The Good and Natural Specialisation of Class, the true assumption of man within his industry or Industrial Human Speciation as a means of producing a more efficient worker

An additional innovation for Skerple's Magical Industrial Revolution. The innovations are broken down into six steps, each ramping up progress towards an world ending event. Will your players help or hinder the apocalypse?

Art by Heinrich Kley

1. Initial Innovation

Designer transmogrification spells have been present amongst the city’s decadent dandy crowd for some time. Inefficient and expensive spells that lasted a few hours and amounted to little more than beautification or novelty - A change of eye colour, a thinner waistline – an expensive and decadent form of fancy dress. Nothing practical by any means. That is until hardnosed and workmanlike sorcerer-magnate, Henril Fwerd came across this fanciful practice at a local fop’s opulent party. While wastrels cavorted about with glowing skin and stilt legs, he sat dreaming. Fwerd, a wizard with a specific and unsavoury view of the class system, had seen an untapped industrial potential in this form of magic and a means to reshape the city in line with his worldview. Leaving with haste to his smoggy wizard’s tower to review the magical logic of these petty transmogrification spells, to rewrite the archaic, amateurish prose and streamline the arcane symbology – to make these transmogrification spells purposeful, practical and cost-effective (even if it meant making the transformations permanent).   

2. Public Introduction

Word around town is that something strange has happened to some of the workers in Fwerd’s main factory. They look strange… their arms and chests all ropey and knotted with muscles, it’s not so pretty but I’ve seen one of them carry a load an entire team of labourers would struggle with. Fwerd himself has begun to experiment on his own workforce, paying them substantial sums to be his test subjects. Henril began with the manual labourers, offering to make their jobs easier by increasing their muscle mass and density. The stronger they are the more raw materials they can carry, the more material they carry the more the factory can produce. The success of the experiment draws the eye of the city’s industrial class who begin covet this new form of magic. At the moment only Henril knows the methods by which to shape and repurpose flesh and he has far bolder intentions than simply making men stronger. There are so many ways in which man may be better adapted to suit his industrial and social condition.

3. Widespread Adoption

Henril, ever eager to acquire capital has taught his veritable army of apprentice-clerks the specific and secret arcane formulas of his new transfiguration magic. These apprentices, hired out by rich industrialists are to continue Fwerd’s work, administering prescribed transfigurations to workers throughout the city. Workers everywhere are financially incentivised to get transfigured and many in their thousands do, they are poor and could do with the money. For now, the transformations inflicted on the working classes are still comparatively mundane. Reducing the need for sleep means you can work longer hours and few would refuse enhancements made to the lungs so that caustic factory fumes are less damaging. The increased output of the working classes is profitable but wealth flows upwards. The rich begin purchase their own bespoke transfigurations. New vogues emerge, flawless skin, svelte frames.

4. Scope Alteration

The benefit of transfiguring one’s peons is too profitable to pass up. The rich and poor alike clamour with increasing lust and desperation for more transfiguration than Henril’s mages can provide. Fwerd’s main factory-complex is being repurposed; conveyor belts of magic wands. Each shipment contains wands loaded with uniform body-altering spells, guaranteed to completely transfigure the inefficient human frame into something wholly more suited to industrial society. These wands are (under threat of unemployment) being administered as mandatory to all workers and new hires. Ten of thousands are given new inhuman forms. These final transfigurations take on many forms, ever more drastic. Workers are given mottled grey asbestos skin resistant to molten metal. The stiffening of men’s hides and the hardening their bones will protect against biting needles and whirring gears of industrial machinery. Luminous saucer-wide eyes improve vision in the factory gloom.

Meanwhile the city’s ruling classes descend into a twilight world of strictly enforced fashion trends and elitism.  They prance about in shivering, waifish golden-skinned bodies. Shimmering and delicate, their features are sharp and precise, a perfectly symmetrical androgyny.

5. Height of Ambition

The lingering human population find themselves obsolete and unemployable, they slowly succumb to stress and deprivation and are forced to leave the city or are transfigured themselves. With humanities departure the nascent post-human ecology is complete. A new industrial ecosystem broadly divided into two post-human species. The golden-skinned ruling-caste flock to skyline gardens above the smog that irritates their fragile lungs and the grey skinned labour-caste, maladapted to the light of the sun, congregate beneath the earth in subterranean tenements and warehouse-cities. The production of goods and the upwards flow of wealth continues for now, after all is it not what the labour-caste were made for?

6. Terminal Events

No, it isn’t. And it is not long till the labour-caste, bristling with muscles and stab-proof skin, begin to remember this. There are strikes, riots. The military-caste are brought in to corral the labour-caste like the cattle they’ve become but find their social positions and species are not dissimilar and join what is quickly becoming an open revolution. The city descends into bloody interspecies warfare but the ruling caste are far too few and physically ornate to compete. Some in the labour-caste begin to question; ‘why not eat the rich?’. Fwerd’s industrial citadel is stormed by the lower-castes. In the ensuing carnage, most, if not all, practitioners of Fwerd’s transfiguration magic are slain and the wands broken. Fwerd, who remained human, dies laughing. The now ruling labour-caste look out from their city and see a species to be utilized – humans.  

The Labour-Caste

Armour class: As chain

Hit dice: 2 HD +6

Move: as man (climb at equal speed)

Attacks: d8 iron bars or sledgehammers

No. Appearing: 1 or workforce, 2d20 

Special: Asbestos hide. Mundane and heat damage received reduced by 1 die size 

Strength of 16+

Lowlight vision and stunned by bright light

Alignment: Neutral

The Ruling-Caste

Armour class: Unarmoured

Hit dice: 1 HD +1

Move: as man x2

Attacks: d2 ineffectual slapping

No. Appearing: couple, 2 or party, 2d4 

Special: Frail. Bludgeoning damage received increased by 1 die size 

Strength and Constitution of 7-

Alignment: Neutral