Magipunk:Main Page

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A fantasy world "seventy-five years later," Magipunk is a game-setting for those who want to marry traditional fantasy with the cyber/steam/whatever-punk genres. It is a world in the throes of a painful change as a magic-based industrial revolution shakes society to its core.

Magipunk is not tied to any one system at present. However, in a few cases, pseudo-game mechanics are included in the text of the project, in order to explain ideas to a level of specificity needed for conversion into a viable RPG setting.

Table of Contents


Project Notes

I (Mike "Epoch" Sullivan) initially conceived Magipunk as a project that would take input from a variety of people, but of which I would ultimately retain editorial control. I think that kind of approach has a lot of merit to it, but it does tie everything to me, and it's clear that I haven't made a lot of forward progress in the recent months. As such, that philosophy is officially out the window. If you want to add something, this is a wiki, go ahead.

I created a little navigation template to help tie the project pages together. It can be found at Template:Magipunk_Template, and can be included in any new pages you create by using the syntax: {{Magipunk_Template}} right at the top of the page (just copy and paste the bold text to the very top of your new page, and the navigation menu will show up. I promise).

Pages in this project should have their titles of the form Magipunk:Whatever, where Whatever is what the page is about.

A note on style:

Magipunk endeavours to sound like the hybrid of antique and modern concepts that it is. As such, we use a few deliberate archaisms and affectations of speech in describing it.

We use the term "Mill" in place of "factory" or similar words. Any place where industrial work is done is a Mill, whether it produces actual milled products like flour, worked hard-goods like wagon-wheels, or magical goods like power-tokens (the Church-Mills being the place for that last production). We avoid referring to businesses as "companies" or "corporations" -- they're either Alliances if they're big enough, or "shops," "businesses," or the like. There is no concept of incorporation in the laws of Magipunk. Minor medical work is done not by doctors but by barbers or chirurgeons. You don't call any particular group of people the Police as a proper noun -- the Watch, the Alliance enforcers, and the Royal Guard all sometimes police the city, but they aren't the Police. Something I haven't been good at doing, but should have, is to refer to the Alliance police forces as "enforcers," rather than "guards." This terminology plays up the antagonistic nature of the Alliance forces.

Given names are generally made by mangling common English names (Mek is from "Max," Lise is "Lisa," Aren is "Aaron," Kevam is "Kevin," etc.). Surnames are segregated by class. People of the lower classes tend to be named either for a profession (Carter, Smith, etc.), or from their parents names. In that case, "sen" (for son) or "dotter" (for daughter) are usually applied. People of the nobility are given meaningless "fantasy" collections of syllables (Roget, Telomay, Usker, etc.).