roseembolism | When the real world and D&D magic collide.

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When the real world and D&D magic collide.

In a recent discussion thread the question was brought up: visualize a modern world where D&D magic was developed in the middle ages. After considering what D&D magic is capable of, my personal view is that it would resemble nothing like either our world or the standard D&D world. For example, consider the effects of:

1431: Roun France
Joan of Arc: "You. Are going to burn. Me. Me. Do you want fire? Here's some fire- FIRE STORM! And while we're at it (summon) Talk to the Arcon about God and heresy."

(High level clerical spells and summonings could easily start, or end a crusade, and have really strange effects on religion.)

1512: Italy
Machiavelli: (hand gesture) "You will stop supporting the Medici's attack against Florence."
Pope Julius II: "I will stop supporting the Medici's attack against Florence."
Machiavelli: (hand gesture) "You will appoint me as your personal adviser."
Pope Julius II: "I will appoint you as my personal adviser."

(The effects of Dominate, Charm Person and similar spells can't be understated in completely warping he political state of the world. Just consider how many events in history could have been changed if a single ruler had decided other than he did.)

1540; Germany
Martin Luthor: "How DARE the Papists monopolize Healing Altars and Hero's Feasts for the wealthy! My Healing Altars and Hero's Feast Altars will serve everyone for free!"

(The ability to create magical devices will have the greatest effect on the world. It's possible in 3.X to create immobile chargeless at-will devices for spells up to True Resurrection. Sure they would be expensive, but the ability to bring back any deceased with no ill effect would massively change warfare, and the costs could be amortized over thousands of people. Similar devices for curing diseases could render plagues irrelevant, and at-will Heroes' Feasts devices could render most agriculture redundant.)

1505: Florence
Leonardo de Vinci: "And so we see by guiding the stream of water from the Decanter of Endless Water against the vanes of the screw, we have a source of motive power for pumps, cranes, carriages and an endless assortment of other devices. In fact, I am now working on a self-propelled balloon which will..."

(I've mentioned before that medieval and Renaissance engineers were very talented and ingenious in their own right, and their main limitations in construction were materials and power. Magic eliminates those restraints. Spells like Fabrication and Wall of Stone could revolutionize construction and engineering.)

In other words, very shortly the world will look nothing at all like history. We're talking about a Renaissance Singularity where the major limitations of the era are eliminated, and the political landscape subject to shifting at the whim of people with the right spells. And I think that considering what powerful magic could do to change pre-industrial Europe may be useful in thinking about creating unique fantasy worlds, and making them look more unique than a faux-medieval Europe.

So does anyone have any ideas of what bizarre things do you think could come out of a D&D/Historical Renaissance?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

>at-will Heroes' Feasts devices could render most agriculture redundant

That right there is effectively The Singularity.

Does 3.X still have the Minor Creation/Major Creation spells that allow you to conjure up simple inexpensive items out of thin air? Items with those spells would effectively be replicators.

Greater Teleport: "Distance is not a factor."^[1] So the 12 guys who have been on the Moon? Could go back any time they wanted to. Depending on the number of people they could teleport with them, we could have a permanent colony on the Moon by now.

^[1](I think Einstein's head just exploded.)

Yeah, the social upheavals caused amortized good food would be drastic. ell they would even in today's society.

And yes, 3.X does have Creation spells, and fabrication spells, though I believe complex items require skills. But the effect on manufacturing would be dramatic. As would the "Wall of Stone" spell.

And never mind the moon. Greater Teleport would allow quick travel anywhere in the world. And anywhere two cities are connected by a teleport portal, sailing ships and caravan routes would be obsolete. Step through the portal in Florance, walk out in Beijing.

Again, though, depends on the frequency of magical capability, and is looking on the positive without remembering the negative.

On my world of Zarathan (my main FRPG setting and part of my main writing world, mentioned once in Digital Knight and the central location in my partially completed "Balanced Sword" trilogy, which I hope to see published one day), there are or were things like flying ships (airplanes), teleport gates, etc., but a lot of these get balanced out or negated by opposing magicians and gods. Teleportation is ... REASONABLY safe, but it's less so for major characters/beings because their attempts to bend space and time will be subject to a lot more attention. Just a LITTLE interference with a teleport can have Bad Effects.

There are still farmers, etc., but what they DO have are charms which are as good or better than our best fertilizers, etc., enabling them to produce a lot more, reliably, on less ground.

However, what you DON'T have are countries as we know them. "Countries" like the State of Elbon Nomicon or the Empire of the Mountain are, in actuality, a long string of cities with islands of relative safety and stability around them, connected by roads that are enchanted and well defended, but mostly with what amounts to variable wildernesses between them. The largest city on Zarathan is probably Zarathanton (the human name; the Ancient Sauran/Dragon name for it is Fanalam' T' ameris' a' u' Zahr-a-Thana T'ikon), and it's probably got between 150,000 to 200,000 people in it. Possibly as much as twice that, but no more.

