Doing gunpowder rails gives some people magic gun powers, so they do a liberalism and overthrew the king. The old power structure doesn’t like this, which includes a bunch of powerful classical mages (the Privileged) and every neighboring country. The subsequent trilogy is better than the first and moves the action to the old kingdom’s imperial quagmire where some imperialism is about to get tipped on its side from several directions.
It also has a sequel series, so there's six decently long books to read. Definitely one of the coolest magic systems out there. To expand a bit on how it works: gunpowder is basically a drug, as mentioned, but powder mages can also burn gunpowder near them and redirect the force thereby generated as they like, so they can make a bunch of powder explode next to them and direct the blast away from themselves, for example, and one character can fire a bullet and make it shoot much farther than it could ordinarily go by expending powder on his person and using the force from it to push on the bullet.
Oh, I got another: The Powder Mage books.
Doing gunpowder rails gives some people magic gun powers, so they do a liberalism and overthrew the king. The old power structure doesn’t like this, which includes a bunch of powerful classical mages (the Privileged) and every neighboring country. The subsequent trilogy is better than the first and moves the action to the old kingdom’s imperial quagmire where some imperialism is about to get tipped on its side from several directions.
It also has a sequel series, so there's six decently long books to read. Definitely one of the coolest magic systems out there. To expand a bit on how it works: gunpowder is basically a drug, as mentioned, but powder mages can also burn gunpowder near them and redirect the force thereby generated as they like, so they can make a bunch of powder explode next to them and direct the blast away from themselves, for example, and one character can fire a bullet and make it shoot much farther than it could ordinarily go by expending powder on his person and using the force from it to push on the bullet.