Travel in Ad Meliora – Airships and the Transcontinental Metro

Ad Meliora is an enormous world, with a wide variety of cultures and locales. To traverse this world without aid of a vehicle or mount would take many years. Luckily, there are two distinct services that have revolutionized travel and united the nations of the known world.

The Airship was the innovative brainchild of the Schwarzwald Republic’s finest steam engineers. A vehicle with the sleek, drag-resistant form of a boat, held aloft by a hot air chamber and various ballast tanks, airships give man the ability to take to the skies and enjoy the sensation of lighter-than-air flight. Because of their size, airships are quite suitable as means of mass-transportation. A single Zephyr-class airship (a medium-sized fuselage in comparison to other varieties) is capable of carrying up to 225 people of weights between 150 to 250 pounds before becoming over-encumbered, with the variable changing quite drastically for lower weights. The modern airship can travel virtually anywhere; Unrestricted by harsh terrain, capable of flying above harsh weather and adapted to land in water if necessary, it is a form of above-water transportation that is truly without bounds. Unfortunately, as a result of new innovations in practical magical application and private business ventures, the Transcontinental Metro became the leading method of individual travel. While airships are still favored for mass-transit and freightmoving, it is often more economical for a single person to make leaps from city to city via magical transportation. The incantation is spoken by a highly-trained wizard, sending the customer to the desired node on the Network Leyline that arrives at another wizard, who speaks a receiving incantation that routes the customer to their destination intact. The sending and receiving wizards communicate via psionic devices that act as multi-channel communicators. The only drawbacks to this process are the inability to efficiently move large quantities of non-organic matter (limited by the power of the wizard speaking the incantation and the concentration needed to receive large amounts of matter), and the possibility of an accidental arcane entrapment. Airships are the favored method of moving freight as the result of the first problem. The second problem may happen if the wizard at the sending end of the transport accidentally sends the customer to the wrong node in the leyline, in which case the wizard at that node is not expecting transport and thus does not prepare to receive a customer. Furthermore, the receiving wizard at the appropriate node might make a mistake with the receiving incantation and also trap the customer in the leyline. It is possible to force the receiving wizard to foul this up intentionally. Oftentimes those with the proper means of instant telecommunication (like psionics) might learn of a transport-in-progress and hire an assassin to kill the receiving wizard and trap the customer(s) in the leyline. The only way to successfully return from the leyline is for a wizard to route you to a destination, so oftentimes the mistake is cleared up within moments, making the problem a matter of inconvenience as opposed to imminent danger.

The ability to reroute someone out of the leyline was a safety feature engineered into it; The Network Leyline is a magical artifice, created by the proprietors of the Metro (Manheim & Gloucester Enterprises, or “MGE”) and maintained at their hidden facility, where it is powered and kept intact by a variety of arcane energy generators.