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

[Amechra]

Phlogiston emits heat at 1000 degrees centigrade.

1000-20=9980/10=998 ER.

I don't know where you are getting 98 ebbs from...

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by Amechra

Phlogiston emits heat at 1000 degrees centigrade.

1000-20=9980/10=998 ER.

I don't know where you are getting 98 ebbs from...

Um, because 1,000-20 is 980, not 9,980?

EDIT: Your first post had it right; it's about 998 ebbs per minute, every 10 rounds.

[General Patton]

For stationary Filters, does preparing it again to increase the load-bearing capacity also increase the Strength Check DC to move it?

Bootstrap Drives now involve Bull Rushing yourself upward/forward. I'm not sure why I love this so much, but I do. So, do you automatically win the opposed Strength Check against yourself as the controller? If not, does succeeding as the agent cause your weight to push the Filter back downward? Seems like that would make it function with a 50/50 chance of going up or down, with the average expected progress being zero.

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by General Patton

For stationary Filters, does preparing it again to increase the load-bearing capacity also increase the Strength Check DC to move it?

No, it just increases the load it can support. I'm assuming the DC 30 Strength check is what's necessary by RAW to 'rip' something from a spatial fixture point.

Bootstrap Drives now involve Bull Rushing yourself upward/forward. I'm not sure why I love this so much, but I do. So, do you automatically win the opposed Strength Check against yourself as the controller? If not, does succeeding as the agent cause your weight to push the Filter back downward? Seems like that would make it function with a 50/50 chance of going up or down, with the average expected progress being zero.

You can always choose to fail a check, so in this particular instance where you're opposing yourself, you could choose whichever result would be the most advantageous to you.

[Qwertystop]

I just realized that Alchemetry could be memetic.

You're convincing the spirit of, say, a block of wood to be harder. What stops the spirit of that wood from deciding that your argument is so good that it will repeat your argument to the nearby hammer? Proceed from there.

[Amechra]

Alright, so I fail mathematics forever. I will now attempt to not cry.

Although, a GS/C Generator can give you 5 ER... if you don't allow it to stack. If you do allow it to stack, then you can laugh at that silly P/I generator.

Consider: a basic bubble will contain 26 cubic feet, already accounting for space lost because of the Input block itself.

Assuming that you could only cast Ghost Sound once in a 5' cubed area, that means you could cast 26 CL 5 Ghost Sounds in that bubble, for a total of 130 ER.

Sure, it only lasts for 35 seconds at level 7 (when you can first do this solo), but consider... you could have a Silver output generate Ghost sounds, maybe 5 of them for a nice, steady 5 Ghost Sounds replaced a round, with a 6th used to reset the 26th one...

That would mean that you could get a constant 125 ER generator, with a slight dip every 35 seconds. At 7th level. Without help. Total cost? 150 GP, given that you could just transmute Iron into Silver anyway, making Silver really damn cheap.

This is, of course, assuming that you can't fit Ghost Sounds into an even smaller area; if you are willing to deal with making a massive number of Silver Outputs, all stored in subspaces, and can make an argument for 1 ghost sound every 1' cube... You'd get something like 16250 ER, before accounting for the SOs that you would need to keep the damn thing up.

The only other generator that can come close is a S/L generator, which would give you a nice, steady 260 ER generator if you were to pack it around the generator.

Of course, that's if you want someone to be able to kill everything within 26 miles by simply rerouting those Ebbs back into the Sunmetal, and want to pay 27000 gp for the services of the Grammarists to make it...

For that much money, you could have 180 GS/C generators, for a good 22500 ER.

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by Amechra

Alright, so I fail mathematics forever. I will now attempt to not cry.

Although, a GS/C Generator can give you 5 ER... if you don't allow it to stack. If you do allow it to stack, then you can laugh at that silly P/I generator.

Consider: a basic bubble will contain 26 cubic feet, already accounting for space lost because of the Input block itself.

Assuming that you could only cast Ghost Sound once in a 5' cubed area, that means you could cast 26 CL 5 Ghost Sounds in that bubble, for a total of 130 ER.

