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Weekly roundup 11/16
🕑 Added 2025-11-16 21:28:30 +0000 UTCFun Tangent
As people have probably noticed, I like to use history to inform worldbuilding so that the world feels more realistic.
Fahrenheit cobbled together his temperature scale by making the coldest thing he could make (a brine solution, which he set as '0 F') and 90 F being the human body temperature (except that later had to be redefined. I've also heard a story where he set the temperature of the human body at 100 but when he measured himself he had a fever; wikipedia disagrees with that story though).
The Moment Magnitude scale replaced the Richter scale for measuring Earthquakes (despite the 'Richter scale' being tossed around constantly by the media whenever an earthquake hits), but the flaws of the first scale are interesting. Richter developed his scale specifically for Southern California and based it around the geology there. The scale was nice for low magnitude earthquakes, but saturated at high magnitudes so it was not useful for big ones.
Those were the two measurement scales I was thinking about when I made "Myr" to measure magical intensity. It doesn't really come up in the story (because it's just not that relevant to the plot, and also, Mirian doesn't know who Fahrenheit or Richter are), but knowing the Myr scale sort of breaks down at higher magic intensities just like the Richter scale informs small details when they come up, like Tyrcast yelling at an artificer who made a Myr detector that didn't compensate for saturation properly.
Finally, and most importantly, if you have an opaque system with historical flaws that cause it to report things inaccurately or inconsistently, no one can yell at you for doing math wrong.
Extra-Advanced Tier
Chapter 264
Chapter 265
Advanced Tier
Chapter 254
Chapter 255
Comments
UraniumPhoenix
It's the word for 'magic' in one of the older languages that predates Cuelsin or Friian. That's why it's also in "myrvite" (myr + vita = magic life). Based on how various romance languages are derived from Latin, and Latin roots and words still stick around in modern languages.
Leaf
what’s the origin of the name “Myr” in lore? is it an acronym or the inventors last name or what?
UraniumPhoenix
I always raise an extremely skeptical eyebrow any time a new technology is rapidly developed in a book, or magic research takes a few days tops. The history of science is full of measurement errors, problems with procedures that seem like they should be straightforward, the need to develop new tools and equipment (and then the process of doing that, which inevitably runs into its own problems), and weird anomalies that take years to figure out.
Amadhe
That’s a good point actually, using the inaccuracies of human measurement tools as a perfect cover so I don’t have to do math in my Worldbuilding.
Michael Vonica
I was planning to use information from book one to try and tie the myr scale to real world forces. Specifically, looking at how much weight early Mirian could lift and connecting that to her starting myr rating, and then looking at what level of myr was said to be required to stop a bullet. I'd make some low and high estimates on how myr scales, and then extend that up to the 10000 myr the leylines are operating at. So that we could see what sort of force that 10000 myr would be capable of, if converted into kinetic energy. But then I ran into the problem of trying to quantify what magic is doing. Are the spells outputting a force to lift objects and stop bullets? Optimally, a force exerted over no distance, like when levitating a book, consumes no energy. It's the equivalent of putting a book on a table. With the right infrastructure, no energy consumption is necessary. Is that what magic is doing? Or is it doing something suboptimal, and consuming energy? What suboptimal approach is it taking? And how does it all work when a force shield is covering an area? Is the force exerted proportional to the area of the shield the object is in contact with? How large and small of a shield is it possible to make, and for a constant myr rating, is the total force, before dividing it across the shield volume, also constant? And force spells could be doing something different, too. Like directly affecting the kinetic energy of objects. Which might still have the problem of using no energy for levitation? Anyway, I'll ignore it for now. So no need to worry about me pulling out some math showing how 10000 myr has enough energy to form a black hole, or blow up the sun.
