"Man errs, till he has ceased to strive."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust<Faction Name>((Aight it's 12:30 am so I'mma make this quick before I pass out.))
The age of kingdoms is drawing to a close. Human development has been mostly analogous that of Earth thus far, power accumulates in a certain way, shapes society in a certain way, the details may vary but there is little room for variance in the grand pattern here.
BAM!
Magical ship. A kingdom is annihilated in an instant. Turns out some bygone empire had a few derelict ships in orbit and one of them has just fallen out of orbit. Entire impact zone is fucked. Enchantments and spells run haywire. Place is just chock full of incredibly dangerous magical phenomona, some of which is flat out invisible to the naked eye. Nestled amidst the wreckage are some random still-functioning pieces of tech.
Many venture into the impact site. Few ever return. But some return with magical artifacts. Oh shit.
Time for a Medieval Roadside Picnic!Except they just throw peasants in there with the promise of wealth and status if they come back with something useful. They start getting their Stalker game on and figuring out how to traverse the zones without it being completely trial by error. Still a lot of trial and error though. More phat loot. Experimentation ensues. A lot of it ethically questionable decisions are made.
More ships fall. More impact zones. We begin to see the first wars involving magic.
Some ethically dubious experimentation begins yielding results. Somewhere along the way they managed to make contact with elemental spirits. Unfortunately the spirits want blood and know how to strike a hard bargin.
One side dabbles with atrocities and warcrimes. Mass sacrifice in return for elemental services. Human experimentation. It pays off.
Genie's out of the bottle now. They've opened Pandora's box and it turns out it was filled with warcrimes.
Atrocities begin piling up. Why would they? It was actually giving them a competitive edge. Mercy is becoming a luxury.
Elementals sense blood in the water and raise their prices. The remaining powers cannot refuse. The Red Queen's Race in full swing now. Those atrocities once gave them an advantage, but now everyone is resorting to the same tactics, losing Elemental support would spell doom. Everyone else has adapted to the new playing field and had plenty of grudges against each other. These are no long wars of conquest. They are becoming wars of extermination as the sides begin regarding each other as beasts, savages, scum, subhuman. Monsters undeserving of life.
Probably colonial age by this point. Conflict begins winding down a bit, the Great Powers have made breathing room for themselves at the cost of those who were once their rivals and use the cost of a potential war to dissuade each other from getting too murder happy. Also atrocities against everyone they colonize but more than usual. Yay. Need to experiment more. Need to maintain elemental forces.
Slowly things get better. Less out of compassion because of some innate tendency to get more peaceful, more just human experimentation is giving diminishing returns and technology is advancing to the point where elements are less critical for military supremacy and really just out of the pragmatic realization that they can't afford to keep conceding to their demands. Plus there reaches a certain point where the elementals don't actually need
that many human sacrifices and ask for different things that require fewer atrocities.
Also with the improving tech and the highly competitive arms races between the remaining powers combined with a history that basically incentivized recklessness and wild experimentation the consequences of mad science begin getting more costly. One of the great powers kneecaps itself with a magical catastrophe. It won't be the last.
Cold War really sets in. Sides begin looking into actual science rather than just magic as a way to get the upper hand. The Great Powers would have likely fragmented at this point. It's hard keeping something that big going under a centralized control scheme.
Oh hey, it's ya boi, Chernobyl! Except actually worse!
More cockups!
Previous cockups put pressure to make a breakthrough to offset the impacts of previous cockups. Turns out it just makes the cockups just fucking cascade.
It's over. It's finally fucking over.
Mercy. For the first time in a long time, mercy. Again, probably more pragmatic than anything else. A fallen superpower can still drag everyone down to hell if it thinks it's headed that way anyways. Still pragmatism got them into this mess, and pragmatism seems to be what's getting them out.
Tensions slowly ease. Some flare ups, but things, actually improve.
