#divine shells

[jiskblr]

Commonplace Mastery: Second Shell

Roughly a sixth of the people of the Second Shell are crafters of various kinds. Masons, Joiners, Blacksmiths, Whitesmiths, Bowyers, Craters-and-Coopers, Cobblers-and-Cordwainers, Tailors, Furriers, Brewers, Bakers, Cartwrights, Shipwrights. About half of them pick up two related specialties - A cabinetmaker might also be a cartwright or a cooper, and a cobbler also a tailor or furrier. A third of crafters instead have farming (or less commonly, fishing or simple hunting) as their second skill instead of another craft. The remaining sixth of the sixth have two unrelated specialties, or know the basics of an adventuring or criminal profession. By our standards, even the journeyman are master craftsmen, able to make extraordinary work regularly. Barrels which are airtight moments after creation, stone roads where a wheel could ride a mile and feel no bump between any stone and the next. When the truly skilled can concentrate, or just work together with their peers, what can they make? Things that last for centuries, commonly.

Masons: the good roads were made hundreds or thousands of years ago and look like new. They suffer no wear and tear - it's virtually impossible to damage them except on purpose. When a powerful king or priest pays for it, they may build towers six hundred feet tall with brick and mortar, which withstand the winds and wars for decades - though usually not centuries, as they cannot hold back a dragon. (Wizards generally build their own towers, secured with magic, though the sensible among them still employ a fine mason to assist.) The finest walls and castles are less magnificent in scale, but often can stop dragonfire.

Joiners: Doors which can stop a charging bull, cabinets which repel pests, or in the very greatest cases, ones which have more space inside than out, folding boxes which can be stored at a quarter their size and still be water-tight when opened.

Blacksmiths: Shackles which can hold a ghost, swords which find their mark unbidden, horseshoes which never wear and never let the horse lame. Knives and arrowheads that never dull, plate armor that moves like leather. Blacksmithery is both the most fabled of crafts, through its swords, blades, and weapons, and the most unassuming, as the most common feature of masterful blacksmithery is something that simply will not break, even if it had an army trying.

Whitesmiths: Workers in tin, gold, silver, and other pliable metals, intricate marvels are a signature of the master whitesmith. One of the most famous creations was the bell-box of Helorion, which if opened a crack and whispered into would hold the sound inside until the next time it was opened, whispering the message in the speaker's own voice. Jewlery is a common medium for master whitesmiths, and fine engraved panels which have more apparent depth than they could fit, or which serve as powerful aids to memory about the state of the location pictured.

Bowyers: Virtually all bowyers also are fletchers, and masters are known for crafting bows with the flexible draw of a composite bow from a single piece, making arrows which fly straight and true despite strange special additions which allow them to trip, drag, or disorient those hit, and make the true greatbows which can fire nearly as far as a man can see.

Craters and Coopers: The ordinary masterwork for a cooper is to make airtight barrels and crates, but true masters can make them so tight that even time itself can only penetrate weakly; when the lid is sealed on, even raw meat will have barely aged even if opened a year later. Other tuns commissioned by brewers make the ale or spirits inside age much faster while leaving the angel's share no larger. And of course ordinary durability for things packaged for long and stormy voyages is popular.

Cobblers: Many master's boots cushion the feet so well that even if they walk a dozen miles soaked, there will not be a single blister or sore on the feet. Others making softer shoes find they slowly heal scabs and sores from the past, clean the feet and leave them healthy, even with flat feet or turned toes slowly healing to the proper shape. Some help their wearers dance, never misplacing a step, or to run through a dark wood without a trip or sprain.

Tailors: The most common features of a master's tailoring are pockets deeper and more secure than an ordinary crafter, and clothes so wondrously beautiful that they shape the view like an illusion. Certainly anything a king wears, when it is not for war, will shift its appearance in the light, seeming to move like a live thing.

Furriers: The finest works of master furriers have the same beauty of a master tailor, in many cases. More practical masterworks usually focus on the warmth and comfort of fur, managing to preserve the wearer in the cold while being no worse than a bare body in great heat, or even to assist in both heat and cold.

