You are a Celestial Wizard, a keeper of the ages. You have the power to travel between worlds and change the development of entire civilizations.
Heavily inspired by John C Wright's
Count to the Eschaton series, but with wizards. And more space.
Magical Physics Physical objects in this plane of existence are composed of either living or nonliving matter. Nonliving matter forms the bulk of the stars and planets in the universe, whereas living matter is composed of Mana, a substance abundant within gas clouds and interstellar pockets of matter.
Mana is a psychic substance, that is, it can be manipulated psychically by any conscious being--not only sapient beings, but anything with emotions or self-awareness. How Mana came to be a psychic substance before the existence of intelligent beings is unknown to science thus far.
Mana does not violate the conservation of energy. While there are cases of celestial wizards channelling large amounts of energy through their brains to power Mana-based abilities, most Mana-based powers result in a manipulation of energy. Fireball spells and the like require an energy source, which can either be environmental or carried in the form of batteries, fuel, or radioactive isotopes.
That said, Mana is an extremely efficient means of transporting energy. Interstellar clouds of medium store enough potential energy to accelerate lone beings up to relativistic velocities. Time still passes for the rest of the world, but travelling celestial wizards can transcend entire eras of civilizations. They are the true judges of the ages.
Since relativistic travel is a staple of celestial wizardry, it is worth discussing time dilation and its calculation.
Consider a right triangle with sides 'd' and 't':
Since our time dimension is imaginary, we can put the time elapsed for the outside world (the bottom of the triangle) to 4i. We can also set the distance travelled to anything smaller than the time travelled in lightyears. Otherwise, we get a real value for time, which is about as real as a negative frequency in circuit analysis.
Our hypotenuse will be the root of both legs squared. Since i² is equal to -1, we get c²=a²-b². c² becomes a negative number, and so the square root is an imaginary number. In our case, we travel 4 lightyears in 5 years, and our time elapsed for the wizard is 3 years.
We can get much higher time dilation values by making the triangle nearly symmetric. Travelling 54 lightyears in 55 years gives us a time elapsed of only 10.4 years.
Since celestial wizards are not too heavy compared to starships, celestial wizards have a much easier time accelerating to relativistic speeds and travelling between aeons, affecting the growth of civilizations to come.
Mana is not self-aware. It can, however, function as an extension of a celestial wizard's mind. Mana can be used to detect objects such as rogue planets, dwarf stars, and lone black holes which would otherwise be nearly impossible to find. It can also function as an antenna, allowing celestial wizards to receive transmissions from star systems.
On a planet, a celestial wizard's ESP takes on a much more limited form due to the scarcity of free Mana. The use of Mana always leaves lingering traces, allowing a celestial wizard to detect its use. Celestial wizards can thus track other celestial wizards, as well as any lifeform in general that manipulates Mana.
Magical Biology All biology comes from the
Mana, a form of life that exists inside interstellar gas clouds, subsisting off of energy gradients. It condenses on planetary surfaces to form life as we know it, although this process depletes volatile Mana very quickly across geological time-scales. That said, the early stages of a living world's formation are shaped by primordial creatures channelling vast amounts of energy through whatever free Mana still exists. Those soon become extinct as Mana condenses into more stable forms, but impact events such as the famous "Dinosaur Killer" asteroid sometimes reintroduce volatile Mana into the world, locked and preserved inside meteorites.
Mana reintroduction events are the primary drivers of evolution on a world, causing rapid change in whichever animals are exposed to it. These events can happen when meteorites containing Mana break up in the atmosphere, or alternatively when the star system passes through an interstellar concentration of Mana. Occasionally this will introduce life to worlds formerly barren, revitalizing life until Mana is depleted.
Most planets have had life at some point due to the power of Mana. Most traces have since vanished, however, although fossils can still be found on geologically inactive worlds.
Machine intelligences are commonly considered persons in civilizations that are not yet aware of Mana's existence. However, most machine intelligences are only virtual, that is, they are convincing simulation of true intelligence but not identical to the real thing. This does not mean that all machine intelligences are fake, however. Truly intelligent machines or A.I's are known as Xypotechs, and their existence and production is shrouded in mystery. Designs that are most analogous to the human (or any rational creature's) brain are most likely to support a Xypotech. These machines can interact with Mana in the same way that conscious beings can, and so Mana use is the chief test of self-awareness in computing.
Xypotechs are not necessarily sapient, although they invariably require a large investment of time and effort to create. As a result, the vast majority are modelled off sapient organisms.
All life comes from Mana, and so all life shares certain traits, although alien biologies are by no means the same as ours. There are forms of life that exist even on inhospitable planet types such as molten worlds, for a time. Mana can create "Death Worlds," as are known in the popular literature, although these are short-lived and rarely outlast their Mana supplies. Some stable configurations exist, such as Mana-manipulating life found in debris disks where Mana does not condense fully and is able to regenerate.
Magical Astronomy The universe is a large and mysterious place. This is a primer on the kinds of systems you might find, although it is by no means an exhaustive list.
Stars
M Dwarf (Red): By far the most common type of star. These are typically aged, lone stars formed early in the universe. As such, they have low metallicities and their planets tend to be much smaller. Red dwarf systems are often packed in close with several tidally-locked terrestrial planets tucked inward of the habitable zone. Young Red Dwarfs tend to emit harmful UV flares, which further complicate things.
K Dwarf (Orange): These stars are similar to Sol, but radiate much less energy (usually less than half). They are often old or middle-aged, and any habitable worlds they might have are likely to be tidally locked (unless they have thick atmospheres). These stars tend to be stable and have long lifetimes.
G Dwarf (Yellow): This is the class of stars that Sol belongs to. Although the UV energy they emit is borderline harmful to life, they can maintain non tidally-locked habitable worlds and typically have one or two gas giants if their metallicity is high.
F-Class Star: These are stars just above the mass of the sun. They typically emit far too much UV for complex life to survive, although assuming shielding they can sometimes have habitable worlds terraformed by simple life.
A-Class Star: These are bluish-white stars considerably more massive than Sol (by 40% or more). They emit harmful UV radiation and last only a handful of billions of years, making them unlikely to have worlds suitable for life. They contain a lot of desert worlds with stripped atmospheres, as well as Hadean worlds blanketed with dense CO2 atmospheres.
B and O Class: These classes are reserved for the massive blue stars with lifetimes measured in the dozens of millions of years and tremendous luminosities. They have many planets, but all planets around these stars are in the early stages of formation and will not last long in the case that the star has 8 or more solar masses. Those stars in particular are known for extremely violent endings wherein they briefly outshine galaxies.
Red Giants: Huge, bloated stars exist across the board in terms of masses. Non asymptotic giants typically have modest radii and stably burn helium shells for periods of several million to a billion years or more. These can maintain habitable planets well past the old system's frost line. Asymptotic Giant Branch stars are in their death throes, on the other hand, and typically shed large portions of their mass every year, eventually exposing the core and becoming White Dwarfs.
White Dwarfs: These are tiny stars with about the radius of Earth. They emit energy as part of the process of cooling down, but generate no energy of their own. They have incredibly high surface gravity due to their small size but are rarely more massive than the sun. A white dwarf's luminosity is extremely low, and since its progenator had a much larger radius than a white dwarf's habitable zone it is unlikely that any planet could exist there.
Neutron Stars: Even more compact than white dwarfs, these stars often get so hot that tthey emit x-rays. Neutron stars with magnetic fields are called pulsars and typically send out beams of electromagnetic radiation along their magnetic poles.
Stellar Mass Black Holes: The deadest of dead objects. Stellar mass black holes are smaller than neutron stars. While most neutron stars are within the 10-20 km range, a black hole with one stellar mass has a radius of 3 km. They sometimes have accretion disks, but this is not unique to black holes, as white dwarfs and neutron stars can also accrete matter. In binary systems a stellar remnant like a black hole or neutron star can pull gas from its primary, heating it through friction and emitting energy of its own.
Planets
Terrestial Planet Types:Terrestrial planets come in many flavors. The term "terrestrial" typically refers to planets made of silicate rock, much like the Earth and Mars, but here the definition is more broad.
Barren: These worlds have little or no atmosphere and have surfaces of exposed rock, often heavily cratered.
Desert: These worlds have thin atmospheres and weathered surfaces, although not thick enough to support liquids.
Oasis: These are deserts with thick enough atmospheres to support pools of water or other liquids, but not enough to allow for plate tectonics.
Marine: These are worlds with a hydrological cycle, either with water or some other liquid (such as hydrocarbons), as well as plate tectonics.
Oceanic: These are worlds fully covered in ocean, where land is never exposed to the surface at any point in time.
Hadean: These are worlds with a high-pressure atmospheres and scorching surface temperatures. They may or may not have oceans, but are dominated by their atmospheres.
Molten: These planets have molten surfaces, either due to tidal or solar heating. Their crust may be either solid in parts or fully liquid.
