Aesca - Songlines - 10 (11?) Things to Know

[raygun goth]

I've posted a bit here and there about the setting I usually run for RPG junk - I figured I'd start a thread on my general worldbuilding in regards to the setting. This is going to be a bit of a wobbling thread, but that's ok.

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Songlines is a spiritual post-apocalyptic fantasy sandbox role-playing game. It takes place on the third planet in its solar system, bursting with life and the victim of many great disasters, both geological and cultural. Magic infuses the whole of the world, from avatar storms across the midlands of Charnra to the poison dusts of the Nazro continent and the savage destroyer that hunts across the Southern Lands, it pervades every day life, providing the comforts of modern technology and showing that the casters of such great wonders are in harmony with themselves and their world.



The Great Races. In Aesca, the Races are any species capable of understanding and accepting a spiritual bargain. Magic is performed by a delicate system of checks and balances, and any species whose members can understand these systems and thereby form a contract with a world through them has attained the status of “Race.” The most prominent of these pacts is the Bargain of the Wheel, a bargain which allows that race to call upon its world to protect it from extinction, after which it has become a Great Race. All Races currently known in existence are Great Races. There are ten “known” Great Races, though most common folk can't typically name them all.


The Elements. The metaphysics of Aesca rely on the transitional properties of the five elements, Ether, Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, each has a sustaining, waxing, and waning influence, as well as the ability to be tainted by rage and corruption from the desires Great Races – intelligent entities using deals and contracts for petty concerns corrupt the magic, rather than the magic corrupting the user. These five elements change states into one another, annihilate one another, and provide others with power, creating a complex system of saturation and interaction that is the basis for all spiritual activities. These elements exist in a complex system of balance, called paqui, that, when undisturbed, allows the world to ebb and flow around them in perfect harmony.


A Magical World. The complex give and take of magic creates the world on a daily basis, pushing in and going out like tides. What remains is solidified magic, literal expressions of the power of memes in a place in which people can interact with it: the very act of walking up a hill is magical, using your feet to tell the hill you are climbing up its side and the hill agreeing with you. This magic is everywhere, and it saturates and forms the world. Objects, ideas, and even people can have memetic weight, making them more likely to solidify or even to be washed away.


The Looming Apocalypse. The world's already been hit by the one-two-four wham slam. At the start of the century, the surge in mana brought on by the change of the century and the introduction of the “world of tomorrow” into the zeitgeist caused a surge of power so filled with potentiality that spiritual beings manifested on the physical plane without their volition; this devastation caused a failed crop harvest globally for three years, sparking a long-held political vendetta, and the Great War began. It raged for ten years, devastating the landscape even further, leaving many communities without aid as the plagues began, cutting through them like a knife, even as the real estate speculator market bottomed out; these four apocalypses became known as the ame-do-bpah, the “four in confluence,” or Nuhaghee, “the eating four.” The world huddles in fear of the fifth blow, considering that a fifth apocalypse could turn the Wheel and end the reign of humanity as the Great Race in ascendance. There's always that next axe waiting to fall.


Human Authority. Humans are the most magically powerful Great Race, even though they are in their waning cycle. Their unique magic is Authority, with which they helped shape the current world. To the human magician, the landscape is a record of heroes and stories, and by reenacting those stories, humans gain a kind of authority called “mana,” proving that they are worthy of commanding spirits, granting them the power to directly impose their desires without need for a bargain, using their word and their command as their bond.


A Spiritual Ecology. The world is inundated with spirits representing ideas, not just of objects, but of cultural and ecological memes. These spirits interact with one another the way objects in the real world do: wind spirits grind down rock spirits, arguments hunt down ideas and tear them apart, and fears huddle in dark corners waiting to disrupt quiet evenings. Most concepts, ideas, and locations have a personification which can be interacted with or spoken to, and those that don't still have a sentience that can be reasoned with to some degree. They behave the way they do because it is what they are, and even the most intelligent among them are still alien to most humans.


Family Spirits. In addition to whatever authority a human has earned, guardian spirits sometimes share their very essence with families, passed through the mother's line. Those who belong to these religions are granted special authority over certain facets of that spirit's domain, acquiring that spirit's traits and position in the spirit world by literally sharing its blood. This influence can transcend tribal boundaries, and its members take on the roles of their family spirits in reenacting ancient tales through new lenses.


Mythology is Cultural Truth. Human families have strong oral traditions. There are man stories, woman stories, child stories, and adult stories. Through stories, a culture experiences itself and grows stronger. To six or more different cultures, a river may be six or more things, and individuals from those cultures might experience a meeting with it in six or more different ways. Those open to the ideals and stories of those other cultures may find that culture's truth embedded within their own, or find a different truth about the river entirely. This has led to intense tribalism, some of which still exists in the modern era.


A World of Technology. Knowledge of how the world works is applied directly into scientific advancements, allowing humans to build great cities, airships, and fantastic machines through taking advantage of the give-and-take nature of magic. The transition cycles of the elements, the behaviors of spirits, and favors owed to and by certain families allow for all manner of devices to be built, designed, and utilized by citizens and explorers alike. Technology inundates everyday life; personal computators or even hefty travel tablets, cities that rise over four hundred floors into the air, and factory machines to make it all run are all part of city life. Even far out in small towns at the fringes of civilization, electric fences and radio networks are bringing people protection and communication in this, the dawning world of tomorrow. This technology has some resemblance to Earth's technological marvels of the 1940s. Art deco and streamline moderne are common design styles.


The Untamed Wilds. Aesca is a world of extreme wilderness. Warmer and more geologically active than Earth, Aesca is given over to wild storms, thick jungles, crowded forests, desolate arid regions, and great mountains. The surface of the world is forged by the actions of heroes and spirits, who stalk the wild places acting out ancient vendettas and alliances in the form of beasts, weather, and plants. The worlds of spirit and flesh converge as one leaves civilized areas; distances and even time has little meaning in the wilds, as one approaches the crucible of the universe out beyond those islands of stabilized history. Ancient animals dominate the world, and dinosaurs stalk the landscape.


Time is Not Linear. History is not a stable thing. The past and future are based on what has been recorded, in the land, in text, in song and story; two cultures may have wildly divergent ideas about the distant past. Cities and civilizations are like islands in time, and recording marks upon the world makes the past and future within a certain frame of reference perfectly legitimate; maps that delineate geographical features and country borders are like boats or life preservers in the spaces between. The further one wanders from a place where people commonly tread, the more plastic and fluid time and space become. This effect is called, interchangably, the Dream-time or the Zone of Isolation, and those who adventure in the wild spaces are often referred to as either “zoners” or “isolators,” seeking out the cultural truths buried in time like ancient ruins buried beneath shifting sands.

[raygun goth]

The Ten Races

A being is known as a Great Race if it has directly contracted the planet itself to be preserved in its memories and take part in its mythic past through the Dream-time. There are ten races, and ten "slots" for a race to fill. if one race is somehow forgotten by Aesca, another one will step up to fill the cosmological role. Not all of these things are really PC-ready, but they weren't exactly made with PCs in mind.

The current ten are as follows. Quick blurbs, low detail.

http://orig05.deviantart.net/f4d7/f/2015/033/0/c/aesca_races_lineup_by_mr_author-d8ggsrt.jpg
From left to right.

Human
The race of Ether, and of magic and power, Humans developed from apes and spirits. In addition to being one of the most magically powerful races in the world, humans are said to stand between all things. They reproduce rapidly and their memories give shape to the world. Guardian spirits vie for their mana, so that they might not fade into the past and become part of Dragon. Their power is authority, which allows them to control the five streams. They are also the race that gives form to the five Voices, entities that can command all five streams and serve as mouthpieces for the earth.


Maize-Cutter
The race of Savage poison, of anger, the Maize-Cutters are also known as “reavers” and “little brothers” by humans, who helped sponsor them. While they maintain a great deal of curiosity about humans and human magic, the two races have agreed to segregate themselves on the proposition that if a little sibling comes to its big sibling every time it has a cut, it will never learn to put a band aid on by itself. Even so, they will help each other if their territories cross. Maize-Cutters live in family bands that pursue a somewhat nomadic existence within specific territories, and do their best to avoid the alien landscapes of the large cities. They can eat near anything, and subsist mostly on meat, much like bearded vultures.

