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Coplantor
2008-10-13, 10:53 AM
So, once I had a crazy dream about a city built in the desert, part of that dream was that magic was real, but it was forbidden. Why? I dont know, the dream was'nt that especific.
Yesterday I thought that I could turn that dream into a mini-setting where all the events happen inside the city. So, I realized that there should be a reason why magic is illegal. In the dark sun setting, magic drew its energy from living things and the constant use of it had turned the world into a giant desert, now, I'm not going to use the same consequence, that was just an example. I thought that maybe magic drives people insane, in game mechanics it would mean that everytime you cast a spell you'll have to check for sanity. Of course, wild magic is also an option, magic is so caothic that every use of it puts the existance of the city in danger, say, I want to cast a regular cantrip and I end up summoning a beast from hell, or something explodes.
Now, magic is illegal for everyone, I want to make that clear because I once thought that maybe magic was exclusive to the upper layers of society, wich would be an intresting turn of events, but not for this setting in particular.

So, I'd like to ask you guys for ideas, remember that the irresponsible use of magic (or all use of magic) must be catastrophical to the city and probably to the world.

Thane of Fife
2008-10-13, 11:01 AM
The Second Edition Spells and Magic had quite a few of these - they were, in my opinion, the best part of the book.

There was Channeling, which fatigued the caster, and is probably not what you want.

Preservers/Defilers were mentioned, as you also mentioned.

Alienists had to make a check every time they learned a spell, or they went insane. Insanities ranged from Phobias to Homicidal Mania, and just how bad they were depended on the level of the spell. If you failed badly enough, then, instead of merely driving you insane, one of the otherworldly horrors actually followed you to this world to start wreaking carnage.

Warlocks/Witches had to make checks when they cast spells - if they failed, they gained new powers and slowly turned horribly evil, eventually becoming NPC's.

An idea I had once tossed around was the thought that magic drained order. Therefore, casting a powerful spell could cause governments to collapse, could scramble the words in a book (or in every book for miles), or could simply temporarily destroy the laws of cause and effect.

graymachine
2008-10-13, 11:09 AM
Playing around with magic, while rather fun, can unbalance the game terribly. That said, however, I would recommend lifting the casting rules from Iron Heroes and mod it to work for standard D&D. Basically for it spells are cast via a skill check; when a 1 is rolled, something goes horribly, horribly wrong with the spell. Furthermore, the structure of magic in the setting makes magic moderately difficult in the first place, so what we end up with is a power that is unreliable and potentially highly dangerous, but still tempting.

Coplantor
2008-10-13, 11:10 AM
OK, i'll check that book, I know where to get it. The alienist insanity results were on a table of random results or the DM had to come up with those?

Pronounceable
2008-10-13, 11:12 AM
Every time you cast a spell, a catgirl dies?
Yeah, it's been done. Forget it...


As for actual ideas, magic requires some dramatic and harmful effects to justify complete banning:
Magic kills random people.
Magic drives random people to homicidal insanity.
Magic ages the caster or (you guessed it) other people.
Casting creates earthquakes/meteor strikes/rains of fire.

Fishy
2008-10-13, 11:28 AM
Chaos theory is the propaganda coup of the century.

It is completely possible to take a few measurements and, extrapolating by using the laws of physics, predict the future with an impressive degree of accuracy.

A select group of people have made this discovery, and have used it to gain incredible economic, political, and military power. The never lose money in the stock market. They never support the wrong public figure. They never get caught in an ambush. For obvious reasons, they choose to remain secret.

Magic, by definition, does not obey the laws of physics. Every time you cast a spell, you change the world in a way that cannot be neatly predicted or controlled. And one of the Illuminati's predictions becomes entirely invalid.

They don't like that. They don't like mages. And they don't like ghosts, or demons or psychics.

They're not illegal, exactly, but whenever one of them shows up, the shadow government calls in the Butterfly Collectors.


EDIT: Wait, that's the just Technocracy from Mage: The Suffix. Nevermind.

snoopy13a
2008-10-13, 11:33 AM
You could always make magic illegal due to politics. Suppose the country is ruled by a cabal of wizards. In order to safeguard their power they ban the use of magic outside their order. Yyou could have both divine and arcane banned or just arcane. Enforcing their laws would be teams of special agents (including approved wizards and sorcerors) combing the area.

Coplantor
2008-10-13, 11:38 AM
Yeah, I know, but I didnt wanted to have it that way because I really want magic to have side effects.

Something new occurs to me, physical mutations, magic turns you into a monster, and a powerfull one... Mmmm, I was'nt thinking about it when I camed up with that idea but... anyone here has seen/read Claymore?

Dogmantra
2008-10-13, 12:35 PM
You could have it so that every time you use magic to produce an effect, the exact opposite of the effect happens elsewhere, to a completely random target. For example, someone casts cure serious wounds and heals one of their party, someone, somewhere, takes damage equal to the healing. Not too bad you may say, but what about when you get to resurrection? One random person is struck dead, or for save or die spells, one random dead person comes back to life. I think that's enough to justify banning it.

Coplantor
2008-10-13, 12:36 PM
OK, I like that, and it can be mixed with other options to generate even more intresting results.

Quellian-dyrae
2008-10-13, 12:37 PM
What if magic worked on a weird sort of equivalent exchange system, where each spell had some equivalent backlash effect on the caster? Cast a fireball? You take equal fire damage (I'd recommend allowing no save or other standard defenses against multi-target spells, while allowing normal defenses against single target spells). Cast invisibility? You're invisible, but also blind for the duration. Haste leaves the targets slowed for equal time after the duration expires. Fire shield causes you to take equal backlash damage when you attack an enemy, and causes all foes to get protection from your fire attacks. Charm someone, and you become charmed by them for equal duration after duration expires. The trick here would be to make the negative effects of the spell roughly equivalent to the positive effects, but in a different area, so that the negative effects provide equal hindrance without actually cancelling out the spell's benefits.

Now, just using the above provides a sort of baseline, magic is not as reliable, and is more dangerous to the caster (thus being outlawed for the safety of potential casters), while still making magic at least vaguely viable, since a smart or well-prepared mage can probably skirt around a lot of the hindrances. Likewise, the backlashes would be much less subject to combo use than normal spells; a mage casts Quickened True Strike (+20 to next attack roll, but enemy receives +20 to next attack on the mage if used in the next round) and fires a Disintegrate at an enemy. Sure, the mage has to hope it misses its own touch AC or makes its Fort save against its own disintegration, but the mage gets the +20 on the disintegrate attack, while the returned effect uses the mage's normal piddly attack bonus. And, if the target gets disintegrated, it won't be getting a next turn to attack with +20.

To really just cripple magic utterly, you can make the negative effects more severe than the positive effects of the spells (a not-so-equivalent exchange) or have something in play where, any time a caster avoids or isn't hindered by the negative effects of the spell, it gets say a karma point which the DM can spend to make things go wrong (kinda like the reverse of fate points and stuff that you see in other games). You could limit this to spells, causing them to fail (maybe with the negative effect still applying), increasing the negative effect, or causing a different negative effect that the mage wasn't anticipating, or you could make this general. In any case, it's even more reason to outlaw magic, since even (or, more to the point, especially) the best mages seem to be walking black holes of bad luck.

If you want to make magic more statistically viable, while giving it an even better reason to be outlawed, you can have the backlash apply to someone other than the caster (or create a feat that allows such). In this case, I'd suggest either the effect applies to some random person not involved in the encounter (to affect the mage's allies would still prove very hindering and make for bad party relations, while to affect the mage's enemies would be too powerful) or, if you don't want to entirely remove the risk, have a roll. For example, on 1d100:
1-10: Backlash affects the mage and the mage's entire party.
11-25: Backlash affects the mage.
26-40: Backlash affects one of the mage's allies.
41-60: Backlash affects someone important to the mage (friend, relative, etc).
51-60: Backlash affects some important or plot-critical NPC (quest-giver, innkeep at your favorite tavern, the king, etc).
61-90: Backlash affects some random person not involved with the party.
91-100: Backlash affects a random enemy.

