I once ran a game of Paranoia in which I gave one of my players an anti-gravity belt. It was not, however, an anti-*inertia* belt.

For those who don't know, there was an event in Morrowind where you found a corpse carrying three scrolls of "Icarian Flight" (if you were in the right place at the right time you'd actually see him hit the ground). The way the scrolls worked was they buffed your Acrobatics skill by 1000 (in a 1-100 system) allowing you to soar across the entire map in one bound... but the duration on the buff was shorter than the time it took to land, and your ability to absorb fall damage was also controlled by your Acrobatics skill. So unsuspecting players would try one of the scrolls and suffer exactly the same fate. The genius was that these items weren't actually useless; there were two ways to use them effectively. The first was to simply cast a second scroll right before you landed. The second was to have a spell, scroll or item that granted levitation; by casting it right before landing you could simply negate the fall damage and drift to earth safely. A famous speedrun used both methods, along with another trap item, The Boots of Blinding Speed; they made you incredibly fast. And blind.

Fuck I want to play paranoia so bad

Every Morrowind player learned this lesson early on.

Fortunately, the blindness can be countered with magic resistance, which only resists negative effects (like blind) while allowing positive effects (like fortify speed) to work unimpeded.

> (if you were in the right place at the right time you'd actually see him hit the ground) If you prepared the right spell ahead of time you could save him, but unfortunately the devs didn't anticipate that and give him any unique dialogue.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Tarhiel

If there isn't a mod to fix that, that also matches the original tone of the game, I'll eat my hat. Or maybe give modding another go.....

he's correct though, at least as far as i can tell with rules as written. you'd at least need an athletics check or dex save

He actually *does* have unique dialogue if you save him, but not much. Trying to talk with him after saving him will have him say, "I don't want to talk about it," and immediately end conversation. Additionally, Tamriel Rebuilt makes him the court mage at Old Ebonheart and adds a quest about selecting a replacement after he dies. Or, if you managed to save him, you can find him in Old Ebonheart for a reward.

Technically the problem there is the effect of that scroll wears off before you hit the ground.

Hehehe there's a suspensor belt in Dune Awakening that does this. So long as you activate it before you really pick up speed you'll be ok.

At three a lot of 6 year olds playing D&D??

Tarhiel was carrying three other scrolls, so he may have planned ahead with one for the jump and one for the landing each time and just didn't manage to use one of them. Though that raises the question of why he'd use a presumably very valuable prototype scroll instead of just using Potions of Slowfalling or Scrolls of Tinur's Hoptoad.

I'd be more afraid of an anti-gravity belt that *is* an anti-inertia belt. It would reverse gravity, which would normally cause you to fall up, except it also reverses your inertia so you still go down. But if you push on the floor, the floor will push back up on you, which will cause you to accelerate towards the floor. You'd probably end up fused into it. I'm really not seeing how one that isn't an anti-inertia belt is a problem, besides breaking general relativity. If you turn the anti-gravity way up the acceleration could kill you, but I'd think of that as too much anti-gravity instead of lack of inertial dampening.

Yeah, Idk. I found an amulet of slowfall somewhere and ended up using them to hanglider around. He's probably just a dumbass.

From what I can find, there's two unique magic items that can grant slowfall. He may not have had access to them. Though I've heard it has a pretty powerful crafting system, so you could probably make them as needed?

lol I also immediately thought of the Scroll of Icarian Flight.

Yeah the enchanting and spellcrafting in that game is pretty freeform. Moreso than Skyrim or Oblivion.

He is. There's even a Jeremy Crawford post from 2015 saying that he'd only consider fall damage to be for falls farther than however high you jumped, but they didn't change it in the 2024 update. Harengons actually don't even need magic to run into this issue, they can just jump high enough to injure themselves as of level 9