Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Gurps Spells to cause unpredictable munitions.

Anaraxes · 11-08-2020, 08:19 AM

I think Tessen was looking more for ideas to booby-trap the ammunition rather than simply destroy it. It might be more annoying, for instance, to warp and corrupt the ammo so that it jams weapons in use, has a lot of duds, or plugs the barrel so the next round can burst it. Delay a spell on a magazine so that every round in a magazine goes off when one round is fired. That kind of thing. If you just destroy the cache and leave a smoking crater, that has some value, but the enemy knows the weapons are useless and will make other arrangements. If the weapons seem normal, then they'll issue them and may only discover the failures once the battle starts.

Dispel Magic ends a Shape spell, but doesn't reverse it. That is, ending a Shape spell doesn't mean all the material spontaneously re-flows back to its form before the spell was cast. (That effect would be casting a second Shape spell to restore things -- assuming you knew what the old shape was.) It just means the shaping magic stops, which is important mostly if the new shape isn't stable. Shape Spells can hold material in forms that would be impossible naturally -- tall columns of water, long thin bridges of stone, etc. Take away the magic, and those kinds of shapes collapse. (Many of the Shape spells have a note to that effect. I'd suggest even the ones that don't still conform to this principle; it's just that the authors of those short spell descriptions weren't thinking of, say, Shape Air being used to hold air inside a spaceship with a hull breach, as opposed to moving some of the air around inside a lot of other air.)

11-08-2020, 08:19 AM	#3
Anaraxes Join Date: Sep 2007	Re: Gurps Spells to cause unpredictable munitions. I think Tessen was looking more for ideas to booby-trap the ammunition rather than simply destroy it. It might be more annoying, for instance, to warp and corrupt the ammo so that it jams weapons in use, has a lot of duds, or plugs the barrel so the next round can burst it. Delay a spell on a magazine so that every round in a magazine goes off when one round is fired. That kind of thing. If you just destroy the cache and leave a smoking crater, that has some value, but the enemy knows the weapons are useless and will make other arrangements. If the weapons seem normal, then they'll issue them and may only discover the failures once the battle starts. Dispel Magic ends a Shape spell, but doesn't reverse it. That is, ending a Shape spell doesn't mean all the material spontaneously re-flows back to its form before the spell was cast. (That effect would be casting a second Shape spell to restore things -- assuming you knew what the old shape was.) It just means the shaping magic stops, which is important mostly if the new shape isn't stable. Shape Spells can hold material in forms that would be impossible naturally -- tall columns of water, long thin bridges of stone, etc. Take away the magic, and those kinds of shapes collapse. (Many of the Shape spells have a note to that effect. I'd suggest even the ones that don't still conform to this principle; it's just that the authors of those short spell descriptions weren't thinking of, say, Shape Air being used to hold air inside a spaceship with a hull breach, as opposed to moving some of the air around inside a lot of other air.)