Recent content by Qvadrater

This isn't quite an answer to your questions, but an interesting perspective I've seen in a story is that the physical appearance can be a bit like a name: while you can change your legal name, most will keep their given name rather than change it to some other name they're particularly fond of...

I see, thanks for the clarification!

I just noticed this bug as I achieved 5 and, soon thereafter, 6 posts. I couldn't access the private forums when I had 5 posts, but I could when I got to 6. I'm guessing it's a simple logic error ("greater than" instead of "equals or greater than"). It's not a big deal, but I figured it might...

As a minor addendum to this: while you need this much water, you won't consume this much water. The amount of water consumed depends on how large and how hot the metal chunk is, and how much it's cooled in the quenching, but it's unlikely that a single quench would consume the entire bucket/trough.

This still has the problem of the victim benefitting from the slave's work. Personally I think it would be better to handle corruption on a state level, where more control can be exerted, than on a citizen level (maybe relevant officials have anti-corruption magic cast on them?); Personally I'd...

Tabula Rasa. Or, in simpler terms: mind wipe. You could have a philosophical discussion over whether this sort of identity/memory "death" consitutes death (I would argue it does), but it would make for an interesting punishment. Maybe you could just remove the memories of a certain period...

One explanation could be space constraints: there simply aren't a lot of large enough contiguous living spaces to house such large families, forcing families to become smaller, and therefore splitting into monogamous pairs requiring roughly half the contiguous space per family. This could also...

The side effects would largely depend on exactly how the shapeshifting worked; here are a few interesting questions to ponder (sorry about the mess): I think experience would be a major concern: you may have turned into a bird, but you have never flown with your own wings before and have no...

No, you forgot a few zeroes in the number of anti-wizards, so the problem wouldn't be that big on the current earth, but it could very well be in a typical fantasy world which commonly has fewer citizens by several orders of magnitude, making anti-wizards ultra rare. actual number of...