Xaeyruudh's Index

Power Outages in a Magical World

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This information is intended for use with the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

First, a Real-World Anecdote…

Okay, so occasionally events in "real life" suggest corollaries in an imaginary world. We got a large snowfall on Tuesday night, which thawed just enough that when it froze Wednesday night most of the snow on the trees turned to ice. Thursday seems to have brought a little bit of wind, and branches started falling. Several trees split into thirds or quarters, pulled in opposite directions by their ice-sheathed branches. So it should have come as no great shock when, around 7pm on Thursday, the power went out.

It was raining instead of snowing by then, and some of the snow was melting, but that wasn’t much of an improvement since slush of the right consistency is just as hard to drive over as ice is… and this was the right consistency of slush. And given that this was happening over the entire western part of the state, estimates of when we were going to get our power back ranged from 2 days to over a week.

So Thursday night was chilly. After spending half of Friday griping about the unfairness/stupidity of businesses getting power restored… not only while homes were still dark, but also while those businesses were closed due to the owners being unable to get out of their own driveways… my lights came back on about 8:30pm. Total time freezing my buns off: less than 27 hours.

It did remind me of why I’m interested in policy and social reform and environmentalism, though… the property damage caused by falling trees would have happened regardless, but the loss of electricity (in itself a significant cause of revenue loss for some businesses, even when they get their power restored first) might have been avoided if all the lines were underground.

Applications to Faerûn

Today, I wondered about whether the Realms suffers "power outages" — times when magic is temporarily unavailable. Not just the obvious stuff like the Fall of Netheril, or the semi-permanent magic-dead zones in the wake of the Time of Troubles. I’m thinking about power outages that are brought about by mortal carelessness or sadism, which last a day or a week and affect only a relatively small localized area.

The Weave doesn’t depend on tangible wires, but what if the strands could be disrupted? If we think of it as a swatch of cloth, or as a spiderweb, it should be easy to say yes… the weave should be vulnerable to some form of cutting or blocking or something. Ley lines might be another way to visualize it.

So how would that work? What would an area like this look like, to the trained or untrained eye? What would it feel like, to mages or to extraplanar creatures?

I dunno, but it’s something fun to think about. Maybe more on this subject later.

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