#age of arcanum

[plantskiddo]

never not thinking about them

[hinumay]

HELLOOOOOO

I was commissioned to draw these love birds in an AU fanfic setting set in the age of arcanum by @blorbologist !!!! Aka umwelt!!!

The fic is!!

Architect of our Demise

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51394138

☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️

!!!!!!!!! Weeeeeee

[firlachieldraws]

Critical Role/EXU: Calamity - Patia Por’co, Keeper of Scrolls

I know everyone.

[blorbologist]

Feeding a Flying City

[Aeor, by Pretty Useful Co.]

This started as a little exercise in my worldbuilding thoughts for some off-hand stuff mentioned in my current fic, but I uh. Got Into It. So enjoy, if you're into two thousand words of nerding out about fantasy economics and agriculture and spells. For the sake of context, this is specifically looking at Exandria's flying cities in the Age of Arcanum, working off D&D 5E's rules as written (so I'm avoiding inventing spells).

When tackling the Age of Arcanum in my fanfic, I knew going in that I wanted to use this space to stretch my worldbuilding muscles and fill in some of the space left by Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan with reasonably plausible meat and bones.

One thing I was excited to squint at was the issue of how the hell flying cites feed their populations. 

The ‘lonely city’ is a common fantasy trope, especially in visual media. Your towering bastion of civilization (or spire of evil) on the open plains, or beside a river, or deep in the mountains certainly makes for a great symbol. A flying city is really the ultimate version of this, completely disconnected from the petty ground below… and the farmland that usually would surround any metropolis. 

See, in medieval times, you only had so much time to transport good until they spoiled. Some could be more forgiving than others - however, given a city often aggregates political and financial elite, there is an expectation that they can get their fresh fruits, and decadent game. Even beyond freshness, if you have a lot of people in one place who are not actively growing their own crops, a lot of more-or-less processed food needs to get into the city daily. And though you could station your acres of farmland just over the hill so they don’t ruin the ~scenic approach~, that will cost more to transport. The fact is, having a lot of people - poor and rich - in one place requires a lot of food, every day, to feed them. And it has to come from somewhere.

(Off-topic note, medieval castles (not necessarily cities) were also there to, y’know, defend the populace. So they had to be both near enough to their peasants to respond to aggression, and near enough for the people to get to the castle for shelter when needed. Which is not relevant to this point.)

Magic, like refrigeration, greenhouses and GMO crops, allows a society to sidestep some of these issues. Which is great! But how the flying cities could use the resources they have to feed their population is half the fun in theorizing. 

To quickly recap what we know to be common to flying cities of the time:

Limited to the city only, usually a location with ground dense with brumestone (i.e., no farmland). 

Their limited ‘undergrounds’ are often fairly dense with more structures (Aeor’s many levels; the labyrinth and tons of administrative locations inside Avalir).

They are nomadic and engage in trade (both with eachother and grounded cities, like Vasselheim).

… but they all likely came from landed roots, and potentially were once perfectly normal cities. 

So. How do you feed your people while flying a path that might take years to travel (ex: Avalir’s 7-year trek), especially between trade stops?

The last surviving flying city is Draconia, which is really fragments of a larger nomadic city that decided to remain fairly sedentary compared to its predecessors. Its answer was probably pretty simple: given that Draconia hovered within Dreemoth Ravine, the tailed dragonborn could just… collect a tithe of crops from the enslaved ravenites. It’s already canon that they were put to work in the mines, so working the land also unfortunately makes sense. It’s unclear how the food then got up to the city (skyships, given they have ready brumestone access?), but given Draconia seems to be an exception to the rules I can (mostly) confidently rule out ‘the Age of Arcanum was built on abusing the grounded cities and towns, potentially requiring an age of magically-enhanced farming to provide for the people above and/or risking the farmers going hungry in favor of the mageocracies’. 

Here’s where magic offers numerous solutions, and just as many weird problems! 

First of all, the stupidly isolated nature of flying cities means that any method of bringing food in has to be extremely structured. Mom and pop can’t just bring the donkey to the farmer’s market to sell their goods in Avalir; to get there you need to fly (more scheduled) or teleport (requires a mage, and limited quantities of goods). So from the getgo a lot of financial control is likely in the cities’ hands. Which… is not all too dissimilar from history, but the lack of flexibility is probably more striking here. Shit, I was hoping to get away from Draconia’s grim worldbuilding.

