How do rulers and governments use D&D magic in your campaigns?

[Dr TPK]

These "city" threads gave me an inspiration...

Kingdoms and nations have many (?) freely roaming spellcasters, both high and low level, but how does an organized government use magic? They have taxes, which I assume is a modest sum compared to the gains made by adventuring, and they want to have a good quality/price ratio, since kingdoms should be able to optimize financing over the centuries.

My takes on the issue:
- Every self-respecting ruler should start their week with a handful of divinations. "How should I rule my kingdom this week?", "Are there important opportunities this week?" etc. An important meetings should always start with a half an hour session (sharp!) because of the augury's limitation. All in all, all meetings should have small breaks every 30 minutes so that the clerics can cast new auguries.
- The most powerful good and lawful clerics should be loaded with spells to save the nation at a moment's notice. Why prepare Raise Dead, ever, if you need to have at least true seeing and plane shift ready every day if the epic monsters of Far Realm invade the country? All powerful NPC clerics that love their country should devote spells solely to be magical minutemen.
- Important NPCs and identity theft: All important leaders should use a hat of disguise to look like some dead person and also use that person's name. Everyone who knows the real identities of the leaders should either disappear and be safely guarded. Scrying attemps should be directed to a dead person, since the scryer only knows the dead person's name and face. Scryers should never get a hold of the possession or hairs of important leaders.

[Geddy2112]

Nondetection is going to be on anybody who can afford the services of(or is) a 3rd level arcane caster, or at least undetectable alignment from a 2nd level divine caster. If the person has access to high level magic, it will be an all out mind blank. This is a requirement for evil/people with things to hide.

Augurs and other divinations like commune would be used, but the results are only guides and cannot simply reveal the entire future.

Most higher ups would have glamered armor and possibly weapons, protection buffs and spells if they are expecting trouble.

[jiriku]

Divination-augmented decision-making is a great choice. In fantasy literature, that's the traditional role of the court wizard -- someone to advise the king from a perspective informed by magical expertise. Keep in mind, though, that the ruler may not always trust the words of the diviner. Some divinations aren't 100% accurate, and there's always the risk that the wizard/cleric might be lying or revealing the truth selectively in order to manipulate the ruler. Even Lawful Good people can disagree about how to run a nation, and politics is a complicated affair.
I'm not sure that augury would be useful in the manner you describe. Because it can't predict the future more than 30 minutes in advance, it could only give advice about how to conduct the meeting -- not on what decisions to make during the meeting.
Disguising the identity of leaders is an excellent tactic, although not without danger. In the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lords of Waterdeep used magical and mundane disguises to render themselves completely anonymous, and use further magic to protect themselves from divination. However, this kind of anonymity is a two-edged sword: completely anonymous leaders can easily be replaced by an imposter, since no one knows the leader's true identity.
Regularly scrying people who are regarded as threats to the kingdom is a viable tactic. Likewise, it would be useful to maintain a list of suspicious characters whom you know are, themselves, protected from divinations. If you run across a plot or threat that resists divination, that list will provide you with a set of "usual suspects" to investigate.
A well-organized kingdom should have a magical "ready-reaction" team available to deal with unexpected, powerful threats. In most environments, this would probably be a set of designated "king's champions", or perhaps a powerful adventuring party that has accepted sponsorship from the state. With spells like sending and teleport available, a good rapid-response communications network can access that team and give them the location of the threat very quickly, allowing them to teleport in from wherever they happen to be.

[Nibbens]

The campaign I'm running features a city (high level campaign), so magic has a really wild effect on the way things are run there.

Golems: Unliving constructs are an ethical addition to supplement police force and military. For every 2 standing police officer there is a golem to help them enforce law. Standing army is a little different - constructs serve as unit transports, fire support and high priority target assassination. My PCs have literally designed over 10 separate golems for these tasks. Within the city, golems are used as a mail service and a taxi service.

Court: Lie prevention, and downright dominate person spells are used to prevent falsehoods. Amulets of thought detection on all judges.

See invisibility wands/scrolls comes in handy for guards.

The standard divinations Commune, etc etc for daily consultation.

Forbiddance is an amazing spell for locking down entire sections of the city, and Teleport trap straight into jailcells or other horrible devices for would be assassins.

Stone shape has endless possibilities in a city, as well as mud to stone, stone to mud, move earth, rampart, wall of stone. Talk about quick fast and cheap construction services! (or during a war, a neverending wall that no one can break down and in mere seconds it's back up again.

Unseen servant is an amazing helper for handymen. "Wrench!" lol. - and he's much cheaper than paying for workers for anyone with one level in sorcerer. Mending and Make whole are commonplace in a city with so many golems, and also really do a myriad of wonders for a city that relies on things working well.

Morturary services are amazing - speak with dead offers much advice in investigation - detect evil, magic, good, and poison for a myriad of questions that could pop up during investigations. Gentle repose - of course - to control decay while examining. Every dead body has Gentle Repose cast on it (free of charge) to see if the family wants to raise dead or resurrect or reincarnate on the deceased individual.

