Rat. Astrological guided Homepaths Vs demons

[madd0ct0r]

In a world where homeopathy, astrology and demonic possession are viable, how do they interact?

Water has a memory, it can be cleansed, primed by something that gives an effect and the effect is refined as you dilute it.
This principle of correct solvent priming followed by dilution as enhancement of effect is a universal rule. It can be applied to say, economic policy or to rocket fuel.

Astrology applies to meta narrative. Predictions can be made based on the steadily churning interactions in the zodiac, if you know enough about the subject of the prediction. Of course, this applies to everyone. Market corrections have interesting futures, and figuring out the exact 'birthday' of an object or law is a valuable proffesion.

Demonic possession. Yeah. Demon's are effectively floating esp parasites. They can latch onto anything with information processing capacity, trees, dogs, ant hills, octopi, smart phones, but people and group minds are especially powerful and empowering for the demon.
The result for the host is a gradual decay in decision making accuracy. This should result in gradually increasing chance of host dying but the demon will often mutate/shift the host to other available energy sources. Predatory trees, oil drinking 'human', heat absorbing wrist watches ect. The demon's themselves just use the diverted information processing to grow and bud, spreading to others its host is within a rough meter of. A possessed human takes 7 days to bud a new demon, and will shed a new bud every three days after. Everything else as host takes longer to spread, proportional to information processing power.

[madd0ct0r]

Worth noting that all three things relate to information, material memory and cause and effect.
Not the usual magic based on conservation of energy

[Formless]

The problem is that homeopathy implodes on itself the instant you start applying logic or common sense to it. If water not only remembers the properties of other substances but those properties only get stronger the more dilute it becomes in water until there are literally no atoms of the original product left in the water, then all water would remember everything that has entered it since the beginning of time-- billions of years-- and have amazing strength basically indistinguishable or even stronger than the original substance.

All of the substances. Water would have too many properties to count, because water is a pretty damn stable molecule. You can break it down, but in nature very little actually does.

In order to use homeopathy as a magic system in fantasy, you must add an additional rule that allows it to forget properties over time. Otherwise, water memory is an incoherent concept.

Also, in chemistry you can't take energy out of the equation. A lot of chemical properties are due to a chemical's energy state. An acid, for instance, is only able to eat through other substances because it has protons to donate, meaning an excess of energy. In other words, energy is an aspect of information, not separate from it.

[Elheru Aran]

^ this post reminds me of the DnD copypasta where a Wizard player defeats an enemy by increasing their body heat (a simple, cheap spell) till they died of massive heatstroke. There's a lot of incredibly powerful exploits of pretty basic stuff with just a little knowledge.

[Eternal_Freedom]

^ this post reminds me of the DnD copypasta where a Wizard player defeats an enemy by increasing their body heat (a simple, cheap spell) till they died of massive heatstroke. There's a lot of incredibly powerful exploits of pretty basic stuff with just a little knowledge.

Exploits like that are always hilarious when they first show up. Last time my group did Black Crusade, we found ourselves up against a Grey Knight Paladin Terminator, and we were level one. Basically a death sentence and none of our guns could do any damage past his armour. So I suggested our psyker use one of the first-level powers to make an organic substance enlarge - specifically, the Grey Knight. He grew - his armour did not, and the result was very very messy. And satisfying.

[Jub]

My group used to fletch arrows with feather tokens that turned into trees and activate them in flight. Enemies tended to not like getting his with arrow velocity oak trees. I started restricting their use from there and it seems like 5e has restricted them even further to prevent such fun.

Other fun tricks are bag of holding head deletion, the infamous bag of holding portable hole blackhole arrow, using bags of tricks to drop elephants/whales on people from a height. Back when magic was a little more freeform and less restricted you could have a lot of fun.

[madd0ct0r]

The problem is that homeopathy implodes on itself the instant you start applying logic or common sense to it. If water not only remembers the properties of other substances but those properties only get stronger the more dilute it becomes in water until there are literally no atoms of the original product left in the water, then all water would remember everything that has entered it since the beginning of time-- billions of years-- and have amazing strength basically indistinguishable or even stronger than the original substance.

All of the substances. Water would have too many properties to count, because water is a pretty damn stable molecule. You can break it down, but in nature very little actually does.

In order to use homeopathy as a magic system in fantasy, you must add an additional rule that allows it to forget properties over time. Otherwise, water memory is an incoherent concept.

Also, in chemistry you can't take energy out of the equation. A lot of chemical properties are due to a chemical's energy state. An acid, for instance, is only able to eat through other substances because it has protons to donate, meaning an excess of energy. In other words, energy is an aspect of information, not separate from it.

Water has a memory, it can be cleansed, primed by something that gives an effect and the effect is refined as you dilute it. This principle of correct solvent priming followed by dilution as enhancement of effect is a universal rule. It can be applied to say, economic policy or to rocket fuel.

[Jub]

Yes, but does it cleanse naturally over time or does it always need to be cleansed?

[madd0ct0r]

Yes, but does it cleanse naturally over time or does it always need to be cleansed?

I was working more towards the idea that it won't pick up effects normally, the water sample has to be cleansed and primed in order to collect an effect.

I'm also going to rule that evaporation counts as cleansing and urine does not count as dilute water. This still suggests that over the years, thousands of complicated effects from potions spilled/poured into the sea will have accrued in basic water. This is suggested to be the reason for water's tremendous heat capacity, that seawater is a reasonable antiseptic for humans, the fact that ice floats when nearly all other solids are denser than their melt, and the fact that pure water is transparent, but the sea shows all sorts of colors. (tongue firmly in cheek).

Given enough time, mixing and confusion, I suggest that the chaotic spread of effects will largely cancel each other out.