However you go about it, if you plan to run this in a game, might I suggest using gestalt rules and requiring each character take both a casting and non-casting class? That way, they have their non-casting abilities and can handle things, but their growing access to magic will present a constant temptation.

EDIT: Or you can just do it so that every time you post cast a spell some other poster ninja mage manages to cast the same spell before you much more swiftly and efficiently.

Thane of Fife
2008-10-13, 12:45 PM
OK, i'll check that book, I know where to get it. The alienist insanity results were on a table of random results or the DM had to come up with those?

There's a table full of lovely insanities with which to plague characters, along with descriptions and some mechanics. The DM need come up only with the specifics (what the phobia is of, for example, and I believe that there were suggestions there as well).

Coplantor
2008-10-13, 12:54 PM
OK, Im loving this, now, picture Quellians scenario with the insanity or mutation options.

Tha wizard casts a fireball, great, he hits, but the backlash kills the guy they were protecting and suddenly the raw energy of pure magic turns the enemy into a half dragon, that would be an extreme scenario against the players. Or... The fireball hits, the mage suffers some damage, he loses his mind for a while and one random player grow wings.

The things that can be done by mixing all this options are beautifull.

EDIT: Note to self, check said table about dementia

Note II, remember to check wild magic table from second ed also.

Kami2awa
2008-10-13, 12:56 PM
Every mage must have a familiar. Familiars are creatures along the lines of imps and quasits, and getting too far from (or losing entirely) your familiar results in the loss of all magical power (or even the death of the caster). The familiar is not on your side (though initially it appears to be) but working to its own ends.

TheThan
2008-10-13, 01:04 PM
I like the idea that magic is highly dangerous to the user (and anyone else around him). Without strong willpower and restraint, your spells could quickly go wrong. This could make magic very mysterious to the layman. Despite the danger, magic would still be powerful and magic users would be feared because of the power they wield.

Imagine the players sitting in a seedy tavern at night, with some deformed npc sitting there whispering dark stories of the power and horror that he’s witnessed at the hands of the magi.

Coplantor
2008-10-13, 01:11 PM
I like the idea that magic is highly dangerous to the user (and anyone else around him). Without strong willpower and restraint, your spells could quickly go wrong. This could make magic very mysterious to the layman. Despite the danger, magic would still be powerful and magic users would be feared because of the power they wield.

Imagine the players sitting in a seedy tavern at night, with some deformed npc sitting there whispering dark stories of the power and horror that he’s witnessed at the hands of the magi.

This is more or less what I want, now, in the main city, wich is huge magic is illegal, wich doesnt mean that there arent mages hiding doing their art in the shadows. But outside the city, that's another thing.

Now, once I had an idea for another minisetting, in wich magic was also a dangerous, unkown thing to the common man because wizards were mostly evil or irresponsible with the way they used their power, so most of the were outcasts, wandering in the wild. City dwellers and most common men grow afraid of them and thus avoided long travels as much as they can, so they wont have to meet a wizard ever in their lives.

The above idea can be also mixed with the previous ones. I like where this is going.

Kami2awa
2008-10-13, 04:31 PM
The BBC series Merlin could give you some inspiration; in this world, magic is outlawed because the king (currently Uther Pendragon) has just finished fighting a huge war against magically-powerful enemies and as a result fears magic as a threat to his power. There doesn't seem to be an automatic down-side to magic in itself, but being caught using magic results in immediate execution.

pendell
2008-10-13, 04:50 PM
How about this , stolen from lovecraft and Terry Pratchett:

Imagine a universe in which there exist -- in a plane just an eyeblink away -- a number of immortal creatures. As a rule, they have no more interest in humans than you have in ants.

But Magic is something they are interested in. Magic crosses the worlds, having the power to take the world from what it is to what people want it to be.

With these creatures, performing magic is a little bit like striking a match in a dark room. You attract ... interest.

How much interest depends on what a person does and how much they do . The more magic a person does and the better they are at it, the more interest they attract.

As the interest grows, the subject will begin to have ... things happen to them. It starts with dreams. Creepy visions.

