She Blinded Me with Science! (Magitek That Doesn't Make Me Cry Myself To Sleep)

[Kellus]

Magitech pokemon

Radmelon's right. Want.

First, I would like to say...

Thank you! I'm glad that you like it. Amechra's exactly right that you can come back to a principle later on to keep working on it, so if you spend enough time or get enough buddies to help you you can make some truly enormous stuff.

Second nitpick, in BIOY 101, you can create affect cubic foot per preparation, but the HD of the biostructure created is keyed of the thickness of the structure. Does this mean I could prepare the Principle 100 times and create a wall 1 foot by 1 foot by 100 foot long and key the thickness of the 100 foot length, so it would have 100HD?

This has to do with how hit points in objects are measured. Most material, like iron, has hit points per inch of thickness. That means that if I swing a hammer at a wall of iron or something, I know how many hit points I have to chew up before I break through to the other side in that particular spot. Unlike creatures, structures don't necessarily suffer critical existence failure just from smashing part of them (unless we're talking about sunders). Because biostructure has properties of both creatures and objects, instead of a flat number of hit points per inch it has one HD per inch of thickness. Note that when you turn it into a chassis and give it life, it loses this material accounting technique and switches to a normal creature progression of hit points.

Could you put a list somewhere of how much all these materials cost per cubic foot? Even for the materials that have a cost per pound (iron, copper, silver, gold and platinum) need you to go to the DMG to find the cost, go here to Alchemetry to find density, and then work it out, so having the cost per cubic foot would be convenient. As for the rest...well. Adamantine, cold iron and crystal, although they have writeups, all only work out their costs based off usage in weapons and armour, not for other items or just chunks of the stuff. And the rest of the materials needed (like lead, mercury, diamond and tin), we don't have any pricings, only density for most of them (but some like diamond don't even have that). So yeah, knowing how much we're supposed to pay for the materials to make all the gramarie stuff would be useful.

I'll see what I can do, absolutely. The problem with arbitrary pricing though is that in a gramarie-enabled setting you can turn iron (cheaply available) into pretty much any other metal. The price of metals has a lot to do with the technology level of your setting.

EDIT: Oh, and how biollurgical chassis size in cubic feet quite relates to size category would be handy.

The space and height guidelines are just that- guidelines. Like Eldan said, humans take up far less space than a Medium-sized creature could take up. Essentially, they're maximums. As soon as you roll over the maximum space alloted to a Medium creature (measured by volume) you end up classified a Large creature. That being said, the rules are incredibly inconsistent with this, having long and tall and skinny and fat creatures that make no sense with their designated size category. So... yeah! For something inherently inventive like designing a chassis, your best bet is to describe the proportions and features of it, figure out what rough category it fits into, and then decide how much of that maximum space is actually filled with monster.

If someone sticks their head through a black filter, does their body go limp?

Very interesting question, and it relates to the nature of information. I'm going to go with sort of. Explicitly the only way that information can be carried back and forth through a Black filter is physically. Sensory information just doesn't pass through it. But everything else in the world does pass through it like it weren't there. If you reach through a Black filter and touch something, you wouldn't feel it because the sensory information needs to move from your hands to your mind, passing through the filter. So, yeah, anesthetic is totally possible with it. But once your brain passes through to the other side, you can interpret everything on that side of it properly. I realize that the rules text for this filter is somewhat ambiguous, I'm going to try to clean it up and explain it a little better. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

But then when your brain passed through it, or books, or scrolls, wouldn't the information contained within be lost?

Similarly, no. It's sensory outputs, exactly as described in imachination, that don't pass through a Black filter.

--

After doing a lot of calculations the last two days, I'm also introducing two new rules to YGGD 101 to stop ridiculous abuses:

1. Fields that occur inside of a semi-space do not pass through the portal and radiate out from it. For example, if you have an input transformer inside of a semi-space, the net doesn't extend past the portal.
2. Similarly, inside is a nebulous term when it comes to a semi-space. From now on, something is called inside whatever space more than 50% of its volume is in. Eldrikinetic engines now only generate Push in the space that they're described as being inside.

--

Secondly, I also have new pricing rules! Huzzah!

When you buy something made of gramarie, you're essentially buying a set of principles that have been prepared on your behalf, and you're buying the raw materials. Every principle that has been used has a value of anywhere from 1 to 9. Every principle starts at a value of 0 for price.

{table=head]Factor|Value
Baccalaureate Principle|+1
Magisterial Principle|+3
Doctorate Principle|+5
Baccalaureate Tech-Level Setting|+2
Magisterial Tech-Level Setting|+1
Doctorate Tech-Level Setting|+0
[Specialist] Principle|+2[/table]

Once you establish the value of each principle that went into the thing you're buying, check this chart for the price of purchasing it:

{table=head]Value|Price
1|3 gp
2|9 gp
3|27 gp
4|81 gp
5|243 gp
6|729 gp
7|2,187 gp
8|6,561 gp
9|19,683 gp[/table]

This has several ramifications: the same gramarie is valued less by society as the general technology level of the society advances. For example, a magical empire on the Astral Plane which is at Doctorate-level won't be willing to pay as much for your semi-space as the mud farmers back home.

Next, specialist principles are now much more valued, since only one out of any eight gramarists will have the specialisation that you need.

In general, the numbers seem to work fairly well to stop players from abusing it too badly on both ends: making a ton of money for nothing, and buying awesome stuff too cheaply (especially stuff that they couldn't make for themselves, like specialist principles).