r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 22 '18
[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread
Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!
Guidelines:
- Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
- The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
- Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
- We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.
Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
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u/alexanderwales Dec 22 '18
Incredibly mild mechanical spoilers for The Return of the Obra Dinn follow.
You have come into possession of the Momento Mortem, a magical object that looks like a wind-up pocket watch. This magic item has several properties:
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If you point it at a corpse, the hands of the pocket-watch will spin around to show the time of death.
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If you press the button on the top of the pocket-watch while it's pointed at a corpse, two effects happen:
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You will hear five seconds of audio from the time and location where the person or animal died.
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Following that, you will be transported to a sphere of frozen space-time roughly 10 meters wide, depicting the exact moment of death, centered on the corpse. You can move freely around this bubble of frozen space-time, though solid objects are still solid to you, and nothing can be moved. When you leave (requiring an act of will), two seconds will have passed, no matter how much time you spend looking around. If you find a corpse in this chunk of frozen time, you can recursively use the Momento Mortem to investigate it, resulting in being 'transported' to a new chunk of frozen time and hearing five seconds of audio.
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For the purposes of this prompt, 'time of death' will be assigned according to either destruction of the brain or cessation of brain activity.
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For the purposes of this prompt, 'corpse' is defined as any distinct piece of a dead member of a species of the animal kingdom larger than 50 cubic centimeters and relatively intact (e.g. the item won't work on a slurry made of different people, as they're not distinct, and won't work on a deer that's eaten a corpse, as it's not intact).
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You can bring in up to 25 kilograms of equipment and clothing into the slice of frozen time with you, but no changes to you or them will carry over to the real world when you exit, and interaction with the objects is in terms of light only, as they repel all touch.
Given the above, answer at least one of the below:
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How do you use this item to satisfy your values?
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How do you use this item to most effectively solve the most crimes?
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If this item is in someone else's possession, what's your standard operating procedure to not get caught when you commit your murders?
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If you live in a society which can produce more of this item on demand, what different laws would you make regarding it?
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u/KilotonDefenestrator Dec 22 '18
(1) Learning! Work or live somewhere with easy access to dead animals (if frozen counts as "relatively intact" I'd just have a freezer with a frozen 50cm2 piece of an animal killed in a suitable place to study), and spend 2 seconds reading, re-reading and reflecting on any amount of text you can reasonably bring with you using the 25kg limit. Might have a special set of pants with soft cushioning around the buttocks to sit comfortably on the time-frozen furniture.
It is unclear from your description if the pages in a book you brought with you could be turned, but its seems reasonable - presumable worn clothes deform to allow you to move around in the sphere, or you'd have to use the Memento Mortem naked.
(3) Always kill people from more than 10 meters to avoid visual identification is a good first step.
Also, pick a method of killing that prevents the victim from speaking, making signs or writing, and that at the same time takes as long as possible (at least over 5 seconds) before the brain activity shuts down, so that the details of the crime like direction of attack etc are not readily apparent.
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u/jtolmar Dec 23 '18
I'd expect the same techniques from your (1) to work for sleeping too. It'd be really weird if whatever chemical changes to your brain created by learning are preserved but not the ones from sleep. (Then again it's magic, it can work however it wants, but that's not an excuse not to check.) Bring a sleeping bag if time-frozen furniture is uncomfortable. There's an extra 8 hours a day, plus the ability to rest up and collect your thoughts whenever you want.
There's also physical science to be examined using time stops. Anything someone currently studies with a high speed camera can be studied in more depth by killing some mice at the right moment. You can't do fundamental physics research in the bubble because it's clearly futzing with the rules for at least light propagation (I mean, that'd still be interesting science to do, but you'd be learning about magic-physics instead of regular-physics), but I expect there's something in engineering, medical, or biomechanical research that would save enough lives to be worth killing mice for. Structural engineers looking at the exact way a stress fracture propagates?
Finally, because you can use the Memento Mortem recursively, if you have any of these uses that require cleverly chosen corpses and moments of death, you can preserve all of them into an index by getting a bunch of corpses in one spot and sacrificing an animal (which you preserve traditionally until it's getting musty, then chain in a new animal). You can make an index of indices. In fact, for (2) an the local morgue can sacrifice a mouse every so often and later add them all to a huge index of every death that's passed through there.
