Quote:No announcement was made - it just "slipped in" with Mal's update of the VVS to 2022. And since Mal's essentially the Editor-in-Chief, well...
If we're going to be 100% honest, it just "slipped in" when the Whole Fenspace Catalog had material on practical magic loaded into it back in 2013.
Edit: More data? More data.
"Magic," for lack of a better word, has been with the setting since inception (this is a retcon of sorts) but it's only been honestly looked for and researched since mid-2013 after the whole interdimensional incident thingie. And even then it's not something everybody knows about; some people suspect but suspicion without evidence isn't much. Noah Scott and his coterie know, but Noah for his own reasons redacts magical information from the Catalog to keep everybody in the dark. Well, almost everybody, though to be fair the Soviets don't unlock the magic section of their Catalog copy until after the LulzSec revelations.
So here's what the Soviets are doing with magic: they're doing good Soviet industrial stuff with it. The important thing to note here is that prior to breaking the locks on the magic section of the Catalog, Black Mesa (by which I mean "the Deehive") was working with a) there's this really interesting quantum field effect floating around, b) it seems to be tied to a number of interesting side-effects, c) so where does it come from, and how do we break it? What follows isn't so much a magical tradition as it is a ground-up research program on the nature of magical energy. The Soviets aren't developing spells or rituals - those are for mystics. They're looking at magic in the same way physicists look at electricity, with the same sort of end-goal modalities in mind. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that's how the Soviet approach to magic works in my head.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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