Dabbler is kidding with the “In space…” line – mostly. Not that she didn’t say “God’s domain,” she said “gods’ domains.” She was intentionally malapropriating the line people try and dissuade mad scientists with. You know, come to think of it, is there a less successful argument? Has anyone in any movie ever said “You’re tampering in God’s domain!” and the scientist goes, “Oh my gosh, you’re right! I’ll quit immediately!”
In the Grrl-verse, mana really only exists on planets with abundant, sentient life. Planets with sapient life usually have more. Well, not like if there’s 30 people in a research station on an Mars. Planets with a long history of plant, animal and sapient life have the most mana. All that is to say that space doesn’t have much mana. Magic still works there, but you have to supply your own source of mana, like pre-charged wands or other enchanted objects, or mana batteries of some sort. Personal mana will still recharge, but usually much more slowly, and any techniques that absorb or convert ambient mana work at an absolute crawl.
An all that is to say that gods don’t tend to keep an eye on deep space, and rarely travel there, as their personal mana is fueled less by biological creation of mana, and more by the absorption of aspect appropriate mana. Which isn’t to say gods don’t generate their own mana, but most powerful beings like that are loathe to leave half or more of their capabilities behind to go tooling around deep space. Besides, most magical forms of travel don’t handle the immense distances of space well. That flight spell that gives you 60 movement per round? Space laughs at your puny velocity. A teleportation spell? Even if it says “line of sight,” well, guess what? That doesn’t mean you can teleport to the moon. You usually have to be able to reasonably visually discriminate your destination. It’s really “line of sight… through a medium that is relatively mana saturated.” Portals like summoning circles work, or inter-realm (which in the Grrl-verse is really inter-planet) transport like the Bifröst work, but they take asinine amounts of mana, and usually work a lot more reliably if there’s matching gates/sigils on both ends. But straight up deep space? There’s not a lot of reasons for a god to hang out there, and most communication and divination spells don’t work well without there being mana to bridge both ends of it. Again like the portals, it will still work, but the mana costs shoot up enough that even gods wouldn’t recreationally divine the heavens for doing weird shit at the fringes of their aspects.
Oh look! The vote incentive has an update!
It’s not quite where I wanted it for this update. I kind of skipped over posting just the flats and started shading Heatwave, but hadn’t gotten as far as J-Watt. But I figured I’d post what I had.
I’ll hopefully have more progress soon as things here are kind of slowing down. Still putting the house together after the move, but there’s still plenty to do. The Patreon version is updated as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
![The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by [Jack Campbell]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51p-qaYLuvL.jpg)