But what it comes down to is that those beings are attempting to use the magic-user as a gateway from that world to this one. To seduce or dominate or persuade him/her to such a point that they open the gateway between the worlds, and the Ancient Ones awaken at last from their long sleep.

And so every act of magic becomes a roll of the dice. Every act of magic has a hidden cost, like drug smuggling. You may get away with it once. You may get away with it twice. But if you continue a long magical career -- especially great magic, powerful magic -- then sooner or later you find yourself confronting these creatures -- who are utterly immoral and beyond your comprehension -- face-to-tentacle.

And the very best you and the world can hope for is that you die quickly. The more likely case is that you live the rest of your life locked in a room raving insane. The very worst case is that you DO open the door, and through it monsters and spawn and horrors come.

Let us suppose that, in this world, this has already happened more than once. And as a result there are areas of the world where there were once great cities where there is now nothing but a salt sea so toxic *nothing* can live in it, now or ever. Or an island now sunk beneath the waves as very nature herself, wracked by torment, fought with volcanic eruption and earthquake and the green, green wave to purge herself of the utter, horrible *wrongness* that had been inflicted on her.

Let us suppose that the sapients of this world are fully aware of this. And therefore they view all wizards as potential gateways to the Horrible Realm, and as a result any man or woman caught performing magic will be killed on sight, as one might shoot a man with his thumb on the trigger of an atom bomb.

This forces the would-be sorcerer to consider carefully his/her every magical act -- whether it's really important enough to, say, throw a fireball at the cost of the horrible battle that will follow that night, for weeks on end.

It also forces the sorcerer/magic-user/magician to opt for subtle, low-end magic over the flashy, high-end stuff; less likely to draw attention. Both from Those Who Wait and from his fellow mortals, who with good reason fear what he is doing.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

bosssmiley
2008-10-14, 04:08 AM
The BBC series Merlin could give you some inspiration; in this world, magic is outlawed because the king (currently Uther Pendragon) has just finished fighting a huge war against magically-powerful enemies and as a result fears magic as a threat to his power. There doesn't seem to be an automatic down-side to magic in itself, but being caught using magic results in immediate execution.

In D&D terms: "Pointy hat make fire. Pointy hat is not your friend!" :smallbiggrin:

Wizards; the gunslingers-with-WMDs of the D&D world. I've often wondered why restrictive, heavily regulated guild structures (like Dragonlance' Order of High Sorcery or Birthright's Temple of Rilni) weren't standard fare in D&D settings. Given its destabilising capacity unregulated magic should be treated much as we IRL treat unregulated strategic materials...

Cost of magic mechanics: Dark Sun had defiling (re-jigged for 3E in Dragon #315), Grognardia suggests that guys who bend reality to their will should suffer it bending them back a little (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/08/grognards-grimoire-price-of-magic.html), WFRP has the Winds of Magic and the Wrath of the Chaos Gods for the over-confident (or unlucky), Mage had Paradox when you pulled openly impossible stunts...

edit: I read a thinkpiece the other day on Dark Sun being the only D&D setting which is actually consistent with the world the rules describe. Due to the collosal power disparities of the level-based system D&D society is nothing but yokels grovelling to the local hard cases. The yokels spend their time trying to make themselves more useful alive than dead to a bunch of paranoid, power-mad epic Tippy wizards who want to kill off anyone who rises to rival their power. Everything beyond the walls of wizardburg? Barbarian hordes, hostile monsters and bizarre environmental effect. All-in-all, great adventure fodder; but hell to live in.

Satyr
2008-10-14, 04:18 AM
First of all, magic is very powerful and offers great might for those who are singleminded and mentally resilient enough to master it. For those, who are not concentrated enough to master their spells, the magic is a dangerous trap.
Magic is also a limited ressource - it requires certain power sources to work properly, and these are hard to get, and more important, they are limited - the more magic is used, the less magic can be used in the future, up to the point of a complete drain when magic will be gone forever.

