Magipunk:Setting
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| Setting |
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Magipunk is set in a world beset by problems of fast magical advance, dirty urbanization, social stratification, rampant crime, and spiritual crisis. It's a grim place to live, but the very rapid changes which give rise to its problems offer at least the possibility of change for the better.
Contents
Overview[edit]
A Fantasy Despoiled[edit]
Approximately 75 years ago, the world of Magipunk was much different: a typical feudal swords and sorcery world. That world, now gone, is much of what you'd expect from Tolkienesque fantasy. There were large human kingdoms ruled by nobles that oversaw peasants who mostly farmed. Small cities with tradesman and artisans, and what little power those commoners had was collected into trade guilds. There was a well-developed religion worshiping six gods, and the Churches were the major check on Noble power.
Magic existed in that world: Sorcerers were able to do wondrous feats, but they required mana to power their magic, and mana could be generated only be rigorous ascetic training, or sincere religious belief. Sorcerers tended to be either devout holy men, or hermits living in seclusion from society.
In the deep forests, ancient and wise Elves lived a life much removed from humans, their lives revolving around husbanding the forest, changing and altering their still-living environment for their own use, and for aesthetic enjoyment. Meanwhile, mercantile Dwarves were the most technologically advanced race, enjoying plentiful trade with the more numerous humans. Finally, at the edges of the civilized worlds, brutal Orcs skulked and raided, and occasionally even sent armies against the nobler species. Occasionally, a dragon would wake from decades-long slumbers and terrorize the land until it either again vanished into sleep, or was found and killed, generally at great cost.
This fantasy world had been stable, changing in the specifics but not the broad generalities, for hundreds of years. But it changed practically overnight.
Religion for Sale[edit]
What changed the world was an Elvish drug called Ellekintlin, or, roughly translated, "The Passion of the Saints." In Elves, the drug induces mild euphoria, and facilitates a trance-state that religious types believed brought them closer to their gods. It was in infrequent but broad use among Elves for hundreds of years before a human tried it.
Most Elvish drugs do little or nothing when ingested by a human, but Ellekintlin is an exception. Its effects are greatly intensified when a human takes it, leading not to mild facilitation of the religious experience, but instant and total religious fervor, a state of mind in which the user immediately accepts totally the divine experience, and helplessly worships. Though this state of mind is chemically induced, it is absolutely real: Though the user might later recant his experience, at the time when he's under the effect of the drug, he devoutly and sincerely believes.
And the Gods respond to that belief. Quickly, Passion (as it came to be called by most humans) came into broad use among the human clergy, who found that their doubts fell away when they used it, and that their Gods, in response, would grant them more mana, giving them more ability to spread their faith in the world.
It didn't take long for Passion to go beyond the clergy. Its effects are strong enough that even peasants unfamiliar with the form or dogma of a religion can none-the-less be guided through the prayers which generate mana. Indeed, this was more efficient for the sorcerer-Priests, who could use laypeople to generate their mana, and then cast their spells clear-headed and immediately (use of Passion makes a human rather useless for anything besides worship). Magical power in quantities unheard of any time in the history of the world were now commonplace, and the system which eventually became known as the Church-Mills was founded.
The Magical Revolution[edit]
Commonplace magic didn't stay within the churches for long. Many of the higher-ranking priests were Nobles who had perhaps not taken their vows to set aside the secular world as seriously as they might have. Others were scholars who had close relationships with secular sorcerers, both eager to improve their shared art. And everyone had dealings with the trade guilds who kept the infrastructure of the world going.
The Churches were magic-rich but cash-poor. The process of selling mana came naturally to them, and as cheap, plentiful mana became available to all, the sorcerous arts proliferated. With ten, and then a hundred, times as many sorcerers as there had been, ancient and inefficient traditions of secrecy and ritual fell away, and the state of the art in magic advanced in leaps and bounds.
Many of the new sorcerers were commoners and tradesmen, and magic was turned to producing first the luxury goods that nobles craved, and then the common goods that everyone needed. Assembly-lines of specially-trained sorcerers produced goods of incredible quality in a tenth the time and half the cost that old mechanical methods had, but put a huge drain on the available mana supply. In response, the Churches, getting more secular by the moment, drew on the peasant supply from the farmlands, drawing more and more youths into the Church-Mills, to produce more mana. Meanwhile, the Elves were being showered in money to keep producing more and more Passion to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from the Church-Mills.
The guilds wanted political power, the Nobles wanted more goods faster, and slowly, the distinction between the two faded: Guilds and Nobles Houses were replaced by Alliances, gigantic organizations that have a stranglehold on the human trade and political power. The manpower needs of the Church-Mills and the Alliances are enormous, and have fueled an incredible urbanization as they draw more and more peasants to the cities in order to work in terrible conditions to keep the machinery of modern-day life in motion.
Human Supremacy[edit]
Passion has its profound effects only on humans. Elves are, as ever, mildly affected by it, and the other races not at all. The other races saw humanity dramatically outpacing them in every magical area.
The Orcs fared the worst. They had traditionally lived in badlands, the sort of area that no army could succesfully penetrate without being bled dry by guerilla tactics. But that was before plentiful mana allowed humans to see perfectly in the night, to destroy entire settlements with magefire, to kill Orcs from beyond bow-range. Nobles seeking glory launched a series of genocidal campaigns against the Orcs, reducing their population to less than 5% of its pre-Passion high.
Similarly, Dragons were hunted basically to extinction. When one awoke from its slumber to raze the countryside now, it was greeted by magic powerful enough to knock it from the sky and burn it to mere bones.