There's a spell (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateMagic/spells/polypurposePanacea.html) which can get you high, drunk, keep you awake for additional time and take away pain, OR make you sober and clear headed... Of course this is the most amazing nightlife spell - and considerably cheaper than drugs without the added complication of addiction.

Someone once mentioned a create food a water "trap" with an automatic reset... I'd never allow such a thing in my games, but someone might. lol.

Nondetection and mindblank for officials. Arcane Sight permanancied on spellcasters.

No one ever enters the sewers without casting arcane eye to locate and identify the problem. Police never go blind into a situation if they can't help it either - using Arcane Eye to scout out something before the approach. Arcane eye also allows for searching out an enemies military as they approach, and allows the underground digging golems to explode directly underneath the enemy commanders... yeah, moving mines that only hit leaders... Leave it to my players to create such a thing. lol.

There's a sanitarium for the insane - the above ground levels are for the people without magic abilities - the belowground levels are walled with permanent antimagic fields to safely house the more violent spellcasting residents of the mental institution.

Brothels often have deals with the local clergy - remove disease is cast at a discounted rate... or there may be a conspiracy of infect and cure shenanigans as a cash cow for both the brothel and the clergy.. but that's none of my business.

More to come... I'm hitting my books now. lol.

[jiriku]

Court: Lie prevention, and downright dominate person spells are used to prevent falsehoods.
Morturary services are amazing - speak with dead offers much advice in investigation - detect evil, magic, good, and poison for a myriad of questions that could pop up during investigations. Gentle repose - of course - to control decay while examining.

I love these ideas. With magical assistance, crime-solving could be made extremely accurate, which would greatly improve the justice system -- you'd really have to have a very specific set of skills to be able to commit a crime and not get caught, which means that for most crimes, the justice system would be very good at correctly finding and convicting the correct person. Such a system might have a dark side, though -- when it's that successful, people might have such faith in the system that when someone comes along who does have the skillset to defeat the system, they could do almost anything and get away with it since the system would "prove" that they were innocent.

[Nibbens]

I love these ideas. With magical assistance, crime-solving could be made extremely accurate, which would greatly improve the justice system -- you'd really have to have a very specific set of skills to be able to commit a crime and not get caught, which means that for most crimes, the justice system would be very good at correctly finding and convicting the correct person. Such a system might have a dark side, though -- when it's that successful, people might have such faith in the system that when someone comes along who does have the skillset to defeat the system, they could do almost anything and get away with it since the system would "prove" that they were innocent.

Thus the premise of Psycho-pass. Great anime, if you're into that kinda thing. lol. I can't wait for the second season! lol.

[Dr TPK]

A well-organized kingdom should have a magical "ready-reaction" team available to deal with unexpected, powerful threats. In most environments, this would probably be a set of designated "king's champions", or perhaps a powerful adventuring party that has accepted sponsorship from the state. With spells like sending and teleport available, a good rapid-response communications network can access that team and give them the location of the threat very quickly, allowing them to teleport in from wherever they happen to be.


In my point of view, lawful and/or good clerics tend to be organized. They have churches, masses and worshippers. This all is pretty much connected to the local ruler or government and ensuring a seamless cooperation, all smart governments want that the high-level clerics are the keys to saving the world 24/7. Wizards and sorcerers are more independent than cleric. At least they don't have churches, but the wizard schools have something of the sort going on. Thus the high priests and arcane school headmasters are the official rapid response team of any kingdom that has survived more than a hundred years.

[jiriku]

That makes a lot of sense. When you head an organization that has deep roots in the culture and history of the nation, you're invested in that organization and that nation. You've got a very strong incentive to defend the nation, even risking your life. I wouldn't neglect, though, to make sure that the team is more well-rounded than just clerics. Especially if you think the PCs might fight this team, it's important that it should have a broad spectrum of capabilities. I'll agree, though, that clerics are hands-down the best at divination under most circumstances. They are information-gathering powerhouses.

[Nibbens]

That makes a lot of sense. When you head an organization that has deep roots in the culture and history of the nation, you're invested in that organization and that nation. You've got a very strong incentive to defend the nation, even risking your life. I wouldn't neglect, though, to make sure that the team is more well-rounded than just clerics. Especially if you think the PCs might fight this team, it's important that it should have a broad spectrum of capabilities. I'll agree, though, that clerics are hands-down the best at divination under most circumstances. They are information-gathering powerhouses.

Ah, Don't forget that Legend Lore /Vision are not in the standard Divine Repertoire. Wizards can still be a piece of that puzzle.

As soon as a High level PC hears the name of the BBEG always expect to have Legend Lore cast with that name in mind. LOL.

Edit: Well, Bards get it at 7th level - so most likely even sooner than "high level" lol.

[HolyCouncilMagi]

In a world like the D&D rules tend to engender, any government with an eye towards self-preservation will want to keep a number of its high-ranking officials on good terms with strong, active teams of individuals. With the way people in D&D get stronger, adventurers who make it out of the lower levels will quite simply end up being hundreds of times stronger than you're able to train somebody to be... And you can't subject your own army to adventuring conditions to get them to that level, unless you're prepared to have 95% of them slaughtered and render the remainder no longer effectively controllable. In other words, friendly but independent adventuring parties will be carefully-treated assets.