The power aspect is not hard to achieve - standard D&D magic is extremel powerful and can easily fullfil the role of an enticing trap for those who lust for power.
The risk part should come from the spellcasting - every spell should require a concentation check, with a steadily increasing DC (I would suggest something like 10xSpell level).
If the check fails, the spell fails as well, but that is not the greatest risk - on a really botched roll (a natural one that is 'confirmed' by a second concentration check), please roll on a nifty table of mean results of your spellcasting - from more or less harmless target mistakes (you cast your save or suck spell on yourself, you buffed your enemy, you hit your ally in the back with that damage spell... up to severe brain damage that turns the magus into human vegetable. The more powerful the spell is, the more aggravating are its results.

Further more, magic energies need a long time to regenerate, without certain help. The magus can sit and wait to regenerate his spell essence, but that can take days or even weeks, or they can try to use drugs that improve their regeneration of spell energy, but they are risky and can lead to severe addiction, or, the most powerful form is to tap a magical ley line or nexuses - the places where two or more of the ley lines cross. The regeneration of magical energies is easier, when you can draw it from the environment, but slowly deplete the natural ressources.

The great power of magic is also the reason why the officials wants to limit it - a powerful mage can easily dominate a region and overtheow its more legitimate rulers.
The limited ressources of magic leads to the situation that the more powerful mages control as many nexuses as they can manage and sometimes actively hunt down their concurrence or try to conquer new nexuses to make sure that their supply of magic grows. Additionally, a sacrificed mage is powerful, yet hard to get magic fuel and therefore the more scrupelous mages hunt other mages as a source of energy.

Emperor Tippy
2008-10-14, 05:09 AM
One idea that I like has to do with energy. Most of the D&D spells do things that require tons of energy (enlarge person would require a very large amount to create that much matter). If the caster gets distracted or messes up all of that energy is released in an uncontrolled form.

Think every spell is a potential nuke. Creating the dollop of acid for acid splash would require several megatons worth of energy. How much energy could be a function of the spell level and it's type.

Add in a function where you need to make a concentration check of 10+(Spell Level x 3) to successfully use a spell and you are looking at a very good reason for it to be banned. The weakest apprentice has the ability to blow up the entire city, and even the greatest mage has an about even chance of blowing up the entire city.

BobVosh
2008-10-14, 05:20 AM
You could have it so that every time you use magic to produce an effect, the exact opposite of the effect happens elsewhere, to a completely random target. For example, someone casts cure serious wounds and heals one of their party, someone, somewhere, takes damage equal to the healing. Not too bad you may say, but what about when you get to resurrection? One random person is struck dead, or for save or die spells, one random dead person comes back to life. I think that's enough to justify banning it.

I can just see it now: Every night before bed the evil cleric blows every cure mass, heal, heal mass, everything. Just so random people have a VERY bad day.

hewhosaysfish
2008-10-14, 09:29 AM
I can just see it now: Every night before bed the evil cleric blows every cure mass, heal, heal mass, everything. Just so random people have a VERY bad day.

Remove Disease! Really ruin their week and that of their friends and neighbours too!



To the OP: Be careful you don't go overboard with this.
If you eventually declare "Every time you cast a spell, roll 1d10 and add the level of the spell. If the result is 10 or greater, hideous monsters with barbed tentalces boil out of the ground in a 100 mile radius and rips everyone's (including the caster) lungs out through their rears." then you have successfuly explained why magic would be illegalised but have now posed the somewhat larger question of why anyone anywhere would ever use magic to do anything ever.
Really, the risk/cost to the caster should be acceptably low while the risk/cost to innocent bystanders and/or chosen sacrifices should be unacceptably high.

elliott20
2008-10-14, 10:04 AM
One idea that I like has to do with energy. Most of the D&D spells do things that require tons of energy (enlarge person would require a very large amount to create that much matter). If the caster gets distracted or messes up all of that energy is released in an uncontrolled form.

Think every spell is a potential nuke. Creating the dollop of acid for acid splash would require several megatons worth of energy. How much energy could be a function of the spell level and it's type.

Add in a function where you need to make a concentration check of 10+(Spell Level x 3) to successfully use a spell and you are looking at a very good reason for it to be banned. The weakest apprentice has the ability to blow up the entire city, and even the greatest mage has an about even chance of blowing up the entire city.
sort of like a guy with a masters in physics being able to create a nuke out of everyday material huh?

