Bardvember Week #1: Lore

In the world of Harem Collector, bards have existed for almost as long as mages. Storytellers, actors and musicians afflicted with wanderlust often ply their trade between isolated villages, ans have done for centuries if not millennia. Such people would frequently run into monsters or bandits on their travels, and being generally unable to afford professional protection, were forced to learn the sword or bow to defend themselves on their travels. While nobody knows when the term "bard" was originally used, chances are it started with these proto-adventurers.
As magic became more widespread, bards were eager to add another trick to their repertoires. While few bards became full-fledged wizards, many learned a spell or two, and often sought magic that could be applicable to both their travels and their performances. A fire spell could provide both defense and pyrotechnics, or a defense spell could shield the bard from harm and extended the life of his instruments. Because of this focus on utility and versatility rather than theory or academics, many early advances in magic came from those bards who would experiment in the field for additional uses of existing magic.
It was only a matter of time until bards learned to enchant their own instruments and songs. Since magic usually required a vocal component of some kind, it was relatively simple to weave magic into the lyrics of music to produce songs capable of sharing an enchantment among all listeners. Unlike other mass enchantment spells, a bard could extend the benefits of a spell to anyone in hearing range, which let them conserve a great deal of Mana. While this efficiency was remarkable, in time most bards choose to simply focus more Mana into a given song for an even bigger effect- they are performers, after all, and few bards count subtlety as a virtue.

It wasn't long before others started to take notice of the unique capabilities of bards. Adventuring parties looking for a fourth or fifth member often sought out bards to round out the team. The tradition of battle musicians- specialized bards that accompany soldiers marching to war- began to take advantage of this unique form of magic. But the most insidious forces to make use of bards was still on the horizon....
About one hundred years before the start of Harem Collector, a Middle Kingdom sorcerer developed the chronomagical dodecagram, or "CD", a new means of inscribing a spell for use later. By inscribing the spell along with a twelve-sided magical diagram onto a one foot diameter clay disc, a spell could be frozen in time, to be reused as necessary with a special device called a "CD player". This method sacrificed the easy portability of scrolls for infinite uses, as the CD was not consumed in the release of magical power. While this was extremely useful to magic experimenters, there was a potent side effect to this magitechnology- because the CD player was effectively "replaying" the point in time, the actual chant of the spell replayed as well. This was initially seen as an undesirable side effect, that for many years wizards tried to "fix".

It was only when the magitechnology became sufficiently widespread were bards able to get their hands on it, and produce the first CDs of recorded music. This was huge, and sales of CD players immediately took off. No longer was music reserved for taverns, special occasions and those few able to hire full-time musicians, now almost anyone could play music relatively cheaply in the comfort of their own home. At this time, bards began to disappear from the ranks of adventurers- after all, why continue to put oneself at risk when you could make even more money by taking a job at a studio and recording music from the comfort of home?

As with any fledgling industry, it was only a matter of time before a bunch of merchants showed up to exploit it. The first "record companies" began to appear. While at first, many of them chose to hire bards as employees, in time it proved far cheaper to simply acquire a slave bard and force them to make music. After all, why pay for every egg when you could simply slap a chicken into a gilded cage and get all the eggs you could want?

This is how Diadira ends up in her situation at the beginning of Harem Collector. Young girls and boys with bardic talent, lured by the promises of fame and luxury to agree to recording contracts, are then placed into perpetual servitude to a soulless corporation and made to tour and produce music until their star wanes and they are discarded or, possibly worse, forced to play backing music for the next big act to get signed. Diadira is currently the number one pop bard in the Middle Kingdom, but longs for someone to provide an escape from her servitude....