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Tedd could produce one-day transformation wands with pointed ears, cat ears, cat whiskers, puppy tail, green skin, etc. (just one small transformation per wand) for vaccination purposes....we could have play groups with every grade-school child showing a different trivial transformation.

I'd much rather something like Incarnations of Immortality, where magic and technology work equally well, with no cross-interference.

If Magic needs to actively suppress systems to prevent them from working, that would explain why Magus's magic and the griffins' magic(assuming their rule system is different) work in Moperville.

*grabs notebook from /me* *flips to the page for TheOldHack* *err, make that pages* *um...* *Volume what?!?* *goes to shelves, finds most recent volume* *adds a note, an underline, and a little cat-face with cross eyebrows*

Magic's weak spot is understanding individuals. People in general would stop using magic. Individual ambitious would-be wizards would continue like no tomorrow. They would likely also die in droves but there would always follow more to replace them. Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series and many of the following books are all excellent. I once ran a roleplaying game with this as a premise. The idea was that the players were supposed to stop and reverse the process before it became permanent. There was a neighbouring dimension with a world much like ours and due to an overlap the world barriers became porous. Close to the rifts forming as a result the two different sets of laws clashed. Magic stopped working in the magic world and science stopped working in ours. Worse, magical phenomenae got loose in our world. The good thing, from the POV of the players, was that the science stuff they brought along while exploring the magic world worked over there. The players won in the end though it was a tight race. I have always been a bit sorry that we never got a chance to play out the aftermath. So many people had died and so much damage had been done that much of Denmark had turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. (Thankfully for the rest of the world, the effects had not yet spread outside Denmark's borders by the time the players successfully fixed things.) It would have been really interesting to play a game where the players were part of a reconstruction effort and had to deal with lingering effects. For example, one idea I had was that magic still worked in certain areas. My best memory from the game was when the players were chased by a huge horde of zombies. This happened to be in the city of Aalborg which we lived in at the time. There was this plaza where you could always be sure to find hundreds of bicycles parked. Bicycles still worked so my players quickly stole some and left the zombies in the dust. They turned a corner and gave a sigh of relief. Moments later, they had a huge OH SHIT moment as they saw a massive mob of zombies all on bicycles turning the corner in rapid pursuit. (We made SO MANY bad jokes about that, by the way. This happened to be while Tour de France was going on and the pursuing mob instantly got named Tour du Mort. The leading zombie was of course wearing a yellow shirt and the players argued about whether being undead counted as a form of doping... it went on and on.)

Cheetahs are rather high-strung and skittish. At the San Diego Zoo and the Wild Animal Park, they routinely will raise an individual cheetah with a very laid-back dog as a constant companion. They bring the pair near the crowds, the cheetah starts to get nervous, looks over at their buddy and sees that they're still calm and happy, and the cheetah relaxes and copes with the crowds much better than without that emotional cue.

More educational would be one-day gender and race transformation wands..

She's kinky as hell! Had to be said.

"Also the Terracotta Army has come to life and is rampaging across Asia"

More like "mostly cloudy with a chance of screaming many-limbed chaos spawns and impossible violations of physics and biology. Bring a few holy or blessed relics to mercy-kill the suffering and purge heresy." Gonna need a bigger blessed chainsword...

Cheetahs : Greyhounds who got the "Hello Kitty" skin.out of a lootbox...

I think you're both right. I think Vlad was such an absurd combination of species that shape-shifting to/from his nonhuman form was so very hard. Throwing Lespuko into Vlad's mix would have probably saved Vlad a lot of pain but as explained with Grace/Shade-Tail, the Lespuko ability to pick, choose and combine pieces of forms is very powerful and dangerous. Without the threat of Damian, the Shady corporation lab appears to have chosen to not to take the risk and Vlad paid the price..

Bungled by overloading. Birds, bats, and ... was there a leopard in there, as well as Human and Uryuom? Just being alive to begin with should credit Vlad with a win.

OK, I'm coming off Abilify and on to Risperdal. Change over starts today. I'm taking my night time meds now and am going to go to bed, the mess up with the transportation hit me harder than I thought it did, so I'm going to grab a couple of PDF files and/or dead tree game books and look for ideas / nap / go to sleep until the morning.

Kind of like greyhounds. I've seen video of a running greyhound. They are amazing, beautiful creatures. An online friend of mine owns one and it can run much faster backwards than she can run facing forward. It loves being chased but has to give the silly slow two-legs a big advantage for it to be fun.

Very good point. Note to all forumgoers here: no matter what you do, do NOT buy Samsung Galaxy S7 transformation wands.

