Alicornutopia

Here's a setting idea I've had bouncing around my head for a while. If anyone wants to sandbox it or something I have several bits of the world with enough detail to make that work easily.

Some people are born with magic, which is understood as being in tune the 'pulse of the world' and being able to time your movements and your own pulse to make the world do things; what powers a particular person gets tends to be thematically appropriate but are not a conscious choice; you can aim to train for more variety or train to put more oomph behind what you do have, but you don't have any conscious control over what you gain. For the most part, you're born into this power; it runs in families, who make up the noble class in most places. People with power are called Pulseblooded or occasionally Conductors; notable Pulseblooded families are called Bloodlines.

Being born into a bloodline isn't the only way to get Pulse magic, though; it's also somewhat contagious. Be around magic being used a lot, and you can gradually gain rudimentary magic yourself; though it takes years to gain enough familiarity to tell the pulse what to do, it's much easier to start hearing it yourself and acting in tune with it, which is rarely overtly magical but makes it much easier to look like you just watched out of an action movie. And if you've 'gotten rhythm' and become a 'Hearer', your own children are likely to be true Conductors.

This is all harder than it sounds, though, because pulse isn't an arbitrarily-chosen metaphor. For unclear reasons, pulse magic is much easier to use under stressful conditions, while your heart rate is raised and your blood is pounding in your ears. It's very easy to use pulse to fight, but much more difficult and exhausting to use to, say, build a house, even if you're using the same telekinesis power for both. This also affects what kind of powers people receive; it's what you do under stress that determines your magical tendencies, so you're much less likely to get mental opacity than an Illithid-style mind blast, and if you get telekinesis, it's more likely to be a lot of brute force than to have the fine manipulation to hold lockpicks.

I also have some ideas about worldbuilding, with a couple other details (pulse interacts poorly with explosives and delicate machinery) and how this has affected the world's society, but this post is getting long so I'll save it for now.

Nifty. I want to hear more.

Would it also be much easier to build a shelter when you need to get a wall between yourself and the Dangerous Person/Animal/Whatever chasing you than it is to build a storage space to store all of your stuff, even if the end result is exactly the same structure? What about if you’re running on a treadmill instead of under actual stress?

Would Bells, who get noticeably stressed about the possibility of people reading their minds, be able to get mental opacity?

This idea sounds awesome. Please tell us more :D

DanielH wrote:Would it also be much easier to build a shelter when you need to get a wall between yourself and the Dangerous Person/Animal/Whatever chasing you than it is to build a storage space to store all of your stuff, even if the end result is exactly the same structure? What about if you’re running on a treadmill instead of under actual stress?

I was thinking something like that but in terms of "magic slavery" or something.

Is it stress per se or can you get into a magic-doing state by running around for a while?

Alicorn wrote:Is it stress per se or can you get into a magic-doing state by running around for a while?

If that works, how about using chemicals or shock therapy?

DanielH wrote:Would it also be much easier to build a shelter when you need to get a wall between yourself and the Dangerous Person/Animal/Whatever chasing you than it is to build a storage space to store all of your stuff, even if the end result is exactly the same structure?

Yes, definitely.

What about if you’re running on a treadmill instead of under actual stress?

Easier than being calm and at rest, but not as easy as when facing a cougar attack. The quickened pulse is most of it, but some fraction of the effect is triggered by other stress symptoms, and I'm ambivalent on whether there is a purely-psychological component to it as well. I may crib some bits of Allomancy Snapping and/or the Elcenia reservoir for how 'the pulse of the world' operates.

Would Bells, who get noticeably stressed about the possibility of people reading their minds, be able to get mental opacity?

If anyone could, it would be a Bell. How difficult it would be would depend on how much of an active fear of being spied on was around while she was growing up; if she lived somewhere where the paranoid government did routine telepathy sweeps or was rumored to, she'd develop it very early, but that's definitely not the norm.

If that works, how about using chemicals or shock therapy?

Shock therapy would work pretty well, I think. A panic disorder that let you go into a stress freakout on demand would be very useful, and I imagine you could induce that pretty easily with shock therapy. And in the short-term, credible threats of "Do this or we hurt you" is pretty close to optimal conditions for magic happening.

Chemically-inducing stress would work less well, but unless my understanding of how stress works is wrong, it would work around as well as exercise and the two together would stack to get most of the way to optimum.

I was thinking something like that but in terms of "magic slavery" or something.

Slavery with threats would work fine in the short term, but it's long-term unsustainable because there's a very good chance of them spontaneously developing some new ability that will explode your restraints. And probably your head.

What counts as 'being around magic being used', for contagion purposes? In particular, do children of Conductors' servants have a higher than usual chance of being Conductors? (If no, I propose that that be used in a different world, I think it's a neat concept for worldbuilding.)