The rarity and power of magic will indeed be key. One reason I picked D&D magic (besides the familiarity) is it's both common (anyone with an above-average Int can apparently learn it) and extremely powerful for magic systems. Something like Gloranthan magic would have a very widespread, but much less drastic effect, and Ars MAgica style magic would probably disappear. ;')

And I do want to read your Balanced Sward trilogy one day. It sounds interesting.

Well, how COMMON it is in D&D is actually GM's choice. A *PC* can choose to be a mage, but then, it's assuming that the PC has the talent, period, and that spell selection is the only constraint guided by INT. You've got to be bright enough to cast it no matter what your talent.

However, a GM could (and I do) rule that in the GENERAL population the percentage with the talent to become a full-blown wizard (as opposed to learning simple cleaning cantrips) is very, very low.

Similarly, how many people the gods choose to actually bestow their powers upon could be very small.

The Balanced Sword trilogy begins with "Fall of Saints" -- I have that one done. I posted some sections of it in my LJ some time ago.

Well, the Heroes' Feast bit is dependent on the number of clerics able to cast it.

The same thing applies to most of the others. How many clerics and mages are there? One out of ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million? Any number will change things, but how MUCH they change things, and in what way, will depend greatly on how many there are.

The teleportation thing? Anyone able to do "Adaption" and Teleport can get to the moon in a very few steps. As in, if you're a reasonably high level mage you can get there with no problem.

back in AD&D times, that was true. But in 3.X and Pathfinder, one can make a "use activated" item, that operates every time a command word is said. Sure such a Hero's Feast item would cost 132,000 gold, but it can cast a hero's Feast 600 times an hour, feeding 6,600 people. Charge one silver per person, and it makes it's cost back in 200 hours of use. Or you can be cheap and spend 30,000 gold, and make a Create Food and Water item that could feed 14,400 people a day. At 1 copper piece per person, that makes its costs back as soon as 210 days. Scary, right?

Now consider the same with a True Resurrection spell.

And oh yeah, I see some peasant writing "Wizard's on the Moon".

No, I know the calculations. It's still limited by money available and by how common the mages are -- each an individual GM choice. If they leave it "mages are as common as those with the intellect" and "132000 gold is easy to come by, even though that's FOUR TONS OF GOLD, worth about a hundred million dollars in today's money", then the world D&D shows is so nonsensical as to be not worth even thinking of. And I don't. If it makes that little sense, there's factors that they're not showing to make it work.

In mine, for instance, a silver piece PER MEAL? Commoners can't afford that. Hell, the middle-class artisans would find that pricey. Even a copper per day isn't affordable by lower classes; a copper will get you a room in a cheap inn, and, well, the commoners can't afford to stay in inns very often.

Resurrection/Raise dead is another. "Order of the Stick" plays around with this, but also shows the usual solution: if the soul doesn't want to COME back, you can throw all the Resurrections at it you want, you get nothing. Same for Speak With Dead; if the soul, or the soul's owner (Deity who took the soul to its realm) don't want to play, "I'm sorry; your call cannot be completed as dialed."

Hum. Did medieval Europe even have 4 tons of gold to play with? Notwithstanding the assumption that any character of the appropriate level has that much wealth to play with I wouldn't assume that devices using that much wealth would be first or second generation magic items. Multiple or even many iterations of wealth generation by lower level devices (say, a command operated Plant Growth item), and spells like Fabricate, Wall of Iron and the Creation spells would be needed first. But cities that manage to spend the wealth for something like a Cure Disease gateway would have a ready-made source of wealth as a pilgrimage point.

Also, bear in mind the medievals were able to build some very extensive structures by amortizing the construction costs over decades. 30,000 gold isn't as unattainable by a city when divided by say, 20 years.

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.

That all depends, can a Limited Wish allow someone to learn magic, how about a Wish? If either is true, especially with Limited Wish, you've got a source for more mages. Then add in the ability of Wish to give someone +5 to their stats. I'd guess that a powerful mage going from 18 INT to 23 INT is going to be fairly impressive, and that such an upgraded person could do considerable amounts at advancing both mundane and magical technology.

Depends on how you do Wish, and how you do magical talent. If magical talent is reasonably common and Wish is considered reasonably powerful, then yes, it can. Many campaigns basically say "well, it can do whatever any other spell can do, but no more", though, and so in that case the most it might be able to do is give you the ability to cast a small specific subset of spells, but not make you a full-fledged mage without some additional tricks.

