Need help...Hexing in an alternate reality with different history/rules

[tetrasodium]

 First, a little background.. a while back our regular gm decided he wanted to not be gm any longer & I volunteered for taking over it. various real world hassles in people's lives combined to grow a general boredom with d&d 3.5 in some folks grew into some foot dragging and difficulties getting folks interested in/willing to make time for reading the rules to some new system they were trying to push the group into playing due to their 3.5 boredom.I have some interest in dfrpg from a couple people but one is hemming an hawwing over the fact that he's ly read the first dresden book and that he wants to read more of them* before getting into dfrpg, being a reasonabe excuse for a change, I'm willing to give him some slack, but having thought up & put together two fairly deep campaign skeletons for two entirely incompatible games/worlds  (D&D +rifts) that this particular person was one of the loudest not dnd folks only after I was ready to start things.. then dragged his feet on aything rifts related.. each time naming a different KoS faction as the character he thought would be cool whenever I started making a rifts campaign... so I'm inclined to tell him to suck it up because YS doesn't really have any spoilers that compare to the back of the book summaries or your average movie trailer and give him some breathing room by setting the game in an earth that had a wildly different history/set of rules. using the autum and spring courts instead of summer/winter. now that some of the reall world issues people had are wrapping up.

Specifically the world would be one where magic was always around based on some fiction I remember reading. Why would Edison try inventing the light bulb or bell the telephone when every general store and local thaumaturgist could sell you a cheap crystal light or speaking stone.  Why go through the trouble and danger of mining coal and building steam powered locomotives when you can just enchant the wheels to go or make a magic black box engine that turns them.  Sure technology might be around, but just generally not worth the effort/risk/cost of trying to make a magicless version so you have horseless carriages instead of cars, Ethernet sites, browsers, and servers running through a crystal ball or something illusory instead of internet & computers.  Saturday morning "action" cartoons are abut folks with crazy technology equivalent to the sort of magic/spititual stuff we see.  Magic should  follow some rules though so it's not too crazy/alien and n need of severe tweaking, I'm thinking function follows form being a big one.. a horseless carriage that looks like a carriage should be easier & cheaper to enchant/build  because the general population knows a carriage sud drive and that faith makes the difference.  a modern day car looking almost nothing like a carriage would be possible but way more expensive and difficult to build because each component would need to be enchanted to think it was the carriage equivalent and such.  50/60's creature feature moves would have been about the demon infused/black magic infused creatures crazed wizards let loose/created accidentally instead of radioactive mutated creatures wardens would just be a special branch of the police/govt agency.  obviously that sort of world would  have a much higher level of practitioners and having hexing do the same sort of thing it does in core would basically make it either useless or highly overpowered by letting it disrupt magic so easily... what should hexing do though?

*as soon as he finishes some other book series he will get started on books 2+ then dfrpg he said

[devonapple]

One thing they say somewhere in the series is that, in days of old, a Wizard's "hexing" radiation - the Murphyonic field - ended up doing things like curdling milk, rather than foiling technology.

Considering how integral magic seems to be in this "magitech" setting you are outlining, you could ignore hexing altogether, or find some other side effect. Something which is unpleasant on an individual level, but which doesn't, on the whole, comprise any real danger. Basically, switch out hexing for something else that causes the Wizards minor inconvenience from time to time, with roleplaying potential.

Some examples could be:

- a chaos pollution that warps or ages things strangely - never enough to affect living things, ordinarily
- simple defoliatory radiation that warps, dessicates, or withers plant life
- mundane people are passively bombarded with negative spiritual energy from the practitioner, making him seem alien, cold or unapproachable
- animals don't like them
- magical healing doesn't work on them, and they must make do with alchemical restorative options

[Haru]

I like the chaos pollution idea, devonapple. You could go with something completely random. Doors would warp out of shape and can't be opened, small things spontaneously combust, change color, solid objects suddenly melt, you get the idea. I think living things should be able to be affected by this as well, only not to a degree that would cause any damage or pain. Change of haircolor for example or rapidly growing mustaches to make it a bit ridiculous.

Of course one of the bigger questions is: how common are wizards in that world of yours? If half of the population are wizards, that would be really unpractical. The fewer there are, the more severe the hexing can become, I think. And if your wizards are not able to use the magitech, they have a slightly less advantage over any normal folk, if you want that. In that case though, normals would be able to create magitech, which might not be what you want.

