Post by Adam on Oct 28, 2009 19:07:35 GMT -5
(May require better name.)
So I've been thinking for a while about my elves. Wraithsight is a techno-fantasy game, I suppose; the technology level isn't quite like what we have, but is a lot further than most fantasy worlds allow. Think, say, Warmachine, then advance it a bit more. The elves have been around for a lot longer than humans, as is the standard, and it strikes me that a race that has recorded histories going back thousands of years might, you know, actually have some technology. Elves in most fantasy worlds don't even have siege towers, but going by how long they've been around, you'd think they'd just launch nukes at Mordor or teleport the ring directly into Mount Doom.
At the same time, I want to avoid 'Race X did it for the hell of it' syndrome, a bit of a problem with my original genetic manipulation storyline. Likewise, an interstellar civilisation that considers a handful of magicians a credible threat to their colony on Planet Y doesn't really hold water (if the worst came to the worst, they could resolve things nicely with either evacuation or orbital bombardment), so despite their advanced age and tech they'd need to be planet-bound for whatever reason. I dismissed the idea of isolated scientific research communities cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the effects of a war of annihilation with another race, because while that does more or less work, it adds a bit of unnecessary grandiosity and scale to the storyline, which I want to have a bit more of a primal, perhaps steampunk, feel.
The solution to all of this lies in the elves' long lifetimes. Traditionally, fantasy elves can live for centuries, or even millennia. This suggests an extremely slow birth rate and maturity rate. The reason elves haven't taken over half the galaxy by now is that there's only about 200,000 of them in their entire civilisation, meaning the humans (population approaching two thousand million) outnumber them almost 10,000 to 1. With numbers as low as that, there's no way for them to support an interstellar civilisation; the whole race lives in three cities, all fairly small, built near one another at the planet's inhospitable southern polar ice cap. Resource usage would also be a problem, if it wasn't for the Void.
Void technology involves tapping into the little-understood dimensional disparity that drenches the world in magic. Elves have no innate arcane powers, and no amount of devices and research have rectified this, but they've managed to make enormous engines called void towers that draw in power from something at an astonishing rate. Void towers are far too large and impractical to be used in robots or vehicles, so large capacitors - also based on void technology - are charged up at the towers and used to drive everything from weather aircraft to war-mechs. These capacitors are themselves too large to be carried by individual elves, who are a little taller than human-sized, but ingenious wireless power transference devices allow an elf to operate heavy lifting equipment, powered armour or deadly weaponry with what appears to be an armoured glove, provided there are void-capacitors nearby. These devices are also capable of drawing loose energy from the world, in a similar way to how wraithseers augment their innate soul energy with natural magic while in battle.
While the elves have vastly better technology than the planet's other races, they are fully aware that an all-out war would result in the annihilation of their race, due to simple law of numbers. The existence of wraithseers is an extremely unwelcome complication. Lacking any kind of magic, ordinary elven weapons can't even hurt wraiths, and arcane attacks do funny things to reality, meaning that without runic enhancement, composite cerametal armour is barely better than badly-beaten steel, and force fields might as well be switched off. The only weapons elves actually have that can destroy wraiths are the inhumanly powerful ones, mostly void-based ones, which also mess around with reality a little. Continuum shear technology, for example, creates weapons which by themselves could easily slice a tank in half, but against a wraith, do as much damage as a runic pistol. At least it's better than nothing. Another downside is that using aircraft makes little difference - wraiths only obey the laws of physics when they want to, and in the air, there's no cover.
Given their low numbers, the elves were adamant that some mechanism be devised by which any elf could defend him- or herself against human soldiers or arcanists, without having to be bodyguarded by a squadron of mecha at all times. The advent of mass-teleportation technology provided a solution that was, let's say, 'inspired' by the elves' most feared foes. All elves now wear a pair of metal gloves, fingerless so they don't have to be taken off in order to maintain dexterity. One glove is the aforementioned wireless power transference device. The other is a teleport nexus transmitter that, with enough power from the first glove, can - within a short distance - receive and project a teleportation signal from an array in one of the cities. In a twist on the concept of the soul-splitting wraithseers, any elf can demand and receive soldiers, robots, and tanks should they be attacked, equipped with specialist armaments and defences to put them on par with the enemy.
This has led to the existence of the Covenant of El'thyrr. The agreement in question was made about two hundred years ago, when El'thyrr and a group of like-minded elves pledged themselves to creating and maintaining an aggressive defence of the elven race, realm and civilisation. These people - known collectively as the Army of the Phoenix - keep track of the movements and activities of other species, surgically attack potentially-serious threats before they develop, and blunt or misdirect retaliatory attacks.
The Army of the Phoenix form the elves' Wraithsight faction. They work a bit differently from the others. An elven 'seer' halves the amount of magic points it receives from nodes, but at the beginning of each turn, each 'wraith' takes an essence wound (representing the draining of its capacitor) and this becomes an additional magic point. Elven war-machines have mediocre armour, not because they lack resilience in any way whatsoever, but because their technology is mostly neutered by the reality mindscrew that is magic. Their melee power isn't great - dedicated melee machines are hard to come by - but have lots and lots of shooting. Most of it's low power, but can be overdriven, by spending more essence points (again, power from the capacitor) to amp it up considerably, making up for the lack of melee attacks (remember, melee attacks generally do a lot more damage). Most units also have some resilience, and are high rank; I'm debating with myself whether to include anything below Rank 4. It's also tempting to allow models to survive all of their essence being removed, provided they have Resilience that is, since they're even more self-destructive than ordinary wraiths - they have ordinary engines as well, and keep operating, but at reduced power.
A word on elven biology. My original intent was to have the elves as nigh-unkillable, twisted monstrosities, rendered immortal but hideous by their genetic manipulations, with multiple sets of arms and skin of stone. Instead, I'd like to do something a little less grandiose and simply switch their affinities with the stereotypical dwarf ones. Elves are creatures of the earth - of forests, sure, and of the seas, but mainly of the earth itself. At first glance, they appear to be carved from smooth stone, in various shades of neutral grey or black. This isn't quite the case. Their bodies are comprised of cells, just like humans', but their skin secretes silicaceous layers of fine scales, a natural armour strong enough to resist ordinary swords. They do possess four arms, the second pair set further back than the first, lower down, and smaller. They obviously lack hair, as their skin's made of frickin' rocks. They augment this fearsome natural strength and resilience with high-tech power armour and, of course, firepower.
So I've been thinking for a while about my elves. Wraithsight is a techno-fantasy game, I suppose; the technology level isn't quite like what we have, but is a lot further than most fantasy worlds allow. Think, say, Warmachine, then advance it a bit more. The elves have been around for a lot longer than humans, as is the standard, and it strikes me that a race that has recorded histories going back thousands of years might, you know, actually have some technology. Elves in most fantasy worlds don't even have siege towers, but going by how long they've been around, you'd think they'd just launch nukes at Mordor or teleport the ring directly into Mount Doom.
At the same time, I want to avoid 'Race X did it for the hell of it' syndrome, a bit of a problem with my original genetic manipulation storyline. Likewise, an interstellar civilisation that considers a handful of magicians a credible threat to their colony on Planet Y doesn't really hold water (if the worst came to the worst, they could resolve things nicely with either evacuation or orbital bombardment), so despite their advanced age and tech they'd need to be planet-bound for whatever reason. I dismissed the idea of isolated scientific research communities cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the effects of a war of annihilation with another race, because while that does more or less work, it adds a bit of unnecessary grandiosity and scale to the storyline, which I want to have a bit more of a primal, perhaps steampunk, feel.
The solution to all of this lies in the elves' long lifetimes. Traditionally, fantasy elves can live for centuries, or even millennia. This suggests an extremely slow birth rate and maturity rate. The reason elves haven't taken over half the galaxy by now is that there's only about 200,000 of them in their entire civilisation, meaning the humans (population approaching two thousand million) outnumber them almost 10,000 to 1. With numbers as low as that, there's no way for them to support an interstellar civilisation; the whole race lives in three cities, all fairly small, built near one another at the planet's inhospitable southern polar ice cap. Resource usage would also be a problem, if it wasn't for the Void.
