Eagle of the Forest Path

2 minutes ago, StrikerEZ said:

(There’s probably a SA joke there)

Elantris, actually.

11 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

It's about 304 square miles, and about 10,000-15,000 feet tall. They're not sheer cliffs, but it is a very steep angle.

Wow! That's like, half as tall as Mount Everest. (Discounting that Everest is on a plateau, so it's not actually 30,000 feet from foot to top)

11 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

I actually hadn't thought about what rock they'd be made of. It doesn't really matter what type of rock they are, except I guess to determine how sturdy it is. What do you recommend would be the best type of rock to use?

That depends on what you want. Granite or basalt are sturdiest, so you can dig out more without compromising the structure and house a larger population. But if you use weaker rocks like sandstone or even limestone, you can add more risk of cave-ins, which is something you might like in the story.
I suggest that you first figure out what you need from the stone for the story, then find a geologist or engineer to work out what materials work best for that.
The alternative is that you decide on the material(s) first, then find the geologist or engineer to work out what that means for the story.

11 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

Yeah, I have a plan for that. The magic on that world really helps with ventilation, lighting, food, etc.

Okay, then! But what happens if the magic fails?

11 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

@Oversleep@The One Who Connects@Glamdring804@Eagle of the Forest Path After thinking about it a lot, I've decided I'm scrapping the floating islands world (for now-I might reuse it eventually). What I have decided upon is making a world where the majority of the world's populations live in huge rock spire-tower things. How feasible would it be for a tower with a surface area of about 304 mi squared on the bottom level? How much of the rock could be excavated before it would fall apart?

No idea about the excavation thing.

But concerning the towers, how tall do you want them (it), and how steeply angled are the outside walls?
304 mi squared, is that a square 304 miles on a side or 304 square miles?
Since you talk about excavating, I assume they're natural features, so what kind of rocks they consist of is going to be an important factor. A granite spire is going to be different from a sandstone spire. More than that, at the sizes you're talking about it's probable that any one spire is going to contain areas of different types of rock.
Do you have a plan for ventilation and lighting?

Big events brought to a satisfying conclusion.

Although, I don't understand why the mayor tells the E that she agrees to the contract.
It was signed under duress, after all, and the E is making it pretty obvious that he'd like to just rip it up.

W kind of reminds me of the French guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I'm sort of sorry there's no face-melting (but that wouldn't be appropriate for your target audience, anyway).

Far from promises made at the beginning I feel you made a promise here at the end: I look forward to reading 20.000 fathoms under the Nether  .

12 hours ago, Mandamon said:

... with probably terrible internet.

Yeah, I hear Alaska's terrible for surfing.

1 hour ago, Robinski said:

Thanks for this, Eagle, and great to hear from you!

No problem, simple google search (la brea tar pits magic book).

Quote

More irritating to me was that van Eekhout's story has a character named M-th. FFS! Double whammy!! 

Huh, I actually hadn't read the full synopsis yet. That is bothersome.

Here's some actual feedback from me (mostly questions though):

Magic
- spell levels -> are the levels solely dependent on the type of bone, or more on the amount of energy? i.e. if eating one chicken bone allows you to cast one lvl1 spell, would eating two chicken bones allow a lvl2 spell or just two lvl1s?
- unicorn horn -> would that include narwhal tusks, which vikings sold as unicorn horns (proving that the proverbial Nigerian prince isn't just a modern problem)?
- extraction -> is the burning etc. required, or is it more of a practical issue? could they just munch on chicken bones in a pinch (beware of splinters)?
-> -> just read @Jorville 's comment on this and I disagree with his premise: the extraction could be considered as a type of distillation, getting rid of the useless parts of the bone while keeping the active component.

Setting
- I joined RX after you'd finished with W&S, so what's the tech level here? Since it's based on the UK, is it Tudor, regency, Victorian?

Scene 1 -> I'm assuming from this that magic is illegal without some sort of permit. Or is it the dumpster diving that's the problem here?

Scene 3 -> If you want to avoid a LL fanfic, maybe avoid the ageing spinster spymaster?

Scene 4 -> Why did D pick J? Because he's the only mage in the crew? (edit: aaah, just got to scene 8...)

Scene 5 -> Did G, as the planner, have a reason for choosing this particular house? The storm feels sort of deus ex machina to me, could be fun to have the crew engineer a disaster they can clean up afterward. Or imply that D had government mages cause the storm? (edit: again, scene 8)

Scene 7 -> Are they covering up something with the staged fight?

Scene 8 -> Hold up, didn't you say G has no hidden agenda? I know you also said unreliable narrator, but isn't that going a bit far to even do that in the outline?

