Supplemental worldbuilding questions

[Alicorn]

I haven't really developed non-alphabet sorcery to speak of. I think it does take ages to get anywhere with that, too, it's a system popular on Asgard, which is not known to be inhabited by omnipotent magical titans.

[Ezra]

Asgardians are noted for Elflike patience. Pulling things off the shelf might be quick, but I'd imagine development to be also slow.

[Kappa]

I've put some thought into non-alphabet sorcery because I run Frigg, who is a non-alphabet sorcerer.

My idea of how it works is approximately: really new spells, that aren't made of innovations and recombinations of spells that already existed, happen now and then when someone does something that causes one to come into being. They are discovered or created rather than invented. Then people spend a long time picking them apart and putting the pieces back together to try to get more use out of them than the original form will cover. It might be a little faster than alphabetic spell development as long as you're only making relatively small tweaks from a spell's original form, but it's drastically more limited in scope, because you can only do things that are achievable using your existing spell library as a starting point. And I suspect (I don't think I've confirmed this with Alicorn) that Loki's spell format isn't amenable to being tweaked using existing spell-tweaking techniques, so you can't even cheat by having Loki invent you a spell and then having all your best sorcerers spend the next hundred years innovating wildly from that foundation.

[DanielH]

Could Loki learn their transmission mechanism? I’m pretty sure regular spells are made of the same atomic concepts and that regular sorcerers don’t have access to those concepts; are either of those beliefs wrong?

[Kappa]

Regular spells are built on the same system and regular sorcerers don't have access to the atomic building blocks, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Loki's spells can be transmitted and used as though they were regular spells.

I'm tempted to make an analogy wherein Loki is programming in assembly code and normal spells are written in some excessively hand-holding coding-for-beginners language with all the interesting stuff tucked under the covers where you can't touch it, except that also the syntax manual and API docs have all been lost, leaving nothing but the code itself. In this analogy, Loki cannot take advantage of the Sorcery For Beginners!! "transmission mechanism" because none of her spells are written in Sorcery For Beginners!!. But I haven't confirmed this analogy with Alicorn so she might be imagining things in a different way.

[Alicorn]

This sounds like it works to me.

[Kappa]

Cool.

[DanielH]

And Loki doesn’t have any special advantage at traditional sorcery like being able to decompile its spells all the way down so she could reuse parts of them? Presumably she could at least learn traditional sorcery spells wholesale (now that she’s a Princessly Exception) if she happened to want to do something which doesn’t require tweaking, but it would usually be better to find somebody who had actually studied traditional sorcery?

[Alicorn]

Haven't decided how Loki interacts with traditional sorcery.

[Ezra]

Milliways: is there a rule for what sort of network connections will (like Janepoints) keep time moving on the other end, vs. which will see their other end non-responsive while the world is paused? Or is it just needs-of-thread? Asking for a setting interaction.