Force Horse! (and other bad arcana ideas)

The usage of arcane glyphs and diagrams to power a wide variety of occult rituals.
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Force Horse! (and other bad arcana ideas)

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TLDR; this is a rambling post that at this point is shared for humor and contemplation..

Been meaning to make a post about this idea since I asked in the voice chat and got an answer to the effect of: probably not, I'm not sure you could make that work. Maybe...

I've been thinking about how to have a functional phantasmal steed spell for arcanists. The most probable specialization would be fourtorgy, hence force horse. Except that looking at the existing fourtorgy effects, I might describe them as functioning like a simplified physics problem with a vector of force or a plane of force, and that does not describe the motion of a horse. So, I decided to consider the most similar glyph more carefully. The SHAOL glyph produces enough force to hold roughly 50 pounds aloft and then some more force to keep it close to the caster (except maybe it doesn't actually provide that force, as it would be more efficient to have them bound at a set distance with a flexible tether, and then all the force of movement comes from the caster who is effectively dragging the extra weight but with none of the friction of being in contact with the ground - but this is obviously a tangent). I'm not terrible with physics, so I am fairly certain that 50 pounds of force could push a handcart if the load weren't too heavy. But I'm also not great with physics, so I couldn't tell you how much that load is, or what kind of acceleration it would achieve under the threshold. I can also tell you that with this hypothetical glyph, I have outlined the invention of a bad car and an unnecessary desire to wear goggles on one's head, and wacky inventing is not the goal of arcana. So... no force horse today... but maybe a glyph could exist that would make a handcart easier to pull, and it would have a more pronounced effect than just using shaol to effectively reduce the cart's load by 50 pounds. But it also seems fairly redundant with shaol. I'll come back to this drawing board later, thanks for coming along on today's random thought train.
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