Building an Empire

Name: The Union of Artificers and Infusers
Colloquial Name: The Tinkers
Leader: Chief World-Interrogator Orethine

Function: The Union of Artificers and Infusers has three major functions within the empire, listed as follows

One: The Union is responsible for the construction and maintenance of public works projects, such as roads, sanitation systems, menial golems, and municipal lighting.

Two: The Union supplies weapons and equipment for most armed services within the Empire; this includes standardized spell-rifles, war golems, medical supplies, the occasional flying machine, and numerous logistical aids used for moving supplies and equipment to the front.

Three: The Union is charged with investigating the vagueries of the world's function (particularly pertaining to the flow of Shadow), and using what they learn to produce new devices that benefit the nation.

History: The Union of Artificers and Infusers is an institution that has existed in nascent form for around 250 years, but it has only received official recognition in the last century or so. This was largely due to various nobles and clergy stomping all over any would-be Tinkers whenever they were found. In the case of the nobles, it was due primarily to them wanting to maintain a status quo where they were unquestionably on top. Meanwhile in the case of the clergy, it was due to Tinkers being prominent atheists for the most part (hence challenging the status quo where the church was on top).

About a hundred and fifty years ago however, everything changed when the first crude Golems were developed. Within a year the Tinkers had claimed a province in the northern part of the empire, and quickly set about producing an army of automatons to keep the armies of the nobility at bay. For thirty years they managed to hold out simply due to sheer superiority in Artifacts, Infusions and Golems. Then everything came crashing down around the Tinkers' due to one simple factor they had overlooked.

All the Tinkers' gear ran on a mystical substance known as Shadow, which had built up untapped in the environment for centuries. The Tinkers' rapid industrialization however had rapidly depleted all the ambient Shadow in the region they had claimed, and at that time they didn't know how to artificially make more. In an instant, their Golem army ground to a halt along with the grandest of their machines. They still had Infusions and what Artifacts could be powered by the souls of their users, but that was simply not enough to deal with the vast numerical advantage enjoyed by the rest of the Empire.

After the war, the nobility and the church looked upon all the Tinkers had managed to build, and decided that they were going to have that for themselves if at all possible. They forced the Union of Artificers and Infusers to sign an extremely lopsided treaty, before spending the next fifteen years painstakingly trying to mold the Tinkers into a compliant instrument of their will. This was partially successful, in that while they got the Tinkers to at the very least stop outright rebelling (save for a few minor uprisings here and there in the forty years after the war), Artificers and Infusers in general hold a major antipathy for both the nobility and the church.

Inner Workings: An intangible fluid known as Shadow flows through the world; if properly prodded, it can be induced to assume the form of any form of matter or energy that may exist, or it can manifest as self-aware spirits which can be put to various tasks. Shadow is everywhere, any creature with a soul produces significant quantities of it just by existing, and most unaltered humans are nearly incapable of directly interacting with it.

Given this limitation, there are two major ways of harnessing Shadow; Artificing and Infusing. Artificing is the process of constructing a device of some kind which is able to consume Shadow as fuel to produce some sort of function; on the civilian end of things, this includes sewerage pumps, lighting without smoke or fire-hazards, and various useful labor-saving appliances. On the military side, it includes spell rifles able to shoot blast of exotic energies, blades crackling with flaming lightning, and armor that can amplify the physical abilities of its wearer as long as sufficient Shadow is provided.

Infusing meanwhile works by altering a person so they can more proficiently alter Shadow. The process of being Infused is the exact opposite of pleasant, as it involves having patterns painstakingly etched into one's soul. Each Infusion provides a single power to the recipient which cannot practically be taken from them. Make no mistake, it can be done, but the damage to the victim's soul is often such that you may as well have ordered them executed anyway. Most people can only survive enough trauma to their soul to support 3-5 Infusions, but exceptional individuals with strong souls can potentially have up to twenty. Receiving Infusions negatively impacts the rate at which a person generates Shadow.

Both Artificing and Infusing are heavily limited by the amount of Shadow available to work with; while Artifacts can have internal Shadow reservoirs and burn mundane fuels to generate more Shadow, a sufficiently energetic fuel to exploit the Conjuration Imbalance and produce infinite Shadow has yet to be discovered. Meanwhile, those with Infusions are most often limited by the amount of Shadow their soul can produce, meaning they often need significant amounts of rest after major magical exertion.

