Mori's Minions

[Bluelantern]

I was supposed to post earlier, but some deck ideas that I discussed with Moriwen.

Paintings: Life-sized paintings that are moved around through a complicated mechanical system. Belong to a rich tarot-user.

Polaroids: I suggested this to Mori and she liked and said it was fad that many users got into. The tarot of choice for a certain Max Caulfield.

Sculptures: small engraved stones/statues with very fine and delicated artwork.

Knives: Beautiful ritualistic daggers with very intricate desings, each corresponding to a card. I can't be the only one that thinks "Chainsaw would love this", right?

Pendrives: The deck would have a motherboard/circuitry aesthetic and each card actually works as a functional pendrive. Mori said that this can even be used such that by make a reading the user can get digital information from a person in the card. Created for one of my characters, Adam, who is the sort of geek that does this.

[Moriwen]

Responses to things I have failed at responding to!

- You can't effectively save up magical energy; resting for a day or two before a major exertion could help, but in general you'll be better off just training up your maximum level. It's roughly analogous to physical strength that way.

- "military surplus tarot deck" is both (a) excellent and (b) totally a thing that happens. The military tarot-users haven't generally been casting for long enough to rely on magic durability for their deck, so they have really high-quality durable cards that can stand up to being in the middle of a muddy battlefield or crammed into a pack and still shuffle easily without a flat surface to do it on. And normally that sort of quality is pretty expensive even with just the standard art like the military uses, but if you can get military surplus decks it's much more affordable.

- Bluelantern has excellent ideas for unconventional decks. I am so into people with no artistic skills making their own decks out of polaroid snaps when polaroids first came out, and it becoming a huge fad, and probably around the present it's starting to come back a little bit as a retro thing. Also he had an idea for a deck designed to be inserted into specially designed chess pieces which I loved.

- I have made various updates to the first post, for readability and to update what I've been wanting to glowfic.

[DanielH]

I am pretty sure there would be a modern fad of somehow making animated decks. Either taking GIFs and making them into flipbooks or some other similar idea.

Also a LOLcat deck would be entirely possible. Googling lolcat tarot gives results even without them being functional magic.

[Ezra]

Flexagon deck! Flexagons are hard to shuffle though.

[DanielH]

So are most of Bluelantern’s suggestions. I assumed you could use alternate randomization methods if necessary.

Do the cards even need to be physical objects, or could you use a pure virtual deck or a large die with pictures or something? I imagine those would require extra effort when casting, but would they work for just reading?

[Moriwen]

In general, significant deviations in form from the standard playing-card style tend to decrease the power of the magic, but if they're sufficiently aesthetic it can make up for that. Same with alternate randomization methods: e.g., designs engraved on knife blades and then thrown at a wall, and read based on the pattern they stick in.

Animated decks, definitely. There are probably quite a lot of lolcat decks. A flexagon deck sounds awesome and I want one. Large die, probably, although that seems like it would be practically speaking a bit of a pain.

Virtual deck, definitely, people are doing a lot of experimenting with those. Something like what you get in the real world by googling for online tarot readings would definitely not work, even with an actual person involved to do the reading, because those sites are not aesthetic at all, but if you got some kind of cyberpunk theme or something going, sure. Works better if you give the person doing the reading some way to influence the results, like entering the random seeds. Someone who's not used to using computerized tarot for their magic probably crashes it a lot because their magic accidentally affects the wrong bits and messes up the program instead of drawing the correct card.

As Daniel says, a lot of these would be annoying to cast with, but you don't use your primary deck for casting anyway.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

I'm amusing myself imagining an eccentric billionaire's gold-ebony--diamonds-and-lapis lazuli-inlaid silk tarot deck.

[Moriwen]

YES PLEASE

There are probably so many terrible decks out there, because it doesn't actually matter if it's a good aesthetic, just if you find it pleasing. Of course people who take the time to study symbolism and literature and stuff, which helps with the skill aspects, tend to improve their aesthetic and end up with quite nice decks, but the author of My Immortal could have a perfectly functional Enoby Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way deck with Goths and Preps for suits and all the people having limpid eyes and purple hair and what have you.

[Moriwen]

Setting!

Bubbles

---

The setting has a lower-than-modern tech level, but not Generic Medieval, because that’s boring. I’m leaning 16th century, so some early guns, printing press, but pre-Industrial Revolution.

The basic magic concept is that magic spells occur naturally in forms reasonably suited to human purposes. There are many theories about the Universal Source of Magic and how the collective unconscious shapes it and so forth, but in practice no one has any idea why it works like this.

The spells look like large bubbles of uniform size, about a foot across. They vary in color, markings, patterns, and so forth, and these indicate what sort of spell it is, although not very precisely and of course you have to know how to interpret them. The bubbles appear most commonly at about 10,000 feet altitude -- about the middle of the clouds -- and less commonly at lower or higher altitudes. They will appear as low as ~100 feet and as high as ~20,000 feet.

