Aetrimonde

It’s a little bit early, but today I’m kicking off this year’s Halloween season of the blog. Last year, I expounded at length on the undead, as part of introducing the basics of how Aetrimonde’s monsters and enemies worked. This year, I’ve got a different topic: mad science and occult magic!

Both mad science and occult magic are things that Aetrimonde won’t have support for PCs using right out of the gate (although there’s nothing stopping a GM from working out their own system…). Frankly, I think they’re interesting enough that they deserve their own supplements. But they will get a mention in the Aetrimonde Gazetteer and the Bestiary, because they’re notable phenomena in the setting.

Aetrimonde is a world where magic is, if not exactly commonplace, at least accepted as a fact of life. As magic becomes better understood and codified, Aetrimondean engineers eagerly incorporate it into machines and devices as a convenient way to sidestep “mundane” physics: it is used to provide motive force at a distance, create frictionless lubricants, and confer intelligence on mechanical servants. But there is a strange grey area of inventions that work in ways inconsistent with (or outright contradictory to) any known laws of science or magic. This is mad science: the domain equally of obsessive geniuses chasing an inspired theory, and deluded kooks meddling with forces they don’t understand.

The boundary between mundane and mad science can be fuzzy: plenty of isolated geniuses over the years have built devices or run experiments that were ahead of their time and inexplicable until the rest of the scientific community caught up with them and discovered the underlying principles. But true mad science is consistently and resolutely inexplicable, a field where perpetual motion machines don’t just work but can be packaged and sold by mail-order, where doomsday devices can hold a country to ransom on the power of a solitary hamster-wheel, and where strange radiations turn test subjects into supermen instead of masses of tumors.

Mad science has been around, in one form or another, since about two hundred years ago, which is coincidentally around the same time that Aetrimonde’s intellectual enlightenment really took off and the sciences started becoming as prominent as magic. Despite that, in all that time nobody has ever produced a satisfactory explanation for what mad science actually is or how it works. The best descriptions of mad science revolve around what it isn’t:

• The important thing to understand about mad scientists is that they are not, in any important sense of the word, actual scientists. Mad science may resemble ordinary disciplines like chemistry, engineering, alchemy, and artifice, but behind its outward appearance it bears as much resemblance to actual sciences as chalk does to cheese. The actual sciences start from observing how the world works and fitting a theory to explain those observations; mad scientists, it is thought, start from a theory and force the world to accommodate it by sheer stubborn insistence.
• Mad science also isn’t magic. Although that was an early hypothesis for how mad science achieved its wondrous results, mad inventions don’t contain any detectable magic (aside from whatever magical components may have gone into them), and mad scientists themselves don’t seem to work any magic while they’re working in their laboratories or tinkering with their contraptions. Whatever force or power allows their physics-defying inventions to work, it isn’t merely magical.
• Mad science isn’t coherent. The theories of more lucid mad scientists often seem to fit into an ordinary scientific paradigm, but they inevitably contain some glaring flaw buried deeply within: an irrefutable contradiction, glaring omission, or simply a math error that makes the theory profoundly wrong. Less sensible mad scientists come across more as raving kooks, spouting easily-refuted arrant nonsense with the occasional scientific term mixed in and badly misused.
• Products of mad science are not reproducible. Take a mad scientist’s invention, have the most brilliant minds take it apart and build an exact copy piece by piece, and you will get, at best, a heap of pointless, nonfunctional machinery. At worst, you may get an explosion. Mad inventions work best for their inventor, and sometimes don’t work at all for anyone else.
• The one thing that mad science actually, consistently is…is mad. Mad scientists are not insane geniuses, but merely insane. All of them are monomaniacal, and this is only the surface of their madness. More capable mad scientists (those with more sophisticated theories and more capable inventions) tend towards megalomania, paranoia, and delusions…and it’s contagious. A competent actual scientist who studies the theories or inventions of a mad scientist will be lucky not to understand them. To actually understand mad science carries a risk of plain, simple insanity…or worse, of falling into the madness and embracing a delusional theory themselves.