Trust me, most of ED is much better than this.
INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.Thanks for the memories. Even though they weren't so great.
(why do I know this) The original comic is from an old webcomic
.
Now.
Even a proxy of that game radiates pain and evil.
Sciencequestion: if somebody reviewed the review, would the metareview still be evil?
edited 22nd Sep '09 7:36:33 AM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.AAAAAAND WE'RE OOOOOO-oh, what the Hell?
The "Magic" chapter starts talking about the nature of the fifth element. (That is, the four classical greek elements, plus the "quintessence" theorized by... oh one of those guys, Socretes, maybe? Anyway, it doesn't matter, the point is that the fifth element is the element of the spark of life.) To Byron Hall, it's the "Element of Ether". Whatever. He draws a big pentagram that supposedly shows us how all these elements intermingle.
Apparently, two parts earth plus one part fire equals ash. Meanwhile, two parts fire and one part air equals smoke. Plus, the two combinations of earth and air are "powder" and "dust". Two parts air and one part fire equals "gas", which is somehow not air. Likewise, two parts air and one part water makes rain. Equal parts water and earth makes "food", and two parts water and one part earth makes "beverage". Still not making this up. Equal parts air and water make ice, but two parts water and one part air make "Bubble".
The most hilarious of all, though, are the mixtures with Ether. Going clockwise...
- 2E (two parts ether) 1W (one part water) = Blood.
- 1E 2W = Urine. (Remember kids, urine is just watered down blood.)
- 2E 1F (fire)= Bile.
- 1E 1F = Base.
- 1E 2F = Acid. (Because acids and bases are not related to water at all, and biles are totally seperate from those, as well.)
- 2E 1R (earth, sorry, but one of them has to have a different letter) = Herbs
- 1E 1R = Plants (Herbs are not plants!)
- 1E 2R = Poison (mmm-hmm!)
- 2E 1A (air) = Lightning
- 1E 2A = Disease. (Darn diseases spread by improperly mixed lightning!)
Anyway, he has several paragraphs talking about how Ether is totally Serious Business and how it is what makes up outer space, and makes our souls and it is what makes magic work and yadda yadda yadda. Frankly, I'd say he was doing a good job of trying to make a fantasy world sound like it had some good backstory and some reasonable guidelines for "Magic A" Is "Magic A", but he talks about everything with pretentious self-importance, and again, he's spent all this time talking about how REALISRAPTOPHILIA everything is while taking an amusingly slanted view of a horrible philosophy and worldview that actually kept humanity back for centuries because belief in theories like this on faith alone instead of having a proper testable scientific method was devastating on our progress as a people. I have no idea where I was going with that last sentence, but this is supposed to be a live blog that I've apparently been given clearance to hijack (I'm a polite pirate, I only steal with permission), so I'm not going to care.
2 coins.
Anyway, ether is space, but "a philosopher theorized" that it's made of particles called "mana" which means that Hall is basically saying his REALISCRITICALHITTOTHENUTSSAVEDC 70 ORDIE is Made of Phlebotinum. Just like real life.
Wait, what? Ok, now he's going on about something called "Defigere" particles, which metal emits ("metal" is not on that chart of elements, even if dust, smoke, powder, and ash all are seperate entries), and a thick enough metal emits enough "defigere" to be anti-magic, because it finds all the mana particles and beats them up and takes their lunch money. Naturally, iron, being the metal of SCIENCE! is naturally the most defigarious of all metals. Oddly, gold is a weak defiggrator, which seems really odd for someone who's been taking all his ques from mythology, because if he'd done any reasearch on the subject at all, he'd know that gold was prized specifically because it was assumed to create magical powers.
Anyway, before you cast a spell, your magic user has to calculate how defigrulated he's being by all the metal around him. In another case of crippling inability to specify what he means in the few cases where it would benefit him to give out clear measurements, he says that spellcasters are affected by metal "near" them, but doesn't bother to specify how near near is. In his example, he talks about a mage wearing chainmail, (no wait, sorry, "Chainmaille" because everything has to be in snooty Olde Speake and nothing can be the same word that D&D uses, even when he is so blatantly ripping them off,) so I assume "near" means it's on your equipment list.