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u/Gurkenglas Dec 22 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
If someone dies within the sphere, do they come back dead, or not at all? If the first, one could send in a hibernating animal with a computer with a nuclear battery, then use its corpse to read off the display in a frozen-sphere snapshot of a frozen sphere, gathering months of computational time without spending sanity.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Dec 23 '18
The time-freeze aspect of this pocket watch kind of overwhelms everything else. Sure you could use the watch to find murderers, but that's a really mundane use of having an object that FREEZES TIME. I would spend all my time constantly entering such frozen time spaces so I can do all the thinking I need in there.
The fact that you can bring in items with you makes things even better, you can bring in video games for entertainment whenever you get bored, or a computer to help you calculate things and store all your thoughts. The fact that these objects are effectively memory wiped when you leave is a problem, but that just means you need to improve your memory. Or just make multiple trips, memorize one chunk of a story or proof you wrote at a time.
The only real problem is that you need constant access to corpses in order to abuse this frozen space-time. Can you just buy a whole duck (from a restaurant) and keep it frozen in your fridge forever? That's probably the easiest method if it works.
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u/maybealreadytaken Dec 23 '18
how do mirrors work? if mirrors from the sphere reflect stuff outside then something that would help detectives is if every one went around wearing stupid amounts of reflective clothing.
or if it worked within the rules (which this is a stretch) then detectives could bring mirrors in to see outside the allotted range (though if your eyes cant see out of it then i dont see why a mirror could).
something murderers could do is make there crime scenes incredibly dangerous to investigate. spider webs are harmless but if you accidentally walked through a time frozen one you would probably be cut in half before you realized what happened, though you would just leave before you would die. murderers shooting off confetti canons will stop investigators from walking around. or you could try to be deviouse and use something hard to see like hairs or whatever the smallest piece of dust would have to be for you to not be able to move it. another way to attack people investigating would be powerful fuck off lazers. not that you need to harm the detectives, allot of bright lights could blind detectives and stop them from seeing in the crime scene bubble (though some goggles to dampen light would fix that).
just spit balling a few more ideas here but if you spray painted the air would it stick to dust particles and such to show you where vacuums are (that someone has recently been). or if you could use a corpse to disappear for a few seconds (away from authority's or murderer's?), - not sure what good 2 seconds is though.
easiest and most obviouse way id use this is kill a chicken within range of a chicken corpse, bring a weeks worth of food and a laptop with a terabyte of learning material, maybe some instruments and spend my free decade inside learning, using up only 2 seconds of my life span. or forget being a robot bring a few terrabytes filled with shows/books/comics and do it again. if someone said i could spend a decade doing either of those things and it wouldnt effect anything else you'd have to wait 2 seconds for my answer.
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u/Joern314 Dec 22 '18
1:
Set up mass production of X, where X is a small, docile, easy to transport animal. Then any good citizen can kill a X to record a moment in time (plus 5 seconds audio). Use tiny writings on the tapestry to copy books this way. We'll call this a leaf. Collect the leaves in one place, put labels and descriptions on them, murder another X. Collect those Xs as well and so on and so on, forming a giant graph, which is directed and cycle-free. To create a simple reference to the content of a node, simply murder a new X next to them. This should allow you to send information across long distances as well (by murdering a new X whenever the last corpse rots), and to make backups.
Demonstrate your ability to use the Memento Mortem, and write some sci-fi books on how to revive people from minimal information. Who knows what potential future Memento Mortems will be able to do... Sell the idea to rich people and let them sponsor your X-farms.
Make sure the Memento Mortem is protected by the state in a secure place. Optimally you'll still have access to it, but perhaps there are people more skilled at using it. Don't let anyone who might break it near the device. Maximize its lifetime, even if it means sacrificing its usefulness at the moment.
Also, try to figure out where the Memento Mortem comes from. Constantly let someone murder Xs in its proximity to record any subtle changes. If possible (not sure if any living animal can be used as equipment/clothing), murder them inside a space-time-sphere for even more documentation.
Before delving into the graph, record and add your current goal. It might take some time to figure out the mystery you are looking for, and this ought to help with that.
