Yeah, but get enough witches and you can do anything. I wonder if you had enough witches you could get something from There to There. That would be interesting, because if you got a few thousand witches you could do the equivalent of teleporting an invading army into the Furnace. On 1/23/06, Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com> wrote: > > > > I was doing my daily nerding (browsing City of > > Heroes/Villains forusm) and > > came to my email and realized something: > > Hmmm, I wonder if it's time to resurrect the idea of The Phoenix Guard > supergroup... > > > Easterns have different, odd powers. In fact, witchcraft > > could be assumed to > > be reality altering, and thus while more difficult to get > > results ultimately > > more powerful than sorcery. > > Witchcraft is different from sorcery on two counts. The first is that > witchcraft is self-powered while sorcery depends upon an external power > source. The second is that witchcraft is a "craft" while sorcery is a > "science". > > Sorcery is all about cause and effect. You do A + B + C to get result D. > Witchcraft is all about effect. That is, (looking at how Vlad does things) > you decide upon an effect and then you just sort of figure out what sorts > of > activities will bring that effect into being. How you get that effect is a > fairly personal thing and is not neccesarily constant from witch to witch. > I'd imagine that a book of witchcraft is more like a book of advice than a > book of precedures. > > It's no accident that Vlad and Morollan sound like a pair of chefs > comparing > recipes when Vlad catches Morollan practicing an unspecified witch spell > in > _Yendi_. > > To the extent that witchcraft is free-form and goal-focused instead of > process-focused, it IS more powerful than sorcery. The flip side is that > witchcraft consumes your personal "energy" and imposes a lassitude of both > body and mind in direct proportion to the size of the effect. It's no big > deal for a sorceror to move many tons of things from Here to There all day > long. Vlad, however, nearly killed himself by attempting to bring > something > from There to Here. The flip-side being that there doesn't yet exist any > sorcery that could duplicate that effect (that we've heard of). > > So, witchcraft is "more powerful" but the effects are so limited in scope > in > comparison to the "gross" (in the sense of "large") effects of sorcery > that > sorcery effectively trumps witchcraft in most ways that matter to the > average person. > >