#magi-tech

[tippilo]

HALLOWS : PART ONE

Thanks to @crymsyy for the amazing video and allowing me to use it in writing this! Now I have a whole fic in process based off this video! Future parts are being outlined and will be posted as they are finished!

Mistakes are my own! I may clean this up in the future to post on AO3 but, for now, this is what we have :)

This is also a Forced Proximity fic for dramione month (@dhrmonth)

[manybackflips]

I absolutely LOVE post-post-apocalypse media!

I love being able to piece together from table scraps how what happened affected the now!

I love the descriptions on how a certain event triggered the collapse of society!

I love how the society in question bounces back and rebuilds!

I love the lingering remnants of what was still having a very faint grasp on the world!

And Guilty Gear tics all of those boxes! Mostly in a anime fighting game lore wise kind of way but still…

I love the details of the Gear Project being an indirect cause of the downfall of society by being on the main causes of a horrible one-hundred year war!

I love the rough and tumble horror that occurred during The Crusades and how it affects our cast!

I love how the horrors of the past change and develop the characters and setting in the world!

I love how the banning of tech introduced the common world to magic and magi-tech!

I love how the Gear Project made an entire race of being that humanity fought in the Crusades now wish for peace!

I love the passing of the torch and moving on from the horrors of the past is symbolized in Sin taking Ky’s duties as a king of Illyria as a half-gear!

I LOVE post-post-apocalypse stories! And Guilty Gear is one of the best.

[jackkilligrew]

Within sight of the Black Cathedral lies the renowned ForgeTech University, now owned by ForgeCorp, a builder of cities. Here, students with wild hair and patched trousers are known for doing crazy experiments in coal-flavored workshops. A poster on the outer walls reads, “Come join the fun in the world of steam-powered dreams at ForgeTech University!” Teachers at ForgeTech, more loopy scientists than sensible educators, let their cohort run riot on reckless journeys of discovery. Meanwhile, ungainly brass gizmos, all pipes and gripes, patrol the corridors, keeping everything in order, and occasionally confiscating a biscuit or two. This is not just a school; it's a place where students really do forge the future, and every cog whirs towards the next great invention.  Curious about Blackspire’s mysteries? Check out my full world-building journey on my blog!

Psst! Did you know you can click on the links in my writing to find out more about this fictional world?

[jetix]

2013-06-12

[nickywhoisi]

so how did Pizzahead get the means to make a bunch of Fakinos anyway???

this is my headcannon for that lol

Peppino does not live on a ground floor btw....

Apologies for the hard to see linework here and there, I tried my best but it's not easy making a comic old-school style where you need one pose to be the same at all times. But I still managed, and am very happy with it! Also these are my designs for them both since I'm finally figuring out how to consistently draw them, especially Pizzahead; I gave him vague hair curls to make him seem like...almost human? Totino-ish? Not really tho XP

This was made over the span of quite a few days so I hope you enjoy! pchooooooooo

Reblogs > Likes, Thank you!

[prettywarriors]

[catdraiochta]

if you're gonna be high and mighty about pop culture witches, i don't want you to interact with my blog. a form of magic being new doesn't make it less valid than ancient practices, and acting like it does does a disservice to the entire community. "how do you know it's not the placebo effect-" how do any of us know otherwise about any magic? everyone's unique experience with their practice shows them what works and doesn't for themselves, and discrediting an entire branch of the practice is brushing off all of those people and their experience. believe it or not ancient folk aren't the sole bearers of knowledge. when are we gonna learn to stop equating "old" with "correct."

[recordstellar-official]

Dhampir Undead Hunter

Some work on a varied character token that I've been busy designing. A lot of arcano-tech that I'm eager to explain, but the novel series needs to come first. I hope y'all enjoy the art!

[shadefish]

A Magi-tech Construct Metal Gear Rex for a client on twitter!

My Patreon

[rosewoodroad]

Fleshing out Sxorr's character a little more, have some fun poses.

Extra character tidbits below

He's a fan of Metal Legion. Initially, he listened to them to annoy his mother, but grew to genuinely enjoy their music. It's edgy! He's also upset they disbanded.

He's obsessed with crystals. Jade technology fascinates him, and he is determined to obtain more for reverse engineering to understand what makes Canthan jade such a great magi-battery. He dreams of incorporating even a sliver of Aurene's brand into his cloaking body suit, which currently runs on a rudimentary prototype of his current crystal theorems.

His current stash of jade tech is small, having been acquired through less than legal means. Legitimate import fees and scarcity due to the Canthan jade energy crisis made it unaffordable with his current bank (that, and he's heard that human trade bureaucracy is somehow worse than the Colleges').

