TL 3 Magic Items for fantasy cities

[hal]

Hello Folks,
Based on the thread of Magery-suppressing shackles, I got to thinking...

What if there were a thread for magic items for Fantasy Cities? People propose magic items that they think a wizard's guild might make to pay off their taxes to the city, or might sell to clients inside of a city. The idea here is to limit this to a TL 3 setting and see what devious things we can use in our cities...

[hal]

Shackles of Mental Stunning
Chain Collar of Mental Stunning

These magic items are crafted especially for the city of Roma, home to almost two million souls.

The Guild of Enchanters pay their annual taxes to the Emperor in the form of enchanted items. When these men and women work their craft, they pay attention to details. Each shackle or collar is formed from materials of metal, meant to last a long long time. Each item's metal used in the original forging, and then crafted but shorn off, are saved as part of the presentation of the finished product. Said left overs of the crafting are used for when mages must use the trace spells to find any missing shackles that have left the vicinity of Roma, heart of the Empire. In the meantime, the finished, un-enchanted shackles or collars are handed over to the enchanters, who will spend their time enchanting these devices used to handle any prisoner of the Emperor. Should a person be slapped into these, the world knows they are deemed to be important prisoners indeed!

First step of process is spending 500 days in slow and sure enchanting, as the enchantment of Mental Stun is infused within the very essence of the shackles or for more important prisoners, chain collar. Once this item is slapped on a prisoner, they become stunned and incapable of anything voluntary until the item is removed. Spell casters can't sling spells, no one can plot to escape or even try to move of their own volition.

Then the next enchantment is added, a simple hex actually. That adds another 200 days to the enchantment process.

The we add a password to the whole thing - for another 200 days of work. What may be maddening to the prisoner's friends is - the password is plainly writ on the item. Anyone who can read, could say the password right? Well, that's when the final enchantment is added.

This enchantment also adds another 200 days to the enchantment process, but what it does is limits when the password enchantment can work. In this case, the enchantment requires that a specific set of rings must be present for when the password may be spoken and the password can work its magic at suspending the Hex. In Roma, the link requires one of three rings that were present when the link was forged, must be in contact with the hexed item when the password is spoken. If any of the rings are lost or destroyed, the poor prisoner who is wearing the item will not be able to be freed except by wizards who can undo the enchantment's process...

Total time spent in enchantment: 1100 days
Total cost for this item: $36,300 for the enchantment alone

Mental stun: 500
Hex: 200
Password: 200
Link: 200



Cost of password enabling rings: inconsequential
Cost of manacles or chain collar, relatively inconsequential.

[Aldric]

Your setting will quickly become TL3+x when you start to use magic to make life better. Light, Food production and preservation, Crafting and maintenance, healing and healthcare.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Your setting will quickly become TL3+x when you start to use magic to make life better. Light, Food production and preservation, Crafting and maintenance, healing and healthcare.

Yeah, but unless you're using the industrial production variant rules from Thaumatology, there just isn't enough density of enchanters in the standard setting to do anything of the sort, save for the rich. I've ranted at length on the subject (https://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/20...y-take-ii.html), but the upshot is this:

Take a fantasy city of 20,000. This is pretty damn large; outside of the northern Italian littoral, it'd be one of the larger cities in Europe in the medieval era. If mages in your gameworld are as common as blacksmiths, that makes forty of them. Not 40 full-time enchanters; forty WIZARDS. This includes apprentices, the royal mage, all the ones who are retired or doing full-time research, the head of the mages' guild, all those full-time healers ... all of them. Then you factor in that the Magery 2 prerequisite for enchanting at all eliminates most of the rest: the guidance from GURPS Magic states "nearly all of [Enchantment spells] are available only to quite advanced mages."

So ten of those mages might be full-time enchanters. It might be as few as five. (By the way, this is a zero-sum thing. If you decide that the vast majority are somehow enchanters, that means that there aren't mages around to send those long distance messages for you, Analyze your loot, or, well, cast healing on you. Oops.)

And presuming they work together well, and nothing ever goes wrong, and they all know pretty much the same spells, you've got a couple enchanting circles that over the course of years, can churn out some widgets.

But you're all looking at the same magic system I am. A Create Food vessel that can create a single meal a day takes 400 mage-days to enchant; that five-wizard circle is going to be able to feed the 150-man Royal Guard three squares a day alright ... in a century. (It'll only take half that to give them all +2 Fortify armor.) A similar circle can churn out three Minor Healing items a year. And so on and so forth.

Honestly, unless you vastly liberalize RAW, you don't get widespread magical tech.

[hal]

For what it is worth, Roma is modeled upon Ancient Rome but a bit more into the future. Technically speaking, Roma is more TL2 historically speaking with all of its mundane engineering feats that are augmented with Magic.

That having been said, the idea of this thread is to look into those items that can be enchanted using GURPS MAGIC, and see what are interesting world building aspects to the magic items that you can create. Show all work, and have fun. An Aqueducts that have a metal hoop for purify water would be a useful city enchantment.

So, think of an urban problem and ask yourself, what magic item would help deal with that urban problem? I'm sure that someone will look at the Food college and come up with something that might help the city - but we're looking for magic ITEMS to add to the list.

