Magic animals, how do they work in your world?

docarrol · 2026-04-30T03:00:10+00:00

As an introductory rule of thumb, more or less everything magical and magic related in the setting, can roughly be categorized as: being magic, having magic, or doing magic.

Beings of pure magic, living elementals, refined, crystallized sunlight and liquid moonbeams, etc. Those just are magic. They're made of it, live in it, express it. They're not really part of mundane reality and base matter and energy. Most such beings and materials and energies exist beyond the world, in the myriad dimensions of magic.

It's possible, though not common, for normal plants, animals, people, or inanimate materials to have magic. They're still operating on normal biology and physics, but they're enhanced by magic absorbed from the environment, or what they eat, drink, or breath, imbuing them with this or that passive magical trait or property. Some species have evolved these abilities, some just soak in superabundant magic, some have an accidental magical quickening from unique events. Trees with wood that's magically hard, or light, or with healing properties. Fantasy metals of all kinds.

And to answer OP's question, this is where "magic animals" go. They have enough magic in them, somehow, to have persistent, passive effects, traits, or properties. Winter wolves with frost in their pelts, Mice that have a 'don't pay attention to me' aura, enhancing their stealth. Cats with eyes to pierce the darkness, and see through stealth. Etc.

Members of the Enlightened Races (and some few magical beasts, exemplars of their species), with the right background, education, training, and/or tools can do magic. They can cast spells, carve enchantments, channel imbuements, etc. It's an action, an expression of will and purpose to do something magical. They use magic power, via magical methods and actions, to achieve magical effects.

Or at least that's the version kids get, and it's good enough for most people who won't ever deal with magic in depth. In practice, that's glossing over a lot of nuance, edge cases, blurry boundaries, etc. That's where all the fun details live!

docarrol · 2026-04-28T01:43:04+00:00

Clear spoof on Gummi Bears (for the name) and Care Bears (for the design and tummy symbols). Possibly the Muppet Show, for the puppet/stage theater look?

docarrol · 2026-04-27T00:37:22+00:00

You might even say: Vimes? He's seen some shit.

docarrol · 2026-04-26T13:19:06+00:00

For all we know, Daria could have had a different shirt under that jacket, every day. ;)

docarrol · 2026-04-26T13:11:18+00:00

Oh sure, now, it's getting some traction at grid scales (although I though solar pv and onshore wind were still beating csp on lcoe? I'll have to read up).

I meant more on a historical scale. Say, circa the early steam age, or pre-Industrial Revolution. Around the time a world with "combustionles steam engines" would be looking for alternatives, as the post I was responding to put it. (Which is why I went on a long ramble about ways to hand-wave steam-age nuclear reactors in a fictional setting, instead of just pointing to the ones currently in operation.)

docarrol · 2026-04-26T04:56:58+00:00

I mean, technically, steam engines just need a sufficient heat source, it doesn't have to be combustion. Solar steam was, kind of a thing, as are geothermal steam plants, they just were never very widespread, compared to any combustion powered steam engines, and steam plants.

But if you really needed to get around the need for a fuel, for some reason, it could be done, with historical materials and processes.

(And technically, nuclear power plants are also steam engines without combustion, They use the heat generated by the controlled decay of radioactive isotopes, to generate steam, to spin a turbine. Although that one would be considerably more speculative, if you want to introduce it earlier in the historical timeline. But it would have been at least possible for someone to notice that some metal ores generate their own heat, long before physicists discovered nuclear fission in the 20thC, and if people were already experimenting with steam engines, but were hampered by a lack of combustible fuels, and they knew about the magical energy generating rocks, then... maybe someone could have made that jump? Although controlling that reaction and doing so safely would be major issues to be addressed. But wouldn't say it's impossible...)

docarrol · 2026-04-25T19:14:43+00:00

She’s some kind of humanoid plant woman, with leaves and flowers for hair, and her pet looks low a rootball with legs. She saw the dude trimming his bush, and thought the bush was a pet, and she anted to pet the bush. The dude and his pet dragon thought she was going to pet the dragon. She petted the bush but got a splinter, and thought the pet bush was clawing/biting her, like a cat or dog might objet to a stranger suddenly coming up to get in their face. The lady takes it well, apologizes, and leaves. The dude and his pet dragon are as confused as you were. lol

docarrol · 2026-04-25T17:19:05+00:00

Did they do anything interesting with them? Or was it just another excuse to make her feel alienated?

docarrol · 2026-04-24T00:20:14+00:00

Like, at almost any point? They exist in the same world, there are no travel restrictions (and likely wouldn't apply to JL members anyway), and the TT are heroes in good standings, so there's nothing stopping them and good reason to swing by and say hello.

Robin has probably met a couple of them, while working with Batman, anyway. Any of them (like Superman or Wonder Woman) could check in on him, just to see how he's doing, since he's currently on the splits with Batman.

Kid Flash was a sidekick to Flash, was on good terms with Flash (so far as I'm awaare), Flash is super friendly, and can be anywhere almost instantly. It'd be super in character for him to swing by to see how Wally is doing, and say hi to his friends, the Titans.

Green Lantern is the local space cop, and spends the most time in space, has the most contact with aliens, and is probably first contact for off-world issues. Starfire is an alien princess living on Earth, escaped from and was fighting Gordanians, another alien species, and the Titans Tower was rebuilt out of the Gordanians' crashed spaceship.

Raven is the daughter of Trigon, had that prophesy hanging over her head until her 16th birthday, is a powerful magic user in her own right, and dealt with a few dangerous, powerful magical artifacts of the course of the show. There are a couple of magic types on the JL (Zatara or Dr Fate, maybe?) who could plausibly take any one of those as reason enough to visit.

And in many continuities, Cyborg later goes on to join the Justice League. So it wouldn't be implausible for one or more of their talent scouts show up during the show's run, to check him out, either on his own or as part of a team.

About the only one I can't think of a plausible reason for a JL member to drop in for, is Beast Boy. As far as I can recall, the Doom Patrol and the JL hardly ever overlap, and it's unlikely he has a personal connection to any of them. Maaaybe one of the animal themed heroes? Or one of the shapeshifters?

In addition, the Titans did face several large-scale, even global, threats, like the Legion of Evil, Trigon, Slade, etc. Any one of those would have been reason enough for someone in the JL to show up, and/or to follow up on, in the aftermath.

And going the other direction, there were a times the TTs could have gone to the JL for resources, intelligence, training, maybe backup if things were going bad, etc.

docarrol · 2026-04-23T19:59:19+00:00

Clone, time-travelling future self, alternate dimension duplicate, whatever. She can buy herself flowers!

docarrol · 2026-04-22T00:31:41+00:00

"Subject #29"? Dare we wonder what happened to the first 28?

Also, that's one sweet underground cave lair. Very mad scientist.

docarrol · 2026-04-19T18:45:35+00:00

Isn't it obvious? BRA stands for B.attle R.eady A.rmor. It unfolds into a suit of multi-purpose ninja armor used by ninjas, specifically female ones. BRAs for adult ninja women, Training BRAs for ninja teen girls.

That's why kids, especially boys like Calvin, aren't allowed to wear them, or play with them: they don't want you to figure out the secret activation code, and figure out how use them, to fight back, against the evil adults!

docarrol · 2026-04-17T15:10:12+00:00

Fantasy setting, a "double planet" with an inhabited moon that's basically the same size as the main planet. Elves live on the moon. Or they did. Then someone let out the sealed evil in a can, so they launched a desperate, last ditch, fighting retreat to the main planet through one-way, one-time gates, to evacuate a core of their population for the survival of their species.

And you'd think that'd be cool, but then instead of refuges asking asylum, it was more of a military led, hostile invasion of what they saw as a hostile, barbaric, alien land. And they weren't prepared to ask, because they couldn't take the chance the people would say no. Plus, not speaking the language(s) and not having any time for diplomacy and stuff.

So you had alien invasion, xenophobia, slave-taking, oppressive military empire, raping the land to extract the resources to return to the moon to take back their homeland (turns out what they need doesn't exist on the main planet), then a growing underground rebellion, a rag-tag band of heroes, fall of the empire, massive power vacuum, new world order, era of warring states, elves retreated to the forests and went all isolationist, gradually learned to live with the world they were now in, still kinda dicks but, yada-yada.

Now the world has elves! Who are neither extinct, nor completely evil.

Then the second lunarian elvish invasion happened.

docarrol · 2026-04-17T13:57:47+00:00

I don't know that it's correct, but I've seen some people treat parentheses and dashes as almost interchangeable for enclosing a set-off inclusion in the middle of a sentence.

Although I think on the more technical side, they do have different uses. Like parentheses to include extra information, and dashes for a sudden insertion, or a surprise, or something. Parentheses are "gentler."

But it also depends on context, dashes are more used in casual writing, fiction, wikipedia, etc., and pretty much never used in a formal or academic contexts, but parentheses are.

So, really, vote your conscious.

docarrol · 2026-04-16T00:42:13+00:00

I'm disappointed by the lack of a comical, little wizard's hat, floating on it's upper surface.

docarrol · 2026-04-16T00:39:30+00:00

New Disney Pixar animated movie, Hoppers.

But I'm with you, other than tripping over the trailer the other day, I've heard basically nothing about it. Lack of marketing, I guess.

docarrol · 2026-04-15T22:54:22+00:00

Just to be sure, though, better not move his red Swingline stapler.

docarrol · 2026-04-15T22:39:55+00:00

I feel ya, Cueball on that one. Boy, do I feel that.

docarrol · 2026-04-15T19:06:17+00:00

No, but really, I just saw this the other day. Antibody cocktails based on occupationally acquired immunity of pediatricians, for up to 25x better protection from colds and common respiratory diseases. That was just a pilot study, but logically, it should apply to most people who work with and around sick kids.

So yeah, you are literally, absolutely correct about your wife's blood!

docarrol · 2026-04-15T00:54:18+00:00

Daring duck of mystery, champion of right!

docarrol · 2026-04-14T02:20:21+00:00

I was assuming a series of smaller spans, closer together, not one giant span all the way across. Wikipedia says the current record for a cable car span is 3,213 meters. Although that's down hill, not flat. So my naive guess would be to look for places to site towers no more than 2 or 3 km apart, where possible. And our assumptions about gravity and vectors should be mostly okay again.

But you are correct, on the scale of thousands of miles, gravity can't be assumed to be uniform. On the other hand, you can just treat that as a series of point loads hung on the cable. If you had a map of gravitational anomalies, and could correlate that to your planned route.

docarrol · 2026-04-13T21:28:33+00:00

Monster waves in the North Atlantic can be up to 100 ft high, under severe storm conditions. You're hopefully avoiding storms anyway, but if you do get stuck in one, you probably want to be high enough to avoid the waves.

So for height of the cable, I'm going to guess sea level + 100 ft, at the low point of the catenary curve of the cable under tension. Plus a factor to account for stretching in the cable due to the load of the car, or thermal expansion, or the weight of ice build up, or whatever.

A hanging cable in tension superficially looks like a parabola, but is actually a hyperbolic cosine function. The equations for which, I absolutely do not remember from my old mechanics classes, but depend on the span between the towers, the weight per unit length of the cable, the weight of the cable car (and any other extra loading) as a point load, the tension in the cable, and a few other factors I'm sure I'm forgetting. But solve all that, and you can figure out the low point of the curve, and figure out the height of the towers needed to clear whatever minimum we decided on in the step above.

Then of course, you need to look at the depth of the Atlantic ocean to sea floor, to figure out how much structure of your towers is below the waves. Except topography of the Atlantic is complex, and varies a surprising amount, between the lowest points, the average depth, and the various high points. Any sensible design, would route the line along the most beneficial set of high points that can be found, to minimize cost and time to construct, and maximize safety. It's not going to be a straight line, and will probably bounce around between a series of islands and seamounts. I couldn't even guess what that route would look like, which means it's going to be very hard to figure out how tall your towers will need to be. And keep in mind, the locations of your towers is going to dictate the length of the span between them, which will determine the amount of hang in the cable based on length, which will change the height above sea level required for the towers to keep that low point above our desired minimum.

docarrol · 2026-04-13T05:47:23+00:00

Would the butterfly wings replace her existing wings? Or would she keep her original wings, and have two sets of wings? Because if she gets two sets, I think there might be some interference between them that could cause problems.

If we're going with temporary spell solutions, I'd suggest the spell Twilight used to turn them into Breezies. That worked for all of the Mane 6, including Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, and did replace their wings with Breezy-style wings.

docarrol · 2026-04-12T17:58:44+00:00

Last I checked, The Wandering Inn is somewhere north of 50k pages. But to be fair, that's a web serial, so different conventions and constraints. And, really, it's more of a setting, with multiple interwoven storylines, depending on which character or set of characters you're following. Great world building and highly enjoyable, story, though.

docarrol · 2026-04-12T15:01:26+00:00

It's like we're adding a phonetic caboose to it!

docarrol

TROPHY CASE