Just now I remember something: You could tie a specific hexing effect to the wizard that is casting and make it unique to his character. I know of at least one system that did something similar, but I can't for the love of me remember the name. A hotheaded wizard would heat up the air around him, maybe even make it smell like sulphur, a druid would make the plants around him grow as a side effect to his magic, an earth mage would create cracks beneath his feet or even small earthquakes, if his magic was strong enough. Wouldn't suit the dresden files, but maybe it is something you can work with.

Oh and Edison could still have invented (or at least perfected) the light bulb crystal. He might have just been a thaumaturgist instead of a physicist. I kind of like it when fundamental magical theorems are named after famous physicists, but I am a physics nerd.

[tetrasodium]

I like the chaos pollution idea, devonapple. You could go with something completely random. Doors would warp out of shape and can't be opened, small things spontaneously combust, change color, solid objects suddenly melt, you get the idea. I think living things should be able to be affected by this as well, only not to a degree that would cause any damage or pain. Change of haircolor for example or rapidly growing mustaches to make it a bit ridiculous.

Of course one of the bigger questions is: how common are wizards in that world of yours? If half of the population are wizards, that would be really unpractical. The fewer there are, the more severe the hexing can become, I think. And if your wizards are not able to use the magitech, they have a slightly less advantage over any normal folk, if you want that. In that case though, normals would be able to create magitech, which might not be what you want.

Just now I remember something: You could tie a specific hexing effect to the wizard that is casting and make it unique to his character. I know of at least one system that did something similar, but I can't for the love of me remember the name. A hotheaded wizard would heat up the air around him, maybe even make it smell like sulphur, a druid would make the plants around him grow as a side effect to his magic, an earth mage would create cracks beneath his feet or even small earthquakes, if his magic was strong enough. Wouldn't suit the dresden files, but maybe it is something you can work with.

Oh and Edison could still have invented (or at least perfected) the light bulb crystal. He might have just been a thaumaturgist instead of a physicist. I kind of like it when fundamental magical theorems are named after famous physicists, but I am a physics nerd.

exactly, I want the world to be similar, just different rather tan alien... Edison might have been the thaumaturgist who invented the light crystal, bell the speaklng stone, etc.  In fact they probably were since the nitty gritty aspects of physics might jst be guidelines like thedresdenverse neverneverphysics. Guns work because there is a little magic charge in the bullet to get everything moving, a "scientist"  working with gunpowder today over here might get it to work "right, tomorrow or over there, it might do something entirely different or not at all, purely scientific creations would need to be fairly simple to work te same all the time everywhere.

 full blown wizards would probably not be so common that your likely to bump into none every day/week/month/year without seeking one out, but focused practitioners would probably be reasonably common on a similar scale as how everyone knows or has a friend of a friend or with an extra of a friend  skilled computer nerd/mechanic seems like a good  metric. seems like a good yardstick for commonness of practitioners.
fu

I think that like the chaos warping stuff mentioned because it has the potential to be both useful and potentially troublesome without (I don't think) being significantly more powerful than hexing.

[Michael Sandy]

Suggesting reading:
The Case of the Toxic Spelldump by Harry Turtledove   How do you dispose of magically active residue?  What happens if every time you draw a circle to open a portal or summon something, you create a little bit of magical waste.  By itself, it generally isn't a problem.  But all those residues can cause other spells to fail.  Like the lift spell on a flying carpet.  Or a healing spell.

The story was set from the exciting perspective of someone who worked in that society's equivalent of a toxic waste dump... who discovered that something NASTY was getting out past the supposedly impenetrable containment fields.

[tetrasodium]

Suggesting reading:
The Case of the Toxic Spelldump by Harry Turtledove   How do you dispose of magically active residue?  What happens if every time you draw a circle to open a portal or summon something, you create a little bit of magical waste.  By itself, it generally isn't a problem.  But all those residues can cause other spells to fail.  Like the lift spell on a flying carpet.  Or a healing spell.

The story was set from the exciting perspective of someone who worked in that society's equivalent of a toxic waste dump... who discovered that something NASTY was getting out past the supposedly impenetrable containment fields.

I'll take a look .  I started doing a little writeup for the world with the intent of giving it to my players and realized this thread could be lots of fun coming up with little differences.  Differences like.. what powers horseless carriages if not gasoline?

Imagine a world not all that unlike our own but only bearing a passing resemblance to it.  A world where the laws of physics are more like suggestions or guidelines to ensure “science” is mocked as little more than the stuff of Saturday morning cartoons and the occasional mechan with a belief in science…. A world where Edison and bell were great thaumaturgists  who first developed a cheap, easy and effective way of enchanting light crystals and speaking stones.  In this world, instead of the internet as we know it… weavesites, servers, and browsers are pulled down from the ethernet on personal crystal(ball)s. A world were your friend of a friend is not a computer geek or mechanic, but a minor practitioner of some kind of magic.
Now imagine you are in tis world.  You know that magic has rules…. One of the most well known rules is that function follows form more than the other way around, I’ll give you an example you probably already know.  Everyone knows what a horseless carriage is and why they are so similar to horse drawn ones.  I’s reasonably cheap to magically s enchant it to  propel itself that way, but its form would still need to resemble how a carriage should be shaped to avoid needing to undertake the expensive and time consuming process of enchanting each piece to believe itself to be/link it to the proper  carriage equivalent .

 A gasoline powered carriage is the stuff of fiction like cartoons and some if the more outlandish and crazy science fiction.  Sure  those conspiracy theorists will tell you some guy made a “car” that runs off gasoline instead of gold but the goldminers cabal had him wacked.  They will even tell you crazy nonsense like how this “car” got like 5 or 10 miles to the gallon of gas… but a gallon is a heck of a lot of volume compared to the 40 or so we get per speck of gold or silver* out of modern day carriages, were would you even find room to sit!  And if this car really did exist, how come nobody else ever made one?  Gold and silver are hard to mine and gasoline comes from oil that they can simply pump to the surface;  Could it be because the same reason those mechan engine  kits are so uselessly unreliable?
the laws of physics little more than suggestions or guidelines tat shift slightly from place and time to place and time, some similar creations are wildly different at a fine enough level… a gun propels bullets not with gunpowder, but with a small magical charge in the bullet set loose by the wielder’s actions. Gunpowder is right up there with the “car”; nobody wants to have their gun decide it’s just going to make a cloud of smoke or do nothing at all when the only thing prolonging their life is that little thaumaturgic charge in the bullet’s shell that can do it right every time, all the time. Everywhere.

I;m not sure about the gold/silver, but it seemed like a good substance that could be sold at a similar cost as gasoline for us  and wanted something that would need occasional refilling that could still be used by a nonpractitioner without needing to have one pump in massive power frequently

Maybe almost anybody, even those not naturally born with some minor talent can go to school and learn one that fits them. using the processes and rules outlined by folks like Einstein and... Freud(?) 

[tetrasodium]

I'll take a look .  I started doing a little writeup for the world with the intent of giving it to my players and realized this thread could be lots of fun coming up with little differences.  Differences like.. what powers horseless carriages if not gasoline?I;m not sure about the gold/silver, but it seemed like a good substance that could be sold at a similar cost as gasoline for us  and wanted something that would need occasional refilling that could still be used by a nonpractitioner without needing to have one pump in massive power frequently

I was driving to work earlier and passed a covered truck transporting (presumably antique/expensive cars) with drawings of things like a model-T, studabaker, etc type car on the side and think maybe I solved the problem of gasoline and hexing both.  Cars did start out looking kind of like a horse drawn carriage  and slowly shifted into the sort of things we see on the road today over the years and decades.  Guns started out as muskets>black powder rifles>six shot revolvers>modernish* rifles, etc into the sort of things we have today.  Maybe computers and the internet went through a similar transition from things like the earlier mentioned ethernet and weavesites to more modern type stuff. as the form and function merged into the collective mortal consciousness as normal and wasn't being hexed constantly by the world itself.  Maybe (probably) the technological/scientific version is easier and cheaper to mass produce than the magical equivalent and works fine as long as it's considered normal or gets deliberately hexed by someone.  The old ethernet & weavesites are probably like trying to use things like gopher and maybe usenet like folks did years and years ago. Sure you could still buy old sytyle thaumaturgic bullets and shells... but why would you want to when gunpowder is just as good and doesn't cost 20$ each .
 
*I'm not a gun person so don';t know what the first rifles using a bullet with its own shell/powder were called and it's not really important