"Magic missile is just a teleportation spell to a gun range. Create food and water? Teleportation. Teleport? Believe it or not, a hack of disintegration"
We found a race condition in the teleport code. Turns out the efficiency curve for the restoration magic that undoes the disintegration in real time has a parabolic mana requirement related to mass, but disintegrate has a caterneric curve. For human sized stuff they match up, but if you try to teleport something of sufficient mass the restoration starts to draw a disproportionate amount of mana and the whole thing falls apart.
Also, we need to hire some more QA contractors.
How we found out? We knew from the start there would be a discrepancy. Early testing pointed to this problem. And we warned every superior up the chain. But in the end we were ordered to just put a warning on the scroll.
We were only taken serious after a junior magician thought it was funny to teleport an elephant into their observatorium before exams and neglected the warnings. That is how the Mana Void of Barkley Academy was formed.
The superiors were out for blood when the first court summon scrolls appeared, using competitors teleportation technology. That was until we gave them a copy of our manilla scroll holder full with communication of them neglecting to heed our warnings.
Charles Stross' Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.
The gender is actually Lovecraftian, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humour source.
It's seriously the best thing I have read in a decade.
Edit: genre I guess 😅 (have been learning French lately so sometimes it messes it all up!).
The gender is actually Lovecraftian, spy thriller, science fiction
New gender just dropped
Gender really is a complex topic huh?
I've known a few people whose gender I would describe as lovecraftian.
I always give that misspelling a pass. It's literally the same word borrowed from French twice.
I don't know what's going wrong. That spell works perfectly fine on my summoning circle.
As a QA myself, this is what dealing with developers (and I this case, wizards) is like. Way too much trust in their code.
Senior QA in the wizard world would actually be a respected title. Can't make senior if you're dead, and you can be alive if you're bad at it.
I'm a dev, and once when I pulled something like that, QA told me, "oh cool, so we're shipping your machine to the customer then?"
Have you tried closing and re-opening your spell book?
What's the uptime on your portal?
Apple-wood makes really good wands for illusions.
Oh, the staff? Built it myself. Hexacore silicon based crystal lattice CPU (Casting Power Unit), 4 billion RAM (Refined Arcane Modules) with an upgraded SSD (Swift Spell Deck) that can hold 2 trillion sigils. Yeah, of course it has RGB aura effects.
"What the fuck? why is this spell trying to access your Patron directly? Theres no reason it cant run off your local mana reserves"
"Wow I made the pact with the creature from the abyss to get my powers, and now it wants a monthly sacrifice in order to keep use them?"
"How does a simple "create water" spell have a 15 second cast time? Is it doing something else in the background or were the glyphs written by a first year apprentice?"
"Ah fuck how do I change the incantation for my spell again? Let me search the the orb real quick...."
"How does a simple "create water" spell have a 15 second cast time? Is it doing something else in the background or were the glyphs written by a first year apprentice?"
And that's how the backdoor (literal) in the xzutils material component was discovered.
"Why would you use Elvish for an earth-spell?? Dwarven is clearly the more appropriate language, especially if it's an incantation"
"It's fine like it is! It works, ok?"
"I copied this spell from an overflowing stack of tomes. I think it was originally meant to cleanse all living things from religious stonework, but I changed some of the constants now it works as disinfectant."
Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld's wizards are sort of like this, at least once Mustrum Ridcully becomes archchancellor, and especially once they built their magic Rube Goldberg style supercomputer Hex.
+++ Out Of Cheese Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot. +++
As always, if someone has a good worldbuilding idea, somebody has already thought of it.
As usual, it was Terry Pratchett.
"Woah! You can't just cast any spell you find laying around. You have to create a virtual world first, then cast the spell. That way if shit goes pear shaped, you just pull the plug and the world vanishes. Can you imagine if you got a grimoire labeled 'Summon Frog', but it actually summoned a plague of frogs? Do you know even who wrote the book? Bro. Virtual World."
Whoa. That is 100% my new favorite campaign setting idea. A wizard's virtual test world, with all sorts of crazy random nonsense happening, and then one day the inhabitants find out he's going to reset the virtual world.
"No, we don't ever touch the old Seance. The wizards of old wrote it a long time ago and the last time we changed a word it stopped summoning demons in jars and started summoning them in rectal cavities. Just leave it alone."
"That spell is setup to cast itself at exactly midnight, every night, in every monestary in our order. Except the black crater, of course."
