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Old 06-08-2021, 01:10 PM   #31
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polkageist View Post
Put another way, the spell has expensive tastes
Much the same thing as I was trying to propose with that requirement for the source to be an ore.

The spell is "Refine", not "Extract Chemical Compound of Your Choice". If it only pulls out materials that people in the setting would consider refined from stuff they would consider unrefined sources of that material, half the problems with it go away. *Many* problematic spells that suffer from horrible problems if you insist they work on some sort of "scientific" or "technical" principles become much better behaved when you assume they operate on ordinary understanding of the words in their names and descriptions.
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Old 06-08-2021, 01:44 PM   #32
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Much the same thing as I was trying to propose with that requirement for the source to be an ore.

The spell is "Refine", not "Extract Chemical Compound of Your Choice". If it only pulls out materials that people in the setting would consider refined from stuff they would consider unrefined sources of that material, half the problems with it go away. *Many* problematic spells that suffer from horrible problems if you insist they work on some sort of "scientific" or "technical" principles become much better behaved when you assume they operate on ordinary understanding of the words in their names and descriptions.
I agree, and I would add that a world with miraculous magic almost certainly does not work like ours does under the hood! So any chain of argument which requires assuming a scientific principle from the 17th century or later is dubious.

This is the same problem as the physicists and engineers who work out rationalizations for the technology of Star Wars: Star Wars is so obviously a 'rule of cool' setting that it can not possibly work under our physics. Ships travel between worlds at the speed of the plot, not according to an equation.
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Old 06-08-2021, 08:32 PM   #33
Pursuivant
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

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Originally Posted by Polkageist View Post
Since this is a brand new spell, I'm not sure if it should work on gemstones or not.
For simplicity, you could rule that it only works to refine metal ore into metal.

For non-metallic mineral compounds, all the spell does is destroy unwanted minerals while altering and separating metals you wish to keep. Nothing about it suggests that you can use it to shape the separated materials (use Shape Earth) or make them assume forms which couldn't be achieved using mundane technology.

Refine could be used to free gemstones from the surrounding rock, however, making it the magical version of the preprocessing and rough cutting that gemstones undergo before they are cut/ground.
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Old 06-09-2021, 03:08 PM   #34
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

Perhaps it could work that way in all cases, including metals - pull it out in the same shape in which it was present in the rock. Then for metals you'd end up with a complete, branching vein of metal lying on the ground (possibly in more or less shrunken or powdery form if the vein was originally ore rather than pure metal), and I think that is very cool.
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Old 06-09-2021, 03:32 PM   #35
Whitewings
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

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Originally Posted by Inky View Post
Perhaps it could work that way in all cases, including metals - pull it out in the same shape in which it was present in the rock. Then for metals you'd end up with a complete, branching vein of metal lying on the ground (possibly in more or less shrunken or powdery form if the vein was originally ore rather than pure metal), and I think that is very cool.
In some cases, one use of the spell will yield two valuable products. Cinnabar, when refined, yields mercury and sulphur.
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Old 06-09-2021, 04:40 PM   #36
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: [GURPS Magic] New spell: Refine

That's a good one, I hadn't thought of that.

(The following is stuff I'd been writing up already, and going off on many tangents about!)

As for the fancy chemistry tricks, depending on what kind of game it is, I'd be tempted to allow some of it if the user can succeed on a very high Chemistry/TL or Alchemy/TL roll to have the character understand thoroughly enough that the stuff is there and what it is. After all, if a character has that much Chemistry or Alchemy skill, it should be worth something, it should be possible to do clever things where clever things are possible.

I'm not sure that there's anything you could usefully do to a sandstone wall until a TL where silica is known to be a compound of silicon and oxygen - which wasn't discovered until the early 1800s in real life.
Granite has maybe a percent or two of iron and that's it in terms of things that mediaeval science knew were extractable metals. It's a mixture of quartz, feldspar and mica; the mica at least is in the form of separate dark glittering flecks that are fairly obvious if you look closely. You might be able to do something with that, extracting the grains as if they were gems. There's not usually that much of it, though - I'm not sure removing it would be enough to break down the wall.
Limestone and marble, as someone mentioned earlier, can be "refined" into quicklime, and that's been known since prehistoric times. Not all that common as a building material, but not unknown. After a bit of web searching, I haven't found out how hard quicklime actually is, but it seems possible that it might be crumbly enough compared to limestone to collapse under its own weight. Of course, then you have quicklime dust flying around.

However, in a modern setting with a wizard with a basic knowledge of modern chemistry, this spell would be much more versatile.
Sandstone very much could be reduced to silicon and oxygen, unless silicon doesn't count because it's not fully a metal.
Granite could be stripped of its aluminium, which is about 7% of its mass so that might at least weaken it a lot for tunnelling purposes.
Limestone could be stripped of its calcium, leaving nothing but carbon dioxide behind.
You could do the same to concrete, or to the mortar in a wall. Even if the metallic calcium was left in the wall, it would be smaller than the mortar had been and the bricks would come loose.
Metallic calcium or magnesium on tap could also be quite useful if you want to make a distress flare or set things on fire.
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/inorganic...2/reacto2.html
Speaking of setting things on fire, you could always extract the elemental sodium from a handful of road salt and stand well back. (Upwind, because there's going to be chlorine too. One for the "Stupid and Dangerous Magic" pile.)

If a GM does want these things to be possible, a price increase might be needed, as well as insisting on a Chemistry/TL roll. The GM might also rule that you can't extract something you aren't familiar with from first-hand experience, putting calcium and sodium out of reach of most people who aren't chemistry teachers. If the GM wants things like the limestone trick to be more difficult, charging by amount of refined material rather than amount of raw material might work.

If the GM doesn't want those things, then as someone else said, the spell will need some additional rules. Perhaps the spell was built around the seven planetary metals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metals_of_antiquity (which were the only ones known in ancient times), and only works for those. There were gemstones corresponding to each planet too, so if you want gemstones you could pick one each of those, or the set of twelve stones vaguely associated with the zodiac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthstone India (I found out while looking this up) had a separate lot of rules, so a spell originating from there might include zinc, and a different set of gemstones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navaratna .
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