Opanian/Phoonkt
The race of Water, Opanians, also known as Fish and Silurans, dwell beneath the ocean and are descended from beings that arrived from the Outside. They are thick, carapace-bodied creatures with four spidery limbs, long paddle-like accoutrements, and a set of fleshy wing-like protuberances that they use to swim through the ocean. They possess five eyes, and two large manipulator limbs that fold like mantis claws and have untold numbers of fingers; without their encounter suits, only the long, tentacle-like snout of the creature has any manipulation ability. They're a widespread people, and store their memories in solid-state calcium constructs.


Iokyu
The Iokyu existed on the world before even the other races came, and are among the elder beings that inhabited the world before the building of the stele or the dreams of Hornhead, depending on whose creation story you heed. They once fed on the Ancients in the time of the Mother of All Things, much like how sharks feed on schools of fish. Their civilization has crumbled, and they now flicker like ghosts through the world. Their mana is that of outsiders, and the powers they can grant to petitioners and the magic they still use is foreign, in addition to the pacts they can forge with spirits as a race held to the Bargain of the Wheel. In their natural form, they resemble nothing more than shadows or black fire with three solid white eyes. To affect the world, however, they must possess a host, anchoring themselves to a soul and a body. Usually done when their chosen host has not acquired an orgus of its own, the host of the Iokyu manifests a physical third eye, through which they feed on mana.
Iokyu are not a numerous race, and have little to do or care with modern politics, though they require the existence of the other races to make themselves manifest. They're shaped by their locality and the things they've eaten. When they first arrive in a culture, they're literally shapeless. Just black things with three eyes. As they insinuate themselves into a culture and eat scraps of meaning from large discharges, they acquire markings denoting what sort of things they've eaten.
They move like sticky ink. They stick better to things that have more meaning, so if you could see one moving around, it'd move like a liquid spider that could only scamper across things with lots of sentimental or monetary or historical value. It could run through a museum jumping from exhibit to exhibit like a liquid squirrel, its body flickering with new symbols every jump.


Sky People
The race of Air who evolved solely from spirits, the Sky People resemble grayish white humanoid figures, having ankles but no feet, thick forearms with seemingly unfinished fingers, and a series of muscular folds for a neck. Their head is a round ball, dotted with symbols, with a single hole, inside which a blue light can be seen. They have a single eye, which is either human or reptilian; the muscular folds of their neck allow them to roll their head to angle the eye in any direction. They have no mouth, and whisper through the blue light inside their hollow heads. Much of the jewelry they wear appears to hang in the air. They are Thunder's people, and live in his kingdom in the sky, which can be accessed through clouds. Their power is shaping, which allows them to make metal and other objects out of clouds.

The Language/Yeeneegahleessdee
An intelligent communication method, The Language, also called Yeeneegahleessdee, exist as systems of ideas that have formed into replicators through complex interactions with one another, eventually eschewing the need for a communicative medium or neural symbiont (such as two other beings speaking with one another), existing in a state of self-reaffirmation. They live in a Near State similar to zobani and other non-manifested spirits.

Golem
Golems are the race of Fire. First made from mandrake roots and murder, as well as the theft and corruption of mana by humans, golems became a race in their own right when they began to be created and acquire sentience through multiple spirits fusing into a single entity, each taking a different job, golems can now self-replicate and have been introduced by humans to the Bargain of the Wheel. Having done so in the recent era, it was discovered that the race had already made the deal in yesterday country. Their power is inspiration, which allows them to sing and affect changes in the world.

Genesis
Originally hailing from deep space, the Genesis is the race of Darkness and exists as a memetic virus. Those who are infected by the physical virus will slowly turn into the Genesis as they learn more about their culture and the source of the particular strain of virus they possess. There are two sources for the virus that have made pacts with the earth, and they are the self-professing Dark Gaia and Wakatapa the Spider-Like One. Even before making the Bargain of the Wheel, they hunted and ate black magic, destroying Tseeveyo when they could. As a race, they have continued this activity, though no longer out of pure selfishness, but because they, too, are tied to Aesca. They possess the ability to see and devour magic from Outside and black magic itself without harm.

