Anti-Elements

[Agar]

I was reading Ylorea's new plot whith the tower that float on the floating stone, and with her comment on the Carpenter's Ring about magic standing in for technology, I was thinking doesn't the floating stone act just the opposite of regular stone?

I mean, on the sterotypical elemental magic chart, water is opposite fire, and air is opposite earth. Since the floating rock rises into the air, could it be considered anti earth? Could there be an anti air as well, a pocket of air in the ground that won't rise, or move for that matter? What are elemental properties and what properties would thier opposites have?

Anti Fire might be cold and could even be drinkable or edible as the case may be. Anti Water should be hot, obviously, but could it also have the dancing movement of fire?

Also, munchkins will have the knee jerk reaction of turning any use of these into a Star Trek episode, and trying to combine an element and an anti element to make something blow up. Since this idea is founded on Ylorea's floating stone idea, that shouldn't be the case. Why? Well, neither source is pure and the methods for purifying them are limited to powerful elementalists or powerful elementals. Even Elemental creatures themselves aren't pure element, they have some spark of life to give them sentience.

Even uranium ore doesn't have enough purity to start a reaction on it's own, it has to be processed and purified before it can be used in a reaction like generating steam for electric turbines. The floating stone would have some anti earth in it, but no more than regular earth has pure earth elemental in it. Since neither is pure, they just exert their properties next to each other and nothing blows up.

So, how do we codify the elements we take for granted? What are thier properties and what are the opposites of those properties? And what can we do with that?

[Ylorea]

I am afraid part of your logic is not correct,  the way you describe anti-fire is basicaly water and anti-water is basicaly fire.

Also the material used to keep the castle afloat is not nesecary anti-earth (i.e. air) I could have opted to use helium, but I would need quite a bit of helium to have the whole contraption fly in a stable manner.

If you want to look at the contraption in a science way, think about it this way:
The earth has a magnetic field, so what is stored in the basement of the island is actualy earth with a reversed magnetic field.

Following your logic, I am afraid anti-earth would have such a density, that the whole contraption could never be concieved in the first place.

Yours sincerly,

ylorea

[Ria Hawk]

Don't forget that this is fantasy.  Things don't necessarily have to follow a logical path.

[Ylorea]

Ach tja ehhh, wellicht betrok ik de opmerking te veel op "mijn" wereld.

Hoewel dat wel degelijk een fantasy wereld is, is het zeker niet zo dat de "normale" regels van .....

ehhhrrr let me rephrase that into english....

I think there is a fair chance that I have interpreted the remark of Agar in the context of "my" world.

Teolin is a fantasy world and some things are powered by magic, but magic is never used to "break" the laws of physics (oke sometimes magic bends the laws of physics.)

Therefore, in Teolin,  (just about) everything does follow a logical path, although people and monsters of course do not always "think" about it that way.

Yours,

Ylorea

[MoonHunter]

Every fantasy, or science fiction world for that matter, has to be internally consistant.  Every writer or GM needs to establish for the reader/ troupe what is and is not possible in their world.  And they should do it as early in the story or campaign as narratively possible.  Failure to do that brings across a feeling from the reader/ troupe, that the writer/ GM has no clue as to what they are doing (or very little clue).  

So if a world has magik, things can happen "there" that can not happen "here". However, the writer/ GM must establish the type of magiks possible as well as their "feel".  Once the writer/ GM has done that, they can do almost anything... as long as it fits the established "rules" and the "feel".  So if your magik system is a subtle one of summoning immaterial elementals that can alter reality slightly, and you have a character/ NPC snap their fingers and create a huge "pit of doom", everyone reading/ playing, is going to go "HUH?!?". However, nobody will blink twice if you create a weakness in the ground and the target falls through it into an existing cave.  They will go... "that makes sense" and read/ play on.

If you establish magik that works on riddles or puns, as long as the magik result comes across with a pun/ riddle response... no matter how random or arbitrary the result might seem, it will make sense and people will accept it.

If magik is a spigot you turn on with no clue as to what will happen when you do, then you would have random magik makes no internal sense. (Yet, it would make sense because magik was basically a wand of wonder effect).  

So yes, you can do anything with magik (or technology which in the literary sense is just another type of magik), as long as you set it up appropriately and it makes internal sense.

This is not just another MoonHunter idea.  Real Writers have written extensively on this subject. In fact, Orson Scott Card wrote it in "How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy".

http://teenwriting.about.com/library/weekly/aafpr110302.htm

[Ylorea]

That is also the reason why a friend of mine asked me to proofread her book.... But I keep having to proofread bits and pieces, so now we agreed I will not have to do that, until she finishes a chapter....

But you are right, consistency is the key to being believable.

Still Ria has a good point, as I failed to see the plothook I posted from a perspective different from my own.

[Agar]

Ok so now that we have seen that this concept is not for a specific game or scenerio, what makes elements the elements they are?

Fire is hot, but so is a sun baked stone, a geyser, and a desert wind. Does that mean being hot isn't what makes fire be fire, or is it that fire has in some way touched all those things to make them hot? Water is wet, but so is fog, steam and mud. Earth is solid, but so is ice, but not wind or fire ... so is that a quality of earth, and if so, how is ice not earth but water ... or is it?