Other than that, everybody else has pretty much said the important city-running stuff.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

Depends on the campaign, really.

[Xervous]

A detailed description of lawful neutral society

Gotta love big brother, he's always there... to give you a hug

[Hrugner]

Honestly, every time I include magic in the day to day workings of a society, the whole thing falls apart. Since that tends to be what happens, I usually just hand wave away the influence of magic or make it extremely rare or it's use persecuted.

Using caster skulls in place of expensive casting reagents helps drive them underground considerably.

[Yukitsu]

Depends on the setting. In one campaign world, the government was a relatively modest in magic theocracy where it was mostly using magic to help provide services to the public (healing, food for the poor, clean water, eliminating plagues) To a lesser degree, it also trained holy warriors to help them fight against demons or other evil things.

In another setting, it was an incredibly high magic confederation.

The government had enough magic that it spent a ton in magic research trying to find new spells.

Magic casting was mandatory in schools, everyone had to be capable of at least level 2 spells to graduate from basic school. (mostly feat retraining to get precocious apprentice)

Taxation was contribution to the government's spell pool. They give high tax payers a cash tax return and use the spell pool to power large scale government projects and programs.

They use a sort of pre-crime system where they determine where their cops need to be deployed and the direction they should be looking in. Possibly whether or not they require see invisibility at the time or not. It's a strong deterrent system, if you're trying to commit a crime, but any time you're about to there's a cop looking right at you, most of the time the cop won't have to make an arrest.

And most important, diviner forecasts and magic based fertilizers are used to boost agriculture. Rather than simply using create food and water, which creates rather gross food, the government subsidizes an improvement in crop quality and yields giving them an absolute advantage in international food markets, even though only a small percent of their population has to work in agriculture.

There's also state run "pre-news" for people who want to know what's going to be in there day for them.

[SangoProduction]

Depends on the setting. In one campaign world, the government was a relatively modest in magic theocracy where it was mostly using magic to help provide services to the public (healing, food for the poor, clean water, eliminating plagues) To a lesser degree, it also trained holy warriors to help them fight against demons or other evil things.

In another setting, it was an incredibly high magic confederation.

The government had enough magic that it spent a ton in magic research trying to find new spells.

Magic casting was mandatory in schools, everyone had to be capable of at least level 2 spells to graduate from basic school. (mostly feat retraining to get precocious apprentice)

Taxation was contribution to the government's spell pool. They give high tax payers a cash tax return and use the spell pool to power large scale government projects and programs.

They use a sort of pre-crime system where they determine where their cops need to be deployed and the direction they should be looking in. Possibly whether or not they require see invisibility at the time or not. It's a strong deterrent system, if you're trying to commit a crime, but any time you're about to there's a cop looking right at you, most of the time the cop won't have to make an arrest.

And most important, diviner forecasts and magic based fertilizers are used to boost agriculture. Rather than simply using create food and water, which creates rather gross food, the government subsidizes an improvement in crop quality and yields giving them an absolute advantage in international food markets, even though only a small percent of their population has to work in agriculture.

There's also state run "pre-news" for people who want to know what's going to be in there day for them.

That sounds pretty damned cool, actually.

[Nifft]

In the "good" kingdom...

* Druids ran the Roads and Fields Department. It was a compromise with the Kingdom: the Druids make sure the crops grow well and the roads are in good condition, and the King enforces an acceptable environmental policy for the lands which aren't cities or roads or fields.

* Rich people had sentries with items of see invisibility (etc.). Poor people were not so lucky. There weren't many police or investigators, as such, but if you were rich, you could ask for a Temple Trial and the Clerics would use divination to figure out who owes what to whom.

* One of the three major magical aristocrat families ran a magic item auction house -- Southebys for loot, basically. Another major family had a monopoly on some key magic item ingredients, and had obfuscated item production formulae to preserve their monopoly (e.g.: instead of "eye of newt", you'd see "three pinches of Blue Powder #7").

[jedipilot24]

These "city" threads gave me an inspiration...

Kingdoms and nations have many (?) freely roaming spellcasters, both high and low level, but how does an organized government use magic? They have taxes, which I assume is a modest sum compared to the gains made by adventuring, and they want to have a good quality/price ratio, since kingdoms should be able to optimize financing over the centuries.

I can't believe that no one has yet mentioned Frank Trollman's tome (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=36046).

His take on this is that the D&D world is set in the Iron Age and that it's not the government that controls adventurers but rather its the adventurers who control the government. People who can stop time and kill dragons aren't going to listen to a king with levels in Aristocrat. The only purpose the Aristocrats have is to look pretty, marry adventurers and have their kids and manage all the boring stuff that the adventurers don't want to be bothered with. And the only reason the aristocrats survive is because they are related and/or married to people who can slay dragons.
And people are actually quite content with this system, because in a world where dragons and giants are real, everyday threats, you WANT your rulers to be the people badass enough to handle those threats. IRL the feudal system only worked because the landed nobles were the only people with the money for armor, weapons and soldiers; it fell apart with the rise of the middle class. But in a D&D world the people with the most money are...the high-level adventurers, especially the high-level wizards who have access to all the world-breaking spells that allow them to create wish farms and such.

