I can't remember if any mention of this made it into DW2, but I know there are references in the fragments of the other Steps that exist. During the vampire invasion of Warriors' World, Shadowwalker was caught by the foe and almost turned; a hastily-improvised ritual cast by Dwimanor (and Hexe, I think; it's so long ago now I can't remember for sure) managed to halt the conversion and leave her balanced on an uneasy cusp between vampire and human. She lived the best part of a year like that, only able to eat raw meat and mildly vulnerable to light. Needless to say, we wanted her cured.
It took Dwim and Doug several months to work up a full High Magick/theurgic ritual, which they performed at Stonehenge on Midsummer's Eve. It was, fortunately, successful, although Shadowwalker came out of it slightly altered. (Not for the worse, mind you. Oh, and the "markers" or favors Doug sometimes notes that he owes several gods are mainly for their participation in the theurgic part of the ritual.)
Anyway, while Dwim performed a very structured and complex ritual, Doug stood by, external senses locked out, playing this song and forcing it for all that he was worth:
It's a strange aberration, this brainstorm of youth
Though it's lost in translation from fancy to truth
It's hopelessly human, both inside and out
A joyous occasion, there's no reason to doubt
It's easy somehow, what once was elusive
Is calling me now
I am waiting, I am patiently
Doing nothing, in a reverie
Climbing higher, seeing everything
Interacting, slowly spiralling
I am giving, while I'm watching the
Life I'm living, precious energy
Escalating, what was once just a game,
It's never the same, no one's to blame
It's a strange situation, there's no cause for alarm
All these hot licks and rhetoric, surely do you no harm
They're hopelessly human, both inside and out
A joyous occasion, there's no reason to doubt
When each word is read, would you know the difference
If nothing was said?
All is rhythm, all is unity
I am laughing, as it's meant to be
Just amusing, I am using the
Word was given, making harmony
Moving slowly, dancing aimlessly
Endless circle, turning fearlessly
Resurrected, falling down again
Introspective, I'm just stating my view
Now you can choose, what do you feel,
Is it for real this time?
-- Kansas, Hopelessly Human
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Since the force obviously succeeded, can Doug use this for other things... like, say, turning a 33S into a human, or curing full-blown vampires/lycanthropes/etc of their affliction?
-Z, Post-reader at Medium
----
If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Probably not. It was effectively a component of Dwim's ritual, plus Doug was concentrating exclusively on curing Shadowwalker. It probably won't do anything ever again, unless you were to duplicate the precise conditions of its first use exactly. And Shadowwalker would have a few things to say about that.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
What would happen if while Doug has a Shadowwalker simulacrum running, someone does a genescan of her...
(Based on evidence to date, I don't think taking samples from a simulacrum works, but the information in a scan shouldn't just fade away afterwards...)
And, then builds a 33S which is mostly organic material based on that genescan?
Hmm???
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
I don't think there are any genes to scan... the sim is just a hunk of protoplasm that's shaped like Maggie, nothing more...
-Z, Post-reader at Medium
----
If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
It's not even protoplasm, it's more or less a shaped field of energy; the official V&V terminology is "solid energy".
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
I know that the simulacra are not "real", but as I understand it they respond to their surroundings in almost all ways as the real thing.
For example, I would expect one to show up as real to almost all high tech scanning, blood typing, retina scan, X-ray, etc. It depends how much detail there is, as DNA scanning is being proposed for high tech security, and quite likely exists on Warriors World. If a simulcrum can 'spoof' DNA scans, then a full genescan is just more detail. Note the blood that stayed on Nene's hardsuit while the simulcrum remained running. And, if the powers come from the genes, plus appropriate training...
I would suspect that quite a lot of the information that makes up a simulacrum comes from the principle of magical similarity, as I doubt that Doug holds more information than a 'hook' on the bodies of the Warriors. It is made quite clear, though, that their minds are based on his knowledge of that person, and can't have anything in them that he doesn't know.
