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META: Magic in Fenspace
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Could someone either put a link to the announcement that magic is to be allowed in Fenspace here, or, a copy of the announcement, please? The idea is that this thread will be easy to find in future.
Thanks! -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind 
No announcement was made - it just "slipped in" with Mal's update of the VVS to 2022. And since Mal's essentially the Editor-in-Chief, well...
Please take note: According to http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Gernsback-2]the GURPS writeup of the setting, magic is notoriously unreliable in Fenspace. The mana level fluctuates wildly, without notice, across the entire Solar System. This will affect manadynamics and manatech. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012  Quote:No announcement was made - it just "slipped in" with Mal's update of the VVS to 2022. And since Mal's essentially the Editor-in-Chief, well... If we're going to be 100% honest, it just "slipped in" when the Whole Fenspace Catalog had material on practical magic loaded into it back in 2013. Edit: More data? More data. "Magic," for lack of a better word, has been with the setting since inception (this is a retcon of sorts) but it's only been honestly looked for and researched since mid-2013 after the whole interdimensional incident thingie. And even then it's not something everybody knows about; some people suspect but suspicion without evidence isn't much. Noah Scott and his coterie know, but Noah for his own reasons redacts magical information from the Catalog to keep everybody in the dark. Well, almost everybody, though to be fair the Soviets don't unlock the magic section of their Catalog copy until after the LulzSec revelations. So here's what the Soviets are doing with magic: they're doing good Soviet industrial stuff with it. The important thing to note here is that prior to breaking the locks on the magic section of the Catalog, Black Mesa (by which I mean "the Deehive") was working with a) there's this really interesting quantum field effect floating around, b) it seems to be tied to a number of interesting side-effects, c) so where does it come from, and how do we break it? What follows isn't so much a magical tradition as it is a ground-up research program on the nature of magical energy. The Soviets aren't developing spells or rituals - those are for mystics. They're looking at magic in the same way physicists look at electricity, with the same sort of end-goal modalities in mind. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that's how the Soviet approach to magic works in my head. Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information "I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!" 
So... not using GURPS's spell list but rather "Thaumatology" and "Thaumatological Engineering."
Or to keep things GURPS-ish... GURPS technology scale has "Tech Levels" 0 for Stone age, 14 for Clarke-ian 'might as well be magic.' Modern tech right now is at the low end of 8, and the high end of 7. Weird tech, like Steampunk/dieselpunk/etc, is notated as, for example, TL 5+3. This is where a standard of living very much like our own is delivered with far more Steam than Electricity, or a fin de siecle vision of "the future!" Fenspace itself is listed as "TL 8^" for having "superscience." On a similar scale for magic, "Normal" magic would be, at this point, TL 3 (Classic spell list stuff) to TL 8 (same stuff, just acknowledging that tech has increased.) I'm thinking that Mal is trying for a magic TL 0+8, or completely different tech tree from the ground up? ''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.'' -- James Nicoll 
Sounds like a completely different tech tree, though there may be strong influences from things like Nanoha. You know, stuff like devices doing the 'heavy lifting' for mathematical computations involved in a spell.
It would also give the Fen a very quick access to a "Magic Detector"... if you have something running on magic, you should be able to measure the amount of magic!
I think the Soviets will get quite a number of "you are awesome, thank you!" cards from CI... because without measurement, things are difficult to research. *G* ---- something different... can Fenspace magic be learned or do you need be born to be magical to do it at all?
Just because the first researchers concentrated in thaumatological engineering it does not mean "mystic" magic is not impossinble, just thta how doing it is not known. Of course, in the (very) long range the best resulst wil come to those who discover how to unite both branches. An Unified Magic Theory will be high on the priorities of most researchers...
