Isn't that almost exactly what happened in Taure's Lords of Magic?

 

Basically. Unless in Xandrel's universe the people capable of casting immortality-creating magic can't do it for other people, and the number of people capable of doing it is really low - like, one or two every century.

Then you end up with Lords of Magic Lite -- you have the Lords, but not the expanded society.

 

Ok, so not everyone can do it. But I'm not talking about your average joe. I'm talking about the extremely powerful wizards and witches who can achieve immortality.

In other words, you will have the likes of Merlin and Morgan le Fay running around, among others.

If anything, immortality being rare only confirms how powerful anyone who did get it must be. People who did it centuries ago were already powerful, but now can do amazing shit simply by spending ages only getting better.

Also, you misunderstood me when I said "War". I meant a war between the Immortals, with some of them leading different Factions.

Am I the only one who thinks wizards/witches aren't so against having multiple children unless you're a Weasley? There are plenty of instances of siblings (Sirius/Regulus, Daphne/Astoria, Bellatrix/Narrcisa/Andromeda), and most people who we do know to be only children, there's normally a pretty good reason for it (James' parents had fertility issues, Harry's parents died, Neville's parents went insane). Besides a few exceptions, like Draco, the remaining people we don't know whether or not they have siblings we also don't know if they do, simply because we don't know much about them.

 

Maybe it was only discovered a 100 or 200 years ago? So, no Morgana or Slytherin, but maybe Grindelwald.

The children thing is a pretty easy fix, really. A side effect of the immortality spell/ability is infertility.

 

A couple of thoughts on immortality.

Firstly, fertility would not necessarily be extended by an immortality magic. Women are born with a certain number of primordial follicles and when they've run out there's no more ovulation. Unless your immortality spell replenished these cells, fertility wouldn't increase and women would still go into menopause at the same age.

Secondly, whether or not all those extra years would lead to a significant increase in power depends on how you view magical talent. Personally I don't think a 500 year old Dumbledore would be noticeable more talented than a 100 year old Dumbledore, or even a fifty year old Dumbledore. I see magical skill hitting marginal returns pretty early in life, and the more talented you are the earlier you hit that point.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Once you can do everything that is magically possible, there's nothing more to learn. Once you can create and transform any physical object you like, and can do so at scale, instantaneously, with no real effort, you've basically hit the point where you've got nothing more to learn in the area of transfiguration. And so on for the other disciplines. It's not that you've reached the end of the body of knowledge. It's that you can now do everything that can be done. You're basically a god.

2. This point is reached within the Hogwarts curriculum. Consider Dumbledore vs. Voldemort in OotP. Every piece of magic used was within Hogwarts curriculum. They can just do it faster, bigger, more perfectly, and with less effort. The reason why not everyone is godlike is that most people never master the Hogwarts curriculum, or even a large part of it. I'd suggest that the average wizard only ever masters one or two spells (e.g. Lockhart and his memory charm).

3. Magical prodigies overtake conventional knowledge before they leave school. We know that Dumbledore surprised his examiners and was publishing academic articles while he was still in school. Probably Tom Riddle would have been too if he wasn't a secretive little shit experimenting with dark magic.

So what can you do after Hogwarts, if you're a prodigy who has almost complete control over reality? Well, you can learn niche magic that's hyper-specialised and isn't taught at Hogwarts (e.g. occlumency, alchemy). This magic can be useful, if only once in a blue moon. You can also investigate history and geography: how things used to be done, and how they're done elsewhere. Or you can invent your own methods for doing the same shit. Or you can practice the application of the magic you learnt at Hogwarts to different situations via a vocational career path like healing.

If you put a 18 year old Dumbledore vs. OotP Dumbledore, I'm not sure that there would be significant enough a difference between them in skill to decide the fight. Older Dumbledore might have picked up enough tricks to pull it out of the bag, but otherwise it'd probably just be down to luck.

 

I would say that OotP Dumbledore would have a rather large advantage over 18 year old Dumbledore. A century of experience cannot be discounted. Even if you go an say that his technical skill hasn't progressed in that time, he would have picked up a thing or two in between graduation, taking up the Elder Wand, becoming Headmaster, and guiding a vigilante organisation through a civil war. Even if what he has picked up is only tricks and cunning, he'll still lord a century of experience over his younger self.

You can't discount that and claim them equal based on technical skill--which I don't believe to be equal, in any case.

 

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

Yeah, right.

