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So you've somehow found your way to this mess I call The Crossroads. I suppose I should start by describing the world.
You know those medium-fantasy settings with elves and dwarves and goblins, plus enough magic to make it all stick together with some left over to cast a couple fireballs?
This is what happens when you take a world like that and slap on a couple thousand years of technological and social development.
And a minor appocalypse because those are always fun.
The world and its contents are spread out over time. There are, broadly, six eras we will be looking at:
| Name (Arkanian) | Name (Tyrian) | Abbreviations | End | Notes |
| Pre-Historic Era | Ahinek historikal | PH TH | Founding of the Tyrian Empire | It's a bit pretentious to call this period Pre-History since there was clearly lots of stuff going on, and someone was probably writing some of it down. But the Tyrian Empire was big on keeping records, so. |
| Pre-Imperial | Ahinek tau Arkinia | PI, TA, TI EE1 | Official First Contact between Thalian and Arkanian officials | This is a big, dense block. Lots of stuff happening in both the north and the south, but they havent interacted much. That's about to change. |
| Imperial | Ahinek tau Tiamat | IE, TT, TB | The release of several dozen old gods | |
| The Turning | Ahinek Tiamat | AT | 50 years later | Someone dug a little too deep and woke up something terrible. Several somethings, who did NOT like the way things were going. |
MAGIC
Magic is a thing. Some of it feels like Science but shifted a little to the (DIRECTION NOT FOUND). That's Wizardry.
It follows rules and procedures, and if you take the time you can build spells out of it. Then just Wind the spell up and away it goes. Until a thread breaks loose. Then some of the energy / magical potential is lost to heat, light, sound, or the distortion of the planes of reality. Since there HAS to be a thread loose SOMEWHERE, Wizardry is full of lights and sounds. Wizards are usually either good at maths or good at reading. Or just crazy.
Wizard spells can be automated very easily. Other magic is mostly manual.
Some magic feels like folding your mind up, cutting along the dotted line, and thinking inside out. This is Witchcraft, and it is inspired almost entirely by the witches from the Discworld novels.
Witchcraft is a quiet and entirely subjective field of magic. The rules are different for every practitioner. Witchcraft works by rules of association, perception, and metacognition, rather than by rules of physics or causality. It can very, very hard to teach someone big Witchcraft; you know how magic interacts with your mind, but the student's mind is going to be vastly different. The results, however, can be powerful. Not blow-up-everything-in-sight powerful, but walk-through-walls-and-time powerful.
Some magic is just flexing a muscle that doesn't exist. This is Sorcery. It's kind of alive? It keeps beings like Elves from falling apart and lets Dragons switch forms. If a creature breathes lightning at you, there's probably sorcery at play. It can be predicted, but only in the way a wild animal can be predicted. You could be wrong and there is no algorithm in the world that can tell you just how wrong you could be.
TECH - The Autoscriar
I spend a lot of my time developing the contemporary period of Crossroads. It's a bit like the USA's 1990s, but the tech isn't exactly the same so it doesn't quite line up?
Anyway, one of the pieces of tech that comes up a lot is the Autoscriar, a sort of magical, light-based equivalent of the telephone. In recent years, it has taken up a similar position to dial-up modems, giving the setting a taste of the early internet. To understand it, we need to also understand conventional scrying.
A Scrying spell lets you link two reflective surfaces so that light that would hit one surface is instead emitted from the paired surface. Done with two mirrors, it means that you can peer through the mirror to see the view from the other one. Like the portals from Portal, except sound and objects can't pass through, just photons.
The first way of doing this - Positional - works by pure wizardry and requires you to know the positions and orientations of the two mirrors with some precision. This sees much use in espionage, with carefully placed glass fragments and mirror compacts being staples for spies. This also lets you make contact with any mirror, as long as you know its coordinates and normal.
The second way - Associative - employs a bit of witchcraft, and requires the use of physical objects, known as keys. A Key is something with a strong association to a mirror. Keys are usually a piece of the mirror frame, or even a cut fragment of the mirror itself. If the key for mirror A is brought in contact with Mirror B, a connection is made.
Early Scriar communication consisted of making connections at predetermined times and relaying messages by writing the message and holding it up to the mirror. This was alright to start with, but some bright spark working on something called a "typewriter" wondered if they could send and recieve messages at keyboard speed.
The first fax machine sent messages through the mirror using tiny shutters, and read them using fragments of raw Stygium, a highly magical metal whose physical properties change when exposed to light. One shutter would be opened per key pressed on Typewriter A, sending light through Mirror A at a specific location. At mirror B, a lens would focus the light onto a Styigum strip, pulling a thread and driving the key of Typewriter B. This worked well enough, until the mechanism was jostled and the motion was read as a reaction the stygium receptors.
Sound was a much trickier proposition, and it took the development of more than rudimentary electronics to solve it. The invention of the telephone was largely the same as it was on Earth. Early audio-sciars used specialized shutters with very fast reaction times and magnetic rather than mechanical Stygium receptors. The quality was absolutely ABYSMAL, but at least it was something.
Electric light and the development of the tranisistor helped a LOT. At last, the microphone could be spoken into without the buzzing of shutters to distract. The ability to amplify electrical signals was also a great help. But radio was still a MUCH more reliable form of sound transimission, especially in areas with magical interference, which were getting more common by the day.