Alicornutopia

Medieval-fantasy-generic tech level.

Yes, "magical effects done by a mage to another person" is the thing.

Homosexuality is reasonably socially accepted - I suppose if I say "about as much as in Nuime" you won't be able to read my mind and tell what that is - hmm, like, it's considered mildly scandalous in some circles but nobody beats anybody up over it?

"Gods are people with all the kinds of magic. Sometimes people worship them, or used to, back when there were any. Sometimes people worship ones that everyone else is pretty sure are dead or maybe never existed in the first place, and they still do that, here and there."

I haven't defined exactly how you accomplish merging into a god. I'm pretty sure it's possible to do using only the magic of the three people involved, but it's possible that not everyone has the exact right set of powers necessary.

I have tentatively decided that all the magic in the world is ultimately the result of mages.

Any Air or Air-derived mage can make a weak artifact. It's pretty trivial. More powerful artifacts require a more powerful mage.

Magic is tiring in the way that any mental effort is tiring.

Jean can make things up about theatrical traditions but he should run them by me to make sure they fit right.

Nothing special about adoption.

I would peg mages at maybe one in ten thousand off the top of my head? And getting slowly more prevalent over time.

Popular opinion on local Serg is "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa". Popular opinion on the Gregor is mostly "??????".

Enforcement wrt Dissidents varies a lot by region, because everything varies a lot by region, because Serg is terrible at running a government.

Serg is TERRIBLE at running a government. As long as he gets everything he wants, he doesn't give a fuck. So some parts of the empire are actually run really well, and some parts are godawful, and some parts are in between, and the capital in particular is a sadistic hellpit of decadence and depravity. He likes torturing political prisoners mostly because he likes torture, but the end result is still that getting caught trying to overthrow the government is bad for your health.

At the top of page three, you said that people with identical genomes who aren’t identical twins (eg clones) are not literally guaranteed to share mage/nonmage status, but it’s close. What happens if there have previously been two people with some genome, one a mage and one not, and then one of them is cloned (or their genes synthesized in a lab, if it would matter which one they’re cloned from)? Would it be 50/50, or would they be almost guaranteed to be a mage or a nonmage, or what?

I've refined the not-quite-inheritance concept a little since then anyway, so let me try to explain it again:

Around the time a person is conceived - at the point where they are established as a little blob with a particular genome that will eventually become a person if everything goes well for them - the universe decides whether they're going to be a mage or not. It makes this decision by looking at the set of previous mages and determining how "mage-like" the new person's genes are, then converting that into a percentage chance of being a mage and rolling an appropriately balanced set of cosmic dice.

If I had to do the math myself I'd probably say that the "mage-like" factor is determined by picking the single most closely matched gene sequence out of the set of previous mages and then comparing them by some formula such that if the two people are basically not related at all, the new person's chance of becoming a mage ends up tiny but nonzero, and if their genomes are identical, the new person's chance of a mage ends up very close to 100% but not quite all the way there. But doing it that way would mean that as long as at least one of your parents is a mage, having your other parent also be a mage will have basically no effect on your chance of being a mage yourself, and that seems to me to be a poor representation of how related-to-mages you are. So let's pretend there's some more complicated formula at work such that having two mage parents is about twice as good as having one mage parent most of the time.

In any case, non-mages with your genome are totally ignored for the purpose of making this determination, and it doesn't matter at all who you're cloned from - unless the cloning takes place in such a way that the magic doesn't consider there to have been another conception necessitating another dice-roll, in which case you will have exactly the same mage status as whoever you were cloned from. This applies to situations like "person with extreme regeneration powers is cut in half", where you start with one person and end up with two but neither of them had to spend time as an embryo along the way; it also applies to actual identical twins, where the split between the two happens after the determination has been made but before either of them is born.

I am undecided on how exactly this interacts with various specific methods of resurrection/forking, but in general if someone has both the same genome and the same mind/template/memories/etc as a previous mage, they're going to be a mage too.

Would they still be a mage if they were resurrected in another universe, or am I being too literalistic?

Undecided on most questions concerning new mages in universes other than Threefold itself, but for resurrection in particular I think location usually won't matter.

I imagine it depends pretty heavily on the style of resurrection. Ice’s I’d guess yes; wishcoins I’d guess it depends on the wish but not with just an evil; Silmaril style I’d guess yes?

"not with just an evil"?

I’m not sure what you’re asking? Why I don’t think an evil would be enough?

It takes an evil to resurrect somebody in general. Or cube-star, or eight, or coin of the sixth order, whatever you want to call it. Generally it doesn’t include magic the person has, I think, and they need to get it re-attached. Or maybe I’m getting confused with torching removing attached magic in which case I expect an evil to work.

Yes, you were getting confused. An evil can resurrect someone with all sorts of features included.

Okay, yeah, looking at Shell Bell’s resurrection again the first thing she did was finish the word she was saying over the brainphone.

(On a related note, it was difficult to find that; Alicorn, could you add a link there from here? It’s the first post where that would make the most sense (I’d put it on the words “saying so”).)


Now I can’t think of a resurrection method which would probably fail to keep a mage being a mage, except for the admin deliberately deciding to wake them without powers or something, which shouldn’t count.


So if there were a culture there that decided to reproduce entirely through cloning (as occurs sometimes in sci-fi), by chance one of them would be a mage, and then after that almost everybody of that genotype conceived after that would be a mage? Eventually, assuming the cloning error rate is negligible, all the genotypes involved would go through that process and pretty much everybody in the community would be a mage?