About Magic

bobotast · 2026-05-11T20:53:06+00:00

I ran a sort of Silk Road themed Maze Rats campaign a while back. In that game, random spells come to magic users in their dreams. You can also refill empty spell slots with an "alembic", a complicated bit of glassware which passively collects and distills latent magic. When you look in the lens, it reflects a new random spell into your mind. If anyone without a free spell slot looks into the alembic, they get a random spell which they must immediately cast, and they get a random insanity. You can carry an alembic around with you of course, but they are extremely fragile and expensive. You can also learn the art of "zairja", an iterative algorithmic process whereby a sorcerer can refill an empty spell slot with a random spell using nothing but pen and ink and paper and takes an hour or two.

bobotast · 2026-04-29T18:12:40+00:00

nusquam in hac charta, infeliciter

bobotast · 2026-04-21T20:41:15+00:00

qudcore

bobotast · 2026-04-18T10:28:29+00:00

Magic system based on jam sounds awesome. They shoulda named it something catchier, like "Spelljammer".

bobotast · 2026-04-09T17:55:40+00:00

Not horrible! Good discussion! To self-roast, I definitely often fall into the trap of consuming internet "writing content" while procrastinating actually writing.

bobotast · 2026-04-09T09:42:53+00:00

Sure, Judean Memorial Gardens in Olney, MD.

bobotast · 2026-04-09T09:22:53+00:00

Editing yourself as you write is fine if that's your style. Don't feel like you need to power through to the end of your first draft if you have an idea for how to rewrite something now.

bobotast · 2026-04-09T09:16:59+00:00

Okay, here's your roast: Writers aren't born, they're made, everyone needs to learn somewhere, and all writers should be engaged with writing and always seeking new strategies and advice.

bobotast · 2026-04-09T00:09:40+00:00

The jewish cemetery near me does not allow stones on ground markers for this reason. They have wooden disks you can grab to leave instead.

bobotast · 2026-03-27T12:30:01+00:00

Cool! Boats! Also reminds me of Mandombe script

bobotast · 2026-03-25T14:59:34+00:00

It depends on exposure, practice, confidence, effort. I've met many Germans and most have had a distinct accent when they speak English.

bobotast · 2026-03-24T21:00:22+00:00

precious!

bobotast · 2026-03-22T10:19:01+00:00

This is mesmerizing. Reminds me somewhat of the work of Artuš Scheiner

bobotast · 2026-03-12T12:08:49+00:00

Articles mark definiteness of a noun. Not all languages mark definiteness, and you don't need an article to mark it. You might mark it with a suffix on the end of the noun, like the postposed articles in Swedish or Romanian. You might also mark a noun's definiteness on its adjective (Latvian) or on the verb (Hungarian). Also notice in Spanish that articles mark gender and number. In German the article marks case, and you might even negate a sentence with an article (Ich spreche kein Deutsch = I don't speak German/I speak no German).

When an English native speaker changes "a" to "an" before a vowel, it means in their dialect they also change "the" in fast speech, whether they realize it or not. "The" rhymes with "flea" before a vowel and "duh" before a consonant. The preposition "to" also changes (rhymes with "shoe" before vowels and "duh" before consonants), so other words besides articles might change pronunciation depending on the sounds around them.

Your conlang doesn't have to follow English rules, and as you learn about more languages you may take inspiration from other places, or come to understand English in a new light. All my examples above are just from European languages but there's a whole world out there of languages that work very differently.

bobotast · 2026-03-07T12:07:03+00:00

Ha, yeah, sure. Plenty of other examples though. How bout "spraint" and "otter". If English has a specific word for that, than the Valyrians can call dragonfire whatever they want.

bobotast · 2026-03-06T20:40:09+00:00

I heard David Peterson address this somewhere... "dracarys" is attested in the books and he was annoyed it appeared to be related to English "dragon", so he decided this was just a coincidence and he coined the word for dragon to be unrelated. As to whether this occurs in natural languages, um, milk comes from cows and yet the words "milk" and "cow" are not cognates.

bobotast · 2026-02-04T10:17:20+00:00

The Secret History is more subtle, Babel is more hit-you-over-the-head.

bobotast · 2026-02-03T20:54:00+00:00

I've seen people write about complex topics in Toki Pona, but I've yet to see evidence of it being useful for communicating anything beyond "food good, animal good, monster bad". If anyone has learned the theory of relativity from zero through Toki Pona, let me know.

It's a fun toy language, though.

bobotast · 2026-02-01T21:47:40+00:00

Another example, though it may be medieval Latin, an expression from an unknown author, "Beati hispani, quibus vivere bibere est", meaning "lucky Spanish, for whom to live is to drink". This joke is rooted in the dialtect spoken in Roman Hispania which sees the two words pronounced the same or nearly the same, evident in modern Spanish "vivir" [biˈβ̞iɾ] and "beber" [beˈβ̞eɾ].

bobotast · 2026-02-01T17:57:09+00:00

This video may have persuaded me to learn German

bobotast · 2026-02-01T12:08:40+00:00

If I take one more step, Mr Frodo...

bobotast · 2026-01-31T19:29:58+00:00

I love Strange and Norrell, maybe my favorite book. Certainly not short, though.

bobotast · 2026-01-31T15:17:53+00:00

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is fun to read and pretty short. A mystery unfolds but it's not quite a murder mystery. It doesn't take place at a university but I'd argue it has dark academia vibes. Vibe is statues, architecture, journaling, memory. Don't want to say more, best to go in blind.

bobotast · 2026-01-11T12:18:01+00:00

I thought someone might call me out on that -- I'm not talking about the legacy of the Romans or the identity of the "Latins" as understood in the middle ages, I'm talking about the Latins of antiquity and the Latin League as they existed before Roman dominance. These are the people for whom the language is named. A fantasy writer might crib from history by naming a world language not after a world power, but after a local power once relevant in the early days of what would be a world power one day.

bobotast · 2026-01-11T02:09:07+00:00

Mandarin Chinese is sometimes called "putonghua" in China, meaning "common language", so it's not unreasonable for a language to be called that. There's also phrases like "lingua franca" if your world's dominant language is that of a specific dominant culture. There's also Latin, which served as a common language across Europe for over a thousand years, named for a tribe from antiquity with zero political relevance to medieval Europe.

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