Re: Its Magic Engine Para Pc
Tacio Allaire
on they have what are called Steam Rails. Big enchanted Engines that run on rails set into the ground. When you add water to the engine, it heats up the the water and turns the water into steam and the steam is then used to push the tires along tracks. Hence my version of trains. The water made for the steam rains on the road are made by Clerics who cast create water for the engines.
Wizardry is the most common but very difficult to use cuz it take YEARS of study to do the simplest of spells. Wizardry is using knowledge to pull Magic out if the Magic world. Even after years of study some students may not even be able to grasp the magical knowledge past a certain level of magic. Enchanting is a school of Wizardy that can be learned.
Managerie magic is MUCH more rare it is people who are born with an ability to bend magic Natturally. It's more of a wild magic more powerful but less controlled like wizardry. Enchanting using Managerie magic could be very dangerous and so is not often done. It may work or it may make the Engine come to LIFE and start eating warm bodied people to power its self.
Soul searching is the ability to find the magic with in ones self, but again this can take years of study and training and learning and still not everyone is able to learn it. To enchant using soul searching magic would be to littural put part of your SOUL into an object which would be less than desirable to most people. There would not be enough of them selves to pass on after death and then you get ghosts powered by Engines.
Clerical is using the power of the gods, to use magic. People are wary to use clerics in stuff and for stuff as most clerics want to spread the word influence of their god and tend to take over where they work. The clerics who do work on the steam engines tend to be clerics to gods of mechanical things and invention so they enjoy working on the Steam Rails as they feel close to their god. The feel no need to take over as they are near their gods feild of influence. The only cleric that would be able to using enchantment magic would be Clerics of gods of machines. Except being a cleric they would most likely feel inclined to dedicate the Steam Rail to there god. Most companies feel inclined to keep there Engines to themselves as then the church and the clererie of that church might feel entitled to use the Steam Rails for missions of there God.
Enchanting by wizardry magic in my world is long and costly. It is pulling magic out of a parallel universe and putting it into objects. The more powerful the object the longer the enchantment. An enchantment of heat metal to the point of making 10s of gallons of water boil is a high level enchantment.The steam rail engines can take YEARS to make. It can take years as the only way to speed up the process of enchanting is to have MORE people working on the enchantment but then the more people working on the enchantment the more people must be payed.
There are other types of obtaining magic but that are rare and far between and often obscure. One would not not want to employ the type of magic for instance called Borrowers. someone who has traded his soul to a devil as they might afraid of a wrong step they Borrower would bring the wrath of their patron down on the Stean Rail.
My ideas was that the size of the magic steam producing engine cannot be made smaller than a certain size or otherwise they explode under the pressure of the steam. But if so why would they not make it out of a thicker or stronger or resistant steel for the engine...
Perhaps the rails provide the magical "oomph" to turn a normal fire into something that can provide a high enough steam pressure, perhaps managing that steam into the pistons requires spells that are built into the rails, but without the rails, you have something that produces lots of steam, but isn't going anywhere.
The effort to make a magic-engine doesn't have to scale linearly, so to make a small magic-engine still takes a long time to do. You could justify this in many ways. For instance that every engine require certain base enchantments to support the main power generating "burner" and these base enchants aren't affected by size because they're simply the magical framework on which the rest of the magic anchors on and only the "burner" enchantment itself scales with the size of the engine you make.
This way you can have a high fixed cost to create the engine, and then another smaller scaling cost on top to add the power generator depending on engine size. This makes small engines economically nonviable, while still creating limits to the size of the engines on the upper end.
But they were heavy and amount of damage that car does to road is proportional to 4th power of its weight. It quickly become evident that those buses profits were based on unpaid externality - broken roads so they were shut down.
You said that magic requires individual enchanters building the object. You can also make it that the entire enchantment must be done by the same person or group of people - you cannot have one person create one part and another person create another part.
