Very early on in the writing of SteamWorks, I wanted to ensure that it pressed the idea that technology is not magic. Unlike psionics, there is no magic-technology transparency. While it is possible to combine the two in interesting ways, I felt that the two were inherently separate fields.

This idea is presented in the book in a variety of ways. For one, the mechanics that technology implements feel very different from magic. To use technology, a character must carry the devices he wishes to use; he must maintain them, repairing and recharging them as necessary; there is always a chance that a technologist’s more powerful devices will fail; and in the construction of some devices, the technologist must use devices he has already built and incorporate them into the new one.

However, to ensure that technology would be useful to a standard adventuring party, the technologist is still capable of things that are typically (at least in d20) in the realm of magic. A technologist can heal others - but their healing is not magical, as it can only affect living things with biological processes, and is weaker than divine healing. A technologist can make himself invisible - but such invisibility is not the same as magical invisibility (the technological term being "cloaking"), and the technologist is unable to manipulate invisibility at all (conversely, arcane magic and psionics cannot easily manipulate cloaks). A technologist can manipulate nature, but such manipulations are forced and artificial, rather than natural applications, as druids use.

The role of a technologist in the adventuring party is similar to that of a wizard or other arcane caster. He has devices like flamethrowers and autocrossbows, cloak generators and flux capacitors, universal remotes and instant fortresses. While they may be similar to spells, they are most certainly not, and no one in a setting would hold a technologist to be anything like a wizard. But while technologists are most similar to wizards, they are also capable of building devices that mimic the abilities of divine casters or psionicists: they can heal, control the wind, and protect their minds from the mental influence of others.

The devices that a technologist can have at his disposal are many and varied in function. While he can do some things that many other classes can do, he cannot do them as well, and some things are beyond even the power of technology. However, in a similar vein, there are some things that only technology can do that no other caster or manifester is capable of.