Why are there seldom any prayer wheels in fantasy?

>>48878613
Because that's be appropriation Anon, I've already reported you to tumblr.

>>48878613
Because they're not a particularly familiar feature of religion to a lot of people that write fantasy.

That said, now you've got me thinking about one of the few times I have seen prayer wheel-like devices - the History monks of the discworld had them

>>48878613

>>48878753
This

And also the fact that alot of typical fantasy is heavily European based and prayer-wheels are more of an eastern thing.

>>48878613
What is the function of prayer wheels, anyway, and how widespread are they? I've only seen them in the context of Tibetan and Nepalese tradition.

>>48879145
They contain hundreds of written mantras inside them, when you spin them it's like if you said all those mantras.

It's basically speedrunning prayer edition.

>>48879223
That's honestly pretty cool. I could see someone taking that idea and turning it into a Divine Magic Prayer Cannon.

>>48879328
I've read the opposite, some wizard wrote (highly inefficient) spells on what's effectively a prayer wheel, spun it and drained all the mana out of arena.

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>>48879353
So the spells were draining the mana, or the spells were meant to drain the mana doing whatever it was they were doing? The latter would mean a lot of spells were going off at once.

>>48879353
That's pretty cool, if you have "background magic field" as a requirement to cast spells, a big draining wheel-spell is a pretty neat way to have an artificially low-magic area without just going "no-magic zone lel"

A lot of people don't know about them.

>>48878677

>hurr durr SJWs amirite?

/v/ plz leave

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Do prayers from a prayer wheel go into a god's prayer spam box?

>>48880145
>>>/co/

>Heroic Big Bad Wolf
>Sneeds on turn 1
>Wolf coins out Power of the Wild and proceeds to kill Sneeds
>it drops Anomalus
Sleep tight, pupper

>>48880145
>/v/ plz leave
Did summer learned new cool phase this year? Each previous summer simply said something in tune of "summer leave"

>>48880145
> It's that fucking anon again

prayer wheels are fun. the other similar thing we tourists did in Tibet was the flags. we wrote names of friends on the flags and hung them up on a pass at 5000m. supposedly every time the wind flutters the flags, it sends prayers for your friends to Buddha. you've doubtlessly seen the same kind of flags on some hippie's house in the west.

in Mongolia there were the zillion rock piles and winding long blue and white cloths around them. i don't even really remember what that was for but it was all kind of similar. you'd be out in the gobi in the middle of fucking nowhere and find six rocks stacked on each other here and four over there. or go near a popular path and find a giant blue and white pyramid.

>>48878613
In Exalted there is a DB that is famous for inventing new high yielding prayer wheels. It's very old lore from first edition though. He was kind of a goofy one, not well respected and kind of the black sheep of his family, until he found a way of creating high yielding, wind powered, essence generating prayer wheels.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel#Electric_dharma_wheels
>However, Lama Zopa Rinpoche has said, "The merit of turning an electric prayer wheel goes to the electric company. This is why I prefer practitioners to use their own 'right energy' to turn a prayer wheel".

How many electric companies have achieved nirvana by now? How does the dharma get split between shareholders and employees?

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>>48878613
I've been messing with a tibetan/tarim basin steampunk setting that includes pic related.

It's the logical next step, really.

>>48879353
That makes sense. I call bullshit on 'antimagic' as an actual force or type of energy or whatever (fuck you D&D), so a device that prevents spellcasting should actually be a focus that drains all the mana in an area and traps it or uses it for something fairly pointless.

You could create anti-wizard grenades which drain all the mana in the area and turn it into sound or heat or light or kinetic force when activated.

>>48878677
Regular shitposting is still shitposting.

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>>48882591
So the strobe grenade hits the ground, sucks the wizard dry and /then/ starts flashing? That's a nifty idea.

Nice thread overall, monitoring..

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>>48881522
So, what does it... do? I mean clearly it turbo-spins a massive prayer wheel. But is there any actual effect?

>>48882591
I do like the idea of clockwork magic disruptors. Actually, that reminds me of pic related.

>>48882707
I guess what it does depends on what's put in the prayer wheel.
But it's going to happen at the speed of Progress.

>>48879223
>They contain hundreds of written mantras inside them, when you spin them it's like if you said all those mantras.
>It's basically speedrunning prayer edition.

Jews have something like this, but without the wheels. They just have prayers written on bits of paper stored in fancy boxes. They're called prayer-boxes or phylacteries.

IIRC there are jewish prayers that some (mainly more orthodox) believe need to be spoken while passing through certain doors. To save time, they set up prayer-boxes at the doors so you can touch them while passing through, and be considered to have made the relevant prayer.

>>48882689
Yep, you'd make flashbangs that leave a wizard dry or grenades that siphon the mana from your magic shield, then blast you with fire or lightning.

If you want to add them to your campaign, I recommend a high price tag or limited number of uses so wizards don't get too butthurt.

I guess they'd work on martials too, since they'd pick up natural mana but the effect would be lesser.

>>48883362
>They're called prayer-boxes or phylacteries
>phylacteries

Jews confirmed for necromancers

But seriously didn't know this was the origin of the word. They already look like magic items.

I remember seeing an idea on /tg/ once kinda like >>48881522 where the dwarves in a setting were industrialized and used huge prayer wheel arrays hooked up to steam engines in order to manufacture gods.

>>48884811
Wait. What? Do you have a link? Or could you extrapolate on dwarven mechanised god generation.

>>48885385
That was pretty much the entirety of the details. Also, this was years ago and I have no idea what I'd search to find it. The thread didn't go far, to my disappointment.

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>>48883362
>IIRC there are jewish prayers that some (mainly more orthodox) believe need to be spoken while passing through certain doors. To save time, they set up prayer-boxes at the doors so you can touch them while passing through, and be considered to have made the relevant prayer.
Actually, it's in accordance with a literal interpretation of a certain Torah passage:
>And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
>You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
>You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
>You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
It's to encourage meditation of the Torah.

>>48885466
Found them by searching for "prayer wheel" in the archives, unsurprisingly

http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/29021338/
http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/29996389/

Pretty good stuff.

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>>48884423
THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING

>>48885725
It's so weird to come across old threads you made. I actually did spin hur hur elements of that into a setting but I concentrated more on the gods. Dwarves are horribly vulnerable to the gods they've made.

>>48881517
I sense a Shadowrun plot.

>>48885940
I read somewhere that the ritual for becoming a Lich involved committing suicide via crucifixion after your phylactery was prepared.

>>48886050
But if you achieve nirvana you can't make profit anymore. It would be useless.
Unless you wanted to make your competition disappear. Damn, that's good.
>now, you need to set up those cylinders at their basement and set their spinning speed to "ludicrous"

>>48886909
>But if you achieve nirvana you can't make profit anymore.
Achieving Nirvana ~is~ profit. Any megacorp that wanted to minimize its costs would leap at the chance. All the most intelligent and selfish corporations would have the chance to vanish from the Earth.

Alternatively, if any part of them honestly wanted to help their customers, they could remain behind as corporate bodhisattvas.

>>48889657
>corporate bodhisattvas
Jesus, that's something I expect to read in a William Gibson book, not on /tg/.