[Sacrieur]

Why wouldn't they?

[Scheming Wizard]

I think the classic approach works best. You have the king who is usually an aristocrat/fighter or aristocrat/barbarian (in those violent northern kingdoms). He leads the military and runs the kingdom. But then he has an adviser who is a high enough level wizard. He takes care of magical attacks on the king and magical spies trying to infiltrate the kingdom.

It's the King Arthur and Merlin combo and it works pretty well.

You can play with the combo some as well. Maybe the King is pretty worthless and plays his lute all day. He is a low level bard while his adviser is a high level sorcerer and is the real leader of the kingdom. Kind of the Jafar situation.

Alternatively take the former situation and the king isn't very competent but he is charismatic and the people love him. The Sorcerer isn't very popular or charismatic, but he is smart and knows how to run things so they have a good duo going.

You can also invert the relationship and have a spellcaster just be the ruler. Then maybe he has a general on hand who is a powerful fighter or blackguard (for an evil ruler) who handles the mundane fighting.

[noob]

Mind control, dominate person, mind rape, hypnotize, dominate undead, create undead, create simulacrum for more dominate person, kill people immune to control, dominate monsters on non humanoids, mirror of opposition clone your mages and dominate them for even more dominate person and undead.
This is what you need for the ultimate tyranny.

[MukkTB]

(1) Low magic places have mundane kings. Some of them even hate magic and magic users.

(2) Moderately magical places have an adviser or courtier who is a caster. Strictly speaking, the magic user could wrestle control away from the mundanes, but the magic users are weak enough that the struggle may not be worth their time or good for their health. Many good stories actually come from the times that these weak casters make a power play. The mortal authorities respect casters and tend to have a live and let live philosophy, mostly because doing it any other way ends badly. Occasionally there is a power structure such as a church or university, subject to light government control, containing the recognized casters of the area. Not too infrequently, the ruling family marries into a casting bloodline, or comes to power through mostly mundane means, but with the aid of their magic. Having magic in the royal bloodline is not uncommon.

(3) In most places where magic is well understood, casters rule. You end up with a underclass of mundanes and a privileged caste of casters. You may have oligarchy, theocracy, or even democracy among the casters. The ruler, president, or high priest will be among the more powerful casters, but he will be a politician first. He will hold power internally through politics. The strength of the national defense will rest on the might of the caster class as a whole.

(4) On rare occasion an exceptionally high level caster will find himself unopposed in an area. He will set up a dictatorship.

When it comes to war (1) is at a disadvantage against everything else and (1) will not last long when it comes into direct opposition against anything other than (2). (2) is weaker than (3) and will lose without extraordinary circumstances. (2) and (4) may be evenly matched in the way that a BBEG is matched against a party of adventurers. (4) is a weaker state than (3) because (3) has many competent competent individuals whose combined strength is much greater than one person could ever be.

I like playing games in (1) and (2) because those situations are closest to many of the stories that exist in the fantasy genre. (4) being a great villain such as Sauron. However the evolutionary stable strategy is either (3), or an apocalyptic wasteland as a result of type (3) kingdoms using weapons of mass destruction on one another. Who wants to spend some more time arguing over the viability of locate city bomb?

[Telok]

I had one game where the government of one kingdom had cut a deal with a LN/LG religion to make it the state religion in exchange for magical support. As a bonus any divine caster of that religion could land a pretty cushy job casting spells for the government. If they went into the military they could be promoted into the landed nobility. They also cut a deal with some arcane casters, essentially making them minor nobility in exchange for running magic schools and being part of the government.
The general rule of thumb was that every fourth government official was a primary caster (any casting class that gets 9th level spells), every other noble was a caster (half of them were primary casters), and every third officer in the military was a primary caster (spells = officer).
The government also ran the forges for warforged production. They were used as military and paramilitary troops, indoctrinated from birth and with a steel plate attached to their chest with a serial number and three Marks of Justice under it. The Marks were just ordinary loyalty and obedience enforcement but if they went off they broke the plate and almost always turned the warforged into an insane rampaging terror. So there was zero support or help for rogue warforged. It was intentional that the Marks were put on before the warforged gained consiousness for the first time and almost nobody knew about them except the people running the forges. They were treated pertty decently in the military anyways, mostly like expensive war animals that could talk.
After about a century everyone who wasn't a vassal state had been conquered.

One of their big innovations was (semi)mass production of twice a day Scrying magic items. Every military fort and many major government establishments had a room with at least one scrying item, a unique black and white geometric pattern built into one wall, a big chalkboard for outgoing messages, and a book of the patterns for other communication centers. At least once a day each official comm center scryed it's two (minimum) assigned sister centers and copied down all the outgoing messages on their chalkboards. Every single center had at least two other centers scrying it, infromation could get from any part of the empire to any other part in less than three days at most.

