Building an Empire

Well, I guess what I probably should've implied is that Demonsul alluded to a 'softer' setting, so the easiest way to work off that is to make space for 'unknowns' within the setting. The intent with 'The Bright' is to be a living, powerful, but poorly-defined and variable source of 'divine magic' which is monopolised by the Churches. To interact with it, you either have to be inherently linked to it or leech off those that can via rituals - magical devices and objects are extremely limited and organic. Because it's alive, it often seems to act with a mind of its own, depending on which Gods it's influenced by, making it a nightmare to work with without an empathic approach. Why exactly this energy emanates from the divine planes isn't really important for the Church, so long as it works. No, you can't use it to fuel a babbage engine but maybe you can use it to float yourself in the air or make a quill that you can command verbally/telepathically.

I'd like to leave plenty of space for people writing factions to decide what kind of local divine magic they're after and how it's used.

Re; The Shadow, I think the question boils down to what kind of golems you're after. Are they bodies with spirits shoved into them or wind-up toys powered by magical oil? Are their brains purely magical, or programmed? Stuff like that. Golems in the traditional sense are more or less just blobs of clay brought into an imperfect form of life, for instance.

The breaking-point isn't the golems and 'infusion', it's the magical-dynamite aspect of artificing, whereby it can be used to create multiple kinds of energy at once. If the Artificers only knew how to reliably 'burn' Shadows to create light and heat and use its flow as a current to generate kinetic energy, then that limits the kinds of devices they can make using it. Making the golems (or at least, the earlier/current models) more low-tech is the easy bypass.

The way I'm rolling with Golems is basically alternate-physics robotics. The body has to be mechanically sound, even if the motor systems and sensors run on magic. Meanwhile the brain is basically a spirit imprinted off of someone's soul and shoved into the control box, as it were.

And regarding the magical dynamite thing, maybe the weirder the energy type you're trying to induce, the more Shadow you need? Like, heat, light, and kinetic force are pretty straightforward and don't need too much Shadow. Electricity is a tiny bit beyond that, but still considered practical. But when you start screwing aropund with shit like conjuring negative matter, shooting stable particles of the Strong Nuclear Force at people, or twisting the space-time continuum into a knot the Shadow costs start going through the roof.

Anyway, is anyone interested in some speculative astronomy? I for one think it would be awesome if the planet had two moons, with the smaller one orbiting between the big moon and the main planet so it looks like a giant eye from the ground.