Again, it lists gold and shit, so I guess carrying your changepurse with you dings you some magic casting powers. Again, because this game really needs more shit to roll on and keep track of, you have to figure out how many pounds of metal is on a magic user, multiply by the metal's type, and then use this to look up on a chart buried around page 420, because none of this is on a quick reference chart, to find out what the percentage chance of failure is on a case-to-case basis, and then roll the spell failure rate before casting any spells. Plus whatever rolls the spells themselves would require. Plus the rolls to be able to cast the spells in the first place, which is its own skill, I remind you.
Anyway, there's two types of magic. "Ceremonial" and "Chaos". "Chaos" magic is better known as "the shit everyone casts in games like these". "Ceremonial Magic" is the special magic only Mages, with their obscene class entry requirements, can achieve. This is because mages are the absolute favorites of Hall, right after the whole "kill someone by punching them up the vagina and damaging their fallopian tubes, but nothing else" thing or the "punch someone from the front, and somehow hit them in the colon, and make poo fly out" thing.
Anyway, Ceremonial Magic is the "Scientific", or should I say alchemical approach to magic, because it's concerned with that whole five elements and magic particles and defigrulation wave motion stuff. Anyway, it apparently requires a chant, an ingredient, and a ritual. So far, it sounds alot like the whole thing they added into 4e to make up for ripping away Vancian Magic, and this stuff came first, so FOURTH EDITION D&D RIPPED OFF BYRON HALL!!!' I knew I couldn't trust that dastardly 4e! (That was just a joke, 4e fans, let's keep the hate where it belongs.)
Right, right, 2 coins. Anyway, studying the relationship of Ether with the four other elements has lead to the development of 10 schools of magic... wait, what? How does that add up to ten? Well, I guess that gets put off for a while, because Hall wants to talk about Chaos Magic next.
Chaos magic is all special and a snowflake and such because every different spellcaster is unique. Sorcerers and priests get this stuff, but so do mages whenever they feel like it because they get more MP and spells than anyone else, what with this game being about everything but being fair, fun, or simple.
Anyway, since it's different for everyone, you have to roll for each spell you learn, individually, whether or not it requires a chant to cast it.
Oh, wait, did you think it was that simple? You haven't been paying attention. No, you have to roll to randomly create the chant for every spell you know. You have to roll against a chart for what consonents and syllables are in a chant. Roll 3d10 for letters, punk! Roll that many times on the letter chart (another 1d100) to figure out what kind of gibberish you're supposed to gargle out. Do it for every spell you learn! (Also, no guarantee you will get any vowels in this shit, either, so choke on those consonents, bitch! Actually, if you roll really high consistantly, you can get nothing but " " as your magic word, as blank spaces are part of the table.) Oh, and remember, each of these potentially 30-letter long words are equally likely to be used in a one-second-long level 1 spell's chant as it is to be used in a week-long level 10 chant. Take a deep breath before you try to spit out (just randomly rolled this one up:) "CEM OGTTATTXTY SG" ten times in a row in less than a second each time.
And no, making the player jump through this absurd hoop does absolutely nothing to improve gameplay.
Anyway, apparently, this all doesn't apply to mages, since those characters have a set-in-stone set of magic words.
Oooookay. Hall gets loopy even for him, and says that you need to then determine if you need ingredients for your spells by rolling 1d100, and then rolling 1d100 again, and if the second one is higher, you don't need them at all. This really makes me wonder why he doesn't just say 50% or better yet, just flip a coin, since that would be a much easier way of saying it. Anyway, after that, roll 1d4 to determine how many ingredients you need. I know I should be more mad about other things, but this 1dwhatever with no modifier stuff is really starting to piss me off. This jackass hasn't the slightest clue about bell curving his rolls, or about attaching stat modifiers to these things. It's not like it's hard, D&D did it fairly well, even in the older editions that he's blatantly ripping off. But no, after all this shit, he really just didn't give half a damn.
Then they have a ritual. They don't say what rituals entail, but it tells the MM to "be creative" about it. Considering as it basically has made out the guy they call the "MAIM MASTER" out to have absolute free license to be the worst Killer DM on the planet, including instructing them to tear up character sheets into confetti right in front of players whenever he "succeeds" in killing off a character, and tells them to summon an actual God to slay your character instantly for daring to roll a critical failure once, you can probably guess where this is going.
Of course, being Byron Hall, he also makes life Hell for the MM, because he doesn't leave any kind of clue what a "ritual" means. Since these spells can take from less than a second to over a week, your guess is as good as mine.
Yay, you have to track when it's dusk or dawn, because all magic effects are given +10% power during those times. The solstices and equinoxes are also given +50% all day, but Hall isn't learned enough to know that's what the equinoxes are, and just calls it "the day the season changes".
