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Old 05-16-2020, 04:34 AM   #3
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Common Magic for a TL3 Wuxia Fantasy Campaign

Why air? In Chinese thought, the other five are xing (states of matter, loosely translated as "elements"), but air is not; rather, it's qi/breath/spirit, the underlying force that moves through them. In GURPS terms, you could nearly say that air is mana. See Chapter 1 of GURPS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers for much more on this. It seems odd to use a Chinese setting and then discard a basic premise of the culture: Not just the five elements as such but the fundamental tendency to group everything in fives—five colors, five tones, five flavors, five basic emotions, five senses, five hollow organs, five solid organs, and probably others.

If you're looking for more advanced technology, you might consider porcelain as an expression of earth magic, and perhaps plate glass. Porcelain was a great secret of Chinese technology that Europeans struggled to penetrate; there's a book on this called The Arcanum. And for fire you might look at gunpowder, perhaps not in handheld firearms but in bombs, rockets, and incendiaries, possibly magically aimed and timed for greater accuracy. For water-based technology you might look at processes involving other fluids, such as distillation, both of alcohol and of petroleum; they might even have reinvented Greek fire.
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