Silicate Worlds: Worlds made of rock. Just like Earth and Venus.
Metallic Worlds: Worlds composed of a large fraction of metals. They can either have started as silicate worlds but lost most of their silicates due to impacts (Mercury) or be formed metallic from the start.
Carbon Worlds: These are planets with a high abundance of carbon. Typically found around brown dwarfs and oxygen-poor systems, they lack water but may sometimes have atmospheres and hydrocarbon seas.
Ice Worlds: These planets are typically covered in ice and are found past the system's frost line. They rarely have atmospheres or weather, since the water is all frozen.
Gas Giants: These are planets mostly composed of hydrogen, with metallic hydrogen layers past a certain depth. Massive ones tend to have powerful magnetic fields and intense radiation belts.
Ice Giants: These are planets composed mostly of ices. They have incredibly thick atmospheres with a high proportion of hydrogen, and tend to have no clear surface boundary.
Ice Dwarfs: As opposed to Titans, these worlds are mostly composed of ices but have such thick atmospheres that there is no clear atmosphere-surface boundary. Commonly known as mini-Neptunes.
How to Play You are a celestial wizard, a being of unimaginable power who is one with Mana. You are able to push, pull, and interact with free Mana where present. Celestial wizards typically carry bottled Mana potions to support their powers whenever free Mana isn't available.
One of the perks of being a celestial wizard is the ability to fly through space, provided you have sufficient Mana. In interstellar space, a wizard can "cruise," causing interstellar Mana to resonate at your command and exert a pull on your body. This allows you to accelerate to near-lightspeed at will, although remember that at high speeds you undergo time dilation. Celestial wizards are thus arbiters of the ages, passing by worlds across the galaxy and guiding the development of civilization as we know it.
Interstellar Mana, however, is not thick enough to use for basic powers other than flight. To simply maintain a pocket of breathable atmosphere, celestial wizards require stored mana, which can only be gathered near gravity wells, especially from young star systems. Maintaining a breathable atmosphere does not require a lot of Mana, but it does occasionally need to be replenished.
ActionsActions use a d6 to determine if you fail or not. Instead of direct bonuses, I use an attribute called
affinity. Your affinity for an action is the amount of times you can reroll an action if you roll a 1 or 2. If your affinity is negative, it instead counts how many times you have to reroll if you get a 4 or 5. Rolling 6's always overshoots, regardless of what your bonuses are.
There is a great diversity of powers available to a celestial wizard, although most tend to focus on a few aspects in particular.
Though there are innumerable categories of powers, or kinesis (plural), their execution usually takes one of the basic Arts:
Creation: The conversion of information (and energy) into forms
Reduction: The conversion of forms into information (and energy)
Alteration: The modification of external information (energy conserved)
Redirection: The transfer of energy
You will notice that there are certain pairs of Arts that combo into advanced Arts:
Creation + Reduction = Transformation: Changing the form of an object
Creation + Alteration = Animation: Controlling a created form
Creation + Redirection = Construction: Merging forms together
Reduction + Alteration = Deconstruction: Destroy only part of a substance
Reduction + Redirection = Destruction: Releasing energy stored in a substance
Alteration + Redirection = Augmentation: Modifying an external form
The term information does not necessarily refer to information as in facts, propositions, and so on, although those are included. Information is always conserved even when objects are destroyed. Objects cannot simply vanish--their information must go somewhere. This is part of the principle of equivalent exchange.
Creation and Reduction simply focus information (Creation) or free information (Reduction)
-You will be able to multicast spells, at the cost of 1 respective affinity per extra spell for that turn. For example, if you have an affinity of 3 in Redirection and you fire 3 Master Sparks, you get a -2 to Redirection affinity and so all three Master Spark rolls still have +1 affinity.
-Mana is not able to act independently. Your powers come from your character's conscious thoughts. Effects that trigger when your character is dead can't trigger, and effects that trigger while your character is light-seconds away will have a noticeable delay equal to 2*distance/speed of light.
-You can, however, enable toggled effects. These will subtract a certain amount of affinity from their respective Art, but can be switched every turn.
-Mana is flexible. Celestial wizards aren't limited to a specific set of powers, they can naturally heal themselves, levitate small objects, fly around, etc. The appearance of their spells is more of how they mentally envision their spells to look like.
-Mana is consumed in proportion to the amount of energy you are manipulating. So if you want to convert a planet into energy, you need a planet's worth of Mana. It's a curve that starts out level and approaches a linear fit for the amount of energy used.
The Setting Due to virtual-reality technology and a planet-wide netvserse, Earth-Luna has developed a monoculture and abandoned its colonization ideals. There
are five major colonies on Venus, Mars, Ceres, Europa, and Neptune, although they are mostly isolated and do not communicate much aside from joint asteroid-mining expeditions (and a fringe culture of interplanetary freelancers).
Earth-Luna here refers to Earth and the colonized Moon.
Instead, most human celestial wizards originated from the past, from ancient to modern times. Earth hasn't produced any celestial wizards since 2025, and Luna pretty much hasn't either. As such, you can be any character from myth or lore, provided that you have either found mana to keep yourself young/alive (if you wish to keep the form of an old person, that's fine) until the year 3000 AD.
Elsewhere, celestial wizards are born regularly in the stellar neighborhood (and further out in the galaxy) and travel across the stars, shaping civilizations as they go. Most wizards use interstellar Mana to repair their bodies and keep themselves from aging, although relativistic travel also contributes to a lack of aging. The average celestial wizard has encountered maybe 5-10 other wizards in their lives, and has encountered civilizations in various stages of development, although few choose to make public contact:
A-Class: Prehistoric, no writing or large-scale organization
B-Class: Intermediate, pre-industrial.
Ca-Class: Industrial, pre-computing.
Cb-Class: Computing, pre-industrial.
D-Class: Post-industrial with computers
E-Class: Systemwide exploitation, no permanent colonies.
F-Class: Permanent systemwide colonization.
The classes end after F because timelag makes it nearly impossible to have an interstellar empire. G-Class is sometimes hypothetically reserved for civilizations spanning multiple systems.
Sci-fi technology here is restricted to semi-plausible speculation. For example, STL Alcubierre drives are allowed, but FTL wormholes and antigravity are not. Reactionless drives are okay, however, as long as they have low thrust compared to reaction drives. As far as energy goes, more advanced civilizations will have much more compact storage, although keep in mind that miniaturizing either will require antimatter, which is pretty high up there on the "most difficult to manufacture" list.
Magic Nanites are restricted because Mana is already Magic Nanites. However, nanotechnology does allow for very small, cell scale machines with the ability to manipulate and move around in a dense medium. Flying, self-replicating nanobots that fire lasers and heal lost limbs are pushing it, though.
AI's can be made, but require a dedicated type of substrate and cannot be moved between substrates. Its substrate can, however, be some kind of emergent network of machines, and in this case you can have rogue AI's that live in a network of computers and constantly add new computers to the mix, although these are difficult to discover. AI's are called Xypotechs, based on Count to a Trillion's terminology (a machine that is "awake").
A universal test for whether a machine is sapient or not is its ability to manipulate Mana.
Dyson spheres are rather impractical because of the resource costs, and a considerable amount of the energy a dyson sphere generates would probably have to be spent preventing the sphere from collapsing or drifting. That said, I'm not ruling out dyson spheres, but simply cautioning worldbuilders in their use.
In terms of destructive potential (since this always crops up) you must remember that planets and astronomical objects are BIG. To boil the oceans you need 3.4×10^27 Joules. While this would only take 8.84 seconds for the sun's total luminosity (3.846*10^26 Watts) to achieve, it would take the Earth's total incoming solar flux of 173,000 terrawatts exactly 622.78 years to boil the oceans completely. Also, the mass-energy of this amount (E=mc²) is 37.83 billion kilograms, so if your hypothetical EXTERMINATUS fleet has less than 40 million tonnes of combined mass (~20 million of which is antimatter), you won't boil no oceans.
Sign-ups This is the character sheet. Your character will most likely be:
-A human from 2025 AD or earlier
-An alien from the local stellar neighborhood
-An alien from elsewhere (edges of the galaxy, inside Sagittarius A*, etc.)
[b]Character Name: [/b]
[b]Place of Origin: [/b]
A brief description of your homeland/planet
[b]Bio: [/b]
Background info, history, circumstances, etc.
[b]Appearance: [/b]
What is your character's signature outfit (if he has one).
[b]Powers: [/b]
Describe your powers and any weapons/equipment you carry with you across the ages.
Remember that celestial wizards all have certain basic powers, such as telekinesis and flight, but they also tend to focus on a particular style more often than not. You can have as wide a variety of skills as you want, as long as none of them individually are overpowered.
[b]Stats: [/b]
---Basic Arts---
Creation: x
Reduction: x
Alteration: x
Redirection: x
---Advanced Arts---
Transformation: x
Animation: x
Construction:
Deconstruction: x
Destruction: x
Augmentation: x
(Delete advanced Arts with 0 affinity to save space)
'x' is your affinity with a category. You have 8 points. Basic Arts cost 2 points for 1 affinity, while advanced Arts only require 1.
If you wish to have affinity with some miscellaneous skill (like diplomacy or engineering) then those also cost 1 point each.
Here are some example characters I've made:
Character Name: Mira
Place of Origin: Earth, 1928 A.D.
Bio:
The eldest daughter of a poor working mother and a father with dementia, Mira faced poverty firsthand and routinely petitioned her mother to send her to work to support the family, but her mother refused every time and instead had Mira study literature and the arts so that she could grow up to be a successful woman.
Mira much preferred science, however, and instead borrowed books from an adult friend so she could read them while she was supposed to study. She learned about chemistry, botany, and physics, but admired physics the most, especially the latest theories on nuclear fusion. When she started reading about astronomy she became obsessed with the mechanics of the celestial bodies, watching the stars every night through the same bedroom window and wishing that she could someday fly up into the sky herself. She was 13 at this time.
One evening, Mira noticed a star that was much brighter than the others and moved across the night sky. She thought it was a meteor and ran outside to view it with binoculars. When she actually viewed it, however, she saw a gleaming figure that blinded her with its light. The figure approached her on its glowing wings, and it was devastated to find that its light had blinded Mira. The damage dealt was so severe that the figure could not mend her eyes unless he would make Mira into a celestial wizard.
So the figure offered the girl a deal: Mira would come to the realm of stars and learn to become a celestial wizard, while the figure would change the mind of anybody Mira wished.
Mira wished to fix her father's mind. And her wish was granted. The rest... is history.
Appearance:
Mira prefers a striped gown of many colors underneath a dark coat which resembles the starry night. She wears her long white hair freely along with a hairpin that resembles the form of a hydrogen atom. Though she still chooses to be blind, Mira wears sunglasses even at night and instead sees by a cloud of Mana that circles her at all times.
Powers:
Mira's spells typically involve fusing objects together and releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of radiant beams. She also fires beams from
She carries her bedroom window with her and uses it as a Mana-hardened telekinetic weapon. Her spells pass through it, and she can concentrate Mana on its surface to amplify her skills with it. She can also reflect attacks with it.
Stats:
---Basic Arts---
Creation: 0
Reduction: 2
Alteration: 1
Redirection: 1
Character Name: The Psychomancer
Place of Origin:
A rogue planet by the name of Quaor. A microsingularity in the planet's core provided energy for a diverse ecosystem of Mana-based lifeforms inside a cavern layer, while the hollow core of the world contained a sizeable amount of free Mana for the Quaori to exploit.
Bio:
A person without an identity. The Psychomancer is the last survivor of a horrific attempt to merge his homeworld's population into one collective entity. The collective entity was destroyed in the process, along with half of the Psychomancer's mind. The Psychomancer today roams the stars, sabotaging any attempts to establish a utopia like the people of Quaor attempted to.
Appearance:
The Psychomancer wears a black glass fishbowl-style helmet at all times, along with a black-and-green trenchcoat with glowing zigzag lines, unbuttoned and collar flaring out. Beneath the coat he wears a suit of downward-pointing chevron-shaped carbon plates that conform loosely to the shape of his body. He wears black gloves and shoes at all times.
Powers:
The Psychomancer is a mysterious entity without a true identity. His appearance contains memetic encodings that inhibit perception, only allowing sapient beings to perceive the Psychomancer as a "presence" without a source.
In this case, the Psychomancer's body is not perceived as a person, but as an unidentifiable object. Smart beings can notice a trend between the Presence's actions and the movement of the Psychomancer's body, but only occasionally.
Grainy images or audio clips do not transmit this effect.
The Psychomancer specializes in the manipulation of thoughts and perception of objects. The Psychomancer can, for example, cause people to believe they are injured or perceive a nonexistent barrier in front of them.
Stats:
---Basic Arts---
Creation: 0
Reduction: 0
Alteration: 2
Redirection: 1
---Advanced Arts---
Augmentation: 2
Players will start in space, somewhere in the local stellar neighborhood. There will be a basic list of radio sources for each player, along with extra info about the relevant stars if necessary.
Author
Topic: Roll to be a Celestial Space Wizard - Turn 30, page 23 (Read 34017 times)