My favorite magic in CE was the gazelleâs ability to suddenly float up into heaven, but that was patched, I think.
Jokes aside, the game in my opinion more or less adequately tries to resemble magic from REHâs stories, not in detail, but in style: no fireball throwing, but manipulating the weather. No flaming swords, but summoning foul beasts.
Some things such as the ice bridge or resource harvesting are a bit too obvious in my view, but itâs not really lore or immersion breaking, either, and fits into a game about exploration and resource gathering. So, itâs a somewhat fitting continuation of the lore in my opinion.
In the game as well as in REHâs stories, I think itâs hard to differentiate between magic and supernatural effects and things that either a.) just work by different natural laws and/or b.) are just not understood by the protagonists.
In Xuthal of the Dust, Conan encounters - at least as I understand it - the remnants of a civilization that used magic as well as advanced technology, the latter to produce food and possible other items, maybe similar to Star Trek replicators. To Conan, all of that is âmagicâ.
The same goes for the âdragonâ he encounters, which to the modern readers seems to be a dinosaur or similar creature, not a dragon as we have in our myths. But to Conan, a large lizard-like creature appears to be a dragon.
The same ambiguity is in my opinion well-represented in the game. Did the Giant Kings use magic to erect their gigantic city and aqueduct, or are those just the product of decades of labor and clever construction? We wouldnât know. They could have had modern cranes and bulldozers for all we know, and they only rusted away during the last couple of centuries.
What âstrange scienceâ, as the Giant Kings call it, did the Witch Queen use to kill their army in what is now the sulfur lake? It may have been a spell, or it may have been some kind of science fiction chemical weapon. We donât have any weapons that turn people into weird dead trees, but a technology like that doesnât seem impossible in principle, especially in a world with slightly bent natural laws.
Even the âmagicalâ bracelets may be technological devices that translate languages and give deadly shocks once they get a radio signal from the wardstones. Except for the battery technology, we could create such devices in real life even now, and the Giant Kings seem to have been somewhat stupid or naive, but also very long-lived and knowledgeable.
Other things such as the undead skeletons walking the Exiled Lands are clearly magical.
The Staff of the Triumvirate and the sandstorm sit somewhere in between, I think. The effects they produce could be caused by technology. The staff isnât much more than a tape recorder playing back bad advice or a malicious LLM. The sandstorm could be caused by some kind of weather control device or even just a huge helicopter-like machine, but even the Giant Kings seem to have seen them as magical in nature, so I think we should assume that they are.
Are alchemical items such as aloe potions magical? Their effect is much greater than any medication could produce in our world, but the game represents them as non-magical âalchemyâ. Weak aloe potions can be crafted by a level 1 Exile by hand, so we know that thereâs no complicated technological or even magical procedure involved. Unless the Exiled Lands, the bracelets or some other unseen effect causes their great healing power, they seem to be a result of different laws of nature - such as steel is produced not by mixing iron and coal as in the real world, but iron and âsteelfireâ.
The âichorâ that can be gathered from spiders and similar creatures most certainly is not actual ichor. I donât know if spiders and insects even produce ichor (i. e. white blood cells), but most certainly not in the amounts that the Exiled Lands creatures seem to have in their body. Itâs probably just bodily fluid. Our player characters identify that smelly substance as âichorâ, because thatâs also a smelly liquid.
This mixture of weird technology, weird magic and weird laws of nature is, in my opinion, a fitting continuation of REHâs stories. Just as in the Conan stories: Through the game, we experience a world through the eyes of people that donât understand the world they live in. And that is underlined by the fact that we understand their world a little bit better, but still not to the full extent. That creates a sense of wonder, exploration and tension.
