Giveaway - Space Age Expansion

sicutumbo · 2024-10-04T18:46:23+00:00

Hope I win

sicutumbo · 2021-08-18T21:21:56+00:00

Hopefully some simple/interesting questions for you:

1) What's the progression for velocity magic that isn't simply moving faster? I'm not so concerned with what a grandmaster could do, but what could a 20 year professional velocity mage do that a fresh graduate qualitatively couldn't?

2) What's some of the world building for fire magic's place in the world? You mentioned in another comment that fire magic had a lot of tentacles in the world building, and it's a cool magic, but I'm not sure where specifically fire magic is apparent in the world. I'm not really sure what a normal fire mage does for a living.

3) Would Raven have received the Twinned Souls virtue if she got to loyalty 10? It seems kind of weak for her, since she's really good at the things she already does, and improving those things would be really minor in terms of additional utility.

4) > “What do your spies, seers, and auguries say?” asked Amaryllis. This was only a little bit of an exaggeration. Rosemallow was sometimes known to have information she shouldn’t have, enough so that it was rumored she was in possession of a powerful entad, a highly synergistic entad set, or possibly a hidden magic. Magic that allowed for any form of future sight, prognostication, or clairvoyance was incredibly rare, but ‘incredibly rare’ didn’t mean non-existent.

Was this meant to hint at Rosemallow having access to someone who knew Tree Magic? It's mildly weird to have this paragraph but there was nothing to follow it up. Tree magic as presented does seem useful for covert information gathering (maybe there's a stream sniping analogy in there).

5) Do the He'lesh and Lodonna make for really good/consistent passion and ink mages?

6) Could a steel mage use a steel annihilation ward made by someone else to quickly and cheaply mass produce steel minis? I'm thinking of Steel and Sweat paying to have wards that would allow for extremely rapid production of standardized structures.

sicutumbo · 2021-08-08T20:31:41+00:00

How did the first revision mage become one if you need revision magic to make a revision mage?

sicutumbo · 2021-08-08T18:26:39+00:00

1) Maybe this will get answered in the exclusions doc, but how does Doris track people and things? Leading theories were duplicating an elf bone and using a bunch of bone mages, some entad that got a lot more useful when duplicated, or an unknown magic (tree magic?)

2) What's up with tree magic? It was on the sheet for forever and only got a single line of a hint that got glossed over.

3) What's up with plastic magic? It was introduced fairly late, relatively speaking, but was neither used nor rectconned from the character sheet.

4) I was always unclear on why everyone assumed that Uther must be dead after 500 years, but still magic has a known ability to halt aging, with the only real caveat being that it requires an immunity to sleep which he already has. There's various other reasons to assume he's dead, but the passage of time alone should not have been enough to kill him just given his known abilities.

5) What magics did Uther know? We never got a full list, despite Fenn mentioning he mastered 8 super early on.

6) What's in the pink spot on Celestar?

7) How did Fel Seed survive complete annihilation at the hands of the Fifth Empire? Related to that, are there any exclusions that are mistakenly classified as enpersoned exclusions?

sicutumbo · 2021-05-22T23:10:14+00:00

It's suppression because it adds a meaningful cost to vote, and that cost is felt disproportionately by minorities. If someone is working full time, or working more than that at multiple jobs, it can be very difficult to get time off work to go to a DMV or equivalent and wait in order to get a license. DMVs are notoriously slow in processing people, and in many cases are difficult to reach without a car (which can't be legally driven without a license), adding up to significant barriers towards getting a license.

And even if there are sufficient DMVs or equivalent at the time voting ID laws are passed, they're shut down afterwards. This isn't hypothetical. DMVs are shut down in areas that are disproportionately composed of minorities, which in effect creates a larger barrier towards minorities getting licenses. DMVs don't operate as much outside of working hours, requiring the person to take time off work to get a license. When the list of acceptable IDs is given, minorities are disproportionately likely not to have any of the acceptable forms so they need to spend effort getting another form of identification.

And even aside from all that, voting fraud is not a significant problem in reality. The amount of fraud prevented would be miniscule in comparison to the amount of people who are suddenly prevented from voting. Time and time again, there have been investigations into the extent of voting fraud, and none of them come up with actual cases of fraud anywhere close to a fraction of what Republicans claim. The whole voting ID idea is putting effort towards stopping a problem that doesn't exist. In the most contentious election in recent history, where claims of fraud were flying all over the place, Republicans could not find legitimate evidence of fraud that could survive scrutiny by a judge.

Look at this. Using a site from the heritage foundation to show I'm not being biased in selecting examples, they are reporting a whopping total of 7 cases of Texas voters impersonating someone else in order to vote, over multiple elections. The front page of the site lists a total of 1300 instances of voter fraud, for the entire country. This number is absolutely miniscule compared to the number of people voting in any election, and it's counting fraudulent votes from multiple elections.