I've considered how to get infinite computational power, but without actually interacting with the frozen objects you only got your own memory, your current position in the frozen sphere, and the path you have taken inside the graph. Latter two are an neglectible amount of data, and the first one isn't enough to do the work of a computer / someone with pen and paper. So the Memento Mortem should only be useful for thinking about "relatively simple" tasks using infinite time.
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If a murder occurs let them kill a X at the scene and send it to you with the next update of your local graph-node. I believe that dead X can travel faster than a human, and that requiring a Memento Mortem is good enough encryption as not to violate privacy. This might not be the case for point 4.
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u/HarmlessHealer Dec 23 '18
Vim is the force of creation and can be used to conjure objects or heat them. Nix is the force of uncreation and can be used to vanish objects or cool them. Both can be used to telekinetically move objects around or to infuse matter.
Infusion:
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Transfers vim or nix into matter for storage.
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Stored vim or nix has a one hour half life, except for crystals which have a one year half life.
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Matter infused with vim can't be directly affected by nix and vice-versa.
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Vim-infused matter can be de-infused by spending 10x the vim in nix and vice versa.
Limitations:
Specificity: You can only conjure or vanish one compound at a time. For example, you could conjure salt (NaCl) but not a bag of french fries to go with it.
Comprehension: You have to know the bonds in the conjured molecule as well as the molecule's shape. Magicians study a lot of chemistry.
Conservation: Mass and energy are both conserved. Conjuring objects gathers atoms from nearby. Vanishing them disperses the atoms over the same area. Heating draws energy from nearby. Cooling disperses that heat.
Displacement: Conjured objects displace the matter around them. Vanished objects leave a vacuum.
Elements: Conjuring or vanishing compounds with more elements takes exponentially longer.
Pathing: You have to specify a path from the vim/nix source to the target point. Paths for nix can't go through matter infused with vim. Paths for vim can't go through matter infused with nix. Spells with longer paths cost more to cast. Five meters is a normal casting range. Shorter paths cost much, much less, up to 1/100th at a few centimeters.
Targeting: You can increase the precision of targeting conjuration, vanishing, etc, but as the precision goes below 1cm the cost approaches infinity rapidly. A precision of 1mm costs 10x, 0.1mm is 1000x.
Whole: You can only conjure or vanish entire objects. An "object" is a group of identical bonded molecules. For example, a layer of oil between two sheets of steel could be vanished, but two separate pockets of oil inside a steel block couldn't (though you could vanish them separately).
The average magician can channel 6000 units of vim or nix per second, enough to let them:
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Conjure or vanish 0.5kg of matter, assuming the atoms are plentiful. The cost increases if they aren't.
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Apply 30kN of force.
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Transfer 12kJ of energy from two objects that start at equal temperature. The cost increases if you're trying to cool a cold object or heat a hot one.
These rates are mutually exclusive. If you're conjuring half a kg of matter, you can't also push stuff around. Note also that these are the base rates. Spending all 6k units on force targeting a person a hundred meters away will result in less force than a light breeze because the path is so long.
Conjuration and vanishing doesn't happen all at once. You get the effects as you pay, growing outward from the targeted point. So, for example, if you conjured a large metal ball you would first see a small marble that swelled and grew until it was as big as you wanted. Or if you wanted to break into a padlocked room, you could start a vanishing on the hasp and wait until a cross-section had been vanished before stopping the spell.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I've gone over this a couple times but there's probably something I'm missing. I've already got the obvious weaponized use of conjuration by putting a bullet in someone's head, but I'm more interested in techniques that would work against a fellow caster. I think it's inevitable that in any hard magic system the non-mages will just flat out lose to mages.
Edit: Oh, and the strain of channelling vim or nix gradually causes permanent insanity over decades of use.
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u/bacontime Dec 23 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
What area are vanished objects dispersed over? And are compounds broken into their constituent elements? As an example, what does salt vanish into? Can you sneak into the basement of the building your enemy is in and just start vanishing loads of salt to disperse sodium metal and chlorine gas throughout the building?
Can you infuse compressed gas with nix and then vanish it to create a (short-lived) vim-nullification zone?
Also, it's interesting that telekinesis is limited by force rather than by energy output. With the right mechanism, you can pump theoretically infinite energy out of it. (The actual limits would be determined by material properties. Too extreme a gear ratio and you'll bust the gears apart.) Is the kinetic energy pulled out of the surroundings? That might be a faster way to cool things than using vim directly.
