“On no! The Big Bad is too powerful, none of our spells are strong enough to inflict damage!”
“…You have elemental transformation spells, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Give me a mage and five minutes, and I’ll have the entire province sterilized. And glowing in the dark.”
In one campaign I played in, someone tried to make a magical nuke. The entire Pantheon showed up to tell them to stop it.
Gods are just mortals with enough nukes to force their way into the God club.
In the campaign setting I’m developing the world works roughly like ancient Greek philosophers thought it worked. Physics beyond Newtonian motion (and even that is iffy) simply doesn’t exist.
Solves all the problems with wondering what would happen if you transmuted this into that and so on and so forth.
a curious enchanter starts wondering how far they can slice things in half, eventually they go insane as they realize it literally just keeps going and never becomes strange at all, despite their calculations and ponderings saying this makes no fucking sense
they set out on a mad quest to interrogate the gods on what the fuck is going on
Made me think of the Godhammer bomb from Pillars of Eternity
You mean the inverse square law? Imagining a square law here, gravity would increase as objects got further away, and objects would appear four times larger at twice the distance… Weird.
the square-cube law refers to how if a thing gets uniformly scaled, its surface area scales by the square of the factor, but its volume scales by the cube. if you grew a human, say, to 10 times its normal height, the cross sectional area of their long bones would increase by a factor of 100, while their weight would increase by a factor of 1000. this is a thing that crops up all over discussions about fantastic architecture, engineering, and biology.
It’s not talking about gravity, but about weight. Normally, any living being or construct is limited in size, because cross-section, which determines structural integrity, grows with the square of the size, but volume and thus weight grows with the cube. Now with levitation magic, on the other hand…
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Space Travel. Also, nano tubes.
HPMOR is unironically the worst thing to have come out of Harry Potter, other than Harry Potter itself
(I’ll take my Draco x Harry fics tho)
*best
No I seriously stand by it, even though I find the writing, structure, and pacing mediocre at best (just like thousands upon thousands of other fics), its emergence as an entry point to most people to rationalists and the whole cult of AI is genuinely pissing me off, because now we have american techbros who can just say “roko’s baselisk” to make investors shit money out of fear of their actually-not-a-cult-homegrown devil, and a homegrown hell, that they’re then condemning everyone in, unless they get more money to create their god
What does HPMOR, or rationalism as a whole, have to do with AI? And I have a hard time believing that any major investor would be seriously swayed by roko’s basilisk.
What does rationalism have to do with AI?
You’re seriously asking me that?
Nevermind, go have fun with it then, I’m not interested
I’ve read that story. It was a lot of fun. Sadly I don’t remember what it was called, it was on /r/hfy.
Out of Cruel Space? That’s basically entirely based on the premise of “Human engineering was only limited to the biological/physical/rational laws of their own galaxy”
Do you know some keywords perhaps?
I think this is it https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/nfsakq/out_of_cruel_space_part_1/
Authorial fetishes apparent
Jfc “part 997”
This guy needs a good bonk
Plot twist: that was all written in one year by a 15 year old girl
The way they describe men is also a little bonk worthy. Sensing some bi energy for sho
