Probably should have called this important information you definitely need to know.
Magical Materials Pixie Dust - Pixie dust is a magical lighter than water particulate matter that when captured in a beaker look like liquid stars made of glowing silt. Pixie dust is slightly heavier than air, causing it to float down gently in a stream of shimmering specks when poured out in concentrate.
When pixie dust is magically charged, it will become lighter than air and float upwards. Before the advent of skyships, the main and only real use people had for it was to chug it for a short period of flight, which even now some people will pay a rather large bounty for just a pint of it. It is easy to tell when someone has pixie dust in their system because their eyes glow.
Mithril - Magical silver, unbelievably light and highly magically conductive, but unless enchanted it is a soft metal, but is exceptional for creating artifacts, enchantments and rituals. Finding a mithril mine is essentially getting yourself set for life, for nations will and have go to war over this valuable resource.
Adamantium - Also called cold iron it's basically the opposite of Mithril, very hard to work with and flat out pushes against magical works around it and magic can't enter it (and vise versa). This stuff is found nearly exclusively in the depths of the Nortgard and dwarves hold a very strong monopoly over it.
Technologies Skyships - Powered by steam engines (or other means of propulsion, some are even full sailing vessels, and lifted by envelopes or tanks of charged pixie dust, these ships can reach most anywhere so long as they have fuel, pixie dust and magic to move. Originally an invention originating from Culad-Lin, the technology would eventually spread to the other nations, but none have come close to Culad-Lin's quality and quantity. There's two factors that are absolutely vital to a functioning skyship, pixie dust and the artificer. Because of the artificer factor, most skyships are unique inventions based on the same principles but vastly different in design and function (money is also a factor but that's a given). Skyships need an artificer onboard to maintain it over time, and since artificers tend to have different flavors, their repair work and upgrades are also notoriously wild and crazy as their creators.
Unlike when a person consumes the pixie dust, skyships are able to reuse the precious magical material due to the entire system being self contained. There is still a little bit of leakage but the loss is negotiable in comparison to direct consumption.
Most skyships have a wooden hull and use balloons for their lift, but variations of all types occur and occasionally someone with the spark of artificery, money and ambition will build a full metal flying battleship with the pixie dust contained within armored tanks that are a true terror of the skies.
Firearms: Guns are pretty ubiquitous and due to artificery never being consistent they come in all forms and types. Many are merely re-engineered wands able to fire off bursts of mana at their targets, some fire projectiles at their targets via propelling them with an explosion, others yet may flat out shoot bolts of lightning. The dwarves have made guns that fire adamantium pellets which break past a person's aura barrier with ease, but these bullets don't work nearly as well against arcane defenses (none the less these helped turn the tide of war in their favor dramatically).
Railroads - Tossing this out here just so people know that railroads exist and they have for a while now, due to the influence of the Versil empire at its height, railroads are universally sized and trains have become standardized enough that they are not in the realm of just what the artificers build but rather the product of industry. That being said, a train tinkered together by an artificer will usually out preform their "mundane" counterparts.
Magic Magic comes in all forms, and everyone has at least some amount of it, but most people can't actively use it.
- Sorcery: The oldest and most direct of magics, sorcery, also known as bloodline magic is often passed down from often unknown ancestry. Sorcerers cast their magic through willpower and while limited to specific types of magic are fairly flexible in their use.
Sorcery is very rare in Nortgard, mostly due to the dwarves lacking in having their own sorcerous bloodlines. In Contren sorcerous bloodlines are not uncommon but usually are let run wild resulting in diluted but varied magics. In Xian sorcerous bloodlines are seen as a treasured inheritance and powerful families will often arraign marriages to increase the power of the next generation's bloodline sorcery (this rarely truly works).
Sorcerous bloodlines are fairly common in Xian due to an abundance of powerful creatures that often take a humanoid form and occasionally mingle with humans.
- Artificery: These people will randomly spring up with the 'spark' and are best described as mad genius. Unlike anyone else they can make the same thing twice and come up with different results (and will). Their magic is more innate and is less of magic but more of building magic into technology.