To obtain a spell, a human has to touch it with bare skin. (Anything other than bare human skin passes right through unobstructed.) Obviously, this is somewhat tricky. Climbing a tall tree will get you to ~100 feet, and if you wait there all day you’ll usually get one or two spells that you can reach, assuming you’re fairly adroit at moving among the branches. A really good tower for that tech level (as in, one of the best in the world) is ~300 feet, and hanging out on the roof all day will get you maybe a dozen spells you can reach.

Climbing mountains helps some, but you can’t just move to a higher altitude and expect to have spells everywhere, they stay basically the same distance from the ground, not from sea level. The top of Everest has tons of spells, but it’s practically impossible to climb without modern technology (air canisters and such).

The existence of spells is universally known, and as a result, there’s been a lot of work towards finding a practical way to obtain them. Tall towers are a popular approach, and kings and rich nobles are likely to build the tallest tower they can afford and then assign people to keep watch there day and night. Hang gliders, developed in 9th century China, spread much faster in this world, although they’re still extremely dangerous, impossible to steer, and can’t carry anyone too heavy. The technology is guarded carefully by those who know it, and it’s mostly a few groups of monks living in the mountains and hang-gliding for spells. People keep trying to pull off hot-air balloons, on the model of paper airplanes, but they haven’t discovered rubber yet and can’t make it work.

Adding to all this, the higher the altitude, the better the spell (on average). A spell at 100 feet might make a loaf of bread appear or turn something purple. A spell at 20,000 feet might give you the power of teleportation. (Not that anyone is getting up to 20,000 feet at this point.) So there’s some pretty strong incentives to find a way to get up high.

Once you touch a spell, it becomes yours, and the bubble starts following you around. It stays a couple of feet away from you by default, but it’s easy to decide you want it to stay closer or further or orbit around you in circles or float above your head, and then it does that. You can keep a dozen or so around you before you start losing them, and get that up to maybe two dozen with practice and concentration. They’ll hang around for a week or so (longer for better spells) and then pop and vanish without effect if you haven’t cast them yet.

To cast a spell, you just will it to come closer to you and then touch it. It then casts. There’s unfortunately no way to target them. You can usually use the appearance of the bubble to figure out how it will target: you, a nearby object, a nearby non-you person, no target, etc. You do your best to figure out from the markings what sort of thing it will do: maybe “grant power to do with sight,” “cure something,” “affect feet somehow,” “something harmful with water,” that sort of thing. Then you cross your fingers and hope for the best. No one but you can cast a spell that you’ve claimed, and if it’s a spell that affects the user, there’s no way to make it target someone else instead.

Spells can create objects, mundane or magical, including living plants and animals, though not humans; change features of objects or people; cause harm in various ways; create things; affect the environment; grant abilities, magical or nonmagical; enchant objects; and so forth. They have a slight preference to be something interesting to humans (“create roast beef” rather than “create pile of bark”) but there’s still plenty of weird, silly, useless, and dangerous ones.

Anyone who can obtain spells can and does use them; a poor family might send a young child to perch in a tree all day and hope they get a food spell. You get called a “mage” if you’ve managed to start a cycle of obtaining magic effects that make it easier for you to get more spells. (So the king’s watchman who stands on a tower collecting spells all day and then does whatever the king says with them isn’t a mage, even though he has a lot of spells.)

Mages can be quite inventive with their powers, since they sort of have to be. If you get durability, you set up a cannon and start firing yourself out of it, that sort of thing. There are legends of mages who could fly and so had as many spells as they wanted, but that doesn’t happen in practice. If a mage is lucky, they might get wings that will let them fly for short distances if they work their muscle strength up a lot, or a decreased falling rate so they can jump off mountains and try to tag things on the way down, or an ability to fly that works for ten minutes a day and then shorts out at a random point after that. Most mages have something much less impressive, like a reduced need for oxygen that lets them climb higher mountains, or boots of jumping that let them hop between trees to catch any spell that comes down that low instead of hoping it comes near them, or a slight ability to attract spells towards them, or an improved ability to tell what a spell does. Being a mage is a somewhat risky business in general, since you don’t know for sure what a spell will do to you.

Kings would obviously like to employ mages, but this is a pain, because mages are pretty dangerous if they want to be, and you don’t want them just taking over the kingdom from you. Also they’ll find spells that do nice things to the person casting them, and that doesn’t do you any good. Obviously a king doesn’t have the time to be a mage himself. It’s too risky to let your heir do it, you can’t have your heir accidentally setting himself on fire, and besides he needs to be learning to rule. If you have your younger son be a mage, you risk him deciding to overthrow his brother and starting a civil war. The obvious solution to this is have your daughters be mages. This can sometimes involve letting them go mountain-climbing and hang-gliding, but that’s still pretty risky, so most often it involves sticking them in a tower and telling them to look for spells. Hence the tradition of princesses in towers. A mage princess is a very nice bargaining chip to offer in marriage as part of a treaty; alternatively, she can stay at home, marry some nice minor noble and move him to court, and work for her brother.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Huh. Sounds interesting and I immediately want to throw characters who will completely break it at it.