Yet another random bit of world building.

[gridlore]

Caught a show last night on the National Geographic Channel about the Sahara Desert. One interesting thing I learned it that you can find natural fused glass all over the place, the result of an asteroid impact some millions of years ago.

One facet of GURPS magic has always been power stones, little magical doohickeys that allow mages to cast spells without incurring fatigue (or, if you're using Unlimited Mana, reduce the Threshold level of the spell, etc.) Y'all can see where I'm going with this. Those lumps of glass are magically charged. Link this back to my Dwarfish Empire and you can see where the age of industrial magic begins. By the default setting time for my Fantasy Europe, power stones are either embedded in magical objects or more precious than all the jewels of far Araby! But there are always legends and maps to fabulous lost mines in the desert, rumors of vast storehouses of raw stones lost to the sands...

A few other thoughts.

• Dragons, being magical, would horde the things.


• A fun campaign might be a "crystal rush" set in the days of the Empire.


• Add some magicpunk elements to the above. Zeppelins, clockwork contraptions built by mad Dwarf artificers...


• The crater itself might be an interesting site. Now merely a depression, it could still be inherently magical.


• Possibly the source of all the so-called abominations that plague the world.


• For a little nightmarish gaming, the asteroid contained a sentient, very evil being. His essence is in each stone, and he wants nothing more than to be reassembled...

Comments

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

The RTS game RISE OF LEGENDS pretty much fills the majority of your bullet points, at least in the demo stage.


The Sahara is also billed as the largest source of fulgarite; I wonder if people are making the distinction between lightning-generated glass and meteorite-generated glass, and if the meteorite glass can be further broken down into impact-glass and flash-glass like trinitite.

[guppiecat]

What about the mad dwarf artificer that realizes that the magic stones come from crashing a sentient asteroid to Earth, so he builds a space ship to create more of them.

problems:

1) The sentient asteroid is also one of $civilization's main gods
2) The ideal place to crash the asteroid is on city of $civilization
3) A sect of $civilization has a belief that when the god visits the city, it will be the end of days, after which they will live forever in the afterlife with 42 well-experienced members of their preferred sexes, as a reward for bringing about the apocalypse.

That might be an interesting campaign.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Oh, that would rock (NPI).

How about this? Mind Flayers, or some other evil race, have decided to deal with humanity and make a lot of powerstones with one act. The party (and this would have to be a high level/500+ point group) have to use an ancient Dwarf skyship to divert the asteroid, defeat the evil critters, and then...

..you have a Spelljammer campaign on your hands. Especially if the finally battle left the characters rather unsure of how to get back to Earth.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

this ties in well to the Inuit thought that the further traveled something is the more power it has...

cant find something thats traveled more than an asteroid fragment i would think.

also this reminds me of the fused sands of atomic test sites...
mana bomb anyone?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

There was a GURPS supplement about this, with communist telepathic penguins.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

i remember it well...

who could blame them becoming communist really?