Elves, on the other hand, had an expertise that humanity desperately needed: The ability to make Passion. Elves were assimilated: their secluded forests first invaded by tradesmen, and then their people tempted with offers of ludicrous wealth to move ever closer to the centers of human industry in order to more efficiently serve the needs of the Church-Mills. Humanity held Elves with a powerful carrot and stick: those who cooperated were rewarded with the benefits of living as an upper-class individual in the magic-rich human society. Behind that was the unstated but ever-felt threat that what happened to Orcs could happen to Elves, too; humans can produce Passion themselves, if they need to.
The Dwarves, seeing the fate of the Orcs and the Elves, withdrew from the world. They abandoned their trading posts and shallower mines, and withdrew to their cities deep beneath the mountain, hoping to escape the long arm of humanity. Thus far, they have been succesful.
The Modern Day[edit]
Generations have now passed since the discovery of Passion. The dominance of the Church-Mills and the Alliances is complete. The cities of the human world are now vast, sprawling affairs, filled with hastily erected, shoddy buildings that house uncounted hordes of uneducated, illiterate peasants who work for the Church-Mills or the production lines of the Alliances. These cities stink with the byproducts of the various processes, of the tides of humanity, and hum with magical potency. Urban sprawl, and the attendent social problems, has come to the world.
At the same time that magical advances have fueled social and physical changes, people have been hard-pressed to keep up. The social stratification of the feudal world has been changed, but not broken: still, 5% of the population controls well over 95% of the wealth. The children of peasants have little opportunity to legitimately advance in the world, sending an increasing number into lives of crime.
But the situation is none-too-good even for those at the stop of the social ladder. The masses cannot be contained forever, and the pace of the continuing changes in the state of the art work against cozy bureaucratic power structures. In a world where every spell is obsolete a year after it's created, where every factor of society is different from what it was a generation ago, is a world that belongs to the youth. As profound as the changes that wracked the world have been, what's coming is greater.
And then there's the prophecies of doom. Even the thoroughly corrupt modern Churches can not ignore the coming end of an Age, as cults spring up among the lower class and the old faiths die.
Atathorn[edit]
Atathorn, the jewel of the West, capital of the Kingdom of Branmir, is the city which most exemplifies the new order, the tumultuous modern world. A city of some two million souls, Atathorn is the largest population center in its region, and a center of trade, political power, and wealth. It houses such architectural wonders as the Dragon Gate and the oldest and largest in-city Elf District in the world.
Atathorn is the home and power-base of the Glassmakers Alliance and the Roget Alliance, and the Spinners Alliance has recently established a major presence as well, and those three organizations shape its economic landscape, though the Arlan Alliance and the Millers Alliance also have toeholds in the city. Politically, the Royal Family, weakened by the depredations of the Alliances and Church-Mills elsewhere in the Kingdom, still have their potency in the capital.
Viewed from above, Atathorn looks like a messy series of concentric rings. At its center, the Royal Palace. Beyond that, old, walled Atathorn, the remnants of the medieval city. Surrounding that, the old trade districts, the part of the city that was new and urban in the days before Passion. And beyond that, the slums of the new order, the largest parts of the city, housing the countless peasant masses.
Within these broad rings, you can find Atathorn's Temple District, its air sickly sweet with the smoke burned from two-ton blocks of incense, the sounds of endless chanting almost covered by the constant high-pitched jingle of tens of thousands of power tokens being moved through prayer-lines, then put in huge barrels and distributed across the city, and all of that overlayed by the subsonic hum of magical energy.
Near the Temple District are the Alliance Mills, huge, non-descript buildings in which semi-trained peasants labour to create the goods of day-to-day life for those who can afford them. Here, the omnipresent smoke lacks the sweetness of the Church-Mills, and the tinkling of the power tokens is replaced by heavier clangs of iron and bronze. The streets are more broken under the heavy loads that the wagons carry, and the hum of unused magical power is replaced by the ozone smell and electrical feeling of magic being discharged in quantity.
The richest areas of Atathorn are characterized by stone, gothic architecture and beautiful gardens tended by Elves. The poorest areas by wooden shanties covered in illiterate grafitti while Goblin children beg in the gutters. But what unifies the city is a sense of lurching towards the future, unprepared, unready, but unwilling to stop or even slow down. Change is in the air, on the lips of the cult-gangs of the dockside, the worried creases in the brows of the Alliance guilders, even penetrating the befuddled numinous experiences of the Passion-addled Church-Mill workers.
Atathorn is a city on the brink. On the brink of what? Nobody knows.
Setting Concepts[edit]
The setting of Magipunk is set up to facilitate two different goals. The first is an aesthetic one: the game is intended to be set in a dirty, grungey urban dystopia. The second goal is thematic: the game is intended to be one of constant change. To an extent, these goals can work against each other.
It is easy, when presenting an urban hellhole like Atathorn, and particularly when that urban hellhole is controlled by powerful forces like the Alliances, to fall into a mood of stasis -- to portray the city as timeless and unchanging. Remember that nothing could be further from the truth! Atathorn was a noticeably different city just ten years ago, and twenty years ago, it was almost unrecognizable. The slums of the New City are dingey and broken-down not because they're ancient and decrepit, but because they were cheaply made and hard-used.
Atathorn, in fact, is probably the most rapidly changing, and most "advanced," location in the setting. It can help set a mood of change if this is acknowledged in the game -- if the PC's occasionally meet newcomers to the city from parts of the world that the high-magic economy hasn't transformed, yet, or if they hear from older friends about times in living memory when there were no Alliances, just Guilds and Nobles. The atmosphere of Atathorn, though desperate, is not hopeless or stagnant, and the supposed movers and shakers are at least as concerned about the future as the workers in the streets.