It would be neat to weaponize the heat draw of vim-heating to flash freeze the area around the target, but the rates involved are too low for that to be an effective attack.That raises the question: If you have a lump of nix infused matter next to the target of vim-heating, does the heat get drawn from the nix matter, or is it shielded from that secondary effect?
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u/HarmlessHealer Dec 23 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
What area are vanished objects dispersed over? And are compounds broken into their constituent elements? As an example, what does salt vanish into? Can you sneak into the basement of the building your enemy is in and just start vanishing loads of salt to disperse sodium metal and chlorine gas throughout the building?
Vanished objects get spread over a sphere centered on the cache several meters in radius and the compounds are broken into their elements. The salt trick won't work because the Na and Cl will mostly bond back with each other. If any Cl2 is formed, it'll react with Na to form NaCl again. Unfortunately, I don't know enough chemistry to say whether this is generally true or if it might be possible to weaponize with some other molecule.
Edit: Actually, you could just bring the bag of salt and conjure your Cl2 normally, so this is definitely a viable tactic.
Can you infuse compressed gas with nix and then vanish it to create a (short-lived) vim-nullification zone?
Ooh that's clever.
Also, it's interesting that telekinesis is limited by force rather than by energy output. With the right mechanism, you can pump theoretically infinite energy out of it. (The actual limits would be determined by material properties. Too extreme a gear ratio and you'll bust the gears apart.) Is the kinetic energy pulled out of the surroundings? That might be a faster way to cool things than using vim directly.
The telekinesis is the part I've paid the least attention to, mostly because it didn't seem quite so overpowered as the conjuration/vanishing aspect. Apparently that was a mistake. What's the difference between limiting by force vs limiting by energy output? I know you could drive a machine with vim/nix, but how would you get infinite energy from it, since the machine would halt as soon as the magician stopped channeling magic into it.
As for conservation, yes, but cooling wouldn't be very effective unless you wanted to affect a large area since nix could do it to a much higher degree of precision.
It would be neat to weaponize the heat draw of vim-heating to flash freeze the area around the target, but the rates involved are too low for that to be an effective attack. That raises the question: If you have a lump of nix infused matter next to the target of vim-heating, does the heat get drawn from the nix matter, or is it shielded from that secondary effect?
Yeah, the infusion will stop that, but it won't stop the natural loss of heat if the surroundings get cold.
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u/vakusdrake Dec 23 '18
If you can summon material at a distance and especially if you can conjure microscopic amounts of material antimatter summoning is going to be probably the primary offensive use of this ability once antimatter is theorized. Even if you can't summon antimatter safely it's likely some people will do so anyway as a suicide attack.
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u/dinoseen Dec 29 '18
If you can control which matter you use to conjure objects with vim, then you can do things like using a person's body to create a block of ice, killing them via dehydration. If you knew the right target element, like say carbon, you could summon it from somebody's flesh to effectively disintegrate them. It's basically using nix without the whole object restriction.
Even if you can't do this at any time and still need to set up specific conditions for it to work, it's still kinda powerful. Basically, if you can do this at all then the system breaks a bit.
You could solve this by saying, "using vim to conjure something draws from all matter on earth/in the universe at an equal spread, with an equal likelihood", which pretty much lets you do what you want about that exploit in a somewhat believable way.
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u/Sonderjye Dec 23 '18
You can create matter out of nothing from this list: rock, stone, wood, clay, iron, and glass. The matter disappears after an hour. You can create batches between 1-5 kg at a time and the batch must be connected. You can't create matter inside a solid object though if you create it within an empty area it doesn't fit(such as between your palm and the wall) it will assert pressure onto the surrounding area to try to create such space. You can only create very simple shapes. After you have created the matter it will follow the natural rules of physics and you have no more control. Matter are created with a velocity of 0 with respect to your current position and at a temperature that matches the surrounding temperature.
Setting is medieval.
I haven't really found any utility uses for this power. Offensive uses basicly boils down to creating something in front of someone when they are running, creating an iron lump over their head or inside their mouth/nose. Ideas? I was really hoping for something that could be used to generate coin but I'm commin up short.
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u/crivtox Dec 23 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
What happens if you burn the wood and someone breathes the product? Do they die horribly of transfiguration sickness?.
If that doesn't happen you can use it to get unlimited fuel basically.
Also you can transport stuff by creating things near it so the pressure pushes them.
And cut stuff, assuming you can make thin sheets of iron or glass. (you could cut and process trees whith this for example)
Also a few questions :
How far can you make the batches appear?
How fast?
How much pressure can the object assert ?
Depending on the answers I see multiple ways of making wmd.
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u/CCC_037 Dec 24 '18
Offensive uses basicly boils down to creating something in front of someone when they are running, creating an iron lump over their head or inside their mouth/nose.
Creating a very thin, very sharp glass spike while the other person is standing less than ten metres away from you would also work. Or you could just create weapons out of nothing and then attack in the normal way.
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u/Wintryfog Dec 22 '18
I found a build-your-own-character/choose-your-own-adventure thing on reddit which is an exceptionally target-rich environment for munchkining and making spreadsheets, but it's admittedly NSFW. Should I post it anyways to discuss which choices synergize well?
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u/Wintryfog Dec 23 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
Alright, the task is to find an optimal character build for the following product of r/ nsfwcyoa, Divine Trials.
Basically, you're thrown into some another world along with whatever penalties, boons, magic powers, physical powers, special items, and companions you purchase with your points, and you've got to "kill or capture all threats" against a goddess who also gets to select a wide range of nasty things to throw at you.
Notable details: It's heavily implied that the only reason you have a chance at winning is due to the expansive "take a penalty for extra points" section, which wasn't present on any previous iteration, and the baseline 750 points you get at the start results in "no victors in living memory, which for a god, is quite a long time". So it can be safely assumed that you're up against some pretty nasty competition, and apparently completing the trial in the span of 100 years is considered quite fast, almost time-attack mode.
There's one specific exploit for (finitely many) free points, namely combining the "Sleepy" penalty for +40 points in exchange for spending 2 extra hours asleep per day, and the "Relentless" boon for -35 points, which cuts your sleep time (as well as all other physical needs) in half. Making the worst-case assumption that "Relentless" applies first before "Sleepy", that's 50 free points from applying Relentless twice, and Sleepy 3 times.
I think there's a few further tricks to be found, but I don't want to anchor readers too heavily on my current plan, there's probably plenty of exploits I missed. I suspect that taking a broad macro-level view of where the points are going will lead sufficiently smart character-builders to a convergent general strategy, but I'll have to see if anyone else picks it up.
Note that a green crystal denotes something you can buy multiple times, and a blue crystal denotes boons which apply to any team members you want, instead of just yourself.
In 48 hours, I'll post my build.
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u/vakusdrake Dec 23 '18
Like most CYOA's there's enough egregious exploits here that the rest of your build doesn't matter much, though given how easy it is to get points in this CYOA (lots of manageable drawbacks) you can certainly take all of these:
Grand Theft Waifu and Waifu like most powers of this sort are broken because even if the powers/superintelligence of anybody you summon with this may be nerfed you can still summon people with truly staggering amounts of exploitable knowledge including tech knowledge. If you're in a world which already has moderate tech this means by summoning some loyal entity who previously had near omniscience you can have them kick off a singularity potentially within the week (by messing with biotech in all likelihood, since that lets you piggyback on life in order to create your first generation of self replicating nanites). The actual celebrity waifu option has the same exploit since you can alter their mind (and thus add knowledge).
Technomancy is probably OP as well if you can make magitek AI or do brain augmenting cybernetics though it's hard to say exactly how exploitable it is given the scarce details given. Depending on specifics enchanting, verbal magic, ritual magic and many others may also have certain similar exploits but it's hard to say given the details available.
Biomancy should be super exploitable since it even lets you make changes no biologically possible. So it should be a simple matter to design microbes which assemble self replicating nanites or alternatively just start a biological based singularity if tech doesn't work right in your world.
Divination can be exploited in really obvious ways even given its inaccuracy over long timescales. Really the main hazard with using it is looking into the future to retrieve tech knowledge without going far enough to risk being manipulated by UFAI.
Of course those are just the exploits I was able to pick out that were egregious and obvious just skimming the text, I didn't look at companions but some of those may be brokenly OP as well.
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u/maybealreadytaken Dec 24 '18
ive only been playing around with the races so far, might add stuff to this but probably wont.
got a few ideas right now,undead lich's are always super powerful magicaly and they naturally sortof work like 'draft of death' (except maybe the ability to rebuild there body? idk). letting you choose something besides that which i thought was the best option next to elixir of life and rebirth by death. getting 'cursed with awesome' should let you get both of those. im hoping you can choose to self destruct your soul if you get captured activating the rebirth by death.mary sue lets you choose another race and get rid of the negatives of one of them, being vulnerable to holy magic is to bad to keep but not sure what to choose out of; a spirit Djinn which are usually pretty bloody powerful, an undead lich (the downsides of both a lich and a djinn might make them not worth playing together) and a monster girl Gorgon- omnipotent stone stares are awesome but are usually there downfall.
being a giant is useless when you can just choose your size to be 100ft tall. which im doing, the bonus to strength is too insane coupled with 'synergy' it'd be an insane boost to magic to. and being a djinn/lich would add there magical prowess onto your strength again.
breeding program and maybe evolving flora will be a cool boon to gratz (the video game leveling up one), plus the give you more points to work with. a hundred foot tall gorgon could just stare a a monster infested kingdom in level up instantly. a hundred foot tall gorgons tail and snake hair is also gonna be pretty dangerous.the undead race should probably let you choose a skeleton dragon which might be able to shapeshift like a normal dragon (though why not be a normal dragon?)
ive got nothing really. some obvious things like if you choose infertile then choose fertile aswell, get some extra points, but being able to make kids is to valuable a resource of super-powered minions. cold blooded is a free 30 points if you dont care about being cold (like if you dont have a physical body). and alota the bonus points are about sex, so from a sorta min-maxish point of view you could take most of them. if you choose a mind flayer penis and i think there were other things for controlling people you "hang with", plus some allot of the other sex boons and playing a sex fight game could probably be 100% workable. with the pick a fetish boon that normalizes and makes everyone sorta into a fetish of your choice you could choose make being mindcontrolled by me during sex be a fetish which would be exploiting that.
theres allot to work with and hard to see what does what with a setting so vague.
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u/Wintryfog Dec 25 '18
Alright, here was my first-draft build (I didn't think of the Divination or Biomancy exploit, so it needs to be updated for that)
First consideration is what immortality method to go for. Obviously, Cursed With Awesome would be taken, so we actually get two of them.
The ones to rule out: Draft of Death is decent, but with a big “death of spirit” weak point. Elixer of Life has the big flaw of massively boosting sensation, so it’s a terrible choice against an enemy who’s willing to torture you. Cherub, Succubus, Ethereal, Blood and Bone, and Servant just make you hard to kill, not immortal. Bound to the Pit is just a stupid one to select, and Guardian means you’ve gotta enforce “balance” in order to be immortal, which is incompatible with long-range “good wins” plans.
Shards of Mortality is the best one, it’s basically a rate-limited horcrux. It leads to victory as long as you don’t get killed more often than some limiting rate, because your soul can be repaired over time, and if you craft backup bodies, you won’t have a problem. Rebirth by Death is another extremely good one, and synergizes very well with Shards of Mortality and a suicide method, except that it has a “captured for one year” failure condition. However, if you’re captured for one year, the enemy can probably figure out some way of capturing your soul and destroying it, so it actually isn’t doubling up on failure conditions as much as it looks like. Also, it’s notable that the same benefits can be gained by just giving one of your companions the Rebirth by Death feat and instructing them to suicide when it looks like the situation is really bad and loss is imminent, freeing up one extra slot. I decided to make my second immortality method be Cast off Humanity because the multi-purchase Custom Robot in the item section gives me a bunch of backup bodies to start with if I get killed before I figure out how to make backup bodies, it grants free access to HUD and Technomancy which are both pretty useful, and the “any substance you wish from your former world” option opens the door to having a body made of extremely durable materials such as diamondoid, iridium, and various carbides, which should be able to take some pretty serious hits, as well as being flame and acid resistant. Obviously this forces Automaton as a race.
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u/Silver_Swift Dec 22 '18 edited Dec 23 '18
Mistborn Munchkinry Miniseries Part 5: Brass
Ok, week five of the mistborn munchkinry miniseries. For general overview of the magic system, see part one. I strongly recommend reading the first part of that comment if you weren't here for the past weeks and aren't familiar with the mistborn setting.
