The Industrialisation of Magic
The biggest changing factor of the modern world, was the discovery of techniques capable of streamlining the basic magical energies of the world and siphoning them into a form of energy that can be exploited (in all senses of the word) and refined into a variety of modern uses.
Now, the element of electricity brings light in the darkest of evenings, animated "living" devices bring convenience to those able to afford them. For a brief period, the world - on the surface at least - enjoyed an unprecedented age of luxury and safety not known of for centuries. The mechanisation of production came to the known world, and new industrial complexes created wondrous goods and services, in cheap and plentiful numbers.
But then the war came, and those industries turned from luxury, to weapons of war, and people begun to doubt this new age of wonders they were entering. Nothing was off-limits in the conflict. Mechanised war-machines bound with captive elemental ravaged whole towns, Arrows equipped with deadly, acidic gas or exploding heads would decimate friend and foe alike. And weaponised diseases and viruses would tear through whole counties, mindless of the allegiance of their victims.
This culminated with the horrific destruction of the City of Spires, and the creeping death that even now grows slowly outwards every day.
Post-war, with manufacturing slowly returning back to civlian uses, there are serious questions to be asked about the repercussions of this new way of using magic. The environment itself seems to be dying. Sickness and exploitation run rampant in factories across the land, odd mutations twisting the very bodies of the most unfortunate of workers. The voices of those who demand a return to the old ways are growing in strength and number, and there are rumblings of the possibility of a new conflict. This time not between nations, but between the ideologies of those dedicated to advanced magical technology, and those who see it as a terrible existential threat to everything...
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