I personally like the idea that all magic needs to be powered. What exactly is up to debate, but it needs to be power by SOMETHING. Maybe the energy comes from another being more powerful than yourself (i.e. a demon), or maybe the energy is tapped from the surrounding, or maybe it uses your personal life force, or maybe you're a good ol' fashion sciencemancer.

In this case, you can take Emperor Tippy's idea of energy, and extend it further. Powering a spell means you need to fulfill it's energy quota. Lesser spells might require something as simple as a contractual agreement between you and another outer planar being, a drop of blood from your thumb, or just knowing how to properly position the rune stones on the floor to get the effect you need, depending upon your school of magic/thought.

You can extrapolate that into mages who work in different methods. i.e. you want to case true resurrection, a powerful spell. The blood magus might have to drain large amounts of blood from himself and 7 other willing individuals (effectively lowering each of their CON score by 1), the sciencemancer might first have to have a lab built to properly harness the energy, then needs to find a way to collect 1.21 gigawatts of energy in a single stroke to power the spell. The planar mage, on the other hand, made an oath to the devil that he would owe him a favor for this.

each one goes about collecting in different ways.

add on to that the fact that magic is inherently unstable. either it can backfire, do something unexpected, not work as well as you hoped, or simply just not work at all. I would be careful with the first and second option though, as those kinds of unreliability can very easily make magic not just dangerous, but downright not usable. So calibrating those will take work. On the other hand, making something not work as well as it should can be as simple as requiring that a lot of the numerical aspects require rolling more dice and have less bonuses to them. i.e. cure moderate is normally 2d8+ 1/lvl. make it 2d8 + 1d8/4 CL. it makes the outcome far less reliable.

but of course, all of this would essentially change the game so much that you might as well be playing your own system instead of d&d

Hal
2008-10-14, 11:25 AM
You could say that accessing such powerful magic is destructive to your own essence. What if access to spell levels decreased your Con score, permanently, by 1.

So, a 1st level wizard loses 1 con. By the time your wizard is able to cast 9th level spells, he's lost 9 con. That will make for a very fragile person, since wizards tend not to have high con scores.

This would also be a great explanation for why epic spellcasting is both rare and unattractive, as simply trying to get access to it could possibly kill you.

Lord Tataraus
2008-10-14, 12:16 PM
Well one mechanic I've come up with is a mana system. All casting requires the use of mana which is created naturally by the environment. A caster must draw upon this mana to use as the energy for his spells so, using the spell point system, a wizard needs to meditate and takes as much mana as he can from the area and prepares them in packages of spell beads that he can use to cast his spells. A sorcerer draws upon the mana around him when he chooses to cast a spell. This way a wizard is more secure in that he makes sure he will have the energy he needs for his spells ahead of time, but the Sorcerer is more likely to get the appropriate type of mana at any given time. If you use appropriate mana (fire mana for a fire spell, earth mana for an earth spell, evil mana for a negative energy spell, etc.) the spell is cast at a great caster level than normal. If you use a maligned mana, the caster level decreases. I still haven't worked out all the types of mana yet, I want there to be more than just elemental manas, but not too many and overly complex. There are also variants with the system like maligned mana causing a spell to backlash, or trying to overdraw mana backlashes against the caster. This system also causes magic to be in short supply and magic users would be very territorial and stay away from each other as much as possible.

Talya
2008-10-14, 12:25 PM
In building her magnificent Basillica of Burning Passions, the new temple of Sune in Calimport, Heartwarder Nara Aesera Nahid had grand ambitions of a decadent display of utter lavish luxury. The temple has waterfalls, that start from the top (approximately 10 stories up), and work their way down the sides of the tiered basillica, with various waterfalls and fountains supplying wonderful fresh water to the entire temple staff...and any passers-by who wish to partake of the ankle-deep outer pools--all in a hot desert clime where freshwater is gold. Magic, of course, presents several ways to do this, from bottles that shoot neverending jets of water, to open portals to the Elemental Plane of Water.

