The Fundamentals of Technomancy
Op-EdCosmic Cutie
Technomancy and magic? Are they the same? Our cherished anonymous writer is back to show you the real aspects of this branch called technomancy and what its knowledge really capable of.
Introduction:
The first question you might ask yourself is: what is technomancy, and why do I need it? Hasn't the mundane world produced computers far more powerful than we have? Can't I just use one of those instead of building my own magical computer from scratch?
This is a genuine question, whose answer lies at the heart of magic itself. Magic is nothing more than the ability to cause highly improbable events 1 to occur by speaking the right words. As most of us have learnt, there are evident limits to magic - mundane laws of physics, like the conservation of energy, which are impossible to break.
The root cause of the incompatibility of magic with mundane technology is quite simple - the residual magical fields generated by witches makes the likelihood of electron tunnelling extremely high, making it almost impossible to use a conventional computer because of all the random bit flips. Shielding the computer (probably the first solution you thought of) is not an option since any permanent shielding enchantment also generates the same fields.
Thus the need for technomancy - the field of magic dedicated to the creation, improvement and efficient use of magical computers.
A Brief History:
The first magical computer began its life as an ordinary typewriter. It was modified to replace the keyset with standard runic, the default language used to cast spells. It was operated by typing spells on paper, which would then spontaneously trigger. The underlying idea behind this is an interesting exploitation of a property of magic words previously thought undesirable - their tendency to retain their power in written form 2. Words have power as long as they are in a form capable of retaining meaning. Thus when words are written down, they struggle against the restraints of the alphabet till they break free and achieve a form of pure meaning, causing the spell they describe to trigger. Since ancient times, those who write grimoires have taken care to encrypt the spells written in them 3. By writing gibberish in place of a magic word, the power of the word is nullified. The computer, by writing spells without encryption, could function as a spellcasting device.
The main breakthrough, which arguably was the one which turned it from a glorified typewriter to a true computer, occurred when someone had the bright idea of enchanting the keys to allow them to be manipulated remotely via magic rather than by physical means. A special purpose spell (termed the “echo” spell) was designed, which could type out a given word using the typewriter's own keys. Thus, was written the first "Hello World" program.
With the first magical computer came the first magical virus - one which exploited the unprotected nature of the spellcasting. It was a simple spell - all it did was write two copies of itself onto the transcript without encryption. These two copies would trigger and compel the typewriter to write two more copies each, which would in turn write two more copies each and so on, till the forces on the keys, produced by a million different spells attempting to use them simultaneously, destroyed the typewriter. This taught the pioneers of technomancy a very valuable lesson about system architecture - never allow unprotected spellcasting; always store spells in encrypted form.
Data Storage
One of the core issues to solve when building a computer is the issue of storing data. The original solution to this problem consisted of cards with holes punched in them, which were used by early computers, both magical and mundane. However, developments in the field of electronics have resulted in a drastic reduction in data density (defined as the number of bits stored per unit volume) for mundane computers. Due to the aforementioned effect that magic has on electronic storage devices, replicating the methods used by mundane computers was seen as impossible.
A breakthrough occurred with the application of alchemy 4 to the problem. The IUPAA (International Union of Pure and Applied Alchemy) standardized the fundamental transmutation spell, defined as a spell which turns exactly one atom of lead into one atom of gold. Due to the fact that all alchemy is bound by the first law of thermodynamics (known by alchemists as the law of equivalent exchange), spontaneous transmutation of lead to gold or vice versa is forbidden, allowing stable long-term data storage in the form of lead and gold atoms.
The modern alchemical hard drive consists of a magically stabilized lattice of gold and lead, roughly in equal proportion. By convention, an atom of lead is treated as the binary 0 while an atom of gold is treated as the binary 1. Data can be written using the fundamental transmutation spell on the correct atom. Locating the correct atom is not easy, requiring dedicated spells to scan the correct section of the drive to identify the atom, which takes time. This need is eliminated in the magical RAM, where each atom is enchanted to be traceable quickly. Needless to say, atomic enchantment at scale is not easy, making the cost per bit of a magical RAM much higher than that of a magical hard disk (much like their mundane counterparts). Fortunately, several systems have been devised to allow mundane computers to run effectively using minimal RAM, which we can replicate to build our computers.