Narhoojai
The race of the Earth and of Strength, the Narhoojai live beneath the ground in vast complexes of caves and caverns. Created by the Mother of All Things, the Narhoojai are mutant Ancients, having had the capacity for bargaining and growing on their own food. They broke off from the Ancients when the world was destroyed at the end of their age and made a single bargain with the earth that they would never be destroyed. In return, they were given the task of introducing potential races to the Bargain of the Wheel. They were also instructed to complete a cycle of ten races, matching the ten great streams of the river of truth. Narhoojai range from six to eight feet tall, are bald, have olive gray scaly skin, large eyes, and hissing voices incapable of human speech, however, they can still project the illusion of human voice using their power. The Narhoojai power is blending, which allows them to appear as members of the other races or create illusions involving rock and stone.

The Seventh Race
Always alongside and just a bit to the back lies the Seventh Race. They are said to be shapeshifters, but the truth is that they project mana in the appearance that would be most valuable in a given situation. They slip into the worlds of other races seamlessly and without much fanfare. Their “true form,” if it could be called as such, is that of a massive translucent worm, often five to seven feet in length, with a myriad of eyes and spinning wheels. The jaws are inside the body, and the wheels and hairs draw food into the stomach. Their association with Wood allows them to reproduce using the potentiality of any creature or even member of the great races, and they often do, storing strange deals for years before reinserting them back into family lines.

[raygun goth]

The first thing about magic is that everyone uses it, but not everyone is a magician or a wonder-worker. The very act of walking down the road or turning over a rock is filled with magic. Utilizing a skill is a form of magic; banging on the head of an axe in the forge or opening a window is a complex series of interactions between your mana and the mana of the object you are manipulating, relying on bargains and acquiescence of the world to your desires. That is the nature of things.

The power of the magician, however, is in skipping steps. Making the window open on its own, dipping hands in molten metal that does not burn because you have made a deal with it not to burn you and pulling out the head of an axe, these are the things a magician does.

Certain types of magic get what is close to a free pass: if you're higher up on the food chain, you can usually just do it. Locksmiths can open locks with some sweet talk and a tool, awahee are born with the ability to tell their elements what to do (within limits, as outlined below), and most adventurer types can tell their fire to best light itself before they do something drastic. New magicians getting into the game can temper their names by demonstrating mental and authoritative superiority over stuff. Magic is the act of getting things to do what you want by showing them you know better than they do. On the other hand, there's certain things that never get a free pass no matter how good you are, and you always need to go in and punch them wielding arguments and the armor of authority.

These include, but are not limited to: curses (because you are often not the person who placed the curse), diseases (who are just trying to do their job), mind control, mind reading (both because a person's mental geography is a place where they have absolute authority and you have to convince their subconscious mind that you are in charge of that most private of places), and shapeshifting (you are subverting the entire cycle of life itself by saying you know better).

Doing these things usually requires entering a metaphorical geographical location and punching everything you see until it relents or sweet talking it. Again, you can get better at this by cutting your teeth on spiritual things and getting a name for yourself. Your reputation can be a weapon. You also run the risk of making that thing more powerful as it becomes wise to your tricks or your fighting style, which is why this is frowned upon when it comes to the untrained fighting diseases or curses.

Aside from using mana to force an object, process, or spirit into acquiescence, whether by family line or obligation, there are methods by which processes and forces can be combined to achieve work results. Understanding these processes is very important for most forms of metal working; the more you know about how something works before you start telling it what to do, the less you'll have to actually force it to do something to behave in a way that isn't in its primary nature. The vast majority of people just don't have the mana to tell a giant stone block to fly, so they throw it on log rollers.

An item to which you've given instructions can't just endlessly repeat them forever, so utilizing the base properties of materials is often more efficient for the purposes of creating an infrastructure than doing a little song and dance routine. The wonder-workers who first experimented with such things are responsible for a wide variety of advancements and techniques, from complexities such as teotl extraction to simple solutions such as trapezoidal doorways in earthquake-prone areas.

