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Magizoic: A Taxonomy of a Magical Earth; A.K.A.: How To Evolve Your Dragon (or Griffin, or Unicorn, or...)
Topic Started: Jan 31 2016, 09:03 PM (690 Views)
Falchion
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When I was young, I used to imagine what life was like in the bygone era when magic didn't exist. Back then, our world was a bleak, dismal, and dangerous one. For our ancestors, it was an eternal battleground, and death and despair seemed just around the corner every day. The threat of war, poverty, and disaster loomed over the heads of every man, woman, and child, and we searched for eons to find a solution. Many different approaches were tested, and not one of them was successful.

And then magic came. It came in many forms, but the first we discovered would change our world forever.

I can only imagine how we felt when we first discovered this new magic. It was a terrifying thing at first, a brilliant ball of fire that turned night into day. Only one nation actually put it to use, and the eastern lands suffered terribly. Millions were lost, and a great war was ended. But soon, we learned to use this magic for good. We used it to heat our homes, to power our countries. For many, it was a cause for celebration. But in the long term, it was the beginning of the end.

Eons passed, and as we learned more about magic, the nations of the world eventually attempted to harness it, to use it for their own ends. What they didn't realize was that they were playing a dangerous game - for the very thing they had sought so desperately would be the thing that would all but doom them. In due course, they did what they had always done: they fought over the right to wield magic. The contest turned into a show of force, with nations far and wide unleashing every type and method of magic known. What we'd all wanted was a paradise... but what we'd got was a global cataclysm.

But not all of us were wiped out. The old tales tell of how some of us, realizing what was happening, retreated to the far corners of the world. But that made no difference. The whole world was soon blanketed in a great aura of mana, an aura that soon permeated anything and everything. At first, we thought that like the first mana we'd discovered, it would doom us all. But as we felt its effects, we, along with the rest of the world, began to change.

It was as though life itself were drinking in the all-encompassing mana. To this day, we still tell of how all around us, the world seemed to heal, even regenerate under the mana's influence. All across the globe, animals began to change, and we were among these animals. And in the aftermath of the cataclysm, we finally acknowledged that we were once again at one with the world around us.

Or so it seemed...





MAGIZOIC
A Taxonomy of a Magical Earth


.:Table of Contents:.





My first thread on this forum, woo! :D I'm still doing plenty of worldbuilding around these parts but I thought it would be fun to share what I have with you guys in general. The general idea is that late in the span of human civilization, magic became a thing, and Earth eventually became host to a massive war that led to it infusing basically everything. The surviving species, including the last remaining humans, evolved at an accelerated rate, gaining a variety of magical traits, and a lot of Earth's hyper-evolved fauna (and a few visitors from worlds elsewhere) have evolved into parallels of the fantasy beasts of yore. I look forward to your feedback as I go along, and expect plenty of art and writing related to it in the days to come! :)

2/9/16 EDIT: Changed up the section order, and posted the first section defining magifauna in general.

-Falchion
Edited by Falchion, Feb 9 2016, 12:10 AM.
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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Beetleboy
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Interesting. Magic pretty seems like fire to me, though. :)
~ The Age of Forests ~
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GlarnBoudin
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Good to see this project back, man!
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khbkhb777
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So are you trying to have semi-scientifically accurate animals here, or are you truely making a magical fantasy land? I'm interested either way though.
"Anime was a mistake" - Hayao Miyazaki

"We predators have long ruled the wild Earth while abiding the rules of nature. Under our rule, landscapes remain fertile. Under YOUR rule, nothing lasts long."-Mauricio Antón

"I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant; it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are."-Mewtwo

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."-Carl Sagan, one of the best our species had to offer


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Falchion
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Feb 1 2016, 11:03 AM
Interesting. Magic pretty seems like fire to me, though. :)
The similarity is not coincidental, although in keeping with one of the themes of this planned work, I based the description of how man first discovered magic on nuclear power and, by extension, the atomic bomb.