Scene 9 and 10 -> textbook example of the scene-sequel format. 

Scene 11 -> I don't see why this can't just be part of 10.

Overall this looks promising.
I did notice that basically all the interactions are J and C, with a little G and D thrown in. P and K don't show up in the outline at all, so what's their role in the story, besides filling out the crew roster?

On 5/17/2018 at 5:26 PM, Mandamon said:

This reminds me of another series. I can't remember the name, but I think it was urban fantasy and involved magicians eating rare animals and/or other magic users to take their magic. Might do some research to find out what it was to avoid overlap.

I think I remember that as a book of the week on WX, if we're thinking of the same thing it's California Bones by Greg Van Eekhout (pronounced ache-how-t)

12 hours ago, StrikerEZ said:

Hmm...could the floating islands have been terraformed to support life? Either way, the people on the floating islands will not live the best of lives. The upper classes of this world will be on the surface.

Well, yes they could have been terraformed, I've actually been assuming that they're similar to environments on good old Earth from the start.

But that doesn't change the fact that you've got a limited surface area, and therefore limited resources. Small(-ish) islands (the type you find in the sea) can't support a population of large animals, such as elephants for example.

Interestingly, you can have dwarf versions of such species on those islands. I'm thinking of Flores Island in Indonesia, where there used to be not only mini-elephants, but also Homo floresiensis, which apparently got nickamed "hobbit".

I'd say mainly birds, and glider-type critters like flying squirrels. (and bugs, lots and lots of bugs)

No large animals in any case, as food supplies are going to be limited (except for those that can get back and forth to the surface).

6 hours ago, Oversleep said:

I've seen enough of discussions about this to answer: nigh impossible.

Oh, drat. I wanted to do something like that too.

How about if you make up a room-temperature superconductor (let's call it Islandwavium)? That doesn't qualify as "relatively natural" anymore, but whatever. I mean, we're talking fantasy here, right?
Islandwavium should be strongly diamagnetic, so it ought to be repelled by the planet's magnetic field, if I understand correctly.

It's been rather quiet in the lounge for a while, so ...

Funny thing happened recently. I've been reading A short history of nearly everything (described as "a rough guide to science") and it contains a formula for Hubble's law (about the relationship between the distance of galaxies and the velocity at which they are moving away from us each other). It was printed here as H0 = v/d

I read it as "ho equals vee dee" (and then rolled around laughing for a while).

PS: It's also where I got my new member title, as the book points out that ambergris - a fixative used in perfumes - is actually the parts of giant squid that sperm whales can't digest. So to quote the relevant footnote: "The next time you spray on Chanel Number 5 (assuming you do so), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster."

11 hours ago, Robinski said:

I have a cunning plan...

Words to strike fear into the heart of anyone who's ever watched Blackadder.

1 hour ago, Robinski said:

LOL, I just found the Grammar & Syntax forum Absolute Write: I may never post here again (jokes)  

This is just begging for a Beer Hall Putsch joke... I only wish I could think of one.

29 minutes ago, Robinski said:

...and I forget they other slider (oops).

It's the Protag(verb) slider, how proactive the character is.

A piece of advice from the podcast that stuck with me is to audition the character for a certain purpose. If you start from the plot, you have something the characters need to achieve. So take that goal and think of the absolute worst person you could possibly task with achieving it. An example of this would be Rincewind from the Discworld series (who's also an example of a character with a competence slider at 0, by the way).

I sort of like the sound of "The lights at the top of the Nether"

For more inspiration: Jules Verne bibliography (Just on the off-chance you haven't checked there yet).

If you can specialize in two branches, and on top of that have (limited) skill in non-specialized branches, I'd get rid of the Specialist/Generalist distinction entirely.

Beyond that, I like that Digital is one of the branches, but I'd need to know more of what the magic is supposed to do to give more feedback.
"A combination of Allomancy and AonDor" really doesn't tell me all that much.

In general, for any Sandersonian type magic system I'm creating, I ask myself a series of questions:

• Is the system intuitive to use? (or do you need to spend a decade meditating on some mountaintop before you have the mental control to make it work?)
• Where does the power come from? (How is the magic "fuelled," because Sandersonian magic isn't supposed to break conservation of energy. You don't actually need an answer for this one, but it can add flavor to the system.)
• What are the limits and/or downsides to the system?
• How do you become a user? (In your case you've already said you have to be born with it, but is it genetic, blessing by a Great Old One, pre-natal vitamin overdose, ..., or just totally random?)
• Does it show that someone is a magic user? (Can they pass unnoticed in a crowd, or have they got horns or wings or glow in the dark?)

