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Old 05-11-2021, 09:59 AM   #11
hal
 
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
For Bless Plants, the optimal choice is to space castings at the centers of a grid of hexagons. There will be some overlap, and thus some wasted effort, but the amount of overlap will be minimal. Then you fit the furrows inside the hexagons, as much as possible.
If you can get the cattle to pull the plow within those guidelines, sure. :)

Real world movement without hexagon mapping for the most part. The idea here is to apply GURPS MAGIC as if it really exists. When we talk about an area fire that is 3 hexes in radius, I presume that for the most part, GM's describe it as a circle effect, even if on the map, they treat the hexes as hexes. But that's a minor quibble, I can work it either way.
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Old 05-11-2021, 10:39 AM   #12
hal
 
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
You say that 2% of the population are magically gifted. Does that mean Magery 1, as in GURPS 3/e, or are you adopting the 4/e concept of Magery 0? It doesn't make a lot of difference at the low end, but whether you have 5 people with Magery 3, or a 50% chance of having one, might be important.
Good question. If the group agrees they'd rather have some sprinkling of Magery values that isn't STRICTLY mathematically derived...

2% of population with say, 2550 people works out to 51 people. 1/3 of that would result in 34 who are 16+, while 17 would work out to be under the age of 16. Breakdown by gender would work out to be roughly 51% women/ 49% men.

That brings us to what their magery values are:

if the lower to higher magery ratios work out as 10x more numerous than the higher magery level value, it would work out as follows. Numbers in parentheses indicate magery value:

100(1) + 10 (2) + 1 (3) or 111 possible combinations in 3e
1000(0) + 100(1) + 10 (2) + 1(3) = 1111 possible combinations for 4e

I can easily write the code so it generates actual magery based on the possible permutations as listed above:

Thus

3e
Magery 1 = 100/111
Magery 2 = 10/111
Magery 3 = 1/111

4e
Magery 0 = 1000/111
Magery 1 = 100/1111
Magery 2 = 10/1111
Magery 3 = 1/1111

I can work it either way. If people want both, I'll list the breakdowns both ways.

Sounds Good?

ADDENDA:

If people would prefer that I make the spread of Magery TRULY random in the sense that I generate all 2550 NPC's and then determine whether ANY of them have magery by giving them a 2% chance of it, I can easily do that.

Thus, I could set it up that I check each NPC that exists with a "Do you have Magery". 98% of the time the answer will be no. 2% of the time the answer will be yes. Once I determine Magery exists, I can then determine its quality value by the above percentage changes.


Last edited by hal; 05-11-2021 at 11:10 AM. Reason: Addenda
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Old 05-11-2021, 11:01 AM   #13
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

For those who want to actively build NPCs and spell lists, below is a possible route to take.

GURPS 3e gives a total number of points for building characters who are aged up until they reach age 15, at which point they have "adult" stats. (See pg 14 of GURPS BASIC SET REVISED). The quote goes like this:

"As a rule, children should be created with 50 points or less. To make up for this, when a child stays in the game for a long time, keep track of his birthday! For instance, when a child turns 10 years old, his ST, DX and HT all go up one (IQ stays the same). This increase is absolutely free."

What we can do is simply build NPC mageborn on 50 points or less prior to age 10, then age them one year at a time until they reach 15 if they should survive. Note that each of the NPC's in this game will have a "due date" built in (ie death date). Some of the mageborn will die before the age of 15 if the odds are stacked against them.

How hard is it to track 2,550 NPC in a database? Not all TOO difficult (especially if I export them to a spreadsheet).

Question? The year of death is determined by die rolls. Would people here in this list want me to generate the "due date" to include month, day, and even possibly hour?

If this thing REALLY takes off, I can even go so far as to generate a Map and have spatial relationships built in such that the time it takes to reach one village that has a Healing mage can be taken into account when we have issues at a village that is 4 hours walking distance away (about 8 to 10 miles away). This way, if someone asks "How long will it take someone with Flight to reach an outlying village, the map will say as such. Now, if anyone wants to VOLUNTEER to generate such a map, I'd be more than happy with that.
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Old 05-11-2021, 12:56 PM   #14
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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I've written code that will generate manorial data one manor at a time. From there, it is a simple step forward to fill in the rest. See next post...
There are several existing tools that may save you some time. donjon and The Realm Generator
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Old 05-11-2021, 02:36 PM   #15
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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My original intent in all of this was to work with one "Noble Family" at each Village as the Landed Knight, and then generally use about 50 families per village, assuming about 5 people per family. I think that I may go with slightly variable numbers of families per village, to where 50 will be the lower end, and 100 will be the upper end, with about perhaps 75 being more average. That will make village sizes closer to 375 people. My program will likely drop that average to closer to maybe 360 or so.

