- Location
- the Literature Club
Fireballs are kinda old, aren't they? And they don't really become more interesting if you're a high-order mage and you scale them up and start blowing up cities.
But fireballs aren't the only thing up a magician's sleeve. I mean, did Maleficent just cast Meteor on everyone in the kingdom when they rustled her jimmies? Hell no! Because Maleficent is a class act, and she knows that the COOL thing to do is to cast a strategic-level curse that doesn't technically kill anyone, but is still pretty terrible all around.
So that's what interests me in this thread - ideas for curses you could cast on entire nations to discourage them from messing with you. But, and this is very important, they can't actually kill anyone. You have to let the Empire know they're on your shit list without using a cheap loophole like "the entire population of Imperiolopolis is nonlethally teleported two miles straight up and I'm not responsible for what gravity decides to do afterwards."
One cool curse, used magnificently in Alastair Reynold's Century Rain, is a condition called Amusica. The novel is SF, so it's caused by a nanovirus, but for our purposes it can just be magic. What it does is make its victims completely tone-deaf. That doesn't seem like much, but what it actually MEANS is that you become unable to listen to music. It's just noise to you, with absolutely no emotional charge. You can't even tell when music is happening, you can just tell that sometimes things are loud, and sometimes they aren't. You can still comprehend human speech, but you lose out all the context that makes up the difference between hearing someone speak, and reading a transcript of their speech.
Another curse is dream domination, where each night, you make everyone experience terrible nightmares. And then they wake up, and get to enjoy some sleep paralysis.
Or you could strike everyone with the inability to recognize human faces...
But fireballs aren't the only thing up a magician's sleeve. I mean, did Maleficent just cast Meteor on everyone in the kingdom when they rustled her jimmies? Hell no! Because Maleficent is a class act, and she knows that the COOL thing to do is to cast a strategic-level curse that doesn't technically kill anyone, but is still pretty terrible all around.
So that's what interests me in this thread - ideas for curses you could cast on entire nations to discourage them from messing with you. But, and this is very important, they can't actually kill anyone. You have to let the Empire know they're on your shit list without using a cheap loophole like "the entire population of Imperiolopolis is nonlethally teleported two miles straight up and I'm not responsible for what gravity decides to do afterwards."
One cool curse, used magnificently in Alastair Reynold's Century Rain, is a condition called Amusica. The novel is SF, so it's caused by a nanovirus, but for our purposes it can just be magic. What it does is make its victims completely tone-deaf. That doesn't seem like much, but what it actually MEANS is that you become unable to listen to music. It's just noise to you, with absolutely no emotional charge. You can't even tell when music is happening, you can just tell that sometimes things are loud, and sometimes they aren't. You can still comprehend human speech, but you lose out all the context that makes up the difference between hearing someone speak, and reading a transcript of their speech.
Another curse is dream domination, where each night, you make everyone experience terrible nightmares. And then they wake up, and get to enjoy some sleep paralysis.
Or you could strike everyone with the inability to recognize human faces...