[AzraelX]

Thus the premise of Psycho-pass. Great anime, if you're into that kinda thing. lol. I can't wait for the second season! lol.
Oh wow, that fits perfectly. Awesome reference. Now I'm imagining a fantasy D&D society governed by a magic Sibyl System.

I feel I should tell you that they must have snuck the second season past you. Psycho-Pass 2 finished airing in December (and it was great).

For anyone interested, this is the first ~2 minutes of the first episode of the first season:
https://youtu.be/clGclukDOiw

I'm not sure I've seen a series that started off better than that.

If you're not planning on watching the series, then the way it applies to this thread is...

Every public area has brain scanners which allow the Sibyl System to monitor everyone constantly. These scans result in everyone having their own "psycho-pass", which is a concise visual summary of your mental state. Ideally, your psycho-pass is light-colored ("clear"). If you becomes stressed or otherwise mentally unwell, your psycho-pass will turn progressively darker shades of color ("clouded").

If your psycho-pass becomes too clouded, it will turn black. This signifies serious mental instability, and it results in the Public Safety Bureau coming for you. The Sibyl System uses brain scans to determine your "crime coefficient": this number determines how likely you are to commit a crime. A crime coefficient under 100 is the norm, and a crime coefficient of 100+ makes you a "latent criminal". More specifically, a crime coefficient from 100 to 299 means you'll be imprisoned (most likely for the rest of your life) to ensure the safety of the public, and a crime coefficient of 300+ earns you a summary execution for being too much of a risk to society.

As you might have noticed in the opening of the first episode (linked above), there's a man with a gun and someone's trying to kill him with a saw blade. At one point, he aims the gun at the attacker, but instead of shooting he merely curses to himself. This is because, as an Enforcer from the Public Safety Bureau, his gun (called a Dominator) is linked directly to the Sibyl System. Since the Sibyl System is perfect, the Dominator's safety automatically turns on whenever the gun is aimed at someone with a crime coefficient under 100. The gun becomes inoperable.

Naturally, the guy trying to cut the Enforcer's head off has a pretty high crime coefficient, but the Dominator is locked because the attacker has managed to beat the system somehow (really can't spoil this since it's such an integral part of the season). Since the target's crime coefficient is showing up much lower than it should be, the Dominator won't let the Enforcer fire at him. Obviously something happened during the fight which nullifies the attacker's trick, since the Dominator finally unlocks and lets the Enforcer deliver a summary execution to the criminal.

It should be noted that the Dominator also has a stun setting, which is only used on latent criminals that have a crime coefficient between 100 and 299. The member of the Public Safety Bureau operating the Dominator (it only works for them) cannot choose which mode to fire in; the state of off/stun/kill is automatically determined by the Sibyl System, based on the crime coefficient of the target.

The thing is: the Sibyl System is so flawless (in theory), and has kept the public at large safe for so long, that it's not just the Dominators which see the Sibyl System's judgment as definitive truth. Every aspect of society is built around the fact that your psycho-pass is always a perfect representation of your mental state.

For example, restricted "high-security" areas are usually completely unguarded, unlocked, and require no authentication whatsoever; they just have automatic doors, hooked up to a brain scanner. If you don't have authorization to be there, then planning to enter would make you a latent criminal, and your psycho-pass would be clouded. Thus, if your psycho-pass is still clear while you're approaching the entrance, then you must have the authorization to enter. When the scanner sees you're someone with a clear psycho-pass, the doors open for you automatically.
It's easy to imagine that a magic-based Sibyl System could be implemented in D&D. It'd need to involve mind-reading "scanners" of some kind; in Pathfinder, these government-created items could be made with Seek Thoughts (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/s/seek-thoughts) (with a question like "are you going to commit any crimes?" or "do you pose any danger to society?"). I'm sure any d20 game which includes Detect Thoughts would allow you to research a very similar spell to this (or let you just use Detect Thoughts in the crafting process).

You could also include Telepathic Bond (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/telepathic-bond) and Permanency (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/permanency) in the crafting process, to allow the scanners and the magic Sibyl System to communicate instantly.

As for the Sibyl System itself, that would be the greatest part of this magical engineering feat: it needs to be capable of receiving the thought data from the massive number of scanners simultaneously, then interpreting it to determine who is a threat to society (and how much of a threat they pose), and then supplying this information to law enforcement (who could be largely automated as well; the Public Safety Bureau has automated drones which detain most latent criminals). It would necessarily need to be impossible to tamper with its judging ability, and it should also be difficult to locate, move, or damage. Needless to say, it'd require a lot of magic.

For the Dominators, you could use the same spells as before (Seek Thoughts, Telepathic Bond, and Permanency) for the scanning portion of their functionality. You could then use Power Word Stun (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/power-word-stun) and Power Word Kill (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/power-word-kill) for the stun/kill effects, respectively. It would also need to verify that an authorized person is using it, and only operate under that condition; this could be achieved by adding Discern Location (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/discern-location), as well as True Seeing (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/true-seeing) for an extra security check.