It also places flying cities in a role very similar to an advancing army, requiring food as they march to be drawn from the surrounding lands. While soldiers can break off and loot towns they pass through, a flying city probably can’t just dock in the middle of farmland, grab all the corn and bolt. So the need for a more organized food transport likely helps protect towns from that exploitation. (Though, with the military posturing of Avalir and Aeor, I could see flying cities strong-arming support from grounded ones in exchange for promised protection/aid if they needed it.)

Of course, when docked at another city (Avalir stayed at Vasselheim for ten days in the weeks before the Calamity), they can fairly easily trade with the surrounding towns there… who are also providing for the existing city. Hosting a flying city must be a huge logistics nightmare, but economically worth the headache. 

(Vasselheim likely has a leg up in that it has both a sitting population of mages, such as Vespin pre-fuckup, and the likes of Clerics, who I’ll get to soonish.)

In EXU: Calamity, skyships (and an offhand mention of something called an ornithopter) already exist, which could facilitate the bulk transport of goods. Based on the speed of the Silver Sun in Campaign 3 (4-5 days to cover ~700 miles translates to a speed of ~5-6.5 knots; for context that seems to be about the middling range for a medieval tradeship), this seems like an excellent way of transporting goods that do not spoil easily. Or use arcane equivalents to the canon Bag of Colding to help keep things fresh longer. However, as noted above, this would require a lot of community organization to get crops together when the skyship shows up for harvest.

The tricky thing is that Avalir, at least, follows leylines as it travels. So if there was intent to line up its passes over farmland with their harvest season - to minimize transport distance - it might be difficult to coordinate. Moreover, with an implied many flying cities, and no clear territorial delimitations between their routes (especially if they’re all following leylines; but Avalir at least made stops in Issylra, Gwessar/Tal’Dorei, and Dorumas/the Shattered Teeth at least), I wonder if there would be economic conflict over which cities could be highest bidder for the freshest crops. Which could be Interesting. 

(I wonder if sky piracy, or sky privateering, was a thing in the Age of Arcanum. Nydas is said to have been a pirate on the actual seas, so aquatic trade is still going strong, but given the flying cities are so reliant on limited methods to get food… you could put a lot of pressure on a rival city by capturing a few key skyships full of the last harvests before winter.)

Another option is teleportation. Avalir, after all, has an entire guild devoted to teleporting people around, so critical to its functioning that part of the Betrayers’ plan was to leave them without leadership when they struck. However, teleportation is very much a creature-oriented form of transportation; perhaps you could bring up a herd of cattle for slaughter, but that’s a pretty damn high spell slot for beef.

Avalir is in a fortuitous situation, in that it has a longstanding relationship with the Gau Drashari; druids, well-known masters of plant and animal life. In theory, this could mean Plant Growth casts to increase harvests… but at this time the Gau Drashari specifically only live in Caithmoira, guarding this holy site. So hopping from one druid-boosted farmland to another is unlikely. 

Well, if transporting food to the cities is such an issue, why not produce food in the cities?

While magical greenhouses must account for some luxury fresh goods for sure, I really don’t think the cities as illustrated have enough real estate to actually support their whole populations like this. Like I noted above, of the two cities we know really well, their insides are already full of labs and labyrinths and all sorts of things probably best kept away from your food supply. 

D&D 5E spells offer another answer, and another piece of potentially complicated worldbuilding: Create Food and Water. Per the spell description, it creates enough food to feed 15 people for 24 hours, which seems to neatly solve all our problems! Until you realize the food is explicitly bland (bet you the mages turn up their noses at it), vanishes if not consumed after 24 hours (so that’s a daily 3rd level spell slot from some poor schmuck), and is mostly limited to Paladins and Clerics. You know, godly people, who are so fondly looked upon by the mageocracies. Artificers, at least, are more in line with the Age of Arcanum attitude - but we don’t see any in Calamity, so it’s unclear if the class ‘exists’ per say in the time period. Reducing powerful Paladins and Clerics to food dispensaries - and not even good food, probably for the lower class - would fit in neatly with how the powers of the divine are seen as lesser. Goodberry falls into a similar role: useful, but probably something mages would avoid.

