Coalition technological devices were unlike anything which had
existed on Kulthea. The extraordinary complexity of the devices, with billions
of circuits concentrated in tiny volumes, gave these items an aura whose
complexity rivaled that of an entire city. It was unthinkable for a spellcaster
to comprehend the workings of so intense an aura, a task made more difficult
by the vast power the devices would routinely manipulate.
The Alchemical Guild nonetheless formed a special hall to study
what Coalition devices had been obtained. Working in secret they labored
to place enchantments upon the items to allow some degree of control of
their function. These efforts uniformly failed but the Guild persisted.
Believing strongly in the importance of matching the Coalition's
technological power and being dissatisfied at the slow pace of progress,
a splinter group of Journeymen broke away from the Guild to begin
their own effort. After a short span of fruitless work they concluded that
the existing alchemical lore would not be up to the task of mastering devices
so totally foreign. With the exuberance of youth they decided to go back
to first principles, to begin their studies from the realm of Arcane magic.
Nearly five hundred years later a new school of magic is emerging.
Using Arcane principles the technomages are able to work with the enormously
complex auras as a whole, without the need to disentangle the separate
strands. Technomagic is still a very young profession compared with more
traditional spellcasters such as Magicians or Mentalists, and shows the
particular Alchemical slant of its beginnings.
There is little love lost between the Alchemical Guild and the Technomages. Alchemists view Technomages as a dangerous rogue school who use the forbidden Arcane magics with impunity. Technomages also have a tendency to raise money for their research by undercutting the price of Guild-produced magical items, which results in a great deal of resentment. Technomages on the other hand blame the Alchemical Guild for the continued subjugation of Kulthea by the Coalition, reasoning that if the Guild had funded their researches it would not have taken 5 centuries to reach their current level of understanding.
In society as a whole the Technomages are almost unknown. Very few in number and concentrating on subjects incomprehensible to the average Kulthean, the technomages do not attract much attention. They do have a certain degree of notoriety based on the "mundane" magical items they often sell to raise money, in that some technomages are not above passing off an item as being far more powerful than it actually is to command a higher price.