Sure, it only lasts for 35 seconds at level 7 (when you can first do this solo), but consider... you could have a Silver output generate Ghost sounds, maybe 5 of them for a nice, steady 5 Ghost Sounds replaced a round, with a 6th used to reset the 26th one...

That would mean that you could get a constant 125 ER generator, with a slight dip every 35 seconds. At 7th level. Without help. Total cost? 150 GP, given that you could just transmute Iron into Silver anyway, making Silver really damn cheap.

This is, of course, assuming that you can't fit Ghost Sounds into an even smaller area; if you are willing to deal with making a massive number of Silver Outputs, all stored in subspaces, and can make an argument for 1 ghost sound every 1' cube... You'd get something like 16250 ER, before accounting for the SOs that you would need to keep the damn thing up.

The only other generator that can come close is a S/L generator, which would give you a nice, steady 260 ER generator if you were to pack it around the generator.

Of course, that's if you want someone to be able to kill everything within 26 miles by simply rerouting those Ebbs back into the Sunmetal, and want to pay 27000 gp for the services of the Grammarists to make it...

For that much money, you could have 180 GS/C generators, for a good 22500 ER.

I like the basic idea a lot, but the main problem is that you can't have multiple of the same spell effect taking place in the same area at a time. Ghost sound has an area of effect of a bubble itself with radius 25ft. + 5ft. per 2 levels. And as far as I can tell, when you place one ghost sound overtop of another one, the first disappears, since they're both changing the sound in the area. It's the same reason you couldn't normally make a magic item that releases 5,000 ghost sounds at once to level a city with the sound of 100,000 humans yelling. It's a weird part of the rules, because it's the only spell that really does anything like that, but by default spells don't stack in the same area with themselves.

Actually, come to think of it, the other main problem that I see is that ghost sound is an Illusion (Figment), it doesn't even create real sound. It just makes people think they're hearing something. So, not actually going to generate any puissance. Sorry to rain on your parade!

[Amechra]

Fine, then, I'll just get 26 Dire Tigers, Shrink them down to medium size, and then I'll compel them to roar constantly.

Might want to buy them as Effigies, so that I won't have to feed them, and they won't get antsy.

[LordotheMorning]

Ya know what's missing? A Kinetic energy transformer. One that transfers g-force caused by motion into ebbs. You could hire some poor fool to crank it all day, or you could put it in a demi-plane with a constantly shifting gravity. Though, it should probably offer less energy than you would need to propel an orthogonal engine, otherwise you'd end up a machine that generates power while moving. Might involve a little too much science?

EDIT: Although I suppose the output to that transformer might be too similar to Eldrikinetic? Or it could just bull rush people. Bull rushing is good.

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by LordotheMorning

Ya know what's missing? A Kinetic energy transformer. One that transfers g-force caused by motion into ebbs. You could hire some poor fool to crank it all day, or you could put it in a demi-plane with a constantly shifting gravity. Though, it should probably offer less energy than you would need to propel an orthogonal engine, otherwise you'd end up a machine that generates power while moving. Might involve a little too much science?

EDIT: Although I suppose the output to that transformer might be too similar to Eldrikinetic? Or it could just bull rush people. Bull rushing is good.

I stayed away from something like that specifically because I decided that all kinds of motion, momentum, and kinetic energy should be the domain of eldrikinetics. I like the idea in theory, but there's too many complicated feedback loops that could quickly become NI when you can power engines with puissance and then use the kinetic energy to generate more puissance.

Although, interestingly, there are some roundabout solutions. For example, I believe that there's one transformer which transforms magnetic pull into puissance, you could set up an interesting perpetual motion generator using a magnetic flux...

[Just to Browse]

ALCH 101, heating effect: 1 over a number is the reciprocal, not the inverse. An inverse of 2 is -2, and a reciprocal of 2 is 1/2. Also, that's a pain in the butt to deal with. First off, you're dealing with awkward physics already of water heating with equal effort to metal (because physics), then you're requiring the material to be uniform so I can affect maybe my suit of armor and then nothing else, and then the usefulness of the heating capacity only actually kicks in when you're getting 20, which means an annoyingly high roll at low levels, or a lot of time spent.

