Salutations, my curious congregation. Today we're going to be talking about magic, technology, and why most settings feel the need to pry them as far apart as possible as if letting them touch is going to cause a rift in the space time continuum.
TWs: If the title didn't tip you off I'm one of those radicals that likes to let magic and technology play nice together so if that bothers you, skip this one. Also I say fuck a lot.
Let me start off by saying I adore Shadowrun. It's one of my favorite settings to visit, and it's no small wonder why. The idea of being an elf five minutes into the future is unique and fun, and the fact that magic exists next to a machine gun tickles me. But it does one of those things that a lot of settings do that I just do not understand and that is the thing where if magic happens, technology doesn't like it, and vice versa.
But imagine for a second if that weren't the case. I know they made them anathema to one another so that people wouldn't end up with OP characters with both spells AND a ton of cyberware, but on a worldbuilding level the idea of mixing them together is just delicious to me.
Of course some settings do exactly that. I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV lately and it's full of magitech. In fact that is the trademark of what the big bad guy faction does, more or less. Take magic, jam it into technology, and watch the bad things happen.
Oh. Huh. It's almost like that setting doesn't think it's a very good idea, either.
Anyway, that's not the approach I'm taking with my setting Astrallis. Magic and Technology play very well together. There's no reason why they shouldn't. There are a ton of spells that directly interface with computers, things you can cast into the machine to make things easier for yourself or harder on your enemies.
And because magic and technology mesh so beautifully, you get things like the wyld AI.
So get this. AI are totally playable in this setting. But there's more than one kind. You have the programmed variety, that are basically what you'd have expected from artificial intelligence, and then you have the kind that happened because magic decided to tickle a few bits of stray code and put it together to form a kind of batshit but undeniably self aware entity.
They're sort of blue and orange morality, because they weren't created by anything human they were just created by wild magic. And they have a reputation kind of like the fey did in folklore; play nice with them and be careful because whatever logic they are operating on they never even considered trying to pretend that it was human.
Imagine working magic into how your ship runs, or to make your cybernetics work better. Spells to make you feel things through your metal arms. Entire programs that were woven together by spells. Oh yeah, it's hard and you have to consider a lot more, but it gives the players so much more room to play with things and I love it, conceptually.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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