The problem with Maha

In the Pelagia section of Raven’s Purge, it says “According to the faith of the druids, the [Maha] cipher must be decoded in person so as not to lose its power”. On Erik Granström’s blog he says “Maha is not about you. It is not about the world. It is about melding your mind to the world” and “Learners are supposed to gain insight by personal interpretation of statements”.

The problem is that the Maha form of writing is laughably simplistic. The sign for “cloud” just is a picture of a cloud. The sign for “3” is a hand with three fingers up. The sign for “go” is a hand pointing forwards. “Hunting Lynx” wears signs meaning “Hunt, Large, Cat” on his clothes and this doesn’t bother him, even though those signs could easily mean “the hunt [by people] of tigers”, which is quite different.

How to reconcile all of this? The Doylist answer is that you can’t ask players to solve a Myst-style puzzle if they don’t want to, so simplify it drastically. The Watsonian answer posits that the true Maha cipher is (a) actually a lot more complicated, but they don’t want outsiders to know, so they have a deliberately dumbed-down version on show to visitors (so the druid mentioned above is deliberately wearing a tourist-friendly “Hello, my name is …” badge), and/or (b) the druids are teaching a type of awareness that could actually be achieved in a number of ways, it’s just that they’ve stumbled across a way that involves investing a lot of significance in a frankly trivial writing system, and that works for them, and have you tried changing a cadre of Elvensprings’ collective minds?

My players are about to encounter Teramalda, and the spike hammered into her, which keeps her alive is inscribed with the symbols “life”, “death” and “and” (which are happily symmetrical). Why? Well, either this is the true language of magic, or it’s someone who went to Pelagia once and wants to frame the druids / pose as more learned than they are, or it’s someone who trained in Pelagia. I like the richness of possibilities here.

One last thing. It’s no surprise that events in Pelagia involve placing Maha signs in a certain way. If this just means that there are magic locks, and e.g. the place where you put a small piece of clay is expecting a small piece of pre-prepared clay enchanted in a particular way, and it doesn’t actually matter what’s written on the top, that’s easy and boring. But what if it were possible to take a brand-new small piece of clay, draw the appropriate sign on it, and that would also work? (That could have been how the MacGuffin was stolen in the first place.)

That implies that there’s some kind of magical spell that is looking at a small clay tablet, and interpreting it. Which means we have some kind of primitive computation going on.

I may have to have one of the druids resemble Charles Babbage. Which means that another has to be Ada Lovelace.