Gorgons

I remember in the Clash of the Titans movie, What's-his-name used Medusa's head to petrify a giant and save What's-her-face. Then again, it's Greek Mythology.

Size has no effect on a creature’s magic power. This has been said time and time again in regards to fairies as them shrinking would then weaken them magically if they did and vice versa. A creature’s magic ability is determined based on how experienced they are with using magic. Most prey sized creatures are not highly experienced because they end up getting a free tour of a predator’s digestive track.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Solution to human sized gorgons not petrifying giants:
In order for something to be petrified their natural magical field must be overcome. A human-sized gorgon can easily overpower a human's magical field with their power, however a giant's magical field is far to strong for it to be effected by a human sized gorgon.

Just use size, in this case, and not "magical field". Magic field adds too much complexity to the situation (both since "magic fields" aren't exactly resolved yet, because this implies that Giants could be turned to stone but instead are predominantly too magically protected to be, replaces the "power" of a Gorgon by turning into a "spell"-like ability, and so on). Just saying "You can't change something beyond [x] height" works better.

For an example of what I meant for "complexity": Could they petrify a Spine Beetle? Why or why not? They're much larger than a Human, mass and volume-wise, but they don't have the "magical field" a Giant Predator would have (indeed, logically they'd have even less a magical field than a human). Is it because the Gorgon's power counts as a spell? If it counts as a spell, then logically would it not be possible for a Gorgon to train the power of their stare to slowly rise, until eventually they could influence things larger than a Human (perhaps even eventually reaching Arch-Mage stages wherein they could afflict a Giant Predator, just like a Human Arch Mage could use more magical effects against a Giant Predator when following the "magic field" argument)?

Just saying "It can't affect more than [x] volume / mass, it must have a physical eye, and it must be living", reduces a lot of the complexity. You don't have to worry about freezing concepts such as the eye of a storm, as it's neither physical nor alive. You don't have to worry about a Spine Beetle being affected (or why it wouldn't be), because it's already past the cut-off.

Solution: The better the mage, the stronger the magic resistance on average.

Oh gosh, now I'm getting confused! \(ﾟДﾟ)/

Malhavoc Shade wrote:

Oh gosh, now I'm getting confused! \(ﾟДﾟ)/

There's a bit of a debate on the forum about just how magic works, especially in regard to size and its importance to magic. Hence why I want to say the power's limited by size, not magic: It avoids having to address the magic issue for the time being. If there's a simple "Those beyond [x] height may not enter ride be petrified" to the effect, it avoids the whole "Magic, do you understand it?" debate.

Yeah, unfortunately it brings up another problem. When a Gorgon's ability is limited by mass, does it increase as the Gorgon ages, or grows more powerful, or trains?

Malahite wrote:

Malhavoc Shade wrote:

Oh gosh, now I'm getting confused! \(ﾟДﾟ)/

There's a bit of a debate on the forum about just how magic works, especially in regard to size and its importance to magic. Hence why I want to say the power's limited by size, not magic: It avoids having to address the magic issue for the time being. If there's a simple "Those beyond [x] height may not enter ride be petrified" to the effect, it avoids the whole "Magic, do you understand it?" debate.

I think that "the more skillful mage is less affected because he's been playing with that thing more often" is more logical as far as spellcasting and spell resistance goes. I can see the idea behind this: If Gorgons could petrify regardless of size, it'd be very broken broken. I can think of something else that giant predators, on average, have lived much longer than normal sized creatures, thus had greater exposure to the ambient magic and developed a bit stronger resistance as a result.

Or it would need a very specific eye contact and obviously the big gap in size makes it more difficult for the giant to get a proper look in the Gorgon's eyes.

Note that I'm not trying to argue right now that size is the ONLY factor, but that to be the reason it can't afflict larger things. It's a cut-off factor, but not the only one. In programming terms, it's one of many things that needs to be "true" ('sufficient size) or under a certain variable for the code to initiate a "Petrify" function. You can fail to initiate the program even when in the size limit, but you can't initiate it otherwise. Increasing the power / ability of the Medusa / Gorgon increases the maximum size they can affect, but it still has a cut-off.

Alright, that sounds reasonable. So basically boost the power, bigger effect.

I dub this practice Tim Taylor Magic.

MM13 needs to change the name of this version of the Gorgon to so that the rest of us don't have to wait for her approval to make a more traditional Gorgon

Sean Okotami wrote:

I dub this practice Tim Taylor Magic.

I approve of this wholeheartedly! XD

Well, quite a few people have responded to my idea.
Just to elaborate, what I was talking about is the healing effect. A giant is bigger so it has more of the healing magic in it, just like a bigger container (obviously) holds more water than a smaller one. The healing effect would attempt to counteract the petrifying.
This wouldn't effect anything else much because the counteract is very, very weak, which is why gorgons can do it to creatures of similar size instantly. However due to the sheer volume of healing effect in a giant, the petrifying can't even being.


This is just an idea, a suggestion.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Well, quite a few people have responded to my idea.
Just to elaborate, what I was talking about is the healing effect. A giant is bigger so it has more of the healing magic in it, just like a bigger container (obviously) holds more water than a smaller one. The healing effect would attempt to counteract the petrifying.
This wouldn't effect anything else much because the counteract is very, very weak, which is why gorgons can do it to creatures of similar size instantly. However due to the sheer volume of healing effect in a giant, the petrifying can't even being.

This is just an idea, a suggestion.

