Help Us Invent the Future!

[N0RKS]

My current game is set in a place where the people who have the most magic have the most authority, and anyone without magical abilities might as well be dirt. So what we've been doing is developing technology in the hopes that having a mundane avenue to power might help the common people. So far we've developed a cannon, a breach loading rifle, a printing press with movable type, we've dabbled in lens-crafting and minor chemistry, and we did some architectural and structural work with canals and anti-flooding measures.
Our inventions have been pretty all over the place, what should we be working on do you think?

[gawwy]

how much magic will the people at the top have?

Is it magic as by the DnD 3.5 rules hard and fast or is there a lot of home-brew on what magic does/ does not exist or how it is "powered"?

If its based on 3.5 magic is it close to ebberon or faerun? ie do elemental's get bound to things to make them go. Are blueprints for magic items closely guarded?

is the technology going to be developed around the same time that the magic people are gaining their magic powers?

If you want a good look at what a heavy heavy magic setting should really look like go find emperor tippy's points of light campaign setting. Its nuts and amazing.

Also now would be a good time to invoke sandersons first law of magic;

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

if making a society around magic you need to understand that magic and make it so your players can understand the magic.

[N0RKS]

I'm not the DM, I'm a player, a Cloistered Cleric of Industry.
The society is kind of 3 tiered, full-casters at the top, wizards, clerics, druids, and sorcerers are in charge of the various parts of the world. Partial casters are like minor nobility, usually in charge of a town or a clump of villages. Everyone without magic are essentially peasants. Anyone with a type of magic that doesn't fit this pattern exists sort of on the fringes of society, psionics, warlocks, dragonfire adepts, swordsages, people like that.
It's pretty much standard 3.5 magic, elementals get bound sometimes.

We're level 14, and we've been inventing stuff since about level 8, my question was more about what people think we should be focusing on if our revolution is going to gain any momentum.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Required reading. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)

For weapons, modify no-save no-SR ranged touch spells (orbs, mainly, maybe Melf's acid arrow for the long range) with metamagic feats, crafting cost reducers, double/triple traps etc. to get a many/turn blasts of 10d6 force damage weapon (aka a MpTBoTDSFDW, rolls off the tongue). Alternatively, get Hank's energy bow as animated autofiring colossal ballista (add divine power and haste if desired/available).

[Âmesang]

If you haven't done so already you could perhaps try and track down Dragon Magazine #277 (November 2000) which has articles dealing with steampunk ("The Age of Steam," p.43), modern technology ("Greyhawk 2000," p.48), and aught else ("Fantasy Futures," p.55).

[gawwy]

Going on your description of the campaign. if your looking to topple the wizards at the top and bring the commoners to power. You need a mundane way to generate an AMF.

Pretty much anything you can make with industry can be replicated or done better with magic. So you need to turn off the magic. While the magic is there the wizards can pretty much decide that they want the commoners to stop building tech that threatens their power and scry and die the leaders of industry until the rest fall in line.

After the magics off you can look into making life better for everyone or into killing all the wizards. That's mainly up to what kind of party you are.

[Yahzi]

So what we've been doing is developing technology in the hopes that having a mundane avenue to power might help the common people.
You might be interested in this novel: Sword of the Bright Lady (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J1HDEH4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1). :smallsmile:

IMHO it's not as easy as whipping up some new technologies. You have to change how people think. Also, these technologies are not one-offs; it takes more than gunpowder to make guns. There's a lot of metallurgy and machinery involved. Also, the principle of rifling was not obvious for the first few hundred years; not sure how your characters discovered it. And so on with dozens of other bits of physics/chemistry we take for granted.

More importantly are the social technologies. Printing presses don't help if people can't read, or if they are disinclined to believe written words over verbal ones. Making cheap paper is as important to newspapers as making presses. And so on.

If anyone can obtain magic with enough hard work and some luck, then people may even feel their current society is just fine. Those with talent rise to positions of power, as it should be. Not everybody wants power, if having power means you're the guy that has to answer the call when demons/dragons/whatnot show up. Plenty of people don't even bother to vote in today's world; your peasants may not be as interested in a "fair" share of the responsibility as you would assume. Or there may be religious reasons why they think society should be structured that way. Technological progress is as much political as it is scientific.

That said, the biggest game changer in D&D is in fact gunpowder. Magic can do everything technology can do, but it can't do it as cheaply. A gun is in fact cheap to make, cheap to operate (gunpowder is made by the ton, unlike alchemy ingredients), and easy to use. Thus you can field many riflemen against a (presumably) limited number of mages and ranked fighters. Guns have two more advantages that are often over-looked: they are much longer ranged than most magic, and they scale.

Scale is important. The reason we make guns the size we do now (bullets are about a 1/5 of an inch wide) is because we need to kill things that are human sized. If you want to kill bigger things, you just make bigger guns (like elephant guns, where the bullet is almost half an inch in diameter). In D&D, fighters with high hit points and monsters = bigger guns. You can't do that with crossbows or other weapons; they don't just scale up; at larger sizes the materials start to fall apart or at least provide different efficiency curves. But guns? Up until 8 inches or so, it's pretty straight scaling.

