Sentai Fhtagn Spell Lists

[Username17]

So we are narrowed down into what magic looks like in Sentai Fhtagn. At the heroic tier, spell-like things are called "techs," and the primary users of them are Witches (like Sailor Moon) and Summoners (like Ash Ketchum). Secondary tech users include Goat Spawn, Symbiotes, and whatever we're calling Power Ranger expies. Super Soldiers and Hard Troopers have arcanotech, but don't have any spell-like techs of their own.

Every tech has a power drain to activate or sustain. A tech user has an amount of power to call upon every turn and some characters have additional stuff they can do to increase their power output for a limited time. So if you're sustaining a buff, the biggest blast you can drop on enemy monsters is smaller. Very notably, a Summoner's pet draws power every turn, so Summoners will be reaching for the same weak buff techs their whole lives and upgrading their monsters.

All techs are aspected to one of the colors, which are also branches of future science that are variously well understood by the Union. All techs Goat Spawn can use are purple, all techs the Symbiotes can use are blue. Enemy monsters are similarly locked down - starspawn only use green techs while the cthonians only use red techs. Witches and Summoners have a personal aspect which limits what they can learn spontaneously, but can learn techs from any aspect.

Which brings us to the heroic tier spell lists. We need blue, green, purple, red and yellow techs for Summoners, Witches, and Monsters. From a D&D perspective, Witches are full casters, Summoners are minor casters, and monsters are like duskblades or something. So we need about one tier worth of Summoner techs, two tiers of techs for monsters, and three tiers of Witch techs. It's ok for some techs to appear on multiple lists.

As was settled in the last poll, the green tech that modifies memories is called "cloud memory" and the blue tech that heals physical injuries is called "mend flesh". What other techs do people want to see?

[Lokathor]

Off the top of my head:

An "energy blast", which might or might not be several different techs. At a minimum there should be Fire, Frost, and Shock attacks. There might be a "non-elemental" attack that just deals normal damage like bullets.

Telekinesis, either as a burst attack that throws metal shards around, or as a sustained effect that lets you pick people up and hold them in the air. You can get a lot of effects by copying all the basic spells in Mass Effect (Push, Pull, Lift, Singularity, etc)

Attack / Defense / Damage / Soak buffs.
``you can have people throwing down prayers over their sniper shots before firing (Hellsing).
``a buff that lets a goatspawn zoom around and only leave shadows of places they stop at to change directions, like a ninja.
``a buff that lets a witch punch through a stone pillar in one hit.
``a buff that gives additional soak points (AT Field).

A spell that converts nearby bodies into minions with dark energy, or calling up spirits to invest them or something. Basically it turns a pile of bodies into a pile of zombie fodder.

A spell to let you store/summon an object from another angle/time.

A spell which dampens energy in an area, disabling electronics.

A spell that generates visual effects on the battlefield, such as darkness, smoke, or fog.

[Username17]

Every spell aspect has a blast. That's the boring spell where you make an attack that does more damage if you elect to pump more power into it. The blast of each aspect is themed differently, but I don't think it makes a huge difference whether you are using ared gravity crush or a purple acid spray. There isn't a whole lot of energy resistance to go around.

Beyond that, blue magic uses angular time and really old protocols. Blue has mostly healing and protection techs. Sailor Moon is blue aspected. Green magic uses dream physics and logic. Green is water themed and has a lot of illusion and detection. Sailor Mercury is green aspected. Yellow magic is quantum based, meaning that it's all probabilistic and shit. Short range teleportation and chaos lightning and such. Purple magic is based on biology and chemistry. Purple magic is all tyranidish and also about primal emotions. Poison Ivy is purple aspected. And red magic is about gravity and space bending. Red strengthens and shatters things when it isn't making wormholes.

The actual nomenclature is the slightly mystical but mostly direct style used in Arkham Horror. So here would be some examples:

Blue: Glyphs of Warding (creates a protected zone), Mend Flesh (heals injuries to living beings)

Green: Celadon Mist (fills an area with fog and the fog with illusions), Cloud Memory (changes someone's memories or just makes them forget an event).

Purple: Deceive the Heart (make the subject feel a base emotion such as lust or anger), Wrack (cause crippling pain to living creatures).

Red: Hurl Objects (telekinetically throw things around), Create Bulwark (make inanimate object hard to move or destroy).

Yellow: Plumb the Void (de-banishes a creature), Probability Travel (teleport short distances).

-Username17

[Maxus]

So like this?

Red: Earth Pulse (groundshaking which gives whatever disadvantages being off-balance does), Craft of the Ancients (improves any melee weapons or armor via toughening them)

Green: Bend the Mist (creates illusion of your location being empty space, area effect)

Blue: Strengthen the Flesh (bulk yourself up for moar muscle), Glyphs of Sealing (blocks target off from their higher powers)

Yellow: Portal Shield (portals redirect ranged attacks to the attacker)

[Username17]

Yes.
Like that.