At the cutting edge of alchemy is research on extending the fundamental transmutation spell to produce stable isotopes of the same element. If this is achieved, the natural instability of the hard drive lattice, caused by atoms changing their radii every time a bit is flipped, can be eliminated by using isotopes with similar radii. This would drive down the cost of data storage since magical lattice stabilization would no longer be needed.
The neat part about the current system is that since there is no net production of gold from lead, almost 5 no thaumic energy is consumed while manipulating data. Systems have been designed to ensure that the balance of gold and lead is maintained. The unused parts of the hard drive do not consist entirely of lead - instead, the atoms are left in a random configuration. Identifying where the true data ends and the unused portion begins is done by using a small section of the drive, which encodes the last address of the used portion (equivalent to a "pointer" used in mundane systems). When data is written by flipping a bit in the used section, a random bit in the unused section is flipped in the opposite direction, which allows the drive to function without violating the equivalent exchange law. Thus it is strongly advised that hard drives are not filled to capacity unless one wants to get all their thaumic energy drained.
Processing:
The next step in building a computer is to develop a system to read, write and manipulate stored data. The mundane system is called a "microprocessor", a small silicon chip with complex circuitry designed to access and modify the electronic memory of the computer. The processor executes instructions which are stored in the memory in binary form, which allows one to load and execute complex sets of instructions automatically instead of giving instructions one at a time.
The practical difficulties of writing complicated spells which interact with one another and manipulate a data storage system at the atomic level is almost insurmountable - the more complex a spell is, the more the likelihood of making an error (often with catastrophic consequences) when casting it. Moreover, the interactions between multiple spells operating in the same region are chaotic and almost impossible to predict. Hence the near-impossibility of simply creating a general-purpose "processor" spell.
This seemingly intractable problem has a simple solution - summon an imp 6, lock it in a tiny cage attached to the computer and use it as a processor. Imps which have been taught the MISC ISA 7 are available on the market at reasonable rates. For increased computing speed, multiple imp-cores can be used to process data simultaneously. For those with more specialized computational needs, imps which have been taught to carry out only a single task (like hashing or matrix multiplication) are also available (though at a significant premium, since the increased intellectual capabilities an imp needs for such tasks also make it much more challenging to keep under control).
At the cutting edge of research are attempts to create a system to quickly carry out the operations associated with the training of a neural network. A groundbreaking paper was published recently - "On the application of repurposed revenant tissue in the creation of a Natural Neural Network (Al-Hazred et. al.)", which describes various experiments where necromancers 8 reanimated the brains of dead lab-mice and trained them to recognize different sigils 9 with 80% prediction accuracy (this figure looks unimpressive prima facie, but when one considers that a high-level witch specializing in sigils only recognizes sigils with 60% accuracy at best, the true gravity of this paper can be appreciated).
It is unlikely that such technology will hit the market anytime soon, so the 8-imp processor with a specialized graphical processing imp is your best bet for making your computer reasonably powerful.
UI:
The earliest UI was a magically triggered typewriter with erasable paper, which functioned like the "terminal" used in mundane computers. The introduction of the mouse and GUI was initially quite hard to replicate with magic since the cathode ray tubes in computer monitors did not play well with magic. Many have blamed the period where UI development plateaued for the relative unpopularity of technomancy, arguing that the terminal-based system was unintuitive and presented a significant barrier to entry for the common witch.
