assassination mission idea

perception based protect a guest from inhumation at a crowded party
lady mademoiselle d'haplessvictim has just been contracted for 10,000 dollars; however, her big party is today! protect her from assassination for the rest of the evening (20 minutes, split up into 20 one-minute periods) to get paid
every time period has a 40% chance to have an assassination
the party is very crowded because the house is actually too small; also someone has brought children, ugh

you are the butler??? or I guess pretending to be a butler since obvious bodyguards are passe

if you leave your guest alone for too long, the assassin will come early
also, poisoned food and traps
food is placed on tables around the house; your guest will give a warning a few seconds before they attempt to eat from one, in which you have to check all the food for an oily sheen, bitter smell, etc. if you indiscriminately bury all the food, your guest will instead faint from hunger, ruining the party
windows are very dangerous because assassins can fire crossbows through them if the curtains are open. however, assassins will not fire through closed curtains to avoid hitting the wrong person
a second before the crossbow firing, you'll notice a glint on the opposite rooftop, or in a mirror, too late to do anything
in dark corridors, sometimes there will be bear traps; your guest will walk right into them
assassin hiding spots: under tables, under beds, on the chandelier, in the air ducts (if you attempt to enter the air ducts, they'll be too small for you to squeeze in)
paintings with eye holes, hiding in a giant ice sculpture of a swan
behind potted plants
behind a pillar
pretending to be a statue

sometimes guests will turn out to be the assassin, wearing a paper mask. if you look at them, they run away and the next minute starts early
when hiding assassins are found, spawn the assassin with invis and have them walk out of the room
add windows to upper rooms that crossbows can be fired through
have a pishite ready to res, your score depends on how many times she had to be ressed
make tables show what's on them, so you can get food and check it for poison before she eats them
at the end of the party, a final showdown?

base assassin detection on perception bonus
easy check for detecting stuff from their long, hard check for their short

 make a whole bunch of rooms and corridors npcs and have them move between them every party phase; anyone could be the assassin and the ambush could spring at any moment
give all of them punny names
rooms: ballroom, dining room (copy cluedo?)
wine cellar?
corridor between each room
characters: mr/mrs fecund, who is harried looking after their two children. they can handle one child, while the other one will wander the mansion at random. when they meet, the two children switch places
the butler, because there is always a butler
- offers wine and snacks
- is a dwarf
- the food and drinks may have been poisoned by the assassin
the old priest (a pishite, so he/she will res the victim if you fail the mission)
- very holy
- victim responds politely
- tries to convert the victim (naturally, Pishe only accepts priests, so she will have to join the priesthood) unsuccessfully
- uses the shadows on the cave wall analogy by Plato, except when you walk out of the cave it's a refreshing shower of rain
- people
the young priest (a hattian?)
- is the life of the party
- wearing the usual underpants on his head
- an old priest and a young priest walk into a bar
- In one of his conversations, he's totally passed out and the victim speaks instead
paranoid scarred soldier, who will explain the various ways you can get assassinated in this very room if you stand and listen to him/her
- wearing a chainmail hauberk, naturally
- sir vivor
- miss d'mi
-
a dashing, or possibly beautiful smuggler
- the love interest, victim's responses reflect that
- Budgie the Smuggler
- is basically a pirate
- tanned, djelian accent
- very dashing and/or beautiful
- talks about amazing sea adventures, sometimes acts them out with his/her rapier and sound effects
- brings exotic gifts from faraway lands, flowers/gems
sings sea-songs? victim can join in
one of his songs is in djelian, which the victim can't understand, but it has hilariously corny lyrics
it's a classic romantic song

Don't make too many characters, because of combinatorial explosion about their interactions
each one has a few rants they will go on, use add response to make others respond briefly

each character will be cloned several times with procedurally generated names; they will occasionally path between rooms

the professor, who is a wizard - wearing a pointy hat with his formal dress, one of Ponder's bunch of new wizards, who will talk on endlessly about the arcane forces of the universe
- I am an expert on the subject
- etheric interactions
- thaumic resonance
- as everyone knows
- [Name]'s Nth/ Law/Principle/Theory
- arcane boundary
- It's simple, really.
- all his citations are super recent
- he is a theoretical wizard so he doesn't know any spells
- victim reacts with basically confusion and nodding
Well, what separates a successfully-cast spell from a failed one, really? Kelleflump's Model supposes that there isn't any real difference, or rather that the difference depends on whether the spell does what we intended it to do. Essentially, "failed" spells are simply different spells that use a similar combination of casting methods, but use the magical energy in a different way, such as directing magical fire to burn yourself instead of a target. However, K's Model is incomplete. What if a failed spell does something closer to the effect you intended than the one the original spell was written for? Friddlefrod's Hydratic Extrusion, infamously, has a common spell failure that soaks the caster instead of drying them. If you were in desperate need for water, and cast the spell with that intention, could the spell failure instead be considered a spell success and vice versa?

It is possible to "fluke" a cast of a spell, casting it especially well for a much greater effect than usual - a fireball might be ten times hotter than usual, for example. K makes the claim that these casts are simply closer to the "perfect" spell than usual. It is impossible to cast spells perfectly; there are slight random differences in channeling that will result in a slightly different spell, which doesn't quite have the full effect. What we call magical skill is essentially gaining, through long practice, a certain precision of enuciation and decisiveness of gesture that brings us closer to the peak output. Myrandil writes that the continuum of spells can essentially be mapped onto a multidimensional space consisting of all the possible spells that can ever be cast, and all the ones that can't, in which these moments of peak output (or "flukes") are local maxima.

Eringyas (2037) states that...
: manages to pronounce the brackets.

We live in exciting times. The thaum, previously thought to be the smallest unit of magic, has been split. X posits that thaums may in fact be composed of actual truly indivisible particles. We haven't settled on a name for these yet, but X wants to call them "neuthaums", because they're new. Y wants to call them "prothaums" instead, while Z suggests "electhaums", and wants us to take a vote on the matter. A, however, makes the bold claim that it's going to be particles all the way down.