiery Hooks - War - The connections that allow War to trigger instinctual reactions
• The Mantle of Aum - War - Protects the Great Basin itself against horrifically powerful sorcerous assault from the things that dwell beyond the world

Not all of these will appear. (Probably.) Just a brainstorm at the moment.

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

OctarineShrike 31 Jul 2019 18:45

First impressions:

The Watching Wind: Maybe this is going into unnecessary levels of detail? People typically just accept scrying as a thing people can do, no mechanism to assist needed

The Loom of Fate: Too Exalted

The Uncountable Spinners of Silver Cords: Maybe? I can see something like this as a prelude to the invention of soul repositories in some bygone era.

The Worlds Beyond: This seems like more of a plot twist, given the original explanation of Worlds Beyond as Aum's thoughts.

The Dream Worlds: I don't know

The Veil of Maya: Are you thinking about retconning the pre-gift world into a masquerade setting? What's the point?

The Ten Crore Stones of Death: What would that mean for Earthpower? It's known to use Meteors for energy waves per the sixth alpha distribution.

Ley Lines: I don't know

Passion's Fiery Hooks: Maybe? For some reason I'm thinking of Passion as some kind of conceptual entity, or ascended being here.

The Mantle of Aum: The existence of something like this seems like it would turn all the space plots into Eclipse Phase style horror. Or is this more like the Outer Gates from the Dresden Files, where there's alternate universes reachable by traveling the Nevernever if you know where to look, but there's also Outside, where all the gribblies like He Who Walks Behind came from. A dimensional barrier as opposed to a deflector shield in space?

Last edited on 31 Jul 2019 18:49 by OctarineShrike Show more

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

OctarineShrike 31 Jul 2019 18:57

I just got the mental image of The Ten Crore Stones of Death being an orbital weapons system that makes meteors whenever people use magic to summon them.

A wizard casts Meteor. Was there a comet in orbit? Did one further out get redirected and accelerated to earth? How many times can wizards plausibly use that spell before there aren't any more convenient meteors? A meteor generation system could address those questions.

Edit: I just realized the Uncountable Spinners of Silver Cords could maybe have been invented during the interregnum. Unsure about plausibility as opposed to a bygone era doing it though currently.

Edit2: I realized another explanation for Wizards casting meteor that avoids cosmological questions, they could be making the meteor ex nihilo with magic.

Last edited on 31 Jul 2019 19:09 by OctarineShrike Show more

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Colin_Fredericks 05 Aug 2019 01:02

I think I'm going to keep the following items:

• For War, The Ten Crore Stones of Death - an an explanation for certain long-range assaults with War. I might expand it to being more than just hovering rocks - maybe weather generators once tied into the Attic Lines, now repurposed for deadlier purposes.
• For Self, The Uncountable Spinners of Silver Cords - as an explanation for why ghosts don't just go straight to afterlives.
• For Mystery… nothing. If there is a technological Great Wonder of Mystery, it's so well-hidden that no one's ever found it.

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

OctarineShrike 05 Aug 2019 01:21

Sounds mostly fine to me. I just remembered something which could be basis for concern though. The metaphysical thoughts you had on ghosts in October of 2018. http://suffadv.wikidot.com/forum/t-7645768#post-4036571. Not sure if you're still going with this, but this could make Empty Gravers uniquely vulnerable to somebody attacking the Silver Cord system, as opposed to their souls being what anchors them. An explanation of how it and Empty Gravers interact may be necessary.

[quote]
Ghosts are imprints of the mind on the clay of the Basin's reality, to which the soul attaches itself after the death of the body. (Ghosts thus cast shadows.)
You can have a ghost without a soul, but it doesn't linger long.
What a ghost looks like is culturally determined. In some cultures, ghosts look exactly like mortals. In most areas they're spectral, washed-out, or a single flat color. Sometimes they're blurry, lack legs, or appear vaporous. What you get when you cut into one is likewise culturally determined. There might be spectral flesh and bones and ink-black blood, there might be wisps of yellow fog, there might be howling voices yearning to devour the living.
In the Cult of the Empty Grave, specifically, they're faded but otherwise human-looking. Their interiors are still effectively flesh and bones.
Among the Sovereigns, who have a fair number of ghosts, they're monstrously beautiful reflections of one's "inner demons" and beliefs, and their insides are fire and gears.
If your culture has no notion of ghosts, then you live in a weird area with a soul magnet nearby or something, because ghosts are a standard thing across the Basin and something is preventing them from appearing.
I understand that "culturally determined ghost appearances" is an odd thing given the metaphysics of this setting and that's intentional.
It is true that immortal people generally do not leave ghosts. When their bodies are obliterated, either a) their body slowly regenerates in a perhaps gruesome fashion, or b) the transition into undeath is part of their method of immortality.
If you have a way to capture a free-floating soul (high Self) you can snatch it around the moment of death so that any potential ghost won't get the soul, and thus will fade away quickly.
[/quote]

Last edited on 05 Aug 2019 01:25 by OctarineShrike Show more

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Colin_Fredericks 07 Aug 2019 18:37

See, this is what happens when I mentally drift back to the "fantasy default" rather than my own lore. :)

Thanks for the note. Will either change the explanation for the Spinners or replace them with something else.

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Colin_Fredericks 07 Aug 2019 19:40

Oh wait, of course. The spinners are the things that attach the soul to the ghost. Without them all ghosts would be soulless.

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

OctarineShrike 08 Aug 2019 00:57

So they're like metaphysical surgery bots stitching and connecting the shadow into the ghost body like an organ transplant?

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - The Great Wonders

Colin_Fredericks 14 Aug 2019 14:29

Ooh, that's a neat image. I was thinking of them more as (metaphorically) wrapping lines of silk around them than stitching into them, but that's a neat idea too.