This is GOOD for the mageborn population howeovere, because this is what I will suggest as the "Currency" for the Mageborn:

Each level of Magery is 10x more common than the next higher.

2% of the population will have ANY mageborn talent at all. The numbers of actual professional mages will largely be up to YOU who partake in this discussion/experiment.

Things to remember: Education takes time. Time spent on education, unless it is a profesion (ie a professional teacher) will likely result in time taken away from the work of the actual professional. For instance, let's say you have a village healer. You decide that the healer will have mundane skills as well as magical skills. You also decide that the mage will be working in their full capacity as a healer and that any "apprentice training" has to occur OFF hours. So perhaps an apprentice might learn the spell "Lend energy" as part of their "Job" as an apprentice, but then also only get 1 hour per day of actual training in spells. That means that the apprentice will be learning at best, 1 spell per year (remember, medieval times had days where one could not work, religious holidays were more common etc).

Per GURPS 3e, starting characters may not have more than 2x age points in skill. A 40 year old mageborn could thus have at most, 80 points in skills.
With 10 villages, that gives us approx 3750 people. Of which 75 will have magery (assuming magery 0 doesn't exist), 67 or 68 will have M1, 6 or 7 will have M2, and about a 68% chance of there being a single M3 candidate.

What is the rate of mage utilization? Do the high mucky mucks have a policy of going to each village every year seeking out mageborn? (I assume they line up everyone in the village in the square and look at them with either the Aura spell, or with an item enchanted with the Aura spell, which can be made using Q&D for 100 mana. Tricky to get enough enchanters, but if there was an active policy of making sure you "capture" all of the mageborn, doable by the government. And worth it, to make sure they get all of the mages they can.

If they don't have a policy about the mageborn, is there any other group wanting to find out who the mageborn are? Because if there isn't, Joe Farmer who is mageborn isn't likely to even know he's special, is likely illiterate, and it won't be obvious that he's a mage to anyone else. He's "just another farmhand". And that means that you might as well cut everything down by another factor of 10 (assuming 10% of the population can get by without being farmers).

Which would give us only 7 M1 mages, with a 60-70% chance of an M2, but nothing higher than that.

So I would expect, if mages are considered valuable in any way, that the lords of these villages (and their lords) would have a policy in place that would check their populations for potential mages. (Which I think is what we are planning, right?) They will then become part of the elite (and I don't think they would be given much of a choice), to be trained as court mages.

Now I just need to look at the table of folks Hal provided, look up what the unfamiliar words mean so I understand it, and put on my thinking cap. ;-)
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My current worldbuilding project. You can find the Adventure Logs of the campaign here. I try to write them up as narrative prose, with illustrations. As such, they are "embellished" accounts of the play sessions.


Link of the moment: Bestiary of Plants. In a world of mana, plants evolved to use it as an energy source.



It is also the new home of the Alaconius Lectures, a series of essays about the various Colleges of Spells.

Last edited by StevenH; 05-11-2021 at 02:58 PM.
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Old 05-11-2021, 07:48 PM   #16
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

GURPS Banestorm makes the assumptions that the 2% mages are mostly Magery 0 and that there is some effort to identify mages in childhood.

Most agrarian societies are not careers open to talents, so a genetic "yes/no" talent for magic has social implications. Do most rural mages at best become hedge wizards and craft wizards (part of the peasant estate), or are they removed from their families and given training so they can become clerks or burger? What about societies where many of the intelligentsia cannot have legitimate children (eg. late medieval Catholic and some Buddhist societies in our world)?
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Old 05-11-2021, 08:35 PM   #17
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
GURPS Banestorm makes the assumptions that the 2% mages are mostly Magery 0 and that there is some effort to identify mages in childhood.

Most agrarian societies are not careers open to talents, so a genetic "yes/no" talent for magic has social implications. Do most rural mages at best become hedge wizards and craft wizards (part of the peasant estate), or are they removed from their families and given training so they can become clerks or burger? What about societies where many of the intelligentsia cannot have legitimate children (eg. late medieval Catholic and some Buddhist societies in our world)?
While asking me these questions if a function of asking the GM how their world functions, this is largely a function of how Yrth was originally portrayed vs how a TL 3 society evolves.

Now comes one problem that I will have to address...

How does one go about identifying mageborn in any of the three levels of GURPS MAGIC (ie Fantasy 1st, GURPS MAGIC 2nd, or GURPS MAGIC for 4e). GURPS GRIMOIRE introduced Mage Light, light that can only be utilized by those individuals who have magery. This makes it absurdly easy to detect who has magery. GURPS GRIMOIRE was carried over into GURPS MAGIC for 4e, so that is an absurdly easy task subsequent to GRIMOIRE and into GURPS MAGIC for 4e.

GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition and earlier however, had to go a different route. One way to test would be to use the AURA spell - which a person casting the spell can also get a pretty good idea of what level of magery the target of the spell has. The only alternative is to try the DUNE Bene Gesserit style of testing by placing a number of small items in a box with only ONE item being a magic item. Thus, each item is grasped in the dark, and the potential mageborn has to pick it out of the non-magical items. Perhaps the best way might be to have identical shaped and sized items (such as marbles?) and have the only difference be in color, which people can't tell without their eyes - from a box.

In any event, the question becomes then of "when does the Mageborn talent manifest itself". For now, unless people don't much care - let's say that Magery doesn't manifest itself until say, 10 years of age. A point can be argued that this isn't "as written" for Yrth, but it does simplify the building of NPC characters based on the 3e rule for starting characters at age 10 and adjusting them over time as they grow up. It also allows for purpose of this simulation, allowing characters more points as they survive growing old...

In the meantime?

Literacy:
  1. Noble Born: Literate as a class
  2. Freeborn - Illiterate as a class unless their craft requires it. Those who are church educated will be literate
  3. Serf born - Illiterate unless directly involved with the church such as a deacon or what have you.

If you who want to discuss any other kind of organization for the discovery of mageborn - would need to answer the question of both how and why. A blanket education is more 20th and 21st century presumptions and mindsets than medieval ;)

In the end? This is more about you working out the ramifications of the Mageborn in society than it is about me handing down edits from on high. If you want to make assumptions on the spending of the "coins" and you want to presume many more are FOUND than perhaps are trained, that's fine. But for every child you release from being an apprentice to their father, you're interrupting the trade secrets training of father to son.

This doesn't even address the issue of what you're going to do with mageborn who are young girls, and ultimately, women. You will also have to bear in mind that mageborn have to have REAL interaction within society. Sometimes, it isn't what the mageborn can really do or really WILL do that matters - sometimes it is what the fear they can do that comes into being.

HOW will the mageborn be perceived within your 10 villages? What spells do you believe will be forbidden to study as violations of the tenants of religion? Spells that remove free will may well be black listed. Spells that are necromatic in nature - may risk damnation in the eyes of the church.

If there are no such limits - how does the Lord of the Village handle crimes of magic? More importantly - how does a Lord handle the need for Magic within their own household?

So - put your thinking caps on, because your'e not just trying to "maximuize the impact of mageborn on society" - you're also taking on the role of a World Builder.

For example - suppose you have a single organization that tears children apart from families as soon as they're discovered to be mageborn? What if this organization were the King of the Realm? What compensations does this organization owe to the parents? To the Lord of the Manor if taken from his Serfs? What if the King essnetially enslaves those mageborn such that he and he alone controls their freedom and how they practice their craft?

In the end, if you propose something for your role in this thread, follow it up with how you expect it to work, or if you open it up to others to discuss, watch as the ramifications of your proposal is discussed amongst others. I kind of like that atmosphere - DISCOVER the implications of decisions and see where they lead you.

:)

For now? I'm going to implement the coding such that I can do it either way where it comes to generating the mageborn within society. First method will be to simply use statistics and say 2% of the entire population is mageborn, then determine their social class. Randomly determine their Magery level by means of either pre or post magery 0 methodology.