Basically, magic is a contract between you and some aspect of the world to act within its purview on your behalf. Only if you apply your own power to that aspect can it start doing things outside its purview: doors open and close, prevent things from passing through, block light, and so on, which is the door using applying own mana – but it can't get up, splinter into a person-shaped thing and start punching your enemies unless you're willing to lend it the weight of your own mana.

[raygun goth]

Since, aside from humans, they're the most "PC-ready" race, I'm going to talk golems.
http://img07.deviantart.net/3e29/i/2012/304/d/b/aesca_races___lineup_by_mr_author-d5jjawe.jpg


http://orig06.deviantart.net/5675/f/2013/108/1/b/golems_by_mr_author-d624ixe.jpg

It might be argued that the first golems of the age were the mandrakes, a plant and dirt-based homunculus produced through a ritual involving the killing of ten humans, burying their remains under an execution tree, and waiting a year and a day. The being created by this process is a counterfeit human with stolen mana that has a reduced sense of empathy (or even none at all), pattern obsession, and bleeds mud and grave mist. This process is very illegal, but it was experimentation with it that led to the creation of the first true golems.


The creators of the first golems adapted the mandrake process and streamlined its requirements, creating the same sorts of mana the murders would produce through torture, and the mana of the tree through careful execution of only a single person, reducing the time of the formation of the body by constructing one beforehand, turning the body into a mana cycle entrapment circle, powered by the human soul wiped clean of its orgus. The entire procedure could take as little as a day as opposed to a year or more, depending on the willpower of the subject. As their experiments continued to the time leading up to the war, golems took on ever more bizarre shapes and materials. A side effect of the process caused collapse and breakdown if the golem lost a hand or a foot, which damaged the one large circle of which they were made.

The process was then adopted by International Military Mechanica as an experiment to produce tank pilots and crews that would prevent humans from being harmed or officers that could quell riots without really being in danger, “mechanical women” would be bulky, metallic things that would, as the project put it, “save humanity” and provide absolute immortality by taking the human out of the equation. It was not to be, and the process was revealed to the public at large, who recoiled in horror at the idea. Several countries passed laws forbidding its use, and the golem was cast as the monster in popular culture.


This would have been the end, if it were not for the fact that the reason for the revelation of the process was the golems themselves, who began to behave like humans, to act on their own initiative, to challenge the assertions of the myths left over from the First Age by making decisions and creating new works of their own, from computators to paintings. Why they liked to build was no surprise to those who could see the Fire in them, and as more and more joined the ranks and wandered the ruins of old cities and lonely roads, the curiosity of scientists and engineers was piqued.

The invention of the computator at the tail end of the war's skirmishes, as well as the sky trap power plant, led scientists to wonder if the same sorts of processes could be applied on the golem's much smaller scale. Two decades of work resulted in one central sky trap worked around a myriad of circles and spirit houses that held zobani and mobs, all doing their one or two jobs together working in tandem to make one entity. This was more efficient since not only was there no murder involved, which pleased just about everyone, if a part became broken or a circle damaged, it could be replaced through a modular system, which pleased engineers.


It wasn't very long until the RobbyTronic golem was marketed to the world through Robby's Universal Robots, though this was deep into the second war, and the marching of the cold machines did little to help the oppressive air that exuded from the nuclear ruins of Armayood when it was bombed. Even so, as the war ended, the need for the machine to fill the needs of industry working amid post-war depression caused it to spread to almost every corner of the continent, and demand for other models continued to rise.

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These, too, became sentient, starting to demand pay, inject creativity into their work and asking for credit. The rumblings were slow to come from the companies that had bought them, though RUR introduced a buyback system whereby they would refund the cost of the golem for a cut of the golem's paycheck until they paid for their manufacturing cost, and thus the golem was introduced to personal debt, which is the day that many say they truly became a Great Race.


Robby's still makes golems, though these days they construct each other or are born straight from the rocks and stones through painting and song. This is usually the sign of a race on life support by the planet, so it must be seen if they continue to survive or acquire enough numbers to truly make an impact on history.


