Have you ever been reading one book, usually an old-time classic, and found yourself suddenly understanding something about some other book by a different author? For example, Gene Roddenberry is said to have insisted that Starfleet is not a military organization, despite the fact that it sure as hell seems to be one. A few years ago, I was reading (I think) Heinlein’s Space Cadet, and one of the characters said that there were three main groups travelling in space: the merchants, out for profit; the military, out to fight and defend; and their own group (whatever it was called), interested in science and learning. I had the sudden strong suspicion that Roddenberry’d had that passage in mind, though he’d botched the job of translating it to Star Trek. Yeah, Starfleet clearly has an exploratory mission, but they also do the things a military is supposed to do — fight enemies of the state, escort civilian and diplomatic ships through dangerous space, etc.
Last night, having finished The Screwtape Letters (Screwtape thinks a lightyear is a measure of time, and I suspect it was Lewis’s mistake; this is funny because Lewis had earlier had Screwtape talk about the difference between actually knowing science and having just picked up a general sense of it), I started on Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance, Tor’s collection of all four of the Dying Earth novels in one fat volume that I’ll be bitching about carrying around for weeks to come. I was two pages into it when I suddenly realized — this is where Gary Gygax gets his writing style from! Gygax writes just like someone trying to imitate Vance’s style, and not being able to pull it off.
I already knew about the magic system, that D&D’s odd system is derived from that used in the Dying Earth books. Someone in Alarums & Excursions once wrote up his own take on the Dying Earth magic system, one that involved more powerful spells being longer, and each mage being able to memorize a certain number of syllables. I don’t think it took the degradation of memory into account, though. It might be worth it to keep track of the number of hours that have passed since the mage last looked in his spellbooks, and then when he tries to cast the spell, roll a number of d20 equal to the number of hours. As long as all the dice each roll over the number hours, everything’s rosy. Each die that rolls under that number is a syllable the mage couldn’t quite remember, and then Bad Things happen. (This system will produce lots of fumbles, so don’t make the Bad Things too bad, unless you’re playing a fantasy version of Paranoia.)
Most modern fantasy authors seem to assume that the power of spoken spells comes from the meanings of the words, not their exact pronunciation. Make the opposite assumption, and you get a world where mages carefully preserve exact pronunciations much longer than the general population. You’d be able to tell mages by their distinctive accent, predating the Great Vowel Shift. (I think Larry Niven once wrote a short about an ancient and powerful mage who’d influenced the evolutionary development of the rest of the people in his world until they became physiologically unable to pronounce his true name.)
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