Heck, the whole ALCH 101 is pretty meh. You're not getting anything in combat from there, which means while the casters are pulling our their crossbows on round 3, you're pulling a crossbow that is effectively equivalent in all circumstances in round 1. It really hurts.

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by Just to Browse

ALCH 101, heating effect: 1 over a number is the reciprocal, not the inverse. An inverse of 2 is -2, and a reciprocal of 2 is 1/2. Also, that's a pain in the butt to deal with. First off, you're dealing with awkward physics already of water heating with equal effort to metal (because physics), then you're requiring the material to be uniform so I can affect maybe my suit of armor and then nothing else, and then the usefulness of the heating capacity only actually kicks in when you're getting 20, which means an annoyingly high roll at low levels, or a lot of time spent.

Heck, the whole ALCH 101 is pretty meh. You're not getting anything in combat from there, which means while the casters are pulling our their crossbows on round 3, you're pulling a crossbow that is effectively equivalent in all circumstances in round 1. It really hurts.

The reciprocal is sometimes called the multiplicative inverse. Since I explain in parentheses what I mean immediately afterwards, I don't think it's a huge source of confusion.

I'll admit that changing the heat capacity factor isn't as glamorous or immediately useful as some of the other 101 principles, but the whole point of alchemetry is modifying material properties. In D&D, materials don't have a ton of things to distinguish them from any of the others: hardness and hit points per inch are pretty much it.

As far as realism goes, I agree that it's not, strictly speaking, ideal, but it works fairly well with the stuff that you would want to do with it. At level 1 you can be expecting results between about 7-27, so you've got a sizeable chance of having a factor of 2 or 1/2 to work with. And when you have results closer to 100 at higher levels, x10 or x1/10 is still reasonable enough for when you're doing things like encasing phlogiston in an icebox.

Meanwhile, combat-wise, I totally agree with you. The class is not made for combat. I understand that combat is the main minigame for D&D, and given enough time there's a lot of things the gramarist can do to help in combat. But if you're expecting him to actually be able to pull his weight in fights, especially at lower levels before he can get some synergistic principles working together, you're going to be disappointed.

I agree that ALCH 101 is not the most useful 1st level principle you could pick, but there's nothing that says you have to learn it at 1st level, even if you specialize in Alchemetry. Wait until you actually have something you want to use it for, or until you have more appealing Diplomacy checks. There are certainly enough ways to optimize skill checks out there!

[jojolagger]

Alch 101 is the best starting principle.
Have 0 ranks in diplomacy, Cha 14, the Dishonest and suspicious traits, and roll a 1, for a result of 0, and and a heat capacity factor of 0 (immunity to fire and cold at level 1), or 1/0 (for super healing iron golems, or really nasty alchemist's fire.

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by jojolagger

Alch 101 is the best starting principle.
Have 0 ranks in diplomacy, Cha 14, the Dishonest and suspicious traits, and roll a 1, for a result of 0, and and a heat capacity factor of 0 (immunity to fire and cold at level 1), or 1/0 (for super healing iron golems, or really nasty alchemist's fire.

Man, you forget one time to put in the obligatory "(minimum 1)"...

[LordotheMorning]

Originally Posted by jojolagger

Alch 101 is the best starting principle.
Have 0 ranks in diplomacy, Cha 14, the Dishonest and suspicious traits, and roll a 1, for a result of 0, and and a heat capacity factor of 0 (immunity to fire and cold at level 1), or 1/0 (for super healing iron golems, or really nasty alchemist's fire.

Come on now, that can't be the way it was intended. Wouldn't the heat factor technically by undefined then? When the object is subjected to heat, it doesn't know how to react, and then likely opens a wormhole.

EDIT: Swordsage'd.

[jseah]

Neumann Cycler continued...

All of these will be pegged onto Independent Locomotion balls. There really isn't any reason not to have it, since it generates enough ebbs for most purposes if you're not moving. And the ability to move to things is better than just bringing it back.

Principle Constructor

Spoiler

Intro to Heuristicism + (Eternal Flame -> Gold Input) x N/2 -> Abnormal Behaviour x N

1 embedded principle of every type.

The Principle Constructor is the primary replication unit of the Neumann Cycler. This is the workhorse that manufactures more units.

Self-replication:
The principle constructor will make a new heuristical circuit by activating its Intro to Heuristicism first, this is pegged to an Independent Locomotion ball inside its area.
It then activates its embedded Abnormal Behaviour to embed an Abnormal Behaviour into that circuit.
The new circuit then routes its power to activate its own embedded Abnormal Behaviour targeting itself while the principle constructor contributes a copy of each one of the embedded principles in turn. An Independent Locomotion ball produces a base of 6 ebbs per round and so 6 principles will be embedded simultaneously.

Once the new circuit is ready, additional Intro to Heuristicism principles are activated on it to grow the circuit to the desired size. Multiple Principle Constructors will often contribute their own activations to grow it faster.

Principle Constructors are incredibly expensive in terms of time to make and will make up the smallest proportion of an active Neumann Cycler.

Limited Principle Vehicles (various)

Spoiler

Since transmuting metals with principles will be in particularly high demand, it makes no sense to use a full Principle Constructor to do it.

A Metal Transmuter is identical to a Principle Constructor but only contains one embedded principle, Mysterious Metallurgy.
A Transformer Plant is likewise the same but for the various Arcanodynamics principles, the most common being Silver, Gold and Wood. These will often be posted together with Metal Transmuters.

Spell Engine

Spoiler

(Eternal Flame -> Gold Input) x N -> Silver output
Obviously enough, this fires off spells where N is spell level / 2.

This can be used in conjunction with Principle Constructors to produce more spell engines.

The primary power of a spell engine lies in the summoning lines (particularly Planar Binding) and primarily in Lantern Archons which can cast Eternal Flame at will for zero cost.
Summoned monsters serve as grunt power to move/dig/fly/scout, they are all vastly more efficient and accurate than eldrikinetic engines. A standard General Purpose Vehicle, the workhorse of the Neumann Cycler and a control node, will be an Independent Locomotion with a Summon Monster Spell Engine.
Another very useful Spell Engine is Fabricate to shape the finished metals into the desired shape (often spheres)

Contrary to what I was originally expecting, the command and control nodes will not be the Principle Constructors but rather the Spell Engines. They sit on the interface between the gramarie and the arcane. A Neumann Cycler will not have a central C&C intelligence to pull the strings; it exists as a network that uses swarm intelligence, the only way to take it down is to destroy all the Principle Constructors.
A single one of them + 1 General Purpose Vehicle will be able to mine anything required to continue replication, although the loss of the different spells in Spell Engines will be a major blow.

The principle side serves primarily as a means to produce more Spell Engines, letting the arcane side serve as the "hands" that manipulate the world.


A good place to start will be some disintegrate-carrying Spell Engines dumped into the Elemental Plane of Earth to make a hole. Then a General Purpose Vehicle to mine any available metals and produce Eternal Flame. Then you add Limited Principle Vehicles to transmute the metals and eventually a Principle Constructor.
Such a mining-purposed Neumann Cycler will then proceed to mine the Elemental Plane of Earth for metals to replicate, yielding gems for spell components (to build new spell engines for material cost spells). Excess materials can be shuttled to the Prime Material plane to the waiting masters for use in normal society. General Purpose Vehicles and Limited Principle Vehicles will also see much use in the Prime.
The base mining operation can also serve as a springboard to launch new operations into other planes, although you are limited to the availability of metals.

[Qwertystop]

Originally Posted by Qwertystop

I just realized that Alchemetry could be memetic.

You're convincing the spirit of, say, a block of wood to be harder. What stops the spirit of that wood from deciding that your argument is so good that it will repeat your argument to the nearby hammer? Proceed from there.

