Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Ra sounds similar to "Mother of Learning", another rationalist-adjacent work of fiction about a universe with logical, well structured magic, and a student who gets trapped in a groundhog day scenario: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning

Its an excellent story, but very long. I'm not sure if it's longer than Homestuck, but the length is comparable.

View on HN

Both are excellent, but I would definitely not call them similar. What's actually going on, the narrative and prose styles, the kinds of characters, what kinds of things they do with magic, the general vibe - are substantially different between the two.

Highly recommend both.

I didn't consider Mother of Learning to have logical, well-structured magic. Curious what gave you that feeling

The idea of mages as essentially just transforming an energy. The fact that there are raw unstructured skills like shaping that influence your ability to perform structured magic, and can be used to build out new forms (in the same way that fundamentals play into real-life disciplines like music and artisanal work).

The structure of living beings having mind/soul/body and how these are formed to protect against certain kinds of magic (soul-killing for example). The way the major branches of magic essentially map to specific transforms on mana.

It's not axiomatic or anything, but the way magic is structured in the MoL universe feels like it would lend itself nicely to axiomisation in something like a systemic game.

I really liked mother of learning. If anyone knows anything similar, I'd really like to hear it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com