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[Mr. Strange]

Arcanum (I've mentioned this game before) had a nice way of handling the conflict of technology and magic. In it tech, despite being victorian-ish steampunk with healthy dose of mad scientist (scientists can into zombies too!) still relied on using and abusing known and predictable laws of nature, while magic was all about bending those laws to produce the desired effect through sheer willpower. Presence of magic made technology more failure prone and likely to blow up on it's users face, but complex and large scale tech made casting spells harder and more likely to fail too, so the two could not co-exist except in very simple forms. If one grew stronger and saw more widespread use the other would become weaker, leading to a situation where scientists had strong motivation to try to suppress magic and vice versa. Mage casting a powerful spell in the city could derail a train, electric streetlights could spit lightning and that battery filled with barely stable chemicals in your pocket watch could explode etc.

That leads to a world where magic has almost completely dissapeared if technology advances freely, but if society grows dependant on tech even weak magic can bring it down just by existing, and like wise world of high magic can last only untill someone invents steam engine and flying wizard towers stop flying...

[i2amroy]

Considering there's magic, all the waste could be relocated to single bag of holding, or something.

Possibly a Bag of Devouring, if we're running by D&D/Pathfinder rules.

Indeed, or have a big thing that's enchanted to be able to mass produce disintegration beams, and just turn all of your trash, magical or mundane, straight into little piles of dust.

[Kadzar]

Yeah, I'd say Eberron is the closest D&D setting to modern technology (albeit magic-based). They do have long-distance communication, though it's not as wide-spread as modern telecommunication and more like 19th century telegraphs. The setting doesn't officially have anything like computers as far as I know (warforged are pretty much sentient robots, but the Treaty of Thronehold banned their subjugation, and they don't have any more processing power than the average humanoid or any way to interface with a network anyway), though I'm sure they could eventually rig something up. That's assuming Khorvaire (the main continent) doesn't kill itself in another war or something.

An idea I've seen suggested somewhere was that too much widespread magic actually has a detrimental effect on the world, that something like Tippyverse could create enough magical pollution or whatever that it leads to something like Dark Sun. Alternatively, it might just be really dangerous to have a lot of high level magic around, since any old crazy person who reads enough spellbooks can create the equivalent of a nuke without needing to produce or steal nuclear weapons (though that often happens in normal settings anyway, I guess).

[Frumple]

As for why things are often technologically stagnant in fantasy settings, it oocrred to me that there's actually a good explanation built into a lot of fantasy roleplaying games quite by accident.

Well, the more explicit explanation is that the planets in question are deathworlds, and every attempt to develop arcanoindustry blows up, gets eaten, and then sinks into a swamp that wasn't there until the entire area went up in a thano-thaumaturgical localized apocalypse. And then the swamp gets up and lays waste to a country or two in a necromantic rampage. People keep trying to advance, and all it gets them is maintaining the status quo because things keep eating the researchers. And the libraries. And the machines. And the surrounding countryside. So they keep having to rebuild the theoretical castle before the swamp decides to stand up and kick it over, then lay down on top of it, smother the lot, and proceed to self-immolate and go on to kill a few tens of thousands of unsuspecting civilians. There's generally no "And the third time, it stayed up!" in these settings, heh.

There's definitely a lot of interesting settings that try the whole integration thing, though. That one that's WWI with dragons, ferex... though trying to remember what it's called, it turns out there's apparently more than one fantasy series that's... basically that. Huh. The Temeraire series, that think I've never read anything from, and... I might have been thinking of Turtledove's Darkness stuff instead, which was a WWII alt-history that was pretty explicitly a re-imaging as to what might happen if there was an arcane revolution instead of an industrial one.

... but yeah, the whole "What would happen" thing depends mostly on what the magical system itself is like. The drawbacks, limitations, and limiting third parties (species that might not want things to get fancy -- the proverbial idea that can't be killed becomes a lot more killable when you have individuals that can burn down the countryside on their own and literally mindwipe anyone they don't kill) all determine exactly what could happen. Definitely wouldn't mind seeing more magitek settings out there, though. Especially ones that are explicitly magic, instead of just unexplained space magic superscience :V