DShomshak

This one: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389250817/astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-dating-to-cosmic-dawn ?

Well, not every great discovery pans out; or it turns out that one discovered something different.
 
This month's Scientific American also has a short article about Big Rocks from Space as the cause of mass extinctions. In brief, the theory is dead. Of the 5 biggest mass extinctions in the fossil record, 4 are associated with massive flood basalt events. As geologists have refined the dates, the association has become tighter and tighter. Only the K-T extinction had a Big Rock From Space impact, but the Deccan Traps eruption was happening at the time and appears to have been plenty big enough to kill off the dinosaurs (and a whole lot more) all by itself. No impacts have been found at the times of other mass extinctions, so it looks like the Chicxulub impact was just a coincidence.
 
(Granted, a big rock falling on a bed of sulfur-rich limestone probably made things worse. K-T impactor co-discoverer Walter Alvarez also tries to keep the theory alive by arguing that the impact shook the Deccan eruption fissures wider, making it worse. Maybe so, but it now looks like the impact was only an aggravating factor, not the main cause.)
 
The Big Rock From Space hypothesis wasn't worthless. It got geologists looking at rock strata and fossil evidence in new ways. It was wrong, but productively wrong, which makes it a good example of science operating as it should.
 
Also, the Ordovician mass extinction remains mysterious. No Big Rock From Space; no Large Igneous Province.
 
Dark Energy may turn out to be another case where the apparent discovery turns out not to be the real discovery. It may take a few decades to figure it out, though.
 
Dean Shomshak

Yeah, that latter is the chief suspicion. If low-metallicity stellar evolution gives you white dwarfs that are systematically different from ones resulting from higher metallicity stellar evolution, then the energy yield might be different between the two if they explode. And with the look-back time, the more distant SNe will be from generally metal-poor environments, since metals accumulate over time. I do not know enough about the physics of degenerate-dwarf supernovae to have an opinion about that: the details really matter and it has been a while since I kept up on the supernova literature.

For this, I'll steal freely from a number of stories I've enjoyed. Citations provided.
 
Most people know ogres only as big dumb bruisers who hit things and eat people. A few ogres, however, are cunning and may even have magical powers. Ordinary ogres are wary of magical ogres, which shows they aren't completely stupid.
 
Simple folk often think tinkers are magical because they travel in strange and foreign lands, such as the next county. It's true, they see more of the world than most folk ever will. If you need advice, you could do worse than ask a tinker. Prudent folk remember the old proverb:
 
A tinker's debt is always paid:
Once for any simple trade.
Twice for freely given aid.
Thrice for any insult made.
(from Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind)
 
So when you meet an ogre with a tinker's pack and cart, keep your wits about you and mind your manners. You have met Slunder the ogre tinker. He's not as magical as his great-aunt Baba Yaga, but he is still a fairy creature. Not many people hire Slunder, but those who do may obtain magical treasures. Those who are try to rob or cheat the ogre tinker... regret it.
 
Pay Slunder a few coins and give him a meal, and he will sharpen knives, mend pans, and provide the other usual services of a tinker. Let him eat his fill (he will leave barely enough to feed the family for a few days thereafter) of offer similar kindness, and he gives one of three possible gifts.
 
The first is a silver coin. It's battered and old, stamped with the face of an unnamed king, but good silver. It's also magical. If you spend it, it reappears in your purse or pocket the next day. The Unspendable Coin won't make
you rich but you will never starve.
 
(Lifted from Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.)
 
You can give the coin away, as a gift, and it becomes unspendable for its new owner.
 
Slunder has a sack of these coins. He never gives but one. Anyone who steals or robs an Unspendable Coin suffers its curse: All the person's other money vanishes within a day, leaving him with just one unspendable coin. Any other money the person makes vanishes as well. You can't lift the curse of the coin by giving it away: It comes back. Mocking you.
 
Or, Slunder might give you a pan. The magic of the pan is that it remains perpetually full of the first food you cook in it, as long as you take care never to empty it. If, say, you fry up a pan of ten sausages, you can keep taking sausages from the pan and new sausages appear. The magic stops only if you create a situation where the pan must be empty, such as flipping it over to dump out all the sausages. Sorry, you can't re-set the pan: It works only once.
 
(From Over the Hills to Fabylon by Nicholas Stuart Gray. The woman who obtained the magical pan unfortunately used it first to cook a batch of swill for her pigs, so she had an eternal supply of swill. Well, it'd be okay if you wanted to run a pig farm.)
 
