Vela Nanashi wrote: Sun May 17, 2026 6:24 pmThank you for the extremely lovely compliment "too wild" and creative and fun concepts ^.^

and the complaint about my use of a whole rainbow of colours, that is also an amazing compliment for me

Yeah most of my universes in my multiverse are extremely high magic, it does not always mean everyone can do magic, in fact a lot can not, but also that there is very little to limit just how powerful magic can be, three things limit a person when it comes to magic:
Already at that point I would loose myself in implications. What use is armour for a warrior if any sorceress kann just cook you and your whole battallion inside of it with a hand gesture?
But then again: Maybe you meet someone who also does not have magic. Is it possible to defend against magic with trinkets? How complicated is that? Can everyone get at least some magical defence?
Questions over questions.
I don't know if I have mentioned this already, but it reminds me of a idea by artist DrGraevling: He had the idea of a world where magic is linked to sexuality. Normal armour is more or less useless due to extensive magic use, but the bikini armour is becoming highly effective. Since magic and sexuality are linked you have to feel sexy for effective use.
Maybe that could be tha base for a story...
The wider world exists, but I will not waste time and words on that if I am limited to a word count below 50k

and even then I am not going to have a character go "oh you know we have a king and our political system is this and blah blah blah" instead you have to infer what the world is about when the characters interact with it, I have no responsibility at all to elucidate the world for my readers, what I want them to enjoy is seeing the world from one or more point of view characters, and I try really hard to not have characters think too much about things they know already in great detail to the point it is like a reflex to them. Like do you think about how you use a bike when you ride it? I am sure if I was in the mood for it I could explain a bike and using it for tens of thousands of words, but am I going to do that? No, and I will treat magic and technology the same most of the time

I will say experiencing the world through the characters is superior to the exposition dump.
And I would not even want to delve so deep as technological backgrounds or political systems.
Maybe it would be different if I was familiar with D&D. But as it is I know almost nothing.
The sorceresses wanted to do some ritual. What kind? What for?
Orcs. Ok, I know orks. From the text I can gather that they are of the hypermasculine (big cock) variety, not the Tolkien-Orks. But blue, green, red? They seem to be very distinct, at least in taste of their cum.
Slave markets are mentioned. But where?
People from the surface. We are underground since when?
I know there is a world around all this but it is just a spotlight iluminating the actor, the rest of the stage and the scenery are not iluminated even a little bit.
I will also use well known short hands to explain concepts that some readers will know about and that those who don't know can find out by seeking it out, like in the case with the bag of holding, or my more normal thing the ring of holding that is more advanced and better in every way. There is no real reason to obscure what it is more, it would take more words than just bag of holding

Sure yes people know that thing from game systems, tabletop rpgs, it is also called other things in other places, like hammer space, or time lord science/tardis/bigger on the inside

It makes sense to use these shorthands especially when you only have 5k words to work with

The "Bag of holding" wasn't one of the things I needed explained actually.
That was pretty clear, and a reader does not neccessarily need more details than that it works, and that it is magic.
In Honor Harrington I don't expect a tech-log for the artificial gravity. David Weber did explain some details of the system, but as a reader I initially only need the info that artificial gravity exists.
In Nights Dawn the author had to do a bit more in teh beginning to explain why the Edenites do have artificial gravity, while the Adamists don't.
His neural nanonics where just there like the bag of holding, and the reader had to figure out what it was, and what it could do along the way.
These are only examples, and these books heaped a ton of exposition upon the reader.
But when I say I want to know more about the world it is not a detailed description of everything, but just a feeling or hints where I am.
For the Warhammer story I am planing atm I thought about entering a section with a short mention of the place (lifted that idea from the Dark Heresy Books)
Year 726.M41
Hive World of Tolmanghast
Tolmanghast, high orbit
Emperor-class Battleship "Righteous Retribution"
This gives the reader almost nothing, but provides an anchor for my imagination. It conjures up some blury images, that will get clearer as the story progresses.
Just the mentioning of a city name could do that.
The mind flayer making alterations to bodies is something that is in the low magic setting dungeons and dragons 3.5, easy to do in 6 seconds, you can even change a person into a rock, or bunny or toad in that amount of time, also other settings like vampire the masquerade you can also do such flesh crafting in a short time, and those settings are low magic as well. In my high magic setting doing some flesh crafting and making some portal pairs that follow a body is easy for a being as powerful as this mind flayer, now not all mind flayers are as powerful as this one, also not as perverted.
I am not a fan of those systems. Not for logic implications or some such, but a matter of style.
While I played Warcraft III back in the day I found it very jarring that some mages could change enemies into a sheep. Such a spell does not only change the shape of the opject, if you think about it: It needt to rewrite the DNA of the target.
Still I suppose in WH40k fucking up someones body this way takes a lot longer? and in the real world these things are just plain impossible to do

I have to confess I am not well versed in WH40k, but I am sure I am some sort of chaos goddess in that setting
Well, yes and no.
There are mutations/transformations that happen pretty fast. Like some guy getting possessed by a daemon, growing, muscles, wings, horns, a tail, fusing with his armour.
But there you could argue that behind these stands the reality altering power of the warp, and the cosmic intelligence of the chaos gods.
Maybe it is an issue of not understanding what kind of being a mindflayer is.
A godlike being with a mind that thinks in more dimensions than a human altering reality is easier to accept than a mind grounded in reality doing such a thing. Because such body alterations are not just like flipping a switch. Even in a fantasy setting there have to be a multitude of things happening inside the body. What kind of mind can think of all these in a matter of seconds?
Much easier to accept elemental spells like fireballs and lightning.
Maybe there is something in between? The mindflayer merely imagines what he wants in the end, and the cosmic power he taps into actually does the 5D-thinking-process?
If that is the case, I would have an easier time with it.
What did happen in Warhammer that comes to mind: A chaos lord known only as "The Warsmith" punished an underling by breating a corupting miasma into his face. But that did not trigger a very specific alteration, but let the guy go into a wild series of mutations that rendered him down to a ever changing helpless lump of flesh.
I am sure some authors did do specific mutations with a handwave, but where I to write it: Either a sorcerer that uses a ritual that is somewhat more elaborate. Or a Dark Mechanicus heretec using technology (warp sorcery and technology kinda melt into each other with those guys)
Also if you want to take the parts you like from my story and use them in your own or if you want to make an edit of your own, I would like that and not mind it

It crossed my mind.
But a mere readability edit was already done twice, I don't think another would add anything of value.
And I am not sure if I could move in your world using my kind of writing. But it might be an interesting challenge...
I am however utterly incapable of writing a low magic very grey story with low chaos and low variations that moves slow

that is not the nature of my multiverse and mind, and is what I very much want to escape, as I have it in this world we all live within

You do you. At the end of day you need to have fun doing it.
Lucius wrote: Sun May 17, 2026 7:08 pmI daresay the editors encountered the same obstacles.
Glad I am not alone