Speaking of spells, let’s get a little fucked up, hm? Who is to say a mage couldn’t just. Summon some pigs to be served up as bacon tomorrow? Well. Conjure Animals specifically says the animals are actually fey, and vanish when their HP reaches 0. Summon Beasts? Same thing. Find Steed? You guessed it. So magic can help us grow food, and transport it, and preserve it, but not actually make it out of nothing. (If there’s a spell I’m missing that completely solves this, please let me know, but I can’t really find one.)

My final little thought came watching geese migrate some time ago. The passenger pigeon has been extinct for… a hundred and ten years, now. But in its hayday, flocks of the birds would literally cloud the sky. Exandria is home to far more stunning beasts than pigeons, and hunting flying game is likely a lot easier when you yourself are flying too. 

Sure, you can apply this to actual fishing when the cities are over the seas, but! Imagine fishing boats but for birds and all manner of winged beasts in great flocks, netting and catching them to haul in. Maybe the magical equivalent of those helicopter boar hunts to deal with invasive populations, but landing at all introduces a whole lot more hassle. Big net and flying device = fresh meat, with an arcane twist.

So: how do you feed a flying city? Especially one with a lavish lifestyle as seen in Avalir, or a hard research focus as in Aeor?

Have an extremely regimented relationship with the towns on your path (likely in competition with other flying cities using these leylines when you are) or that otherwise have food you need. Make sure skyships arrive in time for the harvests. Miss that and things get dicey. 

Supplement this with trade, both with other flying cities and grounded ones when docked. However, docked time has to be limited to not risk starving out the countryside surrounding the city hosting you.

Small deliveries, especially of fresh livestock, can be accomplished through Porter’s Guild or equivalent.

Magically preserve food thus obtained to survive until your schedule and harvests of X Y z goods next align. 

City-based organizations can ‘fish’ for birds as the city flies (or potentially even actually fish as they fly over the ocean) for fresh meat.

Hope to gods (but without hoping to the gods because they’re schmucks) that you time your pick-ups right, that there are no famines, or early frosts, that no one steals your fucking skyships our outbids you on a key agricultural contract, or casts Dispel Magic and makes your food all spoil.

When the carefully-scheduled management of the city’s resources fails, turn to your diviners or healers and have them feed the masses with bland crackers while the Somnovem or Ring of Gold continue eating honeyed lamb and figs. 

If you read this far, I'm super flattered you shifted through my rambles! I'll gladly discuss any glaring mistakes or things I've overlooked; this is only what I considered in worldbuilding for a fic, and I don't pretend to be an expert on medieval agriculture or economic practices.

This was still very fun to (over)think about <3

(Water, of course, would be a similar limiting factor, but is easy enough to magically purify, and would not be too bland when made by Create Food and Water, so I didn’t bring it up.)

[topaz-mutiny]

As a reminder: Ruidus is literally older than every current and Age of Arcanum civilization. The civilization of Aeor the Floating Wizard Hubris City looks like a stumbling bumbling toddler in comparison to its age.

However, genuine Aeorian tech being related makes sense considering they had a weapon named the Malleus Factorum which scared the gods so much it made the gods smite Aeor out of the sky, and Ludinus has been plagiarizing their ideas for like 800 years.

[omens-daughter]

When the malleus keys were first introduced, I noted that "malleus" means hammer, such as in the word mallet and also the bone in your inner ear that helps with hearing. I know this because of a witch hunting book from a long time ago called the Malleus Malefacarum (or the Hammer of Witches)

I make note of this.