The toughness of the mandrakes is inherent in the golems, and even softer materials like bone hold up much better when animated by the mana of the machine, supported and held up by the personal strength and lineage inherent in the creature. RUR is responsible for some of this, for as the company begins to stand for an ideal and industry standard, golems produced by the company serve as a base lineage and family line for the passing of mana, and as golems continued to work for and inspire others, the mana they collect is also taken by the company. This does place a rather inordinate amount of responsibility on the company, who can no longer ruthlessly pursue profit as mana comes to them. It's been said of mana that one can be “pleasant or rich, and mana comes to the pleasant.” Even so, despite the reduction in profits that comes with remaining a personal company, their products still sell, since each golem works off its own manufacturing cost.


Other companies produce golems, including Military Mechanica and Jofield, but their departments are much smaller and their golems, while they are independent, are usually inferior or single minded models, with the same problems relating to others that mandrakes possessed, and some say they even use the old methods, kidnapping those people who won't be missed or experimenting with quicker, easier, darker methods of construction. It should be noted that Seelie Energy Solutions also maintains a small golem production line, mostly to create fair competition for RUR, produce workers that can be present in hazardous environments, and to test the new sky trap devices that they will eventually manufacture and sell to other companies.

The whole of a golem's body is a constantly beating cycle of mana, smaller spirits, memes, and mechanics. They can be compared to a biological system rather well, actually, and it's because of this they can be considered emergent as a race. Golems can go just about anywhere, persist at elevations that give humans trouble, and even operate for a time on the ocean floor. They can run without tiring, march without their shoulders sagging, and most can even potentially clear out space in their bodies without hurting too much of their functionality. They make great soldiers, drudge workers, and hazardous environment operators. They are, however, still thinking beings, and the expense of using them in such environments often parallels putting humans in those situations, since they know their services are in demand, which allows them to earn a little bit more than the human worker, since most of the cost goes directly to the golem, rather than expensive equipment.


A golem's voice is usually the result of a set of five spirits working in tandem to do the talking. Because it works similar to the whispering spirits of a telephone line, words can come out garbled, direct, or drawn out; voice-deepening microphones and other such tricks are used to modulate the voice for a given model, and flickering lights are often installed to create the psychological impact of moving lips or some other method of keeping beat with the voice, should the golem not have a mouth or anything resembling one.

There is little unifying culture to golems; they don't eat, they drink very little, and while they do sleep, they don't need much to get a good night out of it, and most just sleep right where they're standing. Golems do, however, develop habits. The types of spirits used in their initial creation often deeply ingrain autonomic behaviors that they never truly rid themselves of, and that haunt them through their lives. The creative impulses that drive their manufacture and their movement through the days often drive them to be creative themselves, becoming painters or artisans. More so than any other race, expectations of what golems are and do follow them even in their own subconscious. Each golem has a set of behaviors and triggers that they are born with and will go to Death's Country carrying. These are different for each golem, but they are often predictable based upon what they were meant to do. A golem might try to fold every red piece of cloth it comes across, clean any kitchen it sees, or hoard corn seeds. These impulses aren't overriding; a golem won't march into a burning building to fold a towel, nor will it endanger other thinking beings to do so, but if presented with an option, the burning need to do so will make the current tasks before it ever more difficult.


No golem is made of one single material; synthetics jockey for position with natural materials, and in many cases, organic compounds make up the bulk of the machine, especially in older models. There are also independent operators, lackluster manufacturers, and experimental laboratories where construction using wide varieties of materials continues to yield new and fantastic variations on modern technology. It should be noted that whatever material the golem is made from must possess a non-living aura before the final adjustments are made; living metal is useless in a golem, except as an addition after the process is complete. Needless to say, any material used in a golem comes to life after the job is done. Clay and stone become living clay and living stone, wood fills with liquid, and metal takes on the oily, beating mana of a living thing.


Clay

Thick, wet, and sullen, clay can form both the outer shell, entire body, or the joints. When moving, clay golems will break, roil, and tear, their bodies constantly reforming and moving in a jerky, deliberate fashion, like jittering on a camera reel. Others move smoothly, the cracks closing over with a kind of sleek candor. The ones most often used are red clays, being common among the mountains and most often used in art. Typically it will not have been fired, and used directly as padding for the spirit houses in the golem's chest or forehead.


