How would you pull off a magitech setting?

There are a few setting specific terms I'm a fan of. Aethertech, hextech, and alchemy are ones that immediately come to mind.

Establish a consistent basis to what magic does, how you learn it, where it comes from and most importantly, what are its limitations. You don't have to write an encyclopedia, anything as simple as "crystals fall from the sky and putting them in a copper container drives a current" or something can work, but it has to be internally consistent.

Weave it into your worldbuilding. How long has it been going on? Is it passed down from an ancient empire or is it just being discovered? Why now and not before? Perhaps one of the nations got a headstart on it and is rising rapidly through their superior technology. Maybe it's a worldwide industrial revolution except for some dogmatic superpower that's slowly but surely finding themselves eclipsed. Maybe magic works differently in different places, or just is viewed as such, and so the flavors of magitek are radically different.

Establish a tone. Is it a "the magic goes away" type of deal with formerly free sorcery being shackled to industry and dissected under sterile white lights? Is it a wondrous age of discovery and adventure, with magitek airships connecting the world like it never has been and the quality of life rising for dramatically for everyone? Is it a gold rush/arms race, with everyone racing to get an advantage and opening up the floodgates for adventurers, mercenaries, opportunists and desperate or passionate researchers to profit as much as possible?

Think outside the box. Say you still want to apply standard RPG classes and mechanics -- are there any old-type wizards, or are they impossible with the mechanics of magic, or else being phased out? Are they the same or distinct from scatterbrained magic-engineers? Can plate-and-blade knights still exist, fighting against the tide or swimming with it (magic swords and armor is a start)? What about guns, magical or otherwise? Do they change your setting's dynamic or are they just one component among many in the rise of tehnology?

Apply imagination.

Take a transhumanist setting and add magic in front of all words.

This is how my setting does it. When the not!Elves shattered the world into a million and a half floating chunks, the residue from the spell they cast crystallized all around, most abundantly in their ruins and near their cities in the Wilderlands. Several hundred years later and humans have advanced to the point they can use these crystals to power airships, lights, even some forms of weaponry. Traditional Wizardry still exists and can do other things, and combining the crystallized magic with traditional spellcasting is how airship engines ignite, how large and more advanced cities have power, and how more modern forms of transport like trains work.

>firearms exist but are little more than wands encased in gun barrels
You mean like this?

Bump.

Dragonball Z, but with a 7th century aesthetic for rural areas, and a WW1 era aesthetic for urban areas.

13 not only has the most magitech of any game in the series, it also has, by far, the most interesting setting. I pick 13.

If anybody wants to use it, I'll post some magitech homebrew from Middle Finger of Vecna for 5e.

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All the cities can transform into giant robots, thus city states are only threatenable by other city-robot state

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Sci-fi fantasy

Sci-fantasy is the correct term, NERDS.

An enchanted sword is already magical technology. I continue in the same vein - sails that fill themselves with wind, mills and forges turning and churning on their own, etc.

Instead of guns, I might use stone crossbows enchanted to fire via telekinetic acceleration.

Aesthetically, I'd put complex runes on all the magitech shit. I hate crystals.

Sci-fantasy is more starwars imo. The universe is magical but the machines don't explicedly run on magic juice.
Honestly I don't get what's wrong with magitech. It's magical technology, the two terms just concatenated.

Applied Magics.
Hextech.
Runetech.
Arcanotech.

Gramarie and wonderworking are the terms I tend to prefer

I think that was how things worked in Dragonmech, mostly so that they could move away from the deadly alien bullshit that fell from the Moon every so often

Bump.

>thinking about this shit right now for a buddy who wants to take a break from GMing and play a Starfinder campaign.

How would oceans work in a world full of floating landmasses?

Are you me, because that's my setting ()

In my setting, the world was at one point a supercontinent surrounded by ocean, and then, as detailed in that post, the not!Elves broke it. Their magical event exploded the continent and sent the chunks soaring into the sky, and the ocean and some bits of land are still down below. Due to the basically cloud of land masses blocking sixty percent of the sunlight, the ocean is much colder now.

Admittedly my example is extreme, if your floating landmasses aren't the only ones, it makes sense that they'd hover above an ocean and other landmasses.

Depending on how magical you want to go, they could be rifts into the Plane of Water rent open by the destruction of the previous world.

Aetheric Sciences

Minerals that are the corpses of long dead gods, used in similar way as we use oil, one nation has technology to power machines with the metals.
Very original I know.

Pretty similar. Replace elves with WIZARDS. I'm also admittedly stealing a bunch from Shardbound's aesthetic because it's good and the game itself is dead.

>it also has, by far, the most interesting setting
Tell us more about Lightning's armpits, user.

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I figured on lower strata being cloud sea, with the saturation of magical energy allowing tons of undersea life to adapt/mutate into flying amphibious states. There's land floating around in the clouds that are host to sky pirate merfolk and giant crabs.

Pull off a combination of FF 8,9,12, and 15

In the past we made use of energy sources such as fossil fuels until we figured out how to literally harness the ambient magic energy that exist everywhere where for all things from powering industry to powering your cell phone.

The departure from this is that the act of doing so has also increased the ambient level of magic energy so monsters and paranomal phenomenon are more common and excess amounts of it can do weird and fucky things to the environment.

As such, the very face of the world has changed with people living in densely packed city states with walls to protect from monsters and other things. Cities are layered and build up more than they do outwards.

Towns and such outside of such walled city states have various means of protecting themselves from golem drones to wards to just badasses who fight monsters on a regular basis.

The economy is geared towards local industry so the shipping of raw materials and finished products unique to an area is usually what gets passed along

And the internet is literally a dimension of it's own that allows for transmission and receiving of data

My setting is somewhat similar, the upper middle strata in my world is also land, but mostly temperate/tropical rainforest. Life here is more prehistoric and dangerous. Then below that is a cloud layer that has similar aero-aquatic life. Below is a dark and cold ocean full of not!aboleths, which the not!elves were trying to get rid of

I like this idea.

I think it matters how "magicy" you want your magic to be. For me I really love a "Hard" magic system where magic has very defined rules like our own laws of physics. It makes things fell a lot less deus ex machina and when awesome magic things do happen, it's actually fells awesome because it isnt an ass pull. Personaly, I like to take inspiration from the magic system in Fullmetal Alchemist where you need an actual alchemy circle and the right materials to do a certain magical thing. It forces characters to be a bit more inventive and it meshes well with the more realistic tech angle. There may be trains that are powered by magic, but they still require some non-renewable resource to actually work. This also helps to put the non magical and magic characters on a more equal field.

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Final Fantasy or a few of the Tales Of games.

To add to this:

Many modern day products don't follow some kind of universal standard. A refrigerator you get from a country in X nation state is probably way different in shape form and function then one you get in Y but you went and got X because it was trendy and you have the money to have it delievered to you.

The process of going from conventional fuel sources to Ambient magic energy was not a quick one but it's side effects on top of being fucky in general border on SCP level shit like towns with inordinately powerful monsters that appear there (obviously abandonded) places where ghosts and spirits are drawn to in particular and the "weather" of the magic energy can range from calm but spooky to Silent Hill otherword nightmare fuel level (but hey, there is plenty of badass loot to have)

while mundane creatures are still around now you have magical flora and fauna that are specific to certain areas and can't be easily transplanted/reproduced in others so people who managed to figure out how to make use of it profit from basically monopolizing it and guarding it jealously.

teckmagi

I'm surprised that one spaz didn't show up again.

Anyway, I personally prefer to make the magitech logical extensions and uses of how magic works in your setting, so ideally its a "hard" system of magic, more alternative science than flat out mysticism. A lot of magitech having settings, especially Japanese ones, tend to just use magic to exactly replicate real world tech (cellphones with crystals attached, modern design cars powered by magic runes, etc) which I personally find boring and lame. It should be kind of alien and sci fi

Take tech.
Say it's magic.
Bonus points for either strapping arcane magic users to machines as batteries or for coming up with a cheeky pun for your magic fuel-source like Aethernol.

Don't do this. Only bad guys do this

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I already am. Within the context of my setting, magic is residual energy left over from the birth of the universe that coalesced into astral bodies, including planets. It was paramount to the evolution of life, and the concentration of magic on a planet is a determining factor in how complex that life is. Worlds with sentient life are particularly noteworthy as being chalk full of the stuff.

Because magic is a sort of quasi-matter - distinctly different from regular matter, dark matter, etc. - it can be effectively "mined," so to speak, normally as a crystalline solid, but also as a liquid. It can then be used for all kinds of purposes, such as fuel. In some ways, it's not terribly dissimilar to oil, or iron, or what have you.

As far as mages and such, all living beings throughout the universe have some capacity to cast spells since magic is an actual, literal building block of their physiology. This is quite draining, however. Thankfully, ingesting magic - usually in the form of a drink - or even being in close proximity to magic can replenish it. (This is my in-universe explanation for mana potions.)

Magic is finite, though. Under normal circumstances, it returns to the earth as creatures die. Unfortunately, the main antagonists of the campaign are draining the world's magic for debatably nefarious reasons. This has a side effect of killing the planet, and everything on it. They've done this to numerous worlds, but this world is the only one so far that has enough technological prowess to fight back.

Like this, because it doesn't automatically have to be high-fantasy magitech faggotory

Use it exclusively for the bad guys, who then applies it to robotics, humanoid machinery, and airships. The good guys should hesitate on using the same technology for no reason, in which they use generic magic spells instead.

poo in loo

I keep seeing this floating around. What is it? Is it like Thief, but as a tabletop game?