We've all seen them in fantasy literature. Ancient wizards, their bodies worn away by the use of their powers. People like Darth Nihilus, so consumed by their magic that they literally radiate an aura of pain and disease.
How does Multiverser handle things like that? Is it possible for a Verser to be consumed by magic? We know from previous discussions that lichdom is not closed to Versers (and indeed is a good way to prevent Versing out), but what about a permanent condition that continuously kills you?
Is it possible to damage oneself so badly with effects like that that no Verse can sustain you, effectively trapping you in the ether between Verses?
I did write in World A Week: Hermit about an eight thousand year old verser who was so infused with scriff that even hitting his hand hard on the ground was enough to drive him into the scriff, and from thence back to another material universe. He chose to enter Deep Eternity as had been foretold by an alien seer on the planet Tadeusz met him on, but the seer spoke a billion years ago. The planet blew up, for the same reason that comets fly for the death of princes, and because it was World A "Week!!" and Tadeusz needed to get versed out.
Also, I wrote up a list of about Fifty Magic Limits under some title or another.
Some magic requires you to have an item owned by the target. Other magic curses you if you use it for ill (The Three-fold Rule). Other magic requires 'mana', a magic power boost, gathered up from say battlefields. Other magic requires you to be in an altered frame of consciousness to work.
And of course, some magic has the Limit: Must Roll Simple Stamina Check after use. Failure causes loss of stamina point permanently. MJ or Wodium can tell you how much that would be worth in percentage points in casting a spell.
And of course, some magic has the Limit: Must Roll Simple Stamina Check after use. Failure causes loss of stamina point permanently.
With the caveat that if any permanent loss of an attribute would drive it down into the next level, no loss is sustained and the character instead verses out. Thus the use of such magics gets a bit limited once stamina drops to 2@1 (or 1@1, if it was 1@ to begin with, but if you have a 1@ stamina why on Earth are you using that spell?).
I would probably grant +15 for that limitation (destruction of a nigh-unique item or person is +20), and you could probably convince me to add plus 1-5 for 'ritual is exhausting,' which is more commonly used for spells that involve dances and long time factors but could certainly apply here.
Is it possible to damage oneself so badly with effects like that that no Verse can sustain you, effectively trapping you in the ether between Verses?
No.
We know from previous discussions that lichdom is not closed to Versers . . .
Which discussions?
In all cases, the death of the verser's body leads to verse-out. Think of the soul as being the body's equipment. It would be possible for a verser to be a lich in someone else's body (their dead body, of course), but he would have to protect his original body carefully to avoid being versed out by its death. It would be almost like having two phylacteries.
Is it possible for a Verser to be consumed by magic?
Yes. Assuming you mean "completely," he then verses out and verses into another universe, wherein he assumes he last stable form. To be more specific, I'd need a more detailed scenario. If you mean only partially, then also yes, but note again that anything which would permanently reduce an attribute to the point that it drops a level instead results in a verse-out with no attribute loss.
. . . but what about a permanent condition that continuously kills you?
I would handle this identically to how I would handle an addiction resulting in lethal withdrawal - that is, exactly how the First Book of Worlds tells me I should. This is the case wherein the cause of death is so gradual that when the verser finally verses out, his 'last stable form' includes the condition that eventually led to his death. He then continues to die until dead, at which point he reverts to his last stable form and resumes dying. This continues until either A) he or someone else cures the condition in one of the many worlds he visits, or B) the condition disappears on its own in the same way an addiction will fade when the addict goes cold turkey. Given the immortality of the verser, A or B will eventually occur.
Note that a verser in this situation likely will not last long in any given world once he has started to verse out - I can't imagine giving him any longer than a month, even for the slowest and most torturous conditions. Twelve hours is probably the cap for all but extraordinarily extraordinary cases.
Wodium - We got into lichdom when we were talking about undeath and vampirism and how it affects the Verser. I postulated that because the process of becoming a lich takes you straight from living to undead without passing through "dead" first (because it essentially moves your soul into your phylactery and animates your body with Necromancy in one motion) it is a path of undeath not closed to the Verser (that is, it does not undo itself by Versing you out).
