What do you guys feel about Magitek? Any good examples of its implementation?

I like it in theory, but it often attracts bad design.

I agree to a certain extent. If magitech is around, it should be special and/or rare in some way. Making it lost technology from an ancient civilization is just one way to do this.

In the game I'm running, there's an evil empire that has a monopoly on the ancient civilization's magitek and is doing their best to duplicate it. The stuff they make isn't nearly as strong or as reliable as the stuff they dug up (which is usually too precious to ever actually send out into the field and risk destruction or capture) but it still gives them an edge over their foes, who still think black powder weapons and plate armour are new and exciting.

Magitek/magitech makes my dick ROCK HARD.

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This. I'm a sucker for magitech and crystaltech. There's something about a unity between modern technology and nebulous power that feels satisfying seeing it come together, including small bits of modern convenience. In Skies of Arcadia, nearly everything technological is powered by moon stones, bits and flakes of magical rock that are each attuned to one of the six colored moons, each with a different element associated with it. For example, you can have a street light powered by a small red (fire) moonstone that lights up at night.

You. I like you. You get me.

Magitek? Don't you mean ARTIFICE?

It's a good niche. BOTW got a good aesthetic for the stuff but poor implementation, but that might just be because I don't like the temples being giant animal constructs. Which is weird because giant super powered constructs rising from the ruins of their lost civilization to wipe out the current civilization cause it's "Eliminate Threat" button is stuck is one of my favorite tropes.

>crystals powering ancient devices
We're friends now

mein brethren

Kaladesh was bae and shit like SG-Atlantis and the disney Atlantis toon were the tastiest of crystal magic nonsense

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consider the following:

your draw towards crystal tech (and the multitude of similar depictions of it in fiction, overall) may be a holdover in your genetic memory from the world-spanning antediluvian civilization (atlantis, lemuria, the empire of mu, etc) in which it may have been a very real thing. a properly constructed artificial crystal has the potential to store vast amounts of both data and energy.

I could speak on this subject for days though, so before I start rambling I'll leave it at that.

If a natural resource exists, the idea that tool-using creatures would NOT make use of it as a tool is foolish.

Extrapolating from that, the existence of magic should imply that it will be a part of technological development. The real question is whether or not you think it should lead to more advanced technology more quickly, and how you think it should change the course of development. Moreover, magic being rare and expensive may mean that it only has an impact on the production process, or even only on goods available to the upper classes.

There are exceptions, of course. If the setting has a god of magic who explicitly wants magic to remain "pure," there could be divine roadblocks to this sort of thing. If magic has only arrived in the setting comparatively recently, technology may not have had time to integrate it.

Ah, yes. Though the best tech was undoubtedly just before the Finno-Korean hyperwar at the height of the ancient Finnish empire.

Can we talk a bit about textiles in fantasy settings, OP?

Like, she appears to be wearing a skin-tight elastic suit under that armor, which shouldn't be possible without something equivalent to mid-20th century synthetic fabrics.

>she

I mean...

A) That's a boy
B) The game is set after an apocalypse, and the civilization that came before is implied to be some kind of super tech empire

I'm going to be real with you my man, I honestly believe that something like the hyperwar happened. obviously not as depicted in the meme, but i think the idea of a world-spanning hyper advanced civilization that was destroyed (or destroyed itself) in a global disaster is 100% plausible, especially given the amount of things that are just unexplainable in the world.

Not to be an ass, but if you really think so much of the world is unexplainable you should probably work harder to understand it.

They simply had the technology. It was since lost.

I feel you my man. The Finno-Korean hyperwar was a historical tragedy, and the loss of scientific knowledge is still felt to this day. This painful conflict helped shape most of the world afterwards.

A second of silence for those two civilizations lost to the ravage of war. We can only hope to regain the depth of the knowledge lost.

Is there an issue with that?
While "Sci-Fi" often has a cold mechanical feel to it magitech has a more warm feeling to it.

Magitech has a more cozy feeling to me, it's much better to look at intricately carved stone/metal powered by glowing elemental crystals than it is to look at wires and nuclear cores.

But then it's just another source of lost artifacts and makes no meaningful impact on the setting.

Oh man, I never considered that. It's not as though fantasy settings and science fiction have entirely different considerations of technology and themes. No, there's nothing to divide them than the obsessive focus on medievalism that has utterly stifled one and basically eclipsed the much more varied fiction that was at its origins or anything.

Would hardly be the first person to make mistake.

The higher the fantasy and the softer the sci-fi, the more things start blending together. Remember, fantasy and sci-fi exist on a spectrum.
Also, real talk, settings like that in Duelyst and Shardbound are wasted on the games they're in.

I've spent most of my life working very hard to understand it, and there are things that just do not make sense, or rather, make more sense when viewed from a different perspective than is presented by the establishment.

there are mountains of evidence that an advanced civilization existed in the distant past but there are people who work very hard to discredit it because it doesn't fit the narrative

I don't mind going full Sci-fi with magitech.