Adelene wrote:What counts as 'being around magic being used', for contagion purposes? In particular, do children of Conductors' servants have a higher than usual chance of being Conductors? (If no, I propose that that be used in a different world, I think it's a neat concept for worldbuilding.)

I'm kind of vague on how exactly it works, but here's one idea which is mostly consistent with everything I've thought about so far, and is a plausible in-universe explanation on par with Newtonian physics. There is a sense that Conductors are born knowing how to use, which lets them sense the magical currents of the world's pulse, and if you're good enough at using it, which is easy for Conductors, you can manipulate it for magical effects. Everyone else technically has the ability to sense it as well, though, and being around actively-used magic sharpens the sense significantly as they get changes in the pulse coupled to actual magic and gradually intuitively link the two (this is like how people are bad at creating random sequences, but can learn the skill very effectively if you give them feedback on how random the sequences they've given you were). By the time they've become recognizable as Hearers, they're hard to distinguish from an untrained young Conductor, and the pulse has attached to them in the same way.

So yes, servants have a slightly higher chance of becoming Conductors, but unless the family you're serving has someone who uses their powers all the time in a noticeable way, it won't be noticeably higher. On the other hand, if you're the lifelong personal maid of a paranoid precog who runs her precognition constantly (and most people whose powers decide on precognition are probably paranoid), you'll have a very good chance, comparable to a squire who followed a powerful knight-Conductor through a few wars across a decade. Caveat to this, though: first-generation Conductors do tend to be weaker than old families; long-term exposure to pulse strengthens native ability, but while this is privately considered a very plausible position among the various aristocracies, it's still considered very radical, especially in Europe.

Which is an excellent segue into other world-building facts!

[SNIP]

If it wasn't obvious, the magic was basically designed to be a system where the action-movie type of magic is a fairly reasonable and normal use (i.e. compatible with Eliezer's level-1 intelligence, roughly). And to reinforce that, I added the complications that it interacts badly with precision machinery and explosives, by having a tendency to vibrate and shake anything nearby when pulse magic is used. This makes explosives, especially black powder and other early explosives, really unreliable in the hands of the people who are otherwise the best at fighting, and until firearms get a decently long range, they're pretty hard to use against them either. It also makes machinery harder to rely on for anything important, and to be less reliable the tighter the tolerances have to be.

All this adds up to a hereditary class of people who are innately superior to everyone else in an undeniable, very visible way, the only way to get access to that power if you're not born with it is to spend a lot of time as their lackey in very dangerous situations, and a single family unit of Pulseblooded can take on a large mob of non-magical people comfortably and a few squads of Pulseblooded can take on a small army. Which leads to a world where military aristocracy is deeply entrenched in the structure of society and the standard armies-on-a-flat-plain battle is something you do as a distraction to keep your enemy busy while you send your magic commandos to do the real fighting.

This has led to different organizations in different parts of the world, which is Earth and has history roughly based on real early recorded history. Well, very roughly.

Europe and most of the coast of the Mediterranean and Red Seas are controlled by a really, really long-lasting empire, whose rulers are a small extended family who have never been noted to age significantly. They have a fairly direct, autocratic approach to government, and somehow reliably find and draft first-generation Pulseblooded before the draftees know they have talent themselves.

Most of what we'd call Asia, from Kamchatka to Singapore to the Black Sea, is under the control of the Middle Kingdom. It's nominally a monarchy, but in practice has a collection of about a dozen bloodlines who all are consulted for any serious decisions. Every few generations a different family from the ruling clique puts their relative on the throne during a slightly ambiguous succession or after outright deposing the current emperor, but this has very little effect on anybody else.

The empires in Europe and Asia have been at war, with varying degrees of how hot and cold it's been, for centuries, and possibly a couple millenia - no one other than the ruling classes of the two actually has records from that far back. The ruling families of both have long memories, have strong opinions about being naturally fit to rule the world, and hold grudges.

Like in our history, Europe had much larger population density than the Americas, and malcontents decided that they'd rather go find somewhere new to live than stay in Europe. Unlike ours, they didn't have a significant military advantage, so they integrated with the native population to a much greater extent. Native and Euro bloodlines intermarried and formed many small, independent political entities. The history of the Native North Americans and people fleeing an intensely autocratic country means that most of them are more egalitarian than the old countries, but there's a ton of variation, and enough of them are at war at any given time that system-changing coups are expected on a regular basis. I have details about a lot more of this part of the world, because it was where I expected to use the most of when I was trying to homebrew my own tabletop RPG to go along with this setting.

The rest of the world I have very vague ideas about. South America still is dominated by the cultures that arose there naturally; the European empire tried to form colonies, but was heavy-handed about it and got shut down pretty hard. I considered a few different reasons why Africa would stay independent, and tentatively decided that they discovered how to make magic items at some point early in history, and that it was tied in with the traditional religion (which spread with the Bantu migration) so it's stayed mostly within that population. I have no idea at all what Oceania and Australia are like.