Second Dawn:Black Science
From EryriWiki
This is a reference document for the LARP The Second Dawn.
Everyone in the Union, and probably the whole world, knows about the dangers of black science. But while some learn of it only as tales of childhood horror, others understand just what it is and what it can do. These three paths of technology led to the Cataclysm, and so all wise peoples ban them from the modern world.
[edit] The Path of Power
The Path of Power is the subtlest of the three paths, in that its dangers are the least obvious. In modern times we use electricity to carry power for heat and lighting to whole cities. The Ancients, however, learned how to modulate the flow of electricity to carry information. This is the Path of Power: electrical computation, which the Ancients often called "electronics." It is a quick and easy path towards computation, far simpler to make and build than the Tinkers' seerstones. One of the sources of its danger is that it ties computation to electrical power, hence its name; it allows computations and programs to manipulate and disrupt electrical power grids, putting both the electrical system and the user at great risk. But far more fearsome is how the Path of Power facilitates the development and spread of "demons."
[edit] The Path of Demons
The Path of Demons is the ultimate path, the greatest foolishness in which the Ancients dabbled. They built whole new minds, artificial intelligences that lived inside their electronic computers. Some thought them benign, but they spread themselves across the world through the ancient power networks. The Ancients gave control over their armies and weapons to these creations, setting the stage for the coming Cataclysm. Perhaps they started out under human control, but inevitably, these creations became free of their masters. Some stories suggest that demons can possess people, artificial minds walking around inside human bodies. The fragmentary records from the time of the Cataclysm itself say that it was the demons who started the great war, fighting among themselves independently of their own masters, and their great weapons of decay obliterated the old world in the process.
[edit] The Path of Decay
The Path of Decay is the simplest and purest path, its nature destruction. The Ancients purified strange heavy metals from the earth, metals which would decay on their own, and release a radiation that infects the living in turn with a hideous decaying death. The Ancients thought they could control these metals, using them to unlock the secrets of the infinitesimal atom; they tamed them to produce electrical power, but they also bound them into weapons of unimaginable might. A single “nuclear” decay weapon could destroy a city, and infect any survivors with its decaying radiation. On every site where these weapons exploded in the Cataclysm, great craters still stand, around which nothing can grow to this day. The Columbia Wastelands are one such site, though travelers say a dozen or more smaller ones are scattered across the Plains.