Brewers: Perhaps the second most legendary of masters, after the smith, fine ales, wines, and spirits can conjure to mind very specific memories, nostalgia, camaraderie, or other such mental motions. They may restore the drinker to health, wake the recently dead, induce the pain-free frenzy of a berserker, or do any of a great many things for the body. Darker tales say an evil master brewer may make a drink which is pleasant to all except one, who finds it deadly poison.

Bakers: While less notorious, master bakers have many of the same tales told of them as are of brewers. Bread which heals the wounds, strengthens the body, brings those who break it together in fellowship, sustains over a heinous journey, or recalls distant days as if they were now.

Cartwrights: One of the most visible products of master crafters in most people's life is a wandering cart; these roll back and forth along the roads connection a town to its villages, not losing speed when boarded, without a horse to pull them. The standard wandering cart is lightly enchanted by a spellcaster, providing a slight motive force that speeds it up each time it turns around, but the fundamental device is a master cartwright's work in most places. (Wizards occasionally duplicate the effect purely with magic, but they are rarer and their time precious.) Other carts may have impossibly gentle rides even on rough terrain - common for coaches - or keep heat in or out preternaturally well.

Shipwrights: Ships which cut through the water like an arrow in flight are the most common request of master shipwrights, as well as durable ships which withstand fire and monster attacks. Some are crafted for great merchants with the ability to keep all their contents stable despite high seas. Master ships like these are usually sailed for centuries, as the coordination required to make them arises only every few decades, even in the biggest shipbuilding ports.

[jiskblr]

Demographics: Second Shell

Roughly half of people in the Second Shell are farmers, fishers, and hunters - those who harvest food for the table. Roughly a sixth of the people are crafters of various kinds. Masons, Cabinetmakers, Blacksmiths, Whitesmiths, Bowyers, Craters-and-Coopers, Cobblers-and-Cordwainer, Tailors, Furriers, Brewers, Grocers, Bakers, Cartwrights, and others. About half of those pick up two related specialties - A cabinetmaker might also be a cartwright or a cooper, and a grocer also a fishmonger or furrier. A third of crafters instead have farming (or less commonly, fishing or simple hunting) as their second skill instead of another craft. The remaining sixth of the sixth have two unrelated specialties, or know the basics of an adventuring profession.

This leaves about a third of people. These are roughly evenly divided between nobility and other governing classes, adventurers, and 'travelers'. Travelers are roughly evenly split between 'high merchants' and itinerants. High merchants are those who sell wool, spices, rugs, art, delicacies, and other sophisticated products which are bought and sold long distances from where they were made or harvested. Itinerants are messengers, boatmen, coachmen, tinkers, grooms, entertainers, and agents of regional authority - notably tax collectors and judges. Itinerants are treated with suspicion, as they have no reputation, and can easily be disguised bandits, and because of this suspicion frequently slid back and forth between criminal - bandit or poacher - and relatively-upstanding citizen. Regional authorities therefore have difficult-to-fake authorizations, usually magical, to verify the identities of their agents of law and order, and even so many judges are treated with suspicion and refusal to accept taxmen as legitimate is extremely common.

The governance, adventurers, high merchants, and itinerants have a mutual dependence in many ways. Merchants need guards who are often adventurers. Itinerants work for merchants or travel alongside them. Nobles and governors rely on high merchants for much of their revenue, and are their most valued customers. (Adventurers are the next most valued, but have a tendency toward unreliability; they die, ascend, or simply move to another country at rates merchants find annoying to predict.) And adventurers are needed both for the safety of the governed territories (much faster to mobilize than an army, and often more effective) and to project force when the provincials or lower classes refuse to bow to the force nobility can muster.