The current solution is not much different in terms of hardware - it is software that makes all the difference. The modern screen consists of paper enchanted such that the front is magically erasable. A spell is written behind the paper, which draws any shape described in the computer's memory. Special graphics drivers, which constantly run in the background when the computer is on, translate images to a format readable by the spell and place it in the graphics-section of the RAM. Certain reserved bit-states of the graphics-section are used to describe operations like erase(), erase_rectangle(x0,y0,x,y), undo() etc. The details depend on the screen-manufacturer.
When a program wants to display something on the screen, it calls the driver and passes the image it wants to draw. The driver then accounts for screen size and converts the relative locations to absolute locations before writing the appropriate command on the graphics-section of the RAM. The spell, which is constantly active, immediately reads the RAM and produces the image on the screen.
This setup presents a couple of interesting advantages for the magical computer over it's mundane counterpart - since the screen is a continuous object and not segmented into pixels, bitmaps need not be generated at any stage of the process. Vector-based images can be displayed directly on the screen without any loss of detail (not exactly, of course. The paper on the screen is not a mathematically ideal object - it is made of molecules of starch. Thus, there is an effective pixel size of a few molecules or so). The other major advantage is that the screen can double as a printer - all one has to do is replace the enchanted paper with ordinary paper to capture the state of the screen.
The keyboard is easy to create since each keystroke needs to transmit only the fact that the corresponding key was pressed. Each key is enchanted to flip a specific bit in the keyboard-section of the RAM when pressed and flip it back when released. This is interpreted by the process running inside the computer as input from the keyboard.
The mouse, on the other hand, needs to continuously transmit its position, along with which button was clicked. The magical mouse consists of yet another imp in a cage which has been commanded to track the mouse's x and y coordinates. Every time a button on the mouse is pressed, a tiny hammer inside the cage is triggered, striking the imp and causing it to briefly interrupt its transmission of the xy coordinates. This sudden interruption in a steady transmission is interpreted as a click by the computer. The left-click and right-click trigger hammers are of different sizes, which causes interruptions of slightly different lengths. This allows the computer to distinguish left-clicks from right-clicks. When a mouse-button is held down, the hammer squeezes the imp and causes a long gap in xy transmission, which the computer interprets as a continuous click. When the button is released, the computer receives a string of impish curse words directed at the user, which signals that the button is no longer pressed. The entire system is wireless - nothing is attaching the mouse to the computer. If the mouse stops working, trouble-shooting it is as easy as clicking it repeatedly to ensure that the imp is still alive.
Despite it's apparent advantages, we do not recommend using this setup for the following reasons:
- Security: Controlling an imp of this power-level is no trivial task. Sooner or later, it will realize that it can take control of your computer by transmitting incorrect xy coordinates and cursing at it. At this point, the imp has near-complete access to any part of your computer which is not password protected.
- Cost: Capturing and training an imp to transmit xy coordinates is not an easy task. Consequently, magical mouses cost a lot. Most computers are designed to be fully accessible using just the keyboard, so buying a mouse is pretty pointless.
Specialized mouses where imps are trained to transmit x, y, and z coordinates are available for technomancers who need to capture motion in all dimensions. By clubbing two of these devices together, rotation in two more dimensions can be captured.
Networking:
The earliest method to communicate between computers was not very sophisticated; one tied a hard-drive to the leg of a carrier pigeon and hoped it reaches its destination. The first significant improvement came when ley-lines across the earth were mapped accurately, which allowed the set-up of dedicated teleportation routes. Though this resulted in a massive increase in throughput, the fact remained that the data was still being transported on physical media. The latency did not allow instantaneous communication between systems, so magical networking lagged behind the internet, which saw explosive growth.
The pinnacle of networking is a decentralized system capable of transmitting information at lightspeed, without the movement of physical material. The closest we have come to this is with the use of sympathetic magic 10 wherein smaller copies of an object are enchanted to mimic the actions of a bigger object. However, this system calls for centralization since sympathetic magic allows only unidirectional causality - the peripheral objects reflect the state of the core object, but the core object is unaffected by the states of the peripheral objects.
Current research is ongoing to find a way to integrate fibre-optic cables with a magical computer, using light-detection and light-generation spells. However, the technology currently allows only very, very low bitrates. Even if a higher bitrate is achieved, it will take a lot of further research to develop a way to cast light-spells at scale.
At present, networking technology is based on the scrying glass 11. Dedicated servers are set up with scrying beacons, while computers are equipped with scrying glasses. These servers store information on gold-lead lattices on which the scrying glass is trained. The scrying glass, with accuracy at the level of individual atoms, allows the user of the glass to read the data stored on the server.
This system functions like a read-only version of the internet - one may read data from the server but cannot communicate with the server in any way. Furthermore, setting up private networks is difficult since anyone with a scrying glass can access a server with a scrying beacon. Broadcasting information to a select group is done by encrypting the information on the server and providing authorized individuals with a decryption key. The inability of two-way communication makes asymmetric encryption impossible, making private networks vulnerable. All it takes is a single malicious actor to leak the decryption keys to make all the data on the server public.
Mundane servers cannot be equipped with scrying beacons since such beacons generate extremely powerful magical fields which interfere with their data storage. Thus, most popular mundane websites have copies stored on magically accessible servers as well.
Software:
The most popular Operating System today is OccultOS, an open-source UNIX-based operating system designed to run on magical computers. Other popular operating systems include Sage (derived from Linux Mint, designed for newcomers), PointyHat (derived from Red Hat Linux, with several closed-source additions) and Obelisk (derived from Arch Linux, highly customizable but takes a lot of work to set up). Most of these operating systems are derived from mundane operating systems and can thus run every program that a mundane computer can. This saved us from reinventing the wheel, allowing technomancers to focus on developing software with magical applications. OccultOS comes with a vibrant and active user-base, with plenty of high-level technomancers involved in source code-maintainance, documentation, security-patching, etc.
A particularly impressive piece of magical software is Marduk (named after a Sumerian god who could shape reality by speaking magic words), designed to facilitate the development 12 of new spells by allowing the technomancer to interact with a pocket universe designed to act as a testing ground for the new spell. Marduk enables the user to create, destroy and replicate pocket universes as needed, and process the raw data gathered from these universes into readable form. Marduk can also be used to reverse the direction of the flow of time, change the fundamental magical constant 13 and manipulate physical objects within the pocket universe.
Another impressive piece of magical software is SpellScript, which is a system to automatically encrypt any spell written while allowing the user to see it in plaintext, in addition to syntax highlighting and error prediction for modern runic. It is available as an extension for popular text editors like VSCode and Notepad++.
Phlebotinum is a browser written specifically to facilitate networking using scrying glasses. The browser comes with various features like automatically using decryption keys provided by the server, switching keys at high frequencies, controlling the scrying glass to switch between servers and an inbuilt antivirus tool to check the data on the server for any plaintext spells. Additional extensions can be installed from the official Phlebotinum server, which is updated regularly.
In addition to stand-alone software, frameworks and libraries to handle spells have been written for popular languages like C, C++, Python, Java etc. JThaum (available as a .jar file on Maven) is a popular magical library for java users, which utilizes OOP principles. Every spell is derived from the Interface Spell, with a predefined cast() function. The latest version includes an update which allows passing spells as arguments to other spells, allowing the construction of meta-spells whose sole purpose is to regulate the working of other spells.
While coding may appear intimidating to a neophyte, it is encouraged that one learns at least basic spell scripting - the consequent improvement in productivity is vast.
Among the less well-known software are programs written to aid practitioners of augury 14 and numerology 15, by automating the processes of reading star-charts and alphabet-number equivalence generation. Such software tends not to incorporate any magical elements and can generally be run on a mundane computer.
