[Modern Fantasy] "Materials of creation" that could be opposed to magic?

[Outsider]

Or have gold interfere with mental magics... the king wearing his crown when acting officially becomes a guarantee that his decisions are not being magically influenced.

[mhd]

I am fond of the idea of gold as protection against transmutation. Now there's finally a reason to be decked out in bling besides showing off one's deep pockets.

But there are rumors of a hidden people who were so afraid of wizards that it became a cultural tradition for them to carry lead sheets around all the time. Sadly, lead poisoning over the course of centuries resulted in their growth being quite stunted.

[Old Man]

I think that's one of the few things that lead doesn't do, actually.

[Tasha]

Hello everyone.

 

I'm working on formulating a list of materials that are anti-magic in nature. The common theme that ties them must be one of creation, be it literal or symbolic.

 

One such example thus far is very old iron...we're talking extremely prehistoric deposits that can be (radiocarbon?) dated back to the formation of the planet. If a room has walls constructed from such iron, magic cannot penetrate in or out. If a bullet forged of this iron encounters a magical force-field, it punches right through.

 

With that in mind, i'd love to hear other suggestions on materials that would suit my purpose.

 

Hard to answer the question without knowing how magic works in your game world. Is Magic a natural part of the world? or something unnatural brought from other planes, is it a force that causes reality to bend in bad ways(ie WW's Mage).

[Tasha]

But there are rumors of a hidden people who were so afraid of wizards that it became a cultural tradition for them to carry lead sheets around all the time. Sadly, lead poisoning over the course of centuries resulted in their growth being quite stunted.

I think that Lead would just make them dumber as it caused brain damage. Only in newborns can it cause growth slowing.

"From mayoclinic.com"

Lead Poisoning Symptoms

Lead poisoning symptoms in children

The signs and symptoms of lead poisoning in children may include:

• Developmental delay
• Learning difficulties
• Irritability
• Loss of appetite
• Weight loss
• Sluggishness and fatigue
• Abdominal pain
• Vomiting
• Constipation
• Hearing loss

Lead poisoning symptoms in newborns

Babies who are exposed to lead before birth may experience:

• Learning difficulties
• Slowed growth

Lead poisoning symptoms in adults

Although children are primarily at risk, lead poisoning is also dangerous for adults. Signs and symptoms in adults may include:

• High blood pressure
• Abdominal pain
• Constipation
• Joint pains
• Muscle pain
• Declines in mental functioning
• Pain, numbness or tingling of the extremities
• Headache
• Memory loss
• Mood disorders
• Reduced sperm count, abnormal sperm
• Miscarriage or premature birth in pregnant women

[mhd]

I think that's one of the few things that lead doesn't do, actually.

I think that Lead would just make them dumber as it caused brain damage. Only in newborns can it cause growth slowing.

Stop being so ethnocentric.

 

Apart from the OotS thing, I once read a novel where a hidden "tribe" survived the nuclear apocalypse due to being isolated in the lead-lined cathedral attic. And after a couple of hundred years, these living conditions caused them to be about a foot tall. The incest probably didn't help, either.

 

To get back on topic: Would cathedral/church/temple masonry work as anti-magic material? By now, most of it is pretty old, and a lot of church organizations wouldn't have problems as being described as symbolically old, either.

So that might be a long-term plan to cultivate anti-magic.

 

One more reason why they dislike paleontologists.

[Tasha]

Organisms that are confined to small areas tend to shrink in size so as to not stress their environment

[mhd]

Organisms that are confined to small areas tend to shrink in size so as to not stress their environment

As a former cubicle drone, I can confirm that.

[Old Man]

Really? Most cubicle drones tend to expand in size. I know I did.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Organisms that are confined to small areas tend to shrink in size so as to not stress their environment

It's the opposite of inventory, which grows in size until it stresses its environment.

 

Or maybe that's me, crashing around with a cargo mover. Same same.

[gewing]

My old game I used the gold/silver/copper trio as disturbing magic, and being magically immutable. A nice in game reason for them to be valuable, with their ratio of value being relative to just how much you needed for a given magic disruption effect. I also had a rule that undisturbed natural stone worked the same way in sufficient thickness. Mainly to keep castles in the game... tunneling really (ahem) undermines that, otherwise.

 

Another game I was in allowed natural gemstones to be spell receptacles.

I don't think Big John ever had the chance to get the gold eating on his armor... I have tried to figure out whether there is a real alloy with the features of the "silver-bronze" in your game... I have never found any mechanical properties for silver alloys except silver solder, iirc.

[gewing]

The OP sez...

 

 

It depends on how @Ragitsu wants to interpret it; I've been assuming cosmological creation, but the symbolic part could even extend to paintbrushes and chisels. I myself like the idea of more sympathetic, "flavors" of materials myself; like for instance clay, while symbolically being related to creation (in the case of both people creating art out of clay and in the myths of gods creating humans out of clay) would be especially useful for spells of creation. But in the spirit of the original post, that's where I'm coming from.

