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Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
thydungeonguy

Industrial Might and Magic

fuckyeahdnd

A while back I listened to my favorite podcast System Mastery talk about Xcrawl and there was one bit about the setting that interested me but by the sounds of it wasn’t really addressed in depth in the setting: copyrighted spells.

The idea was that some wizard had figure out that they could effectively put a copyright on their spell by making the material component a $50 bill that would be teleported into their personal vault. The wizard thus became obscenely rich because of the usefulness of said spell.

But that made me think: what other stuff can you get in a setting where spells are subject to copyright?

Cheap bootleg spells! They are much more affordable but they don’t quite work as well as the genuine article.

Generic brand spells! Once a spell’s patent has expired everyone can make a variation of that spell! Your wizard emporium might be full of different variants of Mel’s Acid Arrow.

Groups of fucking nerd Wizards developing creative commons spells and getting into huge wizard nerd fights over which version of a spell is the best one!

As I was discussing this with my friends we got lots of really great ideas which I will be posting under the name and tag “Industrial Might and Magic.”

brilliant!!
howtofightwrite

unrivalled-in-sarcasm-deactivat asked:

Is there any relatively safe way to knock someone out with no resources but your hands? My character needs to knock this person out so they don't run off, but he has nothing on him to do so. It's necessary to the story that he be knocked out. Thank you!

howtofightwrite answered:

No.

We’ve gone over this, many times, before. There is no safe way to knock someone unconscious. By definition, you’re specifically attempting to damage their brain, with the goal of getting it to take a little vacation.

More than that, there aren’t even many reliable means to knock someone out. Blows to the head can, theoretically, work, but they can also, just as easily, piss off the person you’re attacking, without much ill effect.

Tranquilizers take ages to kick in, and are very difficult to dose. Too much, and you’ve got a corpse. Not enough, and you’ve got someone who’s groggy, but still ambulatory.

Choking is, in theory, the safest, but the fine line between unconscious and dead is still something you can’t spot intentionally. Choking is something that can be practiced in a safe environment, but using it in the field is incredibly finicky.

And, it gets better.

Strip away all the terminology and a concussion is just bruising on the brain itself. You get hit, your head gets jostled around, and your brain bounces off the inside of your skull. You may have been using that organ for something, and might understand why you don’t particularly want it getting directly injured. Either way, this will, absolutely, interfere with your ability to think, remember unimportant information like your name, or count the number of fingers some well meaning smartass is holding up. Still, probably won’t knock you out, though.

When you’re talking about knocking someone out, you’re really asking, “how can I directly assault their brain, without having to develop psychic powers?” Yeah, that’s never going to be safe. It turns out, getting the human brain to stop working, temporarily, is a lot like trying to get it to just flat out stop working in general, and it’s a crap shoot, which you’ll get.

Concussions are cumulative. This should be fairly obvious, when you actually think about it. If your brain has been pre-tenderized, it’s going to be more susceptible to future concussions, and the ones you receive will be more severe. This means someone who’s had a few before will be knocked unconscious or killed far more easily than someone with a relatively healthy brain. Even then, it’s not like there’s a stable baseline of, “you can hit your head this hard before it kills you.”

Knocking someone unconscious for more than a few seconds is very bad news. If you’re knocking someone out for more than a minute, there’s going to be irreparable brain damage. (The specific threshold is usually around 30 seconds, but for each unique brain, there’s equally unique catastrophic brain damage.) So, you’ve, “safely,” reduced someone to a vegetable. More than a few minutes and you’ve (probably), “safely,” killed them.

So, what do you actually do when you need to be somewhere else and someone is intent on getting you to stick around? Knock them off balance and run. Sucker punches to the stomach are a good option. If unexpected, they’ll usually wind the victim, and give you a good head start. Knees to the gut are another classic. One common variation is to knee the gut, and when they double over, knee them again in the face. Slamming a door in the face, or knocking them to the ground are also excellent options. Really, there are a lot of options. The goal is to simply create an opening and escape. You don’t need to knock someone unconscious to do that. You really don’t want to knock someone unconscious to do that.

-Starke

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failbettergames
wickedbaggins

overreaching in Sunless Sea looks like hiring more crew than you can easily feed and keep feeding and deciding to head all the way across the ocean despite having just spent most of your money on a new ship. I’ll be fine, you think. What’s the worst that can happen.

As it turns out, eating and then murdering most of your crew just outside your home port because you made the journey, you just about made it back, but you’re just that out of food, time, and sanity.

tinsnip

Eating and THEN murdering???

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