The world doesn't have to make sense

What sort of 'evidence?

Gigantic too. Gigantic would make an amazing setting.

Basically
>Land was full of monsters, humans lived trying to survive.
>Star fell
>Woman made an altar to the star, going blind
>Star was actually a "chariot" for higher dimensional beings who are essentially physical gods called eternals
>Eternals appoint woman to be leader of a new religion, teaching her ritual to infuse creatures with the power of the star to protect them
>Big empire is created with 5 houses
>One of the houses is learning to harness this energy to create stuff like airships, massive mining operations, robots and Jaegers
>Tonnes of bizzare tech mixed in with magic and fantasy.
>People going to war because with empire is no longer needed to keep people safe from monsters now that people understand how to create guardians and harness the star energy.

I love it to death, and it is a major part of my Wild Western Fantasy setting.

W-what if we m-made a Crystal Magitek setting...together?

I'd kill for an RPG set in Runeterra.
>cities of magitech
>magic everywhere
>celestials and demigods casually walking the world
>can wander from a traditional swords and sorcery, to wuxia, to pirate adventures
C'mon Riot. give it to me.

Man, I played both of those games, and it is, in fact, a waste.

>she

the remains of an enormous stone road in the middle of the pacific ocean, the underwater pyramids off the coast of japan, the nazca lines, the fact that the stones of the walls of machu picchu are cut with such laserlike precision that you can't slip a credit card between them despite the fact the incas had a bronze age tech level, the massive cities all through south and central america despite the fact no evidence of the wheel has been found prior to european expansion, the Baghdad battery, the fact that the Mahabharata (and a great deal of myth the world over, really) reads suspiciously like a primitive culture's take on high technology, the worldwide proliferation of pyramidic structures that all seem to have something to do with astronomy....I could go on for days

makes great fodder for worldbuilding

It is the logical conclusion in any setting where magic is something that can be studied and used as a tool. Even if magic is something that only comes from the gods, the soul, or is powered by belief or disbelief, you bet your ass people will still find a way to artificially create gods, mutate souls, and exploit antimemetics.

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How are nazca lines supposed to be impressive? It's no different than kids drawing by walking on the snow.

they're only coherent shapes when viewed from a top-down/aerial perspective, otherwise they just look like a bunch of random lines

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>the largest figures stretch over a thousand feet
>patterns designed specifically for viewing from an aerial position on a dry, isolated plateau
It's not so much that they're impressive, though they are. It's the fact that they are a mysterious earthwork given the fact that the people who built them never would have actually seen the designs that they were constructing.

People have built watchtowers for worse reasons.

>enormous stone road in the middle of the pacific
What's this?

Except there's never been any sign of structures built for this purpose on the plateau, and it's a high altitude, low moisture area which is part of why the Nazca Lines themselves have been preserved for so long.

i fail to see the relevance of that in any way shape or form

People have torn down watchtowers and re-used the materials for all sorts of reasons.

What, a nigga can't talk about the nazca lines without trying to make a point about ancient aliums?

The snow drawings also can't be viewed straight on from the ground, but kids somehow make them.
It may look like random lines for someone who doesn't know what it is, but not to the person drawing.

it's in the carribean, my mistake

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimini_Road
this is just the largest known section, smaller bits have been found as well

I genuinely love magitech commonplace. I think one good example is Eberron setting and Spelljammer. I just people love magical settings beyond urban and medieval to show technological evolution with such wondrous powers.

>a naturally occuring geologic formation
Oh.

the difference in scale between a children making shapes in the snow and the nazca lines is a little different, don't you think?

In theory I like it, but often find the execution offputting and bland.

I really like the idea of a typical medieval fantasy setting just being a primitive backwater in an industrial magitech world, though.

What're some ways that makes magitech more interesting? Something more than just giving a fantasy world sci-fi tech?

Maybe they were trying to one-up each other on who can make the biggest drawing and it got out of hand.

>The consensus among geologists and archaeologists is that the Bimini Road is a natural feature composed of beachrock that orthogonal and other joints have broken up into rectangular, subrectangular, polygonal, and irregular blocks.
Is "it's a conspiracy and they're all in on it" really the most sensible explanation here?

Like magitek in what setting?

I suppose in something like Final Fantasy, it's implied that magic is a coherent science that's just not well understood by most, and magitek creations are simply refinements of the science into useful technology. What was once the domain of spellcasters and other magical beasts is now distilled into a simple form for use by the general public, which honestly just means you eventually wind up in an industrial era world.

