What 3.5 Spells Can Be Reproduced With Science?

[CGDG]

I'm not sure if I should post this here or Mad Science, but I'm curious and looking for answers. If you had all the academia and technological and scientific understanding available to you from the modern era but were left with only materials, tools and technology available in medieval/early-renaissance Europe, what spells would you/could you reproduce?

Edit: Extra points for detailed instructions.

[Pilo]

Fabricate : you can craft it manually but it will take some time.
Burning hand : Alcohol spitted form mouth + burning torch
Atonement : Brainwashing, psychology + drugs
Blindness/deafness : burn phosphore + drop sodium crystal in water.
Feeblemind : Lobotomy

[Cruiser1]

Alter Self: Plastic surgery
Know Direction: Compass
Legend Lore: Google search
Minor Creation: 3D printer
Purify Food and Drink: Water filter
Reincarnate: Just wait a number of years
Silent Image: Holographic projector
Touch of Fatigue: NyQuil cold remedy
Zone of Truth: Lie detector

[Dolour]

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

i couldnt really think of anything that wouldnt be reproducable with the proper tools at hand...
prolly not with the tech currently available, but the technocrats will get there. ;o

[Chronos]

Contrapositive of Clarke's Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

[CGDG]

Fabricate : you can craft it manually but it will take some time.
Burning hand : flame thrower
Alarm, partial : move detector/laser + speaker
Atonement : Brainwashing, psychology + drugs
Blindness/deafness : Flashbang grenade
Feeblemind : Lobotomy
Clairaudience/Clairvoyance : Microphones and cameras


Alter Self: Plastic surgery
Know Direction: Compass
Legend Lore: Google search
Minor Creation: 3D printer
Purify Food and Drink: Water filter
Reincarnate: Just wait a number of years
Silent Image: Holographic projector
Touch of Fatigue: NyQuil cold remedy
Zone of Truth: Lie detector

All true. What I was asking for, more specifically, though, were things you could create using only technology available at that period.


but were left with only materials, tools and technology available in medieval/early-renaissance Europe, what spells would you/could you reproduce?

[Snowbluff]

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.



Contrapositive of Clarke's Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

Any civilization for which this is true is not advanced enough to have a way of distinguishing between the two.

[Ephemeral_Being]

Well, I can replicate Daze with a truncheon. Light with a torch. Open/Close by, well, opening and closing things. And Arcane Mark with a paintbrush.

Beyond that, you can clone Grease with actual grease. Comprehend Languages by going to a University. Disguise Self with a decent troubadour's kit. And Ventriloquism by learning to do it.

What, exactly, is your goal here? Cause what separates magic from "I can do it with physics" is that you don't need a vat of turkey grease in the middle of the dungeon in order to make enemies slip and fall. You just snap your fingers, and voila. The goblins come tumbling down.

[Crake]

Fog cloud: Smoke Grenade
Glitterdust: not sure, but i've always thought it would be somewhat replicable

[NecessaryWeevil]

Glitterdust: not sure, but i've always thought it would be somewhat replicable

A sack of flour mixed with bits of metal foil, perhaps.

[Curmudgeon]

Heat Metal, with a maser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser).


A sack of flour mixed with bits of metal foil, perhaps.
How is that going to be bright enough to blind someone? You might be able to imitate Glitterdust with a whole bunch of small battery-powered LEDs and some clear sticky substance, though getting them to cover an area evenly would be a challenge.

[JohnDaBarr]

Fireball = RPGL
Disintegrate = Plasma cannon
Shield = Shield Generator
Death Cloud = Nerve Agent
Firestorm = Willy Pete
Gate = Wormhole
Haste/almost any buff = Combat Stims
Teleport = Teleport
Summon Monster = Teleport
Power word kill = .44 Remington Magnum

[Tarlek Flamehai]

Half of you are missing the point of the OP. Take Bill Nye, MacGuyver, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Edison, Nicholai Tesla, David Copperfield, Chris Angel, and Harry Houdini distill all of their knowledge, skill and talent into one person. Transport that person through time to early Renaissance Europe without any modern equipment. What 3.5 spells could they reproduce?

[JohnDaBarr]

Half of you are missing the point of the OP. Take Bill Nye, MacGuyver, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Edison, Nicholai Tesla, David Copperfield, Chris Angel, and Harry Houdini distill all of their knowledge, skill and talent into one person. Transport that person through time to early Renaissance Europe without any modern equipment. What 3.5 spells could they reproduce?

