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2017-12-24, 10:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2017-12-24, 11:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2008
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- Ireland
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2017-12-25, 01:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2012
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I play a lot of Clerics, it's a class I've become comfortable with on both a meta level and in terms of creating convincing characters that I enjoy playing, If you asked me how many miracles I'd need to run such a character I would easily say none. That's a gaming thing, really. While miracles could and probably should be powerfully evocative and awe-inspiring things, in general their ubiquity and sensation of being a tool one shifts about in one's tool belt kind of undermines them from feeling like divine providence bequeathed to a pious soul.
A mundane cleric is obviously a thing, so that's a non-issue. Even if you're premised on being mundane it doesn't mean the miraculous will never happen to you, miracles in general tend to happen to people of religious significance rather than being channeled or even intended in any way. You can also have seemingly supernatural qualities in the right context, like with faith healing or similar phenomenon. For a fictional example, Leliana in Dragon Age has a clerical history, possesses high religious knowledge, and believes herself divinely inspired from the onset, but has no objective magical qualities and mostly stabs people in the back as a Bard.
I honestly don't think a Wizard is much different here, it's just possessing different base knowledge and motivation. Being wise is the premise here, and there's lots of ways you can own that description beyond throwing spells at things.
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2017-12-26, 09:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Pre- or post-printing press? That is what it probably comes down to, because before the printing press most people couldn't access books to read anyways, so why bother learning? After that, it is my understanding that literacy spread like wildfire after people had things to read.
It is a little bit funny, clerics are possibly easier to make low/no-magic than wizards, yet I'm actually more comfortable with the convenient, easy to use magic being in the hands of the cleric than the wizard, just because I could see a god bestowing some convenient supernatural ability on their devout followers. Because it is the gift of a god, it will probably work out exactly the way it was supposed to.
I can also see a some non-magical abilities you could give to a non-magical cleric, from church connections to public speaking skills. Well that might depend on the sort of church and the sort of cleric. Religions and the roles within them vary significantly.
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2017-12-26, 09:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2012
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- toulouse
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
turns out that the meaning of litteracy changed over the centuries. what we call "illiterate" now means you can't read or write. during medieval times, it meant you couldn't read or write latin. that's how you got litteracy rates of about 5%. most people had a rudimentary writing system just to communicate even before the printing press, but still with nowhere near modern litteracy standards.
as for clerics, i dunno, i've never seen a low-magic cleric in any games i've played. i'm guilty of it too, but clerics tend to be spamming buffs and heal spells all day long indiscriminately. it's not a varied selection of common spells, but i'd be glad to hear stories of low-usage clerics.
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2017-12-26, 09:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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- The Lakes
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Before the printing press. As in, the Romans and Greeks likely had lower illiteracy rates than 40%, and after the printing press the illiteracy rate was lower than 40%.
There's more to literacy than having mass-produced material to consume, and there are levels of literacy between the modern ideal of being able to pick up any book and read it, or being completely unable to even read your own name or write a basic scribbled note.
Combine that change in meaning with our usual culprits in warped history (the Victorians' "everyone between the Romans and us lived in mud-caked ignorance" and the Marxists' "the masses have always been abused and oppressed") and once again 1000+ years of history is relegated to the Dung Ages in popular thinking.Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2017-12-26 at 09:21 AM.
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2017-12-26, 09:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
A low magic cleric is probably a face first and foremost. They deal with people. Although they'll also be a scholar. Essentially similar to a wizard.
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2017-12-26, 09:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2016
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I once played in a campaign with zero magic. But everyone THOUGHT there was. It turned out the "spell components" were powerful hallucinogens that made everyone convinced that "magic" had taken place.
You basically threw a bunch of magic mushrooms in the air and shouted "fireball" and people were convinced they'd been killed by fireball. Convincing themselves to the point they actually died.
This worked pretty well, with no one realizing this until...
We became trapped in a cave and the wizard "levitated" us out. We spent a week in the cave tripping balls on a "magical adventure" and then the wizard ran out of components.
We figured it out then.
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2017-12-26, 03:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
the furthest I have gone is a shadowrun character and a Rifts character who were both sorcerers and had a belief that using magic to kill things was a waste of time and energy: that's what guns were for. they were both as good a shot as I could make them without sacrificing magical capability, specializing in illusions in the case of the shadowrun character and defensive and healing magics in the case of the rifts character.
the first half of the meaning of life is that there isn't one.
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2017-12-26, 03:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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- Dallas, TX
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
What is magic? Even Galadriel had trouble with that concept, saying, "For this is what your folk would call magic. I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy."
In my opinion, the most magical enchantment in the entire trilogy is that Tom Bombadil and Goldberry can bring a feast out of a small kitchen into a crowded dining room and set the table without ever getting in each other's way.
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2017-12-26, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
The Greeks and Romans were among the most advanced civilizations in the entire world at the time. The other ones being China and parts of India, and the Greeks and Romans were more egalitarian than those other two. At the same time there were huge chunks of the planet where no one could read at all, because there were no writing systems.
And personally I find statements of high levels of pre-modern literacy somewhat dubious. There are several countries on the planet with a literacy rate below 40% in 2017.
The pre-modern literacy rates among urban-dwelling males were indeed probably higher than typically thought (though this was likely in most cases to be a very limited form of literacy principally involving recognizing common words and simple phrases), but that's a relatively small portion of the overall population. Greece and Rome, because of their city-state structure, had a higher urban percentage than many contemporary or following civilizations, which doubtless pumped up their literacy rate.
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2017-12-26, 08:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2017
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Well, not to start a literature debate, but I think some of that (like wielding the Flame of Anor, or making himself appear threatening) is just "by the power vested in me" stuff; he's one of the Maiar, that's less (in my opinion) him using magic than him being magical in and of himself.
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2017-12-27, 10:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
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2017-12-27, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I think it's easy to forget from a modern perspective, even for those of us whose formative experiences are from before the ubiquity of the internet, just how powerful knowledge can be. We're like fish in water, most of us never stop to think how wet we are.
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-07-16
"The wizard" or "the shaman" is also often the sage, the scholar, the one with knowledge of this world few others have, let alone knowledge of other worlds. Even post-printing-press, for a long time knowledge was a treasure, not a nearly-free commodity.It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2017-12-28, 12:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Absolutely. Two of the "non-magic" but mysterious and rare powers Gandalf showed were:
The ability to read long-forgotten scrolls in Minas Tirith, and
Knowledge of all the words once used as passwords in any language in Middle-Earth.
[And even today, it is very easy to look extremely knowledgeable when your co-workers don't think to use Google.]
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2017-12-28, 03:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2012
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I liken divine power to lightning. It's a flash of sheer, unadulterated, teeth-shattering power which can be harnessed for bending the continuity of the universe in some fashion but can also burn you to ashes if mishandled in the least. That the ones focusing that power either need a degree of enlightenment that gives them some insight into the workings of reality liken to gods, or surrender themselves into pure instrumentality of a higher being.
I guess I take issue with the kind of setting where it's taken for granted that the local priest/priestess can do the miraculous at command without consequence. The sorts of stories which involve the intervention of deities into our world are soaked in blood, suffering, and the sublime -- the ones who get power from these exchanges rarely live long happy lives, and mostly don't do mundane tasks with them.
Though to me, the only magical archetype which should have cheap and easy power is the Warlock. You get the power, that's the deal, and then comes the cost... whether it was worth it is something you can stay up late thinking about.
You can justify a cleric in most positions and roles. If we're talking D&D as seems to be the case, simply doing the Acolyte Background in 5e or something similar and applying it to a non-cleric class character can give you the flavour of that cleric experience with your character without necessarily any of the magical mechanics. I've done it before, which is why when asked myself whether I could do the same with a wizard, I believe I easily can.Last edited by Kitten Champion; 2017-12-28 at 03:26 PM.
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2017-12-28, 10:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2017
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
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2017-12-29, 12:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
one definition of magic that I like personally is "any willful manipulation of energy, regardless of actual method." by that definition flipping on a light in your house is an act of magic, and there are times that I find it amazing that we are capable of understanding what can be done with fine manipulations of electricity, let alone actually pull it off. In ages past that deemed wizards were simply the most educated in there region. So one could take a modern scientist (as has been suggested before) drop him into a primitive society and watch them react in shock and awe to the new wizard.
the first half of the meaning of life is that there isn't one.
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2017-12-29, 07:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
In high magic, or to be slightly tongue in cheek magical, setting that is the expectation. And you know for the "superhero fantasy" settings it probably fits. Still I could see a system where a pious character might have a miracle happen around them, might have one or two in a longer campaign, work. First because if the chance of miracle is acknowledged in setting it could create some useful dynamics. Second because I think miracles in this context would probably be campaign altering hunks of awesome.
And of course the cleric is still a person with set of skills to get things done, so they don't need that much extra power to get by in lower powered settings.
The "most correct" definition I got from a university professor who studies this is "the manipulation of occult forces towards a particular goal", which except for focusing on the occult is pretty much the same thing. For the record, the electromagnetic force is an occult force so everything you said still applies. Although I think the modern scientist might actually have trouble getting much done with a medieval tool set, unless they are also a survivalist or something.
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2017-12-29, 10:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2017-12-29, 01:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2014
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I think the reason it qualifies is because a lot of old cults actually made use of it, in example the Baghdad batteries.
the first half of the meaning of life is that there isn't one.
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2017-12-29, 01:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
To Max_Killjoy: Partly what vasilidor said, it was notice and grouped with "other supernatural" forces back in the day. The other side of this is that modern definitions of occult (and other words like magic) have actually been changed to exclude things that turned out to be supported by science. I think it is party "people in the past didn't know anything" and party our modern imagery has changed so much from what people back then saw it as. So if by "some definition" you mean a slightly older and historically grounded one, yes. And it doesn't have to be stretched far to include it.
(I have actually studied the history of magic a little so I come at a lot of these things from a slightly more historical perspective than most.)
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2017-12-29, 02:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
That's actually far more reasonable than some assertions along those lines that I've run into in the past. (See, postmodernist garbage that "science is just another way of looking at the world, it's not any more accurate"... usually said via a medium such as printed books, radio, TV, or the internet...)
It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.
Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.
The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.
The Worldbuilding Forum -- where realities are born.
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2017-12-29, 02:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2008
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Part of it was grouped with other supernatural forces. Light wasn't generally classified as an occult phenomenon, those weird rocks that repelled each other or attracted each other depending on facing, or any sort of weird specific setup that produced a noticeable electric current or electric sparks (e.g. various early and primitive batteries) absolutely were occult.
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2017-12-29, 08:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Yeah, I suppose my view is tainted due to mostly being based on Anglican vicars, so I tend to assume priests will either be faces (vicars) or scholars (monks). But yeah, a no-magic priest is still a priest in all the social and religious senses, and the lack of powers (or it being limited to a couple of divine gifts, I once tried to play an Anglican vicar who had supernatural strength and visions of the future).
To me divine intervention should be limited to either the occasional miracle, powers gifted at birth or via items, or just the PCs being in the right place at the right time (I do like 'the PCs don't get miraculous help, they are the miraculous help'). A priest very rarely has this, their deity might answer their prayers but will tend to do so indirectly, helping with a plague by causing a river to overflow so a skilled and kindly doctor has to pass through the town. If a priest wants magic they can learn the wizard stuff.
The main problem for me is that if there isn't the magic angle I'll tend to not call a nonmagical wizard a wizard (I would call them a magician, and I would also call a magic-using wizard a magician). Scholar or vagabond would cover most of them, with con-artist or entertainer being fine for most of the rest. In a setting with magic I might call a scholar who studies magic but can't use it a wizard, but I'd more likely just say 'scholar of magic'.
I like nonmagical scholar characters, they are a nice change to the 'smart people use magic' stereotype I've seen some player have.
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2017-12-30, 09:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
To Knaight: Yeah, I know more than the average person, probably more than the average geek even, on the historical side but I am still not an expert. Still that matches I will know. I would also like to through out that a lot of the lines we think of either didn't exist or were drawn very differently because... well they didn't know enough to draw the lines as we do.
To Anonymouswizard: Or in Sci-Fi they are gadgeteers.
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2017-12-30, 11:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
I tend to seperate engineers from magicians from scholars. Gadgeteers, and their fantasy cousins Artificers, would be in the engineer category.
In a sense, if there's no such thing as a spell, and instead items are used, I consider the character to not be a magician. The SF equivalent to the magician is the psychic, the engineer or technician or gadgeteer makes or improves items that anybody can use (whether or not they can use them effectively is another matter). Or the magician creates new effects, the engineer works with existing effects unless they have a lot of time available. Note that one archetype appears more in fantasy and the other appears more in science fiction.
But again, this is a personal thing.
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2017-12-31, 07:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2008
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
Absolutely. Figuring out the basics of how magnetism and electricity worked didn't happen until the 1700's. That they were linked wasn't picked up until the 1800's, and it took decades after that to figure out that light was electromagnetic radiation. The baseline for a long time was that various specific objects did specific weird things, and that got lumped into the occult.
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2017-12-31, 07:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2015
Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
To Anonymouswizard: I agree with that, my point is that intelligent characters tend towards archetypes that have "special powers" that require intelligence (or are seen as coming from intelligence). At least in these types of game stories, someone who uses intelligence straight or as a force multiplier on a different skill set seem less common.
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2017-12-31, 11:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: How Low Can You Go: The Minimum Magic Required
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