They are called "hammer keys"

So, I'm sitting there. Episodes pass. I'm thinking about the Aeor arc in campaign 2 for some reason, can't recall why. But I'm thinking about it, and suddenly, I recall something

The Mighty Nein uncover notes about something called the Factorum Malleus project, AKA the God Hammer. We know this to actually be, canonically, what Ludinus has been trying to replicate with his keys courtesy of FRIDA and their memory of protecting one

In those notes the M9 recovered, the project head is noted as a mage named Athodan. It is stated that this mage uncovered a relic, which turned out to be a Luxon beacon, and used necromantic glyphwork to unlock some property from it that pleased the overseers of this mage's work. What this mage was working on prior to (or in conjunction with) the Malleus Factorum project was rejuvenation

I believe that Ludinus Da'leth is an ancient Aeorian mage named Athodan who worked on the original project to free Predathos and kill the gods

When the gods (collectively, Betrayer and Prime) struck Aeor out of the sky, I believe Athodan somehow survived, but lost all of his work

Maybe he wasn't in the city at the time. Maybe he had some sort of contingency. Regardless, he survived. And, in order to survive the Calamity, he made his way to Issylra and hid out in Vasselheim, the Dawn City, the last bastion of civilization left after the Calamity ravaged Exandria

Once people began migrating out from Vasselheim again, he settled in a town called Ivaadel. Maybe this is where he developed his harness thing that allowed him to rejuvenate again, since he'd be approaching pretty old age (depending on what was done with the Luxon beacon and how old he was when he did it)

He rejuvenates and relocates. Can't have anyone back home notice that Old Ass Ludinus is a 150 year old elf again, right?

He settles in Molaesmyr, because in this post-Calamity world, he is working with figurative rocks and sticks when it comes to magic and technology. So, he needs somewhere that will

a) have a natural wellspring of powerful magic, and

b) have access to relics from Aeor. Molaesmyr has both

And we know Ludinus began hoarding Aeorian artifacts as per Team Wildemount's investigationHe attempted something. Either a shoddy replication of what was built in Aeor, or just an attempt at communion with Predathos and that wiped out the city and corrupted the surrounding woodlands

Ludinus then runs off to Bysaes Tyl for a brief time before showing up on the Eve of Crimson Midnight (interesting name, that) and is credited with stopping the violence between powerful Dwendalian and Julous Dominion aristocratic mages. This accord he is able to reach with them is the basis on which he founds the Cerberus Assembly

The Cerberus Assembly is named after a conglomerate of mages from the Age of Arcanum and predates with Calamity

Knowing that Ludinus founded the modern Cerberus Assembly is kinda suspicious considering how little information of the Age of Arcanum survived the Calamity

He also mentions Laeryn in his notes (Abriya's character from ExU Calamity) and literally no one remembers who she is. Him being aware of her is nuts in the first place, even crazier if you think he is just a modern-day elf mage

In summary:

Ludinus Da'leth is a pre-Calamity, semi-immortal mage from Aeor named Athodan who has been using his knowledge of rejuvenation to keep himself alive for, at the very least, 1000 years

Too many boxes of this theory have been ticked, and I wholeheartedly believe it

[icy-moons]

With Vespin being a Malconvoker and Halas having spells like Trap the Soul in his spellbook, I love the implication that Age of Arcanum Exandria follows older editions of D&D.

The power disparity between magic users and martial classes was an infamous problem of these earlier editions, and that lends itself well to a world with such a strong emphasis on the power of magic. The rules indeed apply.

And Age of Arcanum characters having access to spells, classes, and items no longer found in 5e is an effective way to show (also mechanically) exactly how much knowledge was lost in the Calamity.

[smolfrumpkin]

exu calamity critters , pls help

a post came up on my dash and someone had linked to a google docs kinda file talking abt the references made in exu calamity abt previous critter knowledge bUT the dashboard refereshed and i can’t find it, can anyone point me in the right direction, pretty please?

[vestigesofperversion]

“It goes against every virtue of this age to believe that something that is achievable by one is not, in theory, achievable by all.”

— A young Vespin Chloras, speaking on the ascension of the Matron of Ravens and the illusion of mortality

[crazywolf828]

I just have to get this out of my head because I love it. The portraits for our new group have been drawn in such an interesting way, it reminds me of stained glass, or maybe even mosaic tile art.

Both were something used ages ago to immortalize important figures, raise them in notariety. But we know these six fail. We know their glass will shatter, their tiles will crack. We know that not a single person will remember these people who almost saved the day.

[microcosmtoxin]

i love you age of arcanum i love you creation of the gods i love you birth of magic i love you dawn of a new era i love you wizardly hubris

[aspiringsophrosyne]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the Ring of Brass is named after the saying: "To grab the brass ring."