I would generally eschew magitek in favor of actual technology, mainly because I prefer magic to be a distinct, non-scientific concept that comes from an external entity such as a deity and thus does not follow specific laws on its behavior, instead existing as a function of said entity's reach into the natural world. This means magic is wild, unpredictable, unique, and most importantly, something not easily abused by the players since magic doesn't quite function in the same way each time its used. When a world starts developing specific repeatable rules and laws governing magic, it starts to lose its flair and simply becomes another implement like a sword for a fighter.

>we don't have a better explanation and it doesn't fit the narrative, let's just say it's a natural formation

come on man, did you even bother looking up an image of the thing?

By not using magitech as an excuse for sci-fi tech but rather as an explanation for Industrial Revolution tech. Magitech lamps and locomotives, primitive automatons, telegraph.

Bonus points if magitech is basically just used as the bleeding edge and the technology is modified to run off coal or some other mundane power-source. Such as locomotives first being designed to run off of some magical powersource before being converted down into steam locomotives after the basic mechanics are confirmed to work.

If this 'road' is supposed to be proof of some high-tech ancient civilisation, where's the rest of their infrastructure? What's so special about this stretch of nowhere that it needed a bit of magical adamantium pavement?

Not related, but I always loved the idea of a game where mechs existed but ran off of 60-90s era internal combustion engines fueled by petroleum products. The thought of a hydrolic propulsion system mostly powered by a simple engine sticking out the back of it, trembling under the weight of its imbalanced form is pretty awesome.

you'd laugh at me if i tried to tell you, there's no point. none of it is "magical", it's a stone road. and all of the other stuff is just the result of technology that utilizes energies we don't understand yet.

if you tried to tell a person from the 1700s about gamma radiation, x-rays and microwaves they'd look at you like a lunatic. the same principle applies

That midget makes mine hard.

>midget
user... that's an 11 year old girl. You're a digital pedophile.

I suppose that's at least slightly better than being a real pedophile. Or worse, depending on your perspective, since real pedophiles are a bit more hidden. Maybe he's both, but that's uncommon, at least as far as I know.

Wouldn't it work the other way around? Especially if magic is a cleaner, more environmentally safe alternative to coal?

>the remains of an enormous stone road in the middle of the pacific ocean,
>the underwater pyramids off the coast of japan,
That is a rare, but known type of underwater erosion and the stone it's made of is perfect for it to form like that

>the nazca lines,
Geoglyphs aren't that hard to make with a decent amount of coordination and planning, primitive does not mean stupid

>the fact that the stones of the walls of machu picchu are cut with such laserlike precision that you can't slip a credit card between them despite the fact the incas had a bronze age tech level,
Once again, primitive does not mean stupid, planning. measurement, and a workforce that is largely idle when crops are not in season can go a long way

>the massive cities all through south and central america despite the fact no evidence of the wheel has been found prior to european expansion,
The wheel and roads are MASSIVELY unsuited for such terrain, and they did have the wheel but it was used almost exclusively in toys because again, it's a shit idea to bother with using wheeled things to transport things there without modern tech

>the Baghdad battery,
That one is still a mystery I'll admit, but again primitive does not mean stupid, though regardless of what it was used for, there's no other evidence that they had knowledge of things like electroplating or other electrical usage at that time

>the fact that the Mahabharata (and a great deal of myth the world over, really) reads suspiciously like a primitive culture's take on high technology,
I question if that's us comparing it to things we know but I lack sufficient knowledge of cultural development of those myths to give a good explanation

>the worldwide proliferation of pyramidic structures that all seem to have something to do with astronomy
Astronomy was very important back then for various reasons, and pyramids are an extremely stable structure, if you want to build BIG with the resources they had you have to use them

Yeah, okay. But why did this ancient superciv not build anything else that's quite as durable as this random piece of 'road'?

And who is paying off all these geologists?

is he really a pedo if he thought it was a midget? as common as halflings, dwarves, etc are in fantasy can you really blame him for not realizing it wasn't a stylized depiction of a fully grown little person?

Will he ever learn to read instructions?

If there were an ancient advanced civilization we'd be digging up their styrofoam cups and water bottles.

I would like to note we have found such drawings in other parts of the world, the Nazca lines are just the best preserved, we have historical records for when/who made some of them, and yeah, none of them could be viewed by the people who made them, it's literally the same as a child's drawing in snow like you compared it to

Most of them are the size of a football field. Tell me you can't see the lines of a football field when you stand on one.

>Irregular units of blocks
>utilizes energies we don't understand yet.
That's a shittily designed road for something built by people able to protect it with energy, it offends me as an engineer

Not necessarily. If you have some sort of magitech engine that uses a magical material that's essentially crystalline magical energy, you might have something roughly as powerful as a pint-sized fusion reactor compared to a coal-burning steam engine. And if you have artificers that are dedicating themselves to innovating crazy shit out of an incredibly energy potent and efficient engine that can put out a hundred times as much energy as a coal-burning equivalent, then it becomes far easiest for those artificiers to build all sorts of devices that might be unweildy or simply too bulky to be practical using a mundane energy source.

Say a pound of crystallized magical energy has the same energy potential as a thousand pounds of coal, and now think about which one of those an artificer trying to build an automaton soldier would design their invention to use. Some devices might fade into mundane replacements soon enough like locomotives and steamships, though things like airships would possibly take decades to simplify into a mundane equivalent.

Maybe their polymers were advanced enough to be biodegradable while highly useful

i'll admit that the nazca lines may just be doodles, but you can't say just say "nah man the primitive people totally knew math" to refute when my entire premise is that the ancients were on literal protoss levels of technology and knowledge

regarding machu piccu, there's a difference between "they knew how to do stuff" and the possible use of technology like laser cutting (i wasn't being rhetorical) that we've only had for a few decades ourselves

as for their practical use of the wheel, the terrain is no more harsh than places in asia and they made plenty of use of the wheel

regarding the mahabarata:
>An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose with all its splendour. It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. The corpses were so burned
as to be unrecognizable. Hair and nails fell out; Pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours
all foodstuffs were infected, and to escape from this fire the soldiers threw themselves in streams
to wash themselves and their equipment.

if that doesn't sound like a nuclear detonation and the effects of the resultant fallout, what is it?

I see what you mean. It was a joke, but I'm not particularly witty so I didn't expect anyone to catch it.

the pyramids were part of the globe-spanning data and energy transfer system and they're still mostly intact.

it's also been neglected and underwater for the better part of a million years, what do you expect?

>it's also been neglected and underwater for the better part of a million years, what do you expect?
>Neglect has caused some blocks to grow bigger than others and some to shrink yet they still lock into place
I'm not complaining about erosion, I'm complaining about the lack of a regular pattern ya idiot, there's no fucking standardization in size/shape

>"nah man the primitive people totally knew math"
It's not a matter of them probably knowing math, it's a matter of yes, we have other records of other people doing similar things with literally nothing more than one guy working out the design and a bunch of other guys to follow orders

>and the possible use of technology like laser cutting (i wasn't being rhetorical) that we've only had for a few decades ourselves
You can get the same effect with more primitive tools and enough dedication user, "Laser cut precision" is something you actually see a lot in old stone structures, there is lost technology there, but it's not hyper advanced stuff, it's carving techniques passed down from master to apprentice that no one bothered to record once shenanigans happened and that type of work isn't in high demand
We had a similar case happen with glass bowing in the fucking 1980's when a number of skyscrappers couldn't have their windows replaced because we lost the tech to make the curved type of glass they used, not cause of some cataclysm, but cause the last guy who knew how to make it didn't bother to write it down before he fucking died

>as for their practical use of the wheel, the terrain is no more harsh than places in asia and they made plenty of use of the wheel
The terrain is remarkably unsuited there, both extremely hilly and full of roots, permanent roads are wheeled carts are near useless compared to simply carrying it. And parts of asia were historically in similar states, wheels weren't used because they didn't really save any labor. And once again, they had the wheel, we found things that used them, they were all wooden toys

>if that doesn't sound like a nuclear detonation and the effects of the resultant fallout, what is it?
Again, without a knowledge of how the myth developed and changed over the years I lack the necessary context to give a decent answer

i don't know what to tell you my man, i'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me so we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Take Final Fantasy 7's materia and combine it with 12's Crystals.

Crystals are the physical manifestation of soul stuff from all living beings and sentient beings. Intelligent beings indirect contribute to this as the collective intelligence and knowledge is absorbed by said crystals giving them power. While crystals can be exhausted the energy will eventually cycle it's way back into the planet so long as it's not over mined or corrupted.

some crystals are event sentient in their own right.

This. Magic should be the antithesis to science. I'd prefer a setting to have the industrial age develop in spite of magic, not because of it. Merging science and magic rusn the risk of watering down both Of course, there's no accounting for taste.

>What do you guys feel about Magitek?
Love it

>muh magic vs science
Fucking gay. It's overdone tripe and unless you're fully taking magic out of player hands and just making it arbitrary wizard ex machina then your magic already has defined limitations and mechanics that exist in-universe and would logically be exploited and harnessed as soon as the scientific method began to develop. I bet your settings are medieval stasis shit too

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There was a extremely trashy anime that had a really interesting take on the concept.

Magitech takes the form of all modern electronics, just fueled by mana instead of electricity. Since this is relatively recent advancement, the setting goes from generic fantasy to modern day almost overnight. At least from what I can remember from it.

I actually wanted to make my own setting like this that is a hybrid of fantasy and modern day, using leylines as a sort of internet. Stupid idea? Does fantasy stop being fantastical when it's too much like real life?

>duelyst ladies
>Not having weird dick sucking lips

This is also the crux for the Trails in the Sky series.