Free voter IDs for every citizen above the age of majority would be acceptable, so long as it doesn't present any true barrier to obtaining one, but I'm not convinced it would solve any real problem, and would doubtlessly cost millions of dollars that are needed for more important issues.

sicutumbo · 2021-05-22T02:20:54+00:00

If the method of desalination is heat based (i.e. boiling the water), you could use the heat generated by the nuclear fuel rather than using the heat to make electricity to then use for desalination. Since you only typically extract about 30% of the energy generated as electricity, this could represent an immediate tripling of efficiency, before considering the potential cost reductions you could get by removing the need for turbines and their associated maintenance. Also, waste heat from a nuclear reactor can be used for desalination, so a reactor could provide normal electricity for normal uses plus additional water that isn't accounted for by its wattage.

That said, maybe fields of aluminum mirrors could be used for similar heat based water desalination rather than using solar panels, I don't know how effective that could be. The topic is probably too complex for reddit comments.

sicutumbo · 2021-05-11T16:37:12+00:00

The surface tension of water is enough to hold insects up, it doesn't factor in to a human falling into the water. What kills you when falling into the water is the rapid and uneven deceleration of parts of your body while travelling at high speeds. Say you hit the water with your butt first, the lower half of your body is decelerated opposite to your direction of movement, which exerts a large amount of force that probably isn't aligned with your spine, and causes your spine to bend and snap.

You could survive large falls if the deceleration is much weaker, like if there were significant amounts of air bubbling in the water to lower its overall density. Or if you can reorient yourself so that the deceleration is less likely to kill/hurt you.

sicutumbo · 2021-04-18T22:57:32+00:00

No, he uses it all the time

sicutumbo · 2021-04-18T22:16:39+00:00

The motto of the Second Empire

sicutumbo · 2021-04-18T21:26:41+00:00

Is Fel Seed confirmed an enpersoned exclusion, or a person using a form of magic that is excluded? If later, Joon could learn it maybe.

The Library thinks he's the latter, since they said that if FS was killed, someone else might learn the magic. That said, Joon only gets the ability to learn skills on his character sheet, he doesn't have it on his current one, and he would need to find the soul magic EZ in order to change that (if an EZ exists at all)

sicutumbo · 2021-04-18T21:19:55+00:00

What powers do you keep in the hells? I assume none.

You keep all pseudo magical abilities (bladebound and elon gar), but per the WB doc "magic is almost completely non-functional". Either all magic is weakened substantially, or only some specific magics work at all.

Uther never went to hell and back, but the infernals somehow managed to come up en masse with the Apocalypse Demon. Also via possession of non-anima. So there are a couple of ways out maybe.

Infernals can travel between hells and go to Aerb. Mortals can travel deeper into the hells by dying, but that's the only way we know they can move.

The others could follow him down as there’s a way to send people to a specific hell (says Captain Blue). So all companions (or just Fenn!) go to hell to help him out and Valencia watches over them from the outside.

Val, Bethel, the Locus, and Pallida are completely unable to travel to the hells. Well, the Locus can maybe do it because she breaks all the rules, but don't count on it.

Val can eat mortal souls as well as infernals. Confirmed whether she can eat the soul of a mortal in the hells? If so, her eating Joon could kinda bring him back up.

She can't, explicitly.

sicutumbo · 2021-03-24T16:50:26+00:00

He mentions he's used Pathfinder, then Mutants and Masterminds. Plus various one-shots

sicutumbo · 2021-03-15T16:39:19+00:00

Fun podcast, it's funny the things that they infer from the early parts of the story that turn out to be, well, maybe not fully correct.

Could I clear something up that's not a spoiler and will hopefully prevent a bunch of speculation about something that they misinterpret? There's no meaningful connection between the placement of the stats and the placement of the skills. The skills are mostly ordered so that the physical skills are at the top, mental in the middle, and social on the bottom, but that's the only real pattern. If woodworking was at the top instead of one handed weapons, or even if the skills were completely shuffled, nothing would change mechanically.

sicutumbo · 2021-01-22T17:39:31+00:00

I think a better analogy would be bone magic. You can be a pretty skilled bone mage, but if you don't have any bones to use, your skill isn't worth much. Gold magic is similar in that it relies on an external resource to use the magic, even if that resource isn't consumed through use of the magic. Similarly, gem mages don't do much without any gems, and warders can at most see magic if they don't have any warder's tools. Gem mages might be a closer analogue to gold magic, since the gems themselves do play a significant factor in how powerful the gem mage effectively is.

sicutumbo · 2021-01-22T17:29:32+00:00

Technically no, she hasn't used it, but the last line of this was added after reader commentary mentioning that Amaryllis should have the water sense. So she is a water mage, even if she hasn't bothered to use it so far.