Let's say it takes a team of ten mages five years to create an engine. This means that, at a minimum, the total cost of the automobile engine must be more than the total wages a single magic-engineer earns in 50 years. (Plus all the additional expenses, like material costs). There will be no way for a typical wage-worker to ever afford a car of their own.
While the automobile was invented in the 1800s, it didn't reach widespread use until the 1900s, when the creation of the assembly line made their mass-production significantly more efficient. If the nature of magic precludes the use of assembly lines, there is no economy of scale - that is, the production cannot be made cheaper or more efficient by building additional equipment or hiring more workers. While cars may exist in your world, they will forever remain toys for the extremely wealthy and will never reach the widespread use they have today.
The International Association of Horse Breeders and Carters is very politically powerful. They object to paving roads because of the extra wear on horses' hooves. The rather heavy steam cars get stuck in the ruts in the unpaved roads, and have to be pulled out by teams of horses, for a not-so-small fee.
Make it so that an engine requires a magic person to be there to steer it. Perhaps a priest is needed at all times to refill the water. Perhaps a magic person is needed to maintain the enchantments, or they need to make minute to minute changes?
Perhaps in the future they can innovate this need away, but right now every engine needs a skeleton crew of 'engineers' to keep it operating. And this is simply not feasible for an automobile. It would also make the trains even more special as every new engine needs a skeleton crew assigned to it at all times.
Steam engines simply do not work at a small scale. You can get big, beefy engines that pull heavy loads, but if you try to shrink them down too small, you get the this bit of the magic too close to the that bit of the magic and the warding scheme can't hold and the entire thing explodes.
Metal wheels must stay on reinforced tracks. Taking metal wheels on cobblestones or dirt roads tears up the roads and renders them unusable. Metal wheels have a difficult time stopping on wet or frosty cobblestones. Therefore, metal wheels must be confined to metal-reinforced surfaces such as rails.
We know that one of the main features of magic is that sometimes it works in unintelligible and irrational ways.
Basically, the magic somehow can sense the number of people carried by the object it is casted upon. If it contains less than - say - 50 people, the magic has no effects and the vehicle can't move.
So, you need to cast it on a mass transit vehicle, like a train, and trains themselves need a minimum number of passengers to be able to travel.
It could also make for some plot devices (like, the fiftieth passenger jumps away from the train, so that it stops in the middle of nowhere...)
Since in your world enchanting is time and money consuming, it makes also sense that no effort is put into using it of a small vehicle like a car: it's more efficient to enchant a train, since it would carry more people/goods.
Don't go down the steam path at all, unless the steam-magic-punk aesthetic is crucial. Have an enchanted rail with an enchanted thingamajig on the train that acts as a _induction_motor.That way you don't even have to explain away why people haven't tried putting 2+2 together and tried heating water with wood to create steam if magic is so expensive, since the trains are so good that no competing technology can get off the ground.
It would also explain why it can't be scaled down into a smaller engine, if the enchanted rail slowly sucks in the relatively diffuse natural magic of the world over the course of the day and over a very large area, since the rails are 100s of km long and discharges it into the passing train's thingamajig.
High traffic rail-roads may be limited to ley-lines for interesting story conflicts, e.g. druids can't plant their magic grove, because that would shift the land's ley-lines and leave a Class-A railroad without power.
That's the only real reason that the 'shipping industry', which wouldn't exist, hasn't invented the automobile. No spices, no exotic lands or peoples, no war : no reason to bother your neighbor other than to borrow a cup of sugar. Kinda lame, but lame is the only thing that will get in the way of progress.
As you state in the question, these engines are expensive. A car engine transports four people. A train engine transports several hundred people. If they cost the same, there won't be very many cars. Maybe a few buses. (Many people have mentioned this, just repeating it for completeness)
This has its own problems. The railway station is in the middle of town and the tracks cut the town in two. People will want to get from one half to the other. Tunnels and bridges are the expensive but safe solutions. Single-level crossings are cheap and dangerous. You might want to have magical warning bells or barriers.
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