quarta-feira, 23 de setembro de 2009

Klaus Lange-Jauch

To show that we're actually still working on this, here comes a character profile written by Kerrah on one of the new additions to the setting, Klaus Lange-Jauch, corporate tycoon and all around philantropist.

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Character profile:
Klaus Lange-Jauch



Klaus Lange-Jauch is commonly seen as a prime example of the opportunities presented by the Age of Magic. In a decade, he has risen from an unemployed wanderer to being the CEO of the world's largest business empire, Lohengrin.

Born in Munich, Germany in 1989, Lange-Jauch's childhood was marked by spectacular school reports and personal trauma. His parents died in a car accident when he was 16, and he soon after left his home city without warning. There isn't an official record on where he spent the next six years of his life, but in 2012 he was working for a small oil company in Norway. The boy managed to gather together a small sum of money and spent it buying stocks from his employers, who were on the verge of going bankrupt at the time.

Klaus got immensely lucky when the firm he worked for found a new oil well [is this the correct term?] shortly after his investments. With oil prices skyrocketing, his stocks sold for millions and he quit his job, moving back to Germany to found his own business. Before he could decide his next move, however, the Great Unsealing took place and wizards started discovering extraordinary powers they'd always had but never been able to use. While Klaus himself wasn't able to use magic, some of the friends he'd made since returning to Germany were. Immediately fascinated by these supernatural powers, he founded his company, Lohengrin, and hired a team of five magicians to study possible uses for their magic.

Half a year later the six young men had a breakthrough, managing to greatly boost the growth and productivity of crops and trees with simple spells. With Klaus' direction, the wizards created ten new plant breeds, all over twice faster and easier to grow than anything made with science. The fruit of their labours was trademarked as Lohencrops and distributed, revolutionarising food production everywhere. In less than half a decade, Lohengrin became the wealthiest foodstuffs company in Europe while Klaus founded smaller businesses on other industries as well.

During this time, the European Union started adapting to the existence of magic, stepping ahead to create laws for it. One among them was the increased taxation of all magic-based business. The Union and Lohengrin quickly got into disagreements on whether the sales of magic-enhanced products counted as a magic-based business, and when the law was reworded to specifically include cases such as these, Klaus chose to move his company.

With the world in a state of constant unbalance, Lohengrin's operations were moved into the one place which didn't seem to be reacting to the surfacing of magic in any radical way: Australia. Four of the members of the original research team stayed in Europe, so the remaining wizard was given a team of newly hired magicians to work under her and Klaus to create the company's second revolutionary invention.

In 2019, the Lohengrin Arcane Research Wing published their new discovery: magical means to turn desert into fertile terrain. In the day before this publication, the company bought a wide strip of Australian desert, turning into into a Lohencrops field in two months. The newly founded African League of Nations led by Ethiopia immediately showed interest in this discovery, gaining Lohengrin its biggest yearly customer.

In the years since, the company has spread its influence and market area into the whole world. Even the United States, despite refusing to grow magically-enhanced crops on its soil, is highly dependent on Lohencrops to feed its people. Lohengrin's subsidiaries include foundries, factories, banks, hospitals and supermarkets, all utilising magic in some way to enhance their productivity. Rumours persist of their third major invention, which is yet to come, being a new energy source to challenge the Ethiopian hamranite trade (or alternately the Africans paying a hefty bribe each year to keep the company's interest away from such an idea).

Klaus Lange-Jauch, despite his busy schedule in working with his research team, has managed to make himself a household name and a world celebrity. When marrying the head of his research team, he held the largest wedding in the history of the planet. He donates a billion dollars each year into varied charity foundations and personally gave a staggeringly large loan to the government of China when it faced financial troubles. Despite repeated demands, he refuses to enter the world of politics in his homeland of Australia, insisting he's not a good leader.

The business tycoon has for years been rumoured to be a closet wizard, a claim he and his wife have denied at every opportunity. "I consider myself the proof that you don't need to have magic in order to understand it. People have dreamed of all the possible uses magic would have for centuries before the Unsealing," he said when questioned on the matter for the first time in 2016.

quarta-feira, 16 de setembro de 2009

Political Map

Here it is, just as promised.

Since that is out of the way, we're now working on how the different factions interact with eachother. Expect more updates in the coming days and please post any comments, suggestions or criticism you have either here or on the thread at SoL.

Cheers!