Nobility or whatever passes for it, those who are considered the rightful government, usually have some elements of an adventurer’s skillset; it would not do to be overly reliant, for their legitimacy, on outsiders who are not entirely trustworthy and might decide they like the idea of taking a crown or title for themself. An ordinary aristocrat is trained with the sword and horse regardless of sex; traditionally, men also train with the lance and heavier armor and women with the bow and knife, and with a variety of skills that differ based on family and personal inclination. Occasional rebellious heirs or third sons will join an adventuring party and usually find they are a reasonably effective fixer, though rarely skilled with traps or mechanisms. Nobility are also chosen at a higher rate than villagers for apprenticeship with retired adventurers, or for the non-heirs even active ones.

[jiskblr]

Special Materials

These materials are regarded as supernatural, but except where noted their special properties are not suppressed by antimagic fields as supernatural abilities generally are. Unusual forms of antimagic have been devised which suppress them, but these have serious deleterious effects on the earth, air, and possibly space around them, as the world's fabric is supernatural in the same respects as the metals.

Research into this field and creating records of any of its results, barring certain grandfathered exceptions, is banned by all civilized polities including ones not known for their regard for morality or international diplomacy; in most jurisdictions it carries the death penalty. These laws are enforced consistently and stringently, but incidents where this arises are rare. Scholars considering the subject generally read the grandfathered experimental logs (which are the only ones legal to distribute), followed by reading the judicial proceedings (which are in most polities legal to distribute in redacted form). Almost all come to the conclusion that the law is sensible and just and they should find a different research topic.

[jiskblr]

Rings

Rings are unusually potent magic items; they require a very skilled spellcaster to create, but it is much easier to imbue them with powerful effects. There is nothing particular about the physical ring shape or the location on the fingers; rings do not interact with traditional body slots or interfere with magic gloves or gauntlets. Rings must be small and made of extremely high-quality materials. And they cannot be embedded into the wearer's flesh without special training*. These two factors together mean that the finger-ring shape is a practical one, and hence traditional, sufficiently traditional that the usual name for the item is ‘ring’ despite the shape being ancillary. Wearers can only receive the benefit of two items which are rings from a magical perspective, regardless of whether they are physically rings; earrings, monocles, or for particularly extravagant expenses a bracelet are magically equivalent, and some items traditionally made as gloves can be crafted as a set of rings without interfering with the ‘true rings’, even if worn on the same hand.

Bracelets, for the wrist or ankle, are considered extravagant because they function no better than a smaller artifact, and require the same quality of material and attention to detail throughout. This means that a bracelet ‘ring’ costs at least five times the price, in labor and materials, that a ring for the same effect would, and as much as ten times or in rare cases twenty times. There are only two purposes for which they are used: covert agents who do not want it to be visible that they are wearing rings, and the extravagantly, conspicuously rich who are wasting stupendous sums of money purely as a highly-visible sign of consumption.

[jiskblr]

Less fun aspects of finishing the climate map: I keep getting situations that, according to the Koppen climate classification scheme, don’t exist. Like long north-south peninsulas and isthmuses, both near the tropic line, that by my reading of how air circulation works, should have hot, wet summers and warm-to-mild, dryish winters, a situation which I am informed should only ever come up in a monsoon on the eastern coasts of wide continents.

I’m marking them as “cool savanna” and hoping I don’t have anyone ask what the flora and fauna look like there.

[jiskblr]

Doing the climate of my world for the Divine Shells, and realized that I effectively put the Dwarf homeland close enough to the pole that it’s mostly under a giant ice sheet (despite not quite being in the antarctic circle, it’s a Himalaya-like plateau that starts around 40 S and stretches to 75 S). Which means that their tunnel network through the heart of the mountain range probably has spurs up to the underside of the ice to collect runoff.

