Community Development Meeting

[SC Lecter]

I am thinking of holding the next CDM on Monday, June 16th at 10pm ET. The topic will be spells and experiments. Let me know if the above time is good or bad.

[Pyra]

I will be able to make it.

[Oliver White]

Bad. Mondays and Wednesdays 5-10 pm, PDT, I teach summer school (this ends the 2nd week of July). Literally every other time I should be able to be there, and at least read the screen if not able to reply easily.

[SC Lecter]

This is tonight at 10pm eastern time. A summary will be posted for anyone who cannot attend.

[Oliver White]

Since I can't be there (might have Oliver logged on to log it, however), I have some advance questions regarding spells (feel free to hold off answering them until appropriate.)

In the Call of Cthulhu RPG, magic is strongly linked with sanity: the more spells you cast, the crazier you go, because you're doing things that man wasn't meant to do. Will our spell system have a similar "cost"? (I absolutely think some "magic" should have a cost like this. Making magic salt from a recipe; eh, that's free. Summoning a byakhee, that'll earn you a phobia, buddy.)

In the more recently released Trail of Cthulhu RPG, the magic system often takes literally Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is often indistinguishable from magic". For example, a teleportation spell may not be "magic", just a deeper understanding of the Non-Euclidean nature of space time and how it is manipulated. As such, many "magic spells" have their costs (typically the casting time) reduced if certain scientific skills are had. I think this is an absolutely brilliant way of approaching it, and far more Lovecraftian than waving your fingers, saying some mystic mumbo-jumbo and then having a doorway to the beyond appear. Any chance our system is tending this direction?

Will there be mechanisms for individual spells vs. ritual spells involving groups? 5 people in the room, lead caster wants to summon evil being, and asks the other 4 to join in. Each is prompted to join the ritual?