Not withstanding that, if you could take a snapshot 'holographic' mind scan of one of his simulacra, and could load that into a cloned body from a pirated genescan of such, you have loads of fun new ethical issues to play with! [grin]
Don't you have lots of fun when you consider the interactions of really high tech and high grade magic? [grin]
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Actually, the simulacra are nothing more than puppets made of energy. Very realistic puppets, mind you, but no more than that. The "blood" on Nene's hardsuit had no more genetic information in it than you could find in corn syrup with red food coloring.
Quote:
Don't you have lots of fun when you consider the interactions of really high tech and high grade magic? [grin]
Now, don't you make me trot out the Bellisario Rule!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
> Actually, the simulacra are nothing more than puppets
> made of energy. Very realistic puppets, mind you, but no
> more than that. The "blood" on Nene's hardsuit had no
> more genetic information in it than you could find in corn
> syrup with red food coloring.
I was not suggesting in any way that the simulacrum _were_ real, I was just pointing out that if they interact with high tech sensor equipment _as if they were real_, then said equipment might aquire information.
At a basic level, humans can see them, and remember them. Cameras similar. If they work on security scanners, ditto. Now, you might say this is just some illusion fuzzing, to make them seem more real, but...
Consider the following: a simulacrum goes up to a door in a high tech base which only opens if a DNA scan matches. The actual matching is done quite a way off, and there are encrypted secure links with active checking to the remote scanner. Now, the scanner checks the simulacrum, sends off the scan for remote checking, and the door only opens if an OK comes back.
If an illusion fuzzes the scanner, and the door opens because it gets an OK, then the remote system may well detect the door opening without it being asked to do a DNA comparison: sound all the alarms! If the illusion magic fuzzes the remote checking as well (this could be a long way away, behind a lot of shielding), then security is broken, but this interference might be picked up by something like a crude magic sensor.
Also, I get the impression that a simulacrum is not really something of illusion, more false reality, so providing valid data to high tech sensors seems far more likely than fooling them into believing they are getting consistent data.
> > Don't you have lots of fun when you consider the
> > interactions of really high tech and high grade magic? [grin]
>
> Now, don't you make me trot out the Bellisario Rule!
Don't (think I) know that one...
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Ahem. The Bellasario rule, so named for the creator of series such as Quantum Leap, and well esposed by one B. "Gryphon" Hutchins of Eyrie Production fame, can be expressed as such:
Don't investigate this to Closely."I was an Otaku before those kids came along and changed the meaning of the word."
-- HM "Howling Mad" Wilson to more than one team-mate.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by
Echo's Children
> Ahem. The Bellasario rule, so named for the creator of series
> such as Quantum Leap, and well esposed by one B.
> "Gryphon" Hutchins of Eyrie Production fame, can be
> expressed as such:
>
> Don't investigate this to Closely.
Ah! Willing Suspension of Disbelief! (Probably by very, very, strong ropes! [grin])
Sorry, but that's rather against my principles...
Quite a few role playing games I've been in have been greatly improved (IMNVHO) by looking really hard at how things like magic interact with reality. Some of our clues that lead us to complete the scenario had come from this sort of thing. OK, sometimes the ref has said we came at the problem from a way he didn't expect, but, hey, he said he was happy enough, and we all had a good time! [grin]
Yes, there are bits of basics in a lot of settings that everyone, author and readers, ref and players, agree to gloss over, but, given IDEC's way of looking at Doug's magic, I didn't thnk this was _too_ unreasonable an approach! [grin]
One of the things that I like about DW is that it seems really good at covering (almost) all of the bases, and Doug weaves together tech and magic to excellent effect. None of this, "I'm a magician, I don't need to understand all this silly tech" stuff!
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Quote:
One of the things that I like about DW is that it seems really good at covering (almost) all of the bases, and Doug weaves together tech and magic to excellent effect. None of this, "I'm a magician, I don't need to understand all this silly tech" stuff!
Well, that's what you get when all the mages on the team are engineers, both in-game and out... The magic system starts looking very non-mystical.
We had a GM some years back, the one who ran the vampire invasion. He did a quite few unpopular or simply bad things as GM, like trying to turn Shadowwalker into a vampire, but one of the very few undisputably good things he did was he imported the magic systems from the ultra-level unlimited powers book (I forget the proper title) of the old Marvel Super Heroes game into V&V. These rules broke magic down into several categories: stuff done with internal energies, stuff done with external energies, and stuff done by bargaining with extradimensional entities for it. The rules change/additional catapulted Dwimanor from a guy with a few spells under his belt to a truly versatile wizard (with sufficient study to learn these "new magics" he'd just discovered).
