Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/21/22: Complicated Magic

Many mages consider it impossible to create a winged hippopotamus. Or is it?

Sometimes I randomgen a spell or magic item that is so complicated to describe I know it won’t fit on a twitter post. So I’ve saved them for here.

 

Complicated Magic

Book of Dragon Coloring:  Contrary to popular belief, most dragons lead dull existences. When they’ve gotten to an age where there are few creatures left they can’t defeat, and their treasure piles full to overflowing, they can often fall into ennui. This giant-sized book of intricate drawings is the solution to that problem. It comes with sapling-sized pigment sticks of different hues the beast can use to color in these drawings, bringing them some happiness and sense of accomplishment.

Calligraphy of the White Kraken:  These special characters for writing magic spells were created by the enigmatic mage of the same name. They can only be used in spells involving the sea and increase their efficacy by 25%.

Card of Easy Gestures: Enchants a plain white card with a list of gestures, and their meanings, of any different race or culture the caster encounters. That way the caster can always refer to the card if they don’t understand what the other being is communicating to them.

Cauldron of The Drunken Warlord: This plain black kettle was owned by a mighty general of a nomadic people who was prone to drunken rages. Therefore, he had it magicked to always sit on its fire and keep bubbling, no matter what physical force hits it.

Create Winged Hippopotamus: Not a real spell, but a lesson teachers of magic often apply to their students. They assign them this spell and see how well they create a solution. But the solution is never the right one, because there is no way even with magic that a hippopotamus can fly.

Gerdyar, Ring of the Scarlet Necromancer: A ring that can summon a ghostly red-cloaked necromancer who can animate corpses. This being can cast spells, speak, and can be commanded. The wearer of the ring is not able to see the necromancer, but can see the effect of its work. It is never hostile to the wearer.

Larka’s Apple: Creates a huge apple-like fruit with leathery brown skin. This fruit is roughly the size of a watermelon. When the skin is sliced into, one hundred smaller, heart-shaped fruits come spilling out, each containing a nectar that satisfies a human’s food and water requirement for one day. The heart fruits must be eaten within 24 hours or they will all wither.

Law Controllers of Ossoth The Humble: A set of legal rules written on indestructible paper to govern how people interact in a guild. For example, one rule is that only people who are a member of the guild can use the guild shop to sell their goods. The rules are magic in that they compel all who enter the guild’s headquarters to obey them.

Lungs of The World Tree: This spell makes the caster’s lungs so powerful they can survive any attempt at suffocation, any poison gas, any lack of breathable air. They are also able to blow out a gale force wind, or inhale at the same speed. Lastly, it amplifies their singing, speaking, or shouting power so they can be heard up to a mile away.

Ophayaë-Balso, also known as The Box of the Dragonfly: This mysterious artifact is made of a mixture of gold and copper and resembles a small oval box with the image of a dragonfly stamped on the lid. It contains six different kinds of health potions that never go empty. The potions are as follows: throat-soothing medicine; bile infusion for healthy digestion of food, blood-clotting solution; universal poison remedy; mollusk or pus remedy; and a tonic for an athlete’s rubdown.

Pastilles of Agility Reduction: This clay bottle of large, multicolored pills radiates magic, but instead of being helpful they reduce a being’s dexterity, 1 point for each pill, for 24 hours. Usually takes a character a while to figure out the correlation because they also act as an analgesic.

Prismatic Trumpet: A shimmering, multicolored trumpet that can summon a number of jesters to play a merry tune that can be heard at least 500 yards away. They play for 1d4 rounds before vanishing. The trumpet is indestructible and can summon an unlimited number of jesters.

Scorpion Abacus: Looks like an ordinary wooden abacus, but when a user moves the beads around each one begins to secrete an oily, deadly poison through small grooves in its surface. The greater the calculations made by the user, the more chance there is of the poison entering through a fingertip and then into their bloodstream. The poison acts just like that from a giant scorpion.

Teapot of The Lord’s Peerage: This ornate silver teapot is sure to enhance the reputation of any mage. Not only can it pour any kind of tea in the world, whoever drinks that tea will treat the mage with utmost respect, seeing them as a peer no matter how highborn they are or how humble the mage.

Terrarium of Desire: This spell is used to make someone fall in love with the caster. It entails setting up a small glass bowl with dirt, rocks, seedlings, etc. and taking care of it until the terrarium is thriving. At the point one of the seedlings flowers, the spell is complete and the lovelorn one comes knocking on the caster’s door. However, if the terrarium is destroyed, or allowed to wither, that love is gone, never to return.

Zifrost’s Venomous Yellow Dye: This yellow powder seems to be only a pigment that dyes fibers or fabrics the color of saffron. But in the hands of a chaotic evil mage it can be used to endow clothing with a horrible curse — the first time the owner of the garment tries it on, it melts their skin off as if by a powerful acid. See the tale of Nessus the Centaur.

The True Face of Sauron

Say the name Sauron and most people will think of this armored character from The Lord of the Rings movies, or a giant burning eye. But in the books Tolkien never spoke of Sauron’s Third Age physical form except in abstracts, saying only that he was  “not fair” which could mean anything.

So, inspired by the recent The Rings of Power series, I took my curiosity into the world of AI generated images to see what the hive mind consensus was. This is what I got from the prompt “The true face of Sauron.”

Sauron is a good boi and wants his snackies.

Obviously, I needed to refine my approach. So I went with the prompt “Sauron in a bathrobe” and the artist Alan Lee, who worked on the pictorial concepts for the Jackson movies. My line of thought was Sauron in a more intimate moment would surely show us his face, right?

Well, not really, but we’re close.  There are hints of horror here especially in the one on left where he looks like he has five dark, beady eyes and either a long beard or dewlaps of flaccid, flappy skin that descend to his chest from where his nose would be. Somewhere in that mass might be a mouth. On the right he looks more conventionally Voldemortish, with a pale, almost featureless face and a toothless maw.

Next I used the prompt “Sauron in the shower” thinking, we’ll surely see him naked, right?

These are all delicately horrific, but again, only hints at his hideous form. The bottom right one is the most distinctive, revealing a Christ-like face with a beard.

Using John Howe, another Tolkien illustrator who worked on the movies, wasn’t any better, yielding only armored Saurons. So, I went further afield. SFF illustrator Michael Whelan as the artist prompt came up with this image of Sauron from the rear, his butt covered by his long dark hair. God knows what that golden sickle-thing is.

Changing the artist to Peter Paul Rubens, who was well known for his nude figures, wasn’t any better, so it was time to bring out the big guns. “Sauron in the shower” using as the artist Tom of Finland.

The bodies are more coherent (and good-looking) but again Sauron either kept his helmeted head, or is making some hideous face at us like the fellow to the right.

Perhaps the problem was with the media. Going with the last artist, and adding “colored pencil” got me this.

Hmm, not bad, Interestingly, all the drawings seem to show the same person. Could this be it?

Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/14/22: Deep Sky Objects

Nebulas created with AI imaging software

From left to right: the imaginary Cupcake Nebula; the Apus Star Cluster; and the Nu Pavonis Cloud Complex.

Like imaginary galaxies, imaginary nebulas are also simple to create. These three were done in Wombo, which is designed specifically to make trading card NFTs. But it’s also fine for other stuff.

These randomgens were tweaked in Write With Transformer, so if some of them don’t make sense, that’s why. WWT is part of the Hugging Face family of AI text and image generators, and there are many, many, fine free ones at the base site to fool around with.

 

Deep Sky Objects

Antlia Sextet, located 3,848 million light years away. Three elliptical galaxies, a supergiant spiral, and two large irregular galaxies locked in a death dance which will end in an eventual merger.

Apus Star Cluster, 13 million light years away. Star-forming cloud that has been orbiting the Milky Way for millions of years. Contains an exo-rythritoid subcluster with three million stars, including a million triple star systems. It is the largest object of its type in the known universe and one of the most massive ever observed.

Aquila Nebulosity, a glowing red cloud from which extrasolar comets have come, is another important part of the Big Closet that lies beyond the Oort Cloud.

Columba Star Cluster, discovered by Italian astronaut Giuseppe Pinchot in 1999 (the year that the European Space Agency launched its Spritzel Space Telescope.)

Delta Mensae Object, an open star cluster arrayed around a neutron star.

La Bretonian Star Cluster, is the closest one of its kind to to Earth. It is so dense that it would be a good candidate for the Large-Scale Meteor Event (LSME).

Lacerta Star Cluster, 14 million light years away. Contains the Gold Nugget Nebula and several stellar nurseries.