"Why not at the black crater?"
"We're not sure. There wasn't anyone left to ask."
midnight
Oh no. Do you mean Midnight for each monestary locally, or do you mean when it's midnight at our prime monestary that it is cast? Three are in the time zone an hour ahead, and seven are an hour behind! They need to happen simultaneously for it to work!
Still better than the spell that needs to be cast at local noon. They synchronized those by having each monastery create and then destroy an invisible copy of the sun whenever they cast it. You don't want to know how expensive to maintain that is.
Let me introduce you to: Noita
WARNING: Teleporting to a location that is in the middle of unloading can delete the player character.
Fish-Swapper: Mostly same as deer-swapper, but fish do not explode and are an alternative to deercoy.
And other fun sentences. The wandbuilding mechanics are second to none. You will accidentally kill yourself, and you may not know how.
I lost a run the other day to a series of events, one of which included me (in-game) finding and eating enough psychedelic fungus to trigger a shift in reality, which transmuted all smoke in the universe and any created thereafter, into acid. Like carbolic acid, not the fun drugsy kind.
Acid, naturally, eats through all creatures and materials in the game world, including many things you'd consider otherwise invulnerable, until it evaporates - into flammable gas.
Therefore any time an object or material caught fire (which is often, with or without player interference), it would quickly consume anything below it for several meters while feeding itself with flammable gas and spreading to any new flammable materials it uncovered.
The world very quickly became a very large mess.
What is casting a spell in debug mode?
Can you put a breakpoint in your spell? Picturing a devil having a smoke while the wizard puzzles over all the runes suspended in the air.
Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn't have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.
These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it's easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.
Debugging spells isn't like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.
But most wizards just go with the ol' "add print statements everywhere" method of debugging.
"Glorfinx's Globular Glassblower" still shouts "HERE!" at max volume when it walks past a wet dog because he never removed the printf rune after he fixed a bug relating to dripping fur.
"Gods, I swear you fix one thing in a ritual, two more take it's place - my teleportation no longer puts me in the ground, but now my clothes arrive backwards and occasionally I'm upside down - didn't even touch those bits of the spell!"
See Rich Cook's Wizardry series. It's about software engineers transported to a fantasy world and they start approaching magic as software. They create complex spells out of lots of smaller spells, they even create a debugger demon.
Oh that series is so much fun! I need to read those books again. Another good one is Scott Meyer's Magic 2.0 series. Basically a random dude finds the rules.ini file for the universe hiding out on the internet and ends up using it to travel back back to Arthurian England to live openly as a Wizard. Except he's not the first one with that idea...
"Uh oh."
"What? Looks like it worked perfectly!"
"Yeah, but that was the first time I cast it."
"Oh. Ohhhh. ...Uh oh."
Some smartass drew a penis into the runes for the ritual circle during development by mistake. We tried removing it once we noticed it, but then the whole spell broke so we had to leave it in.
That's why I practice rubber Flumph debugging before I lint my spells.
This would help explain why there are so few spells compared to the infinite possibilities of magic. Many problems are solved. There are only so many ways to sort a list and many of them are either entirely unuseful or only good for specific situations. Turns out there's only one way to make a fireball. Every other way doesn't work as good.
"Man I knew you shouldn't have inscribed that shady scroll you bought in the alley"
Shut up, I dont need a life lesson, I need my spellbook to stop screaming
"Wait, you're still using store-bought ashes? Haven't you ever made your own? It's super easy, and you don't have to worry if your bone ash is ever cut with Birch anymore."
Kinda meh examples but fantastic concept
Imagine a comedy TV show for magical tech support. Cranky burned out wizards trying to solve magical bugs for fustrated wizard customers.
Fuck I'd watch the shit out of it.
Star Trek example. It would be really funny to me if Scotty refused to personally use the transporter. Everyone else beams down and he shows up on the shuttle a few hours later.
Why does my chromatic orb keep failing to cast on goblins??
Question marked as duplicate
The duplicate question:
Q: Im trying to cast chromatic orb on some goblins, but I dont have enough mana. Is there any way to make it use less?
A: You shouldnt be using chromatic orb on Goblins, you should be using eldrich blast.
"Op is saying eh doesnt have the mana to cast chromatic orb, eldritch blast uses 3x as much mana and is way more complicated to use"
"Well theres a reason no one uses chromatic orb, OP needs to learn best practices."
Humor, jokes, memes about TTRPGs
