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Old 06-07-2021, 11:40 PM   #1
Whitewings
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Rune Magic change: What breaks?

The idea is simple: a rune mage can use the finger tracing rules to carve the appropriate runes onto an inanimate object to cast a spell on that object. A prime example from Nordic legend would be the tale of Egil and his conflict with Eirik Bloodaxe. At one point, Eirik serves Egil some ale of which Egil is suspicious. Egil carves into the horn runes that mean "If this drink be foul let this horn shatter!" and smears them with his blood. The horn shatters. Using the rules in Magic and Thaumatology, this would take a minute if I did the arithmetic correctly and probably cost 2 energy: Knowledge+Food to test the ale, Weaken+Animal to burst the horn, Magic to link the two.

This is an additional use, not a replacement for one-off enchantments.

Last edited by Whitewings; 06-08-2021 at 08:32 AM.
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Old 06-08-2021, 08:33 PM   #2
Whitewings
 
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Default Re: Rune Magic change: What breaks?

Nothing, apparently.
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Old 06-09-2021, 01:40 AM   #3
maximara
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Default Re: Rune Magic change: What breaks?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Whitewings View Post
The idea is simple: a rune mage can use the finger tracing rules to carve the appropriate runes onto an inanimate object to cast a spell on that object. A prime example from Nordic legend would be the tale of Egil and his conflict with Eirik Bloodaxe. At one point, Eirik serves Egil some ale of which Egil is suspicious. Egil carves into the horn runes that mean "If this drink be foul let this horn shatter!" and smears them with his blood. The horn shatters. Using the rules in Magic and Thaumatology, this would take a minute if I did the arithmetic correctly and probably cost 2 energy: Knowledge+Food to test the ale, Weaken+Animal to burst the horn, Magic to link the two.
This is an additional use, not a replacement for one-off enchantments.[/QUOTE]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Whitewings View Post
Nothing, apparently.
You have to give the forum time as there are a lot of threads.

Rune magic is part of Syntactic Magic

"Knowledge+Food to test the ale, Weaken+Animal to burst the horn, Magic to link the two."

Magic p 206 has this: "The energy cost of a symbol spell depends on the symbols used and the discretion of the GM, as described for syntactic magic."

The energy and time chart for syntactic magic is on Magic pg 204 and indicates the minimum of each verb and noun is 1 (Magic pg 204) so the minimum energy is 5 not 2. Thaumatology pg 169 has a more generic energy cost chart.

Plugging the values in gets us this: (energy, difficulty)
Knowledge: not given, assume "very potent" (2, H)
Food: (1, E)
Weaken: (1, A or H); we go with A for this
Animal: (2, A)
Magic: (2, H)

So, assuming we have five different runes, the minimum energy needed to do this is 8.

As for the time: "The wizard needs two seconds to trace an Easy symbol, six seconds for an Average symbol, and 12 seconds for a Hard symbol."

12+2+6+6+12 or 38 seconds.

So doing this costs 8 energy and takes 38 seconds.
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