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Messages - Thanatos

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46
DF Reference Collection / Re: Questions Specifically for Jim, Part 3
« on: June 03, 2010, 08:39:16 AM »
"loves " ?

Harry is the strongest wizard of his generation, and Mab may well know about his nigh-unique power over Outsiders; that's plenty of reason to celebrate exceptionally, without an atom of love involved.

Harry has a history of making nonhuman minds a little more human by the way he interacts with them, such as with Bob and Lash. it's almost as if thinking of them in human terms causes his mortal free will to rub off on them a little. Mab is far more powerful, so her core nature would stay the same, but he may have left some scratches on the surface of the glacier. To someone that's never perceived herself in any way outside her own eternally unchanging nature, that might be significant. That may be part of why she's been acting increasingly odd lately.

47
DF Reference Collection / Re: Questions Specifically for Jim, Part 3
« on: June 01, 2010, 02:49:05 AM »
Only the Queens are eligible vessels for the Knight's power. If just any Summer faerie could receive the power, Harry wouldn't have been able to deduce anything useful from the information the Mothers gave him in Summer Knight--in particular, he wouldn't have known that Aurora did it.

-Max
Hmm, ok... I just figured Aurora made sure she was near when it happened, but I see your point. Scratch that part, then.

48
DF Reference Collection / Re: Questions Specifically for Jim, Part 3
« on: June 01, 2010, 01:26:51 AM »
And there are at least 10 more planned books.

Apparently, yes. Harry is dead. In October you could check "Aftermath", a new short story that would be published on "Side Jobs", the book that recollects the short stories of the Dresdenverse. Aftermath takes place 45 minutes after "Changes" and it is narrated by Murphy.
If he is dead, but is then resuscitated (second time for that trick, so I doubt that's exactly how it plays out), then I guess that technically releases him from Winter Knighthood. There is no "spirit of the law" in Faerie rules, so the technicality stands. It stands, even as crazy as it may make Mab to have finally gotten whom she loves, only to have him independent, unowned again. Really, do you think Maeve or Aurora made such a production to celebrate when they claimed Slate or Reuel? Harry was starting to melt the Ice Queen's heart a little, and since she cannot be other than what her nature makes her, the paradox made her a little nuts. The cold snap after losing him so soon is sure to be horrific. I wouldn't be surprised if all of Lake Michigan freezes solid down to it's bed this winter.

All just speculation of course, and I can't wait to see how it actually develops. This is the first true cliffhanger ending, I think. That's certainly done what it's supposed to do!

49
I think the cycle o' death went more like

Susan dies, then all the vamps of her generation, her 'siblings'.  Then it goes to her 'parent' Bianca and all of Bianca's 'siblings' as well wiping out that generation.  Then Bianca's sire and his siblings, so on and so on, wiping out whole generations as it climbs upwards along the tree.    
Only other vamps made by Bianca would be Susan's siblings. The rest would be cousins.

Killing Susan (5th Gen) would have killed Bianca (4th Gen), had she been alive (showing that the curse can continue up the chain even if a link is missing).

All other 5th Gen vamps made by Bianca would die, since those are Susan's siblings.

Other 4th Gen vamps made by Ortega die for being Bianca's siblings. Let's call one Jose. While he dies as Bianca's sibling, any vamps made by Jose are Susan's cousins.

Other 3rd Gen vamps made by Arianna are Ortega's siblings, so they die. Call one of them Aurum. While Aurum dies, his vampiric children and grandchildren of the 4th and 5th generations are some kind of cousin to Bianca or Susan.

Other 2nd Gen vamps made by the King include all the nobles that are siblings to Arianna. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th generations coming from those other nobles are some kind of cousin to Ortega, Bianca, and Susan.

The King dies.

Now, if cousins are killed as well as siblings, that would have destroyed the whole human race if Maggie had been killed. The Reds don't care about humanity, but they'd get awful thirsty if we all died. For that matter, all other living things are cousins to humanity if you trace it back far enough (unless in the Dresdenverse, the Genesis story of each species being created separately is literal truth).

50
I've been editing / proofing 'for fun' since I started reading...
I tend to be a natural at it. I mean, I still make typos myself, but your/you're, sense/since, quiet/quite and the like tend to jump out at me and disturb the flow of what I'm reading. Netspeak crap like your/ur is very annoying. As you can imagine, reading message boards or practically anything else online tends to set off that peeve on a near-constant basis. I try to control it, but I always have the urge to say something about it. Do you get that urge too? If so, how do you turn it off?

*******

Ok, a question for Jim. What happened to all of the Red Court infected? Was their connection strong enough to kill them? Were they cured? Did they remain as they were, meaning the next time one loses control and kills, the Red Court is reborn?

Also, as I understood it, the bloodline curse would travel up the generations, killing all direct ancestors. If Maggie had been killed, it would have taken Harry's and Susan's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. If it could jump over to siblings as well, Thomas would be in danger, who would have passed it up to the White King. Possibly Lara and the other Raith sisters could have died as well, if the curse could spread to the other siblings of a half-sibling. Suffice it to say, many would die. The trouble comes in if the curse is also able to trace it's way down bloodlines. It seems to have done that in the Red Court. Susan was sired by Bianca, sired by Ortega, sired by Arianna, sired by the Red King. Any other childe (please excuse my use of V:tM terms) of Bianca, Ortega, Arianna, or the King would die. So that takes out the first and second generation vamps, but descendants of 2nd generation vamps other than Arianna would not be in direct ancestry or the siblings of someone that was.

Red King - Arianna - Ortega - Bianca - Susan
|________N2 - G3N2 - etc.
 \________N3 - G3N3 - etc.

While nobles N2 and N3 (on through Nx) would die because they were siblings to Arianna, the 3rd generation vamps of their lines are only cousins to Ortega, not siblings. Since those vamps did die, that means the curse traveled back down bloodlines from anyone it targeted, as well as up them.

The trouble with that is, if Maggie had been killed, the entire human race, and possibly all life on the planet could have died with her. Either this curse was only theoretical until now, or it can't travel up and then back down other branches, and there are still Red Court vamps around, just with no central authority.

I suppose that another possibility is that the curse's ability to trace back down lines of ancestry stops at any point that the direct ancestors are already dead. Then it would seem that Thomas was safe, because Margaret was already dead. Any other children of Ebenezer would die, but unless his mother or father were still alive, any siblings or cousins of his would be safe. However, the fact that the Red King was still around meant that every vampire of his court would die, as the curse traveled up to him and then back down every branch coming from him.

Hmm, that was much longer and more difficult to explain than I'd expected. Perhaps I can mock up a better family tree illustration if necessary.

51
Display Case / Re: Perfect Casting, part 2
« on: April 25, 2010, 11:52:30 AM »
I tend to imagine Jamey Sheridan (Randall Flagg from The Stand) as Nicodemus.

52
DF Books / Re: Did you discover the books because of the TV Show?
« on: February 27, 2007, 04:01:26 AM »
Read the books before the show, and in a way I feel a little sorry for those who are approaching from the other direction. I mean, it kinda sucks for me when I try to watch the show and it barely resembles the books in anything more than character names. The myriad changes to just about every detail, great and small, become a constant nagging distraction even when I try to look at the show as an entirely different universe. It's not much of a loss for 45 mins of TV, but if something similar affects those that knew the show first...  :(

Well, at least the stories and characters in the books are much stronger and more complete, so the dissonance would probably wear off during Storm Front, and it wouldn't bother them for the rest.

53
DFRPG / Re: Magic and Technology
« on: November 01, 2006, 06:23:32 PM »
I think that it's a matter of belief, just like working magic is. For some reason, wizards have a tradition of not trusting tech to work properly, and so it doesn't. Normal people have a tradition of not believing in magic, so even if Harry walked them through a spell step-by-step, they probably couldn't get it to work. They'd ground out whatever power they managed to raise before they even became aware of it.

