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Author Topic: [IDEA] Miasma  (Read 5495 times)
Rayblon
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« on: July 08, 2014, 08:33:08 PM »

Let me start by describing the origin of spiritual miasma the best I can.

It is believed in eastern cultures that negative energies such as suffering, greedy, anger, and the like can build up and manifest into something invisible to the eyes of the average human, similar to how carbon monoxide is invisible to the naked eye. Miasma was believed to be the cause of illness and various other ailments, attracting malicious spirits and demons as well. However, the greatest conduits of miasma are barren locales and rotting bodies. The more death, destruction, and ill will that concentrates in an area, the thicker and deadlier the miasma becomes.

Like a city choked with smog, anywhere saturated with suffering can impose a crushing force of miasma, killing and corrupting animals and vegetation with a thick, dark, and poisonous fog. Normal individuals not privy to the spiritual side of the world may be unable to see the miasma itself, but it is said that priests and priestesses are sensitive to these energies.

Miasma as a game mechanic would change the appearance of everything around it and encroach upon a person's field of view depending on their magic sense. People who can sense magic and natural energies well, like elves, can see miasma with greater clarity than those who may not have a great magic sense. Miasma serves to drain life energy from everything that steps foot inside of it, so magic users are severely weakened and plant life and animals may die or be corrupted, meaning previously harmless woodland creatures may become deadly enemies, forests may turn black with taint, and the skies may darken, lightning and thunder dancing in their depths as the corruption blots out the sun.

Miasma can be warded off through several conceptual ways. The first way, the traditional method, is building, maintaining, or restoring a shrine. A second method could be attending to nearby people, seeing what ails them. Several other ways to reduce miasma in an area would be to dispose of any nearby dead bodies, plant things around the perimeter to slow the spread, and use light magic to restore areas one area at a time. Miasma will not spread more than 50 blocks from a conduit connected to the miasma, but that means any animals that die of miasmatic poisoning can drastically increase the range of miasma. Extremely dense miasma may also poison nearby water sources like wells, lakes, rivers, and even parts of the ocean, changing aquatic life as well as making the water corrosive.

How would miasma spread? Well, a binary 'infected column' system wouldn't work too well since then it could penetrate even a massive wall of stone in a matter of a day(assuming 1 block a day spread is adopted). Instead, there could just be 'miasmatic blocks' that change the local biome as miasma conduits begin to build up in an area. However, weak, low density miasma wouldn't even be able to leave the confines of a suffering village since it wouldn't have the strength to drain the nearby wilds, whereas, if there were several dozen dead bodies around or in the village, the miasma would be able to spread much further... and drain much more life energy from the inhabitants, as well as increase the chance of disease and strengthen hostile enemies. Consecrated structures(blessed, essentially) would be completely immune to miasmatic infection.

Miasma would be cool because it encourages you to do more than just leech off a nearby village because you need to use their facilities. It makes a villager's plea more foreboding... and makes massacring and looting a village in the middle of the night deadly if the bodies aren't handled correctly at the very least. Miasma has also been attributed to the presence of demons and openings to the 'underworld', which is important to consider as well.



Just an idea. I know Paul has a specific goal in mind but I think it may be worth some consideration, and certainly contributes to the importance of maintaining the civilizations, not to mention making it obvious when you're really neglecting your town.
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pspeed
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« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2014, 10:03:19 PM »

It's an interesting idea.  It is not incompatible with where I'm going, either.

Magic is ruled by primitive/elemental forces.  (It's funny because I spend my time trying to reduce that set of forces and here you are trying to add another set. Wink)

Each of these has a positive and negative form and are related to other base energies... and not necessarily in the way we understand them in our world.  For example, one scenario I have has gravity and electricity tied up in some kind of 'opposite but related' scenario... but I digress.