Given the nature of D&D magic, you'd probably want to add something like Analyze Dweomer (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/a/analyze-dweomer) too. That way the Dominator could tell if you're ever under the control of a mind-affecting enchantment (in which case, it'd immediately deny you access).

All the spells linked are from Pathfinder, but D&D and any similar game should have close-enough equivalents for all of them (or alternatively, they could be researched).

I could definitely see creating a whole D&D setting based on this, with its fantasy society being governed firmly by a singular perfectly-consistent entity that would know someone's planning to rebel as soon as they consider it. I think aside from the custom setting, all the normal mechanics and rules would otherwise remain intact. It'd simply be a much more well-ordered society than most places you start in.

[Dr TPK]

Why wouldn't they?

Yes, but in what way? How do they incorporate magic in their rule?

[Yahzi]

Frank Trollman is great, and everybody should read his stuff, but most of us want to play in a faux-feudal world. That means being King means something.

I am working on this a lot and will release an updated version of my World of Prime guide soon, but a few quick details:

Zone of Truth and Detect Alignment don't really change much: medieval rulers thought they had those powers anyway. That's what all the rituals about swearing on a bible and astrology were for. The fact that they actually work in D&D doesn't effectively change anything, since most people assumed they already did work and consequently conformed their behavior to those expectations.

Cure Minor Wounds changes everything, since women almost never die in childbirth anymore. Remove Disease has even more impact, even if you only have one 5th lvl cleric per 10,000 people (after all he can do 700 cures a year: in any given year less than 10% of people are going to have a life-threatening illness).

Continual Flame also has unexpected effects. You know how on TV shows and movies castles are always flooded with candles and torches? No... just no. Burning more than one candle at a time in a house, let alone a room, was considered incredibly ostentatious. Artificial light changes industry by letting craftsmen work even when the sun isn't shining. And CF is both cheap and permanent - eventually a society would build up quite a supply of them. This explains why the tiny, fragmented societies of the D&D world nonetheless all seem to have the manufacturing skills of Late Renaissance Venice.

In the real world 75% to 95% of every society were farmers. Plant Growth lets this get down to 50%. Most D&D worlds seem to think the urban/rural population is the same as modern America (like, 2% farmers). Control Weather would be incredible, except it's way too high level.

Almost all other effects are too high level to affect much. Sure you can replace an iron mine with an 11th lvl wizard casting Wall of Iron, but why in the world would an 11th lvl wizard do that? There are plenty of peasants to do the work.

Finally, by making XP a farmable resource from peasants (and why not, they are 1/2 CR, so when they die, shouldn't somebody get XP), you wind up with Kings and Barons who have large estates of peasants and the levels to protect them. Just like the medieval world ought to be.

[Sacrieur]

Yes, but in what why? How do they incorporate magic in their rule?

I misread the question xD

In every aspect. But I suppose the biggest use would be high level magic as a weapon. The damage you can do with ninth level spells is well... Insane.

[Hrugner]

Almost all other effects are too high level to affect much. Sure you can replace an iron mine with an 11th lvl wizard casting Wall of Iron, but why in the world would an 11th lvl wizard do that? There are plenty of peasants to do the work.

You left off: purify food and water stopping food blights and lost seed, prestidigitation keeping everything clean and warm, create water and irrigation/sanitation, mending extending the life of any crafted good to forever, comprehend languages removing huge cultural barriers and other similar things. Moving beyond 0 and 1st level you run in to other more interesting changes.

The interesting thing about creating iron is that it doesn't simply replace the work that would normally be done by other people. It also prevents trade and travel, exploration for resources as well as the need to use lesser materials for anything. The cost of iron falls through the floor. Beyond that, what happens when magic is employed in the harvesting of diamond; how do spells that require a 20k diamond work when 20k worth of diamond is now a 300ft cube due to over harvesting?

[Arbane]

Something I've been wondering that's vaguely relevant - in a high-magic world, how do bigshots keep themselves from being spammed incessantly by Sending spells?

[Nifft]

Something I've been wondering that's vaguely relevant - in a high-magic world, how do bigshots keep themselves from being spammed incessantly by Sending spells?

I was going to say Psychic Poison, but it looks like that only works against Divinations and Mind-Affecting effects. Sending is an Evocation, strangely enough.

Thus, a custom item:

The High King's Collar of Interdiction - Prevents the wearer from being a valid target for spells unless the caster is already encoded in the Interdiction Spell Exception List. If you are not on the list, your spell connection will be rejected by Collar ID.

[Telok]

Frank Trollman is great, and everybody should read his stuff, but most of us want to play in a faux-feudal world. That means being King means something.

....

Cure Minor Wounds changes everything, since women almost never die in childbirth anymore. Remove Disease has even more impact, even if you only have one 5th lvl cleric per 10,000 people (after all he can do 700 cures a year: in any given year less than 10% of people are going to have a life-threatening illness).

Frank and K are good resources, it's another of the myriad ways to play D&D and a good one to steal ideas from.