Second method will be possible, but not used (unless requested) where each person born has a flat 2% chance of having Magery at all.
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Old 05-11-2021, 08:47 PM   #18
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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Originally Posted by StevenH View Post

What is the rate of mage utilization? Do the high mucky mucks have a policy of going to each village every year seeking out mageborn? (I assume they line up everyone in the village in the square and look at them with either the Aura spell, or with an item enchanted with the Aura spell, which can be made using Q&D for 100 mana. Tricky to get enough enchanters, but if there was an active policy of making sure you "capture" all of the mageborn, doable by the government. And worth it, to make sure they get all of the mages they can.

If they don't have a policy about the mageborn, is there any other group wanting to find out who the mageborn are? Because if there isn't, Joe Farmer who is mageborn isn't likely to even know he's special, is likely illiterate, and it won't be obvious that he's a mage to anyone else. He's "just another farmhand". And that means that you might as well cut everything down by another factor of 10 (assuming 10% of the population can get by without being farmers).

Which would give us only 7 M1 mages, with a 60-70% chance of an M2, but nothing higher than that.

So I would expect, if mages are considered valuable in any way, that the lords of these villages (and their lords) would have a policy in place that would check their populations for potential mages. (Which I think is what we are planning, right?) They will then become part of the elite (and I don't think they would be given much of a choice), to be trained as court mages.

Now I just need to look at the table of folks Hal provided, look up what the unfamiliar words mean so I understand it, and put on my thinking cap. ;-)
Hi StephenH

What needs to be kept in the back of the mind is this:

Medieval mindsets were such that the King did not have Total control much as we see things from a modern lens. Each obligation that various classes held, were the result of prior history being what it is - carried forward into the present. Thus, a Serf was born into the obligations that someone (possibly even himself) obligated himself to a Lord - so that the Lord had to not only provide the serf with a plot of land, but also had to protect the serf both legally and physically. In return, the serf and all of his descendants were obligated to provide a given number days of labor, pay rents and fees, and show up for a civilian militia muster. They were bound to the Lord by contract. A king could not just show up and upset that contract. A King COULD however, offer to pay the fee owed to the Manor Lord for said freedom of the individual. The Lord however, was not obligated to just GIVE up his rights because the King flashed some coins.

But this brings us to the next issue. What I'm outlining above is from an era where magic did not exist. One COULD postulate that certain "customs" might have evolved alongside that of historical feudalism. After all, it is the "custom of the manor" that matters when dealing with the laws of the times.

My "assignment" to you is to put on your thinking cap and offer a solution to the question you asked, even though you didn't mean to ask it. **chuckling**

How are the mageborn treated? If their parents were serfs, what are they? Can a Serf born mage accomplish things? Can the LORD provide for the Serfborn mage's education, and thus decide what spells the mage shall learn? Can the Lord of the manor force the serborn mage to owe a given amount of labor measured in "Days" towards the production of magical activity in lieu of pay?

That last question, be VERY careful in answering. Why? The labor obligation was tied DIRECTLY to the land held by the family in the serf/lord contract. Allowing a child's labor (and ultimate their adult labor) as a mage affect the agricultural labor - means that the Lord will lose his Free HARVEST based labor and require that the Lord's fields (which he derives income from that keeps his family fed) require to be worked.

So - we'll let you propose your own answers so that you can see the implications therein.
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Old 05-11-2021, 10:06 PM   #19
Polydamas
 
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

There were towns with fairly universal schooling in medieval Europe. One world-building decision should be whether the society has cheap-to-write-on quick writing materials such as paper, or just slow-to-write-on, expensive ones such as parchment. Another would be local attitudes to writing: is it seen as a special skill or something every teenager has to learn to memorize enough love songs to woo their special someone like one society in South-East Asia?