I've got more of these questions, but these should be enough to help you along a bit.

And if all else fails for making choices: flip a coin. As mentioned on the webcast (several times, I think), Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle by deciding stuff with the I Ching, so randomness isn't an automatic fail.

4 minutes ago, Robinski said:

My first novel, which I've re-written 3 or 4 times over 20+ years is presently 225,000, in other words, two novels!! 

Or half a Sanderson novel.

You could make it a theme that luck can only do so much. The heart attack thing for example; if the hitman has clogged arteries from a fatty diet, the luck thing can make it happen at the best possible time for your compounder, but if the hitman is a thirty-something or younger who watches what he eats and doesn't smoke etc. no amount of luck is going to make him have a heart attack (IMO, anyway).

I think you're on the right track with making him face a shard, but it doesn't need to be anything so dramatic. Another compounder could do the trick, steel or gold, maybe. Or a worldhopper of some sort. And those medallion things from BoM open up a whole host of possibilities.

For having him lose his metalminds, make the metalminds a liability, a confrontation with a coinshot for example: he's standing at the edge of a cliff with a coinshot pushing his bracers, but - oh fortune! - the bracers luckily come undone, pushed away into the canyon, leaving your compounder free to punch out the coinshot's clock.

A final idea is that you could have the hero tracked because of his chromium minds' effects. Kind of like Ta'veren in WoT, which is essentially what feruchemic chromium does, as I understand it.

EDIT: Sorry, one more, no, two more things.
You could build in a quirk in the fortune that makes it something of a drag sometimes. Like, it can't distinguish between good luck right now, and good luck in the long run. It could be lucky right now to roll double sixes for a big pot, but later on it's going to have some guys named Butch and Tiny try to pummel you into oblivion. And the chromium mind defaults to good luck right now, regardless of later consequences.

And: Have you considered turning it around? Making the chromium compounder the villain instead of the hero?

Wouldn't you know, usually? Your publisher didn't get you drunk to get you to sign something, did he?
(Congrats on the potential book deal, anyway)

Could also be a typo (brassiere).

8 hours ago, industrialistDragon said:

Has actually doing the research on something you've been writing fundamentally changed the way you've thought about/written it?

Yes.

I'm working (and have been working for some time, on and off) on a magic system that includes an emotion manipulation component.
(I've always felt a bit "iffy" about emotional allomancy by the way, since it seems like you can do whatever with it. For example, IIRC in HoA Vin riots someone's sense of calmness, how is that any different from soothing someone's agitation? Compared to the rest of allomancy, it's really loose and undefined, which bothers me.)

Anyway, back to my system. I was browsing the net and came across the Hindu philosophic notion of Gunas. Emotions are messy and complicated so there's always going to be a lot of wiggle-room, but after encountering this idea I based (this part of) my system around the thought of emotions being (predominantly) attached to one of three "principles": Sattva(good, constructive, harmonious), Tamas (dark, destructive, chaotic), and Rajas (passionate, active, confused).

But more than just this system, it's got me trying in general to think about things less "dually" in a yes-or-no way, and more tripartite, which can be something of a challenge.

I'm still doing research into the concept of Gunas, trying to make sure the system is internally consistent, which might qualify for the dreaded syndrome. But I consider it more "getting ready" than "getting ready to get ready".

I too am a crazy outliner. As for how I do my outlining: I use the Snowflake method. I think it's a pretty good way to steadily build up an outline without getting overwhelmed by trying to do everything at once. I only use what's described on the website I linked, though, I don't use the book or the software they're trying to sell (I'm not that crazy about outlining).

Apart from the prophecy that's basically Hunchback of the Notre Dame (at least, the Disney version).
Which doesn't mean it's not still a good idea, of course.

@Lord Bookworm

The attribute storage as you describe it right now is something of a rip-off, but I guess it depends on what attributes you pick for your system. (If you get rid of 'memory' at least, it will go over a lot better, I think)

I do like the idea of the container's value affecting how the magic affects it, quite a lot actually. Value is relative though, and I think you could have a lot of fun with that.
Market values for one thing. If there's a shortage of leather, the value of boots would go up (compared to gold), so would they become better containers than before the shortage?
Secondly is it only monetary value that you're taking into account, or other types as well?  If a person is particularly attached to an object they would value it more. So would a pen you inherited from your father be a better container than one you bought in a shop, even though objectively their cost is the same?

Conversion between physical/cognitive affecting the crumbling is a good way of preventing the system from becoming overpowered (from attributes becoming "blank"), but be careful to not make it too complicated for a reader to understand easily. I suggest not going into too much detail and avoiding having a plot hinge on this.