I'm watching the horror move 'Stay Alive'. In it, the heroes play a next-gen video game that is 'underground', made by Bellman Games. In order to start the illegal game, you have to recite out loud 'Elizabeth's Prayer' which even tho' the players don't realize it brings Countess Elizabeth Bathory's ghost back from the dead to materialize in ghastly form and do horrible things to the heroes. She can only be killed by nailing her head, her heart, and her neck or something, and then burning her blood.
First the hero dies in the game, then the ghost comes for the hero, and the hero dies in reality.
Later, the game starts playing even if the hero stops playing.
This falls under magic triggered by enchantment even if the trigger does not believe in magic. Its one of the 'even if you're an atheist you can trigger this spell' spells, I guess.
At one point, our hero in the real world needs a crowbar so the guy playing at the video game drops a crowbar which appears in the real world to help his buddy.
There's a movie you should check out. It's called eXistenZ. (And no, that's not a misspelling) People play video games, the controller becomes absorbed inside their own body. You have to insert and remove different controllers at different points in the game, until finally, not even the players are certain if they're in the game or not. It's a cool movie. I'll have to rent it again.
(Doing Therapy)
weird. Reminds me of the last starfighter a bit. (that is the name of it, right? the movie where the kid plays an arcade game and gets sucked inside of it?)
Actually the video game is a training simulator for a real starship and they recruit him to their fleet. Tron the guy gets sucked inside a video game. (I remember when that came out. They said the special effects would never be topped....)
(Doing Therapy)
I just watched 'Stay Alive' last night after reading this.
I wasn't paying as much as I intended as it was 3am and I was tired. At one point a rose was used to ward off the queens ghost I believe. How would something like that work in Multiverser? The spirit actually dispersed after flying through the rose and couldn't kill the one character when he fell into a rose patch.
Two possibilities on the rose thing.
One is that the character using the rose to ward the ghost has in essence created a dispel or protection (the latter is probably the better choice), probably one specific to that ghost, and the rose bush was similarly used by someone to ward against the ghost.
The other is that the ghost has a weakness to roses that causes it to dissolve.
Concerning the "atheists can do this spell" thing, I would look for an alternative. Here are a few of the options:
- The "game designer" has actually worked the magic, and set up a "trigger event" for it. This would be similar to the way wards work, in which the magic lies dormant until a creature of the type against which the ward is set arrives, at which point the event of the arrival of the creature triggers the magic. In this case, it is the words of the prayer that are the trigger event, and if someone says them it happens.
- The ghost is not summoned, but is always present ignoring the living until someone says whatever is in that prayer, which provokes it.
- There is an always-active magic device that has been discovered and placed at the starting point of the game, designed to awaken the ghost when someone is present. In this case, I would base the chance of success of the device on that of its creator, and have it cast a spell as an attack against whoever says those words (the speaking of the words makes the victim a target), but would be mindful that an atheist gets his bonus against the magic. Atheists can't perform magic, but they can be attacked by it, but they do get protections against it, but those protections aren't perfect.
- Abandon the notion that it is magical entirely, and assume some psionically active device which draws energy from the target's own mind. One interesting aspect of this approach is that you can make the "ghost" a realized figment of the victim's imagination--what he fears and anticipates is what the ghost can do. It also explains the rose, because if the victim expects the rose to be a weakness of the ghost, it will be. Realizing this will give the victim more control over the situation, but he will still have to sleep, and at that point the ghost will gain power.
Concerning those movies, The Last Starfighter was the first movie in which all the special effects were what we now call CGI, computer generated images. Tron was the first movie in which the bulk of the film was computer animation, the actors providing the faces and voices in a world that existed entirely within the computer in actuality as well as in the story.
And when advertising hype says "the best ever" it means only "up to this time". No one expects that what is done today will not be bested tomorrow; it is only asserted that what is done today bests everything done up through yesterday.
--M. J. Young
Abandon the notion that it is magical entirely, and assume some psionically active device which draws energy from the target's own mind. One interesting aspect of this approach is that you can make the "ghost" a realized figment of the victim's imagination--what he fears and anticipates is what the ghost can do. It also explains the rose, because if the victim expects the rose to be a weakness of the ghost, it will be. Realizing this will give the victim more control over the situation, but he will still have to sleep, and at that point the ghost will gain power.
This was actually suggested by one of the protagonists in the movie. He tries explaining the deaths that occur based on what the movie calls perceptive reality. I know this is a real theorem, but I think the movie took liberties with it as movies tend to do. In the movie the one protagonist suggested that the gamers began to believe so strongly in the game that it would happen in the real world simply because they believed it strongly enough.
The movie seemed to point towards this character being wrong, but never goes so far as to explicitly state this so who knows, he may have been right.