[fullmoonfireball]

So like what's the deal with olimar and the pikmin

^^^ only knowledge of olimar comes from smash bros brawl

FUCK yes you have given me the chance to infodump. thank you <3

so Olimar's this little middle-aged man (literally. the man's less than 2cm tall, despite what Smash might have you believe) from the planet Hocotate who's basically a space trucker. he works for Hocotate Freight, and flies a rocket all around space, unfortunately without a lot of breaks. he's doing his best to support his family, even if his schedule doesn't leave a whole lot of time for him to see them.

at one point, he gets a much-deserved vacation from work, and decides to take his beloved ship (technically it's Hocotate Freight property, but that's not the point), the S.S. Dolphin, and have some fun out there!

this is where Olimar's string of miserable luck begins.

while traveling, a meteor hits his ship, and forces him to make a crash landing on an unknown planet, later dubbed PNF-404. Olimar survives, but the Dolphin is a wreck, its parts scattered god-knows-where about the planet. to make matters worse, the planet's atmosphere contains high levels of oxygen (which is poisonous to Hocotatians) and his spacesuit's life support system will only last for 30 days. what fun!

as he begins his search for the Dolphin's lost parts, he stumbles upon a strange... creature? construct? entity? whatever it is, he decides it resembles his planet's onions, and thus dubs it an Onion. the Onion lifts itself out of the ground on three long legs, and spits a single seed into the earth. the seed quickly sprouts, and Olimar, ever the curious sort, feels the need to pluck it, and surprise!

that's no ordinary plant, that's a little fella! its shape reminds Olimar of the Pikpik brand carrots he quite loves, and so he dubs the creature a Pikmin. through working with the Pikmin to help them multiply by bringing Pellet Posies and the bodies of defeated beasts back to the Onion, he manages to recover his ship's engine, allowing him to at least lift off from the planet's surface overnight.

PNF-404's creatures, while still posing danger during the day, are largely nocturnal. staying on the ground overnight is extremely dangerous, and any pikmin left unattended overnight are quickly devoured- this is the origin of his final smash, End of Day! thankfully, in Pikmin, Olimar does not crash again in the morning, even if the Dolphin is still worse for wear. so yeah, Olimar's trying to recover his 30 (now 29) ship parts with the help of these strange creatures, discovering yellow and blue pikmin, and fighting many strange beasts along the way.

there are three possible endings to the first game, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm only going to cover the best one here. if you manage to collect every single ship part in time, he gets to go back home to Hocotate in his like-new S.S. Dolphin, maybe even pick up a souvenir for his kids real quick!

...now, one thing you may realize here is that is not the ship used in End of Day.

that would be because, well... Olimar has absolutely terrible luck. while on the way back home, he went to park his ship (again, technically company property) back where it belongs with Hocotate Freight, and.... yeah I'm just going to show you the cutscene

[firlachieldraws]

Critical Role/EXU: Calamity - Purvan Suul, Champion of the Raven Queen

He’s just a guy

[rohnoc]

In the lore of Exandria, the rumor is that Vespin Chloras sits at the right hand of Asmodeus.

But if this motherfucker released every betrayer god, why is he at the right hand of just this one guy? And all of a sudden these ideas start coming.

But it’s the Age of Arcanum there’s shitty wizards everywhere. So I don’t want it to be like, oh these other guys ‘we never did anything wrong. Vespin Chloras ruined fucking everything for all of us’ .

Like No. You’re all fucking culpable baby

Vespin is symptomatic of the larger Age

- brennan lee mulligan

[moonhoundlanding]

I still can’t get over the name the EXU:Calamity characters gave their group: Ring of Brass

The strange juxtaposition between the audacity of claiming only roughly 14 people are more politically important than you in your world. (And the characters definitely think they’re bigger movers and shakers that those 14)

Versus the almost childish nature of the name itself. Gold to Silver to Brass. It seems like the name children come up with when asked what they want to be when they grow up. Teacher, we’re going to found the Ring of Brass- it’s like the Ring of Gold but better!

And I desperately want to know if anyone outside the group calls them that (or even knows they’re a group, but that’s a different thread)