Day 5, noon. Calm.(Turn 18, 2nd of day)
A few wisps of cloud scud across the sky, warm sun beaming down. A soft breeze blows across the grass.
Brilliant 'sunlight' eh? I wonder if I can use that..
Lets try a bit more heat. Take a bigger stick and try to change which end is on fire, aiming to delay the transfer until I can store the fire or I hurt myself.
..After that, lets see if I can absorb a little from my skin instead. Walk towards the forest, seeing if I can absorb extra heat from the brilliant light.
..And then see if I can throw a fireball with just hand and arm movements.
Name: Alice
Description: Roughly 11 years old, with unusual blue hair. Not known as a mage, but has demonstrated spontaneous abilities in the past. Has vague memories of both successes and accidents related to said abilities in the past.
Status: Weird cold hand.
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 10/10
Mana: 6/10
Inventory: A uniform of thin yellow unusually light cloth. Reasonably sturdy despite that. Three sealed packages of pure water. A paper notebook and pencil. An Axe. A knife. A basket. An empty water package. A wooden whistle.
Current Location: Near the Shack
Skills: Basic Foraging, Basic Chopping
Spells and magical knowledge: Can sense magic inside herself easily. Cannot sense someone else's mana, unless it enters her body.
There are three kinds of magic inside me. The Blob, which sits there and doesn't do much, the Flow, which reacts to physical movement, but is more of an automatic function, and the Sparkles, which seem to go with the flow and have the potential to do things.
Can cut off a bit of the blob and let it disperse within herself.
Talking and moving while trying to shape the blob can assist in the shaping of it.
Can move heat from one object to another.
4Hmm. It looks like the heat is routing itself through your mana. Attaching a string to both ends of a stick allows you to siphon the heat from one to another just fine, and the speed of that transference is based on how quickly you allow the mana to flow between. It seems there's not even really a chance of hurting yourself, since the mana doesn't have to physically pass through you!
2It's... doable, there's just not that much heat that you can safely take before chills break out over your body. Brr! You note that the Flow seems agitated by your new state of unhealth. Trying to take heat from the 'sunlight' doesn't seem to work, at least for now.
Lose 1 health, 1 mana.5Taking all the heat you've gathered and storing it in a single ball of mana, you metaphorically pitch this mana construct up into the air, arm motion and mind in sync. When you release the orb from your will it continues flying forward, glimmering brilliantly as it travels. The orb moves too quickly to observe with your inner sight, but after travelling a couple paces the construct pops like a soap bubble, a wave of warmer than usual air blowing over you.
...success?
Lose 2 mana, 2 hunger.Name: Eli
Description: A young lady with blue and yellow eyes, dark skin, and perfectly normal pointy fuzzy ears and tail, like anybody else would have. Vaguely recalls using different sorts of energy to kill large things for the purpose of eating said large things. Definitely is the best and stronger than everyone else.
Status: no
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 6/10
Mana: 10/10
Inventory: Spider-silk dress with horned beast embroidery, Straw hat, Brass earring, Shoulder bag, Bag's worth of shiny rocks, Belt, Pickaxe, Shortsword
Skills: Basic Combat, Basic Cooking, Basic Foraging, Basic Construction
Spells and magical knowledge: Self Energy Pool Awareness
Location: home
Rawrh! Annihilate the training dummy with my pick!
34 ((Extra attempt using bonus turn))
You attack the training dummy with all the ferocity of a swarm of cats. Grass flies, wood chips, training, training, training! When you're done with it and the dust settles, the poor thing is basically a pile of scrap. Your stomach grumbles.
Intermediate combat learned, lose 3 hunger, locations updated.Name: Nathan
Description: A thin, reedy, middle-aged man. He's easily excitable, and seems almost happy about this magic learning project. He has the impression that he was apprenticed to a harsh master, who held him back and kept him as an apprentice for long enough to frustrate him. He doesn't remember having any particular specialty, and suspects he spent a lot of time traveling to remote areas.