<Planet Name> is a broken world, a scarred world, forever marred by mad science and magical warfare. But like its people it is slowly recovering. Fairy forests are blooming amidst blighted swampland, lush fields of green are rising from scorch earth. They have built monuments to the fallen, the victims, the lost. They have built temples to gods that are not their own, a sanctuary for those once doomed to wander the stars in solitude. The monuments take back what is already lost, undo the demise of entire peoples. The gods cannot forgive them for their sins, they were after all never
their gods.
The world is not at peace. But it is at last, peaceful. They have made countless mistakes, and they will make countless more (though hopefully more of the OH&S variety) but they will take those mistakes those hard fought lessons to heart and walk forward in the hopes of a better tomorrow, for such is the nature of man.
The Essence of MagnitudeThe Essence of Magnitude is an exotic quasi-substance that only arises in the most extreme of environments where the very fabric of universe begins to unravel. It is what lies within the black heart of a singularity, and what the universe bleeds when its false vacuum begins to decay. It is Magnitude. It is Scale. It is Power. And it is volatile beyond measure.
The trouble with Essence is that it reacts to almost anything. It seeps into it and makes it greater, grander, overwhelming, overpowering, apply it to armor and it may enhance it rendering it virtually impregnable for a few scarce moments, but it is just as likely to enhance its flaws, rending it apart by turning even the slightest of cracks into the greatest of fissures. Of course, such an example assumes one could even apply it to the armor in the first place, an endeavor easier said than done given that it will react with even light itself, exhausting itself in a flash of radiance that is blinding in the most literal of ways.
While extremely difficult to harvest "naturally", Essence is actually fairly easy to bootstrap since the extreme phenomena it requires can be created relatively easily through the liberal application of more Essence. The trick is in ensuring those same phenomena do not obliterate the entire area.
The Art of SearingThe universe resembles to an extent, Plato's Cave. Objects exist as both their Forms and the Shadows they cast. Where it differs from Plato's cave however is that the "true" existence of an object is not simply Form, but rather the union of its Form and its Shadow. Humans can only observe the physical Form. They do not see the Shadow cast by light of Ember, the residual flames of Genesis. But what they can see is Ember. And can kindle it with the Essence of Magnitude.
When exposed to Essence, the flames surge with such fury, such intensity that its light will incinerate Forms and sear their Shadows into the universe itself. This is Searing, that which destroys the Form while preserving the Shadow, it is the First Art, the Primordial Art,
the Art to which all others owe their existence.
These residual Shadows are called Spells and they are still very much capable of influencing the world around them. Were one to sear a raging conflagration, they could unleash it as an attack or apply that bind it to the Shadow of a sword to create a blade that consumes its victims with tongue of cutting steel that spread like wildfire. Under normal conditions Spells have fairly limited manifestations due to existing only as Shadows, but they can be empowered and made to manifest through the use of
Ember, it is after all the brightest of lights that cast the darkest of shadows.
The problem with simple sears is that they have fairly limited control over their outputs. While one can choose what is seared, one cannot choose which aspects are preserved. This is where Occultation comes into play
Underpinning Occultation is the realization that like regular light, Emberlight has wavelengths and that each aspect of a given Form will only absorb specific wavelengths of Emberlight. What this means is that it is possible to selectively sear specific aspects of an object. To do so, an artificer would have to identify the wavelengths absorbed by each aspect of a target. They would then have to find a sufficiently thick screening object that absorbs the wavelengths absorbed by the undesirable aspects of the target but not the wavelengths absorbed by the desirable aspects. The screening object would then be placed in between the Emberlight source and the target object, acting as a kind of sacrificial protection against Searing for the undesirable aspects of the target.
Still, Searing is ultimately still limited by the innate properties of its targets; a spell seared from a railgun will be inherently superior to a spell seared from a musket. It is of little surprise then that <Faction Name> has begun investing increasingly large quantities of resources towards developing technology more securely anchored to the laws of physics.