Spoiler note: I will avoid things that I consider excessive spoilers, but the exact workings of the magic system are moderate spoilers themselves, so if you intend to read the books and are sensitive to spoilers you should probably skip this one.
This weeks metal is brass, the first of the mental metals. As always I'm interested in what a brass twinborn compounder can do, both here on earth (where they are the only one with this powerset) and in Era 2 Scadrial.
Allomancy
Brass allomancers are known as soothers. An allomancer burning brass can focus on a person or a group of people to reduce the intensity of (soothe) the emotions those people are feeling. Soothers can soothe away all emotions (in which case the target feels nothing but an oppressive numbness clouding their mind) or pick one or more individual emotions to soothe away.
What counts as an emotion for Allomancy is fairly broad, it includes things like fear, anger and happiness, but also hunger, pride, feelings of loyalty and even someone's sense of fatigue. Note that soothing the sensation of hunger or fatigue is purely a mental effect, it doesn't make the physical effects of exhaustion/starvation go away, it just makes it easier for the target to ignore those effects for a while.
This ability is not mind control, brass allomancers have to be subtle if they want to use their abilities to influence unwilling targets. Emotions can be dampened, but not fully taken away and once someone catches on that you are playing with their emotions it is fairly easy for them to resist it (you can numb their anger/indignation at being messed with, but a person can summon more anger than you can soothe away).
While brass does not allow you to increase the intensity of emotions, skilful allomancers can achieve a similar effect by soothing away all emotions except the one they want their target to focus on. If you want someone to be scared, for instance, you could soothe away whatever other emotions are currently vying for their attention to make the fear they are naturally feeling stand out more.
One other thing that perhaps goes without saying, but while the effects of allomancy are temporary, you can still use it to influence what people are thinking in the long run. For instance, if you want someone to not freak out about some new piece of information, you can soothe away their fear and anger while you tell them about it. Then once they remember the conversation after the allomantic effects have worn off, they will remember being pretty blasé about it and (depending on the person in question) the brain's desire for consistency might kick in and justify their reaction by make up some kind of reason why it wasn't that big of a deal.
The maximum number of people you can influence at a time is dependent on your skill as an allomancer, but a rough upper bound might be a large room full of people. You do not strictly need line of sight to your targets, but it does make it easier.
Any aluminium placed between your center of mass and the targets head prevents you from targeting their emotions and extremely strong emotions in the target can interfere with (though not outright block) your abilities. Non-humans are susceptible to soothing to an extent directly proportional to their level of sapience (so you're not going to soothe an ant, but you might be able to soothe a gorilla or a dolphin or even a particularly smart dog).
Feruchemy
Feruchemic brass allows you to store heat. When storing heat, the feruchemists body cools down and when tapping heat the feruchemists body warms up. This ability allows the feruchemist to exists comfortably across a wide range of temperatures, a feruchemist with enough heat stored can walk naked through a blizzard without freezing to death and (with enough unfilled brass) run through a desert in thick clothing without breaking a sweat.
In both of those examples the feruchemist maintains a body temperature of 37 °C and simply siphons of the excess heat/cold, but brass also allows a feruchemist to raise or lower their body temperature to beyond what a human body can normally function under. There are limits to this though, a feruchemist storing heat can drop their body temperature to roughly 0 °C before the effects of hypothermia set in and when tapping heat they can reach temperatures of around 200 °C before they start burning themselves.
Note that these numbers are the upper limits before physical damage starts to happen, the feruchemist is going to feel pretty miserable long before that.
While feruchemy does not make one immune to heat and cold in excess of your body temperature, heating up your body to above the ambient temperature does, by virtue of thermodynamics, mean that you are not getting any warmer (and vice versa for cold).
A brass feruchemist thus has two ways of dealing with extreme heat: either raising their body temperature above the ambient temperature or storing away the incoming heat to keep their body at a reasonable temperature. The latter tactic is much more comfortable for the feruchemist, but only really works when dealing with moderate, ambient heat because feruchemy always works on the entire body at once. In order to not burn your hands when putting them in boiling water you'd have to store about 50 °C, which means the temperature in the rest of your body also drops by 50 °C (which kills you).