At the same time, this GM was also the first to declare Doug's powers were magical in nature, not just some unspecified "mutant power". Reconciling his ex cathedra pronouncement with the fact that I had used V&V's "Mutant Power" option to create Doug resulted in the "mutated mage gift" concept. But I digress...
Anyway, this sudden expansion of the magical options, and the fact that the engineer-types on the team were the most affected, resulted in a very "scientific" approach toward in-game magic. Between Dwim studying the new avenues open to him and Doug trying to get a handle on what his power was
really doing, the two of them acquired quite a considerable body of mystic knowledge -- from a thoroughly scientific and mechanistic viewpoint. (And diplomatic, where extradimensional entities were concerned.) And that's the kind of flavor I've been trying to get across with Doug -- to misquote Harlan Ellison, "Magic ain't nothin' but science misspelled."
(Another side effect is that Doug is, entirely accidentally, one of the best-trained theoretical magicians on Warriors' World, familiar with any number of different styles, their uses, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on. He knows it well enough to teach quite competently...)
Anyway.
Back to the question of simulacra. You're overthinking it. Doug's simulacra have exactly the same kind of reality as the projections from Green Lantern's ring. They are solid, having (temporary) mass; they reflect light, sound, radar and most other means of detection, but below their surface level they are blobs of undifferentiated energy. Doug's metagift provides their power effects, not anything inherent in their structure. They have no genetics to scan or clone; they have no minds save that provided by Doug's own subconscious, which puppets them independently of his conscious will.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
I will also point out the time when Doug uses "White Wedding" to conjure the shotgun, the IDEC people scanning him say that he's holding about 3 kilograms of energy. So we know that's what scanners would probably see for anything that Doug conjures out of nothing...
DNA scanners need DNA to scan. Even if you say they're reading the energy pattern of the DNA (which they'd _have_ to be doing one way or another if it's at a distance), there has to be an energy pattern for DNA to scan it. Most likely they'd get a null reading, and assume that either the scanner was broken or that the simulacrum has some ability to block it's readings...
Offsides
Drunkard's Walk Forum Moderator and Prereader At Large
Good point, Josh! I'd actually forgotten that there was a counterexample actually in the text. Thanks!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Aw, shucks!
Thus dies another (unreasonable) techno-magical bootstrap attempt!
[grin]
I hate to think what would happen to anyone who tried to clone Doug's DNA on to a 33S... After all, it's likely that quite a bit of his blood was splattered around in various places, and while his chaos field may well have wiped some of it, I bet some got away...
I don't see Genom as an organisation that would miss any of the tricks, without a direct order from Quincy.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Actually, the arcano-engineer approach is what I would have expected from Doug, given that Bob is his creator.
I mean, seriously, this is a man who writes GURPS sourcebooks. If there's ever a system that breaks magic down into a series of definite, hard rules, its GURPS.
On a completely seperate note, I think it's also a reflection of the "arcane" nature people apply to modern technology - aka the "High tech looks magic, high magic looks tech" rule.
As a general rule, people don't know HOW technology works (like your computer), just that they work. They know that someone with sufficient education and experitise knows how tech works, and how to build it.
I think the psychological aspect of that leaks into our fantasy and sci-fi. Look at most of the more recent movies, anime and video games - magical circles, major constructs, and other "high magic" looks an awful lot like uber-tech. Uber-tech looks an awful lot like magic.
Wow. Big lecture.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
www.yggdrasil.org
Quote:
y, the arcano-engineer approach is what I would have expected from Doug, given that Bob is his creator.
I mean, seriously, this is a man who writes GURPS sourcebooks. If there's ever a system that breaks magic down into a series of definite, hard rules, its GURPS.
Quote:
On a completely seperate note, I think it's also a reflection of the "arcane" nature people apply to modern technology - aka the "High tech looks magic, high magic looks tech" rule.