Status: None
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 8/10
Mana: 7/10
Inventory: Wearing plain white robes.
Current Location: The Northwest Forest
Skills: Basic Teaching
Basic Construction
Basic Chopping
Spells and magical knowledge: Can sense his own inner mana without meditating.
Can slowly move a small amount of mana from his core.
Can maintain a small loop of mana near his core while moderately distracted, likely until pain.
Can control two loops of mana, one in either hand.
Noticed stable mana control, allowing initiation of spells in seconds instead of minutes.
Can control own mana that is not currently attached by a string.
Noticed it seems to spin when near sleep, possibly related to replenishment.
Cannot reclaim finished spell constructions without collapsing them.
Focus is the key to construct strength. Finished spell constructs retain the strength of the focus used to finish them.
Mana exhaustion remains even if mana is recovered.
Discovered physical/body mana. This mana causes minor fluctuations in blob mana.
Spell Concept: Separate - Can slowly break rocks down into coarse gravel, by focusing on the image of breaking things down, and on what is in a rock to separate. Doesn't seem to work on wood.
Spell Concept: Combine - Can join gravel back into pebbles by focusing on the image of combining similar yet diffuse materials. Inefficient mental image. Doesn't seem to work on wood.
Spell Concept: FIRE - With a mental image drawing parallels between a stick and a fire, can inspire mana to motion and heat up a stick until it begins to smolder. Obviously inefficient, as it costs 3 mana.
Spell Concept: Motion/Splitting - Shape mana into a blade and use a mental image of pushing, moving, and splitting. Can cut a finger's width into a branch before losing cohesion.
Proto Spell: Magic Edge - Shape mana into a blade and use a mental image of pushing, moving, and splitting. When mentally anchored in place relative to my fist and physically swung, it is far more efficient than when treating the edge as an independent effect. A blade focus has no apparent effect. It glows, slowly bleeding off energy into waste heat and light.
Spell idea: Mutate Magic Edge into a light spell.
Spell idea: Magic Edge might be affixed to my second mana type, instead of my fist?? Improve control and try to enchant blades for others.
Attempt to learn telekinesis with a pebble. Try concepts like grab/hold and MINE/extension of body. I expect it will be like the magic edge spell, and either need me to keep focus, or to lock it into place.
Meditate and try to work towards conscious mana recovery. Try to spin my mana like I noticed before falling asleep last night. Carefully remember the warning not to integrate external mana carelessly, but a little bit (1 unit) is probably fine.
2Hmm. If telekinesis is achievable, those concepts seem to be the wrong ones.
6Well. It would indeed seem like rotating your core does pull external energy in. You can even see wisps of it in your mind's eye, at the border between the energy not being yours and becoming yours. Pursuing this perception might lead to being able to see external mana.
However, while fiddling with this technique, you may have drawn in more than you really wanted to. Your vision pulses, colors dancing. Invisible spiders crawl upon your back, and you think that eating a handful of grass would be a great way to advance your studies of magic! The sensations fade fairly quickly, though your own warped memories are a disturbing thing to think back on.
Gain 2 mana. Lose 2 hunger.Name: Brooke Fox
Description: A 20 year old caucasian woman with sea green hair and orange eyes. She wears a green dress that is decorated with floral patterns on it. She was sent to an adoption agency when she was young and never really knew her birth parents. An older woman eventually adopted her and taught her how to live off the land.
Status: Her original hair and eye colors were swapped in a magical accident.
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 10/10
Mana: 10/10
Inventory: 1 wand; 1 grimoire
Current Location: In the grassy field
Skills:
Spells and magical knowledge: Self Energy Pool Awareness
Use my awareness of the magic to try to conjure up something. An animal of some kind should be nice.
4With all the confidence of a master sculptor, you draw energy from within and, painstakingly over multiple hours, shape the blob of floating energy into a shape that vaguely resembles a frog. Eventually you lose focus, and it returns to being a spherical blob in your mind's eye.
