Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Foxite]

Most of the people here have obviously played games such as RuneScape, with things like magic, demons, and other mythical things.

Did you ever realize, that the timeline of those games goes further than the time you play in? If it were to reach the time we are in now (Information Revolution, Digital Age, or whatever you call it), what would be different from reality?

[Telgin]

I've thought about this kind of thing before, and I think in general the answer is that so much would be different that it's probably almost impossible to predict what a more modern age would be like.  Most games and fantasy settings already do a pretty poor job of integrating fantastical elements into a medieval world and showing what should be different, and that only ever gets worse as you get more sophisticated technology.

This is probably why most fantasy settings seem to be in a medieval stasis: they've had the same general technology level for many thousands of years and don't seem to be moving past it any time soon.  To do otherwise is a lot more work for the writers.

Anyway, as examples of things that could be different or better now: if magic can perform FTL communication then you can bet that computers and communication technology would be different.  If the equivalent of transistors exist for magic / mana, and if using them is as fast or faster than electronic transistors, and they don't produce exorbitant amounts of heat, then magical computers might replace electronic ones altogether.  If any of those things isn't true them electronic computers would still probably exist.

Cell phones might exist much, much sooner.  Maybe even in a medieval era, if magic can produce remote communication and can be put into portable devices.  This oftentimes seems to be the case in fantasy settings but I'm not aware of many settings where personal magical communication devices are commonplace.

Interstellar travel might be trivial by now with magic.  If magic can produce a vacuum sealed structure then that simplifies some spacecraft designs.  If magic can produce FTL travel then you've already done things that may not even be possible in reality.  If magic can reduce inertia or produce massive amounts of thrust somehow, you might get rockets sooner, or something even better.  If magic can produce artificial gravity, then you've again done something that might not even be possible in reality.

So, in short, it depends on a lot of things about the magic in question. 

[Graknorke]

Industrialisation in a fantasy setting should come around a lot sooner. In fact, where a lot of stories put you, there should already be some analogue to factories, if magic is easy enough to use that someone with an interest could magic together the prerequisite systems to do so. Population growth and QoL should be high too, since even if it's not possible to have wizardy herberts taking care of everyone, they should be able to expend a fraction of the required effort into facilitating the mass-production of food and useful products. Increasing the fertility of soil and the growth of plants, creating enchanted furnaces and metal casts and conveyor belts and so on for tools and vital equipment...

If things are still as shit as in medieval Europe, then people with magic are unreasonably selfish pricks.

[Aqizzar]

Cell phones might exist much, much sooner.  Maybe even in a medieval era, if magic can produce remote communication and can be put into portable devices.  This oftentimes seems to be the case in fantasy settings but I'm not aware of many settings where personal magical communication devices are commonplace.

I remember seeing a short-story fantasy setting about a civilization of Elves who basically had modern computing and communications, only entirely powered by magic, with crystal balls for cell phones and teams of (quantum?) teleporting faeries for an unreliable Internet protocol.

And of course, no discussion of fantasy technology is complete without mentioning the hypothetical Deep Rot, a Turing complete logical architecture made entirely of well trained undead minions.

Most of the commands they're capable of can be broken down into simple logical statements like 'If X, then Y.', such as the attacking one being "If something enters this room, attack them.".
Do you think that with enough undead, with the right commands, you could effectively create a computer?

Every second, look at those two zombies. If only one of them has its hand up, put your hand up.
And then you have a NAND gate, and technically can build any logical circuit from there.

TEN THOUSAND CORPSES DOING THE HOKEY-POKEY IN MY BASEMENT

[wierd]

Yes. I have considered what an eventual technological future for magic using worlds would be like.

Instead of telephones, you have circlets of telepathic communication, and things of that nature.


The real problem though is that high fantasy universes would produce technology very very slowly unless only some small handful of people could use magic effectively.  In which case, the major technology would be magical prosthetic devices-- devices that allow people without magical potential to use magical effects.

The bigger question to ask yourself, is if there are consequences to using magic.  EG, what happens when "magical conjuration" of raw materials becomes a mainstream method of producing raw materials for industry as a result of inexpensive magical prosthetic device technology.  Hold that thought in your mind, then consider our modern problems with waste disposal and things like the pacific gyre.

Great-- Now, imagine the "magical device landfill".

A world with magic is less rosy isnt it?

[TempAcc]

A world full of magical device recharge stations, mana catalysers in leylines, dragons having rallies protesting dragon racism, the summoned creature rights act of 1989 :v

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

[Sergarr]

Just start off with Shadowrun and go on from there.

[Bohandas]

Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series and to a lesser degree Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series deal with this issue

[Loud Whispers]

The Runescape economy developed more in line with a move from industrial to financial-based. I remember all those days spinning flax, mining runestone and hunting for dragonbones only to to punch far above my socio-level weight by becoming a stock broker in the merchant exchange. Swankering around in loot I had no right to have! Inflation was simply moving at a far higher rate than minimum wage in the primary service sector could earn, and this inflation was driven by artificial demand from the merchant guilds... Sneaky gits.

[My Name is Immaterial]

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.

[Culise]

Industrialisation in a fantasy setting should come around a lot sooner. In fact, where a lot of stories put you, there should already be some analogue to factories, if magic is easy enough to use that someone with an interest could magic together the prerequisite systems to do so. Population growth and QoL should be high too, since even if it's not possible to have wizardy herberts taking care of everyone, they should be able to expend a fraction of the required effort into facilitating the mass-production of food and useful products. Increasing the fertility of soil and the growth of plants, creating enchanted furnaces and metal casts and conveyor belts and so on for tools and vital equipment...

If things are still as shit as in medieval Europe, then people with magic are unreasonably selfish pricks.

Or they understand their own power base and seek to protect it (which to be fair, is not mutually exclusive with being selfish pricks, just unreasonable ones ).  Or it's, say, extraordinarily rare.  It also depends on how magic works, whether it's amenable to the scientific method or widespread use.  For instance, if the power for magic is "conserved" (and I use the word loosely, understand) by draining, say, some hypothetical life force or prana out of the surroundings, the widespread use of magic may be understood also to mean the death of fertile life in the area (purveyors of environmentalist aesops, rejoice), or if magic runs off the wielder's life force, mages may wonder why they should cut time off their life to give someone a bit of air conditioning.  I also recall a somewhat old sci-fi story (back when psionics was still a serious thing in sci-fi) where a world literally had magic, with the consequence that it never developed anything vaguely resembling the scientific method, precisely because this world's "magic" was a function of will rather than reality known scientific law; one of the mouthpiece characters in the story actually asks the audience the other character how can you develop a coherent theory about electricity when you can make the current run from negative to positive, positive to negative, or hold perfectly still regardless of voltage gradient simply by thinking it to be so, and how can you ensure reproducibility when the results of any subsequent experiments by other people are entirely dependent on the experimenter being in a similar frame of mind as you and amenable to your conclusions. 

It's important to remember that not all magic in fiction is the same, and so a certain set of assumptions must be made.  For instance, the most amenable environment for a Magindustrial Revolution would be a world with a magic system ruled by a logical and rigorous system subject to scientific inquiry that is also spread sufficiently among the population, either by natural aptitude, potential for tutelage in the arts, and/or by use of intermediary objects such as artifacts or wands usable by the uninducted, and also without immediate or obvious severe costs (for instance, coal-firing does have a huge environmental cost, but not one immediately obvious to a pre-industrial population).  D&D is a great example, bringing us the Tippyverse and other shenanigans.  Discworld is another one.  Valdemar in the Mage Storms trilogy was beginning to hint at becoming a third, though the stories when taken in chronological order in-'verse don't reach the point where things like djinn-powered combustion engines really take off. 

Great-- Now, imagine the "magical device landfill".

Isn't that actually the title of a Pratchett short story? 

EDIT: Corrected a blip there.  Also, I can't believe I explicitly mentioned D&D and the Tippyverse while completely forgetting about the canon magical-industrial lands of Netheril and Eberron until Bohandas brought it up below.  Huge mea culpa, there. >_<

[Bohandas]

It may be worth picking up copies of the D&D sourcebooks Netheril: Empire of Magic (2e) and the Eberron Campaign Setting (3.5e).

IIRC there's actually a free -legal- downloadable PDF of Netheril somewhere on WotC's website, or at least there used to be.

[Bohandas]

Also Warhammer 40k, which is explicitly a sci-fi reimagining of a fantasy setting.

[Foxite]

snip

Your sig literally had me laughing for 20 minutes, making all other people on the bus looking at me, possibly wondering what genius joke I just read.

[Bohandas]

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. Copper, silver, and gold can't be conjured; this is surely just to prevent wizards from being even more powerful than they already are, but if taken as a fact of the setting it explains why electrical technology hasn't been developed - namely the materials that make the best electrical conductors are also therefore significantly more difficult than other materials for the kind of person smart enough to do anything really clever with them to obtain