Grrl Power #961 – Easy peasy thaumaturgeezy
I understand why in most fantasy settings, it takes people (humans especially) decades to learn how to use magic… or at least why it takes everyone else decades, but in nearly every book I read, the Main Character has a considerable aptitude for learning. That is to say, a lot of stories I read take place over a few months to a year or two at most, and the MC goes from trying to cast “Rehydrate Trail Rations” to battling arch-wizards by book 5.
That isn’t to say I’ve never read a straight-up D&D book, but those are never about someone learning how to be a wizard. The stories are about something else, and the MC learns a few tricks along the way. Whether they aren’t a wizard when the book starts or they are, either way they might learn about three new spells by the end of the story. I suppose someone has probably written a book that covers a person’s 80 year lifespan, during which they become an arch-wizard, but that sounds like a challenging read.
The problem with magic is that if there’s not a massive commitment needed to learn it, or only one person in 10,000 can ever touch mana, then just anyone can spend three months in Nepal and become the sorcerer supreme.
In the Grrl-verse, there is such a thing as computer aided spell design, but getting a computer to cast a spell is a lot trickier. Usually the best you can get out of a stock ass computer is getting them to activate enchanted items. Truly sapient AI’s can be taught to use magic, but usually have some peculiar limitations with how they harness mana and interact with the Aether. Sapience is only part of the puzzle though, because there are plenty of animals that can use magic as well. Not so much on Earth, usually, but on like a D&D type world.
July’s vote incentive is up!
You guys don’t know who this is yet. (Her name is Xerxa.) I will give you one single guess what she might be from. (And no, it’s not Dabbler’s mother.) It was a piece I had half finished from a little while ago and given my time constraints this month, I threw a little polish and some background on it and here you are. Unfortunately there aren’t nine separate versions because she’s not wearing a ton to begin with. Hopefully you can read about that soon. I hope you like it, personally I think it turned out pretty good.
As always, nude version are up at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Magic 101. 66 years long. comes with a free youth potion if you pass the course.
and enough condoms for 90 uses per year, if you have any free time.
The course work in sex magic would blow through a lot of condoms.
I’m… fairly sure there’s not much point having them if you can do that.
Given it’s nature, sex magic may not work with comdoms.
You could use the condoms to practice the ritual without actually casting the spell. Practice, lots of practice.
If you were doing sex magic wouldn’t the first magic learned would be contraception and disease prevention magic. Think less did and more ishuzoku reviewers.
Think less * Dnd* and
Given this is Leon, pretty sure it wouldn’t take 66 years. Maybe six weeks. Most of that spent learning how to harness energy.
wow. I never realized that Dabbler only had 4 digits to a hand.
This is something like her seventh appearance, but the first one you can actually see her hands (not counting “Dabbler’s Science Corner”, where she appears in chibi form): https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2012-07-02-GP0097.jpg
And this is her about six pages later, where all four of her hands, and 14 of her 16 digits, are clearly visible: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2012-08-13-GP0103.jpg
I never noticed either. Her Big Reveal page shows them clearly, but I was more occupied with the four arms to notice the fingers, and the rest of my attention got diverted by the mysterious guy in the background.
This raises two questions…
One: do all succubi have four arms, or is it variable (eg Xerxa)?
Two: what is the Succubus number system — octal, hexadecimal, base 24 or totally variable according to mood?
We have only seen three succubae so far (Xerxa is not one of them)
So you’re going with octal/hex for the numbering system? (And all DaveB said was “… it’s not Dabbler’s mother”, but I’ve not seen anything to say that succubi are stuck with 4 arms.)
We’ve only seen one third-Succubae with four arms, her extra arms could be from either of her other parentage
Perhaps it’s an indicator of their individual innate situational awareness, which allows them to be forewarned. Forewarned is fourarmed, yo.
If it works the other way around, would she have a kind of danger sense?
She needs a 4-armed sidekick named “4-Play”
4 Sure!
Dabbler’s four arms are apparently from her part alien heritage. We’ve seen Lots of succubi in flashbacks (Like when she was discussing Succubus school) and so far, Xuriel is the only one with 4 arms.
To be fair HER was also there so…..might not be cannon, or maybe it is and she went to school with a powerpuff villain.
It’s a big universe. The odds that no one out there looks like a Powerpuff Girls villain is actually kinda small. Similarly, the odds of an entire planet made of tiramisu goes up as we explore further until it becomes a statistical certainty.
You’ve been working on drawing faces lately and it shows. Still, I gotta say Leon was a lot cuter before he became Longface Man. Might be exacerbated by the fact that he’s got Muppet eyes in every panel when everyone else gets irises.
No kidding! Dabbler’s eyes are so darned gorgeous! …as well as the rest of her *coughs* super-structure. ^_^
Dave, Leon is freaking me out. Canhe have his brown irises back?
