Disappear Worldbuilding Info
Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:02 pm
Basics:
Normal physics, non-Earth planet, low-key steampunky tech level, humans as only sapient species, they have collectively not invented pants, the magic is where it gets neat.
Magic:
Disappear's magic, wielded by mages, is purely destructive. The three forms of destruction are death, fire, and annihilation, represented in spell design by blood (fresh-ish, and of a mammal - not because mammals die deader or because you can't kill plants or something, but because the human casters are mammals), ash (fine soot is ideal), and vacuum (seldom used, hard to get). You can substitute representations and still get the effect you want, with some fiddling, but it is easier if you at least feature some blood to kill a thing, some ash to burn a thing, some vacuum to annihilate a thing. Mages can recognize each other by looking, but it's not a visual quality (it's more like "familiarity" than "redness"). Completing a spell causes a "flashdark", which is like a flash, but dark, and can go through obstacles; it is always brief but can go farther the more oomph a spell has.
If you want something very simple, like for a specific nearby object to catch fire, you don't need anything elaborate, you just put some representation on the object and say a simple chant, like, "I burn that thing." If you want to get at all fancy, remote, complex, immaterial, or abstract (nonsurgically remove a tumor, destroy that thing over *there*, kill weeds and only weeds, destroy your shadow, eliminate somebody's oaths) then you have to get arty. The correct kind of artiness is recognizable (from the correct artistic background; mage training is 75% art history), without being outright symbolic. Meme and style and feel and convention, not ideograms or precise encoding. You design an art on some combination of a) the thing you are destroying all or part of, b) a convenient surface, and then you chant, mostly "I destroy" and "$THING is not" and stuff like that. If your art is not all the things it needs to be, you may fall unconscious, lose parts of your body (in a previously designated order), or lose enough parts to die and not leave a corpse.
You become a mage by hooking into a disappearance point.
Disappearance Points:
Freaky space-warping stuff-eating locations, typically placed in random undesirable wilderness pointing downward. They are not good for things that touch them, although one that is not growing at the moment will do, like, light spots of necrosis or corrosion or charring or all three, not eat your entire self. People who aren't mages don't like to look at them. Mages think they're beautiful and fascinating. Used very carefully, they can be turned into gates between arbitrary locations. They are also dumping grounds for side-effect destruction every time a mage casts a spell. If you cast any spell your disappearance point eats some more space and some matter. It also eats some on its own, accelerating as its total stuff-and-space-eaten amount gets bigger. It will grow in the direction it is pointed until there is nothing there, and then it will expand on all sides. (Points are always round but they can be ovals instead of circles if desired.) Disappearance points are created by chanting alone (and concentration) on the part of a mage, no painting or anything necessary.
History:
Cor's world hummed along, aware that "spare edible planet" was a finite resource but expecting it to be such an abundant one as to make no difference. They didn't know about the acceleration of disappearance points, because while you can see through a disappearance point to see how far down it's gotten, magma all looks the same. A disappearance point got all the way through the planet and quite suddenly ate half a city on the far side. This could have been done deliberately by the enemies of the relevant country, but would imply staggering malice and magical skill. A war broke out in response, with lots of magic use. This worsened the acceleration of various disappearance points and a few more punched through and they figured out what was going on and were like "oh shit". They started trying to figure out how to save the world, which was being eaten up yum.
Normal physics, non-Earth planet, low-key steampunky tech level, humans as only sapient species, they have collectively not invented pants, the magic is where it gets neat.
Magic:
Disappear's magic, wielded by mages, is purely destructive. The three forms of destruction are death, fire, and annihilation, represented in spell design by blood (fresh-ish, and of a mammal - not because mammals die deader or because you can't kill plants or something, but because the human casters are mammals), ash (fine soot is ideal), and vacuum (seldom used, hard to get). You can substitute representations and still get the effect you want, with some fiddling, but it is easier if you at least feature some blood to kill a thing, some ash to burn a thing, some vacuum to annihilate a thing. Mages can recognize each other by looking, but it's not a visual quality (it's more like "familiarity" than "redness"). Completing a spell causes a "flashdark", which is like a flash, but dark, and can go through obstacles; it is always brief but can go farther the more oomph a spell has.
If you want something very simple, like for a specific nearby object to catch fire, you don't need anything elaborate, you just put some representation on the object and say a simple chant, like, "I burn that thing." If you want to get at all fancy, remote, complex, immaterial, or abstract (nonsurgically remove a tumor, destroy that thing over *there*, kill weeds and only weeds, destroy your shadow, eliminate somebody's oaths) then you have to get arty. The correct kind of artiness is recognizable (from the correct artistic background; mage training is 75% art history), without being outright symbolic. Meme and style and feel and convention, not ideograms or precise encoding. You design an art on some combination of a) the thing you are destroying all or part of, b) a convenient surface, and then you chant, mostly "I destroy" and "$THING is not" and stuff like that. If your art is not all the things it needs to be, you may fall unconscious, lose parts of your body (in a previously designated order), or lose enough parts to die and not leave a corpse.
You become a mage by hooking into a disappearance point.
Disappearance Points:
Freaky space-warping stuff-eating locations, typically placed in random undesirable wilderness pointing downward. They are not good for things that touch them, although one that is not growing at the moment will do, like, light spots of necrosis or corrosion or charring or all three, not eat your entire self. People who aren't mages don't like to look at them. Mages think they're beautiful and fascinating. Used very carefully, they can be turned into gates between arbitrary locations. They are also dumping grounds for side-effect destruction every time a mage casts a spell. If you cast any spell your disappearance point eats some more space and some matter. It also eats some on its own, accelerating as its total stuff-and-space-eaten amount gets bigger. It will grow in the direction it is pointed until there is nothing there, and then it will expand on all sides. (Points are always round but they can be ovals instead of circles if desired.) Disappearance points are created by chanting alone (and concentration) on the part of a mage, no painting or anything necessary.
History:
Cor's world hummed along, aware that "spare edible planet" was a finite resource but expecting it to be such an abundant one as to make no difference. They didn't know about the acceleration of disappearance points, because while you can see through a disappearance point to see how far down it's gotten, magma all looks the same. A disappearance point got all the way through the planet and quite suddenly ate half a city on the far side. This could have been done deliberately by the enemies of the relevant country, but would imply staggering malice and magical skill. A war broke out in response, with lots of magic use. This worsened the acceleration of various disappearance points and a few more punched through and they figured out what was going on and were like "oh shit". They started trying to figure out how to save the world, which was being eaten up yum.