Benny, Dani, Marmalade, Ghirardelli, Aspen. Broken heart emoji.
No gaming today, Jeremy is recuperating or meditating or attending to family duties or rethinking his life choices. I did not manage to find a replacement brain activity.
Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 7 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The last volume I have physically. However, it looks like up through vol 20 is available as ebooks on Kobo. Sweet.
Read (short): “A Black Mile to the Surface” (Chris Bissette): Grim sword and sorcery delve into the depths of the mountain to get the thing, complete with fighterly grumbling about magic and unearthly monstrosity.
Read (manga): Tetragrammaton Labyrinth vol 1 (Ei Itou): A young, heavily armed nun and her tween-looking monster friend protect 1900s(?) London from the demonic crimes Scotland Yard can’t handle. There will doubtless be terrible revelations about everything in the future, and also yuri feels.
Read (graphic novel): A Bite of Pepper (Balazs Lorinczi): By the same creator as Doughnuts and Doom, this time pink-purple and black. A young vampire doesn’t want to deal with familial expectations or her horrible brother, she just wants to skateboard. Things start to look up when she meets a cute artist girl, but then, drama! It is very cute and pretty much nothing bad happens to anyone, although there is a lot of teenaged vampire angst.
Written (game design): 517:
Mortal casters’ experience of magic is always a metaphor. Fancy
Temple Wizards (that might have to be the official class name)
perform the rites to petition the Celestial Bureaucracy according
to the correct forms to get the results allowed by ordinances of
Heaven, but that doesn’t mean there are actually angels reading the
submissions or legal codes they’re being compared to, never mind
detailed reports in scholarly calligraphy being sent back. There
probably aren’t even minds in the way people are used to thinking
of it. That’s just a way mortals can think about it to get results.
Where did they get the idea to begin with? Probably by someone going
deep into the astral plane and trying to put what she saw there
into words.
Seeing into the astral plane is not a handy HUD that tells you what
objects are magical and warns of incoming ghosts and how to counter
spells. It’s the full metaphorical, allegorical, hallucinatorial
experience, and even after you come back, some of your astral inventory
slots are going to be full of Visions. Time and space aren’t direct
limits on what you can see, but to see things that are less directly
entangled with your own fate(?) you have to go deeper, which means more
Visions (or worse Visions, the difference between astral fatigue and
astral wounds).
When recovering from wounds, I think you have to roll to avoid
long-term complications. If you have proper medical care, it’s not
a big deal, but even though we’re not super-gritty, the injuries
from getting squished by an ogre shouldn’t just go away the next
morning.
Back to Facy Temple Wizards, what are their limitations? Time is a
big one, since they have to draw out their magic circles and recite
their petitions. The effect might be ongoing, but they can’t make
the initial requisition in the middle of a fight. Spell selection is
limited, since they have to be approved to even make the request. I’m
thinking they get ordained into a specific celestial ministry
(principality? do we want to get fake Christianity in our fake Chinese
mythology?), which gives them the possibility of getting authorized for
each of a set of spells. The ministries can’t be anything lame like
air/earth/wood/blah or conjuration/abjuration/blah. I’m thinking more
like the Ministry of the East, Ministry of the West, Ministry of Seven
Stars, Ministry of the Dunes and Waves, and Ministry of Oversight. Each
has one or a few areas of magic, and some random spells because if it
were a literal bureaucracy, larger departments would absorb smaller ones
based on opportunity, not logic.
(Different traditions may have different sets of ministries, different
certification requirements for the good spells, different ideas on
multiclassing, etc. Maybe this is where the idea that magic is different
in different places comes from.)
And, of course, the common limitation that active invocations take up
astral inventory slots. Which need a better name. Psyche slots?