For centuries, the use of magic followed a familiar pattern. A mage concentrated aether from their surroundings into a focus object, then used practiced meditative techniques to visualize a pattern for the aether to assume when released into the world, constituting a “spell”. The miraculous capabilities of spellcasting kept mages in constant demand, but the need for years of study, consecrated implements, and hours of quietude cemented it as skilled work necessarily supported by entire communities. It took a village to maintain a mage: they had no time to sow or reap, so their neighbours kept them fed, clothed, and sheltered in exchange for blessing the crops, healing the sick, and giving timely warnings of future catastrophe.

            Then a clever mage invented the condenser. A vacuum-filled cylinder of glass and metal into which aether naturally collected over time, charging it with a cold blue glow. The device replicated the previously laborious, delicate task of accumulating energy with a relatively simple inanimate assembly. While this device alone held the potential to revolutionize the field of magic, the discovery that a purely material construct could channel aether provoked the swift creation of vacuum tube diodes, resistors, and inductors. Each of these new components manipulated aetheric flow in a distinct manner and, when linked together in something called a “circuit”, released the stored esoteric energy in a controllable pattern: that is to say, cast a spell.

            From this point in history, one can imagine a future of radical freedom. An aether machine could cast any spell a mage could, but at the mere push of a button. Once established at an economy of scale, such devices could magically create virtually limitless food and clean water. They could reshape the earth into houses, light the streets, and regenerate the bodies of the wounded. The shackles of scarcity thus broken, human beings could live lives of art, leisure, and self-actualization rather than break their backs with toil. A utopia of plenty for all.

            But history curved in a different direction. The wealthy patrons of the mage engineers who created this new technology saw it as a means to further enrich themselves rather than lift everyone up to their level. They employed the occult appliances to deliver good and services, certainly: but for a price. A price calculatedly just low enough to undercut the standard rates of traditional mages, forcing them to undervalue their work to compete. With more and more of them driven into poverty, the institutional knowledge of their profession withered as many left the field without training apprentices. Their competition thus driven out, those in control of aether circuit manufacture could freely raise their own prices to whatever they wished.

            The economic shift did not spare the rest of the labor market, either. Mechanical spellcasting gradually eliminated the jobs of farmers, smiths, physicians, and anyone else who once delivered a service now done by automatic magic: which, in time, included all services. Only a tiny cadre of jobs remained for the sake of operating and maintaining the aether machines, and as the years passed new designs further automated the process, whittling away the need for even technicians. Unemployment spiked to unprecedented heights, and all wealth flowed toward the top. By the end of the next few decades half a percent of the population controlled virtually all production. With their bargaining power reduced to nothing, the remaining population resigned themselves to offering up their own flesh, dreams, or worse as grist for the mills in exchange for bare subsistence.

            Meanwhile the new aristocracy squatted on mountains of gold like dragons, peering with paranoia at both the teeming underclass and their scheming peers. They raised up high towers, island fortresses, and castles floating in the sky to protect themselves from assassination attempts, while unnaturally prolonging their lives with alchemic anti-senescents and transhuman augmentation. They quarrelled with one another, waging private wars and scorching wide swathes of the land with strategic-scale spell arrays. Ultimately, they carved up the planet into fiefdoms surrounding their individual citadels, supplanting all existing governments with their own eccentric brands of sovereignty. The age of magitechnological tyrants began.

            You were born into this world. Its tyranny is normal to you. Yet you know from whispered stories and banned books that it was not always this way, and it need not remain so. The people no longer have anything to lose. You can sense it in the air.

            Revolution is coming.

[This is the second half of the hidden backstory of ‘Til Death. The first half can be found here.]

A thousand years ago, the woman who came to be called the Ashen Empress founded the solar empire that governs humanity. After an inhumanly long reign she disappeared into a stasis tomb for unknown reasons, and continued to sleep there for centuries. Driven by the faith that she will one day awake, the four noble houses – Dentes, Manus, Oculus, and Cor – maintain a constant rotating regency, jockeying for the right to rule.

The Ashen Empire consists of five habitable worlds orbiting the bright red star Invictus, swollen vast with age and near to death. Of these, one house lays claim to each of planets Primus, Secundus, Quartus, and Quintus as their home territories, fiercely guarded as their ancestral rights and only open to other houses by express diplomatic permission.

Tertius stands alone, tended to only by a skeleton crew of literal skeleton automata. No house claims this planet, as it was homeworld of the Ashen Empress. An ancient battle scoured life from the surface, rendering it the mass graveyard of what once was 90% of humanity, and thus boiling with necromantic energy. Decaying ruins dot the sparsely grassy fields and overlook the sheer cliffs of the sunken, algae-choked oceans. At the center of the largest continent sits the sprawling mausoleum complex of the Empress, at the center of which sits her stasis tomb.

The surface of Tertius is sacred ground not to be tread lightly, so the current government rules from a permanent space station at the L2 between the planet and its moon. From this palatial estate the current regent oversees the empire as a whole. However, whenever the regent passes or steps down, a new one must be selected by a ceremonial trial conducted in the mausoleum below. This is the only time when human feet may stand upon the planet.

Below are descriptions of the four houses, and those who fall outside of them. Each entry gives the stereotype of what a mage from that faction is expected to be like.

House Dentes

The house of judges who oversee the empire from Primus, the closest planet to the central star Invictus. The small planet’s weak gravity allows them to build spindly-spired fortresses presiding over the endless night of the tide-locked planet’s dark side, and for members of the house to grow tall, slender, and long-limbed. The highest nobles here act as the final judges of imperial law, empowered even to carry out summary executions on the spot in extreme situations. Even more than the other houses they look and act the part of nobility, flaunting elegant attire and growing up used to the constant attention of magically animated servants.

Mage

Charismatic, extravagant, beautiful. The diadem of the imperial crown, the very image of nobility. You specialize in animating undead servants, and weave an even stronger pact resonance than others, to the point of exerting slight control over your partner if you focus. People don’t like being manipulated by you, but your natural narcissism prevents you from fully realizing that.

Knight

Your cape shines with gold filigree and your sword is always polished like a mirror. When you leap into action you resemble a hero of legend, and your flashy moves produce awe from onlookers. You are not only a warrior, but a celebrity, a symbol of imperial glory: yet sometimes the constant need for perfection wearies you, and you lash out in a way you instantly regret.

House Manus

The house of soldiers, stationed on Secundus, a planet with heavy gravity and a thick, humid atmosphere. House Manus members are predictably strong, with even the mages often capable of holding their own in a fight. Its scions almost always enter military service at the earliest opportunity. The cloudy skies trap heat like a hothouse, allowing mages to breed animals brimming with life energy, genetically suitable for ritual sacrifice. They tend to travel with bound familiars: unnaturally clever ravens, wolf-like dogs loyal even in death, and furtive cats only glimpsed in fleeting silhouette.

Mage

Unlike the most necromancers, you train both your body and mind. You can hold your own in a sword fight, and carry yourself with the dignity of an officer, using healing magic for battlefield first aid and physical enhancement. When something goes wrong, everyone looks to you to lead them. A single mistake could cost countless lives, but the burden of command is always yours.

Knight

You are the very definition of a cavalier in the most classic sense. From a young age you trained in the martial arts, and today command a peerless mastery of the blade. Veteran of many battles, you never show fear, nor weakness of any kind, no matter how much you hurt inside your shell. Every night, you remember the screams.

House Oculus

The house of scholars living on Quartus, the frigid outer planet chosen to hold the Immortal Archive. Members walk the chill, climate-controlled halls of the empire’s grand central library, perusing the endless sea of books and preserved artifacts they contain. Banned grimoires of unethical magic research tempt those craving forbidden knowledge. The house produces renowned engineers who construct the ships that ferry people between worlds.

Mage

You are a necromancer’s necromancer, an incredibly educated walking archive of esoteric lore. Your psychometric skill reveals all secrets to you, and you speak with spirits as with living friends. However, you are physically weak and reliant on your cavalier for anything outside of academic work. You struggle to read the emotions of others, and even your own.

Knight

You were schooled in a scientific fighting style: you learned classical mechanics, anatomy, and psychology, all to give you the edge in combat. You act with an iconoclastic creativity unbound by traditional forms, and scoff at their hidebound adherents. Your distaste for the dominant modes of culture earns you enemies, but you see this as the price of speaking the truth.

House Cor

The house of priests, cloistered on Quintus, the furthest inhabited planet from Invictus, beyond the asteroid belt. A massive spike of black metal is driven into the planet’s crust, the rings of symbols engraved upon it large enough to be read from orbit. This coffin nail prevents the resurrection of the dead dreaming god the planet truly is. Members of House Cor learn to listen to its whispers and thereby comprehend its primordial secrets. Their skin is deathly pale, bathed only in the fluorescent lights of their hermetically sealed habitat.

Mage

They call you a necromancer, but you are more accurately a priest. You have long listened to the whispers of the dead dreaming god-planet, and gleaned a measure of its primordial secrets. You have no qualms about siphoning life force, and transforming dead matter into bizarre shapes. Your very presence scares people, but that’s okay: they would never understand who you are inside, anyways. What goes on in your head would confuse and disgust them.

Knight

As an adherent of the god-planet cult, you are a sort of templar, a holy warrior of an unknowable deity. You follow a strict code of conduct and maintain a schedule of daily ritual practice. Your dour, taciturn nature prevents anyone from getting close to you, but you prefer it that way. A cavalier ought to remain pure and without worldly attachments.

The Houseless

Renegades who obtain necromantic power beyond the lawful oversight of the four noble houses. Any person operating as a mage or knight without the blood mandate is guilty of treason and subject to lethal retribution upon discovery.

Mage

You’re the kind of necromancer who perhaps shouldn’t have been born magical, for everyone’s sake. You act unpredictably, vacillating between astonishingly cunning ploys and astonishingly vicious outbursts. You’ve developed some rather creative and unsettling uses of flesh magic. Are you capable of love, or do you only toy with people until they stop being amusing?

Knight

You aren’t supposed to be here. You aren’t actually a cavalier. Your necromancer dragged you along because you were the best fighter available and she didn’t have any other options. That means you don’t play by the rules: you do whatever it takes to win. You won’t be able to bury your boiling emotions underneath high society niceties for long.

It will come as no surprise that my game of space necromancer romance, ‘Til Death, came about as a reaction to reading the Locked Tomb novels. I liked the science-fantasy lesbian parts of the books (of course), but I found the logic of the magic presented a bit head-scratching – how does planet-flipping work, exactly? So when I started work on ‘Til Death, the first thing I did was write a new system of necromancy that made more sense, at least according to my sensibilities. I also wrote about the history, geography, and politics of the setting… and then ended up cutting virtually all of it from the final game. It just wasn’t necessary! Adding a bunch of Lore™ wasn’t the move for a rules-light two-person one-shot.

However, I liked how that material turned out. So here are the secrets of necromancy in the world of ‘Til Death, for inclusion in your games if you wish. Next post I’ll follow up with the details on the noble houses, planets, and government of the empire.

Necromancy

Everything that lives inevitably dies. This is the essential truth of the entropy, the fundamental death principle that governs existence. However, as a House Oculus scholar would say, the equation for entropy is the same as that for information: that is to say, everything that dies leaves behind a memory. Even if no human recalls it, that memory is impressed upon the universe.

Entropy constantly gnaws at the world, gradually grinding it down into powder. Life struggles against entropy by forming homeostatic patterns that resist decay through constant cyclic renewal. House Oculus scholars call these patterns “morphic fields” – more commonly known as souls. When a living thing dies, its soul persists for a time before sublimating into the unseen sea of memory. However, a mage can draw the basic essence of the soul, its “anima”, into their own soul, storing it for future use. They can then release it to impress artificial morphic fields (commonly called spells) on the physical world.

