Re: Ask A Delene
Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2016 9:03 am
I have vague questiony feelings but no actual questions as such.
A Schelling point for fans of Alicorn-related things
https://elcenia.k55.io/
Yep, and it can be set up to use either mental triggers or physical ones (clapping their hands, making a particular gesture), which I should probably mention explicitly.Diaeresis wrote:is it possible to cast a spell on a person but have the trigger be something the enspelled can control?
Not straightforwardly. Reasserting a known spell is an automatic action, more automatic than breathing. If you have magic available that will erase the memory, and you also at the same time break the spell so it can't be re-learned, that would do it, but that's not available in-world. (Otherworldly magic that can just straightforwardly break or dispell the spell may also work, and is the better bet for stories; in-world they know that spells on living things don't break but they don't know the mechanics behind that.)DanielH wrote:A question neither Sadde present could have thought of, although there is one who could: can daemons they get rid of a hex? If it’s the soul “remembering”, could you explicitly tell your soul to forget about a spell?
A crack can break a spell even if it doesn't go all the way through the object, and untying the twine counts as that since it stops parts of the object that were enspelled next to each other from being next to each other. Thinking more closely about it, it seems like how strict the spell is about this should be able to be set by the mage (or a sufficiently good mage) on casting; you have to set it to the loosest possible version to cast on liquids, and Lurker does a strict-ish one when she makes twineportals specifically so that the spell is easy to break. (This is also a place where having good coordination helps even if your form is mediocre, then, and the default/easiest form is middling strict and allows for twineportals like we've seen but not casting on water or spells that break given a hairline crack.)Another question that none of them could have thought of because they don’t know the relevant spell target: how does turning a twine circle into a twine line count as breaking it into multiple pieces?
That could be the magic detection form's capstone, yeah. I don't expect it to come up in a story, though.Some questions they could have asked:
Could a 10 detect magic let people see enough of the necessary details to know how to place crystals to eventually charge?
I don't know enough about Turing machines to actually answer this question, but probably yes (might need a specialized form but such a form can probably exist); definitely yes if you want to build a physical machine that uses magic for its logic circuits and rocks or something for its memory.Could you build a magic Turing machine? I don’t think anything except the variable changing magic has been mentioned which allows a memory, and that doesn’t seem like it could quite do it.
That's a valid but less good metaphor; blueprints and circuit diagrams have less of the detailed sensory/artlike element. "The road curves like this" is an important part of maps, and the equivalent sort of detail is important to this language.Blueprints, circuit diagrams, etc. have the same sort of symbol vocabulary instead of key. Is that potentially a better metaphor than music notation or cartography?
Yes. :DIs the end of the first paragraph of this reply about Matilda?