Bone and Wood

While not ideal materials, bone and wood can certainly be used in a golem's body. Bone has always been used in rituals to carve mana funnels, traps, and form the spine of many spirit houses, much like bark or worked sticks and branches. All golems have some bone or wood components, though those with them on the outside may look like straw men, bundles of sticks, or woven bone plates like muscle groups etched with glowing seals.


Metals, Rubber, and Synthetics
The most common of materials used in golem construction, metals have the benefit of being tough, outlasting most of them by potentially centuries, and metal golems are by far the most common. The new RobbyTronic models, for example, are metal and synthetic materials. Synthetic materials, made from ingredients found in the mana realms and wonder-workers plying their trade, can outlast even metals, and might allow the golem to live for millenia. Rubber is used in hoses, wires, and even faces to create the illusion of life in some of the more expensive models.

The Power of the Race: Inspiration

Songs and stories are more powerful than simple strands of music and words told by the firelight. They cast light on ourselves and our histories, they explain the world, and they contain powerful, immortal lessons about love, humanity, and hubris. Long have cultures believed that the storyteller and the singer hold much power. There are gods and demons whose dances herald destruction or new life, and the dances of death in Arcadia call upon that totem.


Mana washes ashore into the physical realm, draining out and then folding back inwards, filtering through Dreams, the Silver Web, and across the realms of Fate and Death. As it does, the nature of Dreams and the Silver Web coupled with the resonance created by both of them in the Near Realm color the mana washing to shore; a haunted house is feared, becoming more fearsome as the terror grows, and eventually it intrudes on the physical world, lengthening its halls, animating dolls and mirrors inside, attracting the unquiet dead, and so on.


Music can change the nature of a mind, even if only for a brief moment. Stories grant glimpses to other world, and movies and radio can make us laugh and cry. As has been seen, if the nature of the mind is changed, so can the nature of the place it resides. As mana washes over reality, it is changed and changes what lies around it, like water eroding the shore. Old theaters famous for tragedies become melancholy places haunted by crying ghosts, and places where stories of childhood are told to new adults, a quiet happiness creeps in to those who stay there, even if no story is told.


Musicians harness this phenomena, using their personal emotion and bodies to amplify that power, unleashing the emotional background of the world and of all humanity to affect change in it, attract ghosts, inflict great longing or happiness to break or mend souls, and bring their listeners to such elation or crushing despair that they are forever changed by the experience.


This all, of course, is workable by any race, human or otherwise; golems, however, are the race of Fire, and thus exemplify both creativity and ingenuity, being products of it. Their presence does something to the music, to the stories, and to any endeavor that requires both imagination and discovery. They inspire it in others, master artwork quickly, and become great scientists and engineers. As humans are the race of Ether and magic, golems have swiftly become the race of Fire and creativity. Their power is Inspiration, and their presence can inspire the very land itself into blooming with life and color, even as they rust and decay.


When a golem with Inspiration moves into an area, depending on the nature of the region, things change. The economy perks up a little as it works odd jobs, grass grows a little greener as it sits and waits in yards, buildings are reclaimed by the land and soft moss as it rests in the shade, painters, artists, and scientists get new ideas as it trundles around downtown. The effect is very minor; no one is likely to even notice at this point, though it can infuse itself or others with this power directly dependent on its mana, usually through performing, painting, or building. Through work considered dull by many and singing work songs, a golem can inspire others to be less affected by the drudgery they may feel.

http://orig09.deviantart.net/1785/f/2011/248/6/e/aesca_races__golem_by_mr_author-d490mee.jpg

[raygun goth]

Let's talk technology.

The most advanced materials in commercial use are synthetics such as bakelite and neoprene.

"Computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer)" are people - teams of mathematicians working on a problem. Aesca has adopted the word "computator" for the machines used to accomplish the same, after the early mechanical calculators of the era.

"Shamanism" is the magical process of guiding great races or humans through songlines and the Dream-time. Applied to computator science, shamans are capable of entering the geographical metaphor of a system and altering the metaphors, writing messages on walls, or outright telling the more complex spirits present their jobs in order to program the system to behave in a certain way.