Nobody has anything to say about this? Really?

[Omnicrat]

Originally Posted by Qwertystop

Nobody has anything to say about this? Really?

Maybe the atomic spirits cannot communicate with one another?

[General Patton]

Originally Posted by Qwertystop

Nobody has anything to say about this? Really?

I like it. Perhaps you can take a number of -5 Penalties to your Diplomacy Check to have the material pass on your argument to that many more chunks of material.

So, no one cares about what I pointed out about Black Filters letting you make secret plans to kill Vecna? "Secret plan to kill Vecna" is the very definition of pinging a deity's Portfolio Sense and almost universally causes a TPK before you even initiate Step 1. But Kaleidomancer don't care, he does what he wants.

[Omnicrat]

Originally Posted by General Patton

So, no one cares about what I pointed out about Black Filters letting you make secret plans to kill Vecna? "Secret plan to kill Vecna" is the very definition of pinging a deity's Portfolio Sense and almost universally causes a TPK before you even initiate Step 1. But Kaleidomancer don't care, he does what he wants.

I cared about it. I thought it sounded awesome. The type of thing you could build a campaign around. If you consider being able to hide from the gods far too OP, then I'm sure an argument can be made that the gods keep an extra eye on Kaleidomancers to check that sort of thing. They may not know your actual plan, but it's still probably VERY hard to out smart a god.

[jseah]

Originally Posted by Omnicrat

I cared about it. I thought it sounded awesome. The type of thing you could build a campaign around. If you consider being able to hide from the gods far too OP, then I'm sure an argument can be made that the gods keep an extra eye on Kaleidomancers to check that sort of thing. They may not know your actual plan, but it's still probably VERY hard to out smart a god.

The Neumann Cycler (now working) makes mass application of gramarie painless and relatively fast. They can easily black filter everything, including the mining operation itself.

[Omnicrat]

Originally Posted by jseah

The Neumann Cycler (now working) makes mass application of gramarie painless and relatively fast. They can easily black filter everything, including the mining operation itself.

That is a good point. But again, if the gods think you're up to something or just want to make sure you aren't, they could dispell your filters, unless your level 20.

[General Patton]

Originally Posted by Omnicrat

I cared about it. I thought it sounded awesome. The type of thing you could build a campaign around. If you consider being able to hide from the gods far too OP, then I'm sure an argument can be made that the gods keep an extra eye on Kaleidomancers to check that sort of thing. They may not know your actual plan, but it's still probably VERY hard to out smart a god.

If you attach Black Filters to a bunch of objects for your party members to carry around, then when you all meet up in one place, it'll be like a shell game and no one will be able to track who's inside of which Filter. If you have as many of these mysterious Filters running around as you have known accomplices/suspects, but then you actually bunch together while summoned minions carry the decoys around, you can completely defy the deity's expectations of what each agent is capable of.

"This group I've been watching has 5 members and there are 5 of these barriers I can't see through. This particular one is heading to one of my temples, but I know none of these meddlers could single-handedly kill my worshippers and head priest."

But then you get to the temple's doorstep, reach into a bag of holding and pull out an item with an even bigger Black Filter that engulfs the entire temple, and your whole party slaughters the priests. Confused god is confused.

[Omnicrat]

I don't know about you. but if one of my temples went dark, I would do everything in my power to get it back. This includes sending my avatar to destroy the barrier (which is quite easy for a god) and wreak a terrible vengeance on those who sought to slaughter my followers.

edit: this of course assumes I am a god.

[jseah]

The filters also aren't immune to infiltration. Someone could easily just peep in physically.

[Omnicrat]

Originally Posted by jseah

The filters also aren't immune to infiltration. Someone could easily just peep in physically.

While true, I have to assume anyone trying this scheme would be using layered filters. But that's still a good point against black filters being a god killers best friend.

