General Fantasy: On the Absence of Technology in the Presence of Magic

[GreatWyrmGold]

When someone says "fantasy," they immediately imagine something along the lines of high-medieval Europe, but with elves, dragons, and wizards, often with fewer feudal tiers and more modern standards of morality. (You can blame J.R.R. Tolkien and R.E. Howard for that.) There is nothing wrong with this setting; after all, our own world went through such a phase. When worlds go on like this for several hundred or even thousand years, however, some people start to question it. Naturally, authors try to provide explanations for such irregularities when people point them out, and if they don't, fans will.

One common explanation for why technology doesn't advance (typically focused on firearms, since many audiences and stories are focused on action more than economics, though this also comes up for industrialization) is that magic makes all of this obsolete. Who needs a gun when you can throw fireballs by wiggling your fingers? Who needs a (cotton) gin when you can conjure silk robes onto your own body? This is a simple yet compelling argument, but it has some serious flaws, which I intend to address.

The biggest flaw is a basic misunderstanding of how and why these technologies changed the world as they did. Most people believe that firearms replaced swords and bows because they are more effective, but this is untrue. Modern firearms are certainly more effective than any medieval weapons, but it took a while for them to get that way; a single, typical peasant armed with a musket or early rifle would have about as much of a chance against a single properly-equipped knight as one with a bow, crossbow, or pitchfork. But battles aren't duels. Longbow armies dominated in the late Medieval period (I'm simplifying a bit) because many trained peasants with longbows had a good chance against a smaller number of knights, and because training and arming these common longbowmen was cheaper than doing so with knights. Firearms made it even easier, by reducing the required training time from years to months, if not weeks. The same general principle applies to industrialization; it was a long time before the goods available to the elite expanded much, but as production costs fell, the commoners' standard of living rose tremendously.

Why does this matter? Well, in most (though not all) fantasy settings, magic is very rare. Even if anyone can be trained, it's rare for more than a select few to actually be trained. It's all well and good that magic allows some people to circumvent the need for guns or factories or what-have-you, but not everyone has magic. For the have-nots, and for the lords and ladies commanding them, technology would still be very useful. Magic-users would have great personal combat prowess, like historical knights, but also like them they would not last forever; even if the technology we understand would be useless against magicians, something would be invented to counter them. Nothing is perfect; nothing can be; nothing should be, if you're writing the rules for a work of fiction (doubly so if it's interactive in some form).

What kind of magic would it take to make technology obsolete? Mu. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#In_popular_culture) Technology will advance no matter what the setting, adapting to the needs and resources of the people who use it. But the question we mean to ask, once we get past the pedantry I reflexively imposed on myself, is what kind of magic would make the sorts of technology which are usually omitted from fantasy obsolete. For guns, the answer seems simple—fireballs, right? Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Your theoretical combat magic would need three characteristics:
1. It must be able to swiftly and reliably disable, injure, or kill other people. (This should be obvious. If the attacks only cause bruises, or miss nine times out of ten, or have a whole five-minute startup time, they're going to be pretty abysmal in terms of usability in battle.)
2. Defenses against it should not be easy and absolute, or too close to that; if wearing an iron amulet makes you immune to faerie magic, faerie magic is going to be useless in warfare against anyone who knows that weakness and has time to prepare. Similarly, there shouldn't be any extremely rare resources which an army can easily be cut off from or lose.
3. It must be possible to distribute it to large numbers of people, whether by teaching people with potential or investing usable power in said people (directly or otherwise), as I hope I've made clear in the first few paragraphs. This means not only that many people need to be able to be taught, but that the
The details don't matter much. The logistics and tactics of death rays powered by mouse blood will be different than those of fireballs which require sunlight, but the general effects will be similar. Once people learned how to use magic (which was probably pretty early in the setting's history, if we go off the traditional mold), it wouldn't take long for magical tactics to dominate martial doctrine the way gunpowder did in our world. Methods for countering these early magical tactics would be developed, as would more refined versions of these tactics.

The question of how to replace the Industrial Revolution, or even the less-remarked-upon economic developments of the Renaissance and the Age of Sail, is (for me) a much more interesting question, but I doubt many people would find it as interesting, and there are both more areas where I'm ignorant and a hell of a lot more potential butterfly-effects in such a system, so I'll restrain myself. My suspicions are that the result would look more like the Tippyverse than Middle Earth. Even in a fantasy world, where everything from geology and astronomy to anatomy and sociology are limited only by the author's goals and imagination, we can still trust that humanity will have the same basic needs and wants, regardless of if the tools it has access to are made of wood, steel, and circuits, or scrimshaw, orichalcum, and gemstones.

Hopefully, what I've written so far is interesting to at least some of you (enough to justify its use of server space and my time, at least). If I'm lucky, it's inspired some of you to think about the relationship between magic and technology in a different way. If I'm very lucky, some of those will decide to share their insights so that I can hear about this issue from other viewpoints. But before we get to that, I'd like to make one thing clear—this doesn't make the standard fantasy setting bad, even if it's kept unrealistically static. That just makes it unrealistic. As long as the sociological implausibility never becomes particularly relevant to the story being told, or gets a decent explanation (rather than the half-arsed one which inspired this post), I have no problem with it. It's just a trope, and tropes are just tools (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreTools).

[Lord Raziere]

Well yeah, I've always found the "tech is absent" thing really silly myself. On the other hand, I avoid Tippyverse at all costs when creating settings with magitech. or with tech and magic at all. I don't like what it assumes or its results, and I prefer something more fair regardless. Something closer to Eberron but more advanced.

But yeah, for magic to replace tech, it basically has to become technology in a way, otherwise its just a rare thingamabopper only a few people understand or care about that doesn't really effect the common persons life. Technically the best example of this kind of magic.....is in urban fantasy settings, where its shown that because magic is only practiced by a rare few, it never had any effect on industrialization because people kept it secret, so technology overwhelmed it and now dominates, thus confining the urban fantasy's protagonists troubles to mostly personal ones because of it. Hard to be world changing when no one believes in magic and your trying to fend a werewolf assassin because you did some insult to their secret pack leader commanding like, five werewolves.

either that, or you have the Kingdom of Zeal from Chrono Trigger, which is like Tippyverse but written better to actually have problems like being a dystopia where everyone who doesn't wield magic is a slave living in a hole amidst an ice age being servants to the mages who pretend they are more enlightened than them in their flying palaces just because they have magic and therefore completely deserves it when Lavos destroys them all from trying to control him.

Of course you can go more cynical than Kingdom of Zeal and point to Dark Sun to see how things would go if the mages weren't interested in building anything better at all. Technically, technology did change in Dark Sun because of magic, due to people using obsidian weapons and different kinds of armor because metal armor is scarce and kind of useless nowadays, as well as people trusting Psions more than wizards. Because wizards are life-sucking jerks like that.

[Chromascope3D]

Honestly, the whole "epic" fantasy timeline is my biggest problem with GoT/SoIaF. If the Alchemists have had napalm on lock for thousands of years, why haven't they figured out gunpowder?

[Bohandas]

See, this is why I like Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and H.P.Lovecraft

[Fri]

Honestly, the whole "epic" fantasy timeline is my biggest problem with GoT/SoIaF. If the Alchemists have had napalm on lock for thousands of years, why haven't they figured out gunpowder?

Dunno, the world does need to wait until 9th century china to make gunpowder, while the greek got greek fire at the 6th century. Though to be specific, I have the idea that GoT's wildfire is magical, and the stash is actually inert until recent event, where suddenly for some reason (dragon reasons) all kind of magic reappears. I think it's specifically mentioned in one of the side chapter about the maesters.

[Bohandas]

Well yeah, I've always found the "tech is absent" thing really silly myself. On the other hand, I avoid Tippyverse at all costs when creating settings with magitech. or with tech and magic at all. I don't like what it assumes or its results, and I prefer something more fair regardless. Something closer to Eberron but more advanced.

But yeah, for magic to replace tech, it basically has to become technology in a way, otherwise its just a rare thingamabopper only a few people understand or care about that doesn't really effect the common persons life. Technically the best example of this kind of magic.....is in urban fantasy settings, where its shown that because magic is only practiced by a rare few, it never had any effect on industrialization because people kept it secret, so technology overwhelmed it and now dominates, thus confining the urban fantasy's protagonists troubles to mostly personal ones because of it. Hard to be world changing when no one believes in magic and your trying to fend a werewolf assassin because you did some insult to their secret pack leader commanding like, five werewolves.

either that, or you have the Kingdom of Zeal from Chrono Trigger, which is like Tippyverse but written better to actually have problems like being a dystopia where everyone who doesn't wield magic is a slave living in a hole amidst an ice age being servants to the mages who pretend they are more enlightened than them in their flying palaces just because they have magic and therefore completely deserves it when Lavos destroys them all from trying to control him.

Don't forget Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality

[Razade]

Honestly, the whole "epic" fantasy timeline is my biggest problem with GoT/SoIaF. If the Alchemists have had napalm on lock for thousands of years, why haven't they figured out gunpowder?

Because we had a form of Napalm (Greek Fire which is what Wildfire is based off of. It's not based on Napalm) in the 9th century BCE while it took us quite a bit longer to discover gunpowder (in the 1st century CE).

[Bohandas]

What kind of magic would it take to make technology obsolete? Mu. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#In_popular_culture) Technology will advance no matter what the setting, adapting to the needs and resources of the people who use it. But the question we mean to ask, once we get past the pedantry I reflexively imposed on myself, is what kind of magic would make the sorts of technology which are usually omitted from fantasy obsolete. For guns, the answer seems simple—fireballs, right? Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Your theoretical combat magic would need three characteristics:
1. It must be able to swiftly and reliably disable, injure, or kill other people. (This should be obvious. If the attacks only cause bruises, or miss nine times out of ten, or have a whole five-minute startup time, they're going to be pretty abysmal in terms of usability in battle.)
2. Defenses against it should not be easy and absolute, or too close to that; if wearing an iron amulet makes you immune to faerie magic, faerie magic is going to be useless in warfare against anyone who knows that weakness and has time to prepare. Similarly, there shouldn't be any extremely rare resources which an army can easily be cut off from or lose.
3. It must be possible to distribute it to large numbers of people, whether by teaching people with potential or investing usable power in said people (directly or otherwise), as I hope I've made clear in the first few paragraphs.

#3 can be dispensed with if the magic is powerful enough. Something like the Rain of Fire spell from the D&D 3e epic level handbook. Something that fulfills the same tactical purpose as the atomic bomb. In fact, all 3 can be loosened a bit in that case

[Bohandas]

An even more fundamental misunderstanding than the one addressed by the OP is the fact that in a world where magic is real a clear dividing line between magic and technology wouldn't even exist. It would be like Star Wars, where the most powerful energy weapons are powered by magic crystals, or Ghostbusters where ghosts can be fought with high tech machines, paychokinetic energy can be gathered and concentrated with a device somewhat analogous to a giant antenna, the fifth circle of hell impinging on your city's sewer system is an excellent opportunity to gather otherworldly materials for experimental analysis, and that analysis in turn may point you towards inventing a device that lets you bring statues to life and direct their movement with a modified nintendo controller

[Khedrac]

There are other factors for a Fantasy world that can inhibit (or prevent) technological progress - and the main one is if physics is not the same as real-world physics.
At the extreme end is the world of David Brin's novel The Practice Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect) (which is technically science fiction, not fantasy).
More mundane:
A lot of technology depended on chemistry arising from alchemy. Yes a lot doesn't, but a lot of technological advancement requires the chemistry to make the needed chemicals (or even simply purify the available ones).
Now alchemy is usually depicted as more of an art that a science - one cannot simply mix the ingredients in the right way and get a healing potion every time
But what if alchemy works? Either one can mix the same chemicals in the same way twenty times and get three different results (one of which is what you want, most are rubbish and one is dangerous) or what happens when one mixes chemicals depends on who does the mixing (so without magic to infuse the mixture you get junk).
If alchemy works then the very basis of chemistry does not work - it is not repeatable.

Where does this leave us - well more knowledgeable people that I will be able to advise, but I can make a start:
1) Forget advanced metallurgy and smelting techniques. You cannot identify or reliably produce the correct additives to make truly superior steels.
2) Forget medicine moving beyond the "herbs" stage (which can get pretty good) - one cannot separate out the active ingredients.
3) Things based on leverage work - crossbows, trebuchets etc., but the real top-end models need reliable metals so they will be much harder to produce.
4) Gunpowder? - ha - would you use a gun that was never reliable because the gunpowder might not even combust when exposed to flame?
etc.
Another point is that is something is not reliable, brilliant minds are less likely to spend time studying and advancing it (some will but overall it will be slower).

Result: technology is inherently limited because of magic altering the world.

[Lord Raziere]

Well there is alternative to "magic being more art than science" causing an effect on the world:

instead of making things rarer, it might actually makes magic and tech more common.

Art can be done by anyone with some skill. If Magic is an art enough that you just have to believe that magic works a certain way and do the necessary steps to make that work and thus achieve what want- within a certain amount of reason so you don't get smartasses saying "my magic is omnipotence when I snap my fingers"- you could actually have thousands of magic systems being made and used, and instead of consistent tech spreading throughout the world, you could have thousands of little different kinds of magi-tech competing against each other, due to working on a thousand different little principles that apply to one but not another. and it has a lot of crossover potential.

[Gastronomie]

If I recall correctly, Twelve Kingdoms or some other fantasy novel series explained that the various metals and fossil fuel required for the development of modern technology are either extremely precious or do not exist at all in the high-fantasy universe, and that as a result, technological progression has been severely limited. I liked that idea.

In Attack on Titan, the government of the medieval-ish universe understands the existence of high-level technology, such as airships and machine guns, but for particular reasons, have disallowed these from being manufactured. They kill off the inventors and erase them from history, and thus technology does not get to advance far. It's not that the inventions were never made; they were silenced upon every attempt.

No, magic does not exist in the Attack on Titan universe - perhaps with the exception of the weird ability to turn into a Titan - but my point is that this could serve as a reason why science does not develop in a particular universe. The rulers of the world prohibit its use.

And it's not that hard to come up with an explanation. For instance, if Sorcery is a talent that is inherited down particular bloodlines, and those Sorcerers are the political rulers of the kingdoms, they will most likely prohibit the advancement of technology that may threaten their rule. No matter how many Fireballs you can hurl, a shotgun can still kill you...

[factotum]

Have you ever played the CRPG "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"? In that, both technology and magic *do* exist side by side, but you can't really mix the two--to the extent that mages are forced to ride at the back of any train, because if they were closer to the engine their mere presence would make it stop working. Conversely, very high-tech stuff can shut down magic nearby, so the elves don't let it anywhere near their forests if they can help it.

[danzibr]

Yeah, I too find this odd. Especially in like D&D where casters can pump their mental stats through the roof, it seems like such magic would naturally lead to spectacular technology.

Anyway, great post!

Have you ever played the CRPG "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"? In that, both technology and magic *do* exist side by side, but you can't really mix the two--to the extent that mages are forced to ride at the back of any train, because if they were closer to the engine their mere presence would make it stop working. Conversely, very high-tech stuff can shut down magic nearby, so the elves don't let it anywhere near their forests if they can help it.
Huh. Interesting.

[Donnadogsoth]

1. Physics may not work the same in the fantasy world as it does in the real one. Gunpowder may not work. There may be no uranium in the ground. Nothing for an advanced society to work towards.
2. "A wizard did it!" Wizards may have changed the laws of physics to prevent economic development.
3. "A wizard did it!" Wizards may be using subtle propaganda and mind control to ensure that technological development is seen as taboo.

[HandofShadows]

Different laws of physics may mean that the formula we use for gunpowder does not work, but does it stop something else from fullflling the same role? In the Amber series by Roger Zelazny gunpowder didn't work in the Amber reality. BUT Jewler's Rouge acted as if it where gunpowder there. :smallbiggrin:

Science is a proccess. Sooner or later people are going to discover things like gunpowder. It's just a matter of how long it takes unless there is an outside force stopping said discovery or somehow some force is specifially inhibiting gunpowder from working. (Gods or magic).

[Grinner]

I suspect the answers to the questions posed are distinctly extradiegetic in nature: adherence to pre-existing genre conventions, adherence to pre-existing setting conventions, and inability of authors to simulate complex systems in their heads. When the two elements do meet in-setting, magic seems to either actively oppose technology through unspecified means or become transmuted into a technology of sorts.

Either approach, in my experience, can come off as exceedingly naive. The reason for that, I suspect, is the result of attempting to syncretize the traditional fantasy elements with the technological elements while clinging to the conventions of traditional fantasy. That's not to say that can't work, but it's difficult to do it well from a worldbuilding perspective.

What I like seeing done is treating magic as a symbolic force instead of treating it as some abstract or physical force. The asymmetry allows magic and conventional technology to exist side-by-side without stepping on one another's toes.

[Donnadogsoth]

Different laws of physics may mean that the formula we use for gunpowder does not work, but does it stop something else from fullflling the same role? In the Amber series by Roger Zelazny gunpowder didn't work in the Amber reality. BUT Jewler's Rouge acted as if it where gunpowder there. :smallbiggrin:

Science is a proccess. Sooner or later people are going to discover things like gunpowder. It's just a matter of how long it takes unless there is an outside force stopping said discovery or somehow some force is specifially inhibiting gunpowder from working. (Gods or magic).

1. You're presuming science is a process in all possible worlds. In a more mythic world, it may not be.
2. The force stopping discovery may be sheer cultural inertia, like Africa or ancient China. One new discovery per three hundred years or what have you, or, similarly
3. The culture may only be interested in inventing new things like advanced pottery, and not anything 21st Century gaming nerds find charming.

[Chromascope3D]

I think Naruto is a pretty good marriage of both. It is, for all intents and purposes, a modern setting. They have cars, and computers, and hospitals. They just don't have guns because they've never needed to develop anything like them, when they already have the perfect weapons in their armies of wizards.

[Lord Raziere]

I think Naruto is a pretty good marriage of both. It is, for all intents and purposes, a modern setting. They have cars, and computers, and hospitals. They just don't have guns because they've never needed to develop anything like them, when they already have the perfect weapons in their armies of wizards.

......computers and hospitals yes, but I don't remember anyone in Naruto having a car. everyone just seems to walk on foot or take boats. did some filler episode have a car or something? Its been a while since I've had a good look at the series ever since Kaguya happened.

[GreatWyrmGold]

On the other hand, I avoid Tippyverse at all costs when creating settings with magitech. or with tech and magic at all.
That's fair. I was using that as shorthand for a more general concept in the first place. When I say "more like the Tippyverse than Middle Earth," I can trust that other people on this forum will understand that I'm talking about a society built on magic, the way 19th-century Europe was built on coal and steam.


Of course you can go more cynical than Kingdom of Zeal and point to Dark Sun to see how things would go if the mages weren't interested in building anything better at all.
I think it's fair to say that relatively little improvement in the human condition has been born out of a simple desire to make the world a better place. There are people who do that, of course, but many of the big paradigm shifts came from people trying to improve their own place. A wizard who invents, say, an enchantment that improves crop yields would probably do so with the intent of gaining the favor of the local nobles by expanding their power, or recruiting peasants to serve him as lord, or to make a boatload of cash, or something along those lines...but future generations are going to use that enchantment in ways which allow a greater standard of living for everyone around. So unless we have a Dark Sun, Lovecraft, or Worm situation where magicians are actively harmful to the world, I don't think mages apathetic to altruism would change the situation much.


#3 can be dispensed with if the magic is powerful enough. Something like the Rain of Fire spell from the D&D 3e epic level handbook. Something that fulfills the same tactical purpose as the atomic bomb. In fact, all 3 can be loosened a bit in that case
Nukes can't win wars alone. Neither can aircraft, or tanks, or dragons, or any other "special weapon". A nuke-level magician can kill and destroy, sure, but that's not the same as winning a war.


An even more fundamental misunderstanding than the one addressed by the OP is the fact that in a world where magic is real a clear dividing line between magic and technology wouldn't even exist.
That depends a lot on the nature of magic and the culture that's grown up around it. And there would definitely be some kind of label for what the "audience" would call magic; after all, we make the distinction between, say, "quantum" or "relativistic" or "biological" phenomena and "normal" ones.


I suspect the answers to the questions posed are distinctly extradiegetic in nature: adherence to pre-existing genre conventions, adherence to pre-existing setting conventions, and inability of authors to simulate complex systems in their heads.
Well, yeah. But that answer isn't interesting; it's obvious, it doesn't inspire new lines of thought or discussion, it just is. That's why I find wholly Doylist discussions to almost always be dull (aside from a few which focus on real-world implications, but I digress).


When the two elements do meet in-setting, magic seems to either actively oppose technology through unspecified means or become transmuted into a technology of sorts. Either approach, in my experience, can come off as exceedingly naive. The reason for that, I suspect, is the result of attempting to syncretize the traditional fantasy elements with the technological elements while clinging to the conventions of traditional fantasy. That's not to say that can't work, but it's difficult to do it well from a worldbuilding perspective. What I like seeing done is treating magic as a symbolic force instead of treating it as some abstract or physical force. The asymmetry allows magic and conventional technology to exist side-by-side without stepping on one another's toes.
I'm having trouble seeing what you mean. I mean, I see what you're saying about how silly the "conflict between magic and technology" trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicVersusTechnology) is, but not the rest. It sounds like an idea I'd like to talk about, but I don't feel like I can make an intelligent response to these ideas without understanding them more first.


I didn't intend discussion to go this direction, but who am I to say it shouldn't? Death of the OP (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor) and all that.


There are other factors for a Fantasy world that can inhibit (or prevent) technological progress - and the main one is if physics is not the same as real-world physics.
There are, generally speaking, two ways to handle such an explanation:
1. "The physics are just different. Guns don't work and magic does." This is lazy and shows a focus on handwaving over creating a meaningful explanation; in my opinion, it's worse than not having any explanation.
2. Provide a specific set of changes to physical laws (e.g, gunpowder not combusting), which will almost inevitably lead to unintended consequences if the reader thinks about it (oxidation reactions are important to...basically everything). This shows a bit more care than #1, but there's still a distinct handwaving focus.


Now alchemy is usually depicted as more of an art that a science - one cannot simply mix the ingredients in the right way and get a healing potion every time
But what if alchemy works? Either one can mix the same chemicals in the same way twenty times and get three different results (one of which is what you want, most are rubbish and one is dangerous) or what happens when one mixes chemicals depends on who does the mixing (so without magic to infuse the mixture you get junk).
If alchemy works then the very basis of chemistry does not work - it is not repeatable.
The question is, what all counts as an "alchemical reaction"? If it affects everything from metallurgy to medicine to basic chemistry, I don't see any way the entire world wouldn't be different, from stellar lifespans to geology to biology. That last one is easy to predict the effects unpredictable laws of physics would have on it, because it wouldn't exist. Every enzyme, structural protein, and organelle in every cell in every organism is a carefully-tuned machine, and changing how those machines interact with each other and the outside world on a regular basis would lead to chaos. That's not even getting started on how unpredictable chemical reactions make life basically impossible all on their own! This is definitely in category #2.


If I recall correctly, Twelve Kingdoms or some other fantasy novel series explained that the various metals and fossil fuel required for the development of modern technology are either extremely precious or do not exist at all in the high-fantasy universe, and that as a result, technological progression has been severely limited. I liked that idea.
That works to an extent, but you still have the whole problem of human innovation. Coal and oil can't be found? Alternate fuel sources can be found. Alternate paths will be taken. Life finds a way, and humans are—at heart—just organisms which found a way to evolve very, very quickly.


And it's not that hard to come up with an explanation. For instance, if Sorcery is a talent that is inherited down particular bloodlines, and those Sorcerers are the political rulers of the kingdoms, they will most likely prohibit the advancement of technology that may threaten their rule. No matter how many Fireballs you can hurl, a shotgun can still kill you...
I covered that point earlier. To summarize, technological development helps the rulers, too.