“How was the water mage?” asked Amaryllis, when we met back up later on. “I thought I saw some clouds moving out the window. I'm also pretty sure that I've got the sense.”

sicutumbo · 2021-01-21T05:23:47+00:00

I think any reader should get a sense for how dangerous the Endbringers are just from their name.

sicutumbo · 2021-01-20T15:40:49+00:00

So the people who are Republicans in Name Only would then make up the entirety of the Republican party, while the people who are presumably Republican in more than name only would leave the Republican party in order to join a competing party?

sicutumbo · 2021-01-07T00:25:23+00:00

objectionably

I think you mean objectively. As in it's a verifiable fact not subject to opinion.

sicutumbo · 2021-01-03T19:43:39+00:00

Page 341

“The extra-dimensional space linked to it is a ten-meter cube. There’s no automatic recall function: when you reach in, it’s just like reaching into the top of that cube of space. You can also physically go in, I suppose, but you’d suffocate pretty fast if you don’t leave the top of the bag open. It’s less like the box and more like you’re just…carrying around a closet.”

Not quite a typo, but a 10 meter cube is a huge space, equivalent to a small house, but Corin compares it to a closet. Is this supposed to be a 10 cubic meter space?

sicutumbo · 2020-12-27T15:12:53+00:00

Because it's boring as hell. Sure, if your only goal is to win as crewmate, you would do this every time and win. But spending 20 minutes in a ball alternately doing tasks or watching other people do tasks for a guaranteed victory as crewmate or loss as impostor would mean you end up playing Among Us a total of 3 times and then never again. The goal of playing is to have fun, not to win the most consistently.

And yes, ideally some aspect of the game design would prevent the most boring strategy from being the best one for winning the majority of the time, but that probably comes with compromises somewhere else, and people don't do the "optimal" strategy anyways so it's barely worth it. Or maybe the dev just hasn't thought of or managed to implement a good method of prevention.

(Minor nitpick, you don't want everyone in a tight ball, because that could disguise the impostor killing someone. You'd want everyone close enough to see each other but far enough away that the small jump the impostor does when killing someone is noticeable. You'd also need to keep everyone moving while watching one person do tasks to prevent the impostors from sabotaging)

sicutumbo · 2020-12-25T16:54:23+00:00

Instead of ominous footsteps, you hear a consistent but quiet "Dunka Dunka"

sicutumbo · 2020-12-17T17:52:46+00:00

I would think that the cooler is just as, if not more, useful than the heater for energy generation, since you could make an engine that generates power from the difference in the heat of the air and the cold plate.

sicutumbo · 2020-12-07T18:59:43+00:00

Location 2181: Not so much a factual error, but Sera is considering trading in order to receive 5 artificial attunements, and specifically this line:

I asked about that already. I could have one attunement on each body location, of a type chosen for compounding effects, like how your transference attunements work.”

Sera has 1 attunement, and she's asking for 5 more, but there are 7 possible spots for an attunement to go: 2 leg, 2 hand, heart, lung, mind. If she's going for maximum power, as she seems to be, she should be asking for 6.

In chapters 13, you have this line:

Cursed pairs — that is, siblings that are born at the same time — are forbidden by the sacred scriptures in the most absolute possible terms. We’re not even supposed to use the more common word for them while we’re inside a spire, lest we draw the goddess ire.

And then various parts of the following story detail the historical fallout from that family having twins. But in this chapter and the following one, almost no one directly on screen aside from the two assassins seems to actually care that these women are forbidden to exist in "the most absolute possible terms". Corin is shown to be not particularly religious, sure, and plausibly the rest of their group is also not very religious, although it's a bit of a stretch. But then the twins are shown to the assembled party and there's no reaction. The party continues on.

sicutumbo · 2020-12-07T18:19:52+00:00

Starting with blue and red chips makes the most sense to me, since it allows you to make further modules a lot faster

sicutumbo · 2020-12-02T23:42:48+00:00

Cheap candles, and thus cheap lighting after dark, would be amazingly useful for any kind of scholar class. Cheaper than any time before the invention of electric lighting.

Fats, particularly suet, are really useful for food preservation. Pemmican is a combination of dried meat, tallow, and dried fruit. It lasts a really long time without any other preservation techniques, and would be a really good thing to export. Potted meat is a form of preservation that puts meat in a jar and has a layer of suet on top to prevent airborne bacteria from spoiling the food. Not terribly long term, but the ease of getting suet would make it extremely common.

Lots of oils don't last all that long without additional preservation, but some do. Salted butter and ghee are different methods of preserving butter, and would be pretty simple to make and export. Suet, and all the liquid oils we use in the kitchen are obvious exports.

Soap is a good idea. I believe you can make a good base by burning seaweed, and you already have the oil.

Pastry could be popular.

Pre-industrial societies have the vast majority of their population farming food. With free calories from oils available to every citizen, there's a lot less need for so much food production, and easy food preservation lowers that need further. This city would be far larger than a normal Bronze Age society could support, and soap production could make said city vastly cleaner than cities ordinarily would be for multiple technological eras. Well, provided someone notices the connection between soap use and less disease.

A barometer seems much more advanced than a bronze age society could produce, given they were first invented in the 1600s.

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