Tag: essay

Dice and Card Games

So characters play games in this story a lot. It’s a character trait that comes up a lot, particularly with Saori and Raincloud. What games they play, when, and how is something that I put a fair amount of thought into.

Dice games are the most commonly referenced. The reason for this is pretty simple, and it’s one that will show up in actual life a lot. Dice games are easy to play. You don’t need much for it. You can play a game of liar’s dice with nothing more than a flat surface, a bag of dice, and some cups or screens. It’s simple, easy, and portable. You can pack up quickly and with little fuss. You can play anywhere that there’s a reasonably flat surface. Dice are durable, and if you lose one, you can use any other die of the same type to replace it.…

Werewolves

Derek has some comments here about werewolves and the experience of being one. Some of this has been mentioned already, but other parts are new information, and it seems like a good time to talk more about it metatextually as well. A lot of information about them isn’t widely known, and some of those details may be revisited later, but for now I’m going to be focusing more on basic information that’s easily learned in-setting.…

Classifying Mages

It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.
Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.

Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.…

Teleportation

Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.

Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.…

Sword Design

The bronze sword that Thorn is being compared to is called a kopis and is a traditional form of ancient Greek sword. It’s curved forward and shaped somewhat like a larger version of a kukri. It’s more sharply curved than Thorn and has a convex tip, for a number of reasons; this makes it less suitable for thrusting. Thorn is more similar in profile to some of the thinner forms of the Illyrian sica, which has a longer, thinner, and less sharply curved blade. Unlike a normal sica (or a kopis, or a khopesh, or a falcata, or a kukri, or…you get the point), Thorn is sharpened on both edges. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly related to how much more you can get away with as a swordsmith when the material you’re working with will be made supernaturally durable. Mundane blacksmiths have to manage an inherent property of steel, which is that harder (i.e., able to take and retain a sharper edge) alloys will also be less tough (i.e., they will be brittle and prone to shatter).…

Enthrallment

Thralls are a complex concept in this setting, and one which varies widely in execution. The basic concept of enthrallment is that a person is subjected to intense enough mental magic that their actions are effectively under the control of someone else. There are a ton of ways to do this, and pretty much all of them are pretty fucked up. Enthrallment is not at all the same thing as subtle mental influence, or even the kinds of high-intensity emotional manipulation which Capinera is capable of. There are qualitative differences that are somewhat hard to define but extremely significant.

To start with, enthrallment is a sustained state. It is not a spell you cast on someone once and move on. Capinera makes you feel something while you’re hearing her sing, but when the song is over you get over it. That’s a big part of what produces the qualitative difference. When the CIA was doing extremely unethical large-scale experiments with LSD (yes, this is a thing that really happened, and Project MKUltra is fascinating to read about in a horrifying way), this would be the difference between the people they dosed once during an interrogation and the people who were on a bad acid trip for six months straight in a mental hospital. One of these things is going to do a hell of a lot more harm to someone than the other, even though both are using the same drug and the same basic methodology. A thrall is like the second one. The enchantments applied to them are not transient in nature, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of ways someone can go about this kind of magic. By and large, they’re going to be sorted into categories in two distinct ways, depending on which part of the experience is being discussed.…