Maybe a few decades ago. Maybe even one decade ago. Now, at least in USA and EU, I think they'd be accepted by the majority. But then you would get the cheap, knock-off brand versions that explode into flames or change you into a war chicken or something.

Oh wow, just realized. Once Magic goes public and knowledge of transformations becoming permanent is common, we will see humanity start to really change. Imagine a world full of people who realize they can become whatever they want by magic. Stronger, handsomer, furrier, taller, smaller, different colors, extra sets of things, whatever. Generations from now, humans might not be recognizably human anymore.

I think that's broadly right, but trying to figure out how Tedd's statement could have been better phrased I think I figured out what she really meant. The term "rules" has been used in this chapter and on the forums as shorthand for "set of rules" (or at least that's how I interpreted it), but I think when Tedd says "if the rules were all ideal" what she meant was "if each individual rule was set to it's individual ideal setting". So adjusting the rules of magic is sort of like when you're adjusting the colors on a picture; you don't want all the colors at max or you'll wind up with solid white, or at minimum as that'll be black, and keeping everything in the middle doesn't change anything. (Another example that comes to mind is adjusting the sound on a sound system / program that allows you to play around with multiple characteristics of the sound.)

I read it as Tedd asking a hypothetical. "Here's this system, and it has a down side. Here's this other system, and it has other down sides." "I don't suppose you could just give us a system without all these down sides?" "Nope, 'cos then disaster!"

At one point in the Illuminatus! trilogy, a guy is on LSD and watching everyone around him change color. Not just normal human skin colors either. It occurs to him that a lot of societal problems would go away if people DID change color. Of course, this wasn't an original concept. And it was revisited somewhat more recently, as well.

Someone call the Vatican, the Imperial Omyouji, the Van Helsing family, all the shamans, the Freemasons, the priests of all major religons, and reconvene the Round Table. And prepare to reopen the crypt of Merlin. We MIGHT have an emergency here.

Makes me mad when people abuse the systems developed to help people with genuine disabilities, and wind up spoiling things for those who really need them. They just had someone who brought their "emotional support dog" on an airplane, and a child was bitten by it. The airline is "now rethinking their policy" on support and service animals. For those of you who don't know, there is no central registration or official legal recognition for service and support animals. There are a great many organizations who will do everything from offer extensive training and socialization for skilled service animals, to web sites selling vests and letters from supposed shrinks to anyone who will pay their fee and fill out an online questionnaire and claim they feel sad without their beloved pet. The law says that a service animal must be trained to do at least one specific thing related to the owner's disability. That can be alerting them of an impending seizure, waking them when their blood sugar gets too low during the night, guiding the blind or alerting the deaf to a knock at the door or a fire alarm going off. Service animals can accompany their human pretty much anywhere, including restaurants and airplanes, by law. Emotional support animals only have rights when it comes to housing -- an apartment or hotel cannot refuse them even if they normally have a no-pets policy. (Can't remember if airline flights are by the law or just by policy for them.) They don't have the right to go into restaurants, motels, grocery stores, etc. What is true of both categories is that they must behave themselves. If a "service" or "support" animal pees or poops inside, or jumps on someone, or barks incessantly, or heaven forbid bites someone, then they can and should be asked to leave. They do not have the right to be wherever they want no matter how they behave. That is why Seeing Eye dogs and Hearing Ear dogs go through extensive training and socialization. My own papillon and I did a course called Canine Good Citizen. It involved learning how to behave around other dogs, other people, in crowds, etc. It was around eight classes, once a week, and seemed like a good criteria for whether a dog should be out and about in crowded public places. Is it practical for airlines, grocery stores, etc. to be allowed to require proof of at least mininal training? Maybe, maybe not. But just letting anyone who wants to, to buy a vest and assert that they have the right to bring Muffy into a crowd of people or places where food is prepared and handled, doesn't seem to be working any more. It used to be only the worst, most despicable creep would dream of slapping a harness on their pet and trying to claim they were a Seeing Eye dog when it wasn't true. I've had clients whose pets have saved their lives or kept them out of the hospital, and I'm glad to do what I can to help them. I wrote a health certificate for a girl's rat after her shrink officially asserted that she needed him for emotional support, so the dorm will have to let her keep him in her room. I fully support when people follow the rules, in spirit as well as letter. It pisses me off that so many people are trying to cheat the system, and now the rights of people who really do need their animals with them are going to pay the price. It also pisses me off when delivery people park in or blocking the handicapped parking, but that's another rant....