Slunder's third possible gift is a doll. It's not a fancy doll, just a common child's toy. Three times, however, it animates to help and advise the child to whom it is given. The doll is virtually omniscient and prophetic, enabling it to give supernaturally useful advice. If the doll is taken by force, though, it gives supernaturally bad advice that leads the thief to inevitable doom.
 
Next: Headmistress Madame Clott and her Finishing School for Young Ladies.
 
Dean Shomshak

Er, this doesn't actually include a treasure hoard, so I'll treat the Bog Beast as still open.
 
The Bog Beast's treasure is... the bog. More precisely, several medicinal mosses, herbs and fungi that grow in the bog; growing in this location, their healing virtue is greater than equivalent plants that grow in other bogs. Local apothecaries value them highly. The Beast makes gathering these plants dangerous, but that is why the gods made apprentices. 
 
Some believe the Bog Beast gains its unnatural resilience from living among the magical herbs, but sages know the truth is the other way around: The herbs gain their virtue from the Beast. The greatest treasure of the Beast is... how to put this delicately... its leavings. To be blunt, its poo. As its droppings dissolve into the muck, the plants they fertilize gain a bit of the supernatural life-force of the Beast itself. If one can collect the Bog Beast's dung fresh, it can be used as a poultice that cures almost any disease. The hazards of collection are extreme.
 
Dean Shomshak

Er, this doesn't actually include a treasure hoard, so I'll treat the Bog Beast as still open.
 
The Bog Beast's treasure is... the bog. More precisely, several medicinal mosses, herbs and fungi that grow in the bog; growing in this location, their healing virtue is greater than equivalent plants that grow in other bogs. Local apothecaries value them highly. The Beast makes gathering these plants dangerous, but that is why the gods made apprentices. 
 
Some believe the Bog Beast gains its unnatural resilience from living among the magical herbs, but sages know the truth is the other way around: The herbs gain their virtue from the Beast. The greatest treasure of the Beast is... how to put this delicately... its leavings. To be blunt, its poo. As its droppings dissolve into the muck, the plants they fertilize gain a bit of the supernatural life-force of the Beast itself. If one can collect the Bog Beast's dung fresh, it can be used as a poultice that cures almost any disease. The hazards of collection are extreme.
 
Dean Shomshak

Yuggoth!

Space news you can use, from Clickhole!

I just heard a news report about the brightest supernova ever observed. (Granted, it's about 3 billion LY away.) In fact, it's so bright some astronomers think it can't be a supernova, but something new. I hope for more information.
 
Dean Shomshak

Or conversely, construction debris.
 
What would be worth building that close to a white dwarf star? If the star has a strong magnetic field, maybe... a power station. Back in my misspent youth, I wondered how much current you could generate by running a loop of wire around low Earth orbit, as the coil of a generator with the Earth as the magnet. Weak magnetic field, but very big coil, moving very fast. The results were, um, impressive.
 
Dunno how intense a magnetic field white dwarf stars have. (You'd prefer a pulsar for this, but maybe they're all taken.) But if it's still at Sun-comparable intensity, only squeezed in because the star is so small, it still might make the core for a pretty good generator.
 
So, what's known about the magnetic fields of white dwarf stars?
 
Dean Shomshak

November's Scientific American has an article about the Dark Energy Survey, a program to map hundreds of millions of galaxies in hopes of measuring cosmic expansion more precisely and maybe ruling out some of the possible explanations. The article summary goes:
 
"Something is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up--but what? Scientists have proposed that a force called dark energy is behind the acceleration or, alternatively, that current understanding of gravity must be modified. If dark energy is the culprit, at least two explanations are possible.
 
"A new project called the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will aim to solve this mystery by studying the history of cosmic expansion and the extent to which dark energy may have stymied the clumping together of galaxies throughout space.
 
"It will tackle these questions in four ways--through observing supernovae, the signatures of primordial sound waves, gravitational lensing (the bending of light by matter in the universe) and clusters of galaxies."
 
There's also a short article about a search for stars collapsing directly into black holes in nearby galaxies. The astronomers are watching for red supergiant stars that just vanish, without going supernova. They already have a few candidates.
 
Dean Shomshak

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS
EXCEPT EUROPA
AND ENCELADUS
AND GANYMEDE IO AND TITAN
YOU KNOW WHAT JUST STAY HOME
YOU'VE DONE ENOUGH DAMAGE ALREADY

The Way Outback, to go with the Even Wilder West?
 
Dean Shomshak

Now there's a very silly superhero origin waiting to happen.
 
(I know, wrong forum, but still...)
 
Dean Shomshak

For static stars, it's something like that. The larger mass limits are things that are never actually stable, but they last long enough and get hot and dense enough in their cores to start fusion processes on a large enough scale to produce enough heavy elements so ordinary stars can form. The stellar interiors calculations get really hairy when you can't be in equilibrium, but last I heard, if any of those zero-metals things makes carbon in any quantity then the rate of energy generation spikes very hard and you might get heavier things during one of those high-temperature flashes.

I think you have to keep in mind the difference between simulating a superhero world and simulating comics as a medium. They are related, but how closely you want to tie them is a matter of taste.
 
One effect of the comic-book medium is that not much stays permanent: Years later, a writer or editor can undo what another writer did, and probably will. Somebody wants to tell a story about the character who was killed off umpteen years before; or somebody just wants to pull some cheap melodrama by shaking up a character's life... again.
 
Which is why heroes' marriages rarely last. A wedding makes a dramatic turning point in a hero's life, but so does a divorce or a spouse's death. Or for lesser impact, hook ups and break ups. It's an easy way for writers to add soap-opera excitement. Like I said, cheap melodrama. After years or decades of publication, though, the resulting churn can look frantic and silly.
 
The Scarlet Witch offers an example. For years, our time, she was married to the Vision. Then -- improbably, but she makes the improbably happen -- they had kids. And the churn begins... Oops, no they don't have kids: They were magical constructs that were actually shards of a supervillain's soul! (Huh?) The Vision loses his emotions, turns white, and their marriage breaks up. Which was about the time I stopped reading Marvel, but Wikipedia tells me she's had various hook-ups, at least one nervous breakdown, and I don't know what all. Maybe it didn't seem so frantic and silly spread over 20 years, but it sure seemed ridiculous as I read the summary.
 
Resurrection retcons are particularly tacky when they unmake character choices, such as Jean Grey's first resurrection. As the Phoenix, she chose to die to protect the universe from herself. Oops, no, she didn't: The Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey, the real Jean Grey was regenerating in a pod on the bottom of a lake! And the Phoenix Force is eternal, so no one really died! From one of the most dramatic events in X-Men continuity, it became a meaningless puppet show. All in all, some of the worst writing comics have ever seen.
 
I would hope the CU, as published, could avoid *that* sort of character resurrection. (AFAIK, it has.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I think you have to keep in mind the difference between simulating a superhero world and simulating comics as a medium. They are related, but how closely you want to tie them is a matter of taste.
 
One effect of the comic-book medium is that not much stays permanent: Years later, a writer or editor can undo what another writer did, and probably will. Somebody wants to tell a story about the character who was killed off umpteen years before; or somebody just wants to pull some cheap melodrama by shaking up a character's life... again.
 
Which is why heroes' marriages rarely last. A wedding makes a dramatic turning point in a hero's life, but so does a divorce or a spouse's death. Or for lesser impact, hook ups and break ups. It's an easy way for writers to add soap-opera excitement. Like I said, cheap melodrama. After years or decades of publication, though, the resulting churn can look frantic and silly.
 
The Scarlet Witch offers an example. For years, our time, she was married to the Vision. Then -- improbably, but she makes the improbably happen -- they had kids. And the churn begins... Oops, no they don't have kids: They were magical constructs that were actually shards of a supervillain's soul! (Huh?) The Vision loses his emotions, turns white, and their marriage breaks up. Which was about the time I stopped reading Marvel, but Wikipedia tells me she's had various hook-ups, at least one nervous breakdown, and I don't know what all. Maybe it didn't seem so frantic and silly spread over 20 years, but it sure seemed ridiculous as I read the summary.
 
Resurrection retcons are particularly tacky when they unmake character choices, such as Jean Grey's first resurrection. As the Phoenix, she chose to die to protect the universe from herself. Oops, no, she didn't: The Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey, the real Jean Grey was regenerating in a pod on the bottom of a lake! And the Phoenix Force is eternal, so no one really died! From one of the most dramatic events in X-Men continuity, it became a meaningless puppet show. All in all, some of the worst writing comics have ever seen.
 
I would hope the CU, as published, could avoid *that* sort of character resurrection. (AFAIK, it has.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I think you have to keep in mind the difference between simulating a superhero world and simulating comics as a medium. They are related, but how closely you want to tie them is a matter of taste.
 