His mother, Xiintra, is a golemancer who supplies special golem units to Rata Sum's security forces- mainly the Arcane Eye. Militaristic, uptight, and loyal to the Arcane Council, she's everything Sxorr aspires not to be. Her relationship with her son is strained, and she makes it very clear that she views Sxorr's little 'rebellion' as an ugly mark on her otherwise flawless and upstanding records. Regardless, she tries to keep in contact with him, if only to get him back under control.

Sxorr is 19ish as of SoTO. He had been a student of the College of Synergetics before he decided to drop out during the events of the Icebrood Saga. The attack on Rata Sum shook him enough to reassess his life priorities, and he took the chance to bail when his mother was too preoccupied with combating the dragons to notice.

Pink is his favourite colour. He will fight you over it.

[tippilo]

I posted this a week ago on instagram (which is my primary social media). Would recommend following me on there if you want more timely updates.

This is part 2 of Hallows (story inspired by @crysmy)

[howtofightwrite]

I've got a world-building/combat question. I have these two warring nations in my setting, both medieval-ish tech levels. One of them figures out how to make magical flying craft that are basically WWI airplanes. The other country invents dragon riders in response. Since then, they've been at war for ~60 years. I'm trying to figure out how the heck an air force would alter medieval combat strategies. If you've any suggestions, I'd appreciate it

The first, and biggest world building problem is that magic is part of your overall tech level. Ironically, Diskworld is an excellent example of how magical technology can basically function as an alternate path for social and technical development, though, honestly, a lot of high-magic settings tend to have tech leakage from magic.

One of the more common examples that comes to mind are “magical radios.” Either it's an enchanted device that allows person to person communication, or it's direct telepathic communication, but whatever it is, it serves a fundamentally similar role to a handheld radio, or (depending on how it works) a phone. The thing is, it's functionally a magical replacement, and it would affect society in much the same way those technologies have.

This is a long way to say, if your magical combat technology has WWI-grade planes, there is a very real possibility that a lot of your warfare is also going to be at a similar magi-tech level, if not more advanced. Having written that, I'm reminded of The Red Star comic series; though, that has a heavy Soviet aesthetic, and is not-at-all medieval.

Again, it doesn't really matter if you have fully-automatic firearms, or if you have a bolt thrower that conjures and propels crystals at hyper-sonic speeds into your foes. If they have a similar rate of fire, and similar accuracy, the meaningful change is texture. Your characters might see tiny crystal fragments shattered on the floor, or embedded into walls, instead of bullet holes. There may be no smell, or conjuring the crystals might leave a different odor. A handheld lightning projector might leave scorch marks, and a scent of ozone, for instance.

Magic might also factor into armor and defenses. If you can use a magical ward to dispel conjured objects, that might be extremely useful for fortifying specific targets against incoming conjured attacks, but it would likely be wholly ineffective against the lightning projector, or some other kind of directed energy beam weapon.

“Inventing,” dragon riding as a response to someone else making a magical airship, does strike me as an odd cause-and-effect. If dragon riding was that easy, it would seem likely that someone would have militarized them long before that point. Inventing flying objects that could function as a hard counter to dragons feels a little more natural. Or, magical, AA installations. Though, this is something that could probably be finessed, if you're really committed to the setup. It's also worth remembering that air superiority is an extremely potent advantage, even if you're not sure what to do with it, meaning that if one side suddenly had fliers, and the other side couldn't come up with a counter in short order, they'd be picked apart, and the war wouldn't have this 60 year timescale.

If it seems like I went to ranged weapons very quickly, there's a simple reason. You can't joust from a plane. Your options are to either propel objects at people, or drop things on them from above. Dragons also (usually) have the option to breathe fire on them. Now, firearms did exist in the late medieval era. So, that's not that far out of range. I'm less sure of the invention of bombs. At least, of the variety you could deliver to your enemy on the battlefield. Though, it occurs to me, you could probably use a catapult or trebuchet to deliver an explosive payload, if the explosives were stable enough to survive launch, but sensitive enough to detonate on impact. (Of course, if you have some kind of magically primed explosive, that stays stable until it is ejected from the catapult, and then explodes on impact, that would work.)

Looping back to the timescale again, this would require some pretty potent defensive capabilities. A dragon, with the ability to breathe fire, and the capacity for strategic thinking, could easily starve out an entire kingdom, simply by making a habit of torching all the cropland it could find. It doesn't, particularly matter if it gets all the food, so long as it torches a meaningful percentage of the available crops. When you have farmers going hungry, you're going to see food production dipping, exacerbating the problem. When you have soldiers going hungry, they're not going to be able to fight as effectively. When you have the peasantry going hungry, you're going to see civil unrest, and probably rebellions coming for their lord's head. You can't wage a war against a hostile nation under those circumstances. (In fact, there were multiple peasant revolts during the Hundred Years War, which basically stalled out France's ability to fight. England also suffered multiple peasant uprisings at roughly the same time. Though, those were motivated by taxation, which ends in a similar place.)

