Nullstone Constructs

Start-class article · First seen: pre-campaign brief · Last seen: s14 (referenced obliquely as the Aurelia/Arcanthus stalemate)

The Nullstone Constructs are Aurelia’s colossal divine war machines — siege-scale automatons forged from black-veined Nullstone that suppresses magic. World-brief canon. Deployed in a single named campaign in Eldurae’s historical record: Aurelia’s two-century-old crusade against Arcanthys (the War of Fractured Heavens, 582-589 A.I.), where the Constructs marched through arcane defences, immune to spells and unstoppable by force alone. The campaign ended in stalemate when Arcanthys countered with the Grand Conflux and pinned the Constructs inside the city — Aurelia could not safely destroy them without risking a collapse of the floating platforms they themselves were now embedded in. Both sides have maintained an uneasy peace ever since. The Constructs are the largest Nullstone-engineered objects the corpus has documented, and the structural reason the standing Aurelia/Arcanthys cold peace exists.

Lede

The Nullstone Constructs are Aurelia’s colossal divine war machines — automatons forged from black-veined Nullstone that suppresses magic in the field around them. The world brief gives them three binding properties: they are siege-scale, they suppress / are immune to magic by virtue of their material, and they cannot be stopped by force alone. They are the most extreme expression of Aurelia’s anti-arcane doctrine — the city’s ordinary Nullstone policy (anti-magic capital masonry; Nullstone-runed plate on patrols; Nullstone-inscribed weapons on the rank-and-file) scaled to the dimensions of a sanctified war engine.

The party has not seen a Nullstone Construct on-screen. The Constructs exist in the campaign as the load-bearing historical fact behind the present-day Aurelia/Arcanthys peace: deployed in one named war, decisively neither victorious nor defeated, and now pinned inside their target city as the lock and key of a two-century stalemate.

Material

The Constructs are forged from black-veined Nullstone. The world brief uses the qualifier deliberately — Nullstone in general appears across the corpus as a pale anti-magic mineral the Aurelians mix into their masonry and rune onto their plate; black-veined Nullstone is presumably the denser, weaponised grade required to assemble an entire siege-scale automaton.

Functionally, the Constructs do what every other Nullstone object in the corpus does, only at vastly greater scale and integration: they suppress magic in their effective field, they resist spells, and they cannot be reliably brought down by arcane work. The brief’s framing — “immune to spells and unstoppable by force alone” — implies they can be brought down by sufficient combined force; the cost would simply be unsustainable in the field.

Deployment: the War of Fractured Heavens (582-589 A.I.)

Two centuries before the present campaign timeline, Aurelia launched a crusade against Arcanthys — the only named campaign the Nullstone Constructs have been deployed in. The Constructs marched through Arcanthys’s arcane defences, untouchable by the city’s signature engineered-magic working. Arcanthys responded by unleashing the Grand Conflux, the reality-warping apparatus housed in the Grand Conflux Spire at the city’s heart, warping reality to trap entire battalions in mirrored illusions and shifting streets.

The battle ended in stalemate:

  • Destroying the Constructs risked collapsing Arcanthys’s floating platforms — the same enchanted-chain magic that holds the city aloft would be unmoored if a Nullstone-grade anti-magic event of sufficient magnitude went off inside the city’s load-bearing infrastructure. The Constructs were now, in effect, embedded in the structure they were sent to demolish.
  • Aurelia could not advance further without devastating losses — the Grand Conflux’s mirrored illusions and shifting streets continued to redirect any sustained Aurelian press into itself.

Both cities have maintained an uneasy peace ever since. Each knows war would mean mutual destruction — Aurelia would lose Arcanthys, Arcanthys would lose its altitude, and the Constructs themselves would presumably be lost to whatever uncontrolled magical collapse the Spire-event released.

The stalemate is the load-bearing geopolitical fact behind a piece of standing campaign canon: the DM’s framing in s14, “the only ones that can get away with using arcane magic near Aurelia are the people in Arcanthus just basically because of the [pact] that they have with that city” [1]. The pact is the diplomatic shape of the Nullstone-Constructs / Grand-Conflux balance.

Present-day status

The Constructs are pinned inside Arcanthys. The brief does not enumerate exactly where in the floating city they sit, how many of them there were, or what their inert physical posture is — embedded in the foundations, half-buried in repurposed plinths, museumised in the Grand Conflux Spire’s mirrored halls, or simply left where they last stopped marching. What the brief makes clear is that the Constructs are still there, still functional, still anti-magic, and still load-bearing against any future Aurelian press.

Aurelia has not, in the two centuries since, attempted a second crusade. The brief does not record whether new Nullstone Constructs have since been forged but never deployed.

Relationship to other Nullstone objects in the corpus

The Nullstone Constructs sit at the upper end of a spectrum the corpus documents:

  • Aurelia’s masonry — pale stone mixed with Nullstone, distributed across the city’s structure as a passive anti-arcane shield.
  • Nullstone equipment on Aurelian officers — the Nullstone-runed plate looted by Vasquez in s10 [2] is the campaign’s only on-screen Nullstone object.
  • Black-veined Nullstone Constructs — the brief’s siege-scale weaponisation of the same material principle.

The escalation across the spectrum is one of scale and integration, not of material principle. The Constructs are Aurelia’s anti-magic doctrine taken to its largest physical expression.

Implications for the campaign

The Constructs are off-screen and the party is unlikely to encounter one in person. Their structural significance to the campaign is in two places:

  1. The Aurelia/Arcanthys cold peace is the reason Arcanthys remains a magic-tolerated power inside Aurelia’s broader anti-arcane regime, and the reason any future “we are protected by Arcanthus” cover the party might claim is even minimally plausible.
  2. The proof-of-concept for Nullstone weaponisation at scale. If Aurelia ever escalates against the party with something larger than runed plate and chain-master patrols, the Construct doctrine is the canonical fictional escalation ceiling.

Status as of session 16

Dormant. Pinned inside Arcanthys. Not engaged in any campaign-current conflict. The [1] reference to the Aurelia/Arcanthus pact is the closest the party has come to acknowledging the Constructs’ standing influence on the present-day map.

See also

References

  1. ^ Session 14, line 1616 — DM — Arcanthus arcane casters are the exception Aurelia tolerates (background canon for the stalemate).
  2. ^ Session 10, line 1639-1644 — Inline citation.