[jiskblr]

The Metaphysics of Magic Items

Every individual has channels of energy which flow through them, which collect, pool, and travel along lines which are very similar from one person to another, though not precisely equivalent. The field of magical items has for the most part been the field of manipulating those channels; early items were usually weapons and armor, which touch only on the most surface-level aspects, and our ability to create more sophisticated items advanced slowly in early times, because we did not possess a good understanding of the principles at work. In a quirk of history, the first channels we learned to manipulate effectively were the ones we know regard as the most idiosyncratic and sophisticated: rings. Rings interact not with the local pooling of energy, but with a deeper level of soul-stuff. This requires fine control and is only possible for the most powerful of spellcasters, but it does not involve systematic understanding of the local flows of energy, and so was separable from the rest of the field. The various bodily affinities were gradually understood in bits and pieces, with the first attempts working only for a single type of effect, such as bracers of armor, and usually only in their weakest form - even early rings are, while powerful, much less powerful than we now know is possible. Also early were potions and oils, which operate using the internal magic channels but in a sufficiently consistent way that a rough, very descriptive understanding, without much grounding in theory, allowed them to create a variety of effects operating along similar lines.

It was in the heart of the dwarven empire in the reformed days where magic was no longer verboten that the first systematic understanding of the individual's magic channels began to be achieved. The first treatises written concerned specifically the channels in the legs and feet, but even this was enough to galvanize the field of item creation: methods which had previously been developed for boots of speed and greaves of stealth were, with the benefit of this systematic understanding of a piece of the whole, expanded to accomodate greater power within three decades, and to expand to a much greater variety of effects within two centuries. From there, the systematization tackled the arms and hands, which went much slower than previously because of misunderstandings caused by rings, which were at that time believed to operate only if found in the traditional shape and location of a physical ring. The insight that they were not interacting with the local channels in the hands allowed scholars to more directly analogize the hands to the feet, with rapidly-productive results when the barrier of misunderstanding was overcome. The community of crafters which discovered these principles was initially a guild system which guarded their secrets closely, but the overall concept of interacting with local channels was not kept secret as effectively. For this reason, crafters in other regions discovered similar principles but applied to other parts of the body. The elvish carvers first found the channels in eyes and were particularly effective in creating sensory-enhancement techniques, and then later generalized to the head and face. The core torso proved more difficult to map, though it has not particularly proven difficult to use once it was mapped; scattered druidic traditions managed to map the waist, but the full torso wasn't understood except in the later-developing study where both dwarves and elves, as well as other communities catching up to them, achieved full understanding of the whole body's map. This eventually unified with the methods used by potion-brewers and other makers of consumable-effect items such as the feather token into an overall set of methods. These take a very skilled craftsman to master the full range of applications, but the theory is consistent and understood by most wizards.

To complete the set of common crafting specialties, let me quickly digress on the spell-like items. Scrolls are as old as wizardry and have been rediscovered repeatedly; they are a minor variant of the notation and stabilized spell that a wizard places in their spellbook. The wand was known relatively early in history, definitely present in Lantide and brought to our continent by expatriates, but their creation was not actively passed down by the elves, and the principles needed were lost during the magic purges of the early dwarven empires. It was only alongside the systemization of magic channels that their creation was rediscovered, and understood as the self-contained 'prepared snare' of magical energy that we now use to create them, which is a mixture of the basic scroll with some techniques used for weaponry, creating a final product which can be used by an apprentice caster, a non-mage crafter, or by anyone who chooses to train in their use, which is common among adventuring fixers. The new - and, we believe, better-developed - theories also laid the groundwork for the staff, which combines the aspects used for weapons, the variants on those structures used for wands, and some fine-grained patterning most similar to rings, and created a powerful, sophisticated extension of a wizard's magical networks which allows a skilled spellcaster a much greater range of spells and can be, in a very real sense, a prosthetic extension of the humanoid body - which is why, unlike almost all other magical adornments and tools, it can be recharged from their reserves. It will come as no surprise to my audience that I am a carver of staves, and while I know several other varieties from earlier in my career I truly believe staves are the pinnacle of the crafter-mage's art. Or, at least, they are for now - perhaps in coming centuries we will advance our crafts and make new and yet-more-marvelous types, as our precessors invented staves.