1. You're presuming science is a process in all possible worlds. In a more mythic world, it may not be.
2. The force stopping discovery may be sheer cultural inertia, like Africa or ancient China. One new discovery per three hundred years or what have you, or, similarly
3. The culture may only be interested in inventing new things like advanced pottery, and not anything 21st Century gaming nerds find charming.
1. The scientific method is effective in any world where effects consistently follow causes. It's not dependent on any law of physics, or chemistry, or anything.
2. "Cultural inertia" didn't stop discoveries in Africa or China. Africa didn't advance to European levels for a number of reasons, with the ultimate one being that the flora, fauna, and environment of much of Africa are comparatively unsuitable for agriculture, which stifled those critical early "stages" of development. As for China...it's complicated, but TL;DR they didn't stop developing at any point in their history, and there are other reasons for them not controlling the world the way Europe did, but no one can agree on which are the most important.
3. "Culture" isn't "interested" in inventing anything. People make inventions, and they don't change much. Even in a culture which upholds tradition as the highest value and condemns personal ambition, there will be people willing to create new innovations to better themselves, the world, or both.

[Chromascope3D]

......computers and hospitals yes, but I don't remember anyone in Naruto having a car. everyone just seems to walk on foot or take boats. did some filler episode have a car or something? Its been a while since I've had a good look at the series ever since Kaguya happened.

Okay, yeah, I was wrong about that. I thought I remembered there being actual modern roads for cars but I was wrong about that. But on that same note, they do have satellite dishes, which implies that they have satellites, which implies that they've figured out rocketry and spaceflight, so that's something. :P

[Slayn82]

An even more fundamental misunderstanding than the one addressed by the OP is the fact that in a world where magic is real a clear dividing line between magic and technology wouldn't even exist. It would be like Star Wars, where the most powerful energy weapons are powered by magic crystals, or Ghostbusters where ghosts can be fought with high tech machines, paychokinetic energy can be gathered and concentrated with a device somewhat analogous to a giant antenna, the fifth circle of hell impinging on your city's sewer system is an excellent opportunity to gather otherworldly materials for experimental analysis, and that analysis in turn may point you towards inventing a device that lets you bring statues to life and direct their movement with a modified nintendo controller

I agree with this line of thought. Bonus points for including Ghostbusters II in tour arguments.

I had a thread about magic and technology on this forum (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?134910-Ideas-for-using-Magic-as-Technology), along with jseah. Illusion based computers, Wall of Fire based power plants, zombie mills.

I think the biggest obstacles to technologic development would be:

1) Meddling from Gods who disapprove some fields of magic research - evil necromancer hunts, banishment of arcane diviners as false prophets, denouncing conjurers for considering with demons, Mystra's chosens going after wizard's that develop over destructive magic, etc.

2) Overly stratified arcane societies, with constant rivalries between groups of wizards (and their apprentices), and little respect for those outside the magical practices. Basically, Thay from Forgotten Realms. The idea in 3rd edition that they became an "enterprise" was quite amazing from the viewpoint of magic development in my opinion.

[Khedrac]

The question is, what all counts as an "alchemical reaction"? If it affects everything from metallurgy to medicine to basic chemistry, I don't see any way the entire world wouldn't be different, from stellar lifespans to geology to biology. That last one is easy to predict the effects unpredictable laws of physics would have on it, because it wouldn't exist. Every enzyme, structural protein, and organelle in every cell in every organism is a carefully-tuned machine, and changing how those machines interact with each other and the outside world on a regular basis would lead to chaos. That's not even getting started on how unpredictable chemical reactions make life basically impossible all on their own! This is definitely in category #2.
But the entire world is different - simply because some people can use magic and some people can't.
The assumption that any change must mess with physics in a consistent way (so same effect on things throughout different scales and places) is rooted in conventional physics that doesn't necessarily apply (or even necessarily does not apply) in a world with magic.
Once magic enteres the scene the assumption that the same input has the same output (usually) goes away.
With this gone you cannot safely say "ah but changing that will have this effect" as the assumption linking cause and effect is no longer valid.
If you want that sort of linked cause and effect and tracing everything to physicis, then yes, technology will arise was it did in the real world - but you will also lose the magic - because it cannot be explained by the physics you are insisting on hanging on to.
Now, you can have a fantasy world with this sort of technology (e.g. the Dresden Saga by Jim Butcher) but there is no requirement for it, and it is not simplying saying "because magic" - instead it is saying "because not physics" - you don't have to explain it, it is fantasy.

Oh, as for the question "what is an "alchemical reaction?" - I would say it is one where you do not always get the same result from the same input, or it is one that requires "magic" (whatever that is) to reproduce. The thing is, if you want all of real chemistry to work, then you are really limiting what magic and alchemy do.
It can be that way (Dresden saga again) but it does not have to be, and if it is not that way then it does not have to stop everything from working because the basis of everything working is no longer conventional physics.

[Slayn82]

I disagree with you, Khedrac. Modern Technology isn't so much due to Physic's as due to the capacity of the human mind to correlate physical phenomenons through Math. Magical societies that could develop ways to quantify variables on their magical phenomena would develop gradually technology adequate to their own needs. Not even advanced math is necessary.

Like I heard another day, that spellcasters in a certain scenario love to use wands and staffs because they help them to focus their spells at the right points in space - those tools would serve them as measuring instruments. Or that communications in certain realms are really great because Wizards use their familiars as training aides to lots of other birds.

Meanwhile, Orc warriors used axes, mostly to help them create barricades to protect against magic, and employed Ogres to carry and rapid load siege weapons. Goblins would carry rotten eggs, so enemies could be marked to be tracked latter by hounds, and invisibility would be less effective if anyone could easily smell your presence in the room. Coal and herbs that created lots of smoke would be throw to break a spellcaster view of the battle, so warriors could close in. Zombies and disposable troops would be sent at the first wave, so either mages threw fireballs or armies would be in grappling range.

Point is: technology isn't exactly the same thing as Physics.

[factotum]

I've been thinking about this, and I wonder if the main issue comes from LOTR. In Tolkien's world there's a definite sense of fading--the people at the end of the Third Age are simply less awesome than the people from 2000 years earlier, and that also extends to their technology; Minas Tirith was just a guard tower to the men of Westernesse who built it, but to the people of Gondor at the end of the Third Age it's their largest city. Swords like Glamdring and Orcrist are simply not made anymore, and ancient ruins like the Argonath are far more impressive feats of engineering than can be achieved "now".

Since a lot of modern fantasy borrows heavily from LOTR they include the same ancient structures and so on, but with rather less justification.

[Khedrac]

I disagree with you, Khedrac. Modern Technology isn't so much due to Physic's as due to the capacity of the human mind to correlate physical phenomenons through Math. Magical societies that could develop ways to quantify variables on their magical phenomena would develop gradually technology adequate to their own needs. Not even advanced math is necessary.

Like I heard another day, that spellcasters in a certain scenario love to use wands and staffs because they help them to focus their spells at the right points in space - those tools would serve them as measuring instruments. Or that communications in certain realms are really great because Wizards use their familiars as training aides to lots of other birds.

Meanwhile, Orc warriors used axes, mostly to help them create barricades to protect against magic, and employed Ogres to carry and rapid load siege weapons. Goblins would carry rotten eggs, so enemies could be marked to be tracked latter by hounds, and invisibility would be less effective if anyone could easily smell your presence in the room. Coal and herbs that created lots of smoke would be throw to break a spellcaster view of the battle, so warriors could close in. Zombies and disposable troops would be sent at the first wave, so either mages threw fireballs or armies would be in grappling range.

Point is: technology isn't exactly the same thing as Physics.
I agree with all you say (and it goes further than anything I had thought of, and I still agree with it).

What I was trying to state (badly) was people assume that technology of a form we recognise is possible - and I think that adding magic to the universe makes this assumption invalid. Technology may be possible, and then, you are right it should happen, but it may also not be possible in which case is won't.

What I strongly disagree with is the assertion that if technology is impossible (because the interactions are not reliable) then nothing else is possible. If the fundamental elements are fire, earth, air and water (and possibly darkness, wood, metal and/or void) then the logic being used to say that life is not possible is invalid. It isn't life as we know it - but it is still life as we recognize it.
Also, given how many different forms of the elements there seem to be, it starts to make sense that one cannot repeat certain combinations. One needs "earth" - but which "earth"? - It is all just "earth" yet manages to be different.

[danzibr]

Okay, yeah, I was wrong about that. I thought I remembered there being actual modern roads for cars but I was wrong about that. But on that same note, they do have satellite dishes, which implies that they have satellites, which implies that they've figured out rocketry and spaceflight, so that's something. :P
Ha, I never considered that implication :P

[Slayn82]

What I strongly disagree with is the assertion that if technology is impossible (because the interactions are not reliable) then nothing else is possible. If the fundamental elements are fire, earth, air and water (and possibly darkness, wood, metal and/or void) then the logic being used to say that life is not possible is invalid. It isn't life as we know it - but it is still life as we recognize it.
Also, given how many different forms of the elements there seem to be, it starts to make sense that one cannot repeat certain combinations. One needs "earth" - but which "earth"? - It is all just "earth" yet manages to be different.

Kinda like Erfworld, where native people have solid eyes, don't bleed, and live under a very different set of natural rules, but still go on in their business. They are alive, think, feel emotions, even if their reactions to things are under an alien logic.

A very old webcomic a i read once, who i think did something pretty interesting about this, was Unicorn Jelly (The art is a turn off to some, but i think it's cool, in a very retro way).

It started like a very steriotipical medieval world, if a bit different. Monsters are creatures of crystal and slime. Mankind lived in very fragile spots, because most of the land was very hostile, and dangerous storms could destroy entire cities.

Turns out, that place was a very different universe, where mankind fled after the end of our own - and mankind managed to cause a cataclism that was periodically destroying and rebuilding the worlds in that universe. Strange magical effects happened because of the interaction between matter from our universe and the matter native to that universe.

A small link for a scene I always liked : http://unicornjelly.com/mapleeson.html

[HandofShadows]

Kinda like Erfworld, where native people have solid eyes, don't bleed, and live under a very different set of natural rules, but still go on in their business. They are alive, think, feel emotions, even if their reactions to things are under an alien logic.


Some of them have solid eyes, others have normal eyes. And while Erfworlders don't bleed, the main character still does, so it's not physics. Also there is a strong sense that Erfworld is artificial so it's not the best example.

[tantric]

this was a major issue for me while developing my bantu based fantasy setting. magic is technology here. in the same way that every item we use today is improved by technology, so are their things by magic. chamber pots dehydrate and sterilize waste into inoffensive fertilizer - no sewage running down the streets. solar charged glow crystals light streets and houses. windows are screened by transparent fabrics. pots cook food, or ferment it, or preserve it. signal drums serve as telegraphs. and their medical technology is far better than ours.


When the waKoka first came to Ubantu, they were an early iron age society. Mundane technology has improved since then, especially in such areas as watercraft and papermaking, but most advances are due to the application of magic. The first practical magic the waKoka learned came from an Aardvark Irimu named Bibi Musso-koroni. This magic uses a burin, an engraving tool, made from an iron needle with a ball of gold at one end. The burin is twisted and must be enchanted with certain songs, then plunged while still hot into the jugular of a sacrificial goat. There after it will write in gold until the ball is used up, wherein it must be re-enchanted. Using this tool, the 'kimusso', she taught the refugees a few simple sigils related to the elements. She made glow-crystals from quartz, heat-stones from river rocks and laid the sigils for air and purity on pots so that they would dehydrate and sterilize their contents. Such items are important to life in Ubantu, as the spirits of the land do not tolerate clear-cutting of trees or the open cesspits that normally accompany humans cities (especially camps of 20,000 that appear overnight). Items made in this manner would function for a few uses then need to be recharged, normally from the sun.

Magical beadwork grew from the sigils taught to the early settlers. In time the number of sigils was expanded and the language greatly complexified, becoming kiGanga, the language of knowledge. KiGanga is not just forms, but colors, patterns and relationships - a basic understanding is no more complex than any script, but true mastery can take years of study. More than a natural language, it most resembles the creation and folding of proteins. Beadwork makes a variety of magical pots which can dehydrate and preserve food, cook it, ferment milk instantly, resist breaking or impurities and other such uses. Beaded clothing lead to armor that repels blows and magic. Beaded jewelry preserves health, repels black magic and even gives the illusion of beauty, though such item are easily recognizable. The main advantage of beads over burin magic is that beads can store much more power, enabling them to function constantly by recharging and discharing simulatneously.