I recently did a spreadsheet on the DMG worldbuilding rules, specifically the population numbers for the various classes. I kept it to the rural population (three sets of stats instead of eight) which, by the book, is 9/10ths to 14/15ths of the total population. By those rules around 85% of the rural population is first level commoners and 2.8% of the rural population can cast Cure Light Wounds. It turns out that those 1 in 20 chances for high level rangers and druids in Thorps and Hamlets kind of skews things by about one tenth of a percent which is about 1/4th of the CLW casters. Even if you discard the high level druids and rangers you end up with about 2% of the rural population able to cast CLW.

That's only one out of every fifty people.
The arcane casters are 1.7% of the rural population.
People able to cast 2nd level and higher spells is only 0.2% though. One in five hundred.

Edit: Spell Turning works on Sending, as does Antimagic Field. That's all a quick SRD check came up with. Even Spell Immunity won't work in 3.5 because it's not immunity any more, just infinite SR which Sending ignores.

[Arbane]

The High King's Collar of Interdiction - Prevents the wearer from being a valid target for spells unless the caster is already encoded in the Interdiction Spell Exception List. If you are not on the list, your spell connection will be rejected by Collar ID.

Groaaaaan. :smallbiggrin:

Anyone want to think up the metaphysical version of voicemail?

[Nifft]

Anyone want to think up the metaphysical version of voicemail?

Sounds like some kind of chain shirt for a Bard.

[AzraelX]

Sounds like some kind of chain shirt for a Bard.
I'm not sure why this made me laugh so hard :smalltongue: Probably because it's funny.

[Sagetim]

You left off: purify food and water stopping food blights and lost seed, prestidigitation keeping everything clean and warm, create water and irrigation/sanitation, mending extending the life of any crafted good to forever, comprehend languages removing huge cultural barriers and other similar things. Moving beyond 0 and 1st level you run in to other more interesting changes.

The interesting thing about creating iron is that it doesn't simply replace the work that would normally be done by other people. It also prevents trade and travel, exploration for resources as well as the need to use lesser materials for anything. The cost of iron falls through the floor. Beyond that, what happens when magic is employed in the harvesting of diamond; how do spells that require a 20k diamond work when 20k worth of diamond is now a 300ft cube due to over harvesting?

You pay more attention to what the rules say and imply. When a cost is given, it's not given for YOUR economy, it's given for the costs and economy presented in that book. In a normal dnd game, 300 gold of diamond dust is not some huge cube of diamond, it's a small enough amount of powder that it can be worked into a spell. You're not shoving a thousand pound diamond onto someone when you cast stone skin on them, you're sprinkling some powder that the rules as written have assumed is a rare and valuable resource.

In other words: Just because your game's economy has caused diamonds to be near worthless doesn't mean that you need tons of it to cast spells which require it as a component. The component cost is supposed to correlate to a poundage, with the assumption that diamond is rare. If diamond is common, you don't need more diamond to cast the same spell, it just has a lower monetary cost. By that same token, if you use enough walls of iron to shoot the cost of iron through the floor, you don't suddenly need a 10footx10foot sheet-block of iron to cast your next wall of iron spell, you need the same sized piece as any other casting of it, it just no longer costs 50 gold, because there's not enough demand to bring the cost that high.

This assumes that there isn't a cartel doing price fixing.

The last time I ran a dnd game (as opposed to some other setting), the players were establishing their own city, so how things worked back in the home country didn't matter so much. For reference, it had a Sorcerer King with a custom 'kingsblood' bloodline that I whipped together for pathfinder, and the players didn't really spend any meaningful time in the home country, so we didn't really go into detail about the place that much. I assumed that it was basically a nice place that operated under a 'better living through magic' mentality.

If I were to run a dnd game now, there would certainly be a city with a blatantly higher concentration of magic users in the world than everywhere else, using a better education system (you know...Having a public education system instead of not) that would result in most of the civilians being able to cast at least cantrips, and given that this would probably be a pathfinder or 5e game, that would mean most people could cast their spells infinity times per day. If every citizen has prestidigitation, then it becomes the normal means of cleaning. If most citizens can cast create water, then gravity based plumbing can provide a means of regulating and outflow of water without needing to worry about an inflow from outside the city. I would probably have it be that most citizens tend to look for a marriage partner who has the other style of cantrips from them (as in, divine cantrips with one partner, arcane cantrips with the other) as a means of having complimentary sets of cantrip access. It's the kind of practical consideration that would go into living in a world that I would run a dnd game in, as opposed to a modern setting where marriage for love becomes a thing.

For a 5e setting: Cantrips are powerful. Firebolt lets you lob 1d10 balls of fire at stuff from level 1. Sure, you need aim to hit anything with it, but if all the police can set you on fire like that, you might be rather disinclined to steal ****. If all the firemen in the city can cast create water, then they can put out the resulting fires of a police pursuit, and they could regularly work in pairs to ensure that the city doesn't get out of control blazes just because some jackass decided to steal some ****. And they don't even need pc levels to get cantrips, they could pick such a thing up with their first level feat.

