Post by lordborral on Aug 5, 2009 4:16:34 GMT -8
and I thought about how magic in fiction is nearly always portrayed as a scholars game, understood by few and mastered by less. Then I thought about how in nearly every fantasy MMORPG magic is merely a skill, as easy to learn as the use of a sword. Then I remembered an MMO where I have nearly as much power as the poor bastard* who has to code the thing.
And so here we are.
It is here I will outline a long winded, complicated form of magic that takes time and a paper trail a mile long to understand.
I speak of Rune Magic.
A magic as ancient as the sun, which few mortals have ever heard about, much less understand.
Ties rather well with our name, doesn't it?
Rune Magic is where great spells are created via an alphabet of pictures, little glyphs that have some ancient long forgotten meaning. This is not a magic your character begins with, but magic you learn in a Vampire Lord's great library, or at the knee of an Ancient Dragon. Perhaps the Gods themselves impart their wisdom to you. Not something easy to learn, that what I'm getting at.
But enough advertising, lets get to the idea. The Rune Magic I envision is more or less based around around English**. There are 33 glyphs, maybe a few more or less, depending on how things work out. These being thought of as
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
for programming reasons. Each of these will have a Magicy looking squiggle attached to it. In the interest of reducing the effects of information sharing in the rest of the Internet, there should be 50 some pictures that are randomly assigned whenever a character finds a new rune. This just makes it harder for new players to become master warlocks simply by looking it up on Google. When a player first learns magic, they get a random assortment of 5 numbers and 15 letters, and a description of how to build spells. Only half of the acquired runes have their descriptions included, the others must be found by trial and error, or by finding a book, or another dragon, etc. Numbers mean either an element or, well, a number. The elements are none/physical, light, dark, fire, water, earth, air, lightning, and ice. Letters can be used to name things, and are linked to shapes of area effects, different stats, different status effects, numbers higher than 9, all sorts of things. It's entirely possible we don't need all 24 letters.
Heres a pic of my thoughts on a basic spell structure"
click me
Some special spells, like teleport or polymorph have specific recipes that don't follow the pattern of more run-of-the-mill spells.
Enchanting items would be a whole different cup of tea. the area you can put runes on would be limited by the type of item, more space on staffs, less on daggers, more space on body armor, less on amulets.
The main problem with this type of magic is that you would have to write some extremely complicated code for this to work. This kind of thing could easily take years to figure out on the developing end. I just want to make it clear that I would much rather you finish the build you are working on now and running weekly sessions before you start working on things like this.
*take it like a joke Charles =p
** heck, maybe the mortal language grew out of the god's language
And so here we are.
It is here I will outline a long winded, complicated form of magic that takes time and a paper trail a mile long to understand.
I speak of Rune Magic.
A magic as ancient as the sun, which few mortals have ever heard about, much less understand.
Ties rather well with our name, doesn't it?
Rune Magic is where great spells are created via an alphabet of pictures, little glyphs that have some ancient long forgotten meaning. This is not a magic your character begins with, but magic you learn in a Vampire Lord's great library, or at the knee of an Ancient Dragon. Perhaps the Gods themselves impart their wisdom to you. Not something easy to learn, that what I'm getting at.
But enough advertising, lets get to the idea. The Rune Magic I envision is more or less based around around English**. There are 33 glyphs, maybe a few more or less, depending on how things work out. These being thought of as
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
for programming reasons. Each of these will have a Magicy looking squiggle attached to it. In the interest of reducing the effects of information sharing in the rest of the Internet, there should be 50 some pictures that are randomly assigned whenever a character finds a new rune. This just makes it harder for new players to become master warlocks simply by looking it up on Google. When a player first learns magic, they get a random assortment of 5 numbers and 15 letters, and a description of how to build spells. Only half of the acquired runes have their descriptions included, the others must be found by trial and error, or by finding a book, or another dragon, etc. Numbers mean either an element or, well, a number. The elements are none/physical, light, dark, fire, water, earth, air, lightning, and ice. Letters can be used to name things, and are linked to shapes of area effects, different stats, different status effects, numbers higher than 9, all sorts of things. It's entirely possible we don't need all 24 letters.
Heres a pic of my thoughts on a basic spell structure"
click me
Some special spells, like teleport or polymorph have specific recipes that don't follow the pattern of more run-of-the-mill spells.
Enchanting items would be a whole different cup of tea. the area you can put runes on would be limited by the type of item, more space on staffs, less on daggers, more space on body armor, less on amulets.
The main problem with this type of magic is that you would have to write some extremely complicated code for this to work. This kind of thing could easily take years to figure out on the developing end. I just want to make it clear that I would much rather you finish the build you are working on now and running weekly sessions before you start working on things like this.
*take it like a joke Charles =p
** heck, maybe the mortal language grew out of the god's language