 

As a GM, I would tend to interpret it as requiring more "oomph"; so, an ordinary chisel wouldn't necessarily inherently be anti-magic; the chisel Michelangelo used to carve David would be, a little bit (though it could also be used as a magical tool, for creating stone golems and such), and the chisel used by the ancient god Ur-Hasham* to carve the first humans out of clay would have all the oomph, especially when wielded with a hammer forged out of nickel-iron from the core of the earth. A different GM could decide that "oomph" is Active Points worth of a sympathetic effect rather than just anti-magic.

 

* Made up by me, as far as I know, to use as an example here.

I have wondered about Cain's knife, the first club...

[Doc Democracy]

ooh!  ooh!  Just reading the thread for the first time and it was Chris Goodwin's post that prompted the idea.  The thought of the chisel.

 

What if all engineering and science was based on this sympathetic magical principal?  Our discipines of science are describing deep magical resonances in the universe.  

 

The fact that chisels work is not because they are sharp and deliver force to the point against the material, but instead the chisel gets better the more it resembles the archetypal chisel of Ur-Hasham.  Our engineering is not entirely about manipulating physical properties but by combining various elements that achieve the end magically.  We have rationally moved away from the principals of sympathy, so far that things barely resemble their original archetypes but are effective because they combine other archetypes to achieve the ends and is only really useful when the proper sacrifices of the earth's blood (oil), or Sun's spirit (electricity) are made.

 

An airplane would be far more effective (and environmentally friendly) if it more closely resembled the sky chariot of Ur-Septimus...

 

Doc

[Doc Democracy]

Organisms that are confined to small areas tend to shrink in size so as to not stress their environment

 

Attractive as this is as a postulate I am not sure it works.  Is this from scientific proof or from the gaian style approach to evolutionary theory??  

[Lucius]

Attractive as this is as a postulate I am not sure it works.  Is this from scientific proof or from the gaian style approach to evolutionary theory??  

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule

 

It works, sort of. "Foster's Rule" posits that large animals become smaller when faced with the food and space constraints of islands or other constricted environments (an oasis for example is very much like an island in that generations of a species can live there without any of them ever leaving nor arriving from outside.)

 

Small animals on the other hand tend to become larger. The smaller the island, the more extreme the effects.

 

This is the world's largest dwarf palindromedary and the world's smallest giant palindromedary.

[Ragitsu]

How about items (clothes immediately come mind, but others certainly exist) fashioned by one's parents?

[Doc Democracy]

Ah, I was not challenging the fact that species may get smaller but that they "shrink in size so as to not stress their environment".

[Markdoc]

Ah, I was not challenging the fact that species may get smaller but that they "shrink in size so as to not stress their environment".

 

It's the other way round - animals don't evolve to try to avoid environmental stress. Environmental stress forces them to evolve.  

 

So in environments where some resource (typically food) is constrained, species may be able to adapt by altering body size. One option - viable in the absence of predators or direct internal competition - is that the average size shrinks because smaller animals burn less biomass, and the largest animals are at a disadvantage, when it comes to scrounging up enough food. But paradoxically, the other option is to increase in size in constrained environments, apparently because the smaller animals are unable to compete effectively for what resources there are. It depends what resource is limiting, and how the species in question competes for it.

 

cheers, Mark

[Doc Democracy]

That was indeed the point I was alluding to.  To suggest that animals evolve to avoid stress on their environment implies a level of agency that does not exist.  :-)

 

I keep telling people that evolution is almost only about numerous baby survival.  If smaller animals are eating enough to both sustain them and deliver healthy babies that survive while larger animals may not get enough food to provide for themselves or to make their offspring less healthy, then, generation by generation the species will become smaller.

 

Sex and babies is all that counts! :-D

 

PS: apologies to OP for thread piracy - will not talk evolution any more...

[Markdoc]

That was indeed the point I was alluding to.  To suggest that animals evolve to avoid stress on their environment implies a level of agency that does not exist.  :-)

 

Also a level of agency that can be observed not to function in nature - we know from simply watching, that left to their own devices, many species will consume every resource they can get their claws/teeth/beaks on, and then perish en masse. If the regenerative limit of the resource is below the threshold at which the species can survive, the environment will eventually recover and if any surviving members of that species are still around, they can begin to grow again.

 

But in some cases, the consuming species will consume so much of the resource that it cannot regenerate ... in which case both consuming species and resource go extinct (at least in that local environment). Nature really is red in tooth and claw.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Nature needs better hygiene.

[Markdoc]

Ahh, just look on it as the feral version of lipstick and nail polish. A biologist friend of mine (when we were discussing pathogens that specifically infect and kill fetuses) said something along the lines of "Hippies have this vision of mother nature as a nuturing Gaia, when in reality, she's a crazed psychob**** who likes to kill and eat her her own babies."

 

In a feeble attempt to drag the conversaion back to the original line of discussion, that image suggests to me an interesting question; In this setting, how does blood - probably the most primal of all bodily symbols, but also something that is being eternally renewed, interact with magic?

 

cheers, Mark