Magical Ways to Emulate Modern Techonology

[violence in the media]

Does this mean wizards who use colorspray need to wear tye dye clothing and live in towers with hypnotic patterns painted on the walls, or that a summoner has to be surrounded by badger burrows

Sadly, no. But you can toss that complaint onto the pile of "D&D magic users can do too much of everything and are not limited to any sort of thematic consistency!"

@momothefiddler -- The other hint might be all of your neighbors that, when asked, respond with, "Momo the A/C Mage? Yeah, he lives right up the road there, in the blue house."

[schpeelah]

Does this mean wizards who use colorspray need to wear tye dye clothing and live in towers with hypnotic patterns painted on the walls

That actually sounds pretty cool.

[JigokuBosatsu]

[momothefiddler]

@momothefiddler -- The other hint might be all of your neighbors that, when asked, respond with, "Momo the A/C Mage? Yeah, he lives right up the road there, in the blue house."

Oh, just because I'm an ice mage, my house has to be blue? Fuck off, asshole.

[schpeelah]

The mageism in modern society runs deep. Just look at K.

[K]

Does this mean wizards who use colorspray need to wear tye dye clothing and live in towers with hypnotic patterns painted on the walls, or that a summoner has to be surrounded by badger burrows

Sadly, no. But you can toss that complaint onto the pile of "D&D magic users can do too much of everything and are not limited to any sort of thematic consistency!"

@momothefiddler -- The other hint might be all of your neighbors that, when asked, respond with, "Momo the A/C Mage? Yeah, he lives right up the road there, in the blue house."

Yeh, DnD mages get all the powers, all the themes, all the tactical options, and all the useful character options. They also get to negate all of their weaknesses pretty easily. The mage is the ultimate author self-insertion character.

That's pretty much why DnD can't get better editions. It's one of the many built-in assumptions in the game that can't be overcome that are a poison pill in the intellectual property.

Really, the only progress is that "mage-ness" has spread beyond just Wizards and now exists in a few other variations like druids.

[Orion]

So why didn't they call them Elves? Why did they chose an old word for Elves that probably only 1/100 gaming enthusiasts would recognize instead of using the word that 100/100 would recognize?

Ooh, ooh! I've got this one. Three reason. First, writers don't like to be too "on the nose." They want to sound creative and not highlight the fact that they're copying, so even if they're functionally using elves, dwarves, and orcs, they renamed them. Second, you want to create brand identity. If I wander into a conversation about "elves", it could be fucking anything, but if I see people talking about "elvhen" I know it's Dragon Age. Third, genre constraints. Even if you put elves in your sicence-fiction game, you're not going to call them "elves" because the word "elf" is a genre cue that primes people to expect high fantasy. Talking about elves in the same sentence as "Volg Underhive" is just weird, so you transmute their name into one that "sounds sci fi."

[tussock]

You can have human contact in the fashion that it is generally understood in a wheelchair. You can also have such human contact while wearing pants. You can't have it in an Iron Man suit.

People lived in iron lungs for decades and kept up "human contact". It's not a big thing to be vulnerable at intimate moments, nor are prosthesis that get in the way of that particularly soulful, real people deal with that all the time too.

I appreciate your genuine feelings for the story at hand, but it must have been well written to tug your emotions because it's not inherently a thing. Some people's boyfriends live on the other side of the planet, which is tricky to shift out of the way for a quick kiss. They manage.

Likewise there are presumably stories to be told of how Mr Lich Who Lives In A Lovely Garden maintains his lovely garden,

Oh, and this side of the argument sucks. As a player, we enter the scene, the DM describes a lovely garden with nothing weird about it at all, what, so we give up surprise or have to meta-game the shit out of figuring out there's a monster in there?

Fuck you guys. Foreshadow your damn boss monsters. "You didn't expect that" is both the worst kind of passive-aggressive bullshit DMing, and also really fucking disempowering for the players.

Let people know what is coming by putting some ice monsters in an ice-scape around the ice-wizard. It's not just thematically pleasing, it helps players interact with the game in an immersive way. Lich-gardens should be eerie and dead, and full of nasty undead things and hangman trees and fucking THEMES, people.

edit:tags

[Grek]

You can foreshadow the Garden Lich in way more interesting ways than with cliche dead gardens for the dead person.

[Shady314]

@ Tussock People were talking about stories in general not adventure modules. Surprise twists can be very welcome in novels and such.

That said there are plenty of ways as Grek said to prevent it from being a surprise gotcha fuck you to players. This isn't albino red dragon set up we are talking about here.

If you look at DnD specifically you have divination, detect magic, undead gardeners, Knowledge skills for the lich's name and the area he lives hell even Knowledge Nature to know these plants are favored by undead. The garden can be inside his big ass bone palace. This isn't requiring much thought or effort.

[K]

"Holy shit, there are tulips and begonias everywhere! The lich must be close!"

[Shady314]

"Holy shit, there are tulips and begonias everywhere! The lich must be close!"

I was imaging bullshit fantasy plants. Venomblooms and Black Leebers? They grow where negative energy is strong. Or feed on blood whatever.

[OgreBattle]

"Holy shit, there are tulips and begonias everywhere! The lich must be close!"

