One of the least plausible aspects of fantasy as a genre is that sorcerers NEVER seem to get bogged down in creating a new spell then spend the next three or four months muttering "I hate this, it's rubbish" under their breath.
@cstross Counterpoint: "I've tried literally all the opening spells I know how the _fuck_ did the dwarves manage to lock up Moria so tight?"
@cstross not unlike how certain SF portrays hackers.
@cstross It's the difference between an amateur and a pro. Trust me on this.
Foster's Spellsinger series does have a bunch of the protagonist getting frustrated, failing, and wanting to give up.
@cstross “That’ll teach me to just cut and paste runes from Spelloverflow…”
@cstross that was one of the things I enjoyed about Raymond E. Feist's Magician actually. Pug is miserable as a kid because the teacher says he has bags of talent, but nothing he tries seems to work right
I had great fun with a young wizard blowing things up a lot. Takes time to learn this stuff. :)
(In SPIRAL PATH.)
@cstross
And testing new spells can have weird and unexpected consequences - for others!
@cstross The real reason wizards go adventuring - to escape from their latest spell research submission.
@cstross Or for the “magic as code” aspect going through an old spell and complaining about how badly written it is then realizing they wrote it a decade earlier.
@cstross I know you're talking about the hateful process of creating a novel and not coffee, but now I'm imagining one Magus dissing another saying "Call that a spell? It doesn't even compile!"
@cstross Are there magic sandboxes where sorcerers can iterate on spell design?
Charlie, we've been doing "programming==magic" SF now for 40 years, since Chalker's "Changewinds" and Rick Cook's "Wiz" novels.
Usually with a theme that nobody-programmer becomes Great Wizard in the D&D universe.
We desperately need an update with the magical equivalents of tech monopolies with abused staff vs open-source hackers, the programming of today.
We need that "Glass Onion" story where the 'super-powerful' boss wizard is actually dumb and dependent on staff.
Survivor bias.
Draft of a book that's not quite right: I hate this.
Draft of a spell that's not quite right: 💀
@cstross This stuck in my brain a bit, now I am thinking about the lack of improper magic side effects.
Not the ' I cast a spell and it went wrong and now demons are Miami', but I said this word wrong and now I will not see purple for an hour, or this gesture hurts my wrist and I really need to figure out how to reload the cantrip cache before the buffer gets full without...
And some people with the talent of drawing a circle freehand, equivalent.
@cstross "Spells as software" seems more Jack Vance than anybody else. Folklore seems to make magic more a matter of either "wanting it hard enough" or haggling with spirits.
@cstross for me it was the profound lack of porn magic
@cstross I always associate Sorcerers with easy-mode just-works damn-the-concequences (and that twit Pratchett wrote screeching about Puissance and getting the short end of a half-brick) where as Wizards are the ones debugging the magic, often literally.
@cstross I always thought it was geography and biome layout, and fantasy creature evolution... but this is an angle I haven't explored. 🤔
@cstross "I don't know why it needs exactly seven toad legs. This spell shouldn't need any toad whatsoever. But any less or any more and your target implodes and that's not what we want in a healing spell. Best practices are a lie. Magic was a mistake."
@cstross
that's the difference between sorcerers and wizards. Wizards are the ones creating new stuff and cursing about yet another difficult pull request from a collaborating wizard. Sorcerers just use proprietary off-the-shelf spells developed by the powers of the abyss.
@cstross That seems like something Jonathan Strange would do.
@cstross Spells as software?
Even worse: spells as software built on top of frameworks you hate, but are forced to use (since you need to pay your mortgage and feed your kids)!
Speaking hypothetically, of course.
@cstross Except in Ars Magica (but then, its trying to be history with wizards)
@cstross "This would've been amazing but the exclusion ward forces a linearization of the energy stack and produces a long poll effect which doubles the casting time and prevents the energy peak from coalescing."
"Ye burned tha tower to the ground."
"IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN TURNED INTO A PUDDLE OF GLASS!!!" *sob*
The wizards-academics link is ancient, but a Stross toot got me thinking about the aspects of academia that don't get enough love in fantasy...
A grimoire that's just three hundred variations on Fireball from one mage who needed to pad his publication count for tenure.
Terrible wars fought over citation indices and co-author credits.
Spells are hard to come by, not because mages are loth to show off their cleverness, but because you have to pay thousands of gold for the privilege of publishing a new spell and hundreds more to read anybody else's.
Thousands dead after relying on a non-peer-reviewed preprint version of Protection From Dragons.
