Just to set the context, a quote from Armifer about Elanthian/Kermorian technology and society in general:

>Maybe the original designers of the game meant to have an European medieval fantasy setting, but the divergences were immediate >and are ubiquitous. Moon Mages have mastered optics. Warrior Mages understand electrical engineering well enough that Hib has a >power grid. Gnomes go totally balls-on-walls steampunk. We have constant, secured international trade. We have sugar and coffee >and chocolate and corn. We have abundant silk production. Oh Christ do we have silk.

>The best approximation I can come up with is that Kermoria is roughly at the level of the Renaissance, but still with some >significant divergences in both direction.

The electrical engineering to allow for some power grids in some areas is worth noting. But so is the level of magic in the game. We have it! I think it's easy to see that influence when you glance at the number of supernatural items in the game, but I've been looking at our instruments and I think there are some areas where we're beyond just the Renaissance.

We have various bagpipes and similar items (physalis) which I think represents the end of developments that in the real world took place in the 1600s, or so. And oboes, which originate from the mid-17th as well but grew more advanced and I'm not entirely sure what the IG oboes are comparable to from the real world. And the various brass wind instruments are further along in technology.

But if you have a Guild manipulating mana through resonance why just look at "normal" real world instruments for inspiration in game? Why not think up instruments for the game that might resemble more experimental musical instruments in the real world but perhaps utilize the game's use of magic?

Why not something like a cambrinth theremin (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin) where you charge up the instrument and it is able to make noises as you drain mana from it and manipulate the space around it? Or if cambrinth is the wrong material something else. Or, given that we have some electricity in some areas, electronic instruments? I'm sure there are lots of potential instrument ideas out there that would embrace the magical side of the game.

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Lupdels

>When magic has affected so much of Elanthian society, why shouldn't it also influence instrument design?

Exactly. Imagine a hydraulophone in which it's possible to summon the water! Or something like the use of Tesla coils to make sound (like in the movie Soccer's Apprentice). Or what about a pyrophone? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clUQMbZVwi0)

On the one hand, I could see an argument that some of those with the greatest abilities to develop these instruments would focus their attentions elsewhere, and that's why we wouldn't have them. Something like a pyrophone or plasmaphone seems more Warrior Mage-esque/mad scientist (although Breath of Lightening and Pyre indicate we'd certainly have the capabilities, right?) than Bardic, and what self-respecting Warrior Mage sits around making instruments instead of trying to blow things up? But certainly there have been plenty of Bards with free time in the past to come up with stuff like this.

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Lupdels