If magical talent is very rare, no, you need the gods or something VERY powerful to give you that ability. I run "Wish" on a sliding scale from 1 through 20. A Wish 1 is the equivalent of an 18th level mage casting Wish; a Wish 20 is a direct pipeline to ask something of God Almighty (i.e., me, the GM). Wish 1 can duplicate the effects of lower level spells easily, other 9th level spells pretty reliably, and do combinations of several significantly lower level spells fairly reliably; so a Wish 1 could probably manage to create a weak-to-moderate power magical item, Teleport you anywhere, bring back a recently-dead comrade, or do significant damage to a castle that didn't have really powerful wards on it.

A Wish 20 could reshape galaxies, change the nature of the universe itself, make you Lord of the Cosmos, etc.

Random notes in response:

Oh yeah, immediate arms race between command spells and countermagics. Not to mention the old "scry-teleport-kill" tactic.

No Reformation...assuming that Commune spells don't give different answers for Protestants and Catholics (not to mention Other branches of the Abrahamic faiths). Of course even if it does give correct answers, then you get into the power of authority vs. critics.

The real question is how many people can be trained as Wizards (or Clerics, or Sorcerers, or Bards, etc.) There really doesn't seem to be any restriction on acquiring magic ability in D&D 3.X, and there'd be a huge demand for magic (even more than Latin). Also, one of the effects of D&D 3.X's not well-thought out magic item creation system is that you don't need a lot of mages creating things to have a huge effect on society. Use-activated items work every time you say the word, so 1 Altar of True Resurrection can bring back 14,400 people per day back from the dead. With no range limitation. And a standard Clay Golem wouldn't just protect the Ghetto of Moscow, it would render Ghengis Khan's invading army moot (unless he got a golem or two of his own).

The real bottleneck I think is the sheer expense of the outrageous magical devices. But magic would have a weird effect on the economy anyway by making expensive materials much more readily available so I'm not sure what would happen to equivalent prices.

A standard Clay Golem? It'd be defeated by any reasonable group of adventurers. Genghis Khan isn't going to have high-level characters in his horde?

If you make magic ubiquitous enough and allow no controls on it (i.e., your 14,000 resurrections and neither the souls nor the gods having anything to say about your doing the resurrection) then you will get something very strange.

I'd expect permanent teleport circles between all major cities within 20 years of magic becoming known. In a century, there would be ultrawealthy people with a house which consisted of separate rooms connected by permanent teleport circles - instead of a refrigerator, part of the pantry would be a room surrounded by an alpine glacier, and there would be several main living areas, one for each season of the year -a warm but not too hot Summer in the French room, a cozy Winter room in the southern portions of Italy or Spain... If magic became known and reliable around 1,200 CE, the world would be very strange and magical place by 1,400 CE, and I don't think anyone can predict what 2,010 would look like - I'm guessing that by 1,600 at the latest the entire planet would be a drastically post singularity society where immortals dwelled in floating cities and elementals and other summoned beings & constructs waited on their every need. I'd expect upgrading people, body switching and suchlike to come in eventually. Also, by no later than 1,300 the great age of planar exploration would start (if the planes existed). Even if other planes don't exist, good telescopes to sight enhancing magic + greater teleport = interplanetary travel.

Depending upon the various events and the quirks of history, 1,600 could look like anything from Star Trek to Eclipse Phase (with magic instead of tech), but it wouldn't look like either D&D or our world.

Edit: I also just remembered the 5th level Druid spell Awaken - permanently give any plant or animal human intelligence. I would presume that it would breed true if two Awakened animals mated. I'd imagine that this would have a significant affect on the world.

Edited 2010-11-09 09:08 (UTC)

Yep, the Time Of Emergence of magic is key to saying what happens next -- and whether anything we know today would exist at all.

Interplanetary? Interstellar. A single mage with adaption and a bag of holding could easily explore out to quite a few light years on his own; a corps of mages could easily reach the nearer galaxies. Trivial, really.

Assuming, of course, nothing STOPPED them.

Note though that many people here are looking at the positives. There'd also be increases in anti-teleport technology, interference in magical scrying, etc., the Gods would get involved, there'd be more powerful attacks and defenses, etc., etc.

On my world of Zarathan, for instance, there are SOME reliable teleport links... but the baddies don't always let them work. Sometimes they interfere, and interference can range from "ended up a mile off" to "disappeared to an unintended plane" to "grabbed by the bad guy and 'ported into a secure holding cell (which gets an Antimagic Shell on it as soon as you arrive".

The mage needs to put Adaption, Teleport, the Bag of Holding and a couple other spells into a single easy-to-access object. Like say, a ring. Yeah, blame yourself for making me think of the Green Mage Corps.