Yeah, Jeremy Clarkson is not a good look on him, next he will develop a giant pot-belly
I always liked the wizard in the Conan movies (whose name was revealed as Akiro, but not until the sequel). He seemed like he had spent 40-odd years learning magic, and his biggest schticks as far as we saw were, A), he was able to heal Conan, but it took all night and involved the gods taking payback from Valeria for their services, and B) he engaged in a duel of what I could swear was Open Door vs Wizard Lock spells with the bad guys’ mage, and you could tell he was winning when smoke started pouring out of the other guy’s nostrils.
So magic in Hyperborea was difficult, dangerous, not flashy, and if you weren’t careful it could boil your brains. And he was successful at it. Plus he was a crazy hermit played by Mako, so what’s not to like?
That was kinda the whole thing of Hyborean magic. It comes in two flavours: Exessive effort for parlour tricks and overpowered shortcuts to power. Vast majority of magic users in Hyboria are evil and corrupt because they go for the shortcuts. After all, what is the point of learning magic if you can’t use it to subjugate the peasants?
i think some of the best lifetime mages, from learning to archmage is done in the Dragon lance series’ at least if you have the fortitude to read the meetings, main series and also the twins and assorted other raistlin themed adventures.
Sounds similar to programming. 10,000 lines of code and heaven help you if you misspelled a word or missed a comma.
Or the End-of-Statement period :[
Rick Cook’s Wiz Biz series touches on that. Minor spoilers, but in the second book an Earth programmer got trapped in an infinite loop while trying to use spell programming from the first book.
It brought a near full stop to their magical programming efforts, while they went back and rewrote the whole code base for safety and robust error catches.
In real life, bad programming can kill (depending on where it’s being used). But it isn’t nearly as common, or instantaneous, as Magic errors can be. Trying to program the control system for a nuclear reactor, on the fly, from scratch, is probably a close equivalent.
Think about the D&D classic “Mage Hand” which can move around 10 lb. objects at 5 feet a second, on top of being gravity neutral. Using some likely bad math, you need to control something 20 Joules. Or 20 Watts as it’s a maintained spell. And just a few milliamps can stop the human heart. Cast Mage Hand wrong, and you could easily kill yourself. And if you don’t kill yourself, burning yourself is likely.
Duh! It took me until just now to figure out the woman on Leon’s right in the last panel was Maxi!!
The combination of magic and programming reminded me of the Wiz Zumwalt book series by Rick Cook. So far, those are the only fantasy books that I have found that use a programming text editor (Emacs) as an active element of the story.
…and of course I’m late to the party. I now see that others made the same connection.
learning the runes and siglets, I am guessing is going to be Lennon’s new pastime. I can see a lot of utility with just designing enchantments letting someone like Dabbler power them.
Interestingly the “Monster Hunters International” Series has it that Microsoft and Apple core programming is so complex and evil, it can invoke demonic magic, The really heavy detail work is done in highly secure server rooms. -Not to keep anyone from sneaking in, but to keep the inevitable accidental magical summonings from escaping.
MHI gets a standard monthly fee to come in and clean up the results of magical misfires an demon summonings in a closed room full of minimum wage (and usually dead when they get there) code monkeys.
“This is Leon. His super power is putting his foot in his mouth.”
Greenwood’s Elminster series, even in the first novel, covers the path of the main character from (in D&D class terms, which is perfectly fair given that the setting is a D&D based universe) Fighter, to Rogue, to Cleric, and finally to Wizard. And before the novel ends, to at least very high level Wizard if not arch-wizard.
I’ll admit that the first novel is all I’ve read in the series, because I found the writing childish, self-indulgent, and not worthy of any more investment of my time or money.
But given that Elminster is far, far older than 80 years old, this series does exactly what you describe.
The Marvel universe, both print and MCU versions, seem to blend a bit of what D&D would call Wizardry and Sorcery. In D&D Wizards need to study to learn magic and improve in the use of magic, while Sorcerers are just gifted from birth for whatever reason (usually involving their family having some bloodline of some critter which is innately magical (demons/devils/angels/dragons/etc.) as a part of their heredity).
In the Marvel universe Stephen Strange is both a good student but also is just innately better at picking up magic than his peers. Otherwise there would be no poor magicians in the Marvel universe who were not simply lazy. Strange has an eidetic memory and is driven to be the best by his colossal ego, but those traits alone wouldn’t be enough to catapult him so far beyond the monks who had been studying under the Ancient One for years or decades if there wasn’t a factor of innate aptitude also involved.
In other words, Stephen is not good because he studied hard, he is good because he is one of the very few who can be good. Since every person on Earth doesn’t even attempt to use magic, we cannot know what percentage fall into this elite category. But we can guess that the Ancient One doesn’t accept students who will never become at least minimally proficient, because why waste the limited teaching resources available to the school? And from that assumption we can extrapolate that Strange’s aptitude is extraordinary even amongst the few who can become masters of the mystic arts.