Void technology involves tapping into the little-understood dimensional disparity that drenches the world in magic. Elves have no innate arcane powers, and no amount of devices and research have rectified this, but they've managed to make enormous engines called void towers that draw in power from something at an astonishing rate. Void towers are far too large and impractical to be used in robots or vehicles, so large capacitors - also based on void technology - are charged up at the towers and used to drive everything from weather aircraft to war-mechs. These capacitors are themselves too large to be carried by individual elves, who are a little taller than human-sized, but ingenious wireless power transference devices allow an elf to operate heavy lifting equipment, powered armour or deadly weaponry with what appears to be an armoured glove, provided there are void-capacitors nearby. These devices are also capable of drawing loose energy from the world, in a similar way to how wraithseers augment their innate soul energy with natural magic while in battle.
While the elves have vastly better technology than the planet's other races, they are fully aware that an all-out war would result in the annihilation of their race, due to simple law of numbers. The existence of wraithseers is an extremely unwelcome complication. Lacking any kind of magic, ordinary elven weapons can't even hurt wraiths, and arcane attacks do funny things to reality, meaning that without runic enhancement, composite cerametal armour is barely better than badly-beaten steel, and force fields might as well be switched off. The only weapons elves actually have that can destroy wraiths are the inhumanly powerful ones, mostly void-based ones, which also mess around with reality a little. Continuum shear technology, for example, creates weapons which by themselves could easily slice a tank in half, but against a wraith, do as much damage as a runic pistol. At least it's better than nothing. Another downside is that using aircraft makes little difference - wraiths only obey the laws of physics when they want to, and in the air, there's no cover.
Given their low numbers, the elves were adamant that some mechanism be devised by which any elf could defend him- or herself against human soldiers or arcanists, without having to be bodyguarded by a squadron of mecha at all times. The advent of mass-teleportation technology provided a solution that was, let's say, 'inspired' by the elves' most feared foes. All elves now wear a pair of metal gloves, fingerless so they don't have to be taken off in order to maintain dexterity. One glove is the aforementioned wireless power transference device. The other is a teleport nexus transmitter that, with enough power from the first glove, can - within a short distance - receive and project a teleportation signal from an array in one of the cities. In a twist on the concept of the soul-splitting wraithseers, any elf can demand and receive soldiers, robots, and tanks should they be attacked, equipped with specialist armaments and defences to put them on par with the enemy.
This has led to the existence of the Covenant of El'thyrr. The agreement in question was made about two hundred years ago, when El'thyrr and a group of like-minded elves pledged themselves to creating and maintaining an aggressive defence of the elven race, realm and civilisation. These people - known collectively as the Army of the Phoenix - keep track of the movements and activities of other species, surgically attack potentially-serious threats before they develop, and blunt or misdirect retaliatory attacks.
The Army of the Phoenix form the elves' Wraithsight faction. They work a bit differently from the others. An elven 'seer' halves the amount of magic points it receives from nodes, but at the beginning of each turn, each 'wraith' takes an essence wound (representing the draining of its capacitor) and this becomes an additional magic point. Elven war-machines have mediocre armour, not because they lack resilience in any way whatsoever, but because their technology is mostly neutered by the reality mindscrew that is magic. Their melee power isn't great - dedicated melee machines are hard to come by - but have lots and lots of shooting. Most of it's low power, but can be overdriven, by spending more essence points (again, power from the capacitor) to amp it up considerably, making up for the lack of melee attacks (remember, melee attacks generally do a lot more damage). Most units also have some resilience, and are high rank; I'm debating with myself whether to include anything below Rank 4. It's also tempting to allow models to survive all of their essence being removed, provided they have Resilience that is, since they're even more self-destructive than ordinary wraiths - they have ordinary engines as well, and keep operating, but at reduced power.
A word on elven biology. My original intent was to have the elves as nigh-unkillable, twisted monstrosities, rendered immortal but hideous by their genetic manipulations, with multiple sets of arms and skin of stone. Instead, I'd like to do something a little less grandiose and simply switch their affinities with the stereotypical dwarf ones. Elves are creatures of the earth - of forests, sure, and of the seas, but mainly of the earth itself. At first glance, they appear to be carved from smooth stone, in various shades of neutral grey or black. This isn't quite the case. Their bodies are comprised of cells, just like humans', but their skin secretes silicaceous layers of fine scales, a natural armour strong enough to resist ordinary swords. They do possess four arms, the second pair set further back than the first, lower down, and smaller. They obviously lack hair, as their skin's made of frickin' rocks. They augment this fearsome natural strength and resilience with high-tech power armour and, of course, firepower.
