Although some aspects of the system make more sense ...
"More gnoll halberds? Look, I've already got more halberds in stock than I'll probably ever sell. Still, the metal's decent. I'll give you their scrap value. 2 gold each. Deal?"
Yeah, that's one of the things that I appreciate about the Infinity Engine games. It's good that you shouldn't loot every goblin halberd that you find, just let it stay on the ground, they're worth 1 or 2 gold pieces each.
On dragons and gold coins, I actually watched this really fun animated fantasy movie as a kid called "The Flight of Dragons". In it, it explains that dragons sleep on piles of gold coins because gold is actually a very soft metal, and because dragons tend to ignite conventional bedding due to small flame bursts, they instead opt to sleep on soft metals, with gold being preferred. It doesn't say what the dragons used to use before humans came along to start minting coins; maybe the dragons just got by sleeping on the ground or on mud and river pebbles. (Hey, who says humanoids have to be the only race who went through a primitive phase? )
Wow somebody else has seen that? John Ritter's the protaganist and James Earl Jones is the antagonist. It is kind of neat to give reasonable explanations for breathing fire or a huge creature flying.
I did watch a set of lectures about how science influences sci-fi, but they had one episode on dragons. They had one interesting way for fire breathing and it was like how the bomardier beetle does by mixing 2 chemicals together that when combined react explosively.
The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos is a fun little game that completely rips on fantasy tropes. I love how fourth wall breaking the game is and the characters even talk about things like game mechanics and maximizing xp. All the characters are such tropes that they don't even have names, it's just The Barbarian, The Elf or The Dwarf (Just a regular Dwarf).
@DrHappyAngry: Any idea what that dragon episode was called? It actually inspired the mechanics behind a dragon I put in one of my manuscripts (the dragon uses the same gas compression system it uses for its fire breath to compress air into liquid nitrogen, so it can breath ice, too!).
@DrHappyAngry: Any idea what that dragon episode was called? It actually inspired the mechanics behind a dragon I put in one of my manuscripts (the dragon uses the same gas compression system it uses for its fire breath to compress air into liquid nitrogen, so it can breath ice, too!).
@DrHappyAngry: Any idea what that dragon episode was called? It actually inspired the mechanics behind a dragon I put in one of my manuscripts (the dragon uses the same gas compression system it uses for its fire breath to compress air into liquid nitrogen, so it can breath ice, too!).
The lecture was Design your own dragon and dealt with some stuff from Game of Thrones, but also touched on dragons in general. Admittedly I never got into that show. That set of lectures was a lot of fun, it went into what sci-fi stories get right and wrong about about science.
The flick Flight of Dragons @Zaxares mentioned was interesting, but is early '80s animation, so a bit hokey. Animation is actually pretty good for it's time. The protaganist gets brought back in time to when magic still worked, but accidentally winds up having is consciousness put into a dragon's body when a spell goes wrong. An older dragon explains how they work to him. They have a honey comb structure inside them to contain gasses that let them become lighter than air. They raid dwarven mines for gem stones and eat lime stone to help generate the hydrogen gas by breaking them down in their craw. They have an organ in the top of their mouth he called the Thor's Thimble that could generate a spark to ignite the hydrogen when they were exhaling it. If they blew too much fire, they couldn't fly until they had replenished the hydrogen.
@DrHappyAngry: Any idea what that dragon episode was called? It actually inspired the mechanics behind a dragon I put in one of my manuscripts (the dragon uses the same gas compression system it uses for its fire breath to compress air into liquid nitrogen, so it can breath ice, too!).
A manuscript of what, if I may ask?
YA portal fantasy novel. I need to revise it one more time before I send it out to literary agents again.
If wizards are typically older people who have devoted their lives to the study of magic, why do they live in such tall towers? (They can magic around, I guess - but usually there's a lot of stairs in there!)
I can't say for certain regarding Western wizards, but in Eastern mythology, sorcerers and sages usually dwelt in towers for two major reasons. The first was that they believed, like many ancient cultures, that high places like mountain tops were where beings like spirits, deities and immortals dwelt, and that the air in higher places was somehow purer or a factor in helping one achieve long-life or even immortality. Living in tall towers or pagodas may have been an attempt to replicate such factors.
Another line of belief was that the shape or design of towers would somehow work in ways to assist in a sorcerer's magic, whether it was because of ley-lines or magnetism or collecting energy from the ether etc. I remember reading one story where the sorcerer cast his ritual by going to the top floor of his tower and then "spoke words to the Four Winds from each window, casting out mystical powders into the breeze".
Comments
Yeah, that's one of the things that I appreciate about the Infinity Engine games. It's good that you shouldn't loot every goblin halberd that you find, just let it stay on the ground, they're worth 1 or 2 gold pieces each.
Wow somebody else has seen that? John Ritter's the protaganist and James Earl Jones is the antagonist. It is kind of neat to give reasonable explanations for breathing fire or a huge creature flying.
I did watch a set of lectures about how science influences sci-fi, but they had one episode on dragons. They had one interesting way for fire breathing and it was like how the bomardier beetle does by mixing 2 chemicals together that when combined react explosively.
The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos is a fun little game that completely rips on fantasy tropes. I love how fourth wall breaking the game is and the characters even talk about things like game mechanics and maximizing xp. All the characters are such tropes that they don't even have names, it's just The Barbarian, The Elf or The Dwarf (Just a regular Dwarf).
A manuscript of what, if I may ask?
It was from this set of lectures called How Science Shapes Science Fiction
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-science-shapes-science-fiction.html
The lecture was Design your own dragon and dealt with some stuff from Game of Thrones, but also touched on dragons in general. Admittedly I never got into that show. That set of lectures was a lot of fun, it went into what sci-fi stories get right and wrong about about science.
The flick Flight of Dragons @Zaxares mentioned was interesting, but is early '80s animation, so a bit hokey. Animation is actually pretty good for it's time. The protaganist gets brought back in time to when magic still worked, but accidentally winds up having is consciousness put into a dragon's body when a spell goes wrong. An older dragon explains how they work to him. They have a honey comb structure inside them to contain gasses that let them become lighter than air. They raid dwarven mines for gem stones and eat lime stone to help generate the hydrogen gas by breaking them down in their craw. They have an organ in the top of their mouth he called the Thor's Thimble that could generate a spark to ignite the hydrogen when they were exhaling it. If they blew too much fire, they couldn't fly until they had replenished the hydrogen.
The wizards who are nice and helpful tend to wander around doing good deeds instead. No need for a tower when you don't even have a permanent home.
Another line of belief was that the shape or design of towers would somehow work in ways to assist in a sorcerer's magic, whether it was because of ley-lines or magnetism or collecting energy from the ether etc. I remember reading one story where the sorcerer cast his ritual by going to the top floor of his tower and then "spoke words to the Four Winds from each window, casting out mystical powders into the breeze".