Words Can Break My Bones is in effect. You need True Names for some spells, apparently.
Magic Points are then covered. Basically, 8 MP per spell level, up to level 8. Then, at level 9 it becomes 270 MP for some reason, and level 10 it's 1800 MP for a spell. I have no idea why. I have no idea why he'd even make it basically always a multiple of 8, when he's handing out 38 MP per level (with no relation to any stat), anyway.
He puts a note about how the 1800 MP is because it's spent over several days (remember, it takes a week to cast one). If you don't have to pay all that MP at once, why even bother listing it, anyway? Or do you honestly want people calculating out rate of flow? You do, you bastard, don't you? Anyway, MP is regained at 1 MP per level per hour for clerics, and 2 MP per level per hour for wizards... *sigh*, damn my mathmatic inclination. 7 days * 24 hours * 2 MP per level per hour = 336 MP per level. 1800 MP / 336 MP per level = 5.357 levels minimum. You can't even learn level 10 spells until level 9 (and you have to roll to advance, because everything has to be fucking random in this game), so that means that the MP requirements are useless if you don't have to pay in lump sum, because it's guaranteed that anyone casting that would be able to regenerate MP faster than they would theoretically be spending it. Did you even bother to figure this out, Hall? No, of course you didn't. What's really sad is that I've obviously put more thought and time into this game than Hall did.
Anyway, now it's on the schools colleges disciplines of magic.
- Annihalation - Stuff Blowing Up
- Convocation - Summon Magic
- Deterioration - Bad Powers, Bad People, basically the parts of Necromancy that involve spreading diseases and rot.
- Domination - Brainwashed "A common use of domination spells is to cause a strumpet to suddenly know her place and submit to the will of the caster." Yeah, this is definitely Gorean philosophy at work, here.
- Eradication - not what it sounds like, as that's Annihalation. It basically sounds like debuffing.
- Hallucination - Master of Illusion, Illusion but you can't call anything what it's called in D&D.
- Prognostication - Waif Prophet? Mad Oracle?, well, anyway, it's Divination. We don't have a good trope for this...
- Reformation - apparently, not Healing Hands, but something about repairing inanimate crap. I guess it's Transmutation?
- Restoration - Healing Hands
- Supportation - Status Buff
- Universal - Eleventh school, and one you have to roll for when you are being randomly alloted the spells you can use when a Sorcerer, meaning it isn't even "Universal", but it's just another college of magic, and he was lying when Hall said there were 10.
OK, now it goes on about how to use the Convocation (Summon Magic) school, you have to draw a 9' diameter magic circle first, and remember, this may be the only magic a sorcerer might be able to cast, and he can only gain XP if he can cast these spells during combat. In fact, the only reasoning Hall gives for why spells are tied to casting magic is that magic users just need practice with spells, so why does it even have to be in life-threatening situations, anyway? In a better game, that might have been to prevent it from being abused, but no other class has that qualification on it, they can just shave any beard they come across to make their way to 5 billion.
Anyway, the not ten schools are all opposed to each other because that's what some of the big kids did back in the day, and Hall does nothing if it's not Follow the Leader while horribly screwing up what made the leaders good.
- Annihalation (Evocation) opposes Prognostication (Divination) because one is about breaking shit, and the other is about "diplomacy"... I'm going to change that to "thinking and planning", and I think it's pretty clear which one of these two Hall better embodies.
- Convocation (Conjuration) opposes Hallucination (Illusion) because it's "real versus imagined".
- Deterioration (Necromancy) opposes Restoration (Technically, healing was part of both Necromancy and Conjuration, depending on the version.) Because it's hurt versus harm.
- Domination (Enchantment) opposes Reformation (Transmutation) because it's mind versus matter.
- Eradication opposes Supportation (Basically, abjuration on both sides) because it's debuff versus buff.
This opposition stuff is important for Druids, because they can only get one of each opposing force. Mages can also specialize, because he hadn't ripped D&D off enough already, but they only get a bonus to learning new spells, they don't get the ability to cast more magic by getting a deeper MP well to draw from.
Next, it has a bunch of charts (because it's been a while), which describe how much bang you get for your buck.