Most "computing" technology uses tiny, weak spirits (called "mobs," after "mobile object") that either exist or don't, depending on the presence of electrical current and adjustment through a switch. Programming is a complicated affair that can either use a shaman-type magician (to lay down large sections of code at once) or through punch cards, manual switchboards, or, most recently, keyboards. Sometimes a system will use a few more powerful spirits capable of understanding the messages they're delivering or the information they're handling, but these types of networks can be finicky and more prone to wild self-speculation.

Telephone and television are run through lines from one spirit box to another - big cylindrical objects that look like modern transformers - with each spirit in the sequence repeating what it heard or saw on one end to the next. While this results in fairly accurate transmissions over short distances, as the spirits have no context and therefore are slightly more accurate at repetition than humans would be, over long distances, the messages break down, resulting in dream-like sequences on television shows and misheard, poorly translated speech on telephones and the like, rather than the garbled hiss of our radio or light-wave transmissions.

Ichor/Teotl (Needs Mention)

Called “blood of the world,” among other creative terminology, this substance, once thought of as pure Etheric energy in its physical form, can be found in thick veins beneath the surface of the earth. In most of the world, exposure to it invites madness, mutation, and uncontrolled magic. In Nazro, where the veins grow thick under the surface like blood rushing to the site of a wound, the teotl glows a bright violet color, and when extracted from the ground, allows the growth of plants and animals relatively free from most of the blight. Ichor denatures quickly upon exposure to the surface, and finding flowing veins in large caverns is very important to both ichor cults – who drink the stuff until their own blood is replaced, leaving their bodies shining in its soft colors – and to biomancers who use it to grow their own creations. Scientists from the world over come to Nazro just to study the unique properties of the ichor that flows beneath the continent.


Electrical generation for modern society is provided by several types of sources.

Crsytallizer Engine

Anchoring mobs with a variety of heavy memes, such as repeated arguments, results in a filament-like, crystalline substance that is charged with Light energy. When the Light is stripped away by using the crystal as the base in a filtered solution that collides with Dark mana, it releases electricity as the energy contained within the mobs is consumed by the reaction. This reaction must be carefully controlled, or else the mobs become stained by Darkness or are not reacted on at all.



Essence Engine

This engine type uses either one or several spirits that produce heat or electricity directly. An essence engine may use one large spirit, or it may use a trap circle containing multiple charge gates and multiple spirits. The simplest lock a fire spirit in a box with a switch panel to regulate its contract and issue orders to it. The most sophisticated of them have multiple chambers and use a constant mana cycle flow regulator to keep the spirits fed and in balance.


Sky Engine
Sky Engines take in water, filtrate it into pure Water, catalyze out Light and Dark aspects, isolate it, inject it with a Wood aspect, and as it reacts into pure Ether, inject it again with Wood and Rage/Savage elements and get raw electricity out in a controlled reaction, which is then drained directly to batteries. These engines have pure quartz elements and lenses that need regular maintenance and checks for imperfections, not to mention the containment cells required to chain the reactions. They use teotl for rapid Ether transference and stabilization.


Ichor Chamber Engine
This type of engine has pure teotl in a storage chamber. It may be combined with aspects of a sky engine (and, indeed, many ground power plants combine elements of all this and an essence engine) to produce more reliable power. These engines use small injections of corrupting ideas and influences to produce movement or heat within the teotl.


Savage Tallow Injector
A dangerous engine, used most frequently only by the most dangerous of Nazro sky pirates. It works similarly to an ichor chamber, but holds pure Rage/Savage mana and utilizes the fact that it's on board a ship to induce the production of movement and heat. These engines are volatile by their nature and have a tendency to detonate at random. Since Savage tallow doesn't like being confined in machine-made objects, these devices are often made of bone and volcanic glass.


Biofuel Engine

Primarily found among the biomancers in Jalpa, the Domere empire, and in variation among southeastern Elohino countries, this type of power plant uses a life form whose metabolic processes generate electricity or great amounts of heat. They're efficient, burn on hay and rice, but tend to produce lots of useless dung and need lots of upkeep. Basically, whatever you've got hooked up needs to be kept clean and fed. These life forms usually have no actual brain and are basically just sacks of organs in tubes.