Negav; Fleshing it out

I like it. There's a few grammatical errors in there, but not too many.

Also, I want to give Chani a hug. Poor girl.

Though at least for her, Kerume had a body to be buried. Most people get eaten, so you cant ever go to a grave and pay respects y'know?

Spoiler:

That's pretty much what the Tomb of the Unknown Adventurer is for. Though it also relies on at least one person of an adventuring party making it back alive or having stayed in the city to write the names on the monument, so I guess some unlucky people just literally fade into obscurity.

Something feels amiss to me about the "After three long years living in fear underground, the giants at last left Negav to look for more prey elsewhere" line. Three Years? If the predators only left because they basically got bored, I can't imagine them having stayed that long. It feels to me like the event would have been a single cataclysm rather than a prolonged occupation. Three days at most.

This is something you'll have to talk to Karbo about, because the chronology lists the Great Destruction having happened in 1837, but the Ps'isol Mages don't start rallying the survivors and rebuilding the city until three years later in 1840.  So either they lived underground for three years by the time the giants got bored and left, or someone made a miscalculation somewhere when writing the chronology.

Perhaps during that three-year period, there weren't predators actively occupying the area, but disorganized attempts at reconstruction by smaller groups wound up failing before they could get off the ground. It took until 1840 for the Ps'isols to rally a concerted reconstruction effort by most of the surviving populace to get a wall that actually stayed up and didn't just get overrun again. The mages didn't make the first attempt to rebuild, just the first one that worked.

Ohh that's a really solid wrapping up of the history of Negav, extensive and well put in form ! very nice job at this  

And writing it like that made me realize a couple of inconsistencies, like the one that XionGaTaosenai mentioned.
Thanks for writing this, it's going to be super helpful ^^

Okay, I went ahead and polished the history a little and added some more flavor text (yay...) I also added Xion's suggestion that the Great Destruction lasted three days, but the people remained holed up underground for three years, which would eventually give birth to the slums.

Now, I have some questions about all this. Do you mind the whole Magitech Revolution, basically an industrial revolution, just for the sake of making Negav more modern? Cause I'm being pretty biased doing that. Also, regarding the whole issue of eternal youth, if that gets retconned, the history will have to be changed a lot, because some of the main actors during Negav's history lived for hundreds of years.

Well I don't mind if you wish to highlight the change the magitech is bringing to Negav. But I wouldn't make it a revolution though, more something progressive instead.

Karbo wrote:

Well I don't mind if you wish to highlight the change the magitech is bringing to Negav. But I wouldn't make it a revolution though, more something progressive instead.

I agree. I think Magi-tech is around and on many commercial things but I don't see it as having gotten everywhere. Mostly it's availible freely to the rich and upper class of Negav so thus it'll not be as seen in the tier 2 societies and only talked of in the tier 3.

I disagree.  This is exactly the kind of wishy-washy thinking that's keeping Negav stagnant and unable to develop as a legitimate setting.  The problem with Negav is that it has no idea what kind of setting it wants to be.  Sometimes it wants to be your standard medieval RPG town like Dark keeps calling it with everyone rocking swords and magic sticks despite the presence of high science.  Sometimes there's high science there with people rocking laser guns and sensor devices to keep what's unwelcome out despite most people being from medieval times.  Sometimes it's a combination of both.  This in turn makes the whole setting look like a patchwork of ideas strewn together with no regard for consistency.  And for what?  What will this lack of consistency accomplish in the long run?  Like it or not, you can't have a cake and eat it too.  Modernizing Negav is the easiest way to finally give it a sense of identity and consistency.  As a compromise, while I opted for magitech to be widespread, I decided that commerce and services are largely controlled by guilds and that Negav doesn't have industries where goods are mass-produced, save for the Great Foundry.  You can see more on the work-in-progress I made so far.  I'll most likely rename the Magitech Revolution once the mostly final version is out, because in retrospect, I agree this wasn't exactly a true industrial revolution.

Not entirely. Japan underwent its transition over the course of just a few short decades. Albeit extremely bloody.

There is another factor you must all consider.  If we assume that the history I proposed becomes the canon history of Negav, it means that Magitech first appeared in 1925.  Given that the present day is dated at around the year 2068, it means that Negav has had 143 years for Magitech to spread around all corners of the city.  Next, compared to most of Earth's major cities, Negav is quite small.  Like I once said in the past, Negav is now only a little bigger than the town I live in.  With how small Negav is, I find it very implausible that Magitech would not have already spread throughout the whole city after nearly a century and a half.  Furthermore, would it not be logical for the Magiocrats to modernize the Lower and Middle Tier to satisfy the common folks and maintain a good reputation in their eyes?

Keeping Negav in a perpetual state of stasis because the setting is unwilling to commit to a side is no better.  I will let you know that some people in the community, mostly on dA, believes that Negav has high science found in every district, which we all know here is false.  Plus, the presence of magitech in Negav is already listed in the wiki.

Quote :

The Galfam-Abh MURCOWIH describes Negav as a thriving type7 pre-industrial society, although some would argue it's evolving rapidly. Technology in Negav is often closely intertwined with magic and make good use of the special properties found in lot of the resources of Felarya. For example, a small Scintilla stone can make a very convenient lighters and Boraloupes are a type of box coated with Boralite used to keep food cool and conserve it. actinite is used to power many things such as lamps, with Mazhir gems providing an excellent catalyst to make it works. Once depleted, the gems can be taken to a Mazirite; a mage specialized in recharging them.
This provides a virtually endless source of energy to Negav, although the downside is that the amount of energy released, while steady, is still quite low and extended to a relatively long period of time. Mages and scientists are searching for a way to make the gem release its stored magic instantly. There is no electricity network in Negav. Some buildings are linked to a power grid of sort but they are typically rare and few and limited to small areas.
Worth mentioning is the network of portals linking various districts between them. It completely redraw Negav's map and the notion of what it means to travel inside the city.

As you can see, this is not a radical change, as all the information about the existence of magitech already exist in this current version.  All I'm doing is giving a clearer idea of how widespread it is, as well as give a reason as to what might have sparked this interest of combining magic with technology.

Can I just take a moment to ask why its called "Galfam-Abh MURCOWIH " I have never been able to pronounce it and the name is just silly.