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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 17, 2015 5:15:48 GMT
This is meant to be a thread whose characters have powers that the readers do not have, and so require cooperation from other players in order to be used.
I'll start with my own: the character introduced with this post will, in his first IC post (assuming I ever get around to writing it), be fully aware he is attempting to contact a truly alien world, and completely unaware he will be hitting a forum with automatic translation. As a result, his first post will be enchanted with a spell of perfect comprehension.
The spell works as follows: anything he says is reduced to their base concepts, the Platonic ideal of his message. The concepts are relayed to their target, and then translated back into a form ideal for the recipient. The overall effect is rather akin to Elspeth and Edward teaming up to deliver a message as clearly as possible: it will use local accent, personal idiom, in-jokes and allusions to get its point across, and the effect is likely to be profoundly unsettling to most people.
The spell cuts through most layers of obfuscation, but does not ensure that it reaches its destination. If ME posts a message to the forum, it is intended for "whoever reads the forum," and will be perfectly comprehensible to any such people, but not necessarily the actual readers: it is likely to cut through Prism's censorship unless the message is entirely blocked, for example, but Archangel is likely not to receive the effect because it will be stopped at whatever poor D-Class is reading his mail. If ME sends an enchanted private message to Archangel, it will then apply to Archangel himself.
ME is likely to stop using the enchantment once people start objecting to it and tell him the translation spell exists, but it's such an obvious thing to do when communicating with true aliens that I can't imagine him not doing it at first.
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Post by esthfora on May 17, 2015 12:53:25 GMT
Esthfora, as mentioned elsewhere, can make statements in rainbow text that are obviously true to whoever reads them. This only works if the statement actually is true. After some incidents the first time she used this power, it is now the case that if any reader would be distressed by encountering rainbow truths, they only see mundane rainbow formatting.
Esthfora is also protecting the forum against memetic hazards; if any reader encounters a message which would be harmful to them (as defined on a case-by-case basis by we the authors), the harmful content will be blocked and replaced by something harmless, along the lines of a pretty swirling rainbow.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 17, 2015 14:56:47 GMT
Oh, a minor thing, but - at some point, ME's avatar will change. This is not an IC thing; this will be because my commission of his actual avatar, done by someone who can art, will have come in.
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Post by lurkingkobold on May 17, 2015 23:46:02 GMT
Lurking has the standard kobold magic applied, which means that by default, spells that are trying to detect her register her as illusory. This isn't especially hard to see through (if what you're doing is better described as 'personally seeing, just at distance' than as 'casting a spell that sees at a distance and seeing what the spell sees', you won't run into it at all), but should foil most automatically-acting spells - it's meant to defeat automatic traps in her world. She can suppress this effect at will, but only while she keeps intending to be properly visible to magic things. (It does work on all senses, not just sight, and it's pretty good about catching secondary effects, too.)
This shouldn't affect her forum posts at all; she has to turn the effect off to interact with the forum in the first place.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 18, 2015 2:25:19 GMT
Please ignore the discrepancy (caused by posting Backstage) between the displayed post count and the actual number of in-character posts. If you're in the Backstage group but not "supposed" to have access to the secret board (Threats and Infosec), then you can still reach it by direct link here and read threads, but it won't show up on the front page and you can't post. Please remember that in this case your character can't read the secret board and isn't supposed to know it exists. A character accessing the forum from Daevinity, but not from any other world, will see plane shift invisibly wordfiltered to dig, and any mentioned zorkmid prices adjusted correspondingly.
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Post by lurkingkobold on May 18, 2015 7:09:06 GMT
People who need special accommodations: Please put a note to that effect in your signatures? I'm having trouble remembering who ME's effect belongs to, and that's only going to get worse as we get more people.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 18, 2015 7:54:30 GMT
So far, effects have been associated with visual effects of some sort - you had no way of knowing this but ME's effect will be accompanied with a very dramatic synesthetic spell circle, though the forum will just interpret it as a multimedia vector graphics attachment and translate it appropriately. Esthfora is using rainbow text when it matters...
