Grrl Power #1175 – As you may or may not know…
Exposition by way of ignorant character acting as audience projectee is vital, you guys.
Dabbler asking “Is that something they teach in schools here?” sounds condescending on its face, but she’s been to a lot of planets and it’s hard to keep that stuff straight. She’s like someone who works at CERN alongside people with multiple advanced degrees being selected to go to (rolls dice) Tonga and giving a talk about (rolls dice) M-Theory. I don’t know much about Tonga without googling it, maybe they’re insanely well educated? At the same time, maybe the average American doesn’t know what transformers actually do or how they work. I’d actually be willing to put some money on that.
In the Grrlverse, just as in many LitRPG/Cultivation novels, an abundance of mana can cause several things to happen spontaneously. Dungeons is one of those things. It can crystalize in various forms and has different names depending on where you are. Magicite, Materia, Chakrum, “Dem glowy things,” etc. It can also form other types of cores besides dungeons, namely monster cores, but also weapon cores, airship cores, all manner of things.
Earth is currently a “Middle Lower Class” planet as far as mana density goes. It doesn’t prevent magic from being used, but mana regen/enchanted item recharge takes a lot longer, and you don’t get many spontaneous mana events. Not none, just enough to inspire a lot of folk tales.
The Twilight Council want to up Earth’s ambient mana to Upper Lower Class, maybe even Lower Middle Class. Enough to give them all a lot more breathing room, but not enough for Earth to suddenly go LitRPG and spontaneously install a System.
Edit: Typos fixed.
The June vote incentive is finally up! Maxima is prepping for her night out.
The new one is on its way. I’m currently mildly sick and that’s causing me to zone out and stare blankly at the screen more than usual.
And in the Patreon variants, she gets (un)dressed and takes a look through all the makeup options.
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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C’mon people. Dabs (and maybe DaveB) know more about transformers than this, but she is trying to dumb it down for people who may not anything about electricity (and, yes, failing horribly).
“Converting volts to amps” probably fits a lot of average-Joe’s understanding of it. If you have 120VAC at 3A, you could step down to 12VAC and get 30A out of it. You traded off voltage to get more amperage; it fits the description. But, of course, the real result depends on the resistance of the secondary circuit. It it’s 10K ohms you’re only going to get 1.2 milliamps anyway. The point is that it COULD drive a couple thousand more identical circuits at the same time; enough current is available, so if you’re throwing together stuff in your garage, thinking like that makes a kind of sense.
Ack. “may not know anything about…”
Magesplaining.
So how is this different from opening a portal to hell for thermal energy? this sounds like the beginning of a Doom storyline
A portal to Hell opens a portal to another plane that falls under a completely different juristiction. Creating a Dungeon keeps things local.
If I’m understanding this correctly, are these “dungeon cores” basically giant domes?
No, a Dungeon Core is a crystal, generally a sphere, that is the heart, mind, and power source of a Living Dungeon. It is usually mobile enough for the dungeon to move its core ever deeper as the dungeon grows. It also usually increases in size as the dungeon grows in power
At least in most fiction, and given that DaveB is referencing Dungeon Core fiction, I am presuming this is how he will present it.
Dabbler’s cleavage, in panel 2 (unlike panels 5 & 7), is more realistically depicted than normally seen for breasts in comic illustrations
The panel 5&7 version are what I’d expect if she was wearing a push-up bra…which is absolutely what I would expect from a succubus.
Panel two has her leaning over, no pushup invented by man or infernal can help counting that amount of pull :P
Panel 7 feels ‘off’ to me, I can’t imagine any circumstance where breasts as large and round as Dabbler’s would simply ‘end’ with so little bulge in the sweater beneath them… unless her glamor is borked.
I’d expect Dabbler’s breasts in that sweater to look something like this: https://sta.sh/01sbj2ziuj1g
That’s just what I *expect* though… reality (and succubus glamours) have a way of disregarding what I expect in the most unexpected ways.
Given it has all of you focusing intently on her breasts, I would say her glamour is probably working just as she intends.
I’m so confused by this “explanation”, so let me see if I’ve got this right: In Grrl-verse a dungeon is not a prison or a place full of traps and monster guardians. Instead, a dungeon is some kind of transformer, and it’s shaped like whatever we saw in panel 4. The byproduct of the transformer working properly is that the dungeon will become a farm. There are other fancy words like “condenser” and “core” in here too, but I don’t know what relevance they have if I’m right in my summary. Which means I’m probably wrong. Can someone please help me understand this better?
The thing depicted is just a magical device you fire up in a tunnel or building that concentrates manna, *resulting* in a ‘dungeon’ being created. Where a “dungeon” is just shorthand for a localized high manna ecosystem.
Full of, yeah, monsters, and exotic plants, and random portals to nether dimensions. because those things show up on their own if you concentrate enough manna in one place.
Think of the monsters as the yeast and bacteria in a sourdough starter. They ARE going to show up eventually if you mix the ingredients and don’t go to great lengths to keep them out.
So a dungeon IS a physical place like a building or tunnel. That really should have been established in the comic.
I don’t think the building or tunnel is actually necessary, so much as setting one up without some containing structure would be like constructing an unshielded nuclear reactor; Sure, a nuclear reactor doesn’t actually NEED shielding to run, but who would do that?
Similarly, you could set up one of these puppies on the sidewalk in a busy city, and get a ‘dungeon’, but things would get messy afterwards.
Yeah, someone might nick it and pawn it for drug money :P
Mage lore common large towers, might be appropriate. Donjon comes to mind. Buildup of close range mana chasers are either in the sturdy tower, or expending effort to fly. Even better if it floats hidden over the anchoring tower, or a tall mountain, which channels mana under the mountain (where dragons tend to make their nest) Mass Quantities of Gold (Treasure) and empathically active art and architecture is a practical component that explains the extra expense, and why stories have dungeon raiding for treasure.
Islands seem like a helpful general containment and natural barrier zone. burned or other active dead or sacrifices are familiar themes. Umbrella Corporation Deep Underground seems like one that breeds undead specifically under control of Digital Red Queen. Orbital seems possible for Archon. Might be fitting if this had been done in Ancient Egypt, Asia and America before, in the area of Step Pyramids.
mana, not manna; mana is magical energy in certain magic-containing universes; manna is what the Israelites fed on when they were following Moses in the wilderness
I was under the impression that the word ‘mana’ came from the videogame Legend of Mana, which itself meant to use the word ‘Manna’, but misspelled it (perhaps voluntarily, because it sounds cooler, perhaps not because they were japanese and they are notoriously bad with phonetics from other languages, as everyone is I suppose). So, if their current meaning is different, in origin they were meant to be one single word.
Wikipedia claims the game usage came largely through the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance. But then says the word ‘mana’ itself is from Polynesian culture and is the idea of an intentional supernatural force. Seems comparable to the East Asian idea of qi (chi).
If I recall correctly, the Maori were one of said Polynesian cultures and Mana was considered something along the lines of one’s spiritual essence or soul in their culture. To this end, warriors from different tribes would cannibalize their fallen enemies as an attempt to gain their Mana.
On dungeons in the Grrlverse:
Given its other parallels with our world, ‘dungeon’ almost certainly means a prison, as you would imagine one.
In the (primarily pen and paper, in my experience) RPG community, ‘dungeon’ also refers to an area or place full of traps and monster guardians. This definition came about because the earliest RPG adventures took place largely in places that could readily be described using the earlier definition of ‘dungeon’, and the term ultimately got used to describe those areas regardless of their compatibility with the original definition.
On ‘core’ and ‘condenser’:
Somewhere along the line, some bright spark came up with an explanation for a single ‘dungeon’ to require frequent attempts to eradicate the monsters contained within – thus was developed the dungeon’s ‘core’ – an object or device that *condenses* (hence the word ‘condenser’) additional mana into the area, much like water droplets condense on the outside of a glass of cold water.
The result of that additional mana is that magical flora and fauna repeatedly appear (or perhaps migrate somehow) to the area.
This issue of the comic declares that such a result is also possible in the Grrlverse, where magic is demonstrably real.
In the Grrlverse, also from the details described in this issue, it seems that such a core may be installed as required, wherever one needs it (underground in a stone-built prison type structure or not), resulting in magical beasts and plants in an area that could subsequently be described, in RPG terms, as a dungeon.
Traps, while typically created purposefully, in dungeons created spontaneously through magical means could be laid by higher intelligence creatures drawn to/generated by the core.
Or they could appear of their own accord as well. It’s magic, after all.
All of which is basically what Brett Bellmore wrote, but perhaps a different wording might help make things clearer.
Or not. Whatever. I’ve written it now.
Someone missed a primo opportunity to say, “…to pull a totally random example out of a HAT…”
this is probably the most normal glamor of dabblers we have seen yet and i would still rate it a 4/5 on the ,OMG i dont know how to aproch you or talk cause your to hot, scale
The definition in my mind of what a dungeon COULD Be is woefully inadequate. What you typed hurts my brain.
Think how much it would hurt if it wasn’t ‘dumbed down’
“Enormous expense and potentially catastrophic damage.” Sounds just like every other large military project.
I’d wager at the least the core probably needs to be made out of certain materials to withstand it’s intended effects without exploding or imploding, can’t say i picture a Mana explosion ending well for anyone in it’s radius, which are likely gonna be both Rare and potentially expensive to acquire on a “middle lower class” mana planet depending on who is selling them. and that’s without assuming it’ll need a specially built structure to act as a Containment unit for the core’s energies.
dungeon core? LOL. looks like Dave has been on Reddit reading the HFY sections.
Or playing games like Trinity Universe.
Or Dungeon Keeper
Or watching Reincarnated as a Sword.
HFY always seemed like an odd fit for Dungeon Core, Reddit Serials seems like a better fit.
Though serials in general do way better over on Royal Road instead of Reddit.
Just rereading this, a lot of Cyberpunk and other near future SF speak of an event that is “The return of magic”. Could this dungeon core steer the grrl power world in such a direction?
Having Katrina there was really smart – instead of just exposition for no reason whatsoever (since assumedly most people there would already be aware of what a dungeon was for, since the meeting is about whether to approve it or not after it’s been suggested for decades by the Council).
DaveB’s really good about giving these sort of in-world reasons why these informative descriptions would be explained (Sydney asking questions, Maxima or Sydney wanting clarification from Dabbler after a villainous monologue, the Press asking questions, Katrina – a newbie to all this stuff – being present at a meeting, interviews, or the good ol’ Dabbler’s Science Corners where Sydney stands in for the audience), rather than how many comics do it where they just re-hash infodumps to each other that they’d already know but the audience wouldn’t. :) Exposition is often difficult to pull off for other writers.
I appreciate that he lampshades things like this arc’s expository idiot ball. Max and Deus, and almost definitely the senator, need some background and details, but Kat’s newness is a really good reason for a quick rundown.
Why is Kat with this group? Does she a government job?
This is Dabbler, so I fully expect a smart-fabric cleavage maximizing bra that changes its performance depending on how actively she’s moving and how many men are looking down her shirt.
Well of course not. Despite one Goblin connection, it’s pretty clear David Bowie was something succubus-adjacent.
That’s the universe where Maxima’s team is made up entirely of succubi. Dabbler would love it; Max would have her patience tested.