Elemental Spirits and Vagrant GodsSpirits are more or less living spells, Shadows without Form holding not only the aspects of their domain but also the aspects of life and intelligence. Their origins are as varied that of humanity, some arose from celestial phenomena, some were created, some birthed, others arising spontaneously as new lifeforms comprised of spells rather than matter.
Their role in the great game of empires is not unlike that of their more classical depictions, as a sort of auxiliary work force or power supply, as servants or as rampaging monstrosities. Centuries of history standing alongside humanity has rendered them increasingly effective as they gained greater and greater understanding of human culture and technology. Indeed, for some more magically inclined factions they can serve as experts capable of deciphering the inner workings of more scientific apparatus.
But those centuries have not taught them simply how to be better servants. No, it has taught them the benefits of unionization, it has taught them the virtues of treachery, and above all else, how to be ruthless negotiators. More than ever spirits serve more as as mercenaries and business partners than simply as servants and peons.
There is no hard distinction between Elemental and God. More often than not, a god is simply a spirit with the gall to call itself such and the power to back up those claims. However some gods hold their titles not out of some inflated ego but out of some purpose of duty, often as a result of being created by some civilization.
And for many, their civilization goes the way civilizations tend to go - toward oblivion. They become Vagrant Gods, gods of a dead people, forgotten divinity drifting through space without purpose. <Faction Name> may not have a religion, but it does a have pantheon, a collection of orphaned gods willing to serve once more, be it out of a sense of duty, a need to make up for past failures, or simply just to feel appreciated again. Tributes and worship are state enforced, though they are enforced more like another form of taxation than anything else.
The Veil And What Lies BeyondIf the Netherworld is the ocean and the material world the sky, then the Veil would be the surface of the water. Matter floats upon the Veil while souls sink. The buoyancy of matter far exceeds the weight of soul, hence why the souls of the living do not fall through the Veil. Souls are however able to exert a certain amount of impulse when submerged, enough to actually bob up and down through the Veil.
Of the Veil Arts, <Faction Name> is most skilled at Soul Binding. Contrary to its name Soul Binding is actually the Art of
regulating the minds of ghosts rather than binding them. This is because while a sufficiently motivated (or confused) soul should have no trouble staying afloat, it would appear that physical neural activity plays a rather important role in maintaining a "normal" cognitive state and without it a ghost would almost certainly a highly altered state of consciousness, the most common kind being similar to those experienced by ketamine users during a "k-hole".
While there are many ways to perform a Soul Bind, <Faction Name> typically achieves theirs using complex spells aimed to emulating a human brain, or through the intervention of a Vagrant God.
Phantom Manipulation is another Veil Art employed by <Faction Name> though to a far lesser degree. A Phantom is an "empty" artificial soul that can be controlled with spells. By using large collections of Phantoms it becomes possible to "weigh" ordinary matter down enough to traverse the Netherworld, using the impulse exerted by the Phantoms as a form of propulsion.
They would soon realize the Netherworld was more treacherous than they initially believed, coming face to face with the Neverborn, vast gestalt entities comprised of innumerable phantoms, the largest having such mass they were capable of creating crushing waves and violent maelstroms in the normally calm Veil. As it turned out, such phenomena is perfectly capable of inflicting very real damage to the material world. It is believed that given their composition, the Neverborn are not a naturally occurring organism but rather the creation of some other civilization, though it is unknown whether this was necessarily intentional. The Neverborn target large collections of phantoms devouring them and assimilating them into their collective. This also explains why ghosts had not reported encountering them before as they would not have been recognized as prey and attracted their attention.
tl;drBasically as a whole, a civilization of recovering mad scientists who are trying their damnedest to put all their atrocities and warcrimes behind them and maybe kinda sorta actually tone down some of the more dangerous experimentation.
It's mostly the magic system I like anyways, so I'm happy to swap it out for some other civ description
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Topic: Ramshackle Titans - Knights Reliquar Thread - M2 Deployment (Read 9838 times)