That's the problem with most forms of vampirism - you have to die before you can undie. Lichdom doesn't work that way - there is no moment of deadness in the middle. You start the ritual alive and finish it undead, without ever actually dying.
At the very least nobody has contradicted me on this yet.
Ah. Point. I was envisioning a different sort of ritual.
Though, there's still the question of what that kind of undeadness means, exactly. Seems to me that you've essentially shapechanged into an inanimate object; beyond that, given that you were already immortal, your undeath isn't really doing anything for you.
Sorry to bring something up unrelated, but what happens if a verser is infected by vampirism?
Wouldn't the 'last stable state' include being infected with vampirism? Would that be one of those things that would steadily kill the verser in every world, like the scenario mentioned by Wodium?
Krillis, that depends on the vampirism. Most forms of vampirism involve killing you first such that you are infected after; for a verser that means death, verse-out, and no infection. Since all of the other forms are the special cases, naturally their answers are also special, dependent on the details.
Wodium - The benefit of lichdom to the Verser is that it allows you to remain in a Verse beyond your normal term. Because the death of your body is not your actual death - which the ritual redefines to include first the destruction of your body, then the destruction of your phylactery - it allows a Verser to escape Versing out if, for instance, he is particularly attached to a given Verse or is working on some eons-long project and wishes to stay. The ritual also grants a lich certain other powers which vary depending on your interpretation of the myths, but which always include a significant boost in overall magical power and a respectable (though not to the level of the death knight or vampire) increase in one's physical strength and stamina (since you effectively have no vital organs, for instance, you are significantly harder to kill).
Krillis - The problem with most forms of vampirism is that you must first be drained of all of your blood, then be fed the blood of another vampire in order to rise as a vampire. The moment you die of exsanguination, you die, and Verse out.
Mind you, this is NOT how the Embrace worked in Dracula. The Count only had to feed you his blood slowly over time in order to turn you, another example of going from living to undead with no death in the middle. This version of the Embrace was popularized in modern fiction, most notably by the novel "Interview With a Vampire" and the "Vampire: the Masquerade" role-playing game.
It is not death in the abstract which causes a verser to scriff out; it's the scriff infecting his neural network. Because the verser's body is what is scriff-infected, destruction of that body will result in his versing out, magic ritual or no.
The only way I can think of for the verser to avoid versing out in the event of his body's destruction is to remove all scriff from that body in advance - and any skill which can do that would also have the capability of stripping a verser of his verser status.
The ritual also grants a lich certain other powers,
which, with the possible exception of the increased resistance to wounds, are not necessarily dependent on an undead state. These things can be obtained through other magics; my point was that the attraction of undeath itself is somewhat diminished for a verser.
Incidentally, I would model the resistance to wounding due to undeath as an array of B12@ damage resistance skills rather than as an increase in strength or stamina. Such increases could be included in the ritual, of course, but I think that particular effect works better if treated separately from any attribute increase.
I'm inclined to agree with you on the B12@ damage resistance.
If the scriff infecting his neural network is what makes one a Verser, what happens to a Verser who has no neural network? If, for instance, he replaces his brain and spine with cybernetic components, or develops a Bod Shapeshifting ability that makes him essentially amorphous (rather like Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or Clayface from Batman)? Now he still has scriff, theoretically, but nowhere for it to nest. Is he still a Verser?
And, as for lichdom, I think it's still possible to use it to nail yourself to the world, if you figure that part of what you're storing in your phylactery is some or all of your scriff as a by-product of storing your soul in there. The whole idea is that the death of your body is not your actual death. You can go through a thousand bodies and just grow a new one every one some self-righteous do-gooder kills one, so long as your phylactery remains.
While I agree that the appeal of undeath itself is significantly diminished for a Verser, who is immortal and capable of phenomenal things without it, I think abilities which allow a Verser to remain in a given Verse still have their appeal. Lichdom, along with certain forms of turning-into-an-animated-object powers, still have that appeal. It's more about redefining what constitutes your body, I think. In the case of the "I turn into an animated suit of armor," maybe the only part that constitutes your actual body is a glyph painted in blood inside the breastplate, and the rest is just dressing that you're controlling via magic. For the lich, maybe the phylactery now constitutes your body - it's where your mind is seated - and your now-undead former meat shell is now being animated via a sort of permanent telepresence. Either way, the effect is the same: slagging what people think of as "you" doesn't Verse you out, because the You that they see isn't the real You, which is what the stay-here-at-all-costs minded Verser would want out of it.
Mind you, I didn't intend this to become another "Undeath and Versing" debate. I just wanted to know how MV handled those "you really ought not be doing this, it's going to eat you" kind of abilities.
All of the effects you describe are achievable. I think that the verser would have to be very careful about how he achieved them. If I were personally going after lichdom, I would clone my body, permanently possess the clone, and polymorph my original body into my "phylactery" (a shilling).
If the scriff infecting his neural network is what makes one a Verser, what happens to a Verser who has no neural network? If, for instance . . . Now he still has scriff, theoretically, but nowhere for it to nest. Is he still a Verser?
Yes, he is still a verser, and his original body is still scriff-infected. This is because <hand-waving>.
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Mind you, I didn't intend this to become another "Undeath and Versing" debate. I just wanted to know how MV handled those "you really ought not be doing this, it's going to eat you" kind of abilities.
And the reason I'm addressing the undeath stuff (besides it being interesting and tricky) is because I think I've said everything I have to say about these cases in general: I've brought up the treatment of lethal addiction and repeated a reminder concerning the rule for threatened permanent reduction in verser attribute levels. Beyond that, I have little to contribute in the absence of concrete examples. Perhaps other folks have useful rules of thumb, but my blanket answer for "how does Multiverser handle stuff like [X]?" is, "case by case."
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Edited to add:
Either way, the effect is the same: slagging what people think of as "you" doesn't Verse you out, because the You that they see isn't the real You, which is what the stay-here-at-all-costs minded Verser would want out of it.
The traditional liching process does not, I think, accomplish this. It was designed to protect ordinary folk, for whom Death is death of the soul. For the verser, it is death of the soul or the body. Once a person has become a lich, death of the body is no longer death of the soul, and thus the ordinary person is protected. The verser is not; he is instead doubly vulnerable.
All that means, of course, is that he should avoid the "traditional liching process."
/End Edit
On second thought, that would leave me versing into the next world as a shilling. Use a Bod morphing skill to change my original body into a shilling; that way I have a chance in hell of reversing the procedure once I end up in a magicless world.
If you'll excuse my peculiarity, I am going to use the word "Spirit" where others have used the word "Soul". This is because I am a dichotomist, and for me a "Soul" is the combination of a spirit infused within a body--in other words, an entire person. It would make no sense to me to separate the soul from the body, because the body is half of the soul.
The benefit of lichdom to the Verser is that it allows you to remain in a Verse beyond your normal term. Because the death of your body is not your actual death - which the ritual redefines to include first the destruction of your body, then the destruction of your phylactery - it allows a Verser to escape Versing out if, for instance, he is particularly attached to a given Verse or is working on some eons-long project and wishes to stay.
As Scott has observed, the rule says that the spirit is irrevocably the property of the body, and cannot be disowned; that it is the body in which scriff is contained; that when the body is killed, the body verses out, and the spirit goes with it. Whether the phylactery in which the spirit is contained also goes with it is a matter of whether it constitutes property of the verser or not, but the spirit goes.
Scott's workaround, to create a second body which is not scriff-infected and morph the primary body into the form of the phylactery, is excellent thinking, and would achieve that part of the intended effect. The point then is that you are going to be manipulating the body by remote control of some sort from the position of an inanimate object which is your real body. That's not the same thing as being a lich, but it does mean that the body that appears to be you is not you. You could presumably achieve the same effect by possessing the body of another person. In fact, you could stash your body in a safe place and move your spirit into a corpse which you then animate by any of several methods; if that body is destroyed/killed, you are disembodied, but since your body is protected (assuming no one else has found it and possessed it) you can return to it easily enough, or possess another body by the same method.
However, if your body is destroyed, it verses out, and takes your spirit with it.
The ritual also grants a lich certain other powers which vary depending on your interpretation of the myths, but which always include a significant boost in overall magical power and a respectable (though not to the level of the death knight or vampire) increase in one's physical strength and stamina (since you effectively have no vital organs, for instance, you are significantly harder to kill).
The overall boost in magic power is probably in most cases due to the fact that your bias just went up to something in the 13@ range; if that is not an increase in bias for you, then it's not going to have much effect. The increase in physical attributes means that you are incorporating 15@ alter reality magic into this as well, although like Scott I would not give you an increased stamina but a set of invulnerabilities and resistances, some bod and some mag. I've got a lot of these figured out in connection with some of the undead in worlds not yet published, but we'll get them out eventually. This of course also is part of why the spell is so difficult: it's doing so many different things, each of which must have its minimums met and add a penalty for combining spells which has to be compensated by increased ritual.
And again as Scott says, there are easier ways to do this.
If the scriff infecting his neural network is what makes one a Verser, what happens to a Verser who has no neural network? If, for instance, he replaces his brain and spine with cybernetic components, or develops a Bod Shapeshifting ability that makes him essentially amorphous (rather like Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or Clayface from Batman)? Now he still has scriff, theoretically, but nowhere for it to nest. Is he still a Verser?
The examples you give all have neural networks; they just have different neural networks. Further, the neural network is the primary conduit for scriff, because it provides electrical pathways that reach every cell of the body, but the scriff ultimately attaches to every molecule in the body. The cybernetic neural network is also electrical, and so also carries scriff, and we have had amorphous versers, the most famous of whom is Whisp, who can take any shape as long as he retains his bronze color.
There are ways of removing scriff from the body. They make you mortal.
Getting back to the original question....
--M. J. Young
...Getting back to the original question, Eric has proposed that you can take as a limitation that a spell will have detrimental effects on you. This is not one of the limitations listed in the book (because frankly, who would take it?), but depending on the probability and degree of detriment, such a limitation might be worth quite a bit.
The trick is defining it in a manner that will impact play without violating fundamental rules. One of those fundamental rules is the reverse level barrier. Call it a bone, if you like; it seemed to us that anyone who had put in the work to reach level 2 (not to mention level 3) in an attribute should have that protected, and really, no player character should have to play with a 0@ attribute in anything. Thus you cannot cross the level barrier backwards permanently; you verse out if anything would cause that. (You can have these as temporary or transient effects, but these do not actually reduce your attribute, they only reduce your performance temporarily.) Thus you cannot reduce your stamina to 0@10 permanently, and no one can do that to you--it's automatic verse-out for a verser.
This makes a lot of other supposed detriments difficult. For example, you might argue that the use of magic disfigures you over time, but if it cannot reduce your charisma or animal magnetism across the level barrier, how much difference will it make?
Now, I can envision a world in which this is the "expected" effect of magic, and therefore all magic users suffer it (this protection does not apply to indigs, only to versers). A verser who learned magic with that expectation would suffer that penalty up to the point where he dropped to the level barrier, and thereafter every spell that caused a drop would verse him out--until he learned to do magic that did not have that penalty.
--M. J. Young
I've noticed on some characters (like the Werser Hephalaestron) certain attributes that are not listed in X@Y format - things like "Immune to gravity as a damage source."
Would it possible for magic that withers you, as MJ said reducing your appearance by making you look like a festering corpse (e.g. Emperor Palpatine), to add something like that to your record? "Frightening appearance"? Yeah, your charisma and animal magnetism are still 2@1 ... if anyone will sit still long enough to listen to you, considering you look like Nosferatu. If James Bond looked like he'd been beaten with the ugly stick, how many people would listen to "Bond, James Bond," instead of taking one look at him and being "OMG kill it with fire!" and running away?
In Hephalaestron's case, that's probably shorthand for an array of expert-level immunity and/or invulnerability skills. Since his character sheet would take a lot of time to detail fully - he's supposed to be on the order of the Elder Versers - that kind of shorthand is necessary.
But yes, you could probably do this. It would likely be the result of an incorporated M1@8 Curse, with defined effects. This is actually similar to modeling a lich's durability with B12@'s instead of with increased Stamina and Resistance - we don't touch the attributes, but instead layer some skill effects on top of them. Most likely, viewers are asked to make an attribute check to overcome revulsion, and if they do so, then the character's An-Mag or Charisma is allowed to shine through.
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Edit: alternatively, it's completely possible to have withering, etc. with no effect on social attributes or interactions at all. Are you less likely to sit still and listen to Emperor Palpatine because he looks like the twisted offspring of prune and a pug dog? No. He's Emperor bloody Palpatine, and you listen whether you want to or not.
The 'lose stamina' or 'appearance' from magic is fairly common in stories. Its probably in the bottom half of the Top Ten of magic limits in stories. Even D20 has 'lose a year of life from casting a Wish spell' which is a possibly milder variant on this.
Which is to say, there should be a world created in which Stamina Loss magic is taught because its just so common.
Probably the most common is 'physical involvement' followed by 'exhaustion-varying by power of spell' followed by 'loss of materials'. Of course, 'time used' and 'visualization required' fit in there too. Maybe 'exhaustion' is most common because it happens in magics where people toss down smokes and powders, but it also happens in magics which are purely mental.
One interesting world might be a world of oh...four types of magic.
Stamina Loss is paired with Extra Effect. High ritual is used as well, along with time and frequently apprentices. This loads up the spells with lots of power, and then that gets expended in part by success, and in part by making the spell massively effective....call these the Thaumaturge Guild. Hiring them is very expensive, but if you need a castle blown up, they're cheaper than hiring an army of mercenaries. They typically only talk to nobles and professional scholars being elitist types.
Rhymespell is what is taught in the villages and among the peasants. Its quick, simple, and largely weak. A visualization, a quiet poem of four lines, and bam...magic. Maybe. Its also by tradition, non-visible. Skilled practioners are called Rhymers and Bards.
The Lightwand use a personalized wand of ash, and heal, and drive out evil influences, and bless crops. They are arcane magicians devoted to holy ends. Their official name is The Order of the Lightwand. They are sometimes called 'Ashworkers' as they use Ash trees, and also use basic fertilization in addition to magic (in many of their works, their is less magic than it might seem as they use basic tech also). They are known for spreading ash on fields to help fertilize them, and using ash to purify water. Much of their magic is ritual, and individualistic, but they do have combat magics which are quick, and powerful. They achieve this by enchanting their personalized wand with spells that can be released by Will and Word.
Power Mages is what they like to be called. Dark Magi is a close second. Most people don't say their name, but only indulge in one of the offshoots of the Rhymers which is an ancient dying tradition of hand magic. They form a hand sign to ward off evil, and that is what these are known by.
They get power from blood sacrifice, usually from others, and frequently from unwilling others. Animals, people, special types of people, and finally from their own selves are the Four Categories of Blood with each yielding more power. Frequently, their spells must be cast at night, and upon 'holy' altars. They summon creatures to carry out their wills. Some of these creatures are not explicitly malevolent. In some worlds, a Giant Scorpion is merely a normal predator, but summoned here it is a threat to any near it. Worse, it can be bound by magic to a purpose.
Of course, some of the beings summoned are explicitly malevolent instead of just predatory.
The typical response of the other groups of magicians is TG ("Raise a mighty curse to shatter their works for seven generations!"); Order ("Send forth a magi to track them down, and destroy them.); and Rhymer (...wish ill upon them...) and Bard ("Lets grab our pitchforks and torches and burn them out!) so they tend to hide especially as they are poorly suited to direct conflict with all but the weaker Rhymers. Instead, they weaken a country, and gather supporters from the downtrodden and over-ambitious created by a country weakening, and eventually raise a host of horrors to ravage the Guild and the Order and burn the villages and turn the King of the land into an undead zombie.
Which is to say that they're are a few wildernesses thick with monstrous things where the Power Mages had their way, and basically depopulated the land, and turned it over to Things in the Night.