In that sense, heat and cold are polar opposites.  In our physical universe, we don't consider cold a "thing".  It's a lack of a thing.  But in Mythruna magic, it makes sense to think of it as a thing because of the way heat can be manipulated.  You have heat sources and heat sinks... and heat sinks can suck the heat energy right out of the air or anything really (converting it to some other form that may not be tangible on this plane).  It may appear to break the laws of conservation.

So in Mythruna, you really can create cold.

Likewise, life force is an energy (likely a complicated tapestry of other energies) that can also have a complicated polar opposite.  (This is the realm of the necromancer by the way).  If you have excess life energy then you can impart it to something else.  Remember that it's a complex array of other forces so it's likely extremely difficult to create on its own... but that doesn't meant that you can't impart your own energy to deficit or temporarily store some up.

However, because of this idea, there is a sort of "death energy".  It's the life sink and it's likely just as complicated to construct as life energy... but as said earlier, this is where a necromancer plays.

Dead/rotting corpses are life-neutral... which is more unusual than it sounds.  Even rocks can conduct life energy but something that was a live and is now dead can no longer do this.  The stronger the original life force the more of a vacuum they leave but it's essentially stable.  (Handling a dead body won't make you die or lose life energy... but the corpse will happily suck up and nullify any that you choose to project into it.  Normal sentient life forms are naturally life-force-stable also.) 

Any symbiotic life-givers will suffer negative effects from this relationship.  For example, if there is some magical forest grove somewhere with an abnormally high life force, staying there may heal you faster.  In Mythruna-magic-theory, it's also slowly sapping life energy from that forest but in general the forest is large enough to recover once you've healed and stopped sucking it away.  Several dead bodies might tip that balance as they will readily suck up the extra energy (delivering it to the spirit plane most likely).  Since the forest is not life-force-balanced, it could kill the forest over time.

(The job of a necromancer would be to depolarize and unbalance some of these energies but that is beyond the scope of this discussion... suffice it to say that fighting the animated dead potentially comes with additional consequences.)

There can be other ways this balance might be tipped.  And corpses may be attractive to other types of magical entities for a variety of other reasons... not the least of which is their existing residual conduit link to the spirit plane.

Even in addition to spreading disease and attracting carrion... there are lots of good reasons to dispose of your bodies.  But the carrion is not to be taken lightly.  "Do you want ants?  Because that's how you get ants."  Only in Mythruna, the ants are 1-2 meters long...

Whether I can implement all of that or not, some of it is just window dressing on the basic idea that there are "energy fields".  This is separate from the blocks and are closely related to water, smoke, fire, etc..  It's an underlying principle to make magic more "physical".  Even if I end up cheating and falling back on boring prescripted magic like "every other RPG" (tm), I will base the theory of that magic on manipulating forces.  Example: if you want to cast a fireball spell then you need to create the fire energy, hold it in a ball (static force field), and propel it forward (gravity push).  In Mythruna magic theory, shooting a cone of fire is actually a much easier form of magic since it's just a nearly uncontrolled burst of heat energy.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2014, 01:09:34 PM »

Eh, I never agreed with the 'cold doesn't exist' thought process. Heat and cold are opposites as adjectives. A hot object is an exotherm, and a cold one is an endotherm towards a point of reference. If you find, say, something hotter than the sun, then if the sun absorbs some of that object's heat, the sun functioned as a cold, endothermic construct. The way I see it, the only things you can call nonexistent are the things that have no effect on anything, but that's only from a philosophical standpoint. Just my two cents on that concept.

Miasma may be a force, but it shouldn't be directly manipulable like heat or cold, if that's what you mean. Can a force that's incompatible with life energy, and life itself, be considered magical energy?
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pspeed
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« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2014, 03:13:23 PM »

In our world, cold is like dark.  You can't create it.  You can only nullify its opposite.

In Mythruna, cold can be created.  Essentially, you can make heat disappear... so the idea of cold is a more tangible thing.  This is also similar to why you can manipulate gravity in Mythruna where we have no idea how to do that... and like creating cold, it may be impossible in our universe.
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