The overall theory of items and the 'bodily affinities' which shape who makes things and why rests on the basic principle that a magic item functions by manipulating the magical channels of the one who uses it. There is a continuum, of course; weapons touch only very lightly, armor slightly more, and sophisticated items can be made to minimize the entanglement, the 'unaffilious' items. But the greater variety of wearable items all use close bonds to a particular part of the network, and have their effects by altering that network to draw on the spells and effects prepared in the item. Wearing two items which try to bond to the same part of the network will, at best, make one work at slightly-reduced capacity and the other not at all; the modified network created by one effect is the wrong 'shape' for the other to bond to it - unless, of course, one of the two has been crafted to not require it, but that is much more involved and takes, for a crafter practiced with both types, twice the time and materials. In principle there should be dozens or even hundreds of possible network sections which an item could bond to, but for the most part the modern crafter divides them into a standard set of twelve. While a few of these have clear delineations, such as the eyes, it is important for the student to note that most of these are essentially arbitrary. It is a fact that the channels in the vicinity of the waist are well-suited for effects which enhance the physical characteristics: strength, endurance, speed, agility. But while any system of crafters which developed independently but with the same knowledge base would make something very much like belts of giant strength, they would not necessarily call them "belts"; they might instead make breeches of giant strength and consider the lower torso part of a different affinity. The virtue of our standard set of twelve, however, is that it is widespread and covers almost all crafters who trade with us. If you create an item with one of our standard twelve affinities, you can be assured that it will interfere solely with other items made to use that same affinity. If you instead make breeches and make use of the channel segments lower on the body, you may have created an item which interferes both with the waist and with the knees and lower legs.

There is, however, reason to think this problem is not eternal. As our theoretical understanding grows more precise, it seems likely that we will find that some of these affinities can be subdivided, allowing more than twelve to be worn simultaneously. We know for certain the affinities are not perfectly interfering, from the art of 'kytoncrafting'. Like many other niche crafting methods, its origin is distasteful, coming from torture cults which revere the extraplanar kytons. But the methods are, when used with informed consent and restraint, ethical and fascinating. Kytoncrafted adornments embed into the flesh, interfering with the circulatory system of blood, and life-force directly, rather than primarily with the magical channels. The result creates wounds which never heal properly until removed, even with the aid of divine healing, but they do not interfere with traditional items utilizing the same 'body affinity', so that, for example, one may wear boots of speed together with ankle piercings of the spider, and have both function perfectly. To date, all attempts to refine this to remove the lasting injury have made them more difficult to create and embed, ultimately approaching the same end state as an unaffilious item. But it gives reason for optimism nonetheless; one boundary can be breached, and with time we can breach more.

[jiskblr]

On Hellish Contracts

If you sign a contract with a devil which forfeits your soul, either outright or as penalty for defaulting on other obligations which you do not manage to fulfill, you guarantee that your soul will be sent to Hell on your death, regardless of your other behavior in life. You will additionally go directly to the custody of the contract-holder, on whichever layer of Hell they reside in. If you would otherwise not have been sent to Hell, you will be subject to the normal restrictions on voluntary changes to a petitioner. However, if you sold your soul and additionally behaved in a Lawful Evil way in your life, you will not only arrive in your contract-holder's custody, you will be in a metaphysical sense their property. This means that they can make these decisions for you, and as far as the universe is concerned they were voluntary. Why exactly this is, is unknown. It has been established that it is not a power unique to devils or even to the Lawful Evil alignment; it is occasionally also used by Fateborn and has the same property that it gives them rights only if the contracted soul behaved in a Lawful Neutral manner in life. Certain archons and lawful angels have confirmed that they are theoretically capable of doing so as well, but it is contrary to their natures to do it, and so they never have. The archons have also established that it is not possible to get the lesser effect of guaranteeing the soul is sorted to a plane without including the greater effect as part of the contract, and the fundamental denial of agency such an effect entails, even as a corner case not expected to arise, is an intrinsically, vilely evil act they are incapable of committing.

The Chaotic breeds of outsider do not seem to be capable of creating such contracts at all. It is believed that a strong connection to the essence of elemental Law is required to imbue these contracts with their force.