Mundane fantastic slice of life

[naomimyselfandi]

Oh, something I should ask - is everyone capable of working magic in the world, or is it a talent only some have? Typically along family lines (but talent doesn't always appear), but sometimes especially in the 60's, some children were born out of wedlock with the magic genes?

@Expendable

I think this came up on the first page:

I also think it's a skill like baking or working on cars. Obviously some people do it professionally, but a lot of people have some knowledge and skill in the subject that they've picked up here and there. Conversely, some people can't work a spell to save their life, and that's okay!

@Gisk

[Gisk]

@Expendable magic is an accepted part of the the natural world in this setting. Your questions keep centering around magic and science as opposing forces, but in this setting they are not. Magicians didn't come out, because they were never hidden.

I recognize the instinct to try to fit everything together, because you're right that the world would be drastically different if magic were real. But the premise of this roleplay is that magic is just another part of modern life. I know there are aspects that are unrealistic, and if I were trying to make a movie or publish a book I might try harder to address them.

As Naomi points out, yes, anyone can use magic.

[naomimyselfandi]

On a different note, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think my character concept keeps getting buried. Gisk, how does this sound?

Third time's the charm!

As for me, I'm kind of leaning towards someone studying computer science. In the 90s, I think that'd put them in the math department... which is actually really interesting in a magical setting, I think. I'm debating a grad student, and if I go that route, they're going to TA a class called Elements of Algorithmic Spellcraft or something along those lines. If being a student there piques anyone's interest, lmk!

[Expendable]

@Expendable magic is an accepted part of the the natural world in this setting. Your questions keep centering around magic and science as opposing forces, but in this setting they are not. Magicians didn't come out, because they were never hidden.

I recognize the instinct to try to fit everything together, because you're right that the world would be drastically different if magic were real. But the premise of this roleplay is that magic is just another part of modern life. I know there are aspects that are unrealistic, and if I were trying to make a movie or publish a book I might try harder to address them.

As Naomi points out, yes, anyone can use magic.

@Gisk

I'm just trying to twist my mind around to how this came about so I can better image a character to fit within its framework. I'll probably file the bits I brought up for a future rp.

[Gisk]

@naomimyselfandi Ah! Yes, sorry! It really did keep getting buried, my bad. It sounds great, algorithmic spellcraft is definitely a thing, too. If you need a spell to affect things differently depending on certain criteria, or to only affect certain targets etc.

I think I've brought up that there's some very real overlap between programming and spellwriting. But if I'm to understand correctly, this person isn't studying magic personally, are they?

[Gisk]

<Snipped quote by Gisk>

I'm just trying to twist my mind around to how this came about so I can better image a character to fit within its framework. I'll probably file the bits I brought up for a future rp.

@Expendable

Yeah, I hear you, believe me! In this world, magic is one of the sciences. It isn't treated differently from engineering, electricity, radiation etc, and it developed alongside them.

[naomimyselfandi]

Ah! Yes, sorry! It really did keep getting buried, my bad. It sounds great, algorithmic spellcraft is definitely a thing, too. If you need a spell to affect things differently depending on certain criteria, or to only affect certain targets etc.

I think I've brought up that there's some very real overlap between programming and spellwriting. But if I'm to understand correctly, this person isn't studying magic personally, are they?

@Gisk

Ah, that's a great question! She definitely knows the theory, being a grad student and all, and she can definitely perform workings with help from a computer - gotta test those theories, right? I think she probably knows some simple utility spells (moving small objects, illumination, that kind of thing) since she already knows the theory and they're convenient, but we'll see; I might adjust that based on the group dynamic.

[Gisk]

I've added some of my work in progress to the opening post. Nothing is set in stone there yet, but I'm working on it.

[Expendable]

Some suggestions:

Main (former residence)
Student Union with vending machines and old telephone kiosks along a wall. Stories about a phone ringing in the night, and if you answer, all you hear is moaning and panting. Someday we'll get that spirit out of the switchboard. Summer used book sale and S&M (science & magic) fairs for the kids.
Student book store (with official Sanctuary Hill swag! Go Grims!)
Student Health Center
College police
Scattered telephone booths.
Mary Parker Memorial Library (Remember to call for an extension, late books will be summoned). Still using Pneumatic tubes to convey book requests to the underground stacks. Lunchroom with vending machines for sticky ice cream sandwiches, small heated tins of potted food, half-frozen sodas, sandwiches of unknown mystery meat, and Charlie, the library ghost. Died in WW2 during the London Blitz, not all together sure how he got here. Likes to pull pranks, and is typically called in for introductory medium classes.
Classroom building(s)
Science building
Nuclear Reactor building
High Energy Magic Research Building (people have been known to leave *before* they went in)
Computer building
Registrar building
Sanctuary Hill Federal Credit Union
Art tower - sways in the wind, weird capsule like elevator cars.
Steam tunnels - mostly occupied by abandoned feral familiars, who wander the campus for hand outs and good garbage.
Gym
Pools
Basketball courts
Tennis Courts
Football stadium
The "Clump" - some pine trees on the far side of the football stadium, known hangout spot
The Visitor Center - across from the Football Stadium.
"Old" dorms with central cafeteria building. Currently empty as construction crews rip out the old wiring and plumbing. Hopefully that will rid the place of the last few ghosts, they're mostly jerks.
New Dorms with cafeteria on ground floor. Known for the raised carpet flooring.

[Gisk]

@Expendable there's a lot of great stuff in there, and our sportsball mascot is definitely the Grim, although I think the school's main sport is baseball.

[Fading Memory]

The energy of the room is mildly infectious, my muse is stirring on some such nonsense of character conceptualization. I’ll flip some coins and drop some ideas in the next day or so, once I have a chance to sit down outside work and catch up on other guild obligations first.

[Expendable]

@Expendable there's a lot of great stuff in there, and our sportsball mascot is definitely the Grim, although I think the school's main sport is baseball.

@Gisk

So a baseball field or two is a must.

I've already spawned a second character idea, a gargoyle named Stanley. Bums cigarettes, sits in on classes in the back.

Some more town ideas, mostly in the streets in front of the school's gates.

A fancy restaurant with bar as close as possible to the main gate.
A local drug store. (should be two or three of them)
A diner (may be two at opposite ends).
A movie theater/playhouse - midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show on Fridays and Saturdays. Bring Your Own Toast.
A Hot dog/ Sausage on a Bun Hut
A jewelry store
A small store selling stuffies and beanie babies.
A bicycle shop
A discount store selling cheap clothes, school supplies, home goods, has a small luncheon counter in the bottom level and paid toilets (don't forget to bring your dime)
A couple of churches
Ethnic restaurants (Chinese, Indian, Mexican)
Pizza parlors
Ice cream place
Comic/game store (already mentioned I'm sure)
Used book store
Magazine/newspaper shop (sells coffee, soda, candy bars, packaged honey rolls, snack cakes and hand pies)
Local candy store
Movie Palace - video rental with large private booths upstairs with large, boxy rear-projection tvs and a vcr, you can rent one of the booths for groups up to eight people, movie concessions stand. Notorious make-out place.
Tobacconist shop
Crazy Dave's Tattoo parlor - famous for the demon tattoo, but you must bring your own demon.
Bars
Army/Navy Surplus (sells messenger bags and backpacks)
Thrift shops/goodwill.
A small mall, possibly outside of town, with various common stores and restaurants. (Malls are parasites that feed off of cities and towns)
Trinket stores (candles, occult goods)
Stationery stores (one sells fancy journals, pens, framed sayings, etc. while one's further out with office supplies, typewriters, cubical settings)
Fancy kitchen store.
Lumber yards and hardware stores (do you know how hard it is to scrape together a coffin at 3 AM?)

[Gisk]

@Expendable cool! Deciding what a gargoyle is in this world just became your responsibility!

[Gisk]

I truthfully did not write as much as I meant to, but there's been some updates to the opening post, now including a character sheet.

[Expendable]

@Gisk For your consideration:

Sam

Name: Samantha "Sam" Igorina Semenova
Age: 23
Appearance: This placid girl has round gray eyes. Her luxurious, straight, long hair is the color of black coffee, and is worn in a pageboy style. She is short and has a thin build. Her skin is very pale. She has a low forehead and a small mouth. Her wardrobe is practical, with a lot of black. She carries a wooden cane because of her bad right knee.

Personality: It's hard for her to work up any enthusiasm, rather obsessive with keeping things clean and organized, something of a pessimist, prone to sarcasm. Very grim.

Background

Father is Professor Igor Semenov, works as a magic antropologist, very well loved at Sanctuary Hill but few of his work ever gets published, so he's relatively unknown outside of the college. Mother Sarah Semenova is very active with Witch Scouts, even today. Her younger sister Rachel, blonde like Mom is very popular, somewhat shallow and fashion-obsessed, and is very much the baby of the family.

Sam was six when she ran across an old guy sleeping on a bench at a bus stop and yelled at him to move. He didn't take kindly to that and claimed he cast a curse on her. Since then, she finds it very hard to get excited about anything. She did, however, get excited about Mr. Cooper, her potions teacher when she was 16, and would stay after school to help clean up and organize his lab classroom. Rachel found out and tattled to their parents, who yelled at her about all the trouble she'd caused for the family while her "good" sister never caused them problems. Sam realized that they'd never taken her side in anything, and she resolved then and there that she'd go elsewhere for college.

Realizing her parents were unlikely to help her, she got an after-school and Saturday job at the bank as a junior teller.

She got into New Salem Tech, doing well in her classes until she accepted a dare to spend the night in the haunted Salem church. They found her the next morning, curled up in a ball with her hands pressed over her ears, talking about "the voices...!" New Salem Tech contacted her parents, and she wound up at New Salem psychiatric hospital. It was a cold, depressing place, she was constantly cold as they wouldn't give her socks. During one of her water therapy classes, she slipped and banged her knee. Despite pain, the injury was ignored for almost a week before a doctor finally saw her limping around the room.

It was there she met Cass, a gray-haired old woman who told her about all sorts of supernatural encounters she has had. Watching this wizened old grandmother throw one of the Samoan nurses across the room, Sam became a believer.

When she was discharged (used up all the money in her bank account), Sam returned to her parents home, but she quickly tired of their self-imposed martyrdom. She got a job at J. W. Stewards', a second-hand student furniture store with a room to let upstairs (she suspect her father had a hand in that). While it's not much, it does allow her to make good use of her ability to manipulate sizes. However, since she hadn't completed college, she's only a minor witch.

But despite any curse, she wants to know just what happened to her in that church.

Magic Specialty: She can enlarge or shrink objects.

Theme

Room 101

Why

Tubular Bells, Pt. 1

Gargoyle is coming.

[Fading Memory]

My muse struck pretty hard as I tossed and turned last night; a wannabe amateur author is in the works.

[Gisk]

@Expendable Looks good!

I need to know the name of that furniture store, unless you don't mind me making it up wholesale.

I want to make two quick notes on her magic. Firstly, just remember that magic still follows conservation of matter. If She makes an item bigger or smaller, the mass needs to come from somewhere(or go somewhere). But I think you can just kind of minecraft it. If you're making a chair bigger, literally any wood could be added. Alternatively, if you make a chair smaller, you'll have some random pieces of wood left over(probably in weirdly regular shapes, spheres maybe).

Secondly, if she attended school, she's probably had some further education on the basic principles of how to actually write a spell.

In fact, let me expound a little on how different people use magic.

Technically, magician is a title that's tied to a degree. Colloquially speaking, however, the accepted difference between a magician and a witch is that a witch just learns spells. A magician writes them. They understand the principles of the magic, and know enough about the fundamentals of the physical world to know how the magic will interact with it. They know the "language" of magic, so to speak, and how to tell it what to do.

If you're a gamer, it's like knowing how to install mods, vs knowing how to make them.

Though, that might not give witches enough credit. They still need to know enough to make minor changes for things like scale of effect, and specifying the object of the spell. Even if someone only knows a spell for light, they usually know how to change the casting to make it brighter or dimmer.

A little update for all: I'm still hard at work! Unfortunately, as I said I didn't get as much writing time over the weekend as I expected, and I've been busy today. I actually went whole hog and bought a fancy keyboard, set up my computer and everything, to try to inspire myself to write more(for this, and other things). It seems to be working so far! I'm definitely working more efficiently.

I've also started working on a playlist for the roleplay, if you have any suggestions, my only criteria is that songs be from 1994 or earlier(though when in 94 they released isn't important). Right now there's mostly grunge and pop.

EDIT: The first post has been updated again. It will take me a long time to fill in all the details that I want to add, we honestly might start the game before it's done. There's so many ideas in my head(including a bunch that y'all have put there), but I've gotten a lot of the important background stuff out, so people should have an easy enough time making characters that are integrated with the world.

[Expendable]

Added a few songs to her sheet, songs that appeal to her. And all before 1994.

In some ways, magic is like electricity. We're not completely sure how it works, but while others try to work it out, we use it, just the same.

Sam, from her classes, knows there's space between the atoms, and what she thinks she's doing is removing that space. It's actually losing mass while retaining its form, slipping the left-over mass into a pocket dimension. When she wants to return it full size, she can pull that mass out of the pocket. Something larger than full size needs to pull more mass out of that pocket dimension.

Her sacrifice is her blood, used to draw her personal rune on the object so that she can recall it later.

music lists

1989

Cold Hearted - Paula Abdul
Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
The Look - Roxette
She Drives me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals
Like a Prayer - Madonna
Eternal Flame - The Bangles
Love Shack - The B-52's
Sowing the Seeds of Love - Tears for Fears
Cherish - Madonna
Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns N' Roses
Love in an Elevator - Areosmith
What I Am - Edie Brickell and The New Bohemians
Poison - Alice Cooper
Smooth Criminal - Michael Jackson

1990

Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinéad O'Connor
Vogue - Madonna
Another Day In Paradise - Phil Collins
Pump Up The Jam - Technotronic
Opposites Attract - Paula Abdul
All Around the World - Lisa Stansfield
Dangerous - Roxette
We Didn't Start the Fire - Billy Joel
Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson
U Can'T Touch This - M.C. Hammer
Janie's Got a Gun - Aerosmith
Free Fallin' - Tom Petty

1991

I Wanna Sex You Up - Color Me Badd
Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) - C+C Music Factory
Unbelievable - EMF
From a Distance - Bette Midler
Right Here Right Now - Jesus Jones
Good Vibrations - Marky Mark and The Funky Bunch Featuring Loleatta Holloway
Justify My Love - Madonna
Emotions - Mariah Carey
Joyride - Roxette
Touch Me (All Night Long) - Cathy Dennis
Losing My Religion - R.E.M.
It Ain't Over Til It's Over - Lenny Kravitz
Wind of Change - Scorpions
The Promise of a New Day - Paula Abdul
Power of Love / Love Power - Luther Vandross
Things That Make You Go Hmmmm.... - C+C Music Factory
Something to Talk About - Bonnie Raitt
Sadeness, Pt. 1 - Enigma
Show Me the Way - Styx
Signs - Tesla
Crazy - Seal
I'm Not In Love - Will To Power
Everybody Plays the Fool - Aaron Neville
Rico Suave - Gerardo
Groove Is In the Heart - Deee-Lite
Freedom! '90 - George Michael
Shiny Happy People - R.E.M.

1992

Baby Got Back - Sir Mix A-Lot
Tears In Heaven - Eric Clapton
My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It) - En Vogue
I'm Too Sexy - Right Said Fred
Black or White - Michael Jackson
Achy Breaky Heart - Billy Ray Cyrus
I'll Be There - Mariah Carey
Life Is a Highway - Tom Cochrane
Remember the Time - Michael Jackson
This Used to Be My Playground - Madonna
Can't Let Go - Mariah Carey
Jump Around - House Of Pain
Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough - Patty Smyth
Diamonds and Pearls - Prince and The N.P.G.
Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me - George Michael and Elton John
Masterpiece - Atlantic Starr
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Move This - Technotronic
Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
The One - Elton John
Make It Happen - Mariah Carey
Set Adrift On Memory Bliss - P.M. Dawn
2 Legit 2 Quit - Hammer
Please Don't Go - K.W.S.
All I Want - Toad The Wet Sprocket
When a Man Loves a Woman - Michael Bolton
I Can't Dance - Genesis
Hazard - Richard Marx
Mysterious Ways - U2
How Do You Talk to an Angel - The Heights
Beauty and the Beast - Céline Dion and Peabo Bryson
No Son of Mine - Genesis
Rhythm Is a Dancer - Snap
Addams Groove - Hammer
Would I Lie to You? - Charles and Eddie
Free Your Mind - En Vogue
I Will Remember You - Amy Grant

1993

I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
Whoomp! (There It Is) - Tag Team
(I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You - UB40
That's the Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson
Dreamlover - Mariah Carey
In the Still of the Nite (I'll Remember) - Boyz II Men
If - Janet Jackson
Love Is - Vanessa Willlams and Brian Mcknight
Runaway Train - Soul Asylum
Rhythm Is a Dancer - Snap
The River of Dreams - Billy Joel
I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers
Right Here - SWV
Ordinary World - Duran Duran
I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) - Meat Loaf
I'm Every Woman - Whitney Houston
Come Undone - Duran Duran
I Don't Wanna Fight - Tina Turner
Whoot, There It Is - 95 South
Will You Be There - Michael Jackson
All That She Wants - Ace Of Base
Real Love - Mary J. Blige
Cryin' - Aerosmith
Bad Boys - Inner Circle
Again - Janet Jackson
Forever In Love - Kenny G
How Do You Talk to an Angel - The Heights
What Is Love - Haddaway
Fields of Gold - Sting
Faithful - Go West
Reason to Believe - Rod Stewart
Three Little Pigs - Green Jelly
Livin' On the Edge - Aerosmith
If I Ever Lose My Faith in You - Sting

[Gisk]

That's exactly what I'm talking about! I'm imagining she copied the pocket dimension part from somewhere without fully understanding it. This is why magic used to be viewed as unpredictable, because people would(and still do) cast spells without knowing what they were really doing. And then it's usually fine, until it isn't.

At some point, this will cause a problem. I don't know what, why, or how exactly, but it will.

[Fading Memory]

Meanwhile I’m over here wrestling with whether or not magical literature would be called Science Fiction or Fantasy.

Something about ‘aspiring science fiction novelist’ but the story being about magical theory in the medieval era just makes me giggle.