When the real world and D&D magic collide.

[roseembolism]

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?

Comments

[mithriltabby]

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.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

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.

[seawasp]

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.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

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.

[seawasp]

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.