Security:
An infamous piece of magically malicious data is a file designed to destroy any computer by making it explode. It consists of three spells:
- An explosion spell, written in encrypted form
- A spell to decrypt other spells, written in plaintext
- A spell to inhibit other spells, written in plaintext
When the file is stored in any physical medium, the inhibition spell prevents the decryption spell from triggering. This keeps the explosion spell encrypted. When copying the data, the bits are copied from left to right. The first spell to be copied is the explosion spell, which does nothing since it is encrypted. The second spell to be copied is the decryption spell. Since the inhibition spell has not been copied yet, the decryption spell spontaneously triggers and decrypts the explosion spell, which, in turn, spontaneously triggers and destroys the computer.
Variants of this file, in which the explosion spell has been replaced with far more dangerous spells, have caused a great deal of damage. We bring up this example to remind you of the cardinal rule of security - never copy a spell in plaintext.
A cautionary tale about cybersecurity is the legend of the Hash Inversion Experiments, where an attempt was made to summon and imprison a Great Old One in a pocket universe created using Marduk. The researchers believed that the Great Old One, which possessed practically infinite intelligence, could be used as an Eldritch computer to compute the inverses of cryptographic hash functions in constant time. The plan was to feed It data through Marduk and get the results through the log files generated by Marduk.
This idea, insane as it sounds, should have worked (at least in theory) since the Great Old One would not have realized that It was in a pocket universe. However, the Great Old One understood what was going on when it measured the speed of light and noticed that it was subtly different. The value of c was initialized incorrectly by the researchers - their first big mistake.
Upon discovering that It was being toyed with, It began to attempt to break out of the pocket universe while deceiving the researchers into thinking that It believed the universe It inhabited to be the real one.
Breaking out of a pocket universe one is trapped in is no easy task, for two reasons:
- The spell required is so complex that no one knows what it is. Thaumologists have proven that while such a spell exists, it would require at least 242 bytes to describe it.
- The spell would have to be cast in the universe one wants to break into, not the universe one is currently in. Thus the only method to break into a universe relies on one having already broken in.
Having godlike levels of intelligence, the Great Old One knew exactly what the spell was. After deducing that Marduk was producing log files in the host universe, It realized that the pocket universe could be manipulated in such a way that the logs produced would say whatever It wanted.
The creators of Marduk had foreseen this threat and ensured that the logs produced were encrypted, so no plaintext spells could be written on them. But the Great Old One, having been chosen specifically for its ability to compute functions quickly, easily broke the encryption scheme being used by Marduk and had complete write-access to the log file.
One last hurdle stood in It's way - the size of the log file was capped at 232 bytes, which is less than a thousandth of the memory required to describe the spell It wanted. This would have been enough to contain It, had it not been for the researchers' second big mistake - not deleting the previous log file before generating the next one.
The Great Old One broke the spell down into its component parts and wrote one part into each log file, with the end of each log file pointing to the start of the next file. Once the spell was complete, It was summoned into the main universe, where It ripped apart the Fabric of Reality for Its own amusement.
The key takeaway from the incident being this:
Don't meddle with forces you cannot comprehend, let alone hope to control.
How is the Universe still here if it was destroyed, you ask? The Universe which was destroyed was not our own but was itself another instance of Marduk, a pocket universe being used in an experiment as part of a study conducted by a team researching human stupidity.[[16]](#16)
Conclusion
This guide is but a brief overview of the rich and diverse field of technomancy. There is plenty to explore; so go ahead, get your hands dirty, have fun and try not to die.