Golem manufacture requires elements of both Artificing and Infusing. After all, a Golem's body is nothing but a particularly complex Artifact. A golem's mind however is something else entirely. To make a golem's mind, raw Shadow has to be pumped through the soul of someone with a specialized Infusion. This causes the Shadow processed in this manner to take on some of the qualities of the subject's mind, granting it just enough sentience to provide decision-making capacity for the golem in question. A golem usually needs some sort of external source of Shadow however, on account of the fact that they don't have a true Soul to generate Shadow with.

Organization Strengths:

-Dug In: Most of the Tinkers' main laboratory complexes are dug deep into the ground so they can more easily get at geothermal energy for a cheap supply of Shadow to work with. As said complexes are often filled with advanced security measures, high-performance prototype weapons, and a downright paranoid level of backup supplies, this means that trying to invade or besiege a Tinker lab is often more trouble than it is worth.

-Bleeding Edge: The Union of Artificers and Infusers not only has all the best toys; they're the source of all the best toys. As such, the Tinkers are generally the best at building basically anything, with a persistent edge in terms of capabilities.

-The Master Plans: As the architects of most of the Empire's current public works projects and many military structures, the Tinkers have the blueprints for nearly every significant building in the nation filed away in their archives. As such, they have a significantly easier time improving on these pieces of infrastructure, infiltrating them, or sending them crashing to the ground with a single well-placed bomb.

Organization Weaknesses:

-Heresy: It is, and always has been the official position of the Tinkers that a rational view of the world's workings has no room for gods of any kind. As you may imagine this severely upsets the religious demographics, especially the higher-ups in the church.

-Grumble-Inducing Obligations: As part of the treaty which barred the Church from continuing to hunt Tinkers as heretics, the Union of Artificers and Infusers found themselves obligated to fulfill any request from a Noble for either Artifacts or Infusions to the best of their ability. Refusing to meet these obligations can be met with fines at the very least, possibly all the way up to the refusing Tinker being forcibly bound to the nobles' service.

-A Bad Reputation: Given the Union's history of less-than-ethical research, particularly where Infusions and related subjects are concerned, many still do not trust them. This isn't helped by the fact that those receiving Infusions are to this day often still traumatized by the process, seeing as it is still one of the most painful experiences a person can survive, even with heavy anaesthesia.

Leader Biography: Chief World-Interrogator Orethine is an enigmatic figure shrouded in rumours. One of the most prolific is the conspiracy theory that they are in fact nothing more than a soul, ripped from their body and kept on this earth beyond their time in an unliving mechanical husk. On her part, Orethine thinks this is a wonderful idea, but has deemed it impractical with current methods. On the other hand, she has integrated several artifacts into her body however, thinking them to be a lot less painful to receive than an equivalent Infusion.

Orethine first came to the Union of Artificers and Infusers as an act of teenage rebellion; her stiflingly religious parents had done their level best to crush all the free-will out of her, and in response she barged into the nearest Tinker lab and declared that she would be joining whether the people there wanted her to or not. From this single event intended mostly to spite her parents, Orethine's life would take a drastic turn.

Thirty years after first joining the Union of Artificers and Infusers, Orethine found herself thrust into the role of Chief World-Interrogator, charged with directing the probing into the secrets of the world that the Tinkers continue with to this day. Orethine's getting up there in years now, only remaining as agile as she is due to replacing significant portions of her body with golem parts in an effort to develop better prosthetics.

Leader Strengths:
-Expert Scientist: Orethine wouldn't have been put in her position if she didn't know her stuff; while not the outright best researcher the Tinkers have, Orethine is definitely up there.

-Augmented Body: Orethine is the living testbed for the Tinkers' forays into golem-based augmentations. As such she has significant physical advantages over unmodified humans, especially when it comes to sustained force.

Leader Weaknesses:
-Heretic: While the religious authorities generally despise those who declare that the gods don't exist, they particularly despise the leader of the biggest faction of atheists in the empire. As such, Orethine needs to tread carefully when outside the Tinkers' heavily fortified laboratory complexes, lest someone take a shot at her.

-Ill Health: Orethine is currently seventy-six years of age. Barring a serious improvement to medical technology, her days are sharply numbered and she knows it.