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition and earlier however, had to go a different route. One way to test would be to use the AURA spell - which a person casting the spell can also get a pretty good idea of what level of magery the target of the spell has. The only alternative is to try the DUNE Bene Gesserit style of testing by placing a number of small items in a box with only ONE item being a magic item. Thus, each item is grasped in the dark, and the potential mageborn has to pick it out of the non-magical items. Perhaps the best way might be to have identical shaped and sized items (such as marbles?) and have the only difference be in color, which people can't tell without their eyes - from a box.
GURPS Banestorm (just to use as an example) suggests Aura, Divination, the "identify a magic item amongst baubles" test, and various quack methods. If we assume that the average mage has IQ + Magery around 11, an advantage of these methods is that they don't require learning a specific spell just to identify mages.
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Old 05-12-2021, 12:02 AM   #20
StevenH
 
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Default Re: Mageborn are like Coins - Worldbuilding TL 3

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Originally Posted by hal View Post
Hi StephenH

<snip>

But this brings us to the next issue. What I'm outlining above is from an era where magic did not exist. One COULD postulate that certain "customs" might have evolved alongside that of historical feudalism. After all, it is the "custom of the manor" that matters when dealing with the laws of the times.

My "assignment" to you is to put on your thinking cap and offer a solution to the question you asked, even though you didn't mean to ask it. **chuckling**

How are the mageborn treated? If their parents were serfs, what are they? Can a Serf born mage accomplish things? Can the LORD provide for the Serfborn mage's education, and thus decide what spells the mage shall learn? Can the Lord of the manor force the serborn mage to owe a given amount of labor measured in "Days" towards the production of magical activity in lieu of pay?

<more snip>

So - we'll let you propose your own answers so that you can see the implications therein.
OK. No answers from on high. I get my own 10 villages to play with.

All right. It won't be historically medieval. It can't be; there is magic, and that changes everything, even with the few mages that are born. So we need to go back further to start the history.

I know we all use medieval as a short of shorthand to get that "swords and sorcery" feel. And that's fine, at a broad, macro level. But it's the details that matter. We will assume that the ability to make steel is known to at least some smiths (mild steel, in this case, circa roughly about 1300AD), and that tempering is known to several of those, although not necessarily all of them. Three field crop rotation was a medieval discovery; four field didn't come into play until the early 16th century. So we will assume three field (two planted, one fallow). Although magic may change this (both due to Plant spells, and due to the variance in education/discovery/invention that will come due to the fact that magic exists.

Grinding mills, pumping mills, and trip hammer mills all exist.

Questions for the Hive Mind:

What is the terrain like?

Where are the mountains, forests, plains, coastlines?

Are there navigable rivers for trade and travel?

How many of the 10 villages are located on or near major waterways?
What is the local weather like?

What are the primary natural disasters? (Floods in floodplains, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes by coastlines, etc.)

What resources are available?

What types of wood are available?

What methods of harvesting said woods are available?

What mineral resources are available?

Is there an iron mine nearby?

Gold or silver mine? What kinds of clays are available?

What about silica sands?

What about volcanic ash, or any of the other ingredients for concrete?

(The Romans got their ingredients from places all over their empire; when that collapsed, the ingredients couldn't be brought together very effectively, and no one really used concrete for a long time.)

What kinds of animals are raised?
What kind of fibers exist for fabrics, paper, rope, etc.?
Is cotton available, or is the climate too cold for it?
What about flax, hemp, bamboo, wool?

What is the local economy based on?

Are there any trading partners outside of the 10 villages?
If so, who are they, and what are they like?

Are there good, well-maintained roads?


Religion:

Hal, you said it was like the historical Catholic Church, minus the anti-witchcraft bits. Is it still patriarchal and misogynistic, or has the incidence of magery in women been able to change any of that?

Can women hold power and position in the Church?

How much power does the Church have in these 10 villages?
Who takes precedence...the local lord, or the local priest?
If the Lord and the Priest have a difference of opinion, which side will the King/Jarl/Grand Poobah favor?


That's all I have off the top of my head. I'll need answers to most of these questions before I can figure out what the society is going to look like. And, by extension, how mages are treated.
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Warmest regards,

StevenH

My current worldbuilding project. You can find the Adventure Logs of the campaign here. I try to write them up as narrative prose, with illustrations. As such, they are "embellished" accounts of the play sessions.


Link of the moment: Bestiary of Plants. In a world of mana, plants evolved to use it as an energy source.



It is also the new home of the Alaconius Lectures, a series of essays about the various Colleges of Spells.
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