Lanerva Star Cluster, a small star cluster that was once the home of star formation, but is now a cold fusion furnace. The cluster is an ellipsoid.

Leaping Nacho Nebula, located in the constellation Libra.

Lepus Galaxy Supercluster, 4843 million light years away.

Little Hoop Nebula in Crux, a diffuse planetary nebula, is another massive object not far from our Solar System. The Chandra X-ray Observatory and its instruments have helped researchers estimate its size and composition.

Musca Void, 4546 million light years away. A nearly empty part of space with no galaxies or molecular clouds.

Nu Pavonis Cloud Complex, contains two powerful radio jets that may be coming from a pulsar buried within the dust clouds.

Pisces 5, also known as the Cupcake Nebula, a large nebula with several dust clouds one of which looks like the silhouette of a cream-filled cupcake. It lies in the center of a massive star forming cloud cluster that has a black hole. The HMM-2000 Chandra mission has been investigating this cluster for more than 35 years.

V-10, also known as the Vindication Point, is a mass of dense matter orbiting the Sun beyond the Kuiper Belt.

Hot and Bothered

The very first story I had published professionally (which means, by my definition, I got paid for, and I could hold the book in my hot little hands) was about a woman who turns, or is turned into, an espresso machine, and all the various sensations she experiences as coffee and creamer emerge from her orifices. This sculpture by artist Karl Claydon invokes some of those same impressions for me. This machine is a little more steampunk, and perhaps more in charge, than mine was; but there’s still a nifty parallel between them.

The Wheel of Time, Season 1 [Review]

 

Finally got around to watching the first season of The Wheel of Time, the 2021 Amazon production based on the fantasy book series by the late Robert Jordan. The first book was published in 1990 and last, number 14, in 2013, finished by author Brandon Sanderson with the approval of Jordan’s widow (who really deserved co-writing credit on the whole thing.) As a young’un I had made it up to book six before pooping out. Unlike the Dune series, which spanned centuries, The Wheel of Time chronicles only a few years, but there was a LOT going on in those few years.

Thinking about it gave me a Mandela Moment. I was so sure I had read it in the 1980s, in college, when I was going to SF conventions with my cousin and sewing costumes for them; but no, the first book came out two years after I’d moved to the West Coast to make a life on my own. My confusion came about because it’s such a prototypical 1980s fantasy. Fantasy series published then tended to be of the Tolkien mold: quests with wizards, elves, goggle-eyed farmboys, and a mysterious, incorporeal baddie. The Sword of Shannara (1977) was the first of these; another influential one was David Eddings’ Belgariad series, the first book of which was published in 1982, followed by the first Discworld book in 1983. The Dragonlance books, darker, cheesier, and more baroque, continued the trend in 1984. There were other types of fantasy around, of course. But while series like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were critically lauded, it’s the lighter, sillier ones that today’s adult fans remember and have affection for.

The Wheel of Time, when it began, had just the right recipe: immersive, character-driven fantasy that was new, but not too new. Jordan’s world was a mix of European settings with Asian philosophies, with a Dune-like hunt for a Kwisatz Haderach in the person of The Dragon, an all-powerful warrior who will either save the world, or end it. The story begins when Orc-analogues called Trollocs attack the village of the three main protagonists and their love interests, causing them to flee with Moiraine, a member of the Aes Sedai (a Bene Gesserit-like society of women) who knows the three are important to “the weaving of the pattern” – that is, major players in whatever conflict to follow – and must protect them, because one might be The Dragon.

On the journey to the city of the Aes Sedai things go wrong, then wronger, as the friends are broken up, reunited, and break apart again; one of the main pleasures of the plot, as with any good soap opera, is seeing who winds up with who, romantically. Jordan began his writing career by doing Conan novels, and those lessons show in WoT: an episodic structure; elements that are novel, yet familiar; a European fantasy world full of past glories, now pulling itself back together.

This was huge project to adapt, more so than anything by Tolkien, just because of the many characters and wandering plotlines, which is likely why it appealed to Amazon programmers looking around for the next Game of Thrones. Its popularity couldn’t have hurt, either.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/7/22: Galaxies

Spiral galaxy airbrushed on the back of a custom van.

Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools and no mess.