A related concept that's somewhat hinted above, is that wars are expensive, and both France and England found themselves facing uprisings because of taxation needed to support the ongoing war. (The irony being that both nations encountered this at roughly the same point in history. Roughly 40 years into the war.) A war that's been going for 60 years will likely have ravaged the economies of the involved nations. This isn't necessarily something that your characters would be aware of, unless you expand the context to show non-wartime economies.

The simplest explanation for why this happens is that any money you spend prosecuting the war are products that you never see returning value from. The money itself doesn't leave the economy, but the natural resources, and labor required, are expended non-productively (from the perspective of economic growth.) So, if you have a peacetime merchant, they're moving money around, but they're paying for their goods, and then those goods are going to consumers, who may also be contributing to economic activity with those goods (this even applies for food, you can think of that as a necessary component to any productive activity.) If you're a wartime merchant, selling weapons to the military, you are contributing to economic activity when you buy the weapons, but when they're sold to the crown, that's no longer productive. Those weapons leave the economy and never return. Worse, any soldiers who are permanently wounded, or killed, are also removed from the economy. Over time, this can destroy the most prosperous of nations. (To be clear, this is more advanced economic analysis than anyone in the middle ages would have had. So, the idea that wars are expensive was understood, but the exact reasons it slowed the economy were not.) And, this kind of thinking is another form of technological advancement. Ideas for understanding complex systems have become more intricate and detailed over time. While it's not the concept of, “invention,” that you might be used to, it is a similar form of progress.

So, how would this look in your world? There's a lot of potential consequences, most of which are not contradictory.

An impoverished lower-class is very likely. Whether that includes wounded veterans or not is a little more up in the air, though after 60 years, military pensioners, and those who suffered life-altering injuries on the battlefield are likely to be a common sight, either on the street or in the poverty line. (Especially if the crown is willing to enforce drafts and conscription.) At this point, that might be a very real possibility.

A struggling aristocracy is also likely, with former major power players who've declined into poverty. This might take the form of borderline abandoned estates that have been taken over by the crown or squatters. (Probably not both at the same time.)

Serious inflation is likely (and could be why formerly stable guild members, merchants, and even some of the aristocracy might now find themselves struggling.) I realize this point isn't something most really think of when you're trying to write a fantasy world, but it's worth considering. More likely this will be seen in food prices having increased over time. So the major symptoms you'd likely see would be decaying structures that no one has the resources to maintain, rising food prices, and generalized poverty. Even in a fairly magically advanced setting, a lot of these things would, likely, still happen. Of course, if the dragons have been used to destroy the agricultural base, things would be even worse in that nation. To be clear, food and taxation riots are not off the table there.

This is sort of a non-sequitur, but if you have a setting with classic transmutation (lead, or other base metals, into gold), you would actually see inflation with every batch of transmuted gold hitting the market. It's sort of an amusing note on the fantasy of being able to produce as much money as you want, but ultimately, it's actually harmful from a macroeconomic perspective. (Basically, the same reason counterfeiting is a problem.) Though, it is a possible hook for criminal groups in one of those nations, producing counterfeit gold via transmutation.

There's also a real world example from 2020, where a jewelry company had fabricated “fake,” gold bars as collateral to secure loans. In total, they claimed to have 83 tons of gold used to obtain loans worth over 2.8 billion dollars, from 14 different creditors. Except, when they defaulted on those loans, and were forced to hand over the gold, it was discovered that these were in fact gold plated copper bars.

I realize the question was about the flying forces specifically, but so long as that advantage is dealt with quickly, and neither side is able to monopolize air superiority, that's not going to change nearly as much as having that level of magical advancement would on its own, and of course, the general consequences of having a war that's been going on for long enough that multiple generations have died on the battlefield. That's going to a bigger effect on your world as a whole.

-Starke

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[jackkilligrew]

In celebration of Halloween week, we delve into the darkest corners of Blackspire with a series of spine-chilling urban legends...

Nightshade

Harold Corbett was a man of few words, but his silence spoke volumes in Blackspire’s underworld. By day, he was the picture of a humble coachman, ferrying the city’s elite to their lavish parties, meetings, and homes. But by night, Harold became something far more sinister—a fixer, one who dealt in bodies.

