“Magic missile is just a teleportation spell to a gun range. Create food and water? Teleportation. Teleport? Believe it or not, a hack of disintegration”
We found a race condition in the teleport code. Turns out the efficiency curve for the restoration magic that undoes the disintegration in real time has a parabolic mana requirement related to mass, but disintegrate has a caterneric curve. For human sized stuff they match up, but if you try to teleport something of sufficient mass the restoration starts to draw a disproportionate amount of mana and the whole thing falls apart.
Also, we need to hire some more QA contractors.
How we found out? We knew from the start there would be a discrepancy. Early testing pointed to this problem. And we warned every superior up the chain. But in the end we were ordered to just put a warning on the scroll.
We were only taken serious after a junior magician thought it was funny to teleport an elephant into their observatorium before exams and neglected the warnings. That is how the Mana Void of Barkley Academy was formed.
The superiors were out for blood when the first court summon scrolls appeared, using competitors teleportation technology. That was until we gave them a copy of our manilla scroll holder full with communication of them neglecting to heed our warnings.
That was thr lore behind infinity blade. All magic rings can be distilled down to short range teleportation, just paired with different locations.
Ah yes, the “every OS but windows -> Linux -> Unix” dynamic
Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.
I don’t know what’s going wrong. That spell works perfectly fine on my summoning circle.
As a QA myself, this is what dealing with developers (and I this case, wizards) is like. Way too much trust in their code.
Senior QA in the wizard world would actually be a respected title. Can’t make senior if you’re dead, and you can be alive if you’re bad at it.
Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’s wizards are sort of like this, at least once Mustrum Ridcully becomes archchancellor, and especially once they built their magic Rube Goldberg style supercomputer Hex.
+++ Out Of Cheese Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot. +++
As always, if someone has a good worldbuilding idea, somebody has already thought of it.
As usual, it was Terry Pratchett.GNU STP
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
What is casting a spell in debug mode?
Can you put a breakpoint in your spell? Picturing a devil having a smoke while the wizard puzzles over all the runes suspended in the air.
Debugging spells isn’t like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.
But most wizards just go with the ol’ “add print statements everywhere” method of debugging.
Okay, let’s see… Not sure if the spell is even activating that glyph sequence. Let’s try casting it again with a purple glow rune there…
printspell debugging.
“Gods, I swear you fix one thing in a ritual, two more take it’s place - my teleportation no longer puts me in the ground, but now my clothes arrive backwards and occasionally I’m upside down - didn’t even touch those bits of the spell!”
That’s why I practice rubber Flumph debugging before I lint my spells.
This would help explain why there are so few spells compared to the infinite possibilities of magic. Many problems are solved. There are only so many ways to sort a list and many of them are either entirely unuseful or only good for specific situations. Turns out there’s only one way to make a fireball. Every other way doesn’t work as good.
Kinda meh examples but fantastic concept
Imagine a comedy TV show for magical tech support. Cranky burned out wizards trying to solve magical bugs for fustrated wizard customers.
Fuck I’d watch the shit out of it.
Pretty much large chunks of the Villain Support channel. Here’s a classic to get you started…
Or “if every engineering field was like IT”.
How was it going? “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science (and tech)”.
Arthur C. Clark.
My own: science is the scrutiny of magic.
deleted by creator
Jack Vance, Dying Earth series has similar ideas.
