A geek moment

[xiphias]

Okay, so have you ever been reading a fantasy novel and you thought, "Wow. That's a really nifty magic system. I wonder how it really WORKS, mechanically," and then you thought, "If I worked out the machanics, I could write down rules for a roleplaying game for it, and that would be a good way of quantifying it," and then you realized, "hey, the person who wrote this fantasy novel also wrote one of my favorite GURPS suppliments," and then you realized, "wait -- we read each other's LiveJournals -- I could just ask HER if she's ever thought of writing up GURPS mechanics for the magic system in The King's Peace.".

Oh. Well, that's happened to me, anyway.

Comments

Chances are...

[beardedone.livejournal.com]

She probably has worked out the mechanics, either in GURPS, RMSS, or old fashioned AD&D.

That's cool that you read each other's journals.

Re: Chances are...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Possibly, possibly not. It's pretty clearly based in Celtic mythology. It could simply be her understanding of how that stuff works.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

I've had the first half of that thought sequence, but I don't think I know anybody that writes GURPS supplements, nor do I know the authors of any of the books I read. And so the second half of that sequence is quite impossible.

I think that one time I actually *did* sit down and work out a plausible mechanics for some novel, although it was system-agnostic and not very useful.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I didn't know she'd written GURPS stuff.

[kiya]

She and her son's father, I believe, did GURPS Celtic Myth.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yup. I wrote it with carandol, my first husband.

[redbird]

I don't think Jo did GURPS for that, but I could be mistaken.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Heh.

The easy answer is no, the complicated answer is that I did once sort of think around the edges of how I'd work it in GURPS, which would be something like there would be a base skill in deity-reaching, which would be one roll you needed to make, and then each charm (I didn't use the word spell once) or hymn would be a separate skill just like a standard spell, and you'd have to make that roll as well. If you didn't have the specific spell, you'd be going on IQ +/- whatever. Then for sorcery, you have a soul, which would be quantified at something like 10*HT, and all spells would have to have a cost which you permanently lose from that figure, only the GM would have to keep the calculations quiet... Or, easier to run, on any critical failure you should make a HT roll against losing your soul and going the way Morwen did.

I should write the Morwen unweaving her soul scene as a story. It would be interesting to see people see her as sympathetic.

I never actually ran this or did the math to see if it would work, and I think this is the first time I wrote it down. If I were to do it properly, I could probably sell an article to Pyramid, but whoop de doo, I can live without. Feel free to tweak this yourself, and email me if you want.

I've run two games in that world, one was Prince Valiant and the other was Everway. Neither time did I quantify magic, I did it by feel. Everway is a great game for GMs who work by feel. I also did it by feel in the book -- writing is easier to do this with, because you can go back and change things you forgot. I am not a rules heavy GM at the best of times -- I once ran a GURPS time travel game for six weeks in which we used dice only twice. (I miss my gaming group! But it did undeniably take writing energy. All the same, I miss them.)

The Amea thing that I'm writing now is using some of the magic system from Celtic Myth as religion. I'm doing the magic really differently... I don't think I could run it even in Everway, it's all about perception and riddles.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Neat. In a lot of ways, I don't know if I could quantify the magic that you wrote -- it just sort of "feels right". I mean, it's just sort of OBVIOUS that you could use a weapon to remove a wound that a weapon gave, and that, unless you were blocked from the gods, you'd just heal very easily. And of course you could start fires, and of course extinguishing fires would be more difficult, and of course seeing into other worlds would make your grasp of THIS world rather shaky.

I love how the gods are done.

The most amazing feat listed in the books was when St. Patrick . . . I mean, Chanerig ap Thurrig wrestled all the gods of Ireland. . . I mean, Tir Tangiri. . .

The other thing which I found myself wondering about was, "what the HECK happened between Urdo's time and Prof. Estin Jonson's time?" And, "so, why, in that world, did they CONTINUE to count years from the founding of Rome, um, Vinca, and not switch it over to counting from when the White God was incarnated as a human?"

If I were to run a game in that world, I'd probably run it around the year 2758, and have it involve people investigating where the heck the gods WENT, and trying to get them back. . .

[papersky.livejournal.com]

If running a game, bear in mind that the university of Stella Nova is on a space station.

They count years AUC forever because of Urdo, because of Urdo's tolerance of religion and keeping continuity. While the White God's religion won, it didn't win in the utterly conclusive way it did in our world -- Marchel's version didn't win, Raul's version did, despite her being canonized and him not. (Oh, and later they have a Jewish society like Spain, and they still have it at the time of their French Revolution.)

What happened to the gods is complicated and happened in the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. It has to do with people moving around a lot and also with the devolution of kingship -- in a democracy we're all kings, and we all need to make our connection with the land.