Artificery is pretty universal due to the randomness at which it appears, however the people of Xian often looks down on it for its chaotic nature and seen as specialist artisans at best. In the rest of the old world, artificers are more often viewed as mad magical geniuses. Versil has done its best to curtail artificers to their needs to maintain their military might although this hasn't resulted in a great success and their war machines are slowly becoming more and more patchwork with different artificer working within the limits of their power on the same devices. Jernand's twist on artificery is that of innovators who can contribute to the advancement of wizardry for everyone, but this often doesn't work out and instead the artificers are seen as enemies of the public for not giving up their knowledge. In Culad-Lin, unlike any other major nation embraces artificery in its fullest which leads to a wide variety of weird and wacky inventions that only a few of which are currently able to be replicated, the skyship being one of them.
- Wizardry: This is the discipline of learned magic, practitioners take several years to master this art and cast their magic mostly through rituals and incantations. If you want consistent results, wizardry is the way to go. Mastery of wizardry is a byproduct of advanced civilization since anyone can learn the art in a stable environment.
While it's still in its infancy, Jernand sees wizardry as the ideal magical art since all of their people can learn it and a heavy emphasis on using it as a part of their daily lives is made with a focus on standardized enchantments on just about everything. In Culad-Lin wizardry is more of a patchwork of different disciplines and with little uniformity and discoveries in it are made on a near daily bases at times. Versil has the most traditional style of siege wizards lobbing great spells across the battlefield behind the lines of soldiers and using rituals for great works of magic. Within Xian, the wizards of the Alliance are of an entirely different breed, due to magical knowledge being closely guarded secrets of the sects, different sects and families will have their own unique styles of wizardry, many of which also include using sorcerous bloodlines.
Money, Trade and Resources Money is fickle at best due to their being at least four different currencies used at once, and half the time trade will be through barter. So instead of keeping track of all the specifics of money stuff, you instead have a "Resources" value which can increase and decrease based upon gaining new resources and expending them. Small purchases will be inconsequential (mostly this is munitions, food and shelter), large purchases will lower the value and doing jobs with high payout will raise the value.
Magical Materials
Pixie Dust - Pixie dust is a magical lighter than water particulate matter that when captured in a beaker look like liquid stars made of glowing silt. Pixie dust is slightly heavier than air, causing it to float down gently in a stream of shimmering specks when poured out in concentrate.
When pixie dust is magically charged, it will become lighter than air and float upwards. Before the advent of skyships, the main and only real use people had for it was to chug it for a short period of flight, which even now some people will pay a rather large bounty for just a pint of it. It is easy to tell when someone has pixie dust in their system because their eyes glow.
Mithril - Magical silver, unbelievably light and highly magically conductive, but unless enchanted it is a soft metal, but is exceptional for creating artifacts, enchantments and rituals. Finding a mithril mine is essentially getting yourself set for life, for nations will and have go to war over this valuable resource.
Adamantium - Also called cold iron it's basically the opposite of Mithril, very hard to work with and flat out pushes against magical works around it and magic can't enter it (and vise versa). This stuff is found nearly exclusively in the depths of the Nortgard and dwarves hold a very strong monopoly over it.
Technologies
Skyships - Powered by steam engines (or other means of propulsion, some are even full sailing vessels, and lifted by envelopes or tanks of charged pixie dust, these ships can reach most anywhere so long as they have fuel, pixie dust and magic to move. Originally an invention originating from Culad-Lin, the technology would eventually spread to the other nations, but none have come close to Culad-Lin's quality and quantity. There's two factors that are absolutely vital to a functioning skyship, pixie dust and the artificer. Because of the artificer factor, most skyships are unique inventions based on the same principles but vastly different in design and function (money is also a factor but that's a given). Skyships need an artificer onboard to maintain it over time, and since artificers tend to have different flavors, their repair work and upgrades are also notoriously wild and crazy as their creators.
Unlike when a person consumes the pixie dust, skyships are able to reuse the precious magical material due to the entire system being self contained. There is still a little bit of leakage but the loss is negotiable in comparison to direct consumption.
