![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Infusing a construct with the capacity for motion is simple enough, as sorcerous artifice goes; there's any number of motive sources, from chained sigil scripts to heartstones to samples of eternal flame and solid lightning and even more esoteric things. Link one or more of these to the pulleys and gears and wire-sinews of one's creation and all is well.
But for sparking actual awareness -- making something capable of acting independently -- the arcanist can but fall back on increasingly obscure and dangerous ploys ... or they can acquire a slice, a nodule, from the Grand Matrix.
Just what the Matrix is, is hotly contested by the sages and arcanists aware of it. Physically, it is a massive growth of a smooth, crystalline substance the size of a substantial hut; ribbed and striated in places, it resembles nothing so much as a great series of glassy lobes of liver or perhaps bracket fungi. And, much like a fungus, it grows in and from a substrate, in this case the shattered and half-overgrown remnants of a truly gargantuan and strange metallic structure.
The Grand Prism slowly heals over slices or chippings cleaved from it.
Setting a fragment from the Grand Prism into a wire cage or net woven from the five great magical metals inside a construct -- even one not originally intended for one -- and energizing the slice requires pouring in as many spells' worth of energy as the construct has Hit Dice and making a Save of 18. (the arcanist gains +1 to this roll for each level over 4th attained.)
If the energization is successful, roll 2d6:
02: Nothing; inert or damaged slice
03-08: Simple responses; aware, follows single command at a time
09-11: Doglike awareness and ability
12: Full sapience
A reaction test is then immediately required by the sorcerer-engineer to see how the construct responds unless further precautions have been taken.
But for sparking actual awareness -- making something capable of acting independently -- the arcanist can but fall back on increasingly obscure and dangerous ploys ... or they can acquire a slice, a nodule, from the Grand Matrix.
Just what the Matrix is, is hotly contested by the sages and arcanists aware of it. Physically, it is a massive growth of a smooth, crystalline substance the size of a substantial hut; ribbed and striated in places, it resembles nothing so much as a great series of glassy lobes of liver or perhaps bracket fungi. And, much like a fungus, it grows in and from a substrate, in this case the shattered and half-overgrown remnants of a truly gargantuan and strange metallic structure.
The Grand Prism slowly heals over slices or chippings cleaved from it.
Setting a fragment from the Grand Prism into a wire cage or net woven from the five great magical metals inside a construct -- even one not originally intended for one -- and energizing the slice requires pouring in as many spells' worth of energy as the construct has Hit Dice and making a Save of 18. (the arcanist gains +1 to this roll for each level over 4th attained.)
If the energization is successful, roll 2d6:
02: Nothing; inert or damaged slice
03-08: Simple responses; aware, follows single command at a time
09-11: Doglike awareness and ability
12: Full sapience
A reaction test is then immediately required by the sorcerer-engineer to see how the construct responds unless further precautions have been taken.
Tags: