Wild Mage an Anachronism in IWD?

HaHaCharade

This likely has been brought up before, but it just kind of dawned on me the other day as some friends and I were going through some FR stuff....

One can play as a Wild Mage in Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. Wild Magic was a direct result of the Time of Troubles, which occurred in 1358 DR (in FR Timeline). Icewind Dale takes place in 1281 DR, over 70 years before those events.

Which of course begs the question - Are all Wild Mages in IWD time travelers? >.<

Lord_Tansheron

Ah, you see, the ripples from the Time of Troubles actually propagate forward AND backward in time, meaning that when it was 1281 DR, there were no Wild Mages; but after 1358 DR, there *were* Wild Mages in 1281 DR.

I assure you it makes complete sense and is by no means a contrivance to explain incongruities in a non-canon video game. Ask any Star Trek time travel episode ever, temporal mechanics is one big headache with a knot in it - a four-dimensional knot that already existed last Tuesday.

HaHaCharade

Seems awfully fishy... Oh well! "Wild Magic for everyone!" as Minsc would say. :-)

elminster

Yea I guess they didn't have it as an option in IWD2 (perhaps because of that games timeline taking place well before the Time of Troubles).

Then again the corruption of Mythal's apparently has been known to create wild magic areas, so perhaps Wild Magic was always around to some degree but it wasn't widely known about until after the Time of Troubles.

Lord_Tansheron

elminster said:

Then again the corruption of Mythal's apparently has been known to create wild magic areas, so perhaps Wild Magic was always around to some degree but it wasn't widely known about until after the Time of Troubles.

I find that to be quite a likely scenario, now that I think about it. There's always the odd magical catastrophe here and there, surely the Weave would be damaged in places in a way that would cause Wild Magic to appear.

Not to mention that it just so happens we do have an area in IWD where a Mythal is known to have gone catastrophically wrong...

the_spyder

Lord_Tansheron said:

I assure you it makes complete sense and is by no means a contrivance to explain incongruities in a non-canon video game. Ask any Star Trek time travel episode ever, temporal mechanics is one big headache with a knot in it - a four-dimensional knot that already existed last Tuesday.

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be."

Courtesy of the late, great Mr Douglas Adams.

kcwise

Ed Greenwood's thoughts on wild mages (from a longer post about wild magic):

As for Mystra: The ‘old’ Mystra (LN) was less than pleased with this road of dweomercraeft because of the damage wild mages can do to fellow spellcasters, the Weave, and most importantly to the reputation of arcane spellcasters with others (and therefore, the general attitude [fear] of most intelligent beings of Faerun towards magic and its use).

The ‘new’ Mystra, however, was more than a bit of a rebel as a young mortal woman. Like the keeper of a china shop glumly observing an approaching bull, she’s against wantonly destructive uses of magic, and her alignment gives her a distaste not just for destructive magic but also for deliberately cruel uses of magic. However, Mystra has seen much reckless use of magic by divine spellcasters serving other deities and by selfish mages of various stripes, noted that many of these uses have been both effective and have garnered much respect among the wider populace, and more or less shrugged.

She may be ‘waiting and seeing,’ and she (or Azuth) may well send some of their powerful servants (including Chosen) to curb individual wild mages who seem to turn wholly insane or who “throw their weight around too much.” For now, however, the rare wild mages in the Realms seem free to follow the path they’ve chosen.

That's not necessarily the official stance of Wizards of the Coast (or of TSR previously) at this point, but if the father of the Realms mentions wild magic as something the "old Mystra" wasn't fond of, then it's probably safe to assume wild mages were around in the old days. They just weren't encouraged.

Here's the link: http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14621&whichpage=21

simples

don't touch my weave!

http://sportsnaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/large.gif

the_spyder

kcwise said:

She may be ‘waiting and seeing,’ and she (or Azuth) may well send some of their powerful servants (including Chosen) to curb individual wild mages who seem to turn wholly insane or who “throw their weight around too much.” For now, however, the rare wild mages in the Realms seem free to follow the path they’ve chosen.

As a side note, there used to be a notation in one of the original rules sets stating that insanity precluded spell casting. I rather suspect that this is one of those rules that got thrown out somewhere along the way. I just find it interesting, the inconsistencies.