Necromancy (or more properly “necrurgy”, but custom favors the less strictly accurate term) remained a matter of myth until the birth of the woman who would be known as the Ashen Empress. Her unique natural attunement to the ripples of life energy allowed her to develop the first, rudimentary spells, and with them prolong her life for the centuries needed to hone the art to a keen edge. Although bearing the bloodline of the Empress is not strictly required to practice necromancy, those of imperial lineage find themselves more innately talented than most – and only those of the great houses are authorized to practice it, anyways.

Spells come in several varieties.

Binding

The most hallowed usage of anima is making a pact with another person, binding them together with magic resonance. Every mage and knight swear this oath to one another. In addition to giving them a dim awareness of each other’s physical and mental state, it allows them to share anima between each other, usually in the form of the knight giving their mage the anima of those they slay. Since harvesting anima requires physical contact with the freshly dead, knights typically employ melee weapons such as swords.

Animation

Anima is pattern, and pattern can be expressed as mathematics. A mage can program a synthetic proto-soul and infuse it into matter to make it act as though it were alive. Anima binds most readily to matter that used to be alive (it has the right shape), so the most common choice is bone, since it is organic matter that remains solid after death and can be cleaned. Reanimated skeletons with primitive, animal-like intelligence perform the vast majority of physical labor in the empire, especially agriculture. Seeing a walking skeleton cleaning a house would neither surprise or frighten an imperial citizen.

Transformation

Anima is the “energy” of shape and form, so when forced into an object it creates a topological tendency for matter to assume the shape of the field. Like with animation, this works best with corpse-matter: a knucklebone “remembers” being part of a skeleton, and may be coaxed into returning to that complete anatomy with relatively little anima. One common use for this property is carrying  servants on demand, in the form of a pocketful of fingerbones to be recreated as full skeletons. Another is altering the shape of flesh, remolding it with additional limbs, claws, eyes, or whatever else the mage finds useful in the moment.

Healing

Since anima is the essence of life, it can be infused into living things to bolster their patterns, healing wounds, curing diseases, and banishing fatigue instantly. In high doses it can even temporarily increase physical abilities to inhuman levels, a potential often employed by House Manus in battle. However, as it causes cell division, the Hayflick limit means that long term use greatly increases the risk of cancer.

Siphoning

With a touch of the hand, a mage can directly draw out the anima from a living thing, effectively draining its life force. This is excruciatingly painful to experience and takes a long time to recover from. Although not a fast enough method of execution to justify its combat use in most cases, complete siphoning kills the subject. Mages who find themselves low on anima will, under normal conditions, partially drain sacrificial plants and animals kept for the purpose, but during combat will prefer to do so from the enemies already on hand.

Psychometry

Death leaves behind echoes in the underlying cosmic anima field. An attentive mage can interpret these signatures to determine things like age, former shape, and cause of death, among many others. Extremely skilled mages may even summon up the remnant souls of the departed – speaking to spirits can provide valuable information. Without physical nervous systems to process information, though, they cannot assimilate new memories, instead acting more like perfect simulations of the dead person. That said, there have been cases of installing a recovered soul into a fresh body through animation, or even using the technique to clone one’s consciousness.

Cursing

A curse can be thought of as the opposite of healing: rather than bolstering matter with a beneficial pattern, a curse corrupts it with a preternatural tendency towards rot. While this can be used on individual targets if the mage is particularly spiteful, it’s not very efficient, so virtually the only time this happens is a rare, particularly punitive form of criminal sentence. Instead, its primary application is on a wide-area basis: cursing a region effectively salts the earth, preventing any life from growing there.

Unique Spells

Outside of these well-known techniques, individual necromancers often employ their own personal forms of magic with bizarre and frightening effects. A knight must always remain on guard to shield their mage from unexpected methods of attack, which so often threaten those caught up in the cloak-and-dagger politics of imperial succession.