Half Ogre Conspiracy, I am unsatified.

[Muro]

We have two sources of information on the topic - game mechanics and game lore. As for game mechanics, we know we can't teleport in nor out of the Isle. As for game lore, it is stated that you can't teleport out, but I don't think there is any mention anywhere of whether you can teleport in or not. Probably nobody ever wanted to try and check out.
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[shupbeav]

This is a second quest I was thinking of going after was to see if it were somehow possible to solve this. Of course I highly doubt there is any in-game way to solve this. Something like that would not stay hidden at all, everyone would want to know how to teleport there. The solution would be more theoretical, unless of course someone wanted to do some major game modding.

It still gets to me though, not so much that they didn't include an ending to the whole situation of the half-ogre conspiracy, but that they placed Ogdin on the isle with the story he told and in no way does he play into the quest. I just can't help but feel there should be something there, even something small. I am just doomed to lead a fool's errand.

Odd though, it is used as a prison partly because no one can teleport there, but no one imprisoned there can even teleport, or even has magic.

[Muro]

[OdiProfanumVulgus]

Hi !

Muro, your graphic is pretty awesome, but it doesn't explain why the Beast you have to kill for the cursed necklace quest can use Tempus Fugit.

This spell can only be used by one wizzard/magical monster at a time in whole Arcanum, which means that if the orange gorilla you're hunting down casts the spell, people on the continent will be affected. So, whether T.F is an exception, whether your theory is wrong. Or maybe when T.F is casted on the Island, it creates a sort of time bubble, and you can still cast it on the continent ?

Looking forward to reading your answer

[Muro]

[OdiProfanumVulgus]

There's nothing I could possibly retort to your flawless demonstration.

I was just wondering... Let's say a powerful wizard travels to the Isle of Despair. He knows a lot about this place, and all the mithril stuff because, since he's a wizard, he spends all his time reading useless books about the world.

He decides to do some experimentation. First, he rests. A little nap. Once he feels he has stored over a hundred fatigue points, he goes to the middle of the Island, and casts a fireball toward the sky. It is no random fireball : the wizard preserves it as it rises up by using a few fatigue points every minute.

Once it has reached a limit, the fireball should fade, since the mithril absorbs it. And even the wizard wouldn't be able to make it exceed this limit. Or maybe the fireball will, somehow, "fall" following a curved line, du to the attraction of the mithril ?

Any ideas ?

[Zanza]

Muro you love using the magnet diagram. I disregarded the explanation that Tempus Fugit controlled the world, I gathered the spell effected the mage and his allies, speeding them up but not affecting anyone else.
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[nomwalla]

Well, the way I see it is this. There are two ways to slow down time in a localized region. The first is to travel near the speed of light. The second is to create a massive gravity well nearby. The first works because it's how nature prevents us from breaking the speed of light--by slowing our passage through time, a la the Lorentz symmetry (a good way to visualize it is as an asymptotic function). The second works because enormous masses in space warp not only space but time.

By this rational, I would guess that the caster of Tempus Fugit has to do either one of two things.

He doesn't actually need to have the entire world but him travel near light speed, but he needs to himself travel so fast backwards that the entire world, relatively, would be near the speed of light. But I doubt this is what he does, since he has free movement while casting it.

More likely, what he did was create an extremely powerful "anti"-gravity well near him. As a result of the lack of gravity where he is, and as a result of the gravity elsewhere, he travels through time much faster than they do. As far as everyone else is concerned, he's moving twice as fast as he is. But then I wonder how he even stays on the ground, if such a powerful well was near him. Maybe Tempus Fugit also has the side effect of a downwards acceleration done not by gravity but by the magic also?

The problem with the second explanation is that the mathematics I'd imagine would be insane. I mean, to even travel near twice the the speed than anyone else in the world would require a gravity well the size of this proportion: the well's mass to the Earth's mass has to be proportional with the Earth's mass to a supermassive blackhole's mass. Essentially, the well has almost no mass.

[Wolfsbane]

But now you're trying to tie magic to the laws of nature, when magic in fact breaks and bends those laws to the magicians will. Magic works in direct opposition to the laws of nature; it's why technological equipment, which is highly dependant on those laws, ceases to function near powerful magical auras.
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[nomwalla]

Magic cannot either bend or break the laws of nature, because if it could, any magician would become infinitely powerful. I realize the game manual says that magic is the bending and breaking of these laws. That is inherently a paradox that I'm attributing to the writer's lack of scientific knowledge. I will explain the paradox shortly.

It is a fundamental law of nature that says magicians need to expend energy to do magic. This law is what we call the conservation of energy law, that energy/matter can be neither created or destroyed. But if magicians could break laws of nature, they could very easily break this if they could imagine it. They could make it so that energy can be created and destroyed without requiring an initial input/output of energy, against the laws of nature. Then they would be infinitely powerful. It is the laws of nature that prevents them from doing quite literally anything they could think of.

What can magicians do then, you ask? The way I see it is this. They can take their bodily energy and convert it into any shape/form they desire (to do this with technology requires nothing short of nuclear experimentation, so thus we can say that magic can "bend" the laws of nature, by doing it without all the fuss of nuclear experimentation). However, this result is the product of their bodily energy. Whether this result is a ball of fire, or a anti-gravity well, it is a product of their bodily energy.

But they cannot subvert the laws of nature. Again, if they could, they could make it so that the laws do not allow force to be imparted from one mass to another. Then they would be immune to weapons and bullets.

By this logic, they cannot truly bend or break the laws of nature (as another example, if they could, they could change the properties of the anti-magic bubble, and make it so that it is a pro-magic bubble). Thus, I put forth an argument as to how they could pass time faster. They can't break the laws of time any more than they can change the properties of magnetic fields, mithril, or anti-magic bubbles.

[Wolfsbane]

And what evidence do you have that proves that strong enough mages can't do things like changing the propeties of magnetic fields and such? Mages in this Arcanum, where magic is weakened, can teleport, create intelligent beings made of fire, water, stone and wind. A mage in Arcanum can turn his body into air and still maintain his intelligence. How is that possible? They do all sorts of stuff, and how do they do it? Through willpower and imagination. A mage cannot do anything by simply imagining it, he must also possess the willpower to turn his wish into reality. Compare it to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The force isn't exhausting to use in itself, but Luke still cannot do anything he wishes with it because he can't make himself believe that anything is possible. It conflicts with his most basic observations of reality. It's the same thing with Neo in The Matrix. Anything is possible inside the Matrix, but it's hard to let go of the things you believe, know, to be true. I think it works in the same way for mages in Arcanum. They must push and trick themselves with rituals and incantations to enhance their willpower (like trance and/or meditation) enough to reshape the world around them. If a mage had a will great enough, he could do anything he wished.
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[nomwalla]

@Wolfsbane: Actually, I have no evidence that powerful mages cannot change the properties of energy (and by extension, matter). But I can say that no mages in Arcanum can do so. I personally don't see why not. If I was a mage, who could manipulate latent energy and matter from my body into active forms elsewhere purely by thought, the first thing I'd try to do is to manipulate the quantum strings (the smallest, indivisible units of existence) and change the properties of the world. I could make fire cold and ice hot. I could make suns out of silicon and planets out of helium. I could make time exponential rather than linear in progression.

By the same token, I can quickly, just by thinking it, remove the world of Arcanum's property for holding energy and matter. I could do this even more easily than I could change the properties of magnetic fields. To do the latter, I must fine-tune the behavior of certain strings. To do the former, all I have to do is to remove all the strings, which is much easier. Then nothing would exist in Arcanum, and, by that token, everything in it would be dead.

Isn't that what Kerghan wants? And if Kerghan, one of the world's most powerful magicians, could not conduct the simple task to moving strings, there's no way in hell that he could manipulate strings. And if he can't manipulate strings, he can't alter the properties of energy and matter. If Kerghan can't change the laws of nature, I am doubtful that anyone else in Arcanum can.

So maybe someone somewhere else can do it. But nobody in Arcanum can, and that means all the mages in Arcanum follow the laws of nature, because it's not within their power to break/bend it.

And that's why I put forth an argument, following the laws of nature, of how a magician could alter his passage through time. Because nobody seems to be able to change the laws of nature.

And what of intelligent beings of air, earth, fire, and water? How do they exist? Well, let's think about intelligence. We are chauvinistic enough to believe that brains are hallmarks of intelligence. But what is intelligence, really? It is the nature of being aware and sentient. This can be achieved with any sufficiently complex chemical reaction, regardless of whether this reaction takes place in a medium of air, earth, fire, or water. The only thing is that it is more likely to take place with a brain. But theoretically even a star could be intelligent.

