Re: Buying Powers Setting (name tbd)
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 3:13 pm
:DMoriwen wrote:Oooh I am totally into the "dystopia of hidden rituals" idea.
It probably shouldn't be a thing, but I'm too lazy to work out cultures from the actual ground up, so, go for it. ^^;Moriwen wrote:How closely does this correspond to Earth? Is it reasonable for there to be a "France," roughly corresponding to our France, though more (like all societies here) more insulated/with different social structures? Or is that not a thing?
Yep, those are possible.Moriwen wrote:Could you have a weaker neighbor of the "believe what I say" power that's more or less a "suspension of disbelief" power? (Doesn't actually convince you, but inclines you to play along, makes it seem conceptually plausible, etc.) (I'm imagining this as a power actors/bards/storytellers might have.) (I am totally also imagining Unwise Experimentation leading to Jeandad having the proper believe-what-I-say power.)
How about an "emotional resonance" power: it's not strong enough for someone to individually control someone else's emotions, but if you get a big group of people with the power together, they can enhance each other's emotions (so, crowds of crying people for funerals, or festivals with everyone gathering around a bonfire and ratcheting positive emotions upward at each other)?
In general the limitations on powers are
- they're tied to their owner - range and duration limited; anything that looks like a permanent effect is actually an ongoing one and will end if it's taken out of range (which might not be possible, self-only permanent effects are common; also 'the entire world' is a possible range but would be super expensive)
- the same ritual always gives the exact specific same power (so nothing that targets 'my wife', but 'this exact person' or 'the person I'm thinking of' or 'anyone around me' or 'just me' are fine, similarly locations etc)
- a given power gives one power - the power can be complex, but it has to be all one thing; you might get a shapeshifting power that lets you do arbitrary forms on a dog-human spectrum or one that only gave you a tail (specific breed or free choice), but not one that gave you both the tail and ears but nothing else, and not one that let you do arbitrary forms on both a dog-human and cat-human spectrum
- sometimes powers don't come with the conveniences you might want, like a decent amount of range or the ability to turn it off at will; this is especially true of experimental powers or powers that are dangerous to experiment with
- unless you're experimenting, it has to be something that someone has discovered, and that you have a way to find out about; this is the biggest limitation. lots of stuff is possible but hasn't been discovered, and lots has been discovered somewhere but was lost to time or never shared at all or isn't known outside its culture or whatever
- also often but not always you have to actively use a power for it to work, this is why I'm iffy on a power that lets you not need to sleep
The only issue I'm seeing with this is that it's hard to contain knowledge of rituals if you're letting people do them at all. If a teen wants a power that they're not personally allowed to have, and they can find someone with that power, they can ask about the ritual; the person might not remember it exactly, especially if they're older, but they'll probably be able to at least provide a starting point for experimentation. It'd also be next to impossible to stop someone who really wanted to learn all the rituals from doing that by asking various kids right after they've gotten their powers, and they of course could share that knowledge with any teens who wanted it. (This doesn't stop a peasant/clergy/noble divide from working, it just has to be a strict one.) (Alternately, memory modification powers are possible, but that does creepy things to the culture.)Moriwen wrote:Other muttering about cultural ideas for limited-knowledge-dystopia-AU-France ("Francish"); please do give feedback on how well they fit! :)
I'm imagining a (quietly state-run) system of monasteries, such that the only way to find out the really good rituals (especially for a peasant) is to be dedicated as a child. The monks/nuns are divided into "lay" and "choir," with the children with highest potential and best-suited personalities being chosen to become choir brothers/sisters. Choir brothers and sisters spend their entire potential on super-useful power suites (chosen by their superiors, ofc), with the rituals having lots of religious significance as well as actual magic power. The lay brothers and sisters have much more like the standard power suite, and their job is to do the practical work of running the monasteries, and take care of the choir brothers and sisters, who of course lack lots of standard things. The special power suites for the choir religious are usually helpful to the community (e.g., various powerful healing stuff), and get regarded as gifts from God (not in that people are confused about how the magic works, just as a cultural thing). They'll also sometimes be used for ritual experimentation, since they can rely on having people to take care of them if it goes poorly. The monasteries curate libraries of rituals (and are probably the only non-noble people who can read); most of those rituals aren't open for public consumption, being reserved for the monks and nuns or for the nobles. Peasants getting ready to choose their powers consult with a monk or nun, who gives them advice about what to choose, and then teaches them the rituals they choose from those they're allowed to know.