Most skyships have a wooden hull and use balloons for their lift, but variations of all types occur and occasionally someone with the spark of artificery, money and ambition will build a full metal flying battleship with the pixie dust contained within armored tanks that are a true terror of the skies.
Firearms: Guns are pretty ubiquitous and due to artificery never being consistent they come in all forms and types. Many are merely re-engineered wands able to fire off bursts of mana at their targets, some fire projectiles at their targets via propelling them with an explosion, others yet may flat out shoot bolts of lightning. The dwarves have made guns that fire adamantium pellets which break past a person's aura barrier with ease, but these bullets don't work nearly as well against arcane defenses (none the less these helped turn the tide of war in their favor dramatically).
Railroads - Tossing this out here just so people know that railroads exist and they have for a while now, due to the influence of the Versil empire at its height, railroads are universally sized and trains have become standardized enough that they are not in the realm of just what the artificers build but rather the product of industry. That being said, a train tinkered together by an artificer will usually out preform their "mundane" counterparts.
Magic
Magic comes in all forms, and everyone has at least some amount of it, but most people can't actively use it.
- Sorcery: The oldest and most direct of magics, sorcery, also known as bloodline magic is often passed down from often unknown ancestry. Sorcerers cast their magic through willpower and while limited to specific types of magic are fairly flexible in their use.
Sorcery is very rare in Nortgard, mostly due to the dwarves lacking in having their own sorcerous bloodlines. In Contren sorcerous bloodlines are not uncommon but usually are let run wild resulting in diluted but varied magics. In Xian sorcerous bloodlines are seen as a treasured inheritance and powerful families will often arraign marriages to increase the power of the next generation's bloodline sorcery (this rarely truly works).
Sorcerous bloodlines are fairly common in Xian due to an abundance of powerful creatures that often take a humanoid form and occasionally mingle with humans.
- Artificery: These people will randomly spring up with the 'spark' and are best described as mad genius. Unlike anyone else they can make the same thing twice and come up with different results (and will). Their magic is more innate and is less of magic but more of building magic into technology.
Artificery is pretty universal due to the randomness at which it appears, however the people of Xian often looks down on it for its chaotic nature and seen as specialist artisans at best. In the rest of the old world, artificers are more often viewed as mad magical geniuses. Versil has done its best to curtail artificers to their needs to maintain their military might although this hasn't resulted in a great success and their war machines are slowly becoming more and more patchwork with different artificer working within the limits of their power on the same devices. Jernand's twist on artificery is that of innovators who can contribute to the advancement of wizardry for everyone, but this often doesn't work out and instead the artificers are seen as enemies of the public for not giving up their knowledge. In Culad-Lin, unlike any other major nation embraces artificery in its fullest which leads to a wide variety of weird and wacky inventions that only a few of which are currently able to be replicated, the skyship being one of them.
- Wizardry: This is the discipline of learned magic, practitioners take several years to master this art and cast their magic mostly through rituals and incantations. If you want consistent results, wizardry is the way to go. Mastery of wizardry is a byproduct of advanced civilization since anyone can learn the art in a stable environment.
While it's still in its infancy, Jernand sees wizardry as the ideal magical art since all of their people can learn it and a heavy emphasis on using it as a part of their daily lives is made with a focus on standardized enchantments on just about everything. In Culad-Lin wizardry is more of a patchwork of different disciplines and with little uniformity and discoveries in it are made on a near daily bases at times. Versil has the most traditional style of siege wizards lobbing great spells across the battlefield behind the lines of soldiers and using rituals for great works of magic. Within Xian, the wizards of the Alliance are of an entirely different breed, due to magical knowledge being closely guarded secrets of the sects, different sects and families will have their own unique styles of wizardry, many of which also include using sorcerous bloodlines.
Money, Trade and Resources
Money is fickle at best due to their being at least four different currencies used at once, and half the time trade will be through barter. So instead of keeping track of all the specifics of money stuff, you instead have a "Resources" value which can increase and decrease based upon gaining new resources and expending them. Small purchases will be inconsequential (mostly this is munitions, food and shelter), large purchases will lower the value and doing jobs with high payout will raise the value.