It will, undoubtedly, even out eventually; when it reaches an equilibrium between heat bleeding off into the surrounding region and heat generation within the area. It will most likely be a rather nasty magic desert, though. And yes, some very wild weather indeed; an immovable high pressure bubble that just fluxes around the edges would be quite the disruption for any weather patterns - and since weather is a chaotic system, there's no telling just how wildly the changes might propagate outward from the central point.
He could, indeed, be a priest; ever since I've been working on Kuramen, I tend to use mage to refer to any worker of magic, whether divine or arcane. I forget they're usually distinguished from each other... I suppose in that case, you might potentially need a powerful entity of the God of Darkness to look upon it and say 'Let There Be Night!' Go to Comment
Might make for an interesting quest to find out what had gone wrong; maybe some other magic is needed to restore the natural progression of day and night, or perhaps someone else needs to reuse the mage's ritual, and be killed at the moment of natural nightfall. Go to Comment
Darkness, in particular, will tend to overwhelm most people, but you are correct - even without the environmental impact, the perpetual light would eventually drive anyone living within the area completely mad, not to mention that for a while it'd likely also cause an increase in accidents, with a complete lack of shadows to help judge locations and distances. Go to Comment
Honestly, I have to share the credit/blame for this with Siren. The overall idea and development are mine, but he's the one who prodded me to actually post it, and provided a bit of feedback (and suggestion to include the Shard). Go to Comment
Really, the first thing I thought of was the French infantry's anti-mine boots; they were built to be capable of protecting the wearer from antipersonnel mines. The downside, of course, is that they're so massive and heavy that anyone wearing them is easy prey for a machinegun nest... Go to Comment
This motivation would be a good inclusion in the sub itself; a little backstory that he was part of the corruption, and that after he fled he saw the abuses of the common folk, and perhaps was given shelter by some families who pretty much had nothing to share, but shared anyway.
This? This very perfectly captures the feel of the Realms Beyond that menace the world of mortals, in everything from Lovecraft to pulp-action-style stories. A place that was once that domain of Man, overtaken by the power of something incomprehensibly alien and powerful.
One thing I could see, since these creatures obey different physical laws, might be that there may be literal masochistic creatures - for whom pain is a most novel and exciting experience; or ones who have reproductive methods that go a step beyond the 'usual' alien methods, breaking up into spawn as they die. I could also see, as complements to the titanic amoebae, gargantuan cellular forms without definable organs, but rather massive, rope-like strands of genetic information, immense enough that, if harvested, they could be used as such - although you'd be collecting those alien proteins on your skin with each touch, and who knows if they have some way to infect you?
I greatly appreciate the acknowledgement; Locastus, as a setting, would certainly mesh with the image of Kuramen in many ways.
My only real issue is that I'd honestly have broken this up into at least half a dozen subs; the blimp dragon, for example, could make a very interesting mini-dungeon; a number of the critters beg for further fleshing out; and so on. Still an awesome piece of work, however! Go to Comment
While the basic logic is sound - a sufficient mass of iron or higher elements will, indeed, cause the star to choke and die - the particulars are, as Siren pointed out far more effectively than I, a bit light. Considering the sheer size and mass of the stellar core of our own sun, 'several tons' will be about as effective in impacting the sun as a few nanograms of dust might be on us, if that much.
Essentially, it's a novel idea, but if I were to have enough mass available to me to have an effect on these multi-million-degree titan of a thermonuclear reactor that is a stellar core, I'd rather shear off pieces to use as relativistic kinetic weapons, if I needed to kill something. It's less prone to showering the local stellar region with murderous amounts of radiation, for one thing, and ELEs are just as good at convincing species to roll over and die.
White dwarf stars - the end point of our sun - consist of an earth-sized-or-larger lump of iron. The stars tend to survive through the accumulation of this mass until they run out of fuel in the fusion reaction. They also go through a process of accumulating multiple layers of 'ash' - helium being the first stage of such - that require greater pressures and temperatures than hydrogen does in order to undergo fusion. During this whole process, flukes of pressure and temperature will result in relatively trace amounts of heavier elements forming. Our star, far from being a generation-one star, has numerous elements contaminating the hydrogen already; the absorption lines of these elements are what produce the spectral lines astronomers use to determine the chemical makeup of a given stellar body. There are stars that have a fairly sizable iron content, enough to be observed across vast interstellar gulfs; they burn 'cool' compared to non-iron-heavy stars, but the reaction is hardly stifled.
One final detail, in passing - while a star is, indeed, a titanic mass of fusing gas, the pressures at the core are far from what we think of as gaseous - the nuclei are jammed at absurd densities. A slug of iron is likely to be sublimated and eroded by the pressure drafts long before it gets anywhere near the stellar core. Go to Comment
Definitely quite an interesting concept in the making here, Cap. Not many people can do the Lovecraftian component in things; it either gets overdone and either silly or grotesque rather than subtly horrific, or underdone and often fails to be noticed. You do a good job of striking the balance. Go to Comment
I imagine the farther reaches of the world have some rather interesting stories of murderous iron daemons... And I can only imagine what must go through the mind of some hapless traveling spellcaster when he encounters one of these things and suddenly finds it marching toward him with weapons deployed.