Techno-magic. Thoughts, ideas...help

[Hainted]

I'm bouncing around ideas for 3 cultures. The first is an ancient race that has built everything from their understanding of magic. The second is an ancient race that has mastered technology. Neither race can comprehend or use the other's specialty, however a younger race has emerged that can use both to a limited degree. They'll never be grand wizards or techno geniuses but they can combine the two into forms neither elder race can imagine.

For example the Magi store information on specially grown crystals, and have workers who catalogue the crystals and sing the proper tones to retrieve the info from them. The Techs have intricate clockwork mechanisms that record info on cylinders and play it back. The Twixt modify the cylinder mechanisms to strike crystals and produce the required vibration to record or retrieve info.

I want to combine Magic and Technology, but in a way that's not just "it's an electric car, but it runs on magiK", so any thoughts, or suggestions, or resources to check out is greatly appreciated.

 

[Lunaairis]

Ask questions like where does magic come from? how is it used by the more magical society?

From your example it seems they need to sing to these crystals. Are their words incantations in the ancient tongue of magic it's self? For that sake is magic alive? Or is it just some supernatural energy that flows through all things?

Once you know for sure how the super magic guys use it. You can start thinking of people who maybe develope machines which react to it, bend it, speak its tongue or something. Machines that over clock it to create devastatingly powerful results and don't weaken the use as much. Or maybe sing the perfect tune so magic reacts exactly as the user wants it to.

Also you should look up Babylon 5 . I think that's the show which used techno mages. I'm not too sure. But you could get ideas by researching where the idea of techno Mage comes from.

 

[Hainted]

Yeah I'm looking for more of magic as a living force, and less magic as a hand wave to explain things.

 

[wordwalker]

Babylon 5 has very little about technomagic, just one encounter with a tech whose machines looked a little like magic for the fun of it. (And sometimes a touch of the same in other tech; it had some Arthurian feel sometimes, but mostly in the references rather than how anything worked.)

 

[Feo Takahari]

Perhaps it might be worth it to study some past examples. See if there 's anything you can adapt and reuse.

 

[thecoldembrace]

How about binding magic. For you this would be really simple and easy to explain. Your magic users already store their information in these crystals and your techs have the cylinders. You already have both forms grounded in tangible objects that hold the knowledge of their races. For the third, bind the magic to the technology.
Some examples being, create an alloy that uses both elder race's form of tangible item together, i.e. an alloy that has the crystal fused into the metal. Another would be to use (if you have them and what I find to be very powerful in my own world) are runes/sigils/glyphs what have you, and bind the essence, the wild nature of magic to metal or stone by some type of new forging, usually where a spell caster during the smelting process or in the tempering process suffuses their magic with whatever they are creating.

-Cold