[shupbeav]

The problem a scientific explanation to a mages spells is that it would then require an understanding of natural law to perform them. In order to have a precise spell casted using someones own energy, the manner of which is also without scientific explanation, in a deliberate attempt to perform any one of the spells it would require them to understand the laws they were using, to think that they merely by chance happened to use their energy in just such a way that performed a spell like teleportation without killing themselves and at the same time not knowing exactly what they were doing is just not probable. Mages do require will power for spells, as every action in nature requires energy, they cannot simply create energy, another law of nature, just because they never break them doesn't mean they do not break any law of nature. To consider how much will power would be required for a spell to give oneself limitless will, it would require nearly limitless will itself, which is most likely why such a thing is not attempted in Arcanum. If they possessed such knowledge then any mage would also be a technologist greater than any that is found in Arcanum. It also would suggest that there would be no issue of using magic and technology simultaneously. Then again you would have to consider Jongle. He claimed alchemy was a bit of both. However being that he never explains any of what he does you can never really know how magical or technological it was, when after all he is the one who had a problem with the steam engine. I do know that the game however does not always separate the two. I for example do have a gunslinging mage teleporting around in mechanized armor and wielding a shield of force. All of which works just fine. But when I try to use a resurrection spell on Magnus, I might get it on the seventh or eighth try if I am lucky. Usually resorting to teleporting to Tarant in hopes of buying a life restore potion.

[Wolfsbane]

You're speaking of these scientific facts as if people in Arcanum, a world much like our late 19th century, would know of these things. And, of course, that you "simply by thinking it" could alter these things by willpower. We again arrive at the problem of willpower and basic, fundamental assumptions. There are certain laws hardcoded into our minds that are very, very hard for us to change. Patterns that we learn to be true fromthe day we're born. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to alter these things. An example: You have a spoon in your hand, and you want it to disapear. Completely. Without a trace. A magician with a willpower great enough, and with a great enough understanding of what he was doing (not scientific knowledge, mind you), could achieve this by forcing his will (and in extension his magical power) through rituals and/or incantations to will the spoon out of existence. What he has now achieved is an override of one of the most fundamental ideas is mind has: the existence of said spoon.

You yourself could try this, of course, but you'd have to ask yourself: could you really, really make yourself believe that the spoon in your hand didn't exist? As in not playing with the thought philosophically but actually believeing it? Or, even harder, that you cold remove it from existence by sheer power of will? Because this is all about will, not intelligence or wisdom (only INT 5 is needed to cast the most complex spells).

I bet it's harder than any of us can imagine.

Now aply this to the task of walking through time. Or instantly transporting not only you but all the equipment you AND your party are carrying to a place you have vague memories of located at the other side of the world.

And now go from this to the task of removing the entire world from existence, or something as "easy" as killing all living things in it.

So, in conclusion: yes, a mage in Arcanum could achieve infinite power if given enough time. But not even the elves with their lifespan of 1000 years have that kind of time. Not even Kerghan, who resides in the Void where time is different from here (as in static in a wierd kind of un-static way ), had enough time to achieve this (even though he did cover some ground on the matter).
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[nomwalla]

Haha, I concede. I surrender. Not only does fighting in forums make me uncomfortable, but trying to scientifically defend something magical and clearly unscientific is similar to trying to prove God's existence with science. It just won't happen.

Not only that, but the existence of magic raises one enormous problem. The sheer energy and effort required to convert latent biochemical energy into active energy/matter of any desired state is insane. It would require the same amount of energy to power the entire world for a long, long time, to do even a simple task such as summoning a demon. Yet that is the principle of magic. The fact that the men and women of Arcanum can perform such an insane task with relatively benign effects points to the fact that what they're doing is already well outside the boundaries of science, something we aren't aware of yet (but they are).

Essentially what I'm doing is trying to do is to limit something I don't understand with the laws of nature. That didn't work out so well with dark matter, so it probably won't work out well with magic.

I could hypothesize and theorize about how magic works, but I'd be no more correct about that than I would be about God (who I don't believe exists, but anyways).

Mea culpa. And both of your arguments are valid. I have counterarguments of both, but they all fall under the false presumption that magic is limited by the laws of nature, or that it even follows it. If dark matter doesn't (to our current knowledge, anyways), magic probably won't either.

[Muro]