[General Patton]

Wait a minute, do Black Filters interfere with a Cleric's ability to recover their Spell Slots? Their prayers would go unheard. What about the other way around? A Deity that can't hear any of his followers' prayers. Does this also cut off the effects of worship? Perhaps it could inflict a penalty of 1/20th of the Spot check result to an encapsulated Deity's Divine Rank. Are summoning effects and things like Gate going to be prevented by an information cutoff?

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by General Patton

Wait a minute, do Black Filters interfere with a Cleric's ability to recover their Spell Slots? Their prayers would go unheard. What about the other way around? A Deity that can't hear any of his followers' prayers. Does this also cut off the effects of worship? Perhaps it could inflict a penalty of 1/20th of the Spot check result to an encapsulated Deity's Divine Rank. Are summoning effects and things like Gate going to be prevented by an information cutoff?

That depends entirely on your interpretation of exactly how divine magic works. Since by RAW it seems that clerics get their magic just by the act of believing hard enough in something, I would say they can recover their spell slots inside of a Black filter just fine. The archetypal example of course being the clerics of 'concepts' instead of straight-up deities.

Now, summoning is another matter entirely. It's fairly clear that teleportation and gate effects and their ilk are blind from one side of a Black filter to the other. Normal summon effects like summon nature's ally, summon monster, planar ally, and planar binding all seem to specify that they're actually contacting and retrieving an actual monster from somewhere else. So yes, I would say that they are impossible to use surrounded by a Black filter. On the other hand, an effect that creates a new monster, like the astral construct power, would work just fine.

This is an excellent catch, and I'll update the text accordingly.

[Amechra]

So, we have been essentially ignoring Yggdratecture... despite the fact that you can have interplanar doorways at 7th level using it, due to the wording of YGGD 241; you simply need to connect two subspaces, flattened out into a 4' by 8' doorway in both cases, and then walk through.

Boom, you got yourself a permanent planar gate. It's kinda small, but Medium creatures fit through easily, and travel time is negligible.

I would reword the ability to connect two subspaces so that it doesn't work if the flux traits you have running in it are different (with the exception of gravity; that just assigns the direction of the opening relative to the subspace.); you get messy things like a hyperacceleration device once you hit 14th level...

I do think you should be able to make single-use Blueprints of Principles, so that you can hand them off and get construction projects distributed to the masses; you can only fit a single Preparation on them, but that should be enough.

On a side note, this is actually giving me a cool idea for a campaign setting, prompted by a single thought:

What kind of things would the Post-Doctorate level of Principles be capable of? I mean Epic level, by the way.

The basic idea is that there used to be Principles far more distinct than those here that have since been erased conceptually from reality, and there are just fragments left (stuff I'll call Understandings, because that sounds semi-religious to me ) that can be found in old records in ruins (perfect adventure fuel!)

Example Understandings would include:

Flesh Engineering Understanding: Allows you to treat flesh as if it were a distinct planetary metal for the purpose of Alchemetry. Changes are hereditary.

Stone-as-Clay Understanding: You can temporarily treat any planetary metal or stone that you use this Understanding on as if it had the general properties of clay; in other words, you can simply sculpt Orichalcum into bracelets and such, which will probably look really pretty.

Question-of-Scale Understanding: You can treat a single cubic inch as if it were a cubic foot for the purpose of the amount of material you can apply a Principle to.

Two-Point Time Understanding: You can connect a sub-space to itself at different points in time; however, all points of time advance in lockstep, you can't use this to travel back before the initial point of set-up for the subspace, and if one side is "broken", then the entire time-travel device breaks.

Imagine the works of the ancients! Seeds you can plant that will grow into houses, carriages, or whatever you wish! Animals that can consume tin, and excrete Orichalcum (or whatever)! Engines that can fit in a hand, that nonetheless produce enough thrust to allow a man to fly...

Then the gods looked down, and saw that the world was black to their senses; then, they came down and razed the wonders of the world...

The small gods rose up, and joined their heavenly counterparts; for a single, horrid day, Grammarie ceased to function; the materials began to follow their divinely-ordained properties, all the potential time-portals vanished, and the world of Man fell apart.

