...YMMV. Most of the parties I was a part of didn't starve without doing that, through the magical art of not journeying into the wilderness for very long. If we did...well, like I said, pretty much every character I made bought magic items that provided food. There are some low-level Cleric spells that can do the same, so Survival isn't always a necessity.
True. A better phrasing may have beeen that parties aren't generally capable of cooking for themselves and have to depend on either the guy with the Survival skill, magic, or carrying Sufficient Rations.
How many stories end in 'and then the evil witch starved'? On the other hand, 'damsel in distress' might be a trope we could aim for ... once we know more about echos.
There is a trope for using just about anything for evil. If we can't even do simple non-evil actions without worrying about the Echo making it evil then there is no point to doing anything, she should just give up and hope the Echo wants her to survive.
What kinds of food are safe to eat raw? Do we know? No we do not, because we know nothing of food prep.
They tend to go...
We can raise a damned skeleton army and intentionally create intelligent magical items. I think you're getting a little bit too paranoid.
How about we go ask a bard?
Last option: Lich
Sounds about right. Or they're doing an urban campaign and food supply is not much of an issue.
If divination cannot tell you 'don't eat these berries, they're poisonous', I'd say we wasted our skill points.
More common than princesses. Given our residential location, I'm guessing we have one floating around our house somewhere.
...That is probably the main purpose the vast majority of it's users use it for. Consider for a moment how common water-divining was even as recently as the 1900's in our world.
If divining the location of a bard is easier than simple questions about nature, I will be very disappointed in how unbalanced and dumb Alivaril's magic system is. Basic, practical uses should be a HELL of a lot easier than seeing the future or searching miles of territory.
...Did you include water when you asked Alivaril about making food via magic? Because, while organic compounds are highly complex, water very much is not. That would probably be much easier to create via Transmutation.
That was what is known as a tangent. Also known as a minor ADHD episode. I am easily distracted and, judging by the number of random tangents found in his other quest's discussions, so are a fair chunk of Alivaril's player-base.
I like to keep my options open. Going adventuring is an option. You claimed it was not, and I disagreed. I never said it was the best option, but let's not close any line of thought preemptively. Needs must and all that.
This. Thanks for having my back, V. I appreciate it.
Because apparently any method she can use to actually find a bard, including the non-evil-supposed-to-be-used-to-find-things-like-people-who-can-help-you-magic, is in some way evil.
I don't think that it will be twisted. I think that it can be and that Iris needs to be carefully monitoring her state of mind to make sure it doesn't end badly. This is also why I'm voting to include the Ghost Princess and track down a journal or some other record we can use to check against; theoretically, changing extant items will be more difficult than changing how a person thinks, since there isn't a a simple route like "power corrupted her and she grew evil".
...when? I said it was a bad idea, not that it was impossible. In fact, I explicitly said we could do it if we wanted to, I just wanted us to be smart about it. Behold:
What do you base this hypothesis on? We are finding dark artifacts in our treasure room - and get invitations from warlords.
It feels like there should be a component that considers how observable an action was. Invitations from warlords are a simple result of someone else considering us to be an Evil Sorceress and are easily within the Echo's power. The artifacts appearing don't seem to happen in front of Iris's eyes and can be explained away as Schrodinger's Artifact or a glitch in the matrix. Changing text that Iris hasn't just already seen but wrote with her own hands is well beyond that.
Creating a replica of the diary that's more in tune with the echo - that too?
See: been skimming for several pages. Sorry for misinterpreting you.
Mate, Alivaril tends to make understandable magic systems, if only because 'lol it's magic don't need to explain' ones piss him off. And if practical, minor spells are out of reach, but less minor ones are not, that starts seriously trending into 'lol it's magic' territory. Sh*t, even the law of contagion and sympathetic magic are rules, and they can be used. Especially the law of contagion and sympathetic magic, the former of which is a common thing in alchemy and both are often found in divination.
Fair enough, but I think getting a handle on precisely what rules our magic follows, particularly Transmutation and Divination, would be a good idea before we do much planning. Both of them have iffy rules compared to enchantment and necromancy.
The details don't matter. Think narratively. The warlords aren't part of the story and can be written in without trouble. The artifacts are a little bit more tricky, but can still be easily revealed by drawing back the curtains on part of the story or setting with only a small "why didn't you notice these before". A journal or research notes, on the other hand, have already been written, and by the viewpoint character's hand, no less. The Ghost Princess's journal would be suspect, as would a newspaper from the townsfolk. Iris's journal isn't bulletproof, because it hasn't appeared on-screen yet, but it's still far more solid than the contents of a random drawer in her lab somewhere.
I think you may be right, simply for meta-reasons - if the QM would reform each and every thing of the main character there weren't a quest left.
You're probably right about water's simplicity making it one of the easiest things to transmute. It's just that that's not particularly useful, because transmutations aren't permanent by default, and you're screwed if you decide to go that way anyway with master-class transmuting and then get hit by a disjunction or something. *Evil Witch Vanishes In A Puff Of Smoke* type screwed, because more and more of our body will be made out of straight up magic.
That's...rather bizarre, frankly. Very odd form of Transmutation if conversion spells are so easily reversed. More like just shaping magic into objects than turning one object into another. Transmutation magic is usually a process than can only be reversed by the application of more transmutation magic. And why would we just poof if we turned stone to water? Wouldn't the magic reversing just turn our blood to rock, along with any other liquid we had in us that we had gained from rock-water?
Hm. I suppose that makes sens-