Now, all you need is a text prompt and an AI art engine, as I’ve discovered with these depictions of Jadis/The White Witch and unknown Narnian monarchs. As depictions of humans, they are far from perfect, and you’d never publish them professionally (unless you’re really, really stupid.) But galaxies are less complex than the human figure, and they don’t vary as much. There are no green or purple galaxies, for example, and they are always depicted against a background of black with white stars. You don’t find them laying on the lawn or in a basket of fresh laundry. Plus, there are tons of galaxy photos available online for the AI to learn from.

Left to right: Rearing Cobra Galaxy, Cheerio Galaxy, Swirling Tricycle Galaxy.
(Note: I did have to do some Photoshop fiddling with them to look more realistic.)

The prompts I’ve used here are from the list of imaginary galaxies below, all randomgenned from the typical names, locations, types, and characteristics of galaxies that already exist.  If you are writing any kind of SF, or creating any kind of SF game, and need a galaxy to stick in somewhere, try one of these.

(If you don’t know anything at all about the different types of galaxies, start here.)

 

Galaxies

Alpha and Omega Galaxy, located in Orion. A large attractive spiral, seen at a 60 degree angle, that has four loosely structured lanes. A starburst galaxy generating many hot young stars.

Black Pizza Galaxy in Chamaeleon, 304 million light years away. A large irregular galaxy that is very luminous, but cloaked by several large dust clouds, one of which appears as the dark triangular “slice” that gives the galaxy its name. This galaxy appears to be forming arms but has no nucleus.

Capricornus NGC4569, a medium-sized spiral galaxy with tightly wrapped arms. Due to a passing encounter with an ultradiffuse dwarf irregular galaxy it has a long tidal tail full of metal-rich stars. Part of the Local Group.

Caterpillar Galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way with a fuzzy, stretched-out appearance.

Cheerio Galaxy: Located in Antlia, 57 million light years away. A ring galaxy with a chubby appearance. Its small nucleus is full of supergiant stars.

Chromosome Galaxy, two colliding galaxies seen edge-on and touching so they look like a chromosome or the letter H.

Eta Indi 29, also known as the Orchard Galaxy. A small flocculent spiral galaxy with indistinct arms.

Huygens 255, a distant spiral with a doubled ring structure from a past merger, from which it received a second nucleus and a short tidal tail.

Musca 9, also known as the Fish Galaxy. A medium sized spiral with multiple arms. Though it contains many old red stars it is very luminous due to its overlarge nucleus.

Norma 819, a giant Grand Design spiral galaxy with multiple arms.

Northern Kraken Galaxy in Ursa Major, a large, loose spiral galaxy with arms that look like the tentacles of its namesake. A Seyfert galaxy that is also a strong gamma-ray source.

Rearing Cobra Galaxy in Virgo, a small, loose barred spiral galaxy with two arms that is part of the Local Group. Named for its distinct shape.

Sagittarius 41, also known as the Heavy Hubcap Galaxy. A giant-sized spiral with a weak inner ring structure and bright, well-formed outer rings.

Small Eridanus Galaxy, 574 million light years distant. A small elliptical galaxy that has no nucleus and contains old red stars.

Swirling Cyclone Galaxy in Indus, a medium-sized spiral with two tight, compact arms and a dust lane that is especially dense and dark. A starburst galaxy that has a large halo and at least three hundred globular clusters.

Swirling Tricycle Galaxy in Canis Major, a medium-sized, very perturbed galaxy that resembles its namesake. Merging with another galaxy known as Flamsteed’s Anomaly.

Turtle Galaxy, an ultradiffuse dwarf that has been severely disrupted by the Andromeda Galaxy of which it is a satellite.

Volans Object, 19 million light years distant. A large ring galaxy with a bright center that looks like it is becoming undone, with a long tidal tail of stars on one side and a short tail on the opposite side. Both tails are forming new stars. The entire galaxy is sending off gamma and radio waves.

Unicorn in the Woods

Now that’s one funny-looking unicorn!

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 [Review]

 

Gil-Galad, King of the Elven nation of Lindor, knows something’s up with Sauron.

Much has been said about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon Prime’s new series set in the Second Age of  Middle Earth. Some fans are enthusiastic about the idea, others skeptical. (I can understand the latter after recently watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies.) Even before it was released many fans damned the series as a money-grab by Amazon. The reasoning being that it was not based on a work of fiction, but the Appendices found at the rear of The Return of the King, which was basically a series of reference articles for the trilogy that had hints of stories in them. It was this material, purchased separately at a 2017 auction, the producers intend to flesh out, which has purist fans up in arms.