To avoid going into the debate right now (came that close to starting it), just consider this at the moment: You're applying a rapid-scale regeneration to beings that's good enough to reverse petrification nigh-instantaneously. With this type of regeneration, you could very probably see a Wolverine or Dante-esque style of regeneration on the common giant predator wherein a weapon could very possibly be healed around before it gets the chance to exit.

I get what, overall, you're trying to argue: "Magic aura big, big aura strong! Little aura no beat big aura, big aura beat little aura! Little aura beat littler aura, but little aura no beat bigger." Simplified to a comic degree there, but the gist of it. However, the implications in how it's presented right now (Super-healing that works strong enough to instantaneously de-petrify) has problems.


To get more on topic, though, how do people de-petrify from a Gorgon's stare? It says it's temporary... but how so? In regard to typical duration, and what exactly is causing it to be temporary? Is it healing related? Is it a trait of the spell / power used by a Gorgon, which can only hold something in a petrified state for so long? Does a Gorgon choose to end it / stop concentrating on the effect after some time? Do they have pre-set time limits ("Imma stare you to stone for a ten-day")? This would, sorta, be helpful to know, and could be asked 13 without really going into a Felarya magic debate (since it has to do with the creatures' innate power, not an effect of the world of Felarya itself).

I said nothing about regeneration.
The heal magic fills everything. What I was doing was tacking on a little extra effect to something already established. That is; living things like to stay made out of living tissue.

Adding on it, wouldn't it be the opposite? Since you used a container analogy, a smaller container is filled faster, so wouldn't a smaller body be healed faster?

*flails manically* \(ﾟДﾟ)/

So... Many... Different... Opinions!!!

Taking into account all these different ideas and tidbits, it will take me a wee bit longer to finish scribbling out the Gorgon subspecies I am doodling. For now, I'll try to keep it simple and avoid any potential issues that might spark debates.

Sean Okotami wrote:

Adding on it, wouldn't it be the opposite? Since you used a container analogy, a smaller container is filled faster, so wouldn't a smaller body be healed faster?

No.
That's where the analogy doesn't work.
Anyway, I should have said 'permeates everything." It would have been more correct.

The soil heals anything living regardless of size. End of story. Now let's move on before Shade collapses.

Also, the wiki only state that it heal wounds and not spells like petrification.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

I said nothing about regeneration.

No, but you did say:

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Just to elaborate, what I was talking about is the healing effect. A giant is bigger so it has more of the healing magic in it, just like a bigger container (obviously) holds more water than a smaller one. The healing effect would attempt to counteract the petrifying.

"More healing magic" equating to an ability to ignore petrification. Through healing magic. That it works for Giant Predators so that you can't even start the process, but that "Prey" are still petrified nigh-instantly, implies a very heavy degree of regeneration / use of the magic. If it's not healing the petrification so fast that the process doesn't even begin, but it's resisting, that's something else entirely (healing / regeneration is a reparation of damaged cells, parts, and so on. Resistance is a prevention of that damage in the first place).

Plus what Sean said, in that just because the Giant's larger doesn't mean it's all plus'. You're larger, and proportionally the surface area to volume / mass would be much smaller for many Giants than a "Prey"-sized being (remember that as height scales, volume and mass tend to cube). As a "battery" they would theoretically hold more (because again, cubed volume / mass to hold in), but in regard to using that around them they'd proportionally be slower as their surface area to their mass / volume is much smaller than something shorter (Well, for some Giants: A Dridder would probably have much more surface area / mass than a regular Giantess, depending on how light the bulb section is).

And we still need an answer on how the petrification works. If healing doesn't come into the picture, healing magic aura is a moot point to begin with.

Yeah..... this is EXACTLY why I hate gorgons from mythology.

I can't see how anybody can hate gorgons. You can hate the way gorgons are portraited (like I hate the way Hades is always portraited in movies as evil and Zeus is the good god, I hate this so much). I just can't see any good reason to hate gorgons or any other mythological creatures.

I hate them because of this retarded concept of magic they have.

It's almost on par with fairy magic in how ridiculously powerful it can be.

We don't need YET another hazard in Felarya specifically designed to screw regular people over.

Pendragon wrote:

I hate them because of this retarded concept of magic they have.

It's almost on par with fairy magic in how ridiculously powerful it can be.

We don't need YET another hazard in Felarya specifically designed to screw regular people over.

To be fair, Felarya is practically a "sod you" to man-sized beings, and has been for a while. The "sod you" has gone down a bit since it was revealed the Crisis diet (all Humans / Nekos / Elves, all the time!) was uncommon for most Giant Predators, as well as the frequency of Giant Predators characters to Prey characters dropping an amount, but it's still a place designed to be nasty to anything under 4m in height (Especially things at or under 2m in height).

And a Gorgon's not really screwing people over right now. It's stated that "true" petrifications are rare. If a Giant Predator isn't aware of the powers of a Gorgon, it'd probably either ignore the Statue'd person or even be upset at the Gorgon thinking it ruined a perfectly good Twinkie (would you think fondly of someone who took a Hershey Bar or a package of Bacon and threw it into a cement mixer, even if it turned out (but you didn't know) the thing could come out about a day later untouched?). And if someone does know about the patterns of a Gorgon, it's still a waiting game that a Giant Predator might not be up for (since picking up is risky and could "break" the meal readily, or possibly taking up a hand until de-petrification, and waiting for the person to "thaw" could take anywhere from hours to days / weeks).