On a long enough time table pretty much everything especially if you start mixing tech with magic, but in a limited time (read one human lifetime) any genius won't do much because the existence of any form of advance technology requires an entire social and economical structure and without it almost all things we today take for granted become impossible to create.

[Pilo]

Half of you are missing the point of the OP. Take Bill Nye, MacGuyver, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Edison, Nicholai Tesla, David Copperfield, Chris Angel, and Harry Houdini distill all of their knowledge, skill and talent into one person. Transport that person through time to early Renaissance Europe without any modern equipment. What 3.5 spells could they reproduce?

None, that heretic would burn in no time.

[shaikujin]

Black/Smoke/Flash powder (or at least the components) should be available during the middle ages right?

Fireball could be Grenades (blackpowder stuffed into a metal can with a fuse)

Magic Missile could be Automatic pistol (make modern bullets by filling shells with black powder, sliding bolt to re-****, magazine clip to feed bullets, rifleling)

Light = Copper/Zinc or lead acid battery with tungsten wire

Assuming batteries can be made, then all manner of electricity, then weak lightning based spells would be possible.

Such as Shocking Grasp by hooking up battery to a gauntlet (with proper inner lining of insulation of course)

Resurrection = CPR + AED using several batteries in parrallel

For mass electricity supply that do not need to be mobile, water mill hooked up to coils of copper wire and magnets

Steed = Bicycle or electric powered motor bikes

Grease = Water pistol/super soaker that pumps out grease/oil

Cloudkill/burning hands = wide spray of kerosene (or order flamable distilled alchohol) using water pistol and a lighter

Lighter = flint and steel shaped into a small wheel like modern zippo lighters

Animate object = battery or steam powered locomotive

Hook a pump/compressor setup to a watermill and store compressed air into thick metal tanks. Robust enough to make liquid nitrogen. From there

Tiny Hut = Air-conditioning via compressor and radiator fins

Gentle Repost = Refrigeration with compressed air + water mill powered compressor

Cold spells = Liquid Nitrogen

Purify Water = Distillation

Not all would work out, but they'll be among some of the things to try.

Hmm...actually, if kerosene is available, would that mean crude oil and a distillation process is also available? If not, we know that tar and pitch were available in the middle ages, that would mean oil wells. With the knowledge of modern distillation process, that would open up access to various petrochemical products. Including petrol, diesel, synthetic rubber, nylon, kevlar etc.

[NecessaryWeevil]

Technically an AED can't do anything for a dead (i.e. flatlined) person, but I can imagine situations in which someone with an irregular heart rhythm (which AEDs can correct) might appear to be dead.

[dascarletm]

Launch Bolt: Crossbow
Launch Item: Having an arm like a major league pitcher
Stick: Horses...
Amaneusis: Scribes

[Zirconia]

Assuming batteries can be made, then all manner of electricity, then weak lightning based spells would be possible.

Hook a pump/compressor setup to a watermill and store compressed air into thick metal tanks. Robust enough to make liquid nitrogen. From there


Battery technology wise, picture something the size of a car battery, but not well sealed so likely to leak if you tip it, and with about the voltage and power storage of a modern D cell. If you can do electrical attacks with that, without having a room full of them, I'm impressed. Any kind of modern "electrical attack", like a taser, uses capacitors which would be the size of a desk with renaissance technology.

And as far as building pumps, the first steam engines, well past the Renaissance, relied on having pistons fit cylinders with about the clearance of a coin's width. You aren't compressing air with that. Before that the fits were even worse. There were a lot of people who had the idea of Mass Production before Ford, but the machine tools and such you could get were crude enough they still needed skilled craftspeople to file down parts till they all matched, even as late as the U.S. Civil War. Pretty much stick to what you can do with a bellows, unless you are willing to start an Industrial Revolution (for that, see the Cross Time Engineer series).

I would say Burning Hands (flammable liquids + bellows), Fog Cloud (various things to make smoke), Grease (oil + bellows), Fireball (black powder was early, probably more of a fragmentation grenade), if you get good with fireworks maybe something like Glitterdust with burning embers, Light (carbide lamp), Pyrotechnics (fireworks again), Explosive Runes if you can get enough chemical synthesis going for one of the several touch-sensitive explosives, such as impure TNT, Cloudkill if you can synthesize chlorine gas, Fireburst (note - not safe for user! :) ). That is all I see offhand from looking through a batch of useful spells I'm looking at for my wizard, at least up to 5th level. I'm not counting something like Levitate using pulleys, since they already knew how to lift things with pulleys back then.