More to come after work tomorrow, starting with the basic question: What is Terra Mana?
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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Falchion
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khbkhb777
Feb 1 2016, 09:18 PM
So are you trying to have semi-scientifically accurate animals here, or are you truely making a magical fantasy land? I'm interested either way though.
A bit of both, actually. Magic is a thing, obviously, but I'm trying to see how life on Earth would evolve under the influence of a few million years' worth of magic. Tomorrow's update should hopefully make things a bit more clear (assuming my other writing doesn't keep me from actually posting it).
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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GlarnBoudin
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Question: Was this based on the RPG Shadowrun? Because it has a very similar plot to this project, except it's set in the future and only a few centuries have passed since magic has returned to the world.
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Falchion
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GlarnBoudin
Feb 2 2016, 07:22 AM
Question: Was this based on the RPG Shadowrun? Because it has a very similar plot to this project, except it's set in the future and only a few centuries have passed since magic has returned to the world.
Coincidence. Shadowrun is fantasy cyberpunk, anyway; this is focused more on creatures and nature, with technology and especially magitek on the side.
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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Falchion
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Introduction: Terra Mana

Terra Mana is derived from the Latin word terra, meaning "Earth", and the Polynesian word mana, meaning meaning "power, effectiveness, prestige" (typically a supernatural power). In the literal sense, it is an "Earth of Power", in essence a world that's essentially stronger than it was before. Specifically, it's Earth, only infused by magic and given several million years to simmer. Which begs the question: Why is magic present, and how did it get there? In order to understand that, we must first define magic itself in this continuum. And here is where I quote a certain memetic speedrunner of recent infamy:

"But first, we have to talk about parallel universes."

The Temperamental Planes
In the world of Terra Mana, our universe, which will be referred to here as the spatial universe, is actually a dynamic combination of four different planes of existence, each of which is represented by an infinite space of a number of different biomes that are linked together by certain qualities. The concept of the Temperamental Planes is derived to some degree from the four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. Whereas these terms were initially used to describe personalities, however, they will be used here to describe the nature of the four planes of existence. They are Sanguine (temperate/dry, typically mountainous and occasionally sub-polar), Choleric (tropical/dry, desertic, and occasionally volcanic), Melancholic (temperate/wet, forested or populated by grasslands), and Phlegmatic (tropical/wet, usually marine and coastal environments). Any one of these existential planes can cross over another, and where they intersect is marked by a change in the biome transitioning from that of one plane to that of another. Any intersection point between two or more planes marks the coordinates of a planet in the spatial universe, but only an intersection of all four of these planes can support a planet capable of sustaining life, such as Earth/Terra Mana.

The Nature of Mana
All of the existential planes are infused with mana, defined here as a property similar to energy and in certain ways, synonymous with it. Like energy, mana cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be changed from one form to another. Unlike energy, however, mana behaves in a similar manner to magnetism, in that it always cycles around or within its source in a consistent pattern. Along with general mana streams throughout the existential planes, mana fields are a given property for everything from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy, and mana fields of the same type tend to accumulate when gathered in larger groups.
Mana fields in the spatial universe are so nominal that conventional science in the human era could not detect them, even though they are a fact of life in the existential planes. The reason is that planar mana streams can only cross a single plane, their own, and their direction varies to the extent that intersections between the streams of two different planes, let alone four, are extremely rare by the nature of probability. Terra Mana, formerly Earth, is unique in that mana streams from all four planes converge here, but the reason is wholly artificial.

The War On Magic
Technology enabling direct manipulation of mana fields was a late development in the history of human-era civilization, but the supposed mastery of this art was documented much earlier, and may have been known from before the major forward leaps in science and industry such as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The earliest known instance of manipulating a collective mana field was similar to the harnessing of energy as a resource in the dawn of civilization, and was likewise treated with the same level of apprehension. The human era knew this instance as the creation of the atomic bomb, and the fields associated with gamma radiation, such as produced by a nuclear explosion, are now known as chaos mana. Although humans learned to harness nuclear power, and eventually mana itself, like other resources they eventually attempted to monopolize and, of course, weaponize it. This ended about as well as you'd expect, with various countries magically bombarding each other in a bid for absolute power, and in so doing bringing about the near extinction of the human race along with a number of other species that had already been threatened by human activity. Among the human descendants of the current time, this apocalyptic event is known variously as "The Magimachy", "Judgement Day", "The Second Great Dying", and "The Day The World Stood Still".
The end of the War on Magic was the beginning for Earth as a whole, and life in general began recolonizing the ruined planet like a global Chernobyl. Although man had introduced mana to Earth artificially, so much of it had been unleashed that it eventually infused every environment, organism, and geological and ecological phenomenon to the same degree as the existential planes. In this way, Earth, now Terra Mana, became a beacon of magic so potent that the adjacent mana streams of all four existential planes were drawn into it in a manner not unlike a black hole absorbing light. This influx of mana has resulted in evolution putting on the metaphorical accelerator, along with the dimensional partitioning between the spatial universe and the existential planes beginning to blur. (It should be noted that wormholes and other cross-dimensional gateways between these two realms can be implied from human-era literature and media, but these were rare prior to the War on Magic and therefore had religious and cultural significance wherever they appeared.)
And as for what happened to life on Earth while all of this was going on... that's a story all its own.

(Specifics on each of the existential planes to come at a later time. For now, hope all this explains a bit of what's going on! :D)
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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GlarnBoudin
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Holy crap, you've put a lot of thought into this.
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Falchion
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GlarnBoudin
Feb 3 2016, 03:03 PM
Holy crap, you've put a lot of thought into this.
This project has been a WIP in progress for several years, actually! The biggest mistake I made when I started it out was to focus on the characters first instead of the setting, which resulted in me having no idea how to fit everything together and bungling the whole lot. This is basically me trying to rectify that by providing the context first instead.
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


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Falchion
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Section One: On Magifauna, Manazoids, and Kaiju

One of the side effects of Terra Mana being infused with, well, mana is that this eldritch force has not only become ubiquitous throughout all life on what was once known as Earth, but also influential in its evolution since the War on Magic. Although anything and everything on Terra Mana has at least some trace of mana, from the lowliest single-celled organism to the mightiest mountain, the most famous and charismatic of mana-infused organisms are known as magifauna, which occupy the vast majority of ecological niches known to laymen and scientists alike. Each and every one of them evolved from Earth-native species that survived the War on Magic, and from a theological perspective, they are defined as magifauna by the ownership of a mana field, which circulates throughout their bodies like a biological system (e.g. circulatory, lymphatic, etc.). Note that the term "magifauna" is somewhat erroneous, as although mana-infused animals are the most well-known examples, plants, fungi, and even more primitive life forms such as bacteria have also inherited the same trait. Magifauna are frequently identical to what the organism they are derived from would be like had they evolved normally over millions of years, but they would be more derived than they otherwise would be due to the increased amount of mana resulting in accelerated evolution. Mana also imbues organisms with unique properties such as enhanced physical and metabolic fortitude, which has helped life in general cope with increased atmospheric oxygen due to the fallout from the War on Magic resulting in forests covering larger expanses of Terra Mana's landmass and the reducing the sea ice at the poles. The increased oxygen would normally exacerbate the aging process due to oxidative stress, but mana fields at the scale of those present in most magifauna help to economize metabolism on a large scale and increase the lifespan of organisms adapted to the updated atmosphere. As a result, certain groups of plants and animals, particularly invertebrates such as arthropods, have experienced gigantism to the point where they are able to match larger vertebrates on the ecological battlefield than in pre-War conditions.
All sapient species have a mana field of their own, and are therefore classed as magifauna; however, they are unique in that they are capable of maintaining their mana fields autonomously, rather than having to acquire mana from other organisms. A specialized organ, known as the mana gland, synthesizes mana by drawing energy from normal metabolism (this is typically derived from the brain or otherwise the equivalent of the central nervous system). Most magifauna have a similar epicenter, but lack a mana gland or, as shown below, have a rudimentary one at best; therefore mana, like food and water, tends to go in a one-way direction in the long run where most magifauna are concerned, going in one end and out the other after serving its purpose.

What Is a Manazoid?
Manazoids (derived from mana and "zoid", Greek for "life", a proper noun that is always capitalized) are organisms engineered by sapients, either through domestication, magical rites, or artifical experimentation, for a variety of purposes, from food to companionship and from agrarian labor to military combat. Manazoids can be engineered from any type of magifauna (animal, mineral, or vegetable), and are distinguished by a rudimentary organ, typically derived from the nervous system or equivalent, and while it is unable to actively synthesize mana like in sapient life, it is capable of circulating it in the same way as a heart pumps blood throughout the body. This makes the Manazoid's mana network more efficient in maintaining a consistent field, although the mana still flows in an open loop. The most important advantage to this system comes into light when one considers that Manazoids and licensed sapients, or Handlers, are capable of synchronizing with each other, allowing the Manazoid's network to become an offshoot of that of the sapient. Synchronizing with regular magifauna is incredibly inefficient due to the amount of mana they require on a daily basis, and studies have shown that even an ancestral mana circulator would reduce that requirement tenfold. This allows the synchronization to take place much more freely, and enables Handlers to experience the thoughts of their Manazoids and train them to follow mental orders. A properly synchronized Manazoid feels almost like a second head, complete with its own thoughts and emotions but nonetheless able to operate in harmony with its Handler.
Manazoids are typically engineered via either a specific magical rite performed on a domesticated magifauna, or by cloning from source genetic code, the latter of which is much more efficient at producing a "blank-slate" Manazoid whose mana network can be customized to suit the temperament of the Handler. These Forged Manazoids are efficient to produce and can be synchronized with their handlers more quickly than with the traditional ritual, but are more expensive than Arcane Manazoids because of the advanced technology required to build a creature from scratch. It should be noted that some feral species of magifauna were derived from Forged Manazoids that went feral after their creators or handlers died off, and that some species of Manazoid can only be Forged or otherwise bred from a Forged lineage.
Manazoids are grouped into tiers, ranging from Tier 1 (small enough to pass as regular small magifauna) to Tier 10 (the very largest of daikaiju, explained below). The Manazoids used by Handlers in monster combat today typically range from Tiers 2 (at most the same size as a person) to 4 (Megafauna in the colloquial sense, at least 2 tons in weight). Tier 5 Manazoids are only reserved for governmental applications, typically in the military, and no Manazoid save for Kaiju (see below) exists at Tier 6 or higher.

Kaiju and Daikaiju
All sapient species of magifauna are capable of maintaining their mana network without obtaining mana from the outside environment, a distinction shared only with unique monsters that have the same property. Kaiju (derived from Japanese for "strange beast") are almost always derived from a Manazoid of some kind, and frequently either originate from them or have obtained a mana gland of their own due to circumstances similar to the creation of the Manazoid. Some were even engineered from Manazoids or were once Manazoids themselves before their mutation. Regular Kaiju include monsters on a human scale, including humanoid monsters known as Kaijin, but the most famous variety are Daikaiju ("big strange beast"), which are classed at Tier 6 (greater than 100 tons) or higher. Daikaiju have to rely on their mana fields to exist without collapsing under their own mass or succumbing to the sheer amount of energy their metabolism produces, and thankfully their mana fields are more than powerful enough to get the job done, and provide them with immensely destructive abilities besides. The very largest Daikaiju are of Tier 9 (mountain-sized, 1,000,000 tons in mass at most), and Tier 10 is reserved for theoretical titans which appear to defy physics, biology, and common sense. Conversely, Kaiju can exist at a tier as low as Tier 3 (Greater than 100 pounds but less than a ton, putting sentient-sized monsters and most sentients at the lower end of this tier).
The Daikaiju is unique among other life forms of its ilk in that its mana gland, aside from maintaining multiple mana fields rather than just one, is capable of synchronizing with a sentient of their choice; they essentially pick their Handler if they so choose. Upon synchronizing with the Kaiju, the Handler is taken to a pocket dimension shaped according to the mindset of the monster, where they can connect with their partner and direct them in a manner akin to a pilot operating a vehicle. Such Kaiju Handlers are rare but exhibit powerful abilities even for their own species, for such is the major benefit of synchronization with a mind many times greater and stronger than their own.
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"The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look… Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" - Alan Grant


Akupara: Island of the World Turtle

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