While a quincunx is a good tool to gauge the power level of an individual witch, it is unsuitable for measuring more powerful phenomena since its range is limited. These days, a simple Geiger-Müller counter is used instead, since the probabilistic nature of atoms decaying allows the counter to pick up magical interference.
turn lead into gold (and vice versa, though most of the research was unsurprisingly focused on the former) and create a living human being (termed a homunculus by alchemists) from inorganic material. Those alchemists who stubbornly maintained that the only way to turn inorganic material into life was via the infusion of a "life force" through magic were proven incorrect when a chemist used mundane techniques to synthesize urea (an organic compound) from ammonium chloride and silver cyanate (both inorganic compounds). When advancements in nuclear physics showed that transmutation between elements was possible by rearranging the protons and neutrons within nuclei (easily done without any magic whatsoever), alchemists were forced to introspect. Was the field they had dedicated their life to just chemistry and physics dressed up as magic? The field of alchemy narrowly avoided having its status reduced down to pseudomagic when it was conclusively shown that alchemy, unlike physics, was unbound by the second law of thermodynamics. When experiments proved that the total entropy in a system could be reduced at will using magic, alchemists (true to their reputation of being-in-it-just-for-the-money) immediately tried using Maxwell-imp engines to create usable energy out of nothing and sell it. However, their attempts were unsuccessful (much like their precursors' attempts to get rich by breaking the law of equivalent exchange) since the creation of usable energy consumes an equivalent quantity of thaumic energy from a magical source. The history of alchemy has convinced a considerable number of people that whoever wrote the rules of the universe had a sense of humour.
- The probabilistic mechanism behind the nature of magic has been proven by the effects that spells have on the quincunx, which is a mechanical device designed to demonstrate the central limit theorem by showing how the binomial distribution approaches the normal distribution at its limit. When activated in the presence of magic, the distribution obtained shows peculiar properties (for instance - a shifted mean, an unusually large or small standard deviation, the presence of multiple local peaks, etc). The theories developed to interpret the curve produced by the quincunx led to the establishment of the field of thaumology (thaum – magic, logos – reason, thaumology – the study of magic), which seeks to come up with a universal theory to explain all of magic. (So far, they have been unsuccessful because - duh - it’s magic we are talking about).↩
- This is the reason why one could safely read necronomicon.pdf, while the real Necronomicon has to be clamped shut at all times using a hydraulic press to prevent Eldritch Abominations from bursting through its pages. The portable document format, when it was proprietary, was so good at distorting meaning that it rendered even unencrypted magic words harmless. When the file format was opened for public use, the spells written in them were no longer inscrutable; this allowed them to burst out of the hard-drives in which they were stored. Fortunately, technomancers suspected that this would happen and ensured that all pdf files containing spells had an additional layer of encryption, which prevented the ISO from accidentally triggering multiple apocalyptic events. Unfortunately, a few witches did not take the necessary precautions (their remains are yet to be found).↩
- An interesting case study regarding the importance of using proper encryption when archiving spells is a grimoire named "Pyrokinesis for Dummies", one of the founding texts of the field of pyromancy. The author, whose name has been lost to the sands of time, collected every known fire-related spell (along with a few they made up themselves) and meticulously archived them in plaintext by writing them down on paper (a flammable substance). The book, which burned constantly, had to be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen. When recent analysis showed that the last spell in "Pyrokinesis for Dummies" was designed by the author to ignite the atmosphere (made mostly of nitrogen), the book was placed in a hermetically sealed evacuated capsule and buried in a specially created cave two miles below the seabed, where it remains to this day. "Geokinesis for Dummies", another work by the same author, is rumoured to contain a spell designed to control the Earth's rotation.
MercifullySadly, no known copies survive.↩ - Alchemy is a branch of magic dedicated to the study of matter and it's interactions (critics disagree and maintain that it is nothing more than an ancient get-rich-quick scam which gained the veneer of credibility over time). The ancient alchemist had two fundamental goals, which were thought to be impossible to achieve without magic:↩
- 'almost' being the operative word here. Though there is no net transfer of energy, carrying out calculations result in a loss of entropy. For instance, consider the simple bitwise XOR - the input may have four states ((0,0),(0,1),(1,0),(1,1)) while the output has only two states (1 or 0). The exact entropy loss can be calculated by using Boltzmann's equation, which states that the entropy of a system is kbln(w), where w is the number of microstates and kb is the Boltzmann constant. Thus the loss in entropy of a bitwise XOR is kbln(4)-kbln(2) = kbln(2). The entropy associated with deleting a single bit is called the Landauer limit - a constraint which is applicable to any computer which obeys the second law of thermodynamics (also called the law of no-free-lunches by alchemists). Though alchemical process are not governed by this law, the fact that such processes require an equivalent amount of thaumic energy means that a variant of the same limit applies to magical computers as well.↩
- The imp is bound to carry out one command of whoever summons it. This used to be a highly dangerous game, since the imp tends to twist the command given and comply with it in the most malicious way possible. This is considered much more dangerous than summoning a Djinn (which grants three wishes) since the second and third wish could (in theory) mitigate the unintended consequences of the first. This has almost never happened, of course. The Djinn, having had millennia of experience with human psychology, generally outwits anyone who summons it.↩
- The MISC ISA is a translation of the mundane open-source RISC ISA into modern impish. Conceived as a way to express commands to imps, modern impish is a conlang designed to have no ambiguity whatsoever, created by an expert committee consisting of linguists, historians, logicians, anthropologists, philosophers and those fortunate enough to survive an encounter with an imp. Modern impish is now the language of choice to give instructions to imps, since the clarity of meaning achieved through its use prevents the imp from creatively reinterpreting any command given.↩
- Necromancy is a highly controversial field of magic, whose practitioners' primary goal is to create a perfect record of the memories of the dead, which can then be used to create an accurate simulation of the dead, thus "resurrecting" them (in a manner of speaking). Almost every significant advancement in this field was a result of the violation of several norms of morality. From robbing graves for access to human remains to trying to make a few quick bucks off the gullible by pretending to commune with the dead to creating super-soldiers from reanimated corpses, the actions of necromancers have done little to endear themselves to the public at large. Consequently, necromancy is banned in most countries. In the few countries where it is allowed, necromancy on human corpses is strictly forbidden, and necromancy on any mammalian corpse can be done only under the supervision of an Ethics Committee (the bane of the average necromancer). Due to the political unpopularity of this field, getting state funding for any research is next to impossible. That said, necromancy remains a popular field of study for rebellious edgelords, who spend all their time trying to get a rise out of the Ethics Boards by making increasingly insane project proposals with the most twisted experiments they can think of.↩
- The sigil system is a spell-writing system purposefully designed to be so information-dense that it is almost impossible for the average witch to read or write. Designed by the creators of modern runic as a tongue-in-cheek response to traditionalists who complained about modern runic being too verbose, the system consists of over a million base characters and a few hundred additions for each character. With base characters allowed to have multiple additions and the ability to recursively use characters as additions for other characters, the total number of possible characters is such that reciting all of them at the rate of one character per second requires several lifespans. The character used to summon a dove from a hat and the character used to induce existential angst in a subject differ only by a single stroke, as a result of which the niche profession of hat-based-psychotherapy has experienced a boom.↩
- Some of the most well-known examples of this type of network are the various magical early-warning systems developed during the Cold War. A large bell served as the core object, with many smaller bells serving as peripheral objects. In the event that an apocalypse-level threat manifests, the information is transmitted across the network by ringing the core bell. Since the links between the network nodes were purely magical, there was no risk of interference or interception of signals sent. The systems were discontinued after several false alarms resulted in a loss of public trust in the system. The decommissioned bells now fetch a pretty penny in the second-hand market due to a wave of retro-technomany enthusiasm driven by the same strange cold-war-era nostalgia seen in the mundane world.↩