The streets of Blackspire were teeming with secrets, and in the dark corners of its alleyways, crimes went unnoticed. For the right price, Harold would help dangerous men and women dispose of their problems—problems that no one could afford to leave behind. Murderers, thieves, even some of Blackspire’s wealthiest patrons came to know Harold's services. They called him “Nightshade” because of how easily he made things disappear.

His black, steam-powered carriage with crystal-enhanced wheels never made a sound on the cobbled streets after midnight. If you needed someone to vanish—permanently—you left word for Harold with a few gold coins at the Blackstone Tavern, and by the next night, he’d be there, waiting.

Harold wasn’t squeamish. He would arrive just as the deed was done, stepping out of his carriage without so much as a glance at the blood or the lifeless form on the ground. He would drag the body into the back of the coach with practiced efficiency, covering it with a heavy canvas tarp stained from countless previous jobs.

Where did the bodies go? That was the real secret. Some thought Harold dumped them into the murky waters of the river. Others whispered that he sold them to anatomists at ForgeTech University for dissection. But the truth was far darker.

At the edge of Blackspire, deep in the industrial district, stood Vance’s Butcher Shop. Few dared to ask where the butcher got his “specialty” meats, but rumors circulated among those who could afford the finest cuts. Harold made his way to Vance in the dead of night, a route known only to him. For the right price, Vance took the bodies off Harold’s hands and repurposed them in the most unspeakable way.

The rich of Blackspire, those who enjoyed their rare steaks and roasted delicacies, were unaware of what they were truly eating. The finest cuts of meat were once men and women who had crossed the wrong people. And every time Harold pocketed his fee from Vance, he thought of the twisted irony—that the very people who paid him to dispose of their enemies might one day be eating a bit of their own dark deeds.

Harold had no remorse. To him, it was just business. The city ran on secrets, and Nightshade was the one who helped keep those secrets buried—or in this case, butchered and served on a platter. As long as there were crimes to cover up and money to be made, Harold’s silent carriage would continue its midnight journey through Blackspire’s fog-laden streets.

Follow my blog for more stories from Blackspire. Use the hashtag #ExploreBlackspire. Other Halloween specials: The Leech - Nurse Whitlock

[markrosewater]

Hi Mark! Not to pile on about the subject, since it's clear you're getting a lot of comments about it already, but I was wondering if there was a way to give nuanced feedback regarding Duskmourn. I happen to really love the house of horrors, the surreal geometry, the glimmers of light, the entire haunted aesthetic, and even the basic concept of a house that ate a world. It's amazing, and I hope you give all the people did the work to craft such a uniquely cool place a high five (or verbal equivalent) when you see them! However, I'm not so much of a fan of the on-the-nose modern tech aesthetic, some of the CRT glitched screens looking really cool aside. Seeing basketball shoes in an in-universe plane is just too mundane for my preferences, and robs the game of some of its, well, magic—all the other tech we've seen has been magi-tech or otherwise unlike what we have on earth. But these are in the same set! How do I indicate that I love half of it and dislike the other when a purchasing decision indicates only a sentiment about the whole thing?

You can voice it here.

[littlefeatherr]

Bad Batch Fanfiction and Fanart Recs #2

The Flame by @moonstrider9904

One of Those Days by @isthereanechoinhere96

Confessions on the Marauder by @lost-in-fiction-like-ur-mom

I Know. by @dystopicjumpsuit

Tech-ology Volume 1 by @apocalyp-tech-a

A Place Called Home by ilcuoreardendo

Unfinished Business by @apocalyp-tech-a

Batch and Beloved by TheWritingMagi aka @the-magi

Slip of the Tongue by @dickarchivist

Rinse and Repeat (Hunter x GN!Reader) by @letsquestjess

Tech's First Time by @spicy-clones

Observations and Analysis in the Galactic Empire by @apocalyp-tech-a

Art:

Omega trying to convince Tech it's time for an unscheduled study break with snacks by @jedizhi

the actual loml by @madsayo

@photogirl894 OC Kimber and Hunter commission by @lightspringrain

Crosshair by @laufxsons

Hunter and Omega by @catdoesarts

Crosshair needs a hug and a good cry by @queenjiru

Family by @gingerpines

You want her? You go through me by @zaana

Dark and broody outlaw adopting a kid that's older than them-Hunter/Omega and Din Djarin/Grogu by @kelstares

Because who needs sleep when there are feelings to be processed - Hunter and Omega by @lornaka

Hunter and Lyra by @amalthiaph for @freesia-writes

Brotherly Support- Crosshair and Hunter by @beetlecrest

[trilobitepunch]

Threw Donnie into a new RP with air pirates and magi-tech and forgot I drew stuff for it.