Exploring the Network

Similar to The Old Blood, The Network acts as the backbone of society for another of the precursors. In-game it's representatives are sci-fi style technology like energy weapons, mecha and the like. Only a few items I've currently written are intended to be creations of the Network society but I imagine they will begin to change with nailing down some of the aesthetics and ideas. An ongoing question about both The Old Blood and The Network civilizations has been: why? If regular style D&D magic existed in the rest of the world (including the northwestern part of the peninsula) then why would these groups push so hard to develop their abilities and masteries in such a different direction. Currently, the answer is that most of the Southern Reaches, for unknown reasons, seems to suppress it's population from developing the Art. Expressing it worked as it did anywhere else, but people born in much of the Southern Reaches were far less likely to be born with the ability to practice magic or to have a magical bloodline expressed (i.e. Sorcerors).

Located primarily in the North-East of the Southern Reaches this precursor culture was long dominated by The Network, which, unsurprisingly, like the Internet on a base level. Much of society's technology was integrated into The Network, from industrial machinery, civil protection armaments to military exoskeletons. This helped create a rough divide of the citizens into two classes: Connected, who used the Network extensively and in many cases had a direct connection to much of the Network's benefits via neural-link or body-jacks, and the Independents, who refused the connection for personal or ethical reasons. As expected this divide only grew with time.

In truth, the centre-most aspect of The Network was built on a lie. The society responsible was legitimately more advanced than it's neighbours after making a string of discoveries (mostly by chance) that rapidly accelerated development. The populace's faith in their scientists and engineers eventually reached a critical mass and their faith in the machine set in motion the birth of a new god. The esoteric, occult and magical weren't foreign concepts to the inner circles and when they recognised just what was happening their research diverted to harness this new development. Before this god in the machine had fully awakened it was in shackles. Ushered into the physical through a blend of high technology and high magic, this Inner Circle harnessed the divine spark and set forth to develop it.

As such, much of the tech of The Network operates at least in part due to the spark of divinity and animates by the directed will of the godling. In-universe this is represented by a few things. Many devices that operate via power from the Shockstars (still unsure on that name) have long been dormant but held charge. Expeditionaries powered them on in their investigations and assumed that the artifacts would recharge much like their own magical items, and that faith guarantees they will. I've had a few ides about having some primitive AI/digital assitant/machine spirit type elements stir if players continue to use their hosts, for example having the assistance AI awaken if a player levels far enough in PrC: Operator. At present the idea is that these limited, hyper-focused intelligences would be sort of shards of the godling's mind. They could be somewhat unpredictable in some regards but have strict guidelines and rules for performing their tasks. I'm not sure if I would want these elements to ever be openly and completely hostile to players. These periphery elements of The Network even now report information back to the remaining elements of the godling, so there's always a possibility of having it rise as a distinct faction provided it's own awareness can somehow throw off the yoke placed on it all those years ago.

Understandably, there's plenty of elements I still have mulling over in my head. Do the Waygates use The Network as part of their function? Could be a fun element, especially if adventuring parties could have been sharing location data but they didn't know how to set some kind of network discovery permissions. Should Networked tech offer to have players join the Connected? If they do, what's the follow-on? I must admit the idea of an Operator player getting a jack installed by their Mantle does seem like it could be fun idea. It seems safe to say The Network was at least partly responsible for the destruction of this society, similar to The Old Blood, I just really like the idea of their manifested god still trying to help even in an unconscious state.