They'd pretty much have to live separately (and build their own places) or spend potential on acquiring the local culture's access-enabling powers or both, and they'd definitely have to get the standard cultural suite if they wanted to stay around in secret. This seems like a tricky problem but not an insurmountable one.Moriwen wrote:Also: a Judaism-analogue (or actual AU!Judaism, depending on how close you want cultures to match to real-world cultures) seems like it would work really well with the cultural insularity that happens here. They're living within other cultures (because diaspora), but they're very culturally separate (and often live in physically separate ghettos). They have their own set of rituals, many of them focused on intellect/learning/mental things, passed down by memorization as part of bar/bat mitzvah preparation. (Francish has of course expelled them, as part of limiting popular knowledge of rituals, though some of them are ofc still secretly around.)
That sounds like exactly the type of thing this system would generate, yep.Moriwen wrote:I'm picturing the aristocracy as running on super-hint-culture, with (read-only) empathy absolutely required to function socially: making anyone feel a negative emotion at any point is an immense social gaffe. (And of course you end up with an 'arms race,' with people getting better at controlling their emotional responses, and then needing better empathy powers, and powers to give false impressions of what your emotions are, and so on.) (No one's managed to figure out a ritual to control people's emotions; or if they have, they're keeping it under wraps.) This then really limits social mobility, because a noble can do without a good chunk of the standard power suite by having servants for them and make room for these social powers that way, but a peasant can't afford to spend half their potential on powers for delicate social maneuvering.
There's a ritual for cognitive speed-up that's closely guarded, and only people in the direct line to the throne are allowed to know about it (including its existence). This of course gives them a nice leg up in social maneuvering.
Moriwen wrote:More powers, if you're up for evaluating possibility/price:
- A power whose only function is to identify if other people have that same power?
Possible, but one that identifies similar powers probably doesn't exist or at least is much less useful, so you're probably stuck with the features and cost of whoever first discovered it, meaning the cost is hard to predict. Always-on at a shortish range, like in the same room, would be cheap, though, 1-2. - A healing touch
- that cures a particular disease?
cheap, 2-5, but good luck discovering the power for the disease you actually want to cure. - a range of minor ailments?
sort of. how this would work would be more like 'instant magic antibiotic' than anything else, so it'd be useless on diseases that are immune to that particular cure no matter how minor they are, and useful on diseases that are susceptible to it no matter how serious they are. 3-30. - everything?
30-35
- that cures a particular disease?
- A power to Create X (flour? bread? water? food in general?)
5-60; making a single simple substance (water) is cheapest. 'food in general' is not a category you can get but 'plant material in general' and 'animal material in general' and 'matter in general' are. - A power to hear things at a specific (arbitrary) point? (Which could then be used for public broadcasting, if pretty much everyone has that power, and you set up an announcer there.)
4ish - A power to need less sleep (say, 4 hrs instead of 8)?
I think there are several approaches to this, actually, so you'll see it working different ways in different cultures. 8-20, where 8 is the ability to move sleep around/break up your sleep needs so you still need 8 hours/day but you can get by on naps or sleep all weekend to be awake all week, and 20 is a fully automatic power where you genuinely need less sleep. - A power for making plants grow better?
define 'grow better', but this seems low-midrange for most use cases, 8-10. 'Instant tree just add sapling' is possible but would be more expensive, around 20-25. - A power to kill at a touch (uh, presumably toggle-able so you don't kill everyone you touch)?
And this is why experimentation is dangerous. ^^; Killing people is pretty easy, 10ish? But might not exist for aforementioned dangerous-experimentation reasons. - A dowsing power for finding water?
depends on range, also you probably want to be able to specify clean fresh water, which makes it more expensive; 4-30, where the 4 gives you the nearest source within a mile or so and doesn't tell you anything about safety and the 30 lets you detect all water sources within a wide range and their cleanliness/etc status.
Yup. This is handled differently in different cultures; I think it's not actually super uncommon for 12-13 year olds to pick up one or two of the very cheapest access-enabling powers.MaggieoftheOwls wrote:So if you don't typically buy any powers until fifteenish, that sort of means that it has to be possible to navigate the culture and stuff without the standard power suite, at least to the level that a child does. This could have some interesting implications, like a higher level of expecting-to-do-things-for-children, and--not adulthood, exactly, but fifteen-or-whenever-you-buy-your-powers would probably be a huge autonomy milestone, suddenly being able to do for yourself all these things that previously you'd had to get other people to do for you.
That could happen but seems like it'd need bigger and more coordinated governments than tend to arise during this time period, to happen at any kind of real scale. What seems more likely is for a rich person to personally do something like that, with the promise of keeping their experimenters comfortable and providing for their families. (...hey Lintamande.)MaggieoftheOwls wrote:Also I'm imagining at least one government that subsidizes poor people doing experimental versions of a bunch of different powers, so like, if your family is broke and you can't get a good apprenticeship your options are sort of to take practical powers and try to make your way in the world anyway, or alternately you could go live in the government dormitories and get a bunch of experimental and probably at least mostly useless powers and have incredibly limited ability to, like, function independently in society but you don't have to do that in order to survive.