[Red_Rob]

How many techs are you looking for? This is related to how specialised they need to be. On a similar note what is the guideline power level for a Heroic Tier tech, and what are the upper and lower boundaries for the three Witch tiers?

[Mask_De_H]

Would Red get a Seven League Boots effect, or would that be Yellow's thing? And thanks to Herbert West, reanimation is a thing, right? So:

Blue: Sustain Life (stabilizes someone on the verge of death), Glyph of Forbiddance (Locks a target in place).

Green: Lakshimi's Tears (creates duplicates, Mirror Image style), Dousing (scrying/person finder).

Purple: Love Me Do (makes a target charmed), Deaden the Soul (makes target not give a fuck about anything)

Red: Stasis Field (stops bullets through gravity), Weaken Object (makes things more brittle and easy to break).

Yellow: Statistical Anomaly (something improbable happens, giving you a mechanical reroll), Quantum Displacement (lets you walk through walls and solid objects).

[Grek]

Red definitely gets the Seven League Boots effect. Yellow would get something more along the lines of superimposed travel: You split off into a bunch of mirror clones who all try different routes, and then collapse into whichever version gets there first.

More broadly, we could probably do with the following for each colour:

• Two short range movement techs.
• A long range transportation tech.
• An area denial tech.
• An area protection tech.
• A self-buff tech of some sort.
• Three information gathering techs.
• One mind-whammy tech.
• Three indirect attack techs.
• A direct blasting spell.
• Three techs used to buff creatures.
• Two techs that restrain/debuff creatures.

Note that these don't have to be individual powers. I can see, for example, the Yellow area denial/protection effect being the same tech: a quantum barrier that teleports any intruders (or incoming attacks) elsewhere. The idea is that all of these capabilities should be present, because they're things that we want all of the alien factions to be capable of on some level.

[TiaC]

How about some Green effects that make real things seem like illusions to your enemies or allow you to just act like a debuff is purely imaginary. Dream physics calls to mind discontinuities that can allow you to just redefine things.

[fectin]

Why no orange?

[erik]

Why no orange?

Frank has a conflict of interest bias with orange.
Or possibly he's saving all that mojo for himself. Take yer pick.

[Lokathor]

I do think I heard once that Orange is Frank's favorite color.

[Username17]

Orange is indeed my favorite color. Probably the mundane defense forces would be orange for the same reason that road crews, hunters, and emergency services wear orange in a lot of countries today: it's maximally visible to humans. Since the opposition are non-human for the most part, Union soldiers have everything to gain and nothing to lose by having orange uniforms.

In any case, while Venus is an orange sailor scout, orange is probably the least used sentai team color. Even things that aren't actually colors like black and white are used more.

-Username17[/img]

[Koumei]

A few ideas just thrown together, many needing better names.

Green:
-Onieromancy: read/view someone's dreams as they're happening, partial mind-reading based on whatever parts of the psyche the dreamstate happens to reveal at that moment
-Splitting the Stream: the Moses Trick
-Touch of Lethe: fling water at someone to suppress their memory for a while
-Clear Vision: look into a small container of water to see through illusions and detect things
-Vision of Loneliness: an illusion causes everyone to be invisible and inaudible to the target, as though they're the only person in the world

Yellow:
-Laws Overlooked: allow an object to disregard various laws of physics, such as not bothering to fall when dropped, or ignoring friction's effects on velocity and so on.
-Quantum Placement: be in a few places at once until somebody specifically tries to interact with one of them, at which point it collapses into you actually being in one place
-Approximate Reality: nothing in the area is precisely where it appears to be, it's just most likely to be there. So sometimes people can walk through walls, but sometimes they bump into the empty space next to the wall, because it's "somewhere around there". In mechanical terms, it probably lets you displace "terrain" by a metre or two at any given time.

Red:
-Personal Gravity: choose where you want to be drawn towards so you can walk on walls and all that

[fectin]

In any case, while Venus is an orange sailor scout, orange is probably the least used sentai team color. Even things that aren't actually colors like black and white are used more.

-Username17[/img]

But if you use all six colors, you have a very clear set of adjacencies and oppositions. That lets you add a fair amount of option space without adding much cognitive load.

I'm not advocating for a redesign, just curious about the thought process.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I can't help but find this familiar for some reason...

[Username17]

Yeah, it's also the Munsel color space, which was adopted by the US government shortly before our plotline differs substantially from the timeline. Computers in SF presumably have a five chroma radial color definition for pixels.

-Username17