Yes, I and others have passed over the negatives. The most obvious would be a war of evolution between wards and scry-and-die techniques. And "Divert Teleport" seems like a reasonable middle-point.

But also the social effects would be incredible, and not just from huge amount of resources diverted to magic. What happens when you invert the entire economy, and instead of paying and taxing peasants for their crops, you make food for them and charge them? What will they do? What about when common Cure Disease items makes sure that most kids survive (Better work on those contraception cantrips and put those in magic items)

Finally, the politics of a 2010 Europe with D&D magic would undoubtedly be far less egalitarian. Feudalism likely wouldn't survive, but there would be a definite divide between "those with magic" and "those who have access to some magic". Enter the classic "Reign of the Wizard Kings scenario.

If you invert the economy you end up with starving broke peasants, or peasants just growing their own food and not buying yours. YOU may be eating Heroes' Feast every day, they're still doing the same old thing because they can't afford your fancy-schmancy magic food.

A Green Lantern ring is something like a Ring of Infinite Wishes with some minor limitations, really. It's way more powerful than anything you'll find in the DMG.

I'm sorry to be picky, but I had to read it twice before I understood what you were saying... so:

"Altar" not "Alter" please. The first is a table of worship, the second is a verb meaning "modify".

Aaaah! *headdesk*

Sorry, I totally missed that. I'll change it right away.

This is trivially obvious. And yet I have had people -- otherwise quite sensible, intelligent people -- seriously argue that if D&D magic worked it would NOT have changed the middle ages appreciably -- because people already believed it worked, and therefore they'd still behave the same.

If you assume magic worked all along, nothing we know in history would be the same.

Basically, at whatever point you assume useful, reliable magic enters the world, at that point the world is changed.

Exactly HOW it's changed is determined by what you allow magic to do and what limitations -- tactical, strategic, etc. -- it has.

Assuming magic to be both useful and reliable, what distinguishes it from technology? Both end up being 'perform these actions in this way, get this result'. This might sound snarky, but it is not meant to be. Dang text interface.

edit: technology is not science

Edited 2010-11-09 17:01 (UTC)

Depends on whose universe you're talking about.

In mine, there's several points that distinguish it from what WE generally call technology:

1) You can't teach it to everyone. Or rather, you can teach and teach all you like, but if you haven't got the talent, you won't get past the most basic of magical effects. Technology, you can teach to anyone with the intellect to build/use it, and that's a pretty basic thing.

2) It's limited to living beings to perform. This means you CANNOT DO MASS PRODUCTION except with some very peculiar and limited approaches. While you can in fact go out and buy a Wand of Cleaning Cantrips for your house use, and get it recharged every few months, you can't crank out Flying Cars for All; each car needs either a single wizard of very high power to spend months and months working on, or a bunch of middle-power wizards doing gruntwork with high-power wizard coming in to lock things down.

3) It's very personal. A wizard develops his power throughout his life, putting his own "stamp" on it. Moreover, unlike technology, a SINGLE wizard can in a reasonable lifetime go through the ENTIRE progression of magic, from the very weakest spells to ones that can shake the fabric of reality itself. A single human being CANNOT go through that progression; he cannot start with chipping flint and go to building jet aircraft by himself. He can't carry the gadgetry, the manufacturing and mining plants, etc., that would be needed, and doing anything at the higher ranges of technology (that we know) takes a LOT of time. He also cannot BYPASS certain things to get to what he wants; you can't decide to ignore learning that boring metallurgy and chemistry and construction stuff and go straight to making portable .50 caliber machine guns, because you need to KNOW that stuff to build a .50 cal. A wizard, by contrast, can choose not to bother with spells to make materials and build things and go straight to shooting fireballs.

4) Magic is not generally transferrable. While a magician CAN make items others can use, that's a specialized act, a difficult one, and for any reasonably powerful item one that costs the wizard some of his own power for a while. Technology is infinitely transferrable. Anyone can use any gadget as long as they don't lack the physical capabilities.

5) Magic is subject to belief. A gun doesn't CARE if you believe in it; there's no protection for you in that. Disbelief can damage a spell, focused will can blunt or unravel one directed at you.

There are some other differences, but in my universe these are probably the most important.

That's one reason I picked D&D (Specifically 3.X/Pathfinder) magic, because it is essentially a very powerful technology. It's also a perfect example of the writers of a game not looking at the logical results of their magic rules, in the form of the item creation rules.

AD&D magic is still a technology, but the difficulty of making magic items reduces the effects greatly. D&D 4E magic...well 4E has an overactive law of thermodynamics, making mass magic item creation impractical.

To really suss out the effects, you have to first decide where and how it develops. That will determine how the knowledge and power is distributed, controlled, and directed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

When the real world and D&D magic collide.

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