Only a few ruins are left, far from where the gods made their wrath felt; in them, they have wonders of a lost age...

I'm thinking the current state of the setting is at maybe Magisterial level in some rare places, while most of it is at Baccalaureate level; Grammarie is no longer considered a science, so much as a religious practice. Engineer-Priests pray to gods, who "grant" them the necessary Preparations, in their magnanimity.

If this sounds cool, I'll elaborate on the theme...

[Kellus]

Originally Posted by Amechra

So, we have been essentially ignoring Yggdratecture... despite the fact that you can have interplanar doorways at 7th level using it, due to the wording of YGGD 241; you simply need to connect two subspaces, flattened out into a 4' by 8' doorway in both cases, and then walk through.

Boom, you got yourself a permanent planar gate. It's kinda small, but Medium creatures fit through easily, and travel time is negligible.

I would reword the ability to connect two subspaces so that it doesn't work if the flux traits you have running in it are different (with the exception of gravity; that just assigns the direction of the opening relative to the subspace.); you get messy things like a hyperacceleration device once you hit 14th level...

I do think you should be able to make single-use Blueprints of Principles, so that you can hand them off and get construction projects distributed to the masses; you can only fit a single Preparation on them, but that should be enough.

On a side note, this is actually giving me a cool idea for a campaign setting, prompted by a single thought:

What kind of things would the Post-Doctorate level of Principles be capable of? I mean Epic level, by the way.

The basic idea is that there used to be Principles far more distinct than those here that have since been erased conceptually from reality, and there are just fragments left (stuff I'll call Understandings, because that sounds semi-religious to me ) that can be found in old records in ruins (perfect adventure fuel!)

Example Understandings would include:

Flesh Engineering Understanding: Allows you to treat flesh as if it were a distinct planetary metal for the purpose of Alchemetry. Changes are hereditary.

Stone-as-Clay Understanding: You can temporarily treat any planetary metal or stone that you use this Understanding on as if it had the general properties of clay; in other words, you can simply sculpt Orichalcum into bracelets and such, which will probably look really pretty.

Question-of-Scale Understanding: You can treat a single cubic inch as if it were a cubic foot for the purpose of the amount of material you can apply a Principle to.

Two-Point Time Understanding: You can connect a sub-space to itself at different points in time; however, all points of time advance in lockstep, you can't use this to travel back before the initial point of set-up for the subspace, and if one side is "broken", then the entire time-travel device breaks.

Imagine the works of the ancients! Seeds you can plant that will grow into houses, carriages, or whatever you wish! Animals that can consume tin, and excrete Orichalcum (or whatever)! Engines that can fit in a hand, that nonetheless produce enough thrust to allow a man to fly...

Then the gods looked down, and saw that the world was black to their senses; then, they came down and razed the wonders of the world...

The small gods rose up, and joined their heavenly counterparts; for a single, horrid day, Grammarie ceased to function; the materials began to follow their divinely-ordained properties, all the potential time-portals vanished, and the world of Man fell apart.

Only a few ruins are left, far from where the gods made their wrath felt; in them, they have wonders of a lost age...

I'm thinking the current state of the setting is at maybe Magisterial level in some rare places, while most of it is at Baccalaureate level; Grammarie is no longer considered a science, so much as a religious practice. Engineer-Priests pray to gods, who "grant" them the necessary Preparations, in their magnanimity.

If this sounds cool, I'll elaborate on the theme...

Those are some cool as hell ideas. I personally hate epic-level stuff, because the game becomes essentially unplayable, which is why all three tiers of this system happen in the normal 1-20 range. But that is a very clever idea for meta-principle effects, and I would think about just straight-up making them [Epic] feats that epic-level gramarists can take to advance their understanding. Because the setting that they make possible is actually kind of killer.

The Blueprint idea is interesting, and similar to something I'd considered previously. I need to think more about it, especially to make sure it's not just an easy way to get around discipline specializations, but I'll probably put something similar to it into the text.

I'm going to go get off my ass now and finish the first couple PrCs, because I'm tired of saying stuff will be up 'soon'.