(All this might be related to the same world)
1) Instead of level(s) being drained from a person, the drained level coalescence in a bubble creature who clumsily tries to run/fly away (how well maybe depending on how many levels got drained at once); if a drained person catches and eats it before 24h / next sunset had passed, they get their levels back.
I imagine some adventuring anxiously asking a passerby 'Have you seen where my levels went? They are round, and about as big as that."
Technically possible but a rather cruel thing would be to allow
monsters to benefit from eating the level-bubble creature as well,
either as denial of the adventurers or just straight up getting levels;
it would probably lead to wrights 'farming' the adventurers for level
boosts.
2) Some herbs and grasses are magical, but not all of them, why?
Because the dragons were the magic, and after all of them died, their magic remained in their bones, slowly seeping into the soil and waters through the centuries, then millenia as the bones lied forgotten. By the deep roots and a movement of soils some plants imbibed this magic into their being, and later their seeds spread with insects, birds or winds, just like any flowers would spread. Which is why in this particular region we have only one or two magical plants but not more of them.
It might be impossible to find dragon bones after all those millenia. For some high-tech-magic future it might be the somebody's 'Aha!' moment and then a giant undertaking to track all these vectors backward to find the source. Somebody's PhD thesis, for sure.
To extrapolate the naturalistic chain of magic, some animals might get magical powers / become monsters because their ancestors ate a lot of magical herbs in places where such plants were plentiful (sort of like mercury bio-agglomerates in a body, but possibly less cruel). This isn't supposed to be a quick process (as the power of magic would half on each transfer, i.e. rodents or herbivores eating plants/seeds would only give half the magic to foxes or wolves that hunt them) but more like at least some decent amount of generations change, so what we have now is a result of uncounted aeons.
Maybe there was only one dragon, who was all the magic, and all magical plants take origin in a soil above their bones, only to later widely disperse all over the continent(s)?
3) On the same note, instead of scrolls and wands, let it be plants to have magic, and nothing else.Words of scrolls might carry magic but not because of the words themselves (they are meaningless) but because of the inks. The best scroll would be just a bunch of Rorschach splatter on a page, a bulky amount of ink.
Hence, magic can also be food, perfume, oils, paper, wood or fiber.
(But then somebody could just find the bones of that dragon.)
For sui generia hexcrawl I am somehow still making, word for magic would be 'sapor' in this case.
4) Thinking about some 'Fromsoftware' games, it is possible for a situation when something like Waters of Rejuvenation flow from the divine mountain, then for them to be filtering through the places similar to Doors of Pharros to eventually become waterfalls near something like Catacombs, to be the reason as to why buried dead there don't stay dead – they are just improperly rejuvenated by the extremely diluted waters.
5) It is just something that bugs me: I saw a few tables for weird weathers, and while they are interesting as adventure obstacles or complications or even exploits, thinking about such weather a little more it is very likely that if such weathers happen even once a week it would be very difficult to have any stable agriculture in a such world. Rain of oil or nails or boulders and fields of grains don't mix well (giving that even one hailstorm can kill a harvest in a real world), and it would require extreme coordinated effort, a lot of special materials and probably some milestone magi/tech achievements to be able to secure natural food productions in such place.
oh i LOVE the level bubbles i am imagining one and chasing after it so fast in my mind. I think we're very much on the same page about making sure abstract game mechanics have an actual in-fiction manifestation and presence and "body" for lack of a better word.
ReplyDeletealso i really fuck with the dragon bones concept and with "diluting" magic effects in general, I feel like magical fallout is something that's often thrown around but like never in an interesting way, just with a "it's radiation but from magic" kinda vibe.
also yeah I feel you on the weather. i'm not one for pure gygaxian naturalism but like. reasonable extrapolations should at least be considered and besides why can't we have like. crazy fuckin magnetic contraptions that grab all the nails out of the air as they fall and protect the crops??
Thank you.
DeleteYes, I also had that image of bubbles-creature(s) chases or search for them, or even trying to steal them back from, for example, a sleeping dragonbear, as they would be hovering around them.
Technically, I think a witch would be able to shape the bubble creature into a familiar or some other creature, or for a bubble creature to transform into something else after 24h/sunset grace period passed and they are no longer recoverable.
re: magic: It is still pretty much 'magic emanation' thing but made a little more grounded (heh), I hope. In a last few years, I am strongly inclining to two opposite approaches, with either in favour of magic being physical, i.e. embodied in objects like above, or basically being a rift in a reality.
re: weather: Slight Adjustments had a magnificent post (https://slightadjustments.blogspot.com/2022/11/fight-demons.html) where they described a lot of dangerous weather but if it happens every day it is very hard for me to believe that the world still has any natural food or ecology, even - or especially if - the weather pattern travel all over the world so no place get weird weather every day, but anyplace has a chance to get some.
(With farming being so distant from most modern urban life, people might have forgotten how fragile agricultural plants are. )
On another hand, this kind of weather implies that the world has abundance of some rare materials (oils or bricks); with slight adjustments to the table of weathers so it isn't completely as cruel as it is right now, it is possible, I think, to imagine a more or less stable but highly weird biosphere in a style of Biomega.
(Less cruelty is a must here because otherwise all plants die after the first lacquer rain, and this is the end of the biosphere in a month / yer time). Crazy magnetic construction for nail-catching would mean that the place also has some supplies of ready-use iron, at least on a level of pig-iron, so there is less need for mining, for example.
The level-bubbles are GREAT. Level-drain is one of the mechanics of old school D&D that I don't think I've ever really implemented, at least not well, in my games. It seems so brutal to me, worse than character death in some ways, especially at higher levels. I guess one way to do it would be to have each player start a new character sheet when they gain - and keep the old one around just in case. I think this is how I played it at one point. But most players will do anything to avoid such an encounter, the loss-aversion factor is just too high. Unless they are forced into it (which really goes against a large part of my gaming philosophy, such as it is) nearly every player who knows what such creatures can do will avoid the encounter completely.
ReplyDeleteBut I love the idea of them having a way to get their levels back, and to do it by chasing around what I picture as sort of a semi-intelligent balloon sounds like a really good time to me, the kind of situation where desperation might lead to all sorts of genius or stupidity on the part of the players!