- The scrying glass is a magical artefact designed to allow the user to look at any point in the universe. The glass by itself is quite useless since it picks random points of the universe to reflect. Since most of the universe is empty space, the glass almost always shows nothing. To solve this problem, scrying beacons are used. These devices generate powerful magical fields, making the glass more likely to pick up the points around the beacon. Since magical fields follow the inverse-cubed law (in addition to the three spatial dimensions, magic also dissipates into another dimension inhabited by Eldritch Horrors beyond human comprehension), the effectiveness of the beacon diminishes quickly with distance. The tremendous amounts of thaumic energy required to set up scrying beacons make them prohibitively expensive, while scrying glass is manufactured easily at industrial scales - a large sheet of ordinary glass can be enchanted, crushed, molten down and diluted with ordinary glass. Since enchantments are invariant under physical changes like dilution, this process can be repeated ad infinitum to produce large quantities of scrying-glass without consuming magical energy.↩
- Spell development is a very tricky business since the only way to test a spell is to actually cast it and observe the results. The successful creation of a new spell almost always happens as the result of a happy accident since thaumology is yet to develop any useful theory which can predict the effect of combining magic words. If a thaumologist attempts to create a new spell and cast it, it is highly unlikely that the spell will work as intended since the thaumologist usually fails to account for every possible consequence of the spell. In the old days, the unintended consequences of casting a malformed spell tended to result in the death of the caster (if they were lucky, that is. There are plenty of fates worse than death). So progress used to be made very slowly until thaumologists began to try out spells in pocket universes which were causally isolated from the main universe. If an Eldritch Abomination is accidentally summoned by the thaumologist during testing, it is contained within the pocket universe, which can be reset.↩
- The fundamental magical constant is used to define the standard unit of thaumic energy, which has been fixed by thaumologists as the amount of magic needed to summon a single billiard ball from a top-hat. While thaumic energy is supposed to be additive, it must be noted that this additivity comes with caveats - for instance, the energy needed to summon two billiard balls from a hat is not the same as twice the energy needed to summon one billiard ball from the same hat. Thaumologists have engaged in a lot of mental gymnastics to try and explain this discrepancy, constructing ever more elaborate theories to predict the consumption of thaumic energy for an arbitrary spell. The fundamental magical constant was originally meant to be defined as the amount of magical energy obtainable by converting one joule of mundane energy into magic using an ideal thaumic engine, but this definition had to be discarded since classical alchemy did not support the existence of a theoretical upper limit on the efficiency of a thaumic engine (of course it did not, since to do so would mean having to admit that alchemists are constrained by the rules of the universe just like the rest of us). Consequently, all attempts to systematically measure and compare thaumic energy have failed.↩
- Augury is the field of magic dedicated to predicting the future. After advancements in quantum mechanics revealed that the universe was probabilistic and not deterministic, classical augury was largely discredited as complete nonsense. How is one to predict exactly what would happen on the Ides of March if one cannot predict the position of an electron in a box? Critics of augury (who maintain that augury is just an excuse to mess around with animal entrails) were vindicated when the field of augury was officially recognized as pseudomagic. Attempts to develop a new contemporary theory of augury based on probabilistic predictions were once more proven unsuccessful when stockbrokers attempting to apply the modern theory to predict market fluctuations ended up losing a lot of money. However, there remains a dedicated fringe who still claim that augury is fundamentally sound and that the problem lies with those who do not understand how to apply its principles correctly.↩
- Numerology is the field of magic which studies the magical properties of numbers. Modern Numerology can be traced back to the various Pythagorean Cults who worshipped the rational numbers as the building blocks of the universe. Till date, not a single rational number has been proven to possess magical properties, while the mundane field of mathematics gave us π and e (which numerologists are still sore about). Modern number theory and non-euclidean geometry rendered the field of numerology obsolete, and numerology has since been designated as pseudomagic. Contemporary numerologists seek to derive meaning from arcane texts by assigning numbers to individual characters and performing operations on them to try understand some "hidden meaning" in the text, nevermind the fact that given any arbitrary message, it is highly probable that one can find a character/operation sequence to generate it (provided the text is long enough). What many witches consider the final nail in the coffin of numerology came when it was shown that standard numerological techniques could be used to produce the supposed Ultimate Purpose of Life from the technical manual written for a vacuum cleaner which went out of production in 1972.↩