thread: 2013-12-16 : Some Basic Rules (iv, abandoned)
On 2013-12-20, plausiblefabulist wrote:
Further riffing, ignore if not helpful:
I wonder if "book" or "scroll" actually makes sense now that it's a plasmid, or if that's just a holdover from D&D? I haven't actually read "Dying Earth", but if you're coming to this fresh it seems like plasmids as visibly swirling colored clouds inside of gems makes the whole idea of them as powerful aliens sort of tangibly clear, while saying that they are "in" a book (and then later will "leave" the book, only to return) requires another kind of metaphorical leap. Because we already have an intuitive feel for how books work—information in them stays there, unless they get wet or something, and can be read by anyone—so repurpoising books as plasmid-hotels requires a certain awkward mental effort of re-envisioning. Are the pages blank when the plasmid is not at home? Do the letters shift and change? Does each letter map to some specific part of the plasmid? If you erase a letter does it wound the plasmid? Can you "rewrite" him? All that could be interesting if it's really intended as part of the mechanic, but from what it looks like you're going for, it seems like it's just clutter.
Whereas if the plasmid is a swirling cloud in a gem, mirror, or shard of glass, then it's pretty intuitive that that's a place to store the plasmid, a home, it's either there or not, when not it's in your mind (maybe even in your brain, maybe we catch a hint of its colors, briefly, in your eyes)... etcetera.
We associate wizards with books, of course, but when we do so, it's really because of books as books... because magic is something difficult requiring learning. I think it would be cool if you needed something transparent—gems are best, the pricier the better, but shattering a wineglass and stuffing the shards in your pocket will do in a pinch—to store the plasmid. And to summon the plasmid, as Slow Dog suggests—to find a new one—you need to know enough about it to find and isolate it, to pull it down from the wilds and into your brain, and later into a container.
So books are crucial, but not because the books are magic, rather because the books are about magic. The only people who can describe to you the plasmid you're looking for are other Vancian magicians who have had it in their brains, and most of them are probably dead. If you can find their fevered journals you can unearth clues about the nature of the plasmid—what it was like, "where" it was found, what it felt like to have it in your brain. And that's your only hope of actually going mentally and capturing it from the wilds.
So the plasmid is unique, and to cast it you must capture and tame it. You can find one—in a gem or crystal or glass shard—and master it, and that's the easiest route to magic, the magical equivalent of being a script kiddie (in computer secure systems intrusion). You can't "learn" a plasmid from a book—what you can learn from a book is clues for hunting down a once upon a time captured, now released or escaped plasmid. That's a higher level of magic, requiring another set of moves, to cast your mind into the plasmid wilds in the hopes of capturing a plasmid.
I'd make the book mechanic something like this—if you have no information and are just randomly looking, your chances are lower and you have no idea what you'll get. If you happen upon a book in which a plasmid is described, you have a certain chance to catch that plasmid, but only once—either the information in the book was sufficient, or it wasn't. If not, though, the book may have clues leading to other books describing the same plasmid : "far from being, as Albigromius insisted in his De Rerum Plasimidae, of a purplish hue, his true color was a verdant orange"... okay, well I didn't find him, but apparently there's a book called De Rerum Plasmidae too. Track that down and I can take another crack at it. So searching in musty libraries or raiding other magicians' collections is really advantageous, because it's what lets you reroll to capture that plasmid (learn that spell) you've heard of. If there's a "Wizard class" with a "spell list", that's not an exhaustive list of the magic you can do—it's just a set of rumors of some plasmids who may or may not have escaped the clutches of their owners into the wilds, and the question is if you can hunt down descriptions of them good enough to capture them before someone else does.
Wow, now I'm starting to like this enough to want to steal it :-)