Butters is more open-minded than most, after all, he classed the vampire corpses as "humanoid but not human" before he knew Harry. Most doctors would probably try to explain the differences in the bodies as deformities or the effects of disease.

Ramirez is probably a good example of a wizard that is a little more open-minded towards tech. Part of it is his youth, but it may also be something intrisic to his personality that makes him just not worry too much whether tech will fail on him, so by default he trusts it more.

Early on in magical training, an initiate has to believe that all the symbols, words, and strange materials have innate power, and he is just putting them together like a puzzle. Later on, he comes to realize that all those things are just foci, and amount to nothing more than a way to get the conscious, worrying and doubting mind to shut up long enough to let the magic work. The foci are mental toys that get the logical mind to stop asking "but why?" for a while. If you were to reveal that the foci are nothing more than a psychological crutch too early in a mage's training, he probably wouldn't trust in those tools long enough to develop trust in himself.

By the same token, wizards are taught that tech is unreliable, but each one has a different line defining what's "simple" and "complex" tech. A sword could be forged with modern metallurgical techniques that might not have been available before WW2, but it still seems "old", tried-and-true.

I think that game-mechanic wise, there could be a few different options, or ranks of "tech friendliness", and you could spend some of your development points towards that. If Harry is a default, then you could say that if you don't buy or sacrifice any ranks of "tech-friendliness" you're comfortable with things that predate you by roughly two generations (or about twoscore years ;) ). You could make an effort to adapt over time (Ebenezar obviously has, he's around 300 and the fact he can work any motor vehicle is a wonder in itself) by spending experience-based development points on it as well.

If the default rank 0 is about -40 years, then the next rank up could be -20, then 0, then +20, +40, +60 and so on. Normal humans probably default to somewhere around the +60 level if they grew up in a developed country, as that would be about the age where all the "newfangled gadgets" start to seem too mystifying to use. :P

After 5 increments of 20 years each, you could start taking larger steps. Maybe it could increment by 50 years after that? Ebenezar is able to use a truck that postdates his birth by about 200 years, so that would put him at 7 ranks of tech-friendliness, even though he's still using very old stuff by modern standards.

Oh, and on the side topic of generating "shields"...

From: http://www.scansite.org/scan.php?pid=203
Quote
Industrial Force Field
Industrial Case Evidence
An invisible force field has been experienced as a by-product of a particular industrial process in a 3M manufacturing plant in the south eastern United States. This occurred in August 1980 at its polypropylene plant around a large film-slitting machine with usually a temperature of about 80 degrees Fahrenheit with a relative humidity of 75-80%.

David Swenson of 3M Electrical Specialties Division in Austin, Texas was called in to investigate the problems with contamination of wide web film as it was being run at high speed, converted (split) into “film jumbos” with a width of 3’ x 5’ for coating with adhesive to make tape.

The Polypropylene web was 21 feet across – with the film running from one roller up 20 feet to another roller; across 15 feet to a third roller; down 20 feet to a splitter; and was then wound onto two rolls. It formed a huge dynamic “tent”. Swenson was there to measure the static electricity inside the web tent . As he approached the tent, his static field meter recorded a 200kV @ 12” The amount of static electricity was in the Mega volt range. The force that engaged him inside the tent was invisible and impenetrable, certainly making him unable to move further forward.

This was Coulomb’s Forces – the law of static attraction and repulsion – Static Electricity can cause some very strange and often difficult to explain phenomena. It is easily controlled if a commitment is made. This nuisance can be reduced to a non-nuisance level by proper analysis and installation of suitable equipment, at a very low cost.

To get rid of the effects at the plant an induction static eliminator was installed across the web at the unwind. The static electricity was immediately reduced throughout the process to less than 50kV (from MV’s). It was then possible to make measurements in the rest of the area. Additional induction units were also installed at the jumbo wind-up areas, which resulted in less than 5kV at conclusion.

Another link on this: http://www.esdjournal.com/articles/final/final.htm





 8)

54
DFRPG / Nevermind.
« on: October 30, 2006, 06:35:38 PM »
Nevermind.

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