[Thrudd]

I think it is a mistake to assume any fictional society would or must proceed in a manner similar to our own regarding technological advancement. This is even before addressing the matter of possibly different laws of physics in a fantasy universe.
Just because our ancestors adopted certain solutions to problems does not mean those solutions were inevitable or that they were the only possible solutions.

Many key scientific discoveries in our own world were accidental or happenstance byproducts of a solution to another problem which itself could have been missed altogether had a different solution been used. Nothing about our scientific history was inevitable.

A fantasy world with mostly stagnant material sciences for long periods of time is not necessarily an unbelievable situation. We are all products of an era of insanely rapid scientific development, accustomed to seeing multiple changes and constant new discoveries within our own lifetimes. This is an anomaly compared to the way our ancestors lived throughout most of human history.

[Fri]

There's the harry turtledove short story "Road not Taken" for example.

In that story, humanity got invaded by alien force with gravity manipulation tech, but it turned out all of their other technology is way inferior compared to human's. It turned out the secret of gravity manipulation is so simple that most other civilization got it in their equivalent of age of sails and let them build aircraft, spaceships, and even ftl at age of sail, but the application is so limited and it's so weird that their (at that point) scientific theorems couldn't accommodate it so their scientific method doesn't advance much. It's basically magic. But mankind somehow missed the development of gravity manipulation tech and instead developed a very wide range of other techs, heavy industries, medicines, computers, nuclear power, etc.

[Bohandas]

A brainwave, perhaps the more moving parts an item has the more difficult it might be to put an enchantment on it

[Slayn82]

A non scientific civilization could fall prey to group thinking, customs and traditions blocking the development of innovations, specially if a well accepted axioms of magic/science were enforced by authorities.

In our world, in ancient Greece, Democritus and Leucipus proposed the existence of atoms, of different types, to explain the changes in matter. But the ideas of the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Aether, as presented by Empedocle and Aristotle, were more accepted - due to factors as Plato really disliking Democritus ideas, while Aristotle's prestige and influence was enormous in Ancient Greece. Also, ideas of elements similar to Aristotle's were well accepted in other cultures.

Meanwhile, the actual field of dispute for those models was on the development of mathematics, astronomy and music - and the desire for the existence of Harmony and natural order was very tempting, so people created complex essays supporting the Aristotelian model of Cosmos.

The dispute between the ideas of Leucipus/Democritus on Materialism/Mechanicism (Matter is the basis of nature/ the investigation of the causes of things) and the Plato/Aristotelis's dualism/Teleology (existence of the mind or spirit/ the focus of the investigation of the purpose of things) was heavily in favor of the latter. The basic presuppositions of things like Alchemy, Astrology resulted from their essays. Only much latter, as advances on mining and metalwork came, that the ideas of Democritus saw a resurgence.

----

There were places in the medieval period renowned by the quality of their steel, due to some trace amounts of other metals that existed in their local mines. Those impurities often made the metal trickier to process. Even if other smiths stole the well guarded secrets of processing that metal, without a supply of ore from those mines it wasn't possible to achieve the same results.

Enter the slow development of geology and chemistry, appropriating tools from the alchemy to advance the metallurgy.

---

In fantasy, mining and smithing are Dwarf things. But Dwarfs are very traditional. Also, very reserved with strangers. They sometimes have a deep distrust of magic. And are said to sit in cities full of Gold and Gems.

Dwarfs could very well have advanced metallurgy, engineering, mechanics and chemistry, creating better metalic alloys, rivets, steam engines, explosives, paints, dyes and acids. Gold and Silver painting would be favorite, to spread light in the subterranean environments. Crystal veins with lesser economic viability would be carefully exposed to decorate their cities. Steam engines offering a way to pump water away from their mines.

Dwarfs and Elfs could be major exporters of clothing - while the Elfs sold works in Leather, Silk (harvesting Giant Spiders?), and animal skins (mostly luxury articles), Dwarfs focused in producing commoner's clothing, buying cotton and dyeing it blue, grey, brown or red.

[Bohandas]

Since you mention Plato that brings up another important point, the existence of objective forms of good and evil and other abstracts would turn much of what we consider philosophy into an experimental science

[GreatWyrmGold]

1) Meddling from Gods who disapprove some fields of magic research - evil necromancer hunts, banishment of arcane diviners as false prophets, denouncing conjurers for considering with demons, Mystra's chosens going after wizard's that develop over destructive magic, etc.
2) Overly stratified arcane societies, with constant rivalries between groups of wizards (and their apprentices), and little respect for those outside the magical practices. Basically, Thay from Forgotten Realms. The idea in 3rd edition that they became an "enterprise" was quite amazing from the viewpoint of magic development in my opinion.
1. Unless all of the gods get together and agree that high-tech mortals are bad, I don't see that happening.
2. I see that causing more innovation, not less. Nothing encourages development like an enemy!


But the entire world is different - simply because some people can use magic and some people can't.
Wrong. In a typical fantasy setting, everything required for a medieval society to work—from respiration and combustion to agriculture and predation to metallurgy and beyond—works exactly as it does in the real world. Ignoring these similarities and saying that everything must be different is fallacious in the extreme.


The assumption that any change must mess with physics in a consistent way (so same effect on things throughout different scales and places) is rooted in conventional physics that doesn't necessarily apply (or even necessarily does not apply) in a world with magic.
Once magic enteres the scene the assumption that the same input has the same output (usually) goes away.
With this gone you cannot safely say "ah but changing that will have this effect" as the assumption linking cause and effect is no longer valid.
There are three points I want to make.
1. Why does adding magic mean that cause and effect go out the window? I'm having trouble thinking of a work where the world works like that, even just for the magic.
2. Expanding on that, pretty much every fantasy book, movie, game, and so on is very consistent on a physical level. If you let go of a rock, it will fall down. If you stick a spear in someone, they will bleed and probably die. If you drink a lot of alcohol, your inhibitions and rational ability will vanish. If a mage of sufficient skill and power casts a fireball, something's going to burn (perhaps not the intended something, if the mage has been drinking a lot of alcohol). Ignoring these consistencies is, again, deeply fallacious.
3. You misunderstand my point. Life cannot effing exist without a consistent set of physics. I mean, I guess you could have a sack of meat puppeted by magic, but there's no reason to think that it would resemble life as we know it as much as it always does, and even less to expect the life to act as consistently as it always is.


If you want that sort of linked cause and effect and tracing everything to physicis, then yes, technology will arise was it did in the real world - but you will also lose the magic - because it cannot be explained by the physics you are insisting on hanging on to.
Now, you can have a fantasy world with this sort of technology (e.g. the Dresden Saga by Jim Butcher) but there is no requirement for it, and it is not simplying saying "because magic" - instead it is saying "because not physics" - you don't have to explain it, it is fantasy.
Oh, as for the question "what is an "alchemical reaction?" - I would say it is one where you do not always get the same result from the same input, or it is one that requires "magic" (whatever that is) to reproduce. The thing is, if you want all of real chemistry to work, then you are really limiting what magic and alchemy do.
It can be that way (Dresden saga again) but it does not have to be, and if it is not that way then it does not have to stop everything from working because the basis of everything working is no longer conventional physics.
You know, for someone claiming that I'm limiting magic, you seem pretty keen on limiting the worlds it can exist in.
Magic doesn't require fundamentally reqriting the laws of physics. You don't need to throw everything out—you can just add something on. It fits much better with how fantasy stories always work, and also allows technology to exist.

What you're doing falls into an ugly gray area. You're cluttering up the lore of this hypothetical world, but in a way which is too inconsistent and poorly-thought-out to actually expand said lore in any meaningful way. Worse, insisting that nothing is consistent ruins your ability to use anything in a plot. As per Sanderson's First Law:
"An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic."
The same is true of anything else. If nothing acts reliably, nothing can be understood, and an author's ability to solve conflict with anything plummets.


I think it is a mistake to assume any fictional society would or must proceed in a manner similar to our own regarding technological advancement. This is even before addressing the matter of possibly different laws of physics in a fantasy universe.
Just because our ancestors adopted certain solutions to problems does not mean those solutions were inevitable or that they were the only possible solutions.
The problem is that in many fantasy worlds, no solutions are adapted.


A fantasy world with mostly stagnant material sciences for long periods of time is not necessarily an unbelievable situation. We are all products of an era of insanely rapid scientific development, accustomed to seeing multiple changes and constant new discoveries within our own lifetimes. This is an anomaly compared to the way our ancestors lived throughout most of human history.
Wrong. The changes in the world weren't always as visible as they are today—and they're even less visible looking back to anyone but a historian—but there were always advancements. The only times when any group of people hasn't been innovating new solutions for problems are times when said group of people are facing extreme struggles to simply survive; these conditions are extremely rare.


In our world, in ancient Greece, Democritus and Leucipus proposed the existence of atoms, of different types, to explain the changes in matter. But the ideas of the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Aether, as presented by Empedocle and Aristotle, were more accepted - due to factors as Plato really disliking Democritus ideas, while Aristotle's prestige and influence was enormous in Ancient Greece. Also, ideas of elements similar to Aristotle's were well accepted in other cultures.
Meanwhile, the actual field of dispute for those models was on the development of mathematics, astronomy and music - and the desire for the existence of Harmony and natural order was very tempting, so people created complex essays supporting the Aristotelian model of Cosmos.
The dispute between the ideas of Leucipus/Democritus on Materialism/Mechanicism (Matter is the basis of nature/ the investigation of the causes of things) and the Plato/Aristotelis's dualism/Teleology (existence of the mind or spirit/ the focus of the investigation of the purpose of things) was heavily in favor of the latter. The basic presuppositions of things like Alchemy, Astrology resulted from their essays. Only much latter, as advances on mining and metalwork came, that the ideas of Democritus saw a resurgence.
Democritus's atoms have as much to do with Dalton's as Aristotle's elements have to do with Mendeleev's. In fact, Democritus's atoms were atoms of Aristotle's elements. Democritus's theories were rejected not simply because of Aristotle's influence, but because of his philosophical arguments, such as how the existence of a void violated physical properties as they were understood. Democritus had no evidence; he was merely trying to reconcile two competing schools of thought, that of Hero****us (who believed that all existence is change) and Parmenides (who believed that change is an illusion).
The idea that ancient people could come up with an atomic model which is anywhere near reality before their society had developed the ability to gather evidence for atoms is fundamentally absurd. It took millennia for humanity to develop the methods to find evidence for or against any theory of matter (the debates of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, etc, were purely theoretical). Once those methods were developed, the evidence gathered, and properly-supported theories constructed, the old theories of matter dropped off of the scientific stage and faded from the public mind (save for flavor in fantasy, of course).
TL;DR: Your argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the debate between atomism and non-atomism.


Since you mention Plato that brings up another important point, the existence of objective forms of good and evil and other abstracts would turn much of what we consider philosophy into an experimental science
Well, not really. There are a few mistakes in this logic, the greatest of which is assuming that "objective" good and evil would be accepted as such by philosophers. As it happens, there has been a philosophical argument that good comes from God for milennia (duh), which was challenged even without challenging the existence or authority of said god. The most famous of these is the Euthyphro Problem—the question of if things are right because the gods command them, or do the gods command things because they are right, and the implications of both answers. Philosophers can argue about the nature of good and evil until the cows come home without ever questioning the Divine Command Theory.
There are further problems which would come from many settings' "objective sources" of choice. For instance, in classical mythology, most D&D settings, etc, there are a number of deities of more or less equal standing, each of whom commands different things, and many of whom are at odds. Who says that Pelor is good and Nerull evil? Is it that detect evil spell from your local cleric of Kord, or a paladin of Heironeous, both of whom also register as "good" according to said spells? Hm.

[Slayn82]

1. Unless all of the gods get together and agree that high-tech mortals are bad, I don't see that happening.
2. I see that causing more innovation, not less. Nothing encourages development like an enemy!

1 depends of the setting and the story being developed. Mystra in Forgotten Realms deliberately restrained certain areas of development of magic.

2 - sharing information is a powerful factor for development. Factionalism makes a lot of effort be lost to sabotage, assassination, or secrecy. Enemies may provide motivation, but otherwise cause more hindrance. When it comes to innovate and development, Collaborating research > trade secrets.



Wrong. In a typical fantasy setting, everything required for a medieval society to work—from respiration and combustion to agriculture and predation to metallurgy and beyond—works exactly as it does in the real world. Ignoring these similarities and saying that everything must be different is fallacious in the extreme.

Or is another direction for the fantastic elements. If your fire magic allows people to heat metal easily, coal mining may be unprofitable. Techniques for working Iron without coal will be very different for their smiths. If the availability of good steel is changed, and a major trade item like coal becomes irrelevant, suddenly, dramatic changes would happen. Chance of gunpowder discovery plummets, for instance.

And then, there's the idea that a world created by Gods could follow their own natural laws distinct from our own, like an elaborate exercise of Descartes Daemon. Our recipe for gunpowder could fail in that world because "the developer disabled that function" - yes, literally by God's Fiat.



The idea that ancient people could come up with an atomic model which is anywhere near reality before their society had developed the ability to gather evidence for atoms is fundamentally absurd. It took millennia for humanity to develop the methods to find evidence for or against any theory of matter (the debates of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, etc, were purely theoretical). Once those methods were developed, the evidence gathered, and properly-supported theories constructed, the old theories of matter dropped off of the scientific stage and faded from the public mind (save for flavor in fantasy, of course).
TL;DR: Your argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the debate between atomism and non-atomism.

My argument was about debate being possibly railroaded and one sided in favor of authority and consensus. Both theories weren't based on empirical evidence. But Plato didn't like atomism. The argument went as far as "The nature abhors Vacuum", and that was a massive arse pull. Having that criticism really damaged the prestige and dissemination of Democritus ideas, even if they were at the time a minor departure to the current understanding.

At least Aristotle moved on to try to understand reality by the experience of senses. Also, even a primitive concept as the acceptance of the idea of matter being discontinuous, with discrete atoms and existence of vacuum between them could be a powerful model to explain things like metallic expansion with heat and hasten a bit the development of chemistry.



Well, not really. There are a few mistakes in this logic, the greatest of which is assuming that "objective" good and evil would be accepted as such by philosophers. As it happens, there has been a philosophical argument that good comes from God for milennia (duh), which was challenged even without challenging the existence or authority of said god. The most famous of these is the Euthyphro Problem—the question of if things are right because the gods command them, or do the gods command things because they are right, and the implications of both answers. Philosophers can argue about the nature of good and evil until the cows come home without ever questioning the Divine Command Theory.
There are further problems which would come from many settings' "objective sources" of choice. For instance, in classical mythology, most D&D settings, etc, there are a number of deities of more or less equal standing, each of whom commands different things, and many of whom are at odds. Who says that Pelor is good and Nerull evil? Is it that detect evil spell from your local cleric of Kord, or a paladin of Heironeous, both of whom also register as "good" according to said spells? Hm.

Well, one group of gods send your soul after death to a Garden full of light, feasts and music. The other group sends you to a place of eternal war. And a third sends you to a place of eternal war and you are the food and the music is the sound of your screaming. Pick your choice.

Some guys will call Valhalla a paradise, and Celestia a torment, and rather settle for fighting in Hell. People can be weird like that.

[Bohandas]

...sharing information is a powerful factor for development...

Two things here

1.) in many settings magic enables instant telecommunication of a sort that wasn't seen in the real world until the invention of the telegraph

2.) More importantly, information in general is crucial to development. Think of what could be done with just augury, or comprehend languages, or deathwatch, or Scholar's Touch


Or is another direction for the fantastic elements. If your fire magic allows people to heat metal easily, coal mining may be unprofitable. Techniques for working Iron without coal will be very different for their smiths. If the availability of good steel is changed, and a major trade item like coal becomes irrelevant, suddenly, dramatic changes would happen. Chance of gunpowder discovery plummets, for instance.

It also allows them to skip right past centuries of development in anything that requires heat

[Leewei]

As a species, modern humans have been around for about a million years. We've had metalworking for several thousands of years. The Industrial Revolution itself is less than 200 years old. That's a lot of time without appreciable advancement of technology.

Many things could account for the lack of progress in a fantasy setting.

1) Magic is unscientific. The most powerful people in society would see no value to something such as scientific method, nor would those seeking prestige.

2) Lack of fossil fuels. Being limited to charcoal rather than coal or kerosene would be very impactful.

3) Scarcity of material or knowledge due to magic. Powerful wizards guard their secrets jealously. Technology such as the printing press may have been suppressed to keep grimoires out of the hands of peasants. Sulfur calls demons, and so is kept out of its purest form in all but minute quantities. Industry is dirty, attracting the wrath of ents and elementals.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm not sure what the problem is here. It took 100,000+ years of anatomically modern humans running around to get to current tech levels, why would fantasy stories have to be set in the last few hundred years' equivalence of Eurasian civilization?

There is already huge subgenres devoted to modern tech fantasy (urban fantasy), why push to eliminate other subgenres?

[factotum]

I'm not sure what the problem is here. It took 100,000+ years of anatomically modern humans running around to get to current tech levels, why would fantasy stories have to be set in the last few hundred years' equivalence of Eurasian civilization?

Well, because they generally *are* set in that period? In a typical fantasy we have guys wandering around in swords and plate armour, all of which are typical technologies of the European mediaeval period.

[TheManicMonocle]

I have a few ideas for this,

Note that in the game of thrones world winter lasts for ten years or so, meaning that the resources required to improve technology can be seen as a waste when those resources are better put towards simply surviving a ten year winter

Alternatively wizards or some other ruling class might not want technology to be prevalent. Often the lack of technology is presented as an accident but what if that lack is just a way to keep power over the peasants? After all, as guns became more prevalent in our world, monarchs became less so

[Tvtyrant]

Well, because they generally *are* set in that period? In a typical fantasy we have guys wandering around in swords and plate armour, all of which are typical technologies of the European mediaeval period.

Are they though? The entire Anne Rice derived genre is "fantasy mixed with modernish technology" and is if anything more mainstream and popular than high fantasy is.

If the OP didn't know that quite large genre existed then here is information on it.

If the complaint is that some people write and read sword and sorcery then basically my advice is going to be to ignore it. There are hundreds of books doing what you want to read, ignore the ones that don't and let the people who enjoy them enjoy them.

I like my settings to be about swords and giants, I don't want to read guns and sorcery or laser guns and sorcery, but both of those are quite well established genres and I don't have any problems with the people who do.

[GreatWyrmGold]

[S]haring information is a powerful factor for development. Factionalism makes a lot of effort be lost to sabotage, assassination, or secrecy. Enemies may provide motivation, but otherwise cause more hindrance. When it comes to innovate and development, Collaborating research > trade secrets.
Factionalism means that you're sharing information with others in your faction, or at the very least with your students. Not to mention that various methods of intrigue, from theft to reverse-engineering to bribery, allow information to flow between factions. Development would be slower than if the factions were motivated and united, but it hardly stops progress in its tracks. (The classical example from history is Europe versus China.)
As an aside, I'd like to know how sabotage and assassination would hinder progress. Unless you're assuming that everyone would keep all of their information inside their own heads and their singular device in question (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup)?


Or is another direction for the fantastic elements. If your fire magic allows people to heat metal easily, coal mining may be unprofitable. Techniques for working Iron without coal will be very different for their smiths.
Um...the reason coal was important for metal-working was because of how well it heats metal. Fire magic being as good at heating metal (and other things) means that fire magic would approximately take the place of coal as the world develops, not that coal-based developments don't happen.


If the availability of good steel is changed, and a major trade item like coal becomes irrelevant, suddenly, dramatic changes would happen. Chance of gunpowder discovery plummets, for instance.
Even ignoring that, what connection does steel have to gunpowder?


And then, there's the idea that a world created by Gods could follow their own natural laws distinct from our own, like an elaborate exercise of Descartes Daemon. Our recipe for gunpowder could fail in that world because "the developer disabled that function" - yes, literally by God's Fiat.
That's an unsatisfying explanation. I don't see any reason for an author to add that into their world.


My argument was about debate being possibly railroaded and one sided in favor of authority and consensus. Both theories weren't based on empirical evidence. But Plato didn't like atomism. The argument went as far as "The nature abhors Vacuum", and that was a massive arse pull. Having that criticism really damaged the prestige and dissemination of Democritus ideas, even if they were at the time a minor departure to the current understanding.
At least Aristotle moved on to try to understand reality by the experience of senses. Also, even a primitive concept as the acceptance of the idea of matter being discontinuous, with discrete atoms and existence of vacuum between them could be a powerful model to explain things like metallic expansion with heat and hasten a bit the development of chemistry.
Again, the moment evidence propped up for matter not being discontinuous, science abandoned theories reliant on matter being continuous. Belief in atomism wouldn't mean accurate chemistry would have taken off sooner, just that it would have been preceded by a different set of inaccurate and useless beliefs which bear more superficial resemblance to reality.
You're not actually proving anything aside from the fickleness of beliefs completely ungrounded in reality.


Well, one group of gods send your soul after death to a Garden full of light, feasts and music. The other group sends you to a place of eternal war. And a third sends you to a place of eternal war and you are the food and the music is the sound of your screaming. Pick your choice.
Some guys will call Valhalla a paradise, and Celestia a torment, and rather settle for fighting in Hell. People can be weird like that.
...What's the relevance of this statement to my point?


As a species, modern humans have been around for about a million years. We've had metalworking for several thousands of years. The Industrial Revolution itself is less than 200 years old. That's a lot of time without appreciable advancement of technology.
...If you ignore all of the developments which happened during those lengthy time periods, then yes, we hadn't made many developments before the modern era. But if you look at actual freaking history, you'll see that innovation is the norm, not the exception. Yes, innovations became more extreme as humanity gathered in larger groups, gained a better understanding of the universe, and made new tools to innovate with, but innovation never stopped.


1) Magic is unscientific. The most powerful people in society would see no value to something such as scientific method, nor would those seeking prestige.
Point the first: What do you mean by the claim that magic is "unscientific"? If casting fireball correctly consistently creates a ball of fire, that spell is subject to the scientific method as surely as a cannon. If it doesn't, you'd have a hard time calling it a fireball spell. Now, it's possible to write magic that seems impossible to control or predict, but that doesn't make for a very good story, and I'm not convinced that something truly unpredictable could exist. There are a lot of things humanity couldn't imagine predicting a few centuries ago that we now understand perfectly well.
Point the second: Anything that is consistent can be exploited scientifically. Anything that can be exploited scientifically is potentially profitable. Powerful people and those seeking prestige will always gravitate towards ways to profit.


2) Lack of fossil fuels. Being limited to charcoal rather than coal or kerosene would be very impactful.
That would delay development, but life finds a way—and what are humans, if not life, evolving and adapting in their own way? We wouldn't have steam engines powered by coal, but we would have something.


3) Scarcity of material or knowledge due to magic. Powerful wizards guard their secrets jealously. Technology such as the printing press may have been suppressed to keep grimoires out of the hands of peasants. Sulfur calls demons, and so is kept out of its purest form in all but minute quantities. Industry is dirty, attracting the wrath of ents and elementals.
There are two ideas here. First the idea that wizards would try to suppress knowledge, and second is the idea that various elements required for developments are discouraged by incidental behaviors of supernatural forces.
The first idea doesn't resonate with me. They might try, but that hasn't worked particularly well for much of anyone without absolute control over a populace—and absolute control is really hard to pull off. Look at how well North Korea manages.
The second idea has some merit; it could actually be a worthwhile explanation if properly thought-out and explored.


I have a few ideas for this,
Note that in the game of thrones world winter lasts for ten years or so, meaning that the resources required to improve technology can be seen as a waste when those resources are better put towards simply surviving a ten year winter
First off, I'm not sure what the show says, but in the books ten years is on the long side for a winter. Second and more importantly...they've got that sorted out, and have for generations. There are clearly sufficient resources for a large, thriving population with an incredibly wealthy nobility and large armies, so there shouldn't be sufficient strife to preclude innovation. (To say nothing how how plate armor and crossbows and so on would require such stable, innovative societies to exist...)


Alternatively wizards or some other ruling class might not want technology to be prevalent. Often the lack of technology is presented as an accident but what if that lack is just a way to keep power over the peasants? After all, as guns became more prevalent in our world, monarchs became less so
That didn't stop monarchs for using guns. And the comparison is a bit flawed—it took centuries for the monarchs to start falling, with guns being but one of many contributing factors to that happening.


Are they though? The entire Anne Rice derived genre is "fantasy mixed with modernish technology" and is if anything more mainstream and popular than high fantasy is.
Let's take a look at Reddit's list of top fantasy novels (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1ynqcm/the_top_rfantasy_novels_of_all_time_results_thread/). Just about all of those are high fantasy. I'm familiar with urban fantasy, but not only is it less prevalent (and less prominent), but it doesn't address what I'm actually talking about.


If the complaint is that some people write and read sword and sorcery then basically my advice is going to be to ignore it.
sigh

I'd like to make one thing clear—this doesn't make the standard fantasy setting bad, even if it's kept unrealistically static. That just makes it unrealistic.
Is it too much to ask that people read to the end of my posts before complaining about them?

[Leewei]

...But if you look at actual freaking history, you'll see that innovation is the norm, not the exception...
I'm a huge fan of actual freaking history. Small, incremental improvements in technology are certainly normal. Emergence of entirely new technologies are a different matter entirely. These occurrences involved access to knowledge from other cultures, formal education, and the ability to work without worrying about starving to death.


Point the first: What do you mean by the claim that magic is "unscientific"? If casting fireball correctly consistently creates a ball of fire, that spell is subject to the scientific method as surely as a cannon. If it doesn't, you'd have a hard time calling it a fireball spell. Now, it's possible to write magic that seems impossible to control or predict, but that doesn't make for a very good story, and I'm not convinced that something truly unpredictable could exist. There are a lot of things humanity couldn't imagine predicting a few centuries ago that we now understand perfectly well.

I meant unscientific as irreproducible by others, as in art. Two wizards may cast fireball spells, but they do it differently, and the spells themselves are visibly different.


Point the second: Anything that is consistent can be exploited scientifically. Anything that can be exploited scientifically is potentially profitable. Powerful people and those seeking prestige will always gravitate towards ways to profit.
Engineers work with others to improve and protect their communities. They need people to carry out their tasks, and to employ them. There is no such guarantee for wizards. Need gold? Transmute a modicum of lead, then get back to becoming immortal. (In most fiction, wizards greatly prefer knowledge to gold.)


That would delay development, but life finds a way—and what are humans, if not life, evolving and adapting in their own way? We wouldn't have steam engines powered by coal, but we would have something.
Unless you can name something specific, the best energy sources I can think of are charcoal, or perhaps dried manure. It's sufficient for metalworking, but not for any real transportation capability. See my subsequent idea for why chopping down a forest could be a very bad idea in a fantasy world.


...The second idea has some merit; it could actually be a worthwhile explanation if properly thought-out and explored.
Heading off on a tangent, have you ever noticed how well humans get along with other races in fantasy literature? Our own history seems very, very different. If humans are struggling, they inevitably seem to start preying on other communities, especially if they are noticeably different. You'd think that any fantasy world would be in perpetual war as these groups set upon one another.

[Tvtyrant]

In your own list numbers 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 and 30 all involve technological development and scientific magic. Heck, the Wheel of Times starts in the 100s year war era and ends with trains and cannons in a 5 year period.

[Lemmy]

Most often, magic is presented as a force of nature that can be studied, harvested and applied in a myriad of different ways, like electricity. The use of magic is technology. There shouldn't be an actual divide in it except in a "fields of study" kind of thing. After all, we don't separate, say, biological engineering and nuclear energy into "technology" and "bio-magic".

That said... I do tend to prefer settings where magic and conventional technology can coexist and develop side-by-side as different, but connected parts of science.

[Bohandas]

I'm not sure what the problem is here. It took 100,000+ years of anatomically modern humans running around to get to current tech levels, why would fantasy stories have to be set in the last few hundred years' equivalence of Eurasian civilization?

The presence of magic and immortal superintelligent gods would speed all that along though. If Hermes was real then ancient greece probably would've had the atom bomb.

[Tvtyrant]

The presence of magic and immortal superintelligent gods would speed all that along though. If Hermes was real then ancient greece probably would've had the atom bomb.

Except Universalism, one of the axioms of science, would be false. You and I may be made of atoms, but he could be made just as easily of quintessence, or of a single indivisible substance. How would you find the laws of physics through elimination of possibilities when doing so is impossible? Is energy indestructible? Not when Glorg the Bearded causes a piece of rock to disappeat without putting it anywhere, or losing energy through thermodynamic decay.

How do you find out the rules of entropy when you can actually have a little demon filter things forever without energy input?

[factotum]

That's a pretty interesting point. When you have gods, mages, and who knows what else regularly breaking the laws of physics, how easy is it to lock down what those laws actually are? "I say that energy can never be destroyed or created, merely changed into different forms!" "OK, how do you explain that bloke who just incinerated a crowd using fire he conjured from his fingers?".

However, knowing those laws is not really necessary for the sort of technological advancements this thread is talking about. Gunpowder weapons were created long before anybody knew the maths of how it all worked--they just found out that putting this grey powder in a sealed container and setting it on fire resulted in a bang, and they later used that bang to propel bits of metal at enemies. Ironically, the LOTR setting does seem to include the knowledge of gunpowder, since they have fireworks, but nobody (other than possibly Saruman, see the explosion that knocked down the wall at Helm's Deep) has ever thought of weaponising that technology.

[tomandtish]

Have you ever played the CRPG "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"? In that, both technology and magic *do* exist side by side, but you can't really mix the two--to the extent that mages are forced to ride at the back of any train, because if they were closer to the engine their mere presence would make it stop working. Conversely, very high-tech stuff can shut down magic nearby, so the elves don't let it anywhere near their forests if they can help it.

The universe of The Dresden Files has a similar principle. Human wizards cause technology (electronics especially) to go haywire. Harry has to use an old-fashion phone. He can't take a hot shower (no water heater in his home). He'll never read Order of the Stick online. He uses candles for light. He has a literal icebox.

[Tvtyrant]

That's a pretty interesting point. When you have gods, mages, and who knows what else regularly breaking the laws of physics, how easy is it to lock down what those laws actually are? "I say that energy can never be destroyed or created, merely changed into different forms!" "OK, how do you explain that bloke who just incinerated a crowd using fire he conjured from his fingers?".

However, knowing those laws is not really necessary for the sort of technological advancements this thread is talking about. Gunpowder weapons were created long before anybody knew the maths of how it all worked--they just found out that putting this grey powder in a sealed container and setting it on fire resulted in a bang, and they later used that bang to propel bits of metal at enemies. Ironically, the LOTR setting does seem to include the knowledge of gunpowder, since they have fireworks, but nobody (other than possibly Saruman, see the explosion that knocked down the wall at Helm's Deep) has ever thought of weaponising that technology.

To be fair, The Lord of the Rings isn't medieval stasis so much as it is a post-apocalypse setting. The akalabeth suggests mankind had guns and steamships when they invaded the west, and magi-tech was much higher in the time of Quenta Silmarillion and when Holly was still a place then in the current era.

Back when I was still in high school we used to debate whether Numenor was supposed to be Britain colonizing America before it sank.

[Slayn82]

The basis of my argument are:

1) You can develop an entire paradigm for technology using magic.

2) Possibly, you can take advantage from the laws of Physics to interact with magic get some creative ideas.

3)Usually, Fantasy Scenarios have Paradigms that don't keep any relation with Physics, and the solution for a given trouble is created entirely with Magic.

The result is that the advancement of your magical technology will depend only of how well you get to understand your magic. Keith Baker put it in a way better than I can, when talking about the UA Artificer:


So: I like the alchemist, but it doesn’t feel like a classic artificer to me. On the other hand, for Eberron specifically, I have bigger issues with the gunsmith. Because the gunsmith is presented as USING A GUN: an alchemical device that explicitly fires lead bullets. I’ve never liked firearms in Eberron because I’ve always emphasized that people in Eberron solve their problems with magic instead of technology: make a wand of magic missiles or enchant a crossbow, don’t invent gunpowder.

Personaly, I think some Magic Users would try to understand better the natural laws of Physics, or how reality behaves when it's not immediately under influence of Magic. But most Magic Users would focus their effort in how to better create and control Magic for their purposes. This focus in Magic and Magical technologies would leave some blind spots, some gaps on their knowledge. What you know or don't know, what you believe, can shape your toughts on how you aproach a problem. If there's an "easy" spell to preserve food, easily affordable for those with money, people may never develop techniques of refrigerating food using Ice spells that could be much more scalable. If there's a spell that enables rocks to fly very well, don't expect much aerodinamics research. If healing magic can instantly cure wounds and disease, people may not have very advanced cirurgical knowledge.

[Sermil]

I'll throw in the Coldfire trilogy (Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, Crown of Shadows) which really try to explain why there was no high-tech in its magic world. The people in that book were descendants of an FTL colonization spacecraft that crashed on a magic world, so technology existed in that universe, but the world itself was all swords-and-armor level.

In that world, "magic" simply responds to your thoughts. The stronger your thoughts, the stronger the magic. The problem was, it reacts way more strongly to subconscious thoughts than to conscious ones. It tends to manifest your fears and doubts and beliefs. So, let's say a person picks up a gun and tries to fire it -- especially, tries to fire it under stress. If you have any doubts, any doubts at all that the gun will fire, the magic may cause it to misfire, because you have this fear, this doubt, in your mind. The more often it misfires, the less you trust it, and the less you trust it, the more often it misfires. The problem is that most people just don't understand technology well enough to know, at a bone-deep level, that the gun will fire. Only a few, extraordinarily disciplined individuals, who are able to absolutely banish doubt from their minds, can use guns. But everyone 'knows' how a sword works, it's 'common sense' from childhood that whacking something with a long, hard stick will hurt it, so swords work for everyone. It's almost impossible to make technological progress because if you make something new, too many people wouldn't believe in it yet, and it will fail. It's also hard to make repeatable scientific observations, because knowing what the outcome "should" be makes that outcome happen.

Magic items work because the rituals are all about convincing people that they will work. They have big, flashy, public investment rituals, and then there's the belief that the item will work, enough belief from enough people to overcome any one person's doubt.

So there's one, pretty-internally-consistent explanation of why a world with magic would lose technology -- people have to believe in the technology, else magic will make it fail, and the more complex the technology, the fewer people believe it will work.

[Bohandas]

That's a pretty interesting point. When you have gods, mages, and who knows what else regularly breaking the laws of physics, how easy is it to lock down what those laws actually are? "I say that energy can never be destroyed or created, merely changed into different forms!" "OK, how do you explain that bloke who just incinerated a crowd using fire he conjured from his fingers?".

The character complaining about conservation of energy isn't a scientist or scholar, he's a type of stock strawman called a flat earth atheist (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlatEarthAtheist)

[Bohandas]

1. Unless all of the gods get together and agree that high-tech mortals are bad, I don't see that happening.

And it's worth noting that in D&D both the gnomish pantheon and Murlynd seem to encourage technological innovation


Well, not really. There are a few mistakes in this logic, the greatest of which is assuming that "objective" good and evil would be accepted as such by philosophers. As it happens, there has been a philosophical argument that good comes from God for milennia (duh), which was challenged even without challenging the existence or authority of said god. The most famous of these is the Euthyphro Problem—the question of if things are right because the gods command them, or do the gods command things because they are right, and the implications of both answers. Philosophers can argue about the nature of good and evil until the cows come home without ever questioning the Divine Command Theory.
There are further problems which would come from many settings' "objective sources" of choice. For instance, in classical mythology, most D&D settings, etc, there are a number of deities of more or less equal standing, each of whom commands different things, and many of whom are at odds. Who says that Pelor is good and Nerull evil? Is it that detect evil spell from your local cleric of Kord, or a paladin of Heironeous, both of whom also register as "good" according to said spells? Hm.

That's a good point. (plus in planescape you'd also get the belief thing from sermil's post throwing a wrench in things as well)

Yhat said, There's a slight equivocation in that reasoning. "good" as in moral and "good" as in preferable aren't precisely the same good. In fact, I would imagine that in the fantast races tending strongly towards a given alignment that correspondence would go towards their preferred alignment (ie. the modron word for something good as in preferable would probably more closely translate to "optimal", and the orcish word for something preferable would be closer to "uninhibited", for baatezu it might be a cognate of the word for "mandatory", for yugoloths it would be "wicked" and could in some cases be translated directly as such, etc.)

