TriadCity Message of the Day
2019-12-17

Prompted by this forum thread, TriadCity's implementation of ritual magic has taken a great leap forward.

TriadCity's magic is not the "cast 'fireball' dragon" variety of earlier MUD traditions. We model the Western ritual magic lineage stretching from Alexandrian Neoplatonism through the Renaissance mages up through the Golden Dawn and later offshoots. Naturally our model is pretty abstract — you really only have to succeed with certain motions, in the correct order. Until now the purpose of these has been limited to Actuating herb sachets and a few other specialized actions. Today the range of possibilities is greatly expanded.

New ritual Skills allow practitioners to access the Astral Plane, for spiritual travel and for remote operations on the game world. You can project your consciousness throughout the City, and use it to do things there, including helping friends and harming enemies.

AstralProject sends your consciousness spiritually to a Room you specify. Not every Room is a potential target: the AstralProject command with no arguments will list them. You can also use it to project to a Player by name.

AstralLook lets you investigate the Room you've arrived in. You use it just as you would the non-spritual Look command.

AstralMove is how you travel once you've succeeded in projecting your consciousness to a target Room. You use it as you would the non-spiritual Move command, with the considerable difference that astral travel is not constrained by physical barriers. You can AstralMove right through locked doors, or doors which are guarded by Sentries.

These Skills allow higher-level characters with appropriate Roles to investigate mysteries they'd be unable to reach in their physical bodies. This can be a safe auxiliary to ordinary exploration.

Or not. You won't necessarily be alone in the Astral Plane. Entities there may impede you, or attack you, depending what you're trying to do. Astral attacks can destroy your projection — or can send bursts of spiritual energy across your Astral connection which can harm you physically. As always, caution is required.

That's only the beginning. The Healer, Magician and Malopath Roles have been augmented with new Astral versions of Skills which can be employed to help or harm friends or enemies. High-level Healers can now AstralEnergize or AstralHeal. Magicians can AstralBefuddle, AstralConfuse, and AstralMystify. Malopaths can AstralEnergyDrain, AstralEnergySteal, or AstralHarm. This adds considerable dimension to the capabilities of these Roles.

These new Skills require successful completion of ritual stages in the correct order. They all require:
Meditate -->
RitualClean -->
DrawMagicCircle -->
Trance -->
AstralProject -->
AstralLook -->
AstralMove
From there you can go on to perform the other actions.

As of today, no special materials are needed to perform these rituals. We'll iteratively add needs for salt, blood, incense, chalk, a spiritually purified broom. Incenses and objects will enhance your magical abilities. It'll become more rich little by little.

Lastly, the Magician Role has been opened to players. There are Skill masters and Skill teachers for Magician in each of the Thirds, and lower-level Mages can use the Befuddle, Confuse and Mystify commands which NPC mages have used forever.

Many thanks to Kata for helping with testing! We think we finally got it right. 🤪

Meet you in The City!
Meet you on the Astral Plane!

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