Weaving - Lectures on Ferrication - 1

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The common man often associates apparatum with terms such as arcane, useful, or mysterious. Practiced artificers use only a single word to describe it. Tedious. Your life as an artificer will be a long sequence of tiny, devastating mistakes. Punctuated occasionally with minor success. You’ll spend your days wishing for finer tools, better eyes, and a third hand. Repetitive stress injuries, migraines, and hours of wasted work will become regular to you.

Your job, in essence, is to convince objects they’re something they aren’t. A daunting task. Altering the metaphysical world. What would you say if I were to ask you, as you are now, to make a spoon think its task is to absorb angular momentum? Put your hands down, it was rhetorical. You would likely shrug your shoulders, or say something along the lines of use magic. But what does that even mean? Even if you knew the fundamentals of artificery, how would you sum up the idea of absorbing angular momentum? Even in Common, it is a challenge. Harder still, you have to tell a spoon to stop being… well a spoon.

There are only two trusted methods in artificery. First, try everything until something works. A repetitive, dangerous, and often futile task. This leads to the second method. Do what works. We spend our days carving immensely complex, and extremely delicate runes. The slightest mistake can ruin weeks of work. Trying to reinvent the wheel is dangerous and a waste of time. In these lectures, I will ask only one thing of you. Listen. Listen to what those who have come before you have done. Otherwise, you will be lost in the tides of tedium, or worse.