Actually, it's less either of these than my personal observation and belief that if magic works at all reliably, then it must have some kind of underlying system, some set of consistent rules by which it operates, even if it appears random at times. And when something runs by such a set of rules, the scientific method will be one of the best tools for analyzing it. Any magic system where the effects are impersonal and more or less replicable -- they aren't gotten by bargaining with idiosyncratic spirits to do favors, for instance -- will eventually yield up its secrets to a proper investigation.
Then you have a "science of magic", and then you get convergence, and... well, you get the idea.
Quote:
As a general rule, people don't know HOW technology works (like your computer), just that they work. They know that someone with sufficient education and experitise knows how tech works, and how to build it.
As I once said in a different context almost twenty years ago: "Magic" is a ritual performed to produce a specific, desired end result, the exact reason for whose occurrence is unknown. By this definition, most of the civilized world operates by magic.
Quote:
Look at most of the more recent movies, anime and video games - magical circles, major constructs, and other "high magic" looks an awful lot like uber-tech. Uber-tech looks an awful lot like magic.
Definitely influenced by Clarke's Third Law, and its usually unconsciously-assumed inverse ("Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Call it "Crowley's Third Law", maybe? )
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Personaly, I've always had an interest in knowing how and why things work, whether you call it magic, tech, or psi...
Otherwise, [nod], [nod].
(I set out to find out how computers worked from the bottom up... I _mostly_ understand them! And, I had the soldering iron burns to prove it! [grin])
People may have heard of a rule book "Authentic Thaumateurgy", which was an attempt to write up "real world" magic, as it has been described in history, for RPGs. Interesting, but finding your initial casting time was an hour or so, and you only got faster by practice in combat situations...
The book it was based on, "Real Magic", by Philip Bonewits (ISBN 0 7221 1770 1), which tries to take a scientific look at the occult, is pretty interesting to!
Occult literature is something that I found had rather more than Sturgeon's Law "90% of everything is crud!" when I read it, when I was considerably younger. [grin]
"Stoke up the Orgone Accumulator! Fire up the Od Rays! Turn on the Kirlian Cameras! Bring up the Tachistoscope to full speed! We're going for broke!" [grin]
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
It's interesting that you bring up
Authentic Thaumaturgy (Amazon link
here). I was just about to mention it myself, as I own a copy, and despite its, um, opinionated idiosyncracies, it's a pretty good example of a magic system that incorporates psionics. Bonewits (Isaac, btw, not Philip) is a little odd, and the book's "mechanics" can get a little impenetrable at times, but it's very useful for the collection of magical laws he lays out, as well as the web of dependencies magic functions under. I wouldn't use it "as-is" as an example of "arcano-magery" (great terminology, btw, Chris!), but I'd certainly use it as a reference for building one of my own.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
The name given in the front of "Real Magic" is Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, BA Magic and Thaumaturgy, UC.
I am pretty sure the two authors are the same person.
Then, I have seen a book "Cosmic Crystals", by a Ra Bonewitz (1983), who also did "The Crystal Heart", so maybe after switching from Philip to Isaac, he went Egyptian?
Or, maybe there are loads of occult writers called Bonewits/z?
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
I know AT's "Isaac" is also the author of RM; why the name change I don't know. He may well be the other one, but I couldn't tell you for sure.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
So if we run into a reference to a Prof. Bonewits, an academic expert on theoretical magic, in Warriors World, we will know where you got him from! [grin]
Warriors World would seem to have considerably more... um... willing and suitable research subjects than ours! [grin]
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
Quote:
So if we run into a reference to a Prof. Bonewits, an academic expert on theoretical magic, in Warriors World, we will know where you got him from! [grin]
Huh. I hadn't thought of that; I'll have to keep that in mind if I need a WW expert in a future part. Thanks!
-- Bob---------"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Quote:
"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert
Mwahahahaha!!
That is all
Offsides
Drunkard's Walk Forum Moderator and Prereader At Large
Quote:
Mwahahahaha!!
Semi-private joke, sorta, folks. You had to be there.
Hm. The formatting on that came out wrong. I wonder why. Let's see if this works...
-- Bob
---------
"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert