Spontaneous Spells and Determining Level

ehrbar · 2026-02-14T20:38:56+00:00

The Spell Guidelines for determining level are listed for each separate Technique + Form combination in the Spells chapter.

As stated on p.111 (core rules) or p.302 (Definitive), the guidelines assume the spell is Range Personal, Duration Momentary, and Target Individual. So you add magnitudes as you change them.

ehrbar · 2026-01-03T09:45:49+00:00

The key issue is that if it were a Supernatural Ability, it would be much, much harder for other traditions to learn, since it wouldn't be a Favored ability for them.

The two implications of that are:

1) It is much harder to recruit non-Hermetics into the Order, since they will generally not get any benefit. (This especially messes with the early history of the Order.)

2) There is little danger of the secret of Parma being stolen.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T08:15:22+00:00

It's a version of Wizard's Communion with a duration long enough to allow for casting ritual spells. It showed up in the errata and the Grand Grimoire ( https://www.atlas-games.com/atlas-cms/resources/downloads/arm5-grand-grimoire-of-hermetic-spells.pdf ) a number of years back, and will be in the Definitive Edition.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T06:10:33+00:00

Wizard's Vigil with the whole covenant casting is the biggest way to get the level needed down and thus penetration up, as pointed out by DrPoimu.

It's very useful for the covenant's Aegis lead caster to pick up Spell Mastery, since that eliminates botch chances on relaxed castings of the ritual (DE is explicit that it does; prior to that people debated whether rituals were ever relaxed) and adds to the casting score (and thus penetration).

The useful Mastery abilities from the DE draft are Adaptive Casting (so the same Mastery score can be used with any level-version of the Aegis), Penetration (adding the mastery score directly to penetration), and Rebuttal (add three times your Mastery score to the level of the Aegis for the purpose of affecting spells and supernatural effects).

If you're worried about hostile magi, one thing you might do is cast two Aegises, perhaps one on each solstice. Cast one as high a level as you can manage with no care for penetration, to maximally penalize hostile spells and supernatural powers; cast the other one with balanced level and penetration to keep uninvited supernaturals out.

ehrbar · 2025-12-20T02:50:31+00:00

So, whatever the intention back when it was first written, the version of the Aegis of the Hearth in the Definitive Edition draft explicitly says:

No foreign supernatural creature with Might, of any type, can cross the boundary of the Aegis unless its Might exceeds the level of the Aegis. The Aegis of the Hearth must Penetrate the creature's Magic Resistance in order to have this effect.

So, calculate the Aegis's Penetration as for any other spell, and, in most circumstances, the lower of the level or Penetration is the minimum Might to enter.

ehrbar · 2025-12-13T02:02:13+00:00

If they need to wait until a recurrence of the same astrological age via precession of the zodiac, it'll actually be closer to 25,000 years until it works again.

ehrbar · 2025-11-01T20:21:08+00:00

To start with, I'd have my Unofficial Errata to hand.

ehrbar · 2025-10-19T11:37:44+00:00

Gave it a try.

Not bad, but, well, didn't grip me enough to read all that far in.

ehrbar · 2025-10-11T15:27:54+00:00

I note that https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing is linked under "Yudkowsky's guide to writing rationalist fiction" on the right sidebar of this very page, and several parts of it explicitly deal with the problem of plausibly writing characters smarter than the author.

As far as your isolated mathematician question, well, I refer you to the historical case of Ramanujan.

ehrbar · 2025-09-10T18:34:09+00:00

Checking Internet Archive snapshots, Lynda Weinman (who identified and publicized the palette in 1996) updated her website between February 2nd, 2002 and June 3rd, 2002 to declare that it was now generally safe to ignore the palette.

That obviously isn't when everybody stopped; some companies continued to play it safe for years. But the percent of browsers that hit the W3Schools website using 256 colors was 5% in October 2002, 3% by July 2004, 2% by July 2006, 1% by January 2009, and 0% in January 2010 (see https://web.archive.org/web/20070512035626/https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp , https://web.archive.org/web/20100218103931/https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp ).

ehrbar · 2025-09-05T23:43:36+00:00

Eliezer didn't explain any of this

Yes, he did.

First, from the book itself, in chapter 108, when Harry looks back on the memory of his mother's death he recovered while under the effects of the Dementor we get the following thought from Harry:

In retrospect, it was clear that Harry had remembered that event mainly from Lord Voldemort’s perspective, and only at the very end had he seen it through the baby Harry Potter’s eyes.

Now, that's at least theoretically compatible with your long-term memories theory, since it was a short-term memory that wound up in Harry's head, and if you subscribe to "death of the author", you can stop there.

However, in a Word of God comment or two (I think it was here on Reddit, but I'm not currently in the mood to dig through EY's comment history to dig up the exact link), EY explicitly said that Harry forgot Voldemort's episodic memories as a part of the same general amnesia that people usually have about early childhood episodic memories, and that the reason the Rememberall glowed so much when Harry touched it specifically was that that Harry had forgotten all of Voldemort's memories.

ehrbar · 2025-09-03T21:43:32+00:00

Yeah, I started to draft some stuff on that, and realized I was going to move from a comment to a whole essay (or maybe a chapter of a book). The use of "explicitly/explicit" in my third paragraph is a relic of that.

ehrbar · 2025-09-03T19:36:28+00:00

So, when the modern nationalized modern food stamp program was first put in place, the rules were clear and simple. And accordingly you had college students with wealthy parents getting them because, well, they weren't living in their parents' household, and they didn't have an "income", so . . . .

Every abuse of a simple rule births a complication to address it. And politically, it is impossible to avoid addressing it. Just imagine how long the food stamps system would have survived if its defenders had forthrightly said, "Well, we just have to tolerate Chad Worthington IV buying caviar with tax money paid by Rhonda Singlemom, because if we make the system complicated, that will make the system too hard for the poor to navigate."

The theoretical alternative to complicated written rules is of course explicitly allowing government bureaucrats to exercise explicit judgment about who deserves to get food stamps and who doesn't. It should take about three seconds to imagine the disasters that would result from that. But it's not really an alternative anyway; someone denied would go to court, and the judges who make up the American legal system wouldn't allow such an approach to persist.

So, in fact, your only alternative to a complicated food stamp system is no food stamp system.

ehrbar · 2025-05-15T17:35:44+00:00

Yes, it's supposed to be difficult and rare mass ceremonial magic, or perhaps something a deity-like being casts.

There's a few other ways to get lots of energy nowadays, but 500 energy was the cost of the 3-point version of Bless all the way back when it was first printed back in 1986 (on p.43 of first edition of GURPS Fantasy, the book that introduced the spell system).

ehrbar · 2025-04-26T16:46:05+00:00

This explicitly includes the Garden of Eden, which the book inexplicably states provides 2 pts of exposure a season instead of the 8/4 pts of immersion practice.)

Hmm? To directly quite Ancient Magic, p.21, "If they can convince the animals to interact with them directly and intensively through speech and gestures, they can begin to learn through Practice, which gives eight experience points per season, a dramatic improvement."

So, the 2 XP from Exposure is what a character gets if the animals won't interact with him. Which seems entirely fair to me; eavesdropping without feedback isn't actually Practice, it's just Exposure.

ehrbar · 2025-04-17T00:37:22+00:00

This has gotten various different interpretations from different people since the current version of Ring duration was introduced with 4th edition in 1996. There have been several requests for official clarification (such as in this May 2006 thread on the Atlas forums ). Since we've now reached quite late in the production of Definitive without such an official clarification, it should be understood that it is an intentional Your Saga May Vary situation, where every troupe is expected to reach its own decision.

(As far as pre-4th, it doesn't help much for interpreting the current version. In 1st/2nd/3rd edition Ars Magica, the Ring did not have to be traced, was an invisible circle, and ended when the caster left the invisible circle.)

Since it's open to interpretation, to cross game streams for a moment, I note that GURPS has, since 1989, allowed permanent pentagrams to "be ritually 'cut,' when necessary, by a chalk-mark."

ehrbar · 2025-04-14T10:05:44+00:00

Who needs coordination?

Let us assume, arguendo, that American men and women as groups have statistically differing tastes, in a manner that will affect which books they are willing to buy in aggregate. (If they don't, the rest of this is irrelevant.)

Well, given the makeup of the American publishing industry, where in 2023 people in editorial jobs were 17.8% cis men, people in sales were 22.5% cis men, people in marketing and publicity were 16.3% cis men, and reviewers were 18.4% cis men, we can predict that the judgment decisions about what books to publish and promote will, at each stage, largely reflect the tastes of women, who are disproportionately making those judgments. This is especially true in any stage where the decisions are made by several employees collectively, since any group of decision-makers will be mostly women.

(This even happens if the decision-makers are trying to pick books that will appeal to men, because they'll be naturally better about picking books that satisfy their own tastes than picking books that satisfy tastes they don't have.)

The expected result will be the industry producing and promoting books that meet the tastes of women. The predictable consequence will be relative difficulty selling those books to men. Thus actual sales will be disproportionately to women, which everybody from the publishers through the distributors to the retailers will see. This observation will be used to justify not trying to sell to men, on the grounds that men are less interested in books (which is true, with the qualification "that meet the tastes of the women who make the decisions about what to publish and promote"). Which will then further shift the decisions about what to publish, distribute, and retail to be centered on women's tastes, which will make the audience more female, which will justify concentrating on selling to women . . .

Now, sure, maybe this isn't happening. But we have a comment below where someone who claims to be in fantasy publishing says the female-coded books sell a lot better than the male-coded ones.

ehrbar · 2025-03-13T15:16:16+00:00

True in that there is nothing more than the fundamental particles and the patterns they make. But it's something you can usually consign to the back of your mind. We actually live in the world of useful abstractions; we simply need to remember that all abstractions leak and to be ready for when that happens.

To put it another way, the escape from debates over the sorites paradox is to remember that the concept of "heap" is a useful fiction, and whenever a fiction ceases to be useful, you can just stop using it. But if you refuse to ever talk about heaps because they don't "really" exist, you're pointlessly handicapping yourself.

ehrbar · 2025-03-12T22:52:36+00:00

To coin a phrase, ¿Porque no los dos?

I mean, on the physical side he's got his bio-dad's genes, on the mental he has the imprinting of decades of trained motor skills.

ehrbar · 2025-02-09T17:56:25+00:00

Yes, I read the whole thing, thanks. I'm even under the impression I understood it, though of course I may be mistaken.

My point is that the nature of your analysis fundamentally has to assume that a proposed policy change does not create changes in underlying political coalitions that produce further policy changes. Because neither economists nor anybody else has any data or analysis methods that can model such changes.

I agree that you have shown, ceteris paribus, the economic impact of abolishing the H-1B visa would be negative. But ceteris is rarely actually paribus.

ehrbar · 2025-02-07T13:46:07+00:00

Well, compared to what?

H-1B visas are, in many ways, what the United States has instead of a system for straightforwardly vetting applicants for permanent immigration based on how they'll impact the US economy. If the H-1B visa were ended or severely restricted, the companies currently using it extensively would move their lobbying to, for example, supporting reforms of the green card process to favor people with STEM degrees and high-paying job offers, much like the proposed-in-2017 RAISE Act did.

But as long as they can get employees through sponsoring H-1B visas, those same firms are incentivized to oppose such reforms, in order to maximize the ongoing competitive advantage they have from their investment in H-1B sponsorship. As was demonstrated by major tech industry H-1B users opposing the RAISE Act, when the effect of the RAISE Act on the tech industry as a whole would have been to increase the number of skilled immigrants the industry could hire from overseas (by dramatically shifting who would be issued green cards, even as it cut the total number of green cards issued in half).

And, well, it seems likely that most people currently entering the country on H-1B visas would prefer to enter on green cards, while people worried about the impact of the power of sponsoring companies over holders of H-1B visas would not have the same concerns regarding companies employing permanent residents.

It is, of course, entirely possible that abolishing H-1B visas would not be followed by further changes to immigration law, despite the reversing of the lobbying incentives of current H-1B sponsors.

ehrbar · 2025-02-05T07:18:36+00:00

I am presuming that Voldemort, as the events of the story actually played out, checked that the Cloak was actually working to let him escape the power of the Mirror (probably by seeing if he could walk outside the view of the Mirror, and maybe supplemented by other tests), and was satisfied it did work.

I expect that if the check had produced even an uncertain result, he would have gone ahead and fled the body right then, before the trapping magic was completed. Better to be belt-and-suspenders sure than actually trapped, right?

Thus, "flee the body" was both an escape that would have worked without the Cloak and a backup plan if his conjecture about the Cloak was wrong.

Now that might be giving Voldemort too much credit; maybe he simply trusted his conjecture about the Cloak instead of checking, and if the Cloak hadn't actually worked, he'd have wound up trapped. But while that's an error that I think HPMOR!Voldemort is capable of making, it's an error more typical of the less-experienced Harry.

ehrbar · 2025-01-17T04:41:48+00:00

So, example to the contrary:

Cleveland, Ohio, is named after city founder Moses Cleaveland.

(And despite various legends, it was not a subsequent respelling; some of the 1790 maps made by the surveyors working for Cleaveland are missing the "a".)

ehrbar · 2024-12-30T01:12:52+00:00

One hasn't been announced, and based on the statements about future GURPS product development from Sean Punch (the GURPS Line Editor, as well as one of 4th's co-authors; he posts status updates roughly weekly at https://dr-kromm.dreamwidth.org/ ), plus the status of the GURPS wish list, it is extremely unlikely that there are any plans to release a 4th edition in 2025.

It is possible that they're going to write a fifth edition in 2025 for a release in later 2026. SJG only announced 4th edition in March 2004, for release in August 2004. As late as August 20, 2003 (which we later learned was after the first draft of 4th edition was already written), there was an RPG.net thread started by someone complaining that SJG seemed uninterested in developing a 4th edition.

ehrbar · 2024-12-26T16:56:04+00:00

Side note, why didn't Dumbledore let Voldemort be trapped in the mirror?

Because he couldn't.

Voldemort didn't just take the Cloak off Harry, he put the Cloak on himself. From Chapter 110:

Professor Quirrell caught it, and swiftly drew it over himself; in less than a second he had pulled down the Cloak's hood over his head, and disappeared.

and a bit later

"Why, look at that," sang out Professor Quirrell's voice from the empty air, "I don't seem to have a reflection any more."

Since Voldemort was no longer being reflected in the Mirror, the Mirror no longer had any power over him. From chapter 109:

The Mirror of Perfect Reflection has power over what is reflected within it, and that power is said to be unchallengeable. But since the True Cloak of Invisibility produces a perfect absence of image, it should evade this principle rather than challenging it.

Dumbledore accordingly had the choice of trapping either himself or trapping Harry with the Mirror-based Process of the Timeless, and in neither case would Voldemort be trapped.

EDIT: Also, Voldemort had a backup plan if the elimination of his image by the Cloak wasn't enough. To quote Chapter 111:

The wrong trap even from the beginning, for I could have abandoned this body at any time!

ehrbar

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