[Aeson]

I meant unscientific as irreproducible by others, as in art. Two wizards may cast fireball spells, but they do it differently, and the spells themselves are visibly different.
Is magic actually irreproducible by others, though? It's a fairly common feature of fantasy that the wizard can teach his magic to someone even if he cannot teach it to everyone, which strongly suggests that the magic is not in fact irreproducible.

Also, regarding your second sentence: If you present two groups of people with the same problem, you should not get solutions which are identical in both aesthetic and implementation unless the problem is something trivial, like "Hello World" or the kinds of math problems used to teach basic arithmetic to kids. If you do pose a nontrivial problem to two groups of people and both groups come up with solutions which are identical in implementation, then it is extremely likely that the two groups did not develop their solutions independently. Aesthetic similarities can be expected, especially when the function strongly influences the form (for example with aircraft) or when there is a commonly-accepted view of what the solution to the problem should look like (for example with internet browsers), but even so it is not particularly likely that the aesthetic choices made by the two groups will be identical. No two groups of people should come up with exactly the same solution to a nontrivial problem even if both groups of people have very similar backgrounds. At the very least, there should be differences in the locations and content of comments and the names of variables in code, in the exact size and location of rooms in a floorplan, etc, and it's not that unlikely, especially for more complex problems, that there will be at least some minor differences in the approach taken to solve the problem.

[Leewei]

Is magic actually irreproducible by others, though? It's a fairly common feature of fantasy that the wizard can teach his magic to someone even if he cannot teach it to everyone, which strongly suggests that the magic is not in fact irreproducible.<snip>

Wizard A wiggles his fingers, twitches his beard, and hurls a small pinch of sulfur and bat guano. Wizard B wiggles her nose and blinks while scattering rose petals.

From a mechanics perspective, both are using spell components to fry a squad of angry orcs. The science, though, may not be there as it would be in an experiment. The learning and practice performed by both wizards is an individual journey into enlightenment.

In fiction, wizards may well have apprentices. Just as often, they are recluses who have no use for others.

I am not asserting that all wizards in all fantasy are one way or the other; I am asserting that they can be reclusive and secretive in the way of explaining lack of technology in a fantasy realm.

[Rodin]

Even if magic is just a technique, it doesn't necessarily follow that it benefits the wizard to teach other people. Yes, from a modern, scientific research perspective we think that way, but I'd look at it more like the history of reading. Up until the invention of the printing press, most people didn't know how to read. It wasn't necessary for their daily life, it took time away from more important things like making a living, and generally speaking only the wealthy could afford to do so. Even basic education is a relatively recent phenomenon brought on by easy availability of the requisite materials.

Wizardry in a medieval world would be much the same - it takes a hellish amount of training to become proficient, it takes the available money to get trained, and it takes an aptitude for scholarship. The end result looks like a wizard tossing some animal dung in the air and muttering a few words, but years of training went in to allowing them to do that. The only reason that wizards would train others at all is because they can make money by doing so, and having a strong guild benefits the whole bunch of them.

It's also often considered quite a dangerous profession, even if not adventuring. You ask why wizards haven't found a way to turn summoning fire from a stone into a set of battery stones that can be sold to travelers? Well, that's because Old Nicodemus tried it and his entire tower burned down from the resulting conflagration.

Whenever I read a Fantasy novel, I try to assume that the local wizards aren't dumb. If Magic A didn't help their situation, asking why they didn't do Magic B is silly because we can assume that someone DID try Magic B at some point and wound up turning themselves into a squirrel. Or summoned something from the Dungeon Dimensions. Similarly, if they could just go into business lighting fires around town or whatever, I'd assume they'd do that. It's just that they either gain more money from researching higher magics or are uninterested in petty concerns like money - they've got their tower and spend a minimal amount of time bringing in the money to sustain it, and spend the rest of the time pursuing what they love - knowledge.

[Lord Raziere]

Whenever I read a Fantasy novel, I try to assume that the local wizards aren't dumb. If Magic A didn't help their situation, asking why they didn't do Magic B is silly because we can assume that someone DID try Magic B at some point and wound up turning themselves into a squirrel. Or summoned something from the Dungeon Dimensions. Similarly, if they could just go into business lighting fires around town or whatever, I'd assume they'd do that. It's just that they either gain more money from researching higher magics or are uninterested in petty concerns like money - they've got their tower and spend a minimal amount of time bringing in the money to sustain it, and spend the rest of the time pursuing what they love - knowledge.

Yup, exactly this. Wizards are not scientists. Just because someone puts a thing to use some way that you wouldn't, doesn't mean they are stupid.

Like say for example, a former dragon slayer using his legendary sword to cut meat for dinner. Is he stupid? No. He just prefers to use it for that since he no longer slays dragons, and the meat he does have is bigger than what can be cut with knives, and leave the dragon slaying to younger more foolish people like he once was, but y'know keep the sword around just to remind you of old times.

similarly, a wizard can be smart, but that doesn't mean he automatically starts making a steam engine work if he had both water and fire magic. Or would be interested in doing so, or have the control necessary, or think up the idea, or think its useful, and so on and so forth. His motivations for using magic are dictated by the context of his life- he might've become a wizard just to fight in a war with magical power and only knows how to use it forcefully. He might've become a wizard without any concern for anyone else and just wants a power trip. He might've learned it just as a pragmatic necessity so he can go adventuring into the wilderness safely to do his real passion: monster watching!
"Well y'know its not every day you see a dragon egg hatch don'cha know. and just think of what can be learned from watching the habits of ogres in their natural environment when no one else is around. crikey, issat a tarrasque? I got to watch this...what a beautiful majestic creature.

Wot? fight em? use me magic for what? I don't care about that, look at all these notes I'm taking, this here is a goldmine of information, mate! A few abjurations and illusions so they don't spot us will be just fine, but fighting them? Nah, they're too beautiful."

[Rodin]

With that last one, I think the actual finishing quote would be more like "What a majestic creatOHGODARGHARGHARGHARGH", and would explain the distinct lack of Tarrasque Biologists in the world setting. :smallbiggrin:

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'm a huge fan of actual freaking history. Small, incremental improvements in technology are certainly normal. Emergence of entirely new technologies are a different matter entirely. These occurrences involved access to knowledge from other cultures, formal education, and the ability to work without worrying about starving to death.
You say that like "entirely new technologies" aren't just an accumulation of "small, incremental improvements".


I meant unscientific as irreproducible by others, as in art. Two wizards may cast fireball spells, but they do it differently, and the spells themselves are visibly different.
Way back in the day, when humans were little more than unusually intelligent apes, any two hominids would have made tools differently, and they were themselves visibly different. Yet we managed to figure out how to use those scientifically.
The process might be artistic in principle, but it's always easy to industrialize in reality. Just look at actual art, whether paintings or literature or film or any other medium. For every true gem which someone poured their heart and soul into, there's a hundred soulless pieces churned out like clockwork. Just look at whatever blockbuster films of 2016 you found particularly distasteful for an example.


Engineers work with others to improve and protect their communities. They need people to carry out their tasks, and to employ them. There is no such guarantee for wizards. Need gold? Transmute a modicum of lead, then get back to becoming immortal. (In most fiction, wizards greatly prefer knowledge to gold.)
I don't think you understand what I mean.
Wizards might be able to ignore some of what they need with magic, but unless they are de facto gods, they can't do everything they want to do on their own. "Profit" here means,


Unless you can name something specific, the best energy sources I can think of are charcoal, or perhaps dried manure. It's sufficient for metalworking, but not for any real transportation capability. See my subsequent idea for why chopping down a forest could be a very bad idea in a fantasy world.
I've never had to put my mind to it, but I'm reasonably confident that something would be figured out if you had an entire civilization working at it. And it's not like transportation or electricity need fossil fuels.


Heading off on a tangent, have you ever noticed how well humans get along with other races in fantasy literature? Our own history seems very, very different. If humans are struggling, they inevitably seem to start preying on other communities, especially if they are noticeably different. You'd think that any fantasy world would be in perpetual war as these groups set upon one another.
No more than they were in real life. If our cultures developed alongside people with pointy ears who could sense secret doors, we'd consider them no weirder than we consider people with dark skin and higher rates of sickle-cell malaria.


Except Universalism, one of the axioms of science, would be false. You and I may be made of atoms, but he could be made just as easily of quintessence, or of a single indivisible substance. How would you find the laws of physics through elimination of possibilities when doing so is impossible? Is energy indestructible? Not when Glorg the Bearded causes a piece of rock to disappeat without putting it anywhere, or losing energy through thermodynamic decay.

How do you find out the rules of entropy when you can actually have a little demon filter things forever without energy input?
You can construct universes in which every rule is broken without spending a second thinking about how to replace them, but that doesn't change a darn thing for the rest of us.


Wizard A wiggles his fingers, twitches his beard, and hurls a small pinch of sulfur and bat guano. Wizard B wiggles her nose and blinks while scattering rose petals.
From a mechanics perspective, both are using spell components to fry a squad of angry orcs. The science, though, may not be there as it would be in an experiment. The learning and practice performed by both wizards is an individual journey into enlightenment.
If they can consistently fry orcs, and if teachers can consistently bring students to enlightenment (or tell them how to reach enlightenment themselves or something along those lines), then how is that meaningfully irregular?


Even if magic is just a technique, it doesn't necessarily follow that it benefits the wizard to teach other people. Yes, from a modern, scientific research perspective we think that way, but I'd look at it more like the history of reading. Up until the invention of the printing press, most people didn't know how to read. It wasn't necessary for their daily life, it took time away from more important things like making a living, and generally speaking only the wealthy could afford to do so. Even basic education is a relatively recent phenomenon brought on by easy availability of the requisite materials.
Right, um, you're making a lot of unspoken assumptions that you never actually explain. Like that first sentence. You never actually explain how the rest of that makes it unbeneficial for the wizard to teach others. There are, loosely speaking, two possibilities:
1. Knowledge of magic is common. Everyone can find someone to teach them whatever little tricks they need. Obviously, this involves teaching magic being common.
2. Knowledge of magic is rare. People with the means and motive will pay through the nose in gold, service, or favors to learn magic. Teaching magic wouldn't be common, but it sure as hell would be beneficial.


Wizardry in a medieval world would be much the same - it takes a hellish amount of training to become proficient, it takes the available money to get trained, and it takes an aptitude for scholarship.
And you don't consider the possibility that such magic would lead to changes in the status quo you asserted last paragraph? If a duke could gain a load of power by having a wizard teach a bunch of soldier-apprentices basic pyromancy, and he had something to give the wizard (gold? land? a noble bride?), he would almost certainly try to do so.


It's also often considered quite a dangerous profession, even if not adventuring. You ask why wizards haven't found a way to turn summoning fire from a stone into a set of battery stones that can be sold to travelers? Well, that's because Old Nicodemus tried it and his entire tower burned down from the resulting conflagration.
That's an assertion which is true in certain settings but not others. And even in settings where it is true...well, plenty of industrial processes are dangerous. Hell, even watermills are dangerous—lots of milled grain means lots of flammable dust, after all.


Whenever I read a Fantasy novel, I try to assume that the local wizards aren't dumb. If Magic A didn't help their situation, asking why they didn't do Magic B is silly because we can assume that someone DID try Magic B at some point and wound up turning themselves into a squirrel. Or summoned something from the Dungeon Dimensions. Similarly, if they could just go into business lighting fires around town or whatever, I'd assume they'd do that. It's just that they either gain more money from researching higher magics or are uninterested in petty concerns like money - they've got their tower and spend a minimal amount of time bringing in the money to sustain it, and spend the rest of the time pursuing what they love - knowledge.
For ninety-odd percent of fantasy novels, I don't trust that the author put any thought into such matters. Most of the others address this sort of issue.

[Thrudd]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?

Any given story, or even a game setting, is generally a snapshot in time of that world. The game takes place in year X, and in year X technological advancement is in state Y. Because it is a fantasy world with different environment and history and dynamics form ours, and possibly different natural laws, there is no reason to expect that year X in this fantasy world should match technology level Y of our own world at any point in time. There is no single way a fantasy world's people would or should react to or utilize the presence of magic in their world.