One effect of the comic-book medium is that not much stays permanent: Years later, a writer or editor can undo what another writer did, and probably will. Somebody wants to tell a story about the character who was killed off umpteen years before; or somebody just wants to pull some cheap melodrama by shaking up a character's life... again.
 
Which is why heroes' marriages rarely last. A wedding makes a dramatic turning point in a hero's life, but so does a divorce or a spouse's death. Or for lesser impact, hook ups and break ups. It's an easy way for writers to add soap-opera excitement. Like I said, cheap melodrama. After years or decades of publication, though, the resulting churn can look frantic and silly.
 
The Scarlet Witch offers an example. For years, our time, she was married to the Vision. Then -- improbably, but she makes the improbably happen -- they had kids. And the churn begins... Oops, no they don't have kids: They were magical constructs that were actually shards of a supervillain's soul! (Huh?) The Vision loses his emotions, turns white, and their marriage breaks up. Which was about the time I stopped reading Marvel, but Wikipedia tells me she's had various hook-ups, at least one nervous breakdown, and I don't know what all. Maybe it didn't seem so frantic and silly spread over 20 years, but it sure seemed ridiculous as I read the summary.
 
Resurrection retcons are particularly tacky when they unmake character choices, such as Jean Grey's first resurrection. As the Phoenix, she chose to die to protect the universe from herself. Oops, no, she didn't: The Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey, the real Jean Grey was regenerating in a pod on the bottom of a lake! And the Phoenix Force is eternal, so no one really died! From one of the most dramatic events in X-Men continuity, it became a meaningless puppet show. All in all, some of the worst writing comics have ever seen.
 
I would hope the CU, as published, could avoid *that* sort of character resurrection. (AFAIK, it has.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I think you have to keep in mind the difference between simulating a superhero world and simulating comics as a medium. They are related, but how closely you want to tie them is a matter of taste.
 
One effect of the comic-book medium is that not much stays permanent: Years later, a writer or editor can undo what another writer did, and probably will. Somebody wants to tell a story about the character who was killed off umpteen years before; or somebody just wants to pull some cheap melodrama by shaking up a character's life... again.
 
Which is why heroes' marriages rarely last. A wedding makes a dramatic turning point in a hero's life, but so does a divorce or a spouse's death. Or for lesser impact, hook ups and break ups. It's an easy way for writers to add soap-opera excitement. Like I said, cheap melodrama. After years or decades of publication, though, the resulting churn can look frantic and silly.
 
The Scarlet Witch offers an example. For years, our time, she was married to the Vision. Then -- improbably, but she makes the improbably happen -- they had kids. And the churn begins... Oops, no they don't have kids: They were magical constructs that were actually shards of a supervillain's soul! (Huh?) The Vision loses his emotions, turns white, and their marriage breaks up. Which was about the time I stopped reading Marvel, but Wikipedia tells me she's had various hook-ups, at least one nervous breakdown, and I don't know what all. Maybe it didn't seem so frantic and silly spread over 20 years, but it sure seemed ridiculous as I read the summary.
 
Resurrection retcons are particularly tacky when they unmake character choices, such as Jean Grey's first resurrection. As the Phoenix, she chose to die to protect the universe from herself. Oops, no, she didn't: The Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey, the real Jean Grey was regenerating in a pod on the bottom of a lake! And the Phoenix Force is eternal, so no one really died! From one of the most dramatic events in X-Men continuity, it became a meaningless puppet show. All in all, some of the worst writing comics have ever seen.
 
I would hope the CU, as published, could avoid *that* sort of character resurrection. (AFAIK, it has.)
 
Dean Shomshak

I think you have to keep in mind the difference between simulating a superhero world and simulating comics as a medium. They are related, but how closely you want to tie them is a matter of taste.
 
One effect of the comic-book medium is that not much stays permanent: Years later, a writer or editor can undo what another writer did, and probably will. Somebody wants to tell a story about the character who was killed off umpteen years before; or somebody just wants to pull some cheap melodrama by shaking up a character's life... again.
 
Which is why heroes' marriages rarely last. A wedding makes a dramatic turning point in a hero's life, but so does a divorce or a spouse's death. Or for lesser impact, hook ups and break ups. It's an easy way for writers to add soap-opera excitement. Like I said, cheap melodrama. After years or decades of publication, though, the resulting churn can look frantic and silly.
 
The Scarlet Witch offers an example. For years, our time, she was married to the Vision. Then -- improbably, but she makes the improbably happen -- they had kids. And the churn begins... Oops, no they don't have kids: They were magical constructs that were actually shards of a supervillain's soul! (Huh?) The Vision loses his emotions, turns white, and their marriage breaks up. Which was about the time I stopped reading Marvel, but Wikipedia tells me she's had various hook-ups, at least one nervous breakdown, and I don't know what all. Maybe it didn't seem so frantic and silly spread over 20 years, but it sure seemed ridiculous as I read the summary.
 
Resurrection retcons are particularly tacky when they unmake character choices, such as Jean Grey's first resurrection. As the Phoenix, she chose to die to protect the universe from herself. Oops, no, she didn't: The Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey, the real Jean Grey was regenerating in a pod on the bottom of a lake! And the Phoenix Force is eternal, so no one really died! From one of the most dramatic events in X-Men continuity, it became a meaningless puppet show. All in all, some of the worst writing comics have ever seen.
 
I would hope the CU, as published, could avoid *that* sort of character resurrection. (AFAIK, it has.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Well, QM, here's a *brief* overview of the ARchmage-related information in The Mystic World. It should answer some of your questions:
 
Mystic tradition holds that the line of Archmages began with Thanoro Azoic -- whoever, or whatever, he, she, or it was. It happend so long ago that mystics have only a name, which might be a mistake or mistranscription.
 
The line of archmages broke in Hellenistic times. The mage Thestor restored it. How? It's a secret. (That's a small joke.) Thestor's grimoire, the Krypticon, was passed from archmage to archmage with ol' Bohdan the last known owner. Presumably it got blowed up real good along with the rest of Bohdan's sanctum, but I gave a writeup of the book so there's hope yet.
 
Seven archmages came after Thestor. One, the Eternal Tulku, retired from the office. He's still alive but deeply senile most of the time. He and Bohdan are the only other named archmages. (The rest are left for you to fill in to suit the needs of your campaign.)
 
An archmage must obtain gifts of power from denizens of all four Imaginal Realms: the syncretic Heaven of Elysium, the Netherworld of all Hells, the Land of Legends, and Babylon the City of Man. OTOH, the archmage cannot be bound to any spiritual power.
 
An archmage must also know a spell called the Quaternion Banishment that provides Earth's ultimate defense against invasion from the Outer Planes.
 
Some mages actively try to become archmage, including supervillains like the Demonologist. Being evil is no disqualifier!
 
Some of Earth's most powerful mages, however, *aren't* in the running, or at least they don't seem to want the job. The Sylvestri Patriarch is obviously disqualified because he's bound to the Dragon. (Note that Demonologist isn't disqualified by his favored style of magic: He exploits demons but never sold his soul.) OTOH, Adrian Vandaleur and Doctor Yin Wu have no obvious impediment but have outlived multiple archmages.
 
Dean Shomshak

Incidentally, this reminds me how in the 1970s, Marvel and DC gave us various black superheroes, who invariably had "Black" in their names: Black Lightning, Black Goliath, Black Panther, etc. Okay, so Black Panther's superhero name would have made sense whatever the character's race, but still -- such names seem *incredibly* dated now, at least to me. They meant well, but such characters just point out how very, um, "white" the comics industry was. "Gawrsh, look at this character, he's BLACK!"
 
It was progress, but thank all gods we've moved beyond it. Heroes and villains can be black, and it matters that the character is black, but it doesn't define the character utterly.
 
I am at least grateful that comics avoided following this clumsy route in the 1990s, as the wider culture became more aware and accepting of LGBTI rights. AFAIK we were spared "Trans Lightning" and "Gay Goliath." Some attempts at respect are worse than scorn.
 
Dean Shomshak

For worldbuilding purposes, mention might be made of the first openly gay superhero.  "Yeah, the 1970s wasn't a good time for that, but someone had to be first."

After reading the CU book, ask here if you want more information about particular parts of the setting, and we can recommend the 6e or 5e books with the most information (or just answer directly). I wrote a bunch of the mystical, Doctor Strange-y stuff, so I am somewhat expert in it.
 
Dean Shomshak

After reading the CU book, ask here if you want more information about particular parts of the setting, and we can recommend the 6e or 5e books with the most information (or just answer directly). I wrote a bunch of the mystical, Doctor Strange-y stuff, so I am somewhat expert in it.
 
Dean Shomshak