If the Lich was a dutch gardener before turning undead, then that clues the players into his presence.

[violence in the media]

"Holy shit, there are tulips and begonias everywhere! The lich must be close!"

If the Lich was a dutch gardener before turning undead, then that clues the players into his presence.

If the Lich was a dutch gardener, I'd expect the crops to be cannabis.

[ishy]

"Holy shit, there are tulips and begonias everywhere! The lich must be close!"

I'd imagine it'd happen something like this.

There is a lich hiding somewhere in the city, doing evil stuff, we need to find and stop it.
Knowledge check: Liches passively drain life energy, harming / greatly irritating living things.
Gather information check: no noticeable effects around the city.
Let's check local flora.

[Occluded Sun]

"Noticed anything odd about the city's rats?"

"Actually, I don't recall seeing any."

"That's precisely what I mean. Something's very wrong here."

[Prak]

Wizard PC: "Huh. We're in a desert, but there's a bigass hanging garden over there. It would take a good deal of magic to maintain that thing in the desert..."
Dwarf PC: "The architecture is actually quite reminiscent of ancient Kadur tomb style..."
Cleric PC: "Undead constantly drain life energy, so the more intelligent ones tend to surround themselves with it. There are necromantic magics which will preserve life, which the magically inclined ones may use to help assure their power source"
Wizard PC: "And it would be simple enough to lay healing and plant growth magics into a building. That's where the lich is."

[Occluded Sun]

That's probably where the deathtraps are. The Lich is hanging out in a deceptively-fortified shanty 'round back.

[hyzmarca]

Thematically, if I was going with a Garden Lich I'd emulate the modern cemetary, rather than the standard unkempt fantasy cemetery. It's immaculate, pristine, and perfect. Indeed, it's too perfect. It's very respectful. Indeed, it's too respectful. It's a facade for the living, cover their eyes so that they can make themselves forget the rot under the ground.

It would be eerie in it's uniformity, and vast.

Something like this.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, instead of having undead draw power from the living, have them draw power from the dead. (i.e., corpses and other remains emit an energy that undead need in order to live.) Some undead can be exceptions, like Vampires who unlive on blood, but this is how most generic undead work.

Thus, Liches surround themselves with corpses, and the more polite one bury the corpses underground or put them in coffins or sarcophagi, because that doesn't interfere with doing so, and keeps things nice, neat, and relatively sanitary.

[Prak]

Hyzmarca was referring to the neatly manicured flora of modern cemetaries, I think.

[hyzmarca]

I was referring to both, actually.

But really, it misses the point.

The Horror of the undead isn't that they're monsters to be slain. The horror of the undead is that everyone dies.

Various undead creatures are all about fear of our own mortality, fear of dying, and existential angst. Some of them are more targeted than others.

The Mummy is the fear of empires and conquerors, great men and women who bring the world to its knees, for a time. Because the mummies were themselves kings and conquers and sometimes high priests, great men who were preserved so that they could one day rise up to lead their empires again, empires that are lost to the sands of time, which no one remembers, which exist only as vague fragments pieced togetehr by dedicated scholars. Nothing you build will last.

The Lich is the fear of the wizard, the magician, the scholar, the teacher, the professor, the scientist, all who love knowledge. It asks a simple question, how far will you go to preserve all you learned? And the Lich's answer is pretty damned far.
But the Lich is a perversion of the scholar. Where as the scholar teaches and shares his knowledge and seeks to better understand the world, the Lich obsessive-compulsively hoards all of his knowledge. He studies, not for the love of learning, or of science, but for his obsession with studying. It's an utterly-unproductive obsession, and he spends so much time gathering knowledge that he can never actually do anything with it, and wouldn't know what to do with it if he were even inclined to do something useful.



The cemetery isn't scary because there might be monsters hiding in it. The cemetery is scary because we all end up there. And while modern cemetery design goes out of its way to hide that fact, and the unpleasantness associated with it, it's still there. And it takes effort for a person to forget it. When you step on those grounds you know that you're going to day, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon, and forever.


I think you could get more milage out of the undead by getting rid of Ressurection spells, or making them horribly costly.

[Prak]

I guess that's part of the reason I really only get into the undead as a player option. I don't have any particular problem with death, it happens, and whether there's an afterlife or not, well, it's coming. I don't want to die (usually), and given the chance, I'd totally trade up to lich or robot body, but if it happens, it does. Oh well.

[hyzmarca]

I guess that's part of the reason I really only get into the undead as a player option. I don't have any particular problem with death, it happens, and whether there's an afterlife or not, well, it's coming. I don't want to die (usually), and given the chance, I'd totally trade up to lich or robot body, but if it happens, it does. Oh well.

Perhaps, but that's really what makes Necrotech Utopias unnerving and frightening.

It doesn't matter if the zombies that work on the Ford assembly line eat the living or drain life or whatever. What matters is that you will one day become a zombie on the Ford assembly line yourself. And absolutely nothing you can do will change that.

It's like, Soylent Green is people, except without even the lie that it's soy and lentils.

[Prak]

I'm sure that works for other people, but like I said before- I don't really much care what happens to my body when I'm done with it. The ravages of the grave or people doing weird shit with my corpse really don't bother me. I'm aware that I'm unusual in this.