An interesting story line.

The rise of magic, the fall of technology, or is it the final balance.

You could say that magic and technology are like fire and water, nothing is directly created by combining fire and water, but as a result they create steam which can be harnessed. Well in the same way when you combine magic and technology nothing useful can come from combining them, but when you do it creates rifts to a plane of magic (as said by the book Soot Of The Gods). If you could harness these rifts it would be possible to contain the spent magic (magic expelled from these rifts) in a substance such as mithril, creating a sort of magic battery not to produce electricity but magic. If people started using these rifts as a source of magic, it could also start the downfall of technology, and start again the rise of magic.

Going on this idea it would be possible to make new magical items, self recharging staves, more powerful swords, bows that create magic ammunition. I mean just picture creating a bow that can shoot arrows made of pure fire, ice, poison or what ever you could think of.

 

After reading your post in the other thread, I remembered reading in the manual and on other places that if you used a tech item on a mage, it would explode or something like that, but it never happened in the game :cry: . Atleast not to a major degree.

Instead of magical batteries I thought more of people studying both magic and tech. They could give the magick-tech meter another dimension, and each time you get a tech skill, it jumps up to the left, and magick up to the right. The higher up and closer to the corner the more powerfull the skill would be.

If you were high in the middle you could use something between a spell and a tech, to make the explosion from combining the two, and control it at your opponent.

 

But explosions would be about all you could do with it in that sense, or maybe something like banishment.

Besides if you where to carry a Magic/Tec "Bomb" it would be like running around with unstable nitroglycerin in your backpack. I can see it now “oops I tripped” or “the bad man hit me” and BOOM you’re gone.

 

I think they should do something like a middle way, you could use the energies from magic and tech for more than bombs.

In Arcanum it's pretty useless to go both magick and tech, so something in between, would be cool.

Having one spell and two tech skills would result in:

tech skills level 1 (2-1)
magick skills level -1 (1-2)
midway skills level 2 (1+2-(2-1)) last paranthesis the distance away from the middle

To learn a middle way skill you have to know both a magic and a tech way to do what you want it to do.

 

In a way there is a middle class in Arcanum, your skills. You can chose to be a mage a technologist or a highly skilled Fighter/Assassin depending on how you use the skill. I have used solid skills before and I was quite strong, using Backstab and Prowling to kill in a single stroke, putting a lot of points into your skills/stats can make you just as deadly as magic or technology.

Besides what could you do in that class that you couldn’t do in either magic or technology? You could blow stuff up (Fire Ball or explosives), you could unleash deadly energies (magic), you could create powerful weapons (technology), you could become a deadly physical force (skills/high stats). What more can you think of?

You may be able to create a select few items that might be powerful, but I don’t think it’s worth a class of its own. It would also make figuring out how to make your character a lot harder, having four ways instead of three.

Why do you say that, you think a guy shooting a gun and throwing low level spells is useless? Anything can be useful in the right hands. But it is mostly because magic and technology weren’t meant to go together, you can’t use a big gun and powerful spells that would be unfair.

 

I meant that most of the offensive spells don’t do nearly as much damage. Most of the defensive spells are still quite useful.

That is cool that “most” of the spells that would be useful to a technologist are first level spells.

I still prefer being mage thou.

Spoiler

Then all you need to defeat Kurgan is Entanglement, a Reflection Shield, your favorite ranged weapon, and he’s dead. 8)

 

Grabbed my shovel and dug deep.



Because it’s mine and I felt like it.