[gurps] Re: Power Sources for Draw Power

[Jeff Wilson]

> From: "Clinton N. Fell" <FELL_CLINTON_N at cat.com>

> I was always waiting for the mage in my Infinite Worlds campaign to 
> discover the technology school.  These guys carried around a handful of 
> TL9 C cells (I strongly considered switching the campaign to use power 
> slugs because I didn't want the characters walking around with 1000FT mana 
> stones - but decided not to in the end) and it would only be a small thing 
> to start using them for giant spells - 1000FT gets you a pretty impressive 
> rain of fire or elemental bloodbag for distractions.  Fortunately it never 
> happened.

There's never been a way to use plain powercells as manastones or 
powerstones; 3/e made it plain that Draw Power didn't work on stored 
energy in a btty or power cell, while Steal Power did, but didn't feed 
into spellcasting. The 4/e version don't seem to contain the overt 
prohibition, but the phrase "active power source" seems to mean that the 
  powercell would need to be connected to an operating device in order 
to Drawn from.

1) So, you'd need a backpack to hold a cell and some kind of gadget able 
to exhaust it in a second to get all the energy out at once. This is 
probably doable, but the whole backpack idea is largely unnecessary, 
since the Draw Power spell can be maintained for free at any distance. A 
  world-traveler could set up a vehicle-carried power plant running some 
useful long-term application or set up to start remotely as needed, and 
use Draw Power on that anywhere in that world, assuming it supports 
magic. In a higher TL world, Seek Power or a trip to the library would 
readily locate native sources of MW-scale energy.

2) A 4/e GM would also have to unlatch the suggested Magery 3 ceiling. 
1000 FP/sec is 357+ MW, so that even a mage with HT 20, Magery 3, and 
Vigour would still be 300 MW over his safe limit, and would drop in a 
second. HT 20, M8, and Vigor+5 would give a safe limit of 400 MW, and if 
the Vigor effect is allowed to increase in steps equal to Magery above 
3, then HT10, M9, and Vigor+11 give 425.25 MW.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >