mithriltabby: Adam Smith with caption “Invisible Hand” (Economics)
Max Kaehn ([personal profile] mithriltabby) wrote in [personal profile] roseembolism 2010-11-09 08:28 am (UTC)

As soon as the existence of charm spells were known, every ruler would have magical bodyguards to deal with them. All those crowns and miters and vestments would be heavily enchanted with protective spells. And you wouldn’t have schisms like the Reformation in the first place: you can cast Commune and find out about issues directly. The availability of healing magic and longevity potions to royalty would do many weird things to dynasties. Armies would march with specialists focusing on spell defense. And you could get really interesting disputes if using weather magic to avoid droughts or floods in one place causes them in another— whole wars could break out over that.

Your main bottleneck is availability of people to wield magic. You won’t get a Singularity because the positive feedback loop damps out: as soon as all available people with the talent for magic have been trained, your society is saturated. Enchantment usually requires a lot of time from highly trained people, as well as valuable materials, so I doubt you’d see ubiquitous items replicating food and goods for the peasantry, or enchanted labor-saving devices for the middle class. Make your Cure-Disease-at-will item an enchanted arch that casts Cure Disease on everyone walking in your city’s gates, and put those in major cities on trade routes as firewalls for plagues. You don’t need very many bound water elementals to create pumping stations for your city’s water supply.

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