To be clear, he’s good because he studied hard, AND has innate talent, AND has a photographic memory. That’s the trifecta for really excelling in practically anything, talent AND hard work.
Talent without the hard work just enables you to reach acceptable proficiency while being a slacker. (Which is actually the fate of most people who are extraordinarily talented.) Hard work without talent gets you into the middle ranks.
To be a star you need to combine both.
Dave should read the Elminster books. They’re D&D Forgotten realms books from like, the 80s. They follow the adventures of Elminster, Chosen of Mystra and one of the greatest wizards on Toril, his home continent, and the continent 90% of the Forgotten Realms takes place on. Specifically, the reason I bring them up is because in book 1 he isn’t even a wizard but just a 14 your old thief. He doesn’t even become a wizard till like, book 4 and the series follows his journey from teenage hulagin to 900-year-old wizard. And it’s not dry at all. Though there’s a lot of time skips.
Just to Clearify. Mystra is the goddess of magic in that setting. She doesn’t care much about anything beyond how good a wizard you are.
As for DnD, how long it takes to learn magic depends on what race you are, as that generally will tell you what your starting age is.
One hilarious thing is that Elves seem to take FOREVER to learn the same things as other races. This leads to theories like “The reason why it takes elves longer to learn anything is that their teenage phase is about 40 years long and al they want to do is drink, party and perform fertility rituals” or the more reasonable like “Elves learn magic slowly because they are cautious. Much emphasis is placed on philosophy and other, tangential lessons. Actual magecraft lessons are rare.
Meanwhile, the west wing of the human mage college just exploded in a massive conflagration, killing half of the students. The other half can now cast fireball. PROGRESS!”
The “more reasonable” explanation makes a lot of sense. Elves are a long-lived, slow breeding race, so blowing up whilst learning magic is a lot more impacting on the race. But humans? We breed like humans, so we’ll just make more to replace the losses.
“It would only be a four year course, but you will be learning how to create love potions, create illusions*, enthral people**, magically enhance yourself*, conjure demons *, cure diseases ***, and so on.”
* to make yourself appear more attractive **
** to have sex.
*** useful in dealing with some of the consequences of having sex.
How does Dabbler kiss people without impaling them on her side horns?
Practice, lots and lots of practice
Magician by Raymond E. Feist. It’s the Riftwar Saga, but the first book takes place over…20 years? 40 years? It was written back 1982. Another one that takes place over a very long period of time would be the Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
I found this series to be very deus ex-machinay, and in some of the books the author has to contrive to make the main wizard vanish for a while in order that the plot can actually develop instead of the wizard just snapping his fingers to solve all the problems.
Sounds like DragonBalls
You gotta remember. It was written 40 years ago. I believe it was one of the first books to actually try to tell a story over decades instead of days and months. At the time it was utterly fantastic. I will admit to being in Junior High and not having a well developed sense of taste for plots. I will also admit to not having read them for decades and I know that some stories are much rosier when when one is young and unjaded by stupid plot twists and might not be able to recognize some deux es machina.
Mostly I was trying to think of some stories that are told over long periods of time with the addendum being that said long story telling happen between the covers of the book. That’s what makes Forever War kind’ve weird. It’s told over a really long time period, but over a few subjective years.
Good teachers make complex material seem easy. Or at least worth the work, so this is really not a knock against Leon as much as it’s a point for Dabbler.
Countdown to Sydney pointing out that they should have put the disguise magic into a pair of plain black glasses.
Dabbler: Because of my top?
Leon: Technically, no, the top helps me focus. It’s what’s… barely… beneath the top that keeps distracting me.
Nice to see someone else use runes/glyphs as modifiers for sigils and siglets in their magic system. It just makes sense.
I like that Leon is at least willing to agree that yes, he is out of his depth, and he doesn’t know much. That’s good character,
Magic seems to bear a fair resemblance to coding.
– a computer language is pretty easy to learn, but almost all your code will be calls to libraries. Learning how to do stuff with those libraries is what takes a lot of time.
– you don’t have anything but some marks on paper (or lights on a screen) without compatible hardware to execute it on (and often the access to do the things the program will do).
It seems to me that the biggest problem with magic like this would be practice.
When you start coding, you make a lot of mistakes. A lot of programmer experience is learning how to think like a computer in a sense.
But with a computer, attempting to execute a program that’s wrong affects at most, the computer. And it almost never damages even that.
Doing the equivalent of leaving off a semicolon in the wrong place with a spell seems like it might do a lot more damage. And you’re not running it on a machine, you’re running the code on *reality*, the place where you live and would like to continue doing so. What does a stack overflow or null pointer exception equivalent do?
I suspect wizards are either wildly hubristic, or really cautious.