I have some random thoughts and ideas, feel free to discuss/disparage at leisure. This is long, but it is easier than creating a post right now.

AFAIK, the first commercial steam engines were used in mining. They basically took out the water used in certain types of mining. Trying to make the engine more efficient led to a Newcom engine – something powerful enough to move locomotives (and other things.)

Based on that, I figure creating a magic 'drill' for mining would be expensive or require a magic to constantly 'recharge' it. In a d20 setting, you could trap a water elemental and a fire elemental together to generate steam, but getting them to come in contact enough to move pistons is tricky, indeed. (In a 2E setting, you could just open a hole to the quasi-elemental plane of steam, but who would make a living created one way gates *from* an elemental plane?)

Instead, magic could be used to create more efficiencies. Watt discovered that a stream of cold water damaged the efficiency of a steam engine. A quick redesign, and he had a practical steam engine. Spells that change temperature of water would seem to take less 'magical' power than something else. (Heck, you could even cast a spell per piston to move it 2 inches back and forth to get a 'fuelless' engine. Still, I imagine this as expensive for the shear number of spells required.)

Still, any kind of effective countermagics could undo an engine really quickly, so a more mechanical solution would still be in a person's best interest in order to create a more reliable machine.

Taking a bit of a conceptual leap, let's apply magic to the fuel, instead of the mechanism. Thus, the self-healing wood, I mentioned in our conversation. Magically treat the wood used in a locomotive to 'heal' itself, allowing the same fuel to be burned over and over again. This eliminates a heavy fuel car, and allows the firebox to be more-or-less a closed system. (You still need air.) Canceling the magic turns it into a normal engine – more inconvenience than anything.

The same kind of thing could be done with computers. The main reason for computers in the first place was either calculating navigational charts (Babbage) or counting people (Hollerith). Either way, it was driven by commerce or taxation and could still be necessary in a 'magipunk' world.

Use magic to help manufacture the non-magical device, use magic to create a re-recordable medium (magic punch cards?), use magic as the electrical power, use magic to provide networking (teleport magic punch cards?), use magic as a programming language (search for Spell Descriptive Language) or use magic as a display device.

As to setting, I'm sure that something that allows more predictable access to magic can come at the cost of sanity/humanity. In my head, it would be like surgically implanting a magic ring. The power of the ring (or whatever else the device is) is readily available, but the presence of the ring has affects on the body and the mind. (Kind of like Shadowrun's humanity stat.)

For that matter, surgery has a different meaning in a society with access to magic. It's not just magical healing, but like stargazer said, magical augmentation.

Again, sorry for the rambling. Look forward to what others think.

<abbr><abbr>pinakidions last blog post..More Ideas</abbr></abbr>

And yes, using such a setting as the basis for a DS campaign could be neat.

I like them both so far.

Also, I think it might be neat to do this as a DungeonSlayers setting.

-mike

I will probably include fantasy races, too, and there will probably a lot of other fantasy tropes but it should be reminiscent of cyberpunk in other aspects like corporations and magic as technology. My idea of the "web" is actually some kind of demiplane, that is used much like the web today, but it's a "real" space where you can travel to, instead of just a "virtual" reality.

This is something that I wrestle with in my Elves & Espers setting, which is basically a take on magic as tech. To make it feel a little less like I've just done a global search and replace, I've:

a) included fantasy races, both straight (Elves & Dwarves) and spun: G-Nomes, Ogres Magically Augmented & Genetically Enhanced

b) went with heritable magic, leading to hereditary aristocracy and merchant families instead of corporations

c) tried to emphasize the anthropomorphic aspects of the magic gear (e.g. a Technomancer's Pentacorder contains a bound information imp: instead of manipulating the Pentacorder by pushing buttons, the Tech has to talk to the imp)

d) tried to spin the tropes a bit more literally, e.g. the Web is an actual web of cables spanning the arcology, and netrunners physically travel the cables using gear like rocket-skates instead of computer "decks."

I'm not sure I'm fully successful. The players really enjoy the setting, but there's a fairly strong undertow as it were pulling them to treat things as standard SF/cyberpunk if not reminded otherwise.

<abbr><abbr>Joshuas last blog post..Which Fantasy Writer Am I?</abbr></abbr>

Perhaps I will just write everything down as a system-less setting (much like I did with Ad Astra) and then I can always add the crunchy parts later.