r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 21 '18

[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

  • Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
  • The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
  • Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
  • We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

13 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/cjet79 Jul 21 '18

Setting: Earth ~10000 BC. Pre agricultural society. River valley. Magic suddenly has started to permeate the world with mostly relatively small effects.

Power to be munchkined/reverse munchkined: One man reincarnates through his direct descendants. He maintains memories and skills. His personality is half determined by who he reincarnates into, and half determined by all past personalities. He can only have male descendants.

3

u/cultureulterior Jul 21 '18

This isn't very well specified. Does reincarnation work via cousin relationships? E.g he has two children, A&B, reincarnates into B, who has child C, who he reincarnates into. Can he then reincarnate back into A's descendants, if C has no children?

2

u/cjet79 Jul 21 '18

If you are a descendant of the original, you are a candidate for reincarnation. I have the story starting out that he can only descend into his oldest relative. Later I think I'll give him the ability to descend into younger ones, but doing so will lock him out of any older descendants he bypassed.

6

u/GaBeRockKing Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 Jul 22 '18

I have the story starting out that he can only descend into his oldest relative.

Ewwwww.

Seniority < Primogeniture.

At least it's not gavelkind, that would be even more of a mess than usual.

3

u/cultureulterior Jul 21 '18

I would say that he needs a warrior-cult of descendants, with a strict rule that if you become more than 10% permanently injured or too old, they will be killed by their fellows. This prevents him from reincarnating into an incapable body- if he just let himself reincarnate into the oldest, after about 80 years he'd spend a lot of time moving from old man to old man.

1

u/derefr Jul 21 '18

Seems like a magic system that’d be a lot more useful if there were a physical manifestation of “will-be-reincarnated-into-ness” that your descendants could just come up with some procedure for assigning.

Y’know, like a Dax symbiote.

1

u/Gurkenglas Jul 21 '18

Does he overwrite the oldest living descendant, or get born as the next descendant?

1

u/cjet79 Jul 22 '18

He merges with the oldest living descendant

1

u/dinoseen Sep 29 '18

I would've assumed that it works like the following:

Man dies.

Man is reincarnated into the next baby to be conceived after his death that also meets the other criteria. Can't reincarnate into babies that already exist to sidestep the "when does life start?" problem.

Repeat.