To get back to 3.5: The main problem for 3.5 is that cantrips are not infinite. You only get like, maybe 4 to 6 with multiple levels of spellcaster. Which is a damn shame, because they can be really useful. On the upside, there are a lot of feats that you can take at first level (some of which are Only at first level) to pick up cantrips here and there, and some races just have a few they can do each day. In any case, large cities would benefit greatly from a fire department with rods of create water (with unlimited uses per day). They're bound to be cheaper than decanters of endless water, and since you can cast it so that the water rains down on a target area, you could put fires out with it a bit better.

I can't remember if hte Control Flames spell made the transition from 2e to 3.5, but it was a great little level 1 spell that let you control fires of various sizes, or put them out (or sections of larger fires out). Even with a low caster level, rods with infinite uses of that and enough of them would be super helpful in putting out blazes that might otherwise engulf a city of any significant size in a dnd setting.

[Mechalich]

Frank and K are good resources, it's another of the myriad ways to play D&D and a good one to steal ideas from.

I recently did a spreadsheet on the DMG worldbuilding rules, specifically the population numbers for the various classes. I kept it to the rural population (three sets of stats instead of eight) which, by the book, is 9/10ths to 14/15ths of the total population. By those rules around 85% of the rural population is first level commoners and 2.8% of the rural population can cast Cure Light Wounds. It turns out that those 1 in 20 chances for high level rangers and druids in Thorps and Hamlets kind of skews things by about one tenth of a percent which is about 1/4th of the CLW casters. Even if you discard the high level druids and rangers you end up with about 2% of the rural population able to cast CLW.

That's only one out of every fifty people.
The arcane casters are 1.7% of the rural population.
People able to cast 2nd level and higher spells is only 0.2% though. One in five hundred.

Edit: Spell Turning works on Sending, as does Antimagic Field. That's all a quick SRD check came up with. Even Spell Immunity won't work in 3.5 because it's not immunity any more, just infinite SR which Sending ignores.

What this essentially shows is that the standard numbers of spellcasters (and really adventurers as a whole) are way to high to give you a world that in anyway resembles a 'Middle Ages with Magic' world when taken to the logical conclusion.

If one in fifty people can cast Cure Light Wounds, then a population of 100 million, which is roughly the population of Medieval Europe or the Forgotten Realms, has 2 million people casting divine spells. And another 1.7 million casting arcane spells. And that's low because the abundance in urban areas is actually much higher.

My understanding of the Frank and K approach is that it tries to take the numbers and follow the assumptions that generates to its conclusion the result looks...rather different than what most people consider swords and sorcery fantasy to be.

Forgotten Realms hand-waves how most governments operate by basically suggesting that good-aligned high-level mages spend a lot of time protecting the country out of some sort of weird sense of noblese oblige or simply have absolutely no interest in ruling (ex. Azoun IV is for all practical purposes Vangerdahast's puppet if the latter wishes him to be). Most of the evil regimes actually are spell-casting theocracies or magocracies anyway - which is probably the most accurate model.

[WhyteWyzard]

This is my first post here, and this particular subject is dear to my heart. If magic exists, as it obviously does in RPG's, why isn't magic and technology combined in more games? I know there are many that attempt it, but I only see "technolgies" that usually apply only to adventuring. I understand mundane magic isn't something that excites most folks, but an unseen servant turning a crank shaft could provide an immense amount of energy for a great many applications. I'm not an engineer, nor do I know the physics, but these sorts of things would be what a state would research to the nth degree.

[bean illus]

This is my first post here.../snip/... I'm not an engineer, nor do I know the physics, but these sorts of things would be what a state would research to the nth degree.

Welcome WhyteWyzard.

I was just going to say "Research and Development". Obviously, any spell the DM wants to exist does.
So it doesn't really matter if a 2e spell was updated, if you want a spell to extinguish fires; then make one.

Any government that could afford to would devote huge resources to R&D. Think tanks, Colleges, Foundations and etc of all sorts. Of course when the ball gets rolling, the 'Kings Magic' (patented spells?) would become extremely profitable, and the taxes on private profits would be massive.

This leads to a Calvinistic interpretation that focuses power on those that engage this particular political/economic view, and also leads inevitably to empire, Many of which would have a theocratic element.

The gods would of course be forced into constant intervention, just to maintain their own power balance.

Which is why i would reduce the per capita of spell users to 1/4 of its current level, or app. 0.5%. I would also reduce the number of high level casters even further. Also, a cultural acceptance that most magic profit is taxed at various levels.

[Telok]

Which is why i would reduce the per capita of spell users to 1/4 of its current level, or app. 0.5%. I would also reduce the number of high level casters even further. Also, a cultural acceptance that most magic profit is taxed at various levels.

What I did was to throw out the broken WotC numbers completely, google up some actual medieval data about the culture or region I want to use, and then say "How many casters do I need to get the effect I want, and what does that do to the society?"

Over in the general Roleplaying Games forum here there's a thread called "Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XVIII", that and the previous seventeen threads have pretty interesting info on various medieval cultures and technologies.