Alicornutopia

Things that have emerged from my thread in Galatea with Faceless:

• In spite of my previous list (which I've edited now), teleportation is not really possible;
• It is not in fact possible to create matter at all;
• Bezanab's tattoos have Significance, political and social;
• Priests of Bezana replace whatever their last name is with "phe Bez" and that is also a title;
• The Guild of Explorers has a classification system for findings. I haven't worked it out in its entirety yet but "Class S" means something like "previously unimagined finding of world-changing potential," red means "life-threatening," green is "not dangerous," and yellow is "of political repercussions." Letters are sequential and denote importance/rarity, colours are more qualitative and can be combined (a portal to another world is a Class S green-yellow finding).

Magic that has a "location" or any form of persistent effect is much easier with artefacts than spells. The Huge Magical Storm is fed by an artefact deep within the ocean, storing information is much easier with artefacts - which have a built-in "magical memory" that can store things, whereas spells would have to specify exactly where the thing would go - that sort of thing.

Okay so I discovered a gorgeous tool to make maps called Inkarnate and I started a Galatea map!



I might add more names of stuff there; I'll update this post with any changes (and I linked it from the OP). And for reference, Galatea-the-continent is roughly Africa-sized.

If 1% of all magic-capable people are metamancers, that means that almost 3% of the people capable of any given type of magic are metamancers. Assuming that about half of them are nonreligious, and half of those can pick up some sort of mana trick like Kaede with their scroll-remaking or just steal mana, that means that oit of 140 people who practice any given type of magic regularly, there’s a good chance one is a closet metamancer (and the chance of at least one in a group of 100 being a metamancer is about even).

Sounds about right. I'd naively expect way less than half of metamancers are nonreligious but don't have an actual number.

I assumed the vast majority of the general population is religious, but I would think being a metamancer would be a great counter to that. Like how being red probably makes you a lot less likely to believe in pollution.

I mean, yeah, it's a great counter, but I had a number more like 5~10% than 50% in mind. But I'm not married to that number and haven't given it a lot of thought.

Even with being able to notice “but I’m not evil” and the powers of cognitive dissonance, you would guess only 5-10% of metamancers don’t have the common belief that metamancy is Evil?

That is not a number I find plausible but that could easily be me having bad intuitions.

People typically believe that a metamancer can refrain from harming others if they're in a monastery type of place, and it's always using magic and making political decisions that's said to be evil so I don't think it's too much of a stretch for that son of a shoemaker to go "I'll just ignore this forever and I'll be fine" or "it's not me it's just the others, if I start being evil people will tell me".