Alicornutopia

Aestrix wrote:It might be possible, but we haven't talked about it at all, so I'm not confirming or denying its existence. I'm tricksy like that.

Fair, it did sound like something way outside Phix-Max ability to figure out.

So HDM realted questions

Is there an official cause for intuitive alethiometer reading? Genetics? Random? Is there anything special about ... "joker"-ness to it?
If a cloudpine witch went through the trouble of getting the relevant degrees would they be able to have a better ability to work around technology? (In such way that it pays off the work to get the degrees)

I was going to save this until I’d read The Amber Spyglass, but I haven’t actually picked that back up in a while so I’ll ask now. So far the books have gone into very little detail of how witch magic works, and it seems unlikely they’ll expand on it much (and the book seems to contradict the glowfic ’verses; blowing snow on locks being the only visible component of opening them doesn’t fall into herb, sacrifice, rune, poetry, or even gesture-based magic). How did you come up with this magic system for HDM worlds?

And a medallion question: Alicorn said somewhere that Superluminal has worldbuilding tweaks from the Aestrix-coauthored Medallion. Could you summarize them briefly? I’m particularly wondering if the League dragons would be able to runecast, but I’m curious about other worldbuilding tweaks as well. Which world if either is Myth closer to?

Neither continuity has a causal explanation for intuitive readers. Kappa wanted Kas to be one, so he is.

Engineering degrees would not substantially help witches do magic to tech. It's a basic conceptual limitation of their magic's symbology.

I made up the system, without rereading first. I had forgotten entirely about blowing snow onto locks, but I need something more systematized in order for Bells to exploit it anyway.

Runecasting is different because kappa wasn't fully satisfied with the Medallion system, and Superluminal has unicorns and some other species that Medallion doesn't. Myth is closer to Medallion as of right now, because Medallion is basically Alicorn-systematizes-Skin-Deep-with-some-Aestrix-commentary, and Marri has not issued any worldbuilding opinions at me yet, let alone ones similar to kappa's.

In Superliminal and similar settings, could a peryton shape-shift into someone by eating a cloned copy of their heart?

I had been wondering for a while: The Haut know about critters; do House Bharaputra?

We have no major peryton characters planned so this isn't going to be a plot point. I'm inclined towards yes but if kappa disagrees I'd go with that.

I think Bharaputra could probably not be induced to keep mum about critters. They're the ones who will clone you a new body; if they could clone you a new body with the ability to turn into a dragon they would advertise this very loudly.

Alicorn wrote:Myth is closer to Medallion as of right now, because Medallion is basically Alicorn-systematizes-Skin-Deep-with-some-Aestrix-commentary, and Marri has not issued any worldbuilding opinions at me yet, let alone ones similar to kappa's.

My approach to worldbuilding is basically this:


Which in practical terms summarizes to "just do what canon says and, where unspecified, extrapolate as plot convenient", but we haven't had to do a huge amount of that for Myth yet.

I think cloned heart-eating is awesome and I'm fully on board with it.

Marri, you are a delight. <3

What memories the cloned heart-eating perython would get? The clone? The original non-clone? all "instances" of the person? none?

Deciding to combine Vorkosigan saga and Skin deep was anything more complex than "Woah this would be awesome!"?

My instinct is that the eater of a cloned heart would only be able to shapeshift and not get memories.

We wanted a way to put a Bell on the relevant doorstep and came up with this as a thing to do that was not another plant Bell.