Annihalation is the most direct about it, since it's basically the school of Direct Damage nukes. It describes it in how many people you can make explode at once. Level 1 spells give you the power to explode "1 cat or 1d10" HP. Level 2 spells are "1 dog or 2d8" HP. (Damn you for mixing dice pools, Hall!) Level 3 spells are "1 human or 2d20" HP. Then, "10 humans, or 4d100" HP. yadda yadda, it goes up to a level 10 spell being capable of ending 10 million lives, and dealing 4d1000 * 100,000 HP in damage, which reads as both "Why even bother rolling" and "It really is a nuke".
A similar thing goes on with the convocation. Apparently, it's measured in hit points, but instead of just summoning 10,000,000 humans, you can just summon an Elder God as an example spell. Somehow, nothing else seems as fitting an ending to a game of FATAL as summoning a literal Eldritch Abomination.
Necro- Deterioration spells let you spread disease for the same die pools of HP for some reason, but switch after level 6 into how many miles you can spread a plague. 1,000,000 square miles at level 10 magic. I'm not exactly sure, but I think a 1,000 by 1,000 mile area would basically be continent-sized.
Oh, look! How creative! Domination is measured in the number of people and hit points it can affect.
Eradication (that's the debuff one, remember) just says how "vulnerable" they make the other person in abstract terms, up to "Total Vulnerability", whatever the hell that means.
Hallucination starts off with a cubic foot, and "50% believability", whatever the hell that means, and goes on to "99.9% believability" and 100,000,000 cubic miles of affected area. Assuming you lay it flat a mile high above the planet, I'm pretty sure that would be able to cover the entire planet in a single spell. Do I even need to ridicule how absurd it is to cast a planet-wide illusion spell that you have to maintain control over?
Prognostication has to be something Hall can't measure in HP, so he bitterly sulks by just listing what crap it can detect in vague terms, like "elements", "temperment", or "hypersensitivity". Actually telling the future requires level 9 or 10. I don't see why they'd need to tell the future at that point, anyway, they could just nuke their problems, or throw down world-wide illusion spells or mentally enslave 10 million people at that point. Hard to kill someone with 10 million cannon fodder at their disposal. You know, unless they know nuke spells, too. Still, there's 30 some-odd skills for divination, anyway.
Restoration. It's a healing spell, obviously it uses the same absurd scale where you can wind up healing 10 million people if they don't mind waiting a week to have their wounds healed... Actually, that sounds like a damn good health care plan.
Supportation. Everything from level 7 up is "Invincibility", with 10 being mass invincibility. Invincibility sounds like a good thing to have around all these nuke-weilding lunatics.
Uh-oh! End of the chapter already? That was actually not so painful, especially compared to the last few chapters. But don't worry kiddos, next up is the actual spellbook, so you're sure to get all your rape spells in next time. Who wants to start a betting pool on which kind of spell will be more common - mental domination for sexual slavery, gruesome human sacrifice of babies still in the womb, or just plain ol' Naughty Tentacles?
I'm honestly surprised that semen wasn't one of the elemental mixes. It would make sense, even, Sumerian mythology at least has a lot of "water of life" symbolism. Of course if it did we'd just mock it, but eh.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.I guess even Byron Hall has standards.
INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.Well best keep him from it. No need to associate Sumeria with him.
What's the frequency Kenneth?|In case of war.Or Lord Tzetze will kill us.
So, Bile Fascination has led to the popularity of this thread, right? Right?
INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.I think the likelihood of Naughty Tentacles is very, very low in this game, simply because this guy seems like the sort to loathe everything that comes from further East than the old Soviet border.
Sakamoto demands an explanation for this shit.It's the dismemberment and Epic Fail biology for him. though.
INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.You know, I hate to say it, but... I kind of like the idea of making random magical words for spells, if only due to my fondness for Calling Your Attacks. But seriously? You need a way to guarantee you some vowels in there. Do it like the Japanese system. A vowel in every consonant's pot!
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaOr just, y'know, let people come up with it themselves?
Anyway, moreso than the magic system, the side-effects of magic in this game are really infamous, and not just for the endless "branded by the symbol of [god]" ones.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.Actually, a licensed doctor told me that something like that is actually true.
Now, was he in his "SCREW Biology" phase at that point?
What's the frequency Kenneth?|In case of war.Art Major Biology, Zyxzy. It works - if you're not claiming REALISMCAPITALLETTERS.
edited 22nd Sep '09 9:57:34 AM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.Oh, I have nothing against abandoning biology for the sake of awesome, but was he doping it at that point?
What's the frequency Kenneth?|In case of war.

What does the BW image come from ? (I assume the head comes from FATAL).
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."