"It's also possible that I found it out at the time and then forgot, it having been over a century since then, but I feel like that's the sort of thing I'd remember knowing, you know?"

"Yep."

"How would you design a world, if you had the opportunity?"

"Ooh, good question. I'd start with my normal physics, I think, they're a nice baseline - maybe I only think that because I haven't studied the advanced stuff, perhaps they get horrible, but I like the gravitational constant being a thing."

"It is tidy. And I get the sense it's better-understood than the Elcenian scheme, which seems like it'd be important once you start tweaking things from the extant version. I'd hate to say 'planets should be arranged in a predictable grid relative to one another' and then find out that that's the condition under which the fire of the suns consumes all the air in the universe. And designing your own functionality-of-a-world from scratch would involve making a lot of explicit decisions about edge cases. For example, if I went that route, I would be sure to note that there are no conditions under which the fire of the suns consumes all the air in the universe."

She giggles. "And then where would you be? Holding your breath and much too warm, I guess is where."

He cracks up.

"So, physics as of your world, but what about the goodies? I assume you wouldn't want an unmodified version of your magic system, but does it have advantages you'd like to keep?"

"It does pretty good variety and it's not use-limited, as many people can touch an artifact as the owner cares to allow and it'll still work. You can change artifacts, too, weaken the drawback or improve the advantage, it just takes a long time and you have to be touching it to do it, I'd want to soup that up if I went with artifacts at all. I'd want it reversible."

"Do you suppose there'd be a reason to keep the drawbacks?"

"There's occasionally some disagreement about how drawbacky they are, in some cases, but maybe they could be optional or something."

"And reversible, reversible seems very important. I still think, hmm... to my eye, a world is missing something if it doesn't have a magic system that - takes design input from the user? In a way that I think even mitigated artifacts don't sound like they would."

"That's what I mean by souped up adjustments. Also, artifacts are currently made when people die based on traits of the person, perhaps instead they could be made by live people on purpose!"

"Yeah, 'made by live people on purpose' sounds more the thing - what I like about wizardry is that I can think to myself 'I want a spell that achieves this end', and then poke around and see if somebody's already done the work for me and if they haven't I can do it myself, and the end result is a spell that does the thing I wanted unless the thing I wanted was impossible. Or just impossible to fit in my CC. Altering existing artifacts doesn't sound like it has this property, or at least not very conveniently, but creating new ones does."

"I mean, we don't know how far altering artifacts can go because it's so slow."

"But even if it could go arbitrarily far, you'd still - no longer have the artifact you started with, afterward, that's what I meant by 'not very conveniently'."

"Yes, that's true. Also, I might want artifacts to have to be activated on purpose instead of whenever anybody touches them."

"Yes, that's an excellent idea."

"Although I suppose if it worked like that being hit by a vanful might have just killed me instead of this thing, I'm not sure if my injuries would have been fatal sans healing factor."

"Yeah, that's - a concerning sort of edge case. You might want to add in some things like lights - I think every world could stand to have a better version of lights, possibly applied to the entire population."

"Lights sound great. If with a stupid limitation. That I could excise on account of designing the universe."

"Side effects of this conversation that I should have predicted but didn't: now I really want to have the opportunity to design a universe."

"I will keep an eye out for opportunities!"

"If I find one I will definitely invite you to collaborate."