This is the most important advantage technology has over magic. Magic usually has a fixed size of effect for a fixed input. Technology usually lets you change the size of the effect with the size of the input. Why does any spellcaster bother with 5D6 fireballs, given that monsters have 10HD or more? Because he can only cast a 5th level spell. But with gunpowder, you just make bigger hand-grenades, and even your 0th level soldiers can use them. The chief advantage of being high level - that it puts you on a plane of effect that others cannot match - a level you gained through years and years of hard work and study - is negated by a peasant dumping twice as much powder into his musket.

(Not to delve into real-world issues, but this scaleability is also one of technology's chief drawbacks).

After that it is the technological innovations of democracy, universal rights, the value of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and faith in progress that drives the growth of technology.

[N0RKS]

Thank you Yahzi, that looks pretty cool.

1. What kind of social technologies should we be pursuing, farming equipment? Water wheels? The spinning Jenny?

2. We aren't necessarily looking to be rid of magic, just to open up another avenue to those who do't have access to it. We aren't anti-magic, we're anti-tyranny.

3. Good grief the Tippyverse looks awful. Our DM is much more reasonable than that, RAI overtakes RAW, and exploits and those types of shenanigans are highly discouraged.

[Yahzi]

1. What kind of social technologies should we be pursuing
The big game-changer was energy. Everybody thinks mechanical contraptions and physics, but the real deal was chemical engineering. Fuel is a form of chemistry, and everything was powered by muscle (either human or animal) until the age of steam. This limited populations because food could only be created by transforming other food into muscle power to make more food. Artificial energy broke that chain; now people could turn coal or trees into food. (And the technologies that allowed steam engines - metallurgy etc. - were chemistry-based.)

You might think magic could do the same; after all, a magic item lasts forever, so after enough centuries a society would have built up so many of them that they could coast on their combined power. But magic items can be broken to yield stuff to make other magic items, so in a D&D world all your magic plowshares will eventually be turned into magic swords, because the need to kill something right now always trumps the idea of free food for the future. Again: magic is personal, meaning it cannot scale on an industrial level.

Socially, the game-changer was the idea of universal rights. The basic concept of equality - that all men are created equal - is not at all obvious. The Greeks had it with their invention of democracy, but there were plenty of people at the time who doubted that wisdom, including some Greeks (like Sparta). The Romans, despite their Republic, certainly did not believe it (though they had some level of equality, which is why they made the progress that they did). The thing is, democracy requires that concept; and technology basically requires democracy. In a non-democratic society, you are not going to share information, because information is power and sharing power only weakens you. Technology progresses very, very slowly in this environment (which explains why wizards have not taken over the world - they literally get nothing for sharing a spell with another wizard, so why would they? On the other hand scientists make progress precisely by sharing their results, even the negative ones). On the other hand, democracy (like all of these other technologies) scales; you can increase or decrease your state's power simply by increasing or decreasing your population, since each person is a source of power.

In a D&D world, gunpowder makes democracy possible. Given a world where a King can single-handedly defeat whole companies of troops (run a 9th lvl fighter with WBL vs 100 0th lvl commoners), feudalism actually lives up to its hype. In all the legends and stories, kings could do this; and in those legends there are never peasant revolutions because peasant revolutions cannot succeed when that is true. Guns change that. Guns make democracy possible by making power scalable.

Steam engines and fertilizer allow you to raise armies (in RL 75% of your population had to be growing food or everyone starved; for Vikings it was 95%; for modern societies it is... 1%). Mass production and gauge sets (the idea that one part should fit in any machine) allows you arm those troops with only a small part of your population working in factories. And then you have to convince people working in smelly closed-in buildings is better than being a farmhand. Once you have armies, you can take over territories, impose "democracy," and use the new population to... raise more armies.

These are all really hard concepts! It's not just the idea, but the execution: remember Charles Babbage invented a mechanical computer, but no one could build it because they could not make parts to enough precision to overcome the friction. Magic might be able to fix some of these problems - a Calculating Engine is worth the price of a vial of Oil of Slipperiness - but for most things you need to gradually refine materials science, mechanical engineering, and mathematical calculations (each one step at a time) as you build up the infrastructure capable of making cool stuff.

So: Your characters need to focus on why peasants should take on the responsibility of protecting themselves. Presumably the ruling class are all corrupt, wicked rat-bastiches (they usually are), so that will help. Creating labor unions and neighborhood councils and radical concepts like police forces that serve the people rather than the ruler (did you know Rome did not have a police force? 1 million people living together without cops! It was not safe to leave your house or neighborhood after dark) are ways to start towards self-government.

Then they need to make it so peasants can do something other than grow food. Plant Growth actually works out here; it's as good as modern fertilizer and a single casting per day support a population of 50,000. A handful of magic tractors (or more importantly combine harvesters) will also do wonders. Steam engines would be best, but again, they're pretty dang hard.

Finally comes the guns part. If you have breech-loading rifles and cannon, you've got everything you need. I would add grenades, since area-effects are really awesome in D&D. Automatic weapons are nice, but not necessary. They don't bring anything to the table that a dozen men with .50 Sharps rifles don't.

Once you have an army of 0th levels that a 9th lvl wizard is afraid of, you've achieved your goal. Your peasants now have the power to demand a seat at the table. Of course, that means when the next dragon shows up, your peasants will be out there shooting at it and getting roasted by it. They may not thank you. On the other hand... they probably will. :smallsmile: