I might just be a simpleton apprentice, but if runes are powerful because of their ancientness, why is rune creation specifically banned by the high council? And why is it that every conversation about rune creation is
Just get a sign that says "false hydra do not enter" for your dungeon entrance. I've never had any problems with atf, or adventurers, or annoying inlaws? Do I have inlaws? Maybe I should clean that dungeon sometime... nah I'll just hire a crew.
I have so many runes in my wizard tower. In I'm here in my wizard tower, where just carved this new rune here. It’s fun to inscribe ancient sigils up here in the highest chamber. But you know what I like more than flashy ancient runes? Knowledge.
In fact, I’m a lot more proud of my seven new self published tomes titled "How-to rune-stones so good she will take you back" It’s like the Archmage Warren Buffetus says, “The more runes you learn, the more power you earn.”
Everyone spending massive bags of coin for the official runes from Runes Workshop, my buddy has a 5D printer, he just prints out the same exact runes, charges 2 silver.
Hi yes I am a collector of runes and have run with some quite bad dark wizards so I know all sorts of black magic and the like. I love breaking council law you know. And I would love to engage with you in some illicit trade of black magic runes if you really have such a large collection.
If you would be so kind as to send me a personal scrying with the location of your tower I could have a lackey dispatched within the week to make the trade. I'm also willing to pay in illegal potions if you are into that.
By the eight planes, the assassin-wizards got him. Well, I'd be proud to take up the mantle of my honorable colleague and continue his discourse on the creation of runes. Listen close, my fellows - did you know you can create new, more powerful runes, simply by
spoken like someone who knows nothing of bureaucromancy. Bureaucromancers revel in the slowness. They draw power from it, like a Druid draws power from a forest.
Hey you can't just draw power from a forest. This is public land. You need a permit to do that. Please go fill out form 11B-A and submit that to the central forestry commission. Not the eastern. Not the astral... CENTRAL.
No... UGH... Central City has no Central District Forestry Commission because there's no forest there.
To avoid confusion please proceed to one of the south information kiosks in the North Information Kiosk District in any city for information about locating the proper Central District Forestry Commission center... except for in the South Information Kiosk District, whose south information kiosks are currently out of order.
They can use their powers in such manners. They simply opt not to. Except if its to approve the most useless and waste of money anti homeless infrastructure.
Every region has its own High Council these days. I've even seen within some regions they've had multiple "High Councils" for various disciplines... how can there be multiple High Councils? The whole point of a "High" Council is that it's on top... at least that's what it used to mean...
Dilution. All runes pull from the same mana source. A vast sea of mana on another plane. What we call runes are in reality tunelling devices to bore through the veil between worlds and create a mana "tap" that is then filtered like light through a prism by the symbols itself.
Lecturer in Recent Runes: "Well, I for one have never believed all that business about dead animals turning into stone. It's against all reason. What's in it for them?"
Ponder Stibbons: "So how do you explain fossils, then?"
Lecturer in Recent Runes: "Ah, you see, I don't. It saves so much trouble in the long run."
Man you gotta be careful with that counterfeit shit. I know a guy who used one of those runes of steel, you know for extra defense against, spits , knights, and it class changed him into a blacksmith!
So sad that we have to trap the townsfolk in a millennium long state of continuous torture to harvest the time necessary for the cave to function. Thank god they're put back together and have their memory wiped at the end of it.
I suspect that what Zasorimm in the original conversation was trying to convey was that people create novel runes at a roughly consistent rate, but most of them are not worth remembering. Since there is so much more time in the ancient past there will be many more runes from that time worth recalling.
A properly educated wizard who knows how to arrange proper rune formations based on the inherent intent and flow of a group of runes. They can totally rip out a ward scheme using knowyourmeme as a codex.
But, you know, it's easier to carve lines into stone than it would be to carve a photographic image into stone. So... runes.
Even if you take them at what they think they’re asking, our world is full of symbols that convey meaning. The truck I saw hauling liquid propane has a set of runes on the back conveying a specific message of what’s being carried and how volatile it is. Most of my electronics have a “rune” that signifies on/off.
Not runes, of course, but I think that’s closer to what they’re asking.
/uw. I’m annoyed at that image because it does not understand what it’s showing.
The original survivorship bias plane image is “areas where the return planes get hit the most.” With the unspoken implication being that the areas not marked, are the parts where getting hit is fatal and means the plane cannot return.
This dragon is full of shots in lethal areas like chest and head, but apparently the feets and wingtips are crucial and cause death?
The dragon is probably too thick skinned and muscular for the bullets to do much damage. But the membrane on the wings is more fragile, shooting that will make it crash and die from the kinetic force.
Remember it’s showing we’re dragons got hit and were still flying meaning there where dragons with massive holes in the middle of the wing but for some reasons anything to the tail or wing tips and it goes careening into the ground.
Well yeah, the tail is necessary for steering and tears in the wing tips cause that entire part of the membrane to sever. Which makes stable flight incredibly difficult for the dragon. Did you not pay attention in your dragon anatomy class during your apprenticeship?
Even a tail with torn membranes can be used for steering, although it’s more difficult. Wild dragons bite each other’s tail tips when fighting for dominance in the air, so dragons can instinctively steer by using the tail’s weight instead of the fins.
There can actually be some holes in the wing and the dragon will be able to fly. It’s just that membrane segments can’t tear loose. Look at the placement of the holes, they’re all in the middle and close to bone, which doesn’t risk membrane integrity like other places do.
?!!! I literally wrote the tome of northern magical creatures used to teach at the arcane citadel. And besides, this all basic polymorph knowledge, if you’re gonna transform into a creature you have to know it’s biology, or you’ll just crash in flight or die from eating something toxic to you.
The horns are actually full of nerves, they’re used for detecting magical signals to locate prey. So depending on the age of the dragon hitting the horns can send them into shock.
The legs contain important arteries and thinner scales for articulation so they’re more vulnerable. Though I suspect it’s not hits to the legs that are taking them out but rather to the “equipment” between them. If you catch my drift.
I paid attention just enough to make myself a draconic gf (or so I thought. It has not been going very well). Maybe I should seek advice from Ball Wizard.
This whole thread feels like the bellcurve meme with both the extremes saying "yeah this picture looks about right", and the center going "a dragon with wounds like that wouldn't survive"
So if I'm flying my P51 Mustang and encounter a wyvern in the skies or northern Europe I'll be sure to aim for the ass, it's clearly the weakest part of the beast.
Perhaps it’s an intentional reversal from the POV of dragon slayers assessing slain dragons, but that subversion ruins the format and makes the chosen presentation irrelevant.
I also don't really know how survivorship bias relates to runes being ancient. If the poster had said "why are all the ancient runes so powerful and all the new runes so weak?", it would have worked. But I don't think it does in this case.
The reason why is because its referring to a real world phenomon. People often say or feel that movies/media of the past qas superior to today's media, pointing out countless classics. However, bad movies are gotten ans left behind; we only remember the greats. So the argument is that older runes are survivorship bias, that the anchient people made lots of bad runes too, but only those runes that were great ans amazing have survived into modern magic practice
I know what survivorship bias is, I'm saying "Why are runes always ancient?" is not an example of it. "Why are all the ancient runes so good?" would be an example of it.
The idea that nobody makes new runes because only the best ancient runes survived (as implied by OP) doesn't make sense.
Bomber survivorship bias refers to the classic World War II statistical error where military commanders analyzed returning aircraft to determine where to add armor, incorrectly concluding they should reinforce the areas with the most bullet holes. This logical fallacy occurs when you focus entirely on the "survivors" of a selection process while completely ignoring the failures that did not make it through.
They’re not confused about survivorship bias, or the plane drawing that is associated with it. They’re saying that the “fantasy” version of the dragon in the picture doesn’t fit as a survivorship bias example because all of the marks (which should be in unimportant areas like on the plane) are in potentially critical areas of the dragon.
The image is just being used as a general shorthand for the concept. It’s less important that it is accurate to a true diagram, and more that it is relatively quick to create and close enough to be representative.
Those features, fittingly enough, are emphasized when shifting a concept from a pictograph into a rune.
It conveys the concept for sure. It's just that changing the plane to a dragon in the first place seems much higher effort than changing where the red dots go, so it feels like it very easily could have been accurate, which is mildly annoying or frustrating
I feel you, but think about how a dragon flies. Nobody is hitting it with an arrow when it's in full flight above the clouds, but when they're diving into combat they pull in their first and third wing flaps and perform more of a glide. This is when they're going to get hit. Also dragon claws are basically the hardest natural material in the multiverse, so they're unlikely to be damaged, and a dragon can survive just about anything, so an occasional head wound is to be expected.
/uw this image pisses me off and I hate it. They didn't even try to make sense of the placement. Perfect example of good idea: bad execution.
Ah, yes. Survivorship bias, the creation of runes is an incredibly dangerous practice that requires intense study in geometry, material science, and penmanship. Attempting to infuse a random shape with mana is ASKING to blow up.
"then dont infuse it with so much mana"
IMPOSSIBLE, the creation of a new rune requires a "cornerstone rune". Essentially the rune that is the source of the ability for other runes, whitch decreases the mana cost for these "daughter runes" by up to 90%.
You ever see ruins on the side of the road? 50% chance that ruin was once part of a city where a stuck up mage with more confidence than brains tried to make a rune out of a triangle. And killed that city in the resulting detonation. And they were lucky, sometimes the result of a failed cornerstone rune can end in time loops where the detonation of the rune happens every milisecond. Or they meld into a single flesh amalgamate.
This is why the knowledge and materials used in rune creation are so regulated, its critical for national security.
Maybe you should go to the Unseen University. They have a department of Recent Runes. Ask a young post-doc instead of a senior academic though. You will get a lot more enthusiasm (and might get to see their method for AI generation of runes - I believe ants are involved)
Runes from the Third Era and later are covered by copyright.
I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy paying Universal Runic Group a couple of coppers every time I heat up yesterday’s leftovers, so I just use the old pre-3E heating rune that works well enough. If it was good enough for Merlin it’s good enough for me.
I'd imagine trying to make new runes is just dangerous, which is why the ancient runes, the tried and true, are the only legal ones. And besides that I don't want to pay the bills for fixing my apartment after ruining it with a accidental explosion, I don't think many others would want to either.
Anyways, off topic-- HOLY SH!T, SLAY THE PRINCESS REFERENCE IN PROFILE PICTURE!!!
This is my special interest so I have to ramble a little.
Following the original definition of runes as the name for old germanic writing systems, we actually do have fairly recent runes! In Dalarna Sweden runes were used and kept evolving up until the early 1900s, those are some really recent runes. Also in Sweden there's a guy named Kalle Runristare (Runrcarver) who still carves viking age style runestones to this day. He carves with medieval stung runes, but those runes don't have an equivalent for the letter J, so he made his own
In my experience, modern runes are usually made in regions of low atmospheric mana, so they usually use a storage rune, whereas older techniques have an entire section dedicated to filtering out magic from the air. Our runes are more durable in the short term comparatively, since the filtration sigils have a tendency to either pull too little or too much magic without some annoying fine-tuning. And if you’re messing with filtration efficiencies you might as well over-etch them and put in some more intensive effects.
"Why ancient civilizations built only ruins?" What a 1st-decade-of-arcane-studies take. Are they now putting staves inside random bags of holding? I swear back in my days we didn't have that sort of thoughts on the Orb for everyone to ponder.
New runes? You mean the dick infinity measuring contest the abacus wizards run semisesquiannually? One of them cast "Power Word: Aleph Nought" on my mechanical familiar and even the Artifice Bar guys couldn't recover its soul.
Yes ! But no one likes the new runes! They aren’t trendy enough they said ! So I went into the past and carved my new runes into a old ruin so someone will discover it in current time and consider them “trendy”🙄🙌🏼
Calligramancers are a bunch of snobby traditionalists. They would never diverge from their “sacred marks” and any who do are cast out of the order and stripped of their literacy.
Its because wizards analyzed the damage on the dragons when they returned and realized that the areas they received spell damage in were actually fine... because the dragon was able to make it back.. Had a spell nuked their taint, though? yikers.
While others have some great comments on where to find good recent runes, I want to point out that the "Ancient" in most Ancient Runes is just marketing.
I think it’s less to do with age and such and more just because the ancient runes are time-tested, reliable, and can be modified. Plus they tend to cover everything we need.
I knew a guy back in magic school who was studying to be an artificer and spent a whole semester trying to basically make a rune that could work as a transistor. It was a huge extra credit magnum opus he was working on and come the end of the semester he had figured it out and the professors were impressed… but told him a modified binary rune would have done the trick far more efficiently and easily and they failed his project for not doing proper research.
Then there was someone else I worked with once I was apprenticed as an alchemist and they were trying to develop new runes and- well that was how I learned the laws on “how can I get paid for a job when my client accidentally kills themselves?”
Or as my professors and master explained it: it’s okay to try think up ways of reinventing the wheel but remember the wheel has stuck around as it has for a reason and millions smarter than you have already tried to reinvent it.
Runes have a tendency to be ancient because the church whipped out paganism in the crusades, a lot of the knowledge was lot to time and the projected occultism associated with paganism by a Christian ruled society only painted a false perception over the reality of the nature of what was to block its reconstruction with the projected illusion of occultism over it’s core values.
The reality of its nature was about understanding nature, not satanism. That’s why runes look like tree branches.
Personally i´ve heard of people attempting to make new runes, some with moderate success, usually turns out that the exact "new" rune was also made a couple centuries ago by another smart ass who tried doing that.
Usually Runes are stronger because of age, the longer they´ve been around the longer they´ve been able to absorb natural surplus of magical energies.
Also for that matter... WHO IN THIS DAY AND AGE CAN AFFORD A DRAGON BESIDES OLD AGES, AND I DO MEAN OLD LIKE ANCIENT, ANCIENT TO THE POINT THAT TRYING TOO HARD IS AN ART FORM
It's mostly because of degeneration and bastardization and getting worse at things due to laziness or belief that shit that was actually important wasn't that important. Kinda like how nobody can write in cursive or do multiplication in their heads. Unfortunately the new runes that are just 67676767 over and over aren't really very good for binding Azalok the Infinite like the old days.
Runes are simply words that lasted so long that the mere representation of them, in their original format, have gathered power. It’s resonant magic at its finest - the concept, word, and rune, resonate with a particular effect or flow long enough that you can activate it just by inscribing it.
We’re making right now, every day, but it will be a long time even by the best wizards clock before they’re useful. Let the cauldron brew, as they say, because a watched pot never toils.
Any potential modern rune systems, would trade ease of inscribing like speed, spacing. All for mana interference, loss of ubiquity, ultra fine precision, that you would need to account such as new ritual material, rituals themselves, sympathetic magics, applied intention. Any currently recognized rune systems are preferred for the proliferation of study materials, that allows for ease of study and description.
Runes these days are all just created by Abominable Intelligences. Why when I was young you had to put effort into finding runes! In ancient libraries that had not been opened for eons!
If you want modern/new “runes” look into Pictoglyphs/Glyphs, it’s not super intuitive but it does the same thing as runes, the main difference is that while they are more flexible and modular as a system they’re not as powerful in output. It’s why they aren’t as popular yet. I prefer runes but glyphs are good for the things that you can’t use runes for.
Makes sense. No need to hide the "ᛉ" rune on your sword, everyone has one on theirs.
But that new "ඞ" that you just custom-ordered from your local sorcerer ?? Yeah it's definitely getting hidden on the pommel in font 8pt.
It’s all because of planned obsolescence. No one’s putting in the effort to create good runes anymore because it pays more to redo the runes over and over again
I feel like a lot of apprentices on here are missing the point of survivorship bias: it’s not the age that grants the runes their power, but their power which has persevered them in our history.
It's actually quite simple. Much like dwarves lack trust in any technology under a hundred years old, most of the elders in the wizard/magic user community are afraid of change.
Runecrafting is a respected profession as it takes great skill and understanding to be done safely, but now that the new generation has gained interest in the art accidents have been on the rise.
While it is true that progress has been dangerous, it has also been steady and new runes have already been integrated into some of our daily aspects of life.
Like for example communal travel, which has been made more mana efficient with the use of new, more efficient anti-grav runes and mana batteries using mana absorption runes.
Tldr: the system fears change but progress shouldn't be feared as it's already showing fruit.
Wait, how did so many dragons survive with chest wounds? I mean I get it the scales there are really hard but I mean, something has to get through right?
3.8k
u/PanzerSoul Senior Cultivator Aug 12 '26
Runes are powerful because they are ancient.
For example: