Introduction
This is quite a quick and dirty overview of magic and tech in the world of Starspun Tale. It’s loosely inspired by ancient myth and delves a little bit into ancient philosophy. Hopefully this is compact enough to provide as much information as possible and comprehensible enough to not lose anything along the way.
A look at the antediluvian aesthetic (screen from the movie Tron)
Before the Flood
The antediluvian world was quite similar to modernity in its presuppositions and assumptions, albeit set in an indeterminate future and turned into a dreamlike fairytale.
The world was flat, humanity plucked stars from the sky and bled them for light, only for something to go wrong and all land being flooded water (though that wasn't called the Flood yet). All that remained was one city, surrounded by large dams, with all humanity squashed into it. Eventually all religion, fairytale and myth was labelled unhealthy and unproductive, and ultimately discarded. An AI was created at the pinnacle of engineering, a demon of laplace, allegedly capable of predicting the future by processing all available data. It was called Luminous AI and was set in the governance of the City.
Understanding of the world and technology was quite modern.
Knowledge was empirically verified and arrived at through arduous experimentation
Created tech followed rules of energy conservation, and was powered by starlight extracted in nuclear generators.
What tech was capable of could be quite varied, though most commonly things like projecting images, performing calculations, parsing data, fabricating objects or moving machines. Almost everything you can think of being done in the modern world was doable with this tech.
Antediluvian tech was primarily about energy in the form of starlight. It was managing your batteries in combat or during remote work far away from a generator. The law of conservation of energy was of great importance and how much energy you devoted determined how big of an effect you got, of course limited by the technical capabilities of the machine you were using, integrity of its parts, and its size.
There was one core caveat to energy gained from starlight - raw starlight had a terrible mutative effect, and people exposed to it became hideously deformed, sometimes dying in the process. Both those assigned to the generators and rich in starlight eventually became diseased, their skin growing scaly to shield inner layers, their eyes becoming narrow slits to avoid retina damage.
There was another matter which could not let the antediluvian people rest - the “spooks” or perhaps more accurately the Old World. It was, roughly speaking, everything that caused unexplainable chaos - insanity that made people perform rituals to forgotten gods, machine bugs that made them self-conscious, and finally anomalies in reality that defied cracking by science. In it all were the sparks of something the antediluvians had decreed nonexistent - the wondrous but also dangerous world of myth and magic. It was but a murky shadow of the postdiluvian world so refer to that section for more about this.
The Flood
To the antediluvians, the Flood was a societal collapse - foreseen by the Luminous AI, but ill-prepared for. The nuclear generators exploding and the dams that held the City together bursting was primarily a mistake of social engineering to them. A union of human error and ill will.
To the postdiluvians, the Flood was a divine judgement - rising of the waters and rain of stars. To them, the stars were souls and torturing them for light is unforgivable, a deed which they called the Sin of Stars and thereby condemned along with the antediluvian civilisation. Likewise, they believe the mutative effect of starlight was a just payment for their greed, the Curse of Stars. This, among other things, is why the rich and powerful of the antediluvian world came to be known as Lizards.
Now neither side is completely right or wrong, since the Flood was a world-wide paradigm shift, and thus a degeneration of frames of perception by which it could be accurately described, hence why the incoherence. In its wake, the principalities of Science and Progress died, and with them the empirical paradigm. Their corpses line the Flood’s mound of victory. Now an entirely new world emerges.
After the Flood The postdiluvian world is very different from the modern (and thus antediluvian) paradigm.
Science is dead - empirical method will give you differing results, working tech is practically impossible to arrive at by experimentation, physics doesn't work half the time, maps of the world are utterly undrawable.
Theonomous epistemology - knowledge is arrived at by divine revelation; scholars are priests, deities inform and sustain tech, what’s more so - there’s no distinction between tech and magic here, both are arrived at in the same way. Here the obvious inspiration is the Book of Enoch.
Living world - rather than physics, everything that moves in the world is moved by some conscious force. Plants have plant spirits, there’s spirits of winds, thunderstorms and hurricanes, that’s true also for deities of cities and tribes, but you’ll find nothing like the hermetic universal soul or the gnostic demiurge.
Magic
It becomes possible in this paradigm, but it’s quite different from what you’d normally expect from the pseudo-scientific worlds. You don’t “draw arcane energy” from the “leylines” or something like that.
Instead, there are spirits in heaven (more on it in the next section) which can inhabit moving things, that also means air, storms, etc.
There are also spirits higher in the hierarchy, also called Powers, Principalities and Archons, which reign over groups of other spirits or material things. There can be a spirit of a forest, which guides all the fairies, beasts and whatnot. There can be a spirit of a city, which is its god, the spirit of a nation, and finally of all humanity or all forests.
Magic occurs when you request a spirit to do something for you. There’s no spell per say, though a certain way to speak to a spirit is in order, such as pathos and exultations.
Now there are a number of things that come into play whenever you do that.
Your relationship with them, improved by rituals (more on them later).
Their power - are they a spirit set over a tiny gust of wind, or are they set over a grand hurricane? It’s not power in the “energy” sense, more of a position in the hierarchy.
The difficulty of your request - the guardian spirit may have to consider also the needs of other creatures in the forest; a spirit of a nation may have to battle other gods to deliver you from your enemies, same with a minor spirit of wind.
What can it do? What a spirit is capable of depends on what they’re in charge of, and a spirit higher in the hierarchy can of course do more, but likewise they’re far tougher to make deals with and will demand far more from you.
For example, a spirit of a tree can move its branches or even uproot and fight for you (though that’s far less likely), spirit of the hunt can help you track or kill your query, a spirit of the wind can knock someone off their feet. Take heed, these are not precise effects of vancian spellcraft, but rather approximates of a spirit struggling against others to fulfil your will or trying to balance it against the needs of others in the area.
Rituals are not magic spells, meant to produce some kind of effect. Rituals are the way a community coheres with each other and with their deity. Partaking in a ritual indicates someone is part of said community and it improves their relationship both with the group and its deity. Rituals can also be performed as an appeasement, in which case they can be individual (i.e. no community shares in the meal, only the priest for someone’s sake).
There are a few core elements to rituals:
Communion, which is a ritual meal shared with the deity, and likewise with the whole community.
Here sacrifice comes to play, which is the content of the meal being shared. Sacrifices can be livestock, birds, but also things like live humans (in that case the community as a whole engages in cannibalism). Of course different spirits have different preferences here, and the closer one gets to their preference the better the results. A more powerful spirit obviously requires a greater sacrifice.
Now the sacrifice is most commonly, though not necessarily, fed to an incarnate being or deity. Incarnation means taking up a body, which can be done by a spirit in the form of an idol or some other inanimate thing, a strange form (more on that in the Heaven section), or by possessing another living being, thus setting that being’s spirit aside.Remembrance, which means remembering and ritually acting out the common story that a community shares with their god. This common story is what defines the people as well as their technology (not just level, but flavour, type, etc.) Of note is that technology only really exists in bubbles and does not, usually speaking, spread, which is why various nations or factions can have various different tools to accomplish the same thing.
Rituals may also involve elements of dance, recitation, poetry, singing, and sex in the case of fertility rites, but those are not as universal as the two former elements.
They are carried out solely by priests which must always be purely human, regardless of whether the group they perform the ritual for is human - for example druids perform rituals for beasts and Fey to appease Fairyland spirits. This is because humanity was set as an intermediary between Heaven and Earth.
Heaven (the Spirit Realm, Veil of Dreams) The place where the spirits live. It’s not some kind of abstract dimension, but something of an invisible veil draped over reality. It’s possible to see into it, although at a cost for one’s sanity.
Spiritual Weight determines how material a spirit is. In some places the veil of Heaven is particularly thick, and spirits take on strange bodies, but are likewise able to be seen and interact with physical objects without the need for a more physicalincarnation. There are various levels to this, for example:
In Fairyland, most spirits are visible by the strange fairy light they exude.
Wraiths, who are the risen souls of the dead, are given a body of dark smoke, and can only interact with silver; thus they need silvery gloves to touch things and silver-laced cloak to clothe themselves.
Demons can be quite physical in binding rings.
Nightmares become more tangible, visible and powerful the more people believe in them.
Now there are parts of Heaven which are close to earth, and Places which are far-off. Some Places map onto the night sky, some do not, but it’s important to understand that Heaven is entirely different from the sky. Places indeed seem closer to dimensions, being largely illusory with no direct impact on physical reality, though they may seem physical in their laws and makeup. They’re heavenly realms, usually housing major gods and their entourage.
Sorcerers and Neon Priests Now two traditions have a quite hostile relationship with Heaven - the Sorcerers and Neon Priests.
Sorcerers do not perform rituals in the way priests do. Instead, they prepare a tasty sacrifice, but instead of partaking in communion, they use secret witchery to bind a spirit to their will. The way they use magic is by lightly unbinding a spirit, or again using the secret symbols, phrases and the like to force a spirit to do something. This is quite painful (or at the least very rude) to the spirit and only minor beings can be bound this way. Naturally, the moment the spirit is able to break out somehow, they will do their very best to murder the sorcerer.
Neon Priests see themselves as inheritors of the antediluvian paradigm. Now, their claims can only be so true, considering the gods of Science and Progress are dead, but that does not deter them They use imperfect renditions of antediluvian tech in a way they don’t fully understand, approaching it with reverence reserved for divinity and feeding it the light of their own souls. Now this tech indeed represents the antediluvian paradigm (even though it is used like magic), which is an antithesis to the existence of spirits, which in turn damages them when in vicinity and sets them in conflict with the Neon Priests.