I don't really like the idea of signature accommodations because it breaks immersion, but if it's necessary I guess we can do that.
(Just plain magic, of Lurking's type for example, doesn't really require "accommodations" because it'll come up when it's relevant. Things like truthspeak and subtle mental influence are always present and not obviously present except in the sense that rainbow text is weird, say, so they need a thread like this.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 18, 2015 15:14:10 GMT
It occurs tt me that anybody with panlinguism (Rae, for example) could notice one of the subtle inaccuracies in the public zorkmid instructions. Two of the characters in the inscription were swapped around, so it says something like “I ZORKM1D”.
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Raezenoth
Poster
Posts: 79
World: Arabek
Pronoun: He
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Post by Raezenoth on May 18, 2015 15:17:10 GMT
Actually I think in that particular case, Rae wouldn't notice it at all. He has trouble even telling when people change languages; as long as the word ultimately means the same, he won't notice.
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Post by anthusiasm on May 18, 2015 21:27:57 GMT
So I have a character who can predict the future to a certain extent. I'm still a little iffy about how her powers interact with the wider multiverse, but I think it's safe to say that if it were really, really probable that posting on the forum would result in a major existential threat to her world, she would have been warned about it. If you want to introduce a highly probable existential threat to forum users, talk to me and we can make up some arbitrary reason why it wouldn't affect Mysis. If you want to introduce a lesser threat, also talk to me and I'll let you know if I think she would have predicted it.
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Post by Captain Viridian on May 18, 2015 21:31:35 GMT
It occurs tt me that anybody with panlinguism (Rae, for example) could notice one of the subtle inaccuracies in the public zorkmid instructions. Two of the characters in the inscription were swapped around, so it says something like “I ZORKM1D”. It also occurs to me that it's fairly plausible for one of the crew to notice this (after manufacturing the coins), as an effect of having six people happening to look at the same subtle error, but I'm honestly not sure if it's plausible enough.
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Post by Daniel H on May 18, 2015 21:36:34 GMT
Do they have any other experience with this script, or some sort of universal translation? The inscription does not actually use the Latin alphabet or Arabic numerals.
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Post by Captain Viridian on May 18, 2015 21:37:52 GMT
See, I completely missed that. That's why I posted here first.
Edit: That said, if they got the hint that something was wrong, they probably have implausibly good machine translation of languages they have never seen before, given the genre and tone of their setting.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 21, 2015 18:57:52 GMT
So, I realized with kappa's prompting that the other half of having an unnaturally perfectly understandable message is that I need to say would it actually says somewhere. So, here's an attempt at explaining ME's greeting: My physics works on different principles without being physically separate from your world. As a being that works on those principles, I greet you. I know absolutely nothing about the targets of this message at all, since they are from a different truth as above defined, and I fully expect them to be completely and utterly alien to me. I enjoy being pretentious and grandiose, however, and so I have written this in the manner of a grand ritual. I did, however, target a community that will generally be good to me - fun to be around and useful to know. (I prefer my world not to be overrun by Lovecraftian squamous entities.) On that basis I greet you. As a mildly snarky reference to a speech said before one of our local moon landings, I point out that I cannot speak for everyone in my universe, but I come in peace - I have no pre-existing intentions to harm anyone here, though that may change if, say, one of you turns out to be a slaver or mass murderer or something. "May we walk through Mystery together" is a local formal idiom among scholars, implying collaboration to unravel all the secrets of the world and lay bare the Truth, which is culturally important as well as/partially due to its importance to our magic. -- One who studies alternate ways-the-world-could-work.
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Post by Daniel H on May 21, 2015 19:01:32 GMT
I was not picking up on all of that, though I got some of it from backstage. Could you similarly translate the other enchanted message?
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