"Do you know how many spells are just recycled incantations?"

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.

That was thr lore behind infinity blade. All magic rings can be distilled down to short range teleportation, just paired with different locations.

Ah yes, the "every OS but windows -> Linux -> Unix" dynamic

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!).

That sounds awesome, thanks for the suggestion!

Fucking sold!

This series seems to check more boxes than I thought I had...

i'm adding it to the top of the list. Except i don't have a list, so I'm creating a list and adding it to that and therefore it automatically finds itself at the top of it.

God help the poor mathematical geniuses who accidentally discover that math. If they're lucky, they end up working for the Laundry.

As a QA myself, this is what dealing with developers (and I this case, wizards) is like. Way too much trust in their code.

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.

"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?"

groan... it's meant to be fantasy! Why do i have to subscribe to 15 patrons to get access to the spells i want?

3E sorcerers in a nutshell

As always, if someone has a good worldbuilding idea, somebody has already thought of it.
As usual, it was Terry Pratchett.

GNU STP

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.

Personally, I have a dedicated realm for testing. Its an environment with a bunch of cool integrated magic I use for developing spells.

"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."

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.

Also, as someone who didn't understand this, most of the crazy stuff you get right away. I think because it sort of looks like Terraria I thought a lot of stuff is crazy high level items but it's not.

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.

The devil knowing if the wizard doesn't get it right, he might get hes breakfast, wizard soul!

printspell debugging.

two more take its* place

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...

"Random door is now fused closed permanently 3km away"

By the time the archwizard has finished the incantation, the rest of the party has finished the dungeon

This is probably true in the game world as well as in the game development world. WotC and Paizo could create more variations on Fireball, sure, but does it really change the game in a meaningful way?

There is one standard way to cast fireball - it works, it's cheap, it very rarely backfires, it's in all the textbooks, everyone knows how it behaves - but sometimes you sit down in a tavern next to another wizard and you just know before they even open their mouth that they are going to spend the next twenty five minutes telling you about how they learnt this alternative way to cast it and it's taken a bit of practice but they can just about cast it as fast as they could before and how it's so much more ergonomic or whatever

"I use ash btw"

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

Which is probably why I have a soft spot both for the "lost technologies" scifi trope, and fantasy universes where magic is studied just like any other science

Arthur C. Clark.

My own: science is the scrutiny of magic.

This is why I love Dimension20's DnD shows. Capitalism is always the bad guy.

Steal lore from Shadowrun, they've already fleshed out the details for you!

maybe read the dark profit saga then!

kinda terry prathett vibe with a more modern style, first one is called "Orconomics"

amazing trilogy, highly recommended!

Boeing leaves the chat

So, you're a warlock without the background story?