The problem for me to work out how these theoretical anti-elements could work would be to first define the "true" elements. Anyone care to give me a hand?

[Strolen]

anti-stone = floats?

Why? If this castle gets hit by a catapult will half the dirt fly up and half fly down? As people walk, will some dirt they kick drift off into space?

There has to be something that causes the two pieces to react that well with each other. Is there an altitude that anti-stone just stops at? Is there a 'ring' around the planet that holds this and it can be incorporated into flying castles? Can it be weighed down so that it can be used as a wagon without wheels? Probably still have to limit its use (or creation) to the ultimate mages and can't just leave it as a simple anit-element.

Besides that though...

Anti-Fire: Fire is hot, so cold might work, but what if anti-fire was able to recreate things? After all fire destroys, what if we could use anti-fire to build a tavern? Could only create from combustible materials but a great mage could set an anti-fire and concentrate on a goal and it would gather all the materials from the air and recreate them in an actual physical establishment. Perhaps the anti-fire needs to be fed something that it can convert? instead of just getting it from the air. Perhaps you need to feed it water continuously for it to stay lit?

Anti-water: Solid makes sense. Flow uphill somehow comes to mind. Maybe a maleable solid that slowly grows upward. If a block of anti-water is left long enough perhaps it creates a column based on the mass of the original block. Then that column can be used for building? Not too sure on this one overall.

Anti-air: A solid again? Anti air could be used as a road surface or something. It can be spread and fill all empty spaces creating a smooth top surface. Sort of picture a unbreakable glass that flows.

Who knows? Interesting to think about though.

[Kinslayer]

It must be remembered that the elements are pure only in an ideal state, e.g. magma is earth, with some fire added.  

One possible route is to divide the elements based upon traditional observations of activity.  That is, fire is active, earth fixed, and both water and air are mutable.  This would give us opposites of fire & earth:  anti-flame is rock-solid & still, anti-earth is leaping & constantly in motion.

[Cheka Man]

I like the idea of anti fire being used to build things. What happens if an anti-fire gets out of control and runs riot? One could get a huge mishapen city with no sense of city planning, that has destroyed the nearby forest and perhaps even crossed the borders of another country. You could have your world's equivilant of Yellowstone National Park built over and turned into a city because what was meant to be a small anti-fire went wrong. Dryads, elves, anybody who lives in forest settings, maybe even dragons, would be outraged as their woodland homes would be built over and destroyed.

Mage "It was just meant to be a small log cabin, honest!"

[Scrasamax]

If we follow the logic of matter-antimatter, we will realize that the opposing forces are pricipally very similar. A postion is not much different from an electron save that its magnetic charge is opposite. Whne the two are brought together, the charges cancel out, and the two particles cease to be, producing a great deal of energy.

Thus, anti-fire is the easiest. It still burns, it still consumes flammable materials because it is still fire. However, instead of producing heat, it consumes it. An antifire leeches the warmth out of the air, causes water to freeze, and so on and so forth. I see an idea of great vessels of anti-fire encased deep in the ice of the poles of thw world, partitioned off by the gods so that life could exist. Perhaps breeches of these jars cause cold spells and ice ages.

Currently I dont have any ideas for the anti-variants of the other three elements, but I will see what i can come up with, I like this thread.

[CaptainPenguin]

Water and anti-water come together like an acid, by Scras' idea.
Air and anti-air create a solid; earth and anti-earth create a gas.

[Scrasamax]

Anti-water is a rare and terrible thing. Water is the fluid of life, and the huma body is primarily water. Drinking water moisturizes the body, things left in the water bloat as they absorb water into their structure. A body dumped in the bloats and swells, becoming water-logged.

Anti-water drys things. Anti-water could form in oases in the desert, insulated from elemental water. An animal falls into anti-water, and instead of bloating, they are dehydrated, and turned into a mummified corpse. Drinking antiwater would cause near instant dehydration, and death. When brought into contact with water, the two create a dynamic reaction as the two opposing phases of water boil against one another, leaving behind a crust of impurities and a cloud of whichever element had the greater volumn, in the form of steam.

Could be used as a nasty nasty poison to kill people, or as a spell reagent for drying, or sand spells.

BTW - adding any element to its anti-element destroys both, possibly in a dynamic explosion (fire) or a nasty hissing cloud (water)

[CaptainPenguin]

Anti-fire = coldfire
Anti-water = deathwater
Anti-air = earthsmoke or earthcloud (or something like that)
Anti-earth = skystone

[Kinslayer]

Anti-water could be opposed to the dilution effect of normal elemental water.  That is, adding more water to a substance increases its efficacy, rather than dulling it.  However, to incorporate this mystical effect properly, "succussion" must be used.  In other words, shaking a snow-globe filled with anti-water would allow you to add more snow--with larger "flakes"--by adding more anti-water alone... and shaking it...


(Sorry, I couldn't resist.  I've been spending too much time around medical professionals lately.)