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snippet seeks good home, magical adventure, cabbage
03-11-2012, 10:15 AM
"Magical duel? I'll do no such thing. Throwing about little balls of fire or bolts of lightning, such things are beneath me as a War-Wizard of the Collegium. No, if you want an example of my magic, point out a goodly sized city of your enemies, and have your army lay siege to it for a week to prevent escape while I perform one of the lesser Rituals. When the sun rises on the eigth day every stone of the walls and within them will melt away like morning fog. That is the kind of magic at my command. Supply a dozen novices to assist and the time can be cut to three days through my puissant skill, or with twenty one days ending on a new moon the mist can be rendered so violently explosive that a single candle or pipe-match alight within it will leave naught but a scorched crater where the target once stood."
- CD
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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... Something tells me this guy ain't very well liked.
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I'm reminded of Ars Magica in a strange way.
Though Magi in Ars Magica generally wouldn't have the power to level a city. Or the inclination to stir up the mundanes by doing so. But the attitude sure fits.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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blackaeronaut Wrote:... Something tells me this guy ain't very well liked. Well, he's the high fantasy version of a nuclear armed B-52. You don't have to like him, just insure your country has as many of the Collegium's alumni on retainer as the others do. The fact that said alumni do very little besides hole up in their heavily fortified and warded towers or dungeons doing the stereotypical mad wizard magical research on the public's dime is something to be thankful for, and even if a few oddly mutated animals or peasants show up nearby from time to time it's a small price to pay for national security.
He's intended to be somehow transplanted out of his familiar context here, though I have no firm idea where. This originally grew out of a one-liner of someone else trying to explain it, "It's less the sort of magic where you throw little balls of fire or a lightning bolt, and more the kind where you and a dozen friends dance on the hilltop for three days and three nights while an army lays siege to the city below, and on the fourth day no more city."
- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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military engineering vs Doomsday Wizards?
03-11-2012, 09:53 PM
I wonder why I see so many of those days long Doomsday rituals ending abruptly with a large messy splat or with the wizard experiencing a sudden sinking sensation followed by a burning sensation as the entire ritual site drops into a burning mine filled with dead wood just recently soaked in a flammable liquid.
Doomsday rituals almost certainly require specific locations, distances and/or local materials and you can be certain the targeted cities military engineers have made arrangements via the local Trebuchet guild and/or the local Minors 101 and wood carriers guild to stop any such rituals and the Wizard permanently.
hmelton
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Well, intercepting that sort of thing is the job of the besieging army, generally. of course, tehre's also the question of pulling off sufficient wards to keep the magic from havaing its effect, or doing something to teh army first, or... well, any number of moves and countermoves.
- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Actually, cities are valuable things. People almost never actually want the "no more city" result. - so what they're *really* good for is dancing on that hill for two-and-a-half days, at which point the invading army makes a few pertinent comments, and the city gives up and lets the invading armies in, while a runner dashes up to the top of the hill to tell the mages to call it off... which means in turn that fortress walls are no longer particularly effective as defenses when your enemies have siege-capable wizards on tap, unless they can field some sort of highly effective anti-wizard defense... which means, again, that as a reasonably-sized empire, you have to be *able* to field siege mages, but you don't actually wind up doing it that often... which means there's a definite niche for brave young grifters who can *pretend* to be fully capable siege-magii, and doesn't *that* offer all sorts of entertaining story possibilities?
Edit: also, I gotta think that the really major cities are largely immune to this sort of stuff. After all, while it may be possible to make cities go away by dancing on nearby hills with what you can bring with you, it's got to be easier (and faster) to make said nearby hills go away by dancing in specially prepared and consecrated focus rooms inside the city (with the targets pre-dialed-in and everything), and it probably doesn't even cost as much (siegemagii strike me as the sorts that enjoy being able to go home to their own well-appointed beds at night, rather than living in whatever style the army affords). Indeed, it makes trying to field a besieging army against them downright perilous. That little game of do-they-or-don't-they on whether or not a given city has siegemagii on tap is *also* an interesting bit for stories.
Worth noting that things that can work on that sort of a scale might well also be useful (and used) in pubic works - though the details on how the magic worked and what it was capable of doing would certainly have an influence on exactly how. At the very least, being able to make really big booms is helpful for things like creating mountain passes and digging (somewhat oversized) canals.
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