For traditional magic, there is this from the other thread: Quote:Ace Dreamer wrote: My opinion os that we should avoid making "real world" magic work, for one simple reason: It has never worked before. So I think all the mythical and folk magic traditions should have the same relation with "real" magic as, say, the Philosopher's stone to chemistry or the Four Humors to medicine: They may have some basis in truth, and be the eventual parents of the real thing, but are fundamentally flawed or outright supertitious theories. M Fnord Wrote:If we're going to be 100% honest, it just "slipped in" when the Whole Fenspace Catalog had material on practical magic loaded into it back in 2013.Well, the WFC also lists things that just don't work in Fenspace but do work elsewhere, and things that are obviously fictional... M Fnord Wrote:So here's what the Soviets are doing with magic: they're doing good Soviet industrial stuff with it. The important thing to note here is that prior to breaking the locks on the magic section of the Catalog, Black Mesa (by which I mean "the Deehive") was working with a) there's this really interesting quantum field effect floating around, b) it seems to be tied to a number of interesting side-effects, c) so where does it come from, and how do we break it? What follows isn't so much a magical tradition as it is a ground-up research program on the nature of magical energy. The Soviets aren't developing spells or rituals - those are for mystics. They're looking at magic in the same way physicists look at electricity, with the same sort of end-goal modalities in mind. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that's how the Soviet approach to magic works in my head.If I'm understanding you correctly, the VVS is working on that "unified theory of magic" that Warriors' World has (or at least has a start on), but from first principles instead of from comparison of existing magical traditions... Nifty. Rakhasa Wrote:My opinion os that we should avoid making "real world" magic work, for one simple reason: It has never worked before. So I think all the mythical and folk magic traditions should have the same relation with "real" magic as, say, the Philosopher's stone to chemistry or the Four Humors to medicine: They may have some basis in truth, and be the eventual parents of the real thing, but are fundamentally flawed or outright supertitious theories.Sounds good to me. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
I've spoken to a number of people on the subject of "Real World" magic, and the way I'd summarise it is that "things change over time".
In previous centuries (before the 20th) there were pretty reliable reports that something strange was going on. 20th Century, post WW2, the comments I heard are that "if magic is being used, then 'plausible deniability' is being maintained". If magic works in Fenspace, then it is very likely there have been historical practitioners. But, something (a wider belief in the effectiveness of science? cosmological changes as the Solar System orbits in the Milky Way? wide use of electrical power? the spread of radium then other radioactives?) has been messing up the more overt varieties. Historical magic would have no real solid theoretical basis, just loads of 'working rules', many of which might be useless, or worse than useless. But, here and there, there would be useful practices, such as use of meditation, emotional control, training a 'magic self', that sort of thing. I'm not saying that there are the equivalent of full-blown combat mages ready to step out of the shadows of "Real World" history. What I'm saying is that there is a lot of weird stuff, not adequately explained by conventional science, and the odds are there are people with some strange, if relatively low-key and 'deniable', talents. -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Might be that the solar system only got magic energy when Handwavium appeared. ^^
Ace Dreamer Wrote:Historical magic would have no real solid theoretical basis, just loads of 'working rules', many of which might be useless, or worse than useless. But, here and there, there would be useful practices, such as use of meditation, emotional control, training a 'magic self', that sort of thing.That was my idea. Let's take Alchemy: They discovered many important chemical processes like distillation, calcination or purification. But they did not think on then as steps in an experiment, they were mystical paths called things like "the green lion eating the sun" (solving gold in a solution of nitric or sulphuric acid); and they did not use it to create dyes, stronger metallic alloys or medicine, they were obsessed with the Philosopher Stone, a myth. So as a "science" alchemy was useless -worse than useless, becuase it made real discoveries and hid it under a layer of secrets and codes. But it did make those discoveris, and eventually soem alchemists set the bases for the creation of Chemistry. Magical traditions should be like this: Yes, there may have been some effects, discovered by change or emphirical research, butthey were so bogged donw in superstition that by the time something esembling the Scientific Mehod appeared, it was too late for magic to be studied properly. HRogge Wrote:Might be that the solar system only got magic energy when Handwavium appeared. ^^Some of this might interest: http://www.strangehistory.net/tag/levitation/ http://en.wikipedia.org/w...itation_%28paranormal%29 I use levitation as an example because the blatant disregarding of gravity is a pretty serious disagreement with known physics. It is obviously a lot more testable than many other things. If you want more subtle stuff, look at some of the "Top Gun" pilot and short-term precognition stuff. There is certainly weird things being researched. Parapsychology can be a fascinating area. -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind robkelk Wrote:If I'm understanding you correctly, the VVS is working on that "unified theory of magic" that Warriors' World has (or at least has a start on), but from first principles instead of from comparison of existing magical traditions... Nifty. Sort of. I mean, I'm explaining this VERY BADLY because the terminology is all kind of muddled up in my head and it's all still very preliminary. Right, so the Soviets have looked at all the various magic theories from like the dawn of Man up to the most recent neopaginisms and decided that since none of them have any appreciable effect on the universe they are all bupkis. However! The mystery field does exist, and people (that is to say, the Visitors) have been recorded tapping into that field to do things. Therefore it stands to reason if they can do it, then so should the Soviets (and eventually All People, but that's a ways off). So not knowing a single goddamn thing about magic except that a) it exists and b) it can used, the Soviets start dicking around with theory and experiment. What they've got as of the 2022 update is about half a Newtonian mechanics model of "magic" as an energy field. A few of the top boffins of the Ravenholm Project who may have been doing this for too long have noticed similarities between the Black Mesa model and the luminiferous aether, but hope springs eternal that that Pandora's Box of crackpottery stays closed. The model is predictive but not perfectly so - it doesn't quite explain the wobble in local mana levels among other things - but it's good enough to use for some simple engineering work. This amounts to a handful of magic-powered vacuum tubes and a widget that passively converts mana to electricity... but it's a start. Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information "I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
Do they publish this results?
I'd have thought a 'Magic Detector' gadget, that just gave a Yes/No, and if you are lucky a (rough) power level and direction would be a very popular thing people would want.
Followed by some sort of "Magic Analyser", that gave some details you could use to attempt to figure-out anything magical, the 'dimensionality' of the magic, some sort of useful parameters. I'm pretty sure people would at least try and use handwavium to build this sort of kit, even if they were very skakey on the theory. Finding materials that interacted with magic, insulated from it, conducted it, would also be pretty high up there on the list. Building a ritual area that smoothed out the wobble in local magic, so you get a consistent level to work with, at least inside that volume, might also be remarkably popular. -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
... You know, once Ben gets wind of what Mal's doing at Black Mesa, I'm pretty sure his first reaction is to get Bob on the line and go, "I think they got the right idea, but maybe they could use some help. You wrote about this stuff, after all."
Depends on how public the research is. You know what these SMoF's are like....
If it is, anyone sensible's going to get in on the act in *some* way. Even if it's just tinkering under the covers. ________________________________ --m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig? Dartz Wrote:Depends on how public the research is. You know what these SMoF's are like....Anyone "sensible"? It is magic we are talking about. Anyone sensible AND about 90% of yhose who would not be able to find the word Sencible with a dictionaryand google. What worries me slightly is the political damage about all the secrecy, because it goes way too close to dystopism, but we have an entire mayor Faction of magical fen (even if we always ignore then in the stories) -two if we count the magical girls. Learning that another faction has known and researched magic for years and did not told then is the kind of betrayal of trust that is able to break a political system, with the Wizards leaving the convention. This is something that the lack of interest on wtiting about then can help: Since we know nothing about what the Wizards have been doing after the war, maybe the Soviets and Stellvia did not actually keep magic secret for then, they simply asked for discrection. With the awful loses they suffered after the war, they would have been in Moody-levels of security paranoia, so they might agree with no problem, for the first few years at least -that's why the magic secret broke out in the late 10's, the post war mistrust had lessened enough by then. We have not heard of the wizards again because they have been buried under hundreds of heavy tomes in their magic towers in the Belt, busy researching true magic...
Maybe the Wizards got hold of a Catgirling Machine, really early on, and adapted it to help them create all the 'magical creatures' that they want for their fandom? Then, found some of those creatures turned out to be a lot more magical than could be easily explained by handwavium and biomods?
Writing stories for Wizards who rely on fake magic via handwaved gadgets (particularly wands), is a lot more difficult than technomage stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technomage who are at least cyborgs, with waved-up implants helping them to fake-up magic. Maybe what the Wizards need is someone attempting to be a Dark Lord, who seems suspiciously good at Wandless Magic, and has a load of new spells, a few of which are a bit short of the Slapstick Effect? Or, we could do with someone who finds a buried Spelljamming Helm somewhere on Terra? (No, I'm not suggesting SJ physics or crystal spheres anywhere near Fenspace, just a Helm which mostly works canon with the gravity plane and the air envelope. Maybe some really reliable spells that make personal air envelopes, or do other life support stuff. A scroll with a copyable "Minor Spelljamming Helm" on it would be one alternative to finding a Helm...) -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
I think the Wizards consider the CGM even worse than most other Fen...
What have the Wizards got that works in Fenspace? Their brooms are pretty obvious, with an 'enchantment' that lets them have an air envelope, and keep the air good. Cauldrons for potion making, that interact with their wands, and make all those wonderful WWW products:
http://harrypotter.wikia...._Wizard_Wheezes#Products Do they have Polyjuice? I'd be inclined to say "Yes", with the restriction that is doesn't create or destroy matter, even on a temporary basis. And, sometimes glitches or quirks in 'amusing' ways, such as Hermionie Granger's catgirl incident. Note that this would be an amazingly powerful thing to have. Do they have Veritaserum? If they do then the effect on various judicial systems could be... interesting. http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Veritaserum Having a list of Wizard spells and an idea whether they can or can't be simulated by wands (or which mark wand?) might be worth while: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_spells and answers as to whether the Wizards have various people who are biomodded to be functioning werewolves, vampires, veela, half-giants, centaurs, etc. A Dark Lord might be very interested in the CGM to make their own Trolls and Giants. Not to mention Dragons... Space Dragon with a speed drive as a fully organic part of it? And, plasma breath? -- "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind HRogge Wrote:Do they publish this results?If they don't, then they're just like Noah Scott... who they broke relations with specifically because he didn't publish. (Edit: And if they try to suppress the data and Sora finds out, she'll go on the warpath. She might not be happy with Noah at the moment, but he's still her father - no fair punishing him for doing something then doing the same thing themselves.) Rakhasa Wrote:What worries me slightly is the political damage about all the secrecy, because it goes way too close to dystopism, ...The alliance of the socialist VVS and the capitalist StellviaCorp was always an odd duck, held together at first by the necessity of everybody working together, then by a mutual distrust and dislike of the founding CinC of Great Justice. Eventually, something was going to break that alliance apart - if not Noah's suppression of what he considered to be the really dangerous parts of the Whole Fenspace Catalog, then something else. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did, actually. And there will always be "misfits" in each faction that would be more comfortable in the other, so there won't be a complete severing of ties. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 Ace Dreamer Wrote:Maybe the Wizards got hold of a Catgirling Machine, really early on, and adapted it to help them create all the 'magical creatures' that they want for their fandom? Then, found some of those creatures turned out to be a lot more magical than could be easily explained by handwavium and biomods? I think I'd prefer the first generation of "magical creatures" to be one-offs, rather than produced by any sort of machine. There is at the very least a social pressure against biomod-machines, after all - That's Something The Boskonians Do. It'll take the research project that Jenga carries out to break that prejudice... and by then it'll be too late to use machines to produce the first of the magical creatures. IMHO. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 robkelk Wrote:Quote:Do they publish this results?If they don't, then they're just like Noah Scott... who they broke relations with specifically because he didn't publish. Random catgirl at Jenga grinning madly: "Excellent... girls, lets download the specs and go to our lab... time for more SCIENCE!" HRogge Wrote:Do they publish this results? Naturally. It's not like they hold press conferences or anything - all that does is light up a big sign reading "I AM A CRACKPOT PLEASE IGNORE ME (EXCEPT FOR YOU, GULLIBLE AND SCIENCE-ILLITERATE MEDIA)"[1] - but the results of all their experiments and theorizing is written up and published in as many respectable journals as will take them. Which to be fair isn't many; Fen science is still looked upon with a bit of a gimlet eye by mundane scientists. But it is published, and people are replicating the results & confirming parts of Black Mesa mechanics. [1] See ref. Pons & Fleischmann, 1989. Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information "I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!" |
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