It’s certainly not the usual way to create a fantasy series, especially one by Mr. Tolkien, who was, when he was alive, adamant that LoTR not enter cinematic territory. (The much-ballyhooed Beatles version that never came to fruition happened because Tolkien reluctantly sold the rights to fulfill a tax bill.) Tolkien was even unenthusiastic about the children’s stage versions of The Hobbit that took place in his lifetime. He was not alone in this; peers P. L. Travers (the Mary Poppins series) and C. S. Lewis were also resistant to having their books commercially adapted. His ideas about the sanctity of his creation, echoed by his son Christopher, carried over to many fans.

The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the multi-volume History of Middle-earth were not part of the deal, even though the Appendices included some of their material. Then again, all of the former are appendices of a sort, or were, until edited by Christopher into a more coherent form from his father’s sometimes-conflicting notes. (Christopher Tolkien has passed away in 2020, so what will happen with that material now is up for grabs.) Tolkien always considered the Appendices an integral part of LoTR that added to and enhanced the work. They weren’t something stuck in just for padding, so any arguments that the Appendices aren’t viable  enough for adaptation are just wrong. The Rings of Power fleshes out that material, using a team of writers to create an overarching plotline and new characters.

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The World of the Castrati
[Reading Challenge 2022]

 


The World of the Castrati

by Patrick Barbier
Souvenir Press, 1998

[Challenge # 32 : A book taking place in Europe or is about Europe.]

I got this book from one of my favorite places to get free reading material, my neighbor’s Little Free Library which has rarely failed me. I’d enjoyed both the movie Farinelli and the Anne Rice historical novel about castrati, Cry to Heaven, so when I saw this book there I decided to learn more about the topic. For my reading challenge, it fit into the “European” category because castrati were a singularly European phenomenon.

Though it looked like it would be scandalous and juicy (as the movie Farinelli was) the execution was on the dry side. I think someone would need a grounding in the history of opera seria (Italian opera) first to really “get” it. Certainly they’d need to be familiar with the Italian musical terms used to describe operatic singing. Though I picked up these from the text, it was a struggle for me not knowing what the singing the author was describing sounded like, or was meant to sound like. Which is of course true, as there are no castrated men singing opera today and making recordings for listeners to hear them. But even a glossary of terms would have been nice. The author is a professor of the history of opera so why he didn’t, I can’t guess.

I don’t think the overly academic approach helped the subject matter either. He divided the book into chapters based on a castrato’s life: childhood castration, conscription into an Italian music school, early performances, performing at the opera, etc. and then he would give myriad examples of how all the major castrati went through these passages. The problem with that it was very easy to get all these singers mixed up so they became a castrati zupa. I’d rather he’d just concentrated on a few singers to go in-depth on and make anecdotes out of all the others. What worked with this method, though, was describing the background history, and some of that was very fascinating, like how it was customary for Italians to talk loudly, eat, and socialize as they watched that week’s opera with no regard for the performers.

A Baroque opera with a stage showing forced perspective, a common trick of the era

Everything about that world of the 1600s and 1700s was so dramatic and colorful, it seems a shame more pictures weren’t included to make it more of a coffee-table book.

The entire era was a glorious yet disquieting one in European music, for the boys who were castrated to feed the mania had no choice in the matter, and of course some of them died from the operation or never developed decent voices even after many years of grueling schooling. And grueling lessons they were, concentrating on breathing and developing the lungs, larynx and ribcage to the hit the supernaturally high notes so beloved of the Italian public. These singers were truly athletes; in the days before electrical amplification voices had to reach into the highest seats of the theater, the upper recesses of the church. Though they were the cossetted pop stars of their day they were produced in a manner similar to the endless stream of boy bands coming out of the US or Korea, created to fill a need that, even at its height, was always questionable, and questioned, for reasons of taste and morality.

In the end, I enjoyed did enjoy learning about early opera but, being there are no castrati around today who can recreate those sounds, the whole book was like a what-if.

The End of Another Summer of Narnia

King Peter hunting the White Stag, from the 1979 animated TV special.

Looks like we’ve come to the end of another Summer of Narnia. I thought that this would be the last one, but there’s yet plenty more material to be mined, depictions to critique, maps to draw and characters to analyze. Before I ride off to hunt the White Stag, I’ll say it’s been fun!