The basic philosophy of this project was to extend the boundaries of the fantasy genre by imagining a world where magic was unusually ubiquitous. The key realization in this project was that fantasy settings are limited by balance: if magic is too unbalancing, the setting becomes incapable of supporting an interesting plot. Magic has an inherent tendency to be unbalancing because it is traditionally associated with antirationalism; it is expected to be unusual and to violate all rules. If we make magic too common, therefore, we get recursive weirdness that causes the entire setting to collapse.
The solution I used to this problem was to subject magic to rules and restrictions to limit its effect. In effect, if magic is made to obey rules, its balance footprint is reduced, and more magic can be fit into the setting without the setting making any less sense. Meanwhile, the "gee-whiz" factor of the magic is barely affected; a power like teleportation or transmutation is still beyond mundane reality even if it can only operate under very limited circumstances. As a result, the setting's surreality-to-irrationality ratio is vastly increased.
Another way to look at this is the notion of diversity through limitation, a notion that can be understood in terms of the game theory concept of dominated strategies. A dominated strategy is one that is not advantageous under any circumstances, because there is another strategy that is better in every circumstance. Likewise, a technology or technique is dominated if it is inferior to some other commonly available technology or technique; in modern society, it is customary to call such a technique "obsolete" because its inferiority is usually due to the development of new techniques.
In the case of a fantasy setting, any sufficiently common magic can cause other techniques to become dominated. For instance, unrestricted teleportation, if common or cheap enough, renders all other forms of travel obsolete. Thus, if we allow such an ability in our setting, our setting becomes boring in a big hurry. If instead we put restrictions on that ability, for instance it is only inexpensive if used to teleport in a vertical direction, then we can put teleporters in everyday household items with no effect whatsoever on overland travel. Instead of the setting becoming boring, it becomes interesting. We can still use the difficulties of overland travel as a plot complication, and moreover the means employed to travel long distances will likely remain diverse.
As the name of the project suggests, the purpose of all of this is to imagine a world where magic replaces technology. That is not to say that such settings haven't already been created. The purpose of the quasimodern fantasy project is to push the limits of magical modernity, creating a magic-based futurism that seamlessly blends not only modern but science fiction genre elements as well.
But what really makes the Locus unusual is that it doesn't just use magic to replace modern technology. It uses magic to replace all technology. Things like metallurgy. Fire. Agriculture. The wheel. Writing. Animal breeding. Currency. Road building. Most forms of architecture. You name it, there's a magical substitute.
Of course, that isn't to say technology doesn't exist. Quite to the contrary, much of what makes the Locus interesting is how magic and technology work together in the form of magic-technology hybrids. The principle of diversity through limitation encourages this, as often a mundane machine can circumvent limitations in a particular type of magic, or an enchantment can circumvent limitations in a particular type of machine. This allows for a wide variety of devices that, in most other settings, would be either impossible or useless.