Exate wrote:I thought that we were supposed to make one of every unit type listed, so I did. Anyway, given that there are plenty of real-world locations where the desert is right next to the ocean (the Sahara comes to mind), and that there are some famous One Thousand and One Nights tales involving the sea- Sinbad, for example- it doesn't seem to clash with my flavor to me. And yes, I would like to make one of my ship units a marid, a powerful aquatic type of jinn. It seemed to fit the flavor of the side better than another fairly generic ship type, and I don't really see any reason why the only seafaring units would be ships anyway- there's precedent in a recent text update that there are normal water-capable units as well.
Okay okay fair enough. I guess I’m just used to the previous people ignoring ships mostly because they weren’t interested in sea stuff. It’s fine that you put them.
Exate wrote:Oh, I'm definitely not looking for long-term predictions through the knights. The flavor behind their abilities in Dune is a sort of mind-over-matter deal powered by believing that what they want has already happened and then reflexively taking the most efficient path to making their belief reality.
I would interpret this in Erfworld terms as sensing and then following the flow of Fate to the desired result. The net result would be similar to some scenes in the Sherlock Holmes movies with his "predict how to win and then do it" sequences. Other potential applications are realizing that going into battle would be a poor idea, maybe sensing ambushes early enough to avoid being surprised, and so forth; nothing which gets too abstract or affects things at a remove from themselves. While the rules as written break this down into "limited mancy, 30 juice and cast spells" personally I'd like to flavor things more as a constantly running strong sense of their personal Fate that they can take advantage of than actual casting.
That would be unusual to run, but I think I can work with it. The problem is in Erfworld Predictamancy is not as awesome as Spice-induced precognition or Bene Gesserit trickery (it kills only animals). So I will do my best to think of a way to work with that for now.
Exate wrote:Well, there are two other existing abilities that grant some form of stealth to compare against: Simple Foolamancy and Burrowing. This is obviously much less powerful than a full simple foolamancy since it's far less flexible and personal-only. As described here it's significantly weaker in stealth terms than Burrowing, which at four points provides not only concealment but also significant protection and movement bonuses. Given that this can't be used while moving, it takes an entire turn to activate, and there is still a chance for other units to blow the veil and see them I can't say this is worth more than two points. At three it would need a significant power boost to measure up.
To be clear, I'd like to apply this to the Jinn, Ifrit, and Marid units since they're the three jinn unit types. This doesn't map strictly into the unit build guidelines; is it permissible or are you inclined to nix it on grounds of unit restrictions?
Yeah... that’s something that is bugging me. I didn’t put burrowing in, that was an addition of whoever made those rules. Basically, the way I see it is this – Borrowing is basically weak dirtmamancy. Sizemore can do it through his magic, therefore that behavior falls under that particular area of magic. However, it is also basically flying, only using the ground instead of the air. When I went off Stealth I was going by something we’ve already seen in-setting: the scout unit Wanda croaked who was hiding behind a magic item producing a veil. It was implied he needed to be stationary for that to work, too. I think I may need to revamp burrowing, because even Veils have a chance to be spotted. Why would burrowing be undetectable? I'm thinking there would be a sound able to be heard, or even better a mound of earth moving along. Nothing says they by default should be able to be invisible. As it is you're already getting a free ability to ignore terrain penalties. Thus… I think I will revamp Burrowing now. Your units are no longer invisible while burrowed --UNLESS THEY ARE NOT MOVING, at which point they are considered veiled-- due to either noise or the aforementioned mound of moving earth, but you still are outside of combat range until you come up. It is also now a 3-point ability. So, to summarize – you get to move freely on non-water hexes, and avoid attacks, and a weak sort of veil. That’s not bad, it has some advantages over flying and some weaknesses compared to it.