Yes, authors should take care to have a rational and internally consistent world - but that does not mean that all people and cultures in that world always discover or apply the most expedient and efficient way of doing everything at every moment of their existence nor that certain advancements will occur on any particular time table.

There can also be any sort of supernatural explanation for why a fantasy world is the way it is, if it is necessary or convenient to the telling of the story for the world to be technologically stagnant for thousands of years.

I am sure not all authors give much thought to such things, not feeling it relevant to the telling of their story. The detail given to developing a setting certainly aids in telling a good story, but sometimes the desires of the artist to have a certain aesthetic outweigh the scientist's or historian's desire to adhere to a believable and naturalistic sense of world development.

[Kitten Champion]

I am sure not all authors give much thought to such things, not feeling it relevant to the telling of their story. The detail given to developing a setting certainly aids in telling a good story, but sometimes the desires of the artist to have a certain aesthetic outweigh the scientist's or historian's desire to adhere to a believable and naturalistic sense of world development.

It's not just an aesthetic though - well, it is in the more derivative stuff like D&D settings - but the heart of modern fantasy is emulating the epics (and folk tales, though they have there own timeless conventions) from various cultures diving allllll~ the way back to ancient Summaria but for a contemporary audience and with a full acknowledgement that the setting is entirely fiction to begin with. While such poetry often did provide some broad overview of the history hitherto - because edification was part of the function of such stories - they were obviously never penned with a modern scholarly perspective in mind.

Chances are if there's a fictional mythos for your high fantasy world than there are literal deities behind the creation of a setting, that biological evolution will never have even been contemplated or mentioned, and quite often you'll get a Golden Age of spiritual, technological, and physiological perfection of which the current world has declined from. A mythic backstory that takes the reader from the world's beginning to the whatever-era & culture context the current story is set in the style of pre-modern creation myths and cultural histories.

Magic and the divinely miraculous are ubiquitous elements of poetic epics and folk tales the world over, but that doesn't change they're written to ultimately result in the present reality of the audience they were written for. Whatever wonders Thomas Malory's Merlin could provide Arthur, his wisdom wasn't going to lead to the innovation of the steam engine for Camelot. If you're a contemporary fantasy author creating a work which takes Le Morte d'Arthur as its chief inspiration - which has been known to happen - than chances are neither will your Merlin despite the fact that you're fully cognizant of steam technology... though Hank Morgan would, I guess.

That's the assumption of the writer going in, the anachronism is twofold -- both on a meta-level as well as in the text directly. Now, there are of course people who buck this conception and write fantasy from different viewpoints or take much more modern or even later periods - like steampunk, science fantasy, or dying Earth subgenre fiction - but they too tend to take on the different kinds of anachronistic paradigms of different styles and eras of fiction in their base.

[factotum]

Any given story, or even a game setting, is generally a snapshot in time of that world. The game takes place in year X, and in year X technological advancement is in state Y.

I think the issue relates to stories where you hear about thousands of years of history, but no obvious technological advancement in that time--or even going backwards; the people of Gondor at the end of the Third Age appear to not be capable of feats like building the statues of the Argonath, so they've actually backslid technologically in the 1600 years since. In the case of LOTR, as I said earlier, that's kind of justified because everything magical and awesome is diminishing in the world, and Tolkien wanted to show that in the writing. Later fantasy writers just put the ancient awesome things in without really considering why they were there in LOTR.

[Thrudd]

I think the issue relates to stories where you hear about thousands of years of history, but no obvious technological advancement in that time--or even going backwards; the people of Gondor at the end of the Third Age appear to not be capable of feats like building the statues of the Argonath, so they've actually backslid technologically in the 1600 years since. In the case of LOTR, as I said earlier, that's kind of justified because everything magical and awesome is diminishing in the world, and Tolkien wanted to show that in the writing. Later fantasy writers just put the ancient awesome things in without really considering why they were there in LOTR.

But what are actual examples of these authors who "put awesome ancient things" without considering why? How do you know they didn't consider why? What are some stories that are guilty of this?

The whole topic is making a very generalized claim without any specific examples, just a general statement that most fantasy settings are improperly developed. Each fantasy world is unique and would need to be addressed according to the details given by its own author. The idea that the only rational result of a world with any type of magic for any amount of time is some form of industrialization or mechanization can't be supported in this very general sense. It could be argued in specific cases of specific worlds with specific types of magic, but this thread hasn't gotten into that. And even then, that argument would be little more than expressing an opinion about someone else's art (stating that world development should follow patterns of the real world rather than being expression of something more mythic, as Kitten Champion points out).

[Bohandas]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?

A lot of D&D campaign settings do have hundreds or thousands of years of in-world history.

[Thrudd]

A lot of D&D campaign settings do have hundreds or thousands of years of in-world history.

D&D is a game that definitely is built around a certain aesthetic and a specific collection of things. So the end result, the present state of the game world, needs to match what the rules of the game represent. In this case, both art and naturalism take second place to making sure the setting remains appropriate for the game. In D&D, the game must include magical treasures hidden in dungeons, implying one or more past civilizations that had technology and magic near to that which exists in the present world - otherwise you wouldn't be finding magic swords and armor and spells that your characters can use. So, the implication would be a world that has either been stagnant or cyclical, gaining and losing and gaining and losing but never going beyond the level that the game mechanics represent.

Or, a DM can explain things in such a way that the treasures found in dungeons are clearly from another civilization with different level of technology - and you can clearly identify adventurers wearing "magic" armor and weapons because they are made of stuff or in a manner completely unfamiliar and maybe impossible to the present material culture.

But that is neither here nor there. If we're really complaining about D&D settings and not fantasy world in general fiction, it's sort of a different issue. The issue is what the game is designed to do, and how the designers explain what is going on in the game and why. Ultimately, that is an issue for each DM to address individually, and we'd need to talk to each one to see how and if they address the technology and magic issue.

Some D&D settings, of course, have more than others - Eberron is a really popular one with magi-tech. Spelljammer is another one. Dark Sun is a very well thought out setting, as well.

[factotum]

But what are actual examples of these authors who "put awesome ancient things" without considering why? How do you know they didn't consider why? What are some stories that are guilty of this?

I'm just reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and it definitely has this. The best swords in the world are made from Valyrian steel, the secret of whose forging was lost when Valyria was destroyed some 400 years before the story opens--yet apparently no smith has been able to replicate this over those four centuries. Moat Cailin, the ancient fortress of the First Men and rumoured to be 10,000 years old, lies in ruins, but the three remaining towers are still somehow solid enough to make effective defensive fortifications against modern armies. Yet there is no general sense that the world is in decline--people are generally horrible to each other, but it's pretty clear that's been the case for hundreds if not thousands of years.

[Thrudd]

I'm just reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and it definitely has this. The best swords in the world are made from Valyrian steel, the secret of whose forging was lost when Valyria was destroyed some 400 years before the story opens--yet apparently no smith has been able to replicate this over those four centuries. Moat Cailin, the ancient fortress of the First Men and rumoured to be 10,000 years old, lies in ruins, but the three remaining towers are still somehow solid enough to make effective defensive fortifications against modern armies. Yet there is no general sense that the world is in decline--people are generally horrible to each other, but it's pretty clear that's been the case for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Sure, but this is also a world with a mysterious history only revealed as legends and myths. We don't know the truth of it, and it appears likely that there is some sort of cyclical cataclysm or rising and falling of magic forces/deities which has affected civilization. Until a definitive and non-mythological history of that setting is revealed (if it ever is), it's hard to argue one way or the other. We simply don't know enough about the age of heroes to know what was really going on. But yes, that world does seem to have a slower progression in material technology than has our world,. I'm not sure there is enough to detail given about the history to provide a strong argument that this is unbelievable enough to ruin the story.

[factotum]

I'm not sure there is enough to detail given about the history to provide a strong argument that this is unbelievable enough to ruin the story.

I don't think anyone other than you has said that this sort of thing ruins the story? It's just a common trope in fantasy novels that's under discussion.

[Lemmy]

I don't think anyone other than you has said that this sort of thing ruins the story? It's just a common trope in fantasy novels that's under discussion.
In the case of ASoIaF, at least when it comes to magical things, there's an explanation.: Since the Doom of Valyria, magic's neen weakening, to the point where it's little more than parlor tricks and superstition to most people in the world. It does seem to be recovering, though, possibly because of the return of dragons (or maybe the return of dragons was only possible because magic is recovering... who knows?).

All that said... The world does seem technologically stagnant. Other than the bronze-to-steel transition, I can't recall a single description of technological advancement anywhere in the novels, at least not off of the top of my head. However, there are no fully trustworthy narrators in the series. Even the history books (like the encyclopedia) are told from the perspective of a character, so we can't tell what's true and what's myth. It may very well be that the stories told about events hundreds of year in the past use current weapons and armor simply because that's what the narrator believes or how he prefers to tell the tale. Even IRL there are plenty of art depicting past events with anachronistic gear.

[GreatWyrmGold]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?
sigh
There are several situations where it would be relevant.
1. The backstory provided indicates that the world has been remarkably static for centuries. (And no, the real world wasn't static for that long; for instance, less than a century passed between the invention of plate armor—a fantasy staple—and the printing press—which enabled some of the defining features of the Renaissance when contrasted to the Middle Ages. Hell, cannons were invented before plate armor! Wikipedia has a quick list of things that came about in the Middle Ages which could matter to fantasy stories. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology) Note the military technologies section in particular.)
2. The technology available does not make sense, in that no conceivable backstory would have had no one pick up on a given innovation by the time others came along.
3. Magic is given as an excuse for technology not developing, which is the effing point of the OP! So good reading comprehension, there.

[Excession]

This video provides an interesting point about ASoIaF, and how dragons might prevent progress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDdKmx0PW7s

I think the argument might be a bit simplistic, and probably glosses over a lot of the economics or warfare and advancement. The central point is interesting though: magic and tech are different. Having a big nation-state, economy, and technology is good for making cannons, but it doesn't help make dragons or mages. So if dragons/mages are rare, or limited to a particular family/school, that group will end up in charge without needing to create a renaissance nation-state or economy, and they will be able to stay there as well. If someone does start making tech progress that could threaten the thaumocracy, they end up dead, because an army with first-gen cannons can't fight dragons or archmages.

Few stories that I can remember use this reasoning, but A Practical Guide to Evil (https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/) does as one example. Anyone trying to break out of their magical/medieval stasis gets (after two warnings) a visit from the bigger fish of the setting. After that visit, they serve only as an example to others to not try the same thing.

[Armok]

I think that it's also important to consider what technological advancement provides a story from a narrative standpoint, and how it can also limit it. Take the gun, for example. In any good fantasy setting a battle between two characters serves a very specific narrative purpose. Two characters come face to face to struggle against one another and resolve a conflict. The battle is interpersonal, and the spectacle of combat serves as the climax of everything built up to that point.

But let's introduce the gun into this. Now there's no need for the spectacle. Why would you fight face to face with your antagonist when you can lean around a corner and put a slug in him? Sure, there's the classic western standoff, but even then it's over in a single shot. Battle becomes impersonal as military technology advances, and ultimately the kind of conflicts you present and the way they're resolved change.

The setting might gain more "historical accuracy" by advancing at a rate closer to reality, but it can also lose its... tone? Identity? Something like that. For the purpose of telling the sorts of stories we love in fantasy, I think it's necessary to suspend our disbelief and say "Yeah, this is just what they have."

[factotum]

But let's introduce the gun into this. Now there's no need for the spectacle. Why would you fight face to face with your antagonist when you can lean around a corner and put a slug in him? Sure, there's the classic western standoff, but even then it's over in a single shot. Battle becomes impersonal as military technology advances, and ultimately the kind of conflicts you present and the way they're resolved change.


Some SF stories try to get round this in various ways. In Frank Herbert's "Dune", for instance, portable and almost impenetrable personal shield generators exist, but these (for some reason) can only block high-velocity things like bullets, so knife fighting has become common again. In the Deathstalker novels by Simon R. Green they use blasters, but blasters have a very slow rate of fire so it's easy to be caught with your gun not ready to fire again...although he never explains why they just don't keep using projectile weapons in that case, since blasters are clearly strictly inferior to them.