Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180615004848/@comment-31763506-20181023155606

Fluid-decanter wrote: Looking at it, I don't think the Denmiel bar conversation relates.

Hilstara: So this area isn't a real desert, just a wasteland... Wait, are we that close to the Incubus King's borders?

Megail: That's right. It's the fastest path, and I figured it would be safe with so many of the Incubus King's forces focused toward Ardoheim.

Varia: You mean... this wasteland was caused by the war?

Hilstara: That's right. It was before my time, but a lot of energy was drained during the battles.

... (later)

Simon: People also talk about magical residue that causes problems as corruption, but is that another misuse?

Robin: Even more of one. The term is often used to refer to what is simply the fallout of heavy magic use. Divine magic produces little by nature. Most arcane mages are very controlled and thus produce little, though there can be arcane fallout. But sexual magic most frequently produces it. All the more so when the user is someone like the Incubus Emperor.

OK, reading the above over, it superficially looks like there are two types of magical pollution under discussion, but I think you may be falling into the trap of conceptualizing the game world in terms of Earth physics. We know that fallout in the real world is potentially poisonous because it's a residue of unstable matter subject to weak nuclear force decay, and consequently emits radiation, adding energy to the environment in a manner that is harmful to life.

But we've established numerous times that real world physics does not obtain in TLS, so there's no reason that the magical residue that acts as "fallout" can't be damaging to life by continuously draining energy from the environment.

Of course that could also be me misapplying scientific reductionism to try and reconcile an apparent contradiction. It could also be that SL intended both forms of magical pollution to be the same, and has unintentionally introduced a contradiction, because this does happen once in a while. Or Hilstara's use of the word "drained" could reflect her own in character ignorance of how magic works.

As to the lack of graphical change in the maps of Gasm Falls or New Givini... I seem to recall that there were problems with Tile Swap scripts that made their use for for progressively changing game maps impractical, and that some fat, lazy bastard had worked out what the problems were but hadn't put in the effort to fix them because he'd rather spend his time writing books no one will ever read.