06-15-2020, 10:02 PM | #31 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: New Orleans, LA
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
|
06-16-2020, 03:08 AM | #32 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
One exotic 'pocket universe' my normally SF campaign wandered through had a world on a disk (think like a CD or a vinyl record, complete with whole in the middle), flying ships on the 'sea of air' in that central hole, and a "clearly artificial" (as one player decided) sun circling in it in on a path that was definitely not a conventional gravitational orbit. They had reason to suspect that the atmosphere went all the way up to at least the moon (on another not-an-orbit path not much lower than the sun's). Quote:
__________________
Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
||
06-16-2020, 05:09 AM | #33 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
If you can see a meteor coming down, you are tens of miles from where it landed. And the atmosphere is variable enough that "much the same place" amounts to a circle miles across too. That's a lot of area to search for a small object. Or lots of small objects - meteors almost always break up into strewn fields miles long and half a mile wide.
__________________
-- MA Lloyd |
06-16-2020, 06:11 AM | #34 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
If magic can't sense meteoric iron, you can just look for the big voids in what you do sense. If you want the iron to be undetectable while using magic, the universe has to go a step beyond "can't be affected by magic" to "creates an illusion to magical senses of something else in its place".
(And the "something" really needs to be reactive to its surroundings to blend in convincingly. If iron always looked like some particular kind of dirt, then you could just Sense Earth for that kind of dirt, which finds all iron in other sorts of soil, loam, clay, sand, organic matter, trace chemicals of the sort farmers and landscapers test for, etc. Pretty difficult for a lump of iron if you're trying to treat magic as physics just with a different name for energy; perhaps fairly routine if you have an near-animate and intentional force of magic or active gods.) |
06-16-2020, 06:31 AM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
To review, you start by crafting the item(s) you want out of normal iron with all the magic assistance you desire, and use Shape Earth or similar to surround it/them with a protective layer of rock (note you can "flow" the stone around and into crevices of the iron item(s), making the whole mass solid without any air pockets to ker-splode from being heated, and you can then just use Shape Earth or a disintegration spell or magic acid or whatever to free the meteoric iron item(s) once it lands) . You then do some ceremonial casting to put some sort of slow-fall spell on the outer layer, with a built-in delay (ideally "activate x yards above the ground," but "activate in y minutes" can also work). You then do further ceremonial casting to teleport it high enough that it becomes incandescent upon re-entry (or whatever requirement you have for "meteor"), possibly waiting to finish the spell until the timing is right for the delay to work. The rock teleports up, becomes a meteor streaking through the air, then gets slowed down to land safely. You can use Detect Magic to track it while the slow-fall spell is active; if you don't think it'll last long enough for you to find it in a timely manner, you may want to include something in the meteor that makes it easy to track, such as a small magic item, a bit of precious metal, etc. Doing all this isn't going to cheap, of course, but may allow for items that are basically impossible to craft without magic at TL DF, or perhaps can result in a reduced cost for meteoric iron (AlexanderHowl's suggestion, which I suspect would have a lower yield-per-dollar than the above, implied roughly a CF of +1, as it doubled the cost of raw materials from ~$5.50 to $11). Of course, I think we're veering a wee bit from the topic of discussion due to my mostly-a-joke suggestion. It sounds like the intent was that meteoric iron was largely something of a plot device, but I see no problem with a semi-scientific analysis of the way meteoric iron roughly works. Just don't be surprised if you wind up with odd results.
__________________
GURPS Overhaul |
|
06-16-2020, 07:03 AM | #36 | ||||||||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
As far as Dungeon Fantasy is concerned, the defining properties of "meteoric iron" are: (1) it's magic-immune, and (2) it's recognizably iron. That's it, that's all. The adjective "meteoric" is a fanciful one applied by simple folk blindly struggling and reaching to explain the weird properties of an otherwise normal-seeming material. It falls into the same category as "fairy" and "dragon's" and a bunch of other words thrown around with abandon. If you really believe that "fairy stones" were carved by fairies or that "dragon's root" grows only where there be dragons, I have a bridge to sell you. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
This is a case where I expect the reader to accept author fiat and not bother to dig.
__________________
Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
||||||||
06-16-2020, 07:27 AM | #37 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
I've always assumed that people in setting *do not* call this stuff meteoric. The idea that meteors (a phenomenon in the sky) have anything to do with stuff found on the ground is seriously anachronistic in a fantasy setting after all. The idea that meteorites were rocks that fell from the sky and were associated with meteors in some way is an early 19th century concept, though the assortment of holy stones (bethels) that supposedly fell from heaven, some (though not all) of which actually are meteorites allows you a little leeway on that if you insist.
__________________
-- MA Lloyd |
06-16-2020, 07:46 AM | #38 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
Actually, a conceit of mine is that because magic messes up science and technology so thoroughly, TL ceases to have meaning and it all runs together . . . and because TL all runs together, divinatory magic is doomed to reveal almost nothing useful about science and technology. It's all a headachy hodge-podge that nobody can decipher, and it's a tossup who's nuttier: spellcasters and prophets who purport to have discerned or been shown the truth, or artificers and alchemists who actually believe their systems and calculations are founded on something more stable than whimsy and a divine sense of humor.
__________________
Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
|
06-16-2020, 08:25 AM | #39 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Quote:
Still, it's not entirely clear even sticking with Basic-style magic that there aren't other ways than Seek to take advantage of anti-magic to help find MI. Earth Vision presumably can't see through MI any better than any other magical sense, but suddenly not seeing through the earth to the distance you expect because that's where the chunk of MI is buried is still useful information for Alexander Howl's estimate of difficulty of searching for the Iron That Fell To Earth (Unless It Didn't). Earth to Air would make for a quick and easy means to sort out the MI from all the boring iron and gold while mining, perhaps Move/Alter Terrain even to excavate the entire region of the crater to leave the unaffected bits behind in a nice pile. The point was merely that negative properties can sometimes be as useful as positive ones for detection and manipulation. One nice thing about Basic magic is that the spells are often open to creative application. |
|
06-16-2020, 09:55 AM | #40 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
|
Re: Meteoric iron immunities
Only if the voids are large enough to matter. A four pound piece of iron is a pretty small object to find over a square mile (it is around one cup in volume). As for the economics, they are based on the Teleport Other spell, so it does not matter in the object is mostly iron or mostly taffy, though a worked sword will likely not survive the process regardless of its protection.
Last edited by AlexanderHowl; 06-16-2020 at 09:58 AM. |
Tags |
magic, meteoric iron |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|