In a fantasy village, an air-golem scythe would be a reaping machine that does not grow tired. If you "program" it correctly, it swings in an arc, takes two steps forward, swings another arc. After precisely X steps, the sythe walks back to where it started, takes two step to the right, then begins sything again. WHen it does a full acre of scything, it drops to the ground, and requires its user to move it to the next acre and start scything. It will also need a self-sharpening aspect to the blade so as to keep slicing the stalks of wheat or other grains...

Now - that's for a village, not a city. What might work for a city? Perhaps wagons that are pulled by a team of air golems? How about Air Golem pumpers for helping put out fires?

So, come up with specific urban problems and see what magic item handles it. So what if we start to approach TL 2+4 as a result of some of these magic items. Explore the possible and then see what that suggests to you as a player in your GM's world, or as a GM, for your own players?

[hal]

In response to the issue involved with mage-tech, there is another problem that is not addressed here, but then again, we COULD revisit the Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3 thread and undertake some world building exercises on what a given world might be like if it had to account for:

How many mageborn exist
how many mageborn are trained
how many mageborn are untrained due to social status or lack of training

If a society organizes to seek out its mageborn as resources - what will that do to the mageborn's social standing? Are they in debt to the King or Emperor or Noble - because they were initially born to slave parents and received an education? Are they slaves to the emperor because no one but the Emperor may have mageborn in their employ, all others are put to death (and if so, how many flee to neigboring nations or are executed out of hand, thus lowering the numbers of mageborn availaboe)? This kind of world building should be pointed out in Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3. But for here? go with the fact that the education process of enchanters is a situation that makes them highly specialized mages. Why? To enchant a single magic item, you need both the underlying spell along with the Underlying Enchantment spell. What Mageborn #328 learns is based solely upon the spells he needs as requisites plus the spells he needs as enchantments. This will largely make said mage relatively useless for other different magic item enchantments (ie Water enchanters vs Beast enchanters vs Fire Enchanters, vs Information enchanters, etc).

That's not even including the fact that some of the mageborn, if women, may well be unable to enchant as they bear children (or won't risk it while pregnant". Unless the women enchanters can turn over their progeny to others to raise, they as mothers are going to be busy.

GM's who play with numbers and fail to take into account human nature, may weill want to have a 100% utilization number of all mages. Just because a mage may well be good at enchanting doesn't mean that they will study enchanting. They may well decide that they like animals and have nothing to do with spell casting at all.

So - again, switch over to that thread if you want to enter "world building mode" and implications thereof. Here? Enter your own magic item - how long it takes to manufacture, and why it would be desired. After that, maybe determine just how many of those single magic items might a single mage enchanter produce in their lifetime?

Also, is it possible to have a "Struggling income" enchanter, where they make only half the income as might a standard income enchanter make? Oh wait, that can't happen, because to earn $33 per enchantment day, they have to have comfortable income. So, jump into the other thread and post ideas, answers, etc.

;)

[whswhs]

GURPS Thaumatology: Urban Magics discusses this in Chapter 5: The Enchanted City. There are rules for enchanted buildings, public works, travel and transportation, and wonders and marvels.

[RGTraynor]

Another factor in such demographics is the eternal truth that power structures run things. If I'm the king, what I'm invested in is NOT my capitol city having magical streetlights. What I AM invested in -- for instance -- is for as many of my generals and chief officials as possible to have Hide Thoughts items ... including the Power/1 it'll need to be fatigue-neutral to maintain, at 1500 mage-days a pop.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Your setting will quickly become TL3+x when you start to use magic to make life better. Light, Food production and preservation, Crafting and maintenance, healing and healthcare.

If you are talking about spells yes but Enchantment is a very expensive spell (Magery 2 and 10 spells each from a different college). IMHO most magic items will be Low Magic (as GURPS defines it)

*Craft Magic
*Mysteries of the Trade
**"Enchanting for Non-Mages" by Ricky Hunt (5/5/2000)
*Syntactic Enchantment: This includes most flexible magic system in GURPS. It can require a large time commitment by a GM to create and balance.
*Alchemical Items (Alchemical Enchantment)
Other options:
*Enchantment Through Age and Deeds
*Clerical Enchantment
*Alternate Enchantment: An Expanded Look at Creating Magic Items in GURPS (10/17/2003)
*Playable PC Enchanters for GURPS: The Crossbow Method (5/7/2004)
*Build a Better Wand in Seven Days (11/11/2005)
"Willful Weapons" (Pyramid #14, 08/01/1995)

[hal]

Originally Posted by whswhs

GURPS Thaumatology: Urban Magics discusses this in Chapter 5: The Enchanted City. There are rules for enchanted buildings, public works, travel and transportation, and wonders and marvels.

Which is good. Now, pick an issue, craft a magic item, in the same manner as the mental stun item. For instance, a city using magic items in the form of light, saves the city the cost in lantern oil. How much oil, assuming that each item saves 10 pints of oil per day per light?

If cooking fires or heating fires need a certain number of cubic feet of wood per day, how much more slowly will a magic item for home heating during winter, or food cooking slow down the deforestation that historically occurs?