 

Maybe it is god status in some primitive culture but is also status of a typical factory.

What about creating things that never existed before? For example "book that would be written by X". Or transfigure at larger scale (create constructions like Hogwarts, terraform Mars, create astronomical objects like planets, stars or go to even larger scale).

So lets go and invent new stuff. Canon Dumbledore did this.

 

They indeed cannot do it for other people, this is an ability you have to learn on your own.

There is also one key difference between this and Lords of Magic. If I remember correctly, in Lords the longevity was created by advanced transfiguration. It gave you eternal youth, but not indestructibility. Here, this immortality makes you capable of withstanding even the Killing Curse, which is quite the achievement.

Another thing is that this ability is perhaps a new invention, discovered perhaps around the 1900s, so we would not have to deal with Merlin and his friends. (I always disliked the 'Ancient Wizards were better than now')

 

This idea reminded me of the play "The Macropulos Affair" by Karel Čapek, where Elina Macropulos is immortal. She was originally afraid of death, but eventually (when she was 337 years old) realised that inhumanly long life is worse than death.

I wonder now if Voldemort would come to the same conclusion... Meh, probably not. But still, that's a good one, Xandrel. Thanks.

 

You are thinking too small. If I were to become a god level wizard;

I would;
1) Build a craft world.
2) Traverse and explore the universe.
3) Troll the any alien I came across.
4) ???
5) Profit?

 

So... You'd be the Doctor?

 

Nah, he'd be magical.

trollface.jpg

 

You just gave me an idea for a story where an extremely powerful, nearly immortal being (presumably of an advanced, futuristic, over-populated Earth) leaves his planet, which has rules against experimentation with non-sentient beings. As magic was invented in the far past, now the rich can virtually live forever, as long as they have the proper artifices (and middle-class folks to craft them). However, our main character is convinced he can both create, and rule, his own sustainable life force, with the inevitable purpose conquering his own planet and freeing the poverty stricken from their proverbial cage.

It doesn't work out so well, however; upon leaving the planet, it is both difficult to locate a useable alternate and for him to evade capture by the planetary fleet long enough to get started. A particular battle ensues, and he decides to completely leave the galaxy; the only catch, is that he can't immediately find his home galaxy again. The universe is, in a sense, working against him.

He crafts the people of his new world in his own image, with two legs, two arms, and righteous minds. Time passes differently for him; where his tiny, malnourished versions of himself slip through millennia nearly unchanged, their environment moves on a pace more like his own. Mass floods wash the planet, encourage only the strong to survive, in order to push them on a path toward greatness. Occasionally, strong-willed individuals are noticed and punished, encouraging others to think differently...

Anyway, Brazil game's on.

 

I think he was planning to be an Eldar. Not sure, but that's the only craft world i've heard of.

 

Craft world?

 

Pretty sure the TARDIS could hold a craftworld.

 

Suicide Squad - Harry Potter style. For those of you unfamiliar with the Suicide Squad, it's a dirty covert ops team of assorted supervillains (the likes of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark, Black Spider, etc) from DC controlled by Amanda Waller. In exchange for having their time shaved off their sentences, they undertake undercover missions that the US government cannot be seen to be responsible for - assassinations, espionage, extractions, etc. To ensure none of them go rogue, they have nanite bombs implanted in their head controlled by the absolutely ruthless queen bitch, Amanda Waller. Attempt to defect - KABOOM! goes your noggin'.

I'd love to do a similar thing with HPverse. A team of convicts from Azkaban (I'm thinking the likes of Sirius Black, Bellatrix, Dolohov, Rodolphus, maybe toss in a few cool OCs), assembled to do the Ministry's dirty work - say assassinate a rogue dark wizard/warlord in Mexico, extract an asset/undercover auror captured by the hostile Russian Ministry, stop a deranged witch from exposing the Wizarding world, that sort of thing. I'm not terribly good with coming up with mechanics for missions, plotlines, etc, but I'd be more than happy to write if someone good with that kind of stuff could help me brainstorm/co-author stuff. We could do an isolated mission by mission thing per chapter, and either have it tie in to an overarching plot, or not. Any takers?

 

Sounds like the Warlock's Circle in Taure's In Essence Divided.

 

It seems rather... unlikely, a good word as any for it, since most Ministries tend to be self-contained within the boundaries of the countries they find themselves in. They don't care much for the troubles at others, unless it actually impacts them, rather directly and brutally, like Grindelwald did.