A wizard gets invited to the Grand Conclave of Archmages, "in recognition of your important work", but it's actually just a vanity scam to milk the naïve.
Everybody learns the Bigby's Hand spells, not because they're effective but because Bigby might be Reviewer 1 and he'll reject your work if you don't stroke his ego.
Reviewer 2 is Vecna.
@cstross
Sounds like a feature of the Ars Magica role playing game.
@cstross It must be because it's their hyperfixated project, not one asked of them.
@cstross imagine the entries and comments in SpellOverflow or similar fora.
@cstross Well, we need to be allowed some wish-fulfilment somewhere, after all.
@cstross “Schoolboy script, lines drawn with painful accuracy, mistakes scraped out and redrawn. . . The idiot! He forgot the hooked tail on the Whirlpool design. A wonder it didn’t eat him.” -- Larry Niven, "What Good is a Glass Dagger"
@cstross I hate those modern spells. The entire summoner facing interface is written in pig Latin. The language should even exist in the first place. It doesn't even relate to actual Latin other than that it shares some of the syntax. It was fine for making the pictures in the grimoire move, but for entire spells? The semantics are totally different to Latin. It's entities are weakly typed for fucks sake. Look at that identifier. It should refer to a lesser demon but half the time you get a shoggoth instead. How the hell should I track that down? Also the spell is utterly slow for the amount of black candles I have to throw at it. And then I need to summon an entire demonic entity just to interpret it. We should have stuck to the original ancient languages. So much more efficient.
@cstross Have you read Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet?
Andats (created demigods with power over a defined domain of reality) are conjured into being by a team of poet-mages. Then the team’s lead designer gets to spend the rest of his life maintaining the thing.
@cstross "Don't roll your own crypto", I mutter, as I clean up what's left of the poor fool who thought they knew more than the Necronomicon about the secret spells.
@cstross Naomi Novik's Deadly Education (and the full Scholomance series) actually has something like this. The protagonist just wants simple, useful spells, like one that will clean a bedroom...with soap and water, not scour it with flame or enslave an army of servants to clean it for her.
@cstross
In Max Goldstone’s Craft Series magic is based on contracts, and all the fine print better be right or truly nasty unforeseen consequences might ensue.
And the really proficient and dedicated practitioners keep working and giving up aspects of their lives (sleep, relationships, recreation) and finally die, after which they really go to work.
@cstross Counterpoint: D&D's Bigby and his collection of highly specialised hand-shaped spells.
@sebastian @cstross We tried teaching sorcery students Old Enochian, but they found the parentheses off-putting, so Pig Latin it is.
@acb @sebastian Or, from Microsoft, VisualENOCHIANScript for Excel! Now with added widgets of unspeakable gruesomeness in multidimensional sheets
@cstross @sebastian To be fair, Microsoft knew their way around the eldritch realms. I think I still have my 1990s Microsoft Creatures Of The Necronomicon CD-ROM in a box somewhere…
@cstross @acb @sebastian To be fair, I’d take my chances with that versus a VLOOKUP and a pivot table.
@cstross took a closer look at the script. Turns out the toad is to counteract this line here which summons the all-consuming Void. That line was copied straight from a hypothetical untested cure for cancer on Ars Overflow, and that was an adaptation of an entry off Matt’s Scroll Archive to get rid of unwanted houseguests.
@milquetoast Also never trust a currency system that uses base 10 or base 100, with fixed integer exchange ratios between different metal coinages, all gold pieces are of equal value (regardless of seigneorage, adulteration, clipping, etc), and there's no deflation if it's a precious metal currency (unless someone is looting entire empires next door), and so on …
@RoyBrander You're not familiar with my writing, are you? (Specifically the Laundryverse …)
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Ah, Charlie, I keep you in very good company up on the shelf. And after this many hundred bucks in hardbacks, I figure I've earned the right to kid you a bit.
Actually, let me take this opportunity to have a few other Stross fans read down to the bottom of that "library" page on my web site, where I explain all those expensive hardbacks for a civil-service retiree:
"Readers may note that I took it seriously when economists say that every purchase is a communication back to the producer that they should do more of that. My favourites, I buy in hardback, early. "
Say, for instance, "Season of Skulls"...I'll start a new shelf.
@MacBalance @cstross "When I cast this spell, I discovered that Belphegor is no longer Lord of Eternal Pain, and that I now need to call on Astaroth for that. But the invocation for Astaroth seems to be totally different. Can I still use these black candles, or do I have to throw them away and lay in a stock of hemlock?"