Naked and Afraid, GURPS Fantasy Edition

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Yes.

..........

Mary Ann, Ginger, and Lovie Howell?

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Fire is another hard one, unless you have enough Survival skill to start a friction fire yourself, there don't seem any good fire symbols available for a typical uninhabited tropical island. Maybe a generous GM might let you construct a burning lens from ice with a water college spell. Of course an island big enough you're thinking about aerial survey has been visited before. Maybe you can find something suitable in the ruins of the World War II era emergency airfield....

It's not hard to char stuff with friction and make smoke (and where there's smoke...). A couple rocks struck just right can make a tiny spark, and while a neophyte survivalist might not expand that into a roaring fire, a wizard might.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Not all tasks need to be accomplished with magic. Do the sorceresses have any other skills, particularly survival ones?

There's also some overlap. In particular, Naturalist is an enormously useful skill for mundane survival purposes, and will also help a lot in identifying specific species with a strong symbolic resonance. It's probably the difference between success and failure in this situation (especially as it gives a default to Survival, and a scholarly Hermetic wizard is much more likely to have studied Naturalist than Survival).

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

There's also some overlap. In particular, Naturalist is an enormously useful skill for mundane survival purposes, and will also help a lot in identifying specific species with a strong symbolic resonance. It's probably the difference between success and failure in this situation (especially as it gives a default to Survival, and a scholarly Hermetic wizard is much more likely to have studied Naturalist than Survival).

On the other hand, if you school traditionally drops students naked somewhere as a graduation exercise, it really ought to have a required class on not dying if dropped naked somewhere.

It might not be strictly Survival - indeed "Improvising Focuses from Nothing" sounds like a really useful class for magic students, not just for this exercise, but for finding something you can afford, or when you need it [now] and your good stuff is miles away. But it should teach something.

And yeah OK, it's a magic school, and those always ignore stuff like parental involvement. But seriously if you're going to drop people's kids in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks as a class exercise, you damn well better devote more than a lecture or two to survival stuff before you do, and have really good monitoring and rescue plans in place, or their parents are going to be understandably very, very angry if something goes wrong. Very, very angry muggles can't do much more than sue your institution out of existence. Very, very angry wizards are much more personally dangerous.

[Whitewings]

One clarification: this is in a pulp fantasy setting. The students, the ones who get far enough to take this particular test, are adults, not children. The ranks are Sorceror/Sorceress Ordinary, Sorceror/Sorceress Adept, Sorceror/Sorceress Master, and Sorceror/Sorceress Supreme. Each rank requires passing a more difficult test, and the last requires a significant contribution to the state of the art of sorcerous practice.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Culture20

It's not hard to char stuff with friction and make smoke (and where there's smoke...). A couple rocks struck just right can make a tiny spark, and while a neophyte survivalist might not expand that into a roaring fire, a wizard might.

If the desert island is a coral atoll, you could be looking for a long time before you find rocks that'll strike sparks.

[Phil Masters]

Anyway, why worry? This is pulp fantasy, and these three are the protagonists. It’s 100% certain that a pirate ship or something will heave into view ten minutes after they improvise some clothes and hence spoil that part of the fun.

[Whitewings]

So their priorities should be:

1) Shelter
2) Water
3) Food
4) Protection

Repeat and refine as desired. The fairer-skinned ones will want protection from the sun; the Shade spell is in Light & Darkness, and one correspondence for Phoubêl is tropical beaches. So that's at least three "just stand in the right place" correspondences: Phoubêl (Light & Darkness), Harpax (Plant) and Saphathorael (Water). Edit: Charchnoumis (Animal) resonates with forests, including rainforests. So that's four.

No point in making clothes unless and until they need to leave the island ahead of schedule. :)

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

So their priorities should be:

1) Shelter
2) Water
3) Food
4) Protection

Repeat and refine as desired. The fairer-skinned ones will want protection from the sun; the Shade spell is in Light & Darkness, and one correspondence for Phoubêl is tropical beaches. So that's at least three "just stand in the right place" correspondences: Phoubêl (Light & Darkness), Harpax (Plant) and Saphathorael (Water). Edit: Charchnoumis (Animal) resonates with forests, including rainforests. So that's four.

No point in making clothes unless and until they need to leave the island ahead of schedule. :)

Clothes are both shelter and protection, and as the latter includes from getting holes put in your precious hide from thorns, sharp bits of coral, etc., they are fairly important, especially footwear.

[Whitewings]

That last was just me riffing on Phil Masters’ comment about pirate ships.