Initially, Nara planned to have the water merely use the city's extensive drainage/sewer system--deserts get some spectacular rainstorms, rare as they are, so to avoid flooding, Calimport actually has an undercity-sewer system three levels deep. This would have had the added benefit of rendering the undercity around her temple, in a path to the Shining Sea to the south, utterly uninhabitable (which is nice when the sewers are infested with Shar-worshipping shadow-cultists.)

Good intentions, though, did not stop Nara from receiving a stern lecture from a (thankfully benevolent) druid, who advised against upsetting the balance of nature by providing such an unnatural source of water to a barren land. Now the plan is to have the water cycle back to the elemental plane of water after it reaches the lowest levels. (An open, permanent portal to the plane of water will do the trick...the elemental plane of water has no gravity, and therefore no water pressure. If the portal is placed at the bottom of a large cistern, the pressure in the cistern will drive the water throught he portal, back to the endless seas.)

hamishspence
2008-10-14, 01:29 PM
"Balance of nature" isn't a great phrase. Used a lot in D&D though.

Perhaps more benevolent reason would be: Water+ desert = extinction of rare an unique desert species that will not survive increase in water level and colonization by creatures with a lower drought tolerance.

Same principle, but it puts it in terms of life: living animals and plants.

sleepy
2008-10-14, 01:50 PM
Feel free to go the W40K route.

If you're not familair, magic/psychic powers (depending on the culture you're talking to) in that setting involves acting as a conduit to something like a parralel dimension of formless acausality.

That dimension happens to be populated by the most horrifying things you could possibly imagine. Literally. The thoughts of sentient minds are amalgamated and given form in the immaterium. The place is known as Chaos for a reason. Everything there is extremely unpleasant, both in character and in its incomprehensible alternate-laws-of-physics-or-lack-thereof-ness. Glimpsing the realm of Chaos tends to cause immediate and debilitating insanity.

Using magic safely in that setting requires iron discipline far beyond the capabilities of the average man (consequently, most psykers are executed on discovery, most who are chosen for training are lobotomised as a safeguard, and the one-in-a-million guy who gets to keep his whole brain undergoes years of extra brainwashing). A lapse in vigilance, even when not using his powers, can lead to all sorts of nasty things. Random mutation is extremely common and comparatively tame. Creeping insanity is almost assumed, sudden killing spree style insanity is not unexpected and any sign of a power use going sideways is liable to get you shot by anyone nearby just in case. Daemonic possession is a very serious risk. Worst of all, it's quite possible for things to get really out of hand and have the immaterium/realspace conduit through your soul detonate said soul and cause a breach in reality itself, allowing the maddening energies of Chaos to come spilling into the physical universe. Obviously that's not bad enough because the daemons that populate the realm of chaos see that kind of thing like a solar flare and hurry on through the rupture and get right to their favorite activity, killing everything that moves. Entire planets have been depopulated this way. Many times.

How's that?

(I left out the gorey bits. 40k is not a pretty universe)

Coplantor
2008-10-14, 01:55 PM
I loved it! It involves mutations, madness and dimensional gates to realms of pure madness! I gotta put it down into game mechanics right now!

Talya
2008-10-14, 02:23 PM
"Balance of nature" isn't a great phrase. Used a lot in D&D though.

Of course you hear it a lot in D&D...it's the entire guiding principle behind the Druid class and all of it's fluff.

hamishspence
2008-10-14, 03:01 PM
Yup. druids used to have to be true Neutral.

I like justifications for deserts to be based in terms of life and the living, rather than just "Its supposed to be here"

Would said druid oppose the almost equally unnatural irrigation?

Coplantor
2008-10-14, 03:08 PM
How should the mutatuions/lost of sanity work?

Perhaps casting always have a chance of affecting sanity, and spell failure means a fissure in reality that releases great amounts of energy that end up altering the world in some caothic way. I like the idea of a far away forest where everything, from the animals to the trees are completly twisted and have no resemblance of their original form, all of this because of one of the outcasts mages that declared said forest his new home after being expelled from his original community.