Definitely a drastic improvement in your ability to manipulate the energy!
Lose 1 hunger, 1 mana.Name: Aaron
Description: Vaguely foreign, with red hair and a slightly-taller-than-average stature. He feels rather certain that he specialized in enchantment and fish. And that this was not what he signed up for.
Status: Fine
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 5/10
Mana: 10/10
Inventory:
-Practical cloth-and-leather clothing
-Solidly-built, ornately-carved fishing rod that may also be an arcane focus
-Serrated knife
-Straight knife
-Hatchet
-Flint and steel
-Basket
-0x Bluegills (being dried)
-0x Cooked Bluegill Fillet
-0x Medium Fish
-0x Large Fish
Current Location: Genesis Field
Skills:
-Intermediate Fishing
-Basic Foraging
-Basic Construction
Spells and magical knowledge:
-There is a ball of magical energy in me
-I can make the ball exude tendrils of energy
-Snapping tendrils is a Bad IdeaTM
First off, let's have some food, because I am hungry.
Second... okay, I have these magic tendrils. What can I do with them...
Can I pick something up with the tendrils? That feels kind of like something that could be done.
And what if I touch somebody else's tendrils or core with mine? Let's see if anybody would be willing to help test that.
You eat quite a few of the shed bits of meat, before moving on to magic practice.
Gain 5 hunger, locations updated.Nathan seems available, and the muttering about 'birds flying in spirals' and 'grass on the skin of the mind' isn't enough to dissuade you from such an enthusiastic test subject!
3When you reach a tendril inside Nathan's body, it very quickly gets ripped apart by some unseen force, which Nathan reports seemed like his body mana took offense to the intrusion. You weren't really able to pick up or sense anything yourself, so you're just gonna have to take his word for it. Sigh.
3Making tendrils intersect within the mind's eye is difficult when distance is vague and there's no landmarks, but you manage it. They seem to mostly not interact with each other, though Nathan did find he was able to force a small portion of his mana into yours. This made your tendril vastly harder to control, however, and you barely manage to cut it off before losing control entirely; thankfully, it doesn't whiplash back into your core!
Lose 1 mana.
The genesis field:
A very grassy area
A rickety shed: (Basic tents, blankets, padding. Simple tools such as swords, knives, axes, shovels, pickaxes, all in limited quantities. Torches, linen, etc. etc. Nothing obviously magical, though.)
- 1 broken knife
- small pile of shiny
rocks
- 3 bits of smoked meat that should really be eaten soon
Alice’s tent
Nathan’s tent
Meat smoking tent
- 11 meals worth of various deer bits. Done and smoked, as of turn 11.
- 12 medium fish, done and smoked as of turn 18
- 1 large fish, done and smoked as of turn 18
Scrapped high quality training dummy (the poor thing)
Amon’s small pile of straight sticks and small logs of varying lengths, a basic wood and leaf bed.
River heading from North to South on the West edge
Three very small piles of different sized firewood
Large pile of green large branches
Large pile of leaves and small branches
Five body length logs
Cooking fire
Rope and wood swing, on the edge of the forest.
The Northwest forest:
A small cluster of pear trees (about half stripped of fruit)
Felled younger tree
Four medium tree trunks
Seven adult length logs
The Northernmost foothills:
Shiny rocks, boulders.
The edge of the world
Southern badlands
Clay beds near the river
Southmost glass/something desert
The edge of the world
Dangerous(?)
Western swamp
Mosquitoes in the trillions
Westernmost jungle
Thinking of giving some more Fate style concepts a try. Specifically for combat, it might be nice to have combat be single or two turn resolvable things with a decent system, rather than taking multiple days or needing to spin down the time periods for a number of combat only turns. In general I find combat tends to be the least interesting part of TTRPGs and such, so thoughts and opinions are welcome.
Author
Topic: Roll to learn magic (5/8) Day 5 (Read 17479 times)