Development of Magical Societies

[Cosi]

The industrial revolution was (arguably, is) the most significant development in human history. Over a relatively brief span, a large portion of humanity went from subsistence farming on the edge of starvation to a world with commercial air travel, food plentiful well beyond the point of excess, personal automobiles, and every other commodity associated with modern life. Faced with the fictional world described by D&D, it is natural to ask what the industrial revolution might look like there.

The trivial answer is that it wouldn't happen because magic is powerful enough to preempt, if not the final forms of technology, certainly the initial ones.

A somewhat less trivial, if still unsatisfying, one is that it won't happen because the people with the capacity to deploy magic to transform society are far better equipped to simply retreat into hedonistic palaces of their own design. If you can cast wall of stone to make shelter, create food and water to feed yourself, and planar binding for companionship of whatever form and variety you desire, why bother making life better for the common man? There's nothing he can offer you. Well, there's worship, but that's not really the basis for a stable industrial society.

So ignore that. Maybe you assume that people who are literally and explicitly Good will take it upon themselves to fight starvation and disease (an assumption that is not unreasonable). Maybe you just handwave it because "basically medieval Europe, but also there are palaces built by god kings who have retreated into solipsistic hedonism lying around" is less interesting to you than "the industrial revolution, but with magic". But even then you run into the issue that D&D magic isn't really "industrial revolution" so much as "singularity". planar binding loops aren't really equivalent to the increases in productivity found in the industrial revolution(s). They're closer to the imagined intelligence explosion of AI.

So that is, as I see it, the problem -- magic doesn't lend itself well to capturing the feeling of the industrial revolution. So let's think about some ways to change that. Here are some rough ground rules I plan to follow for this discussion:

1. The effects of magic will be constrained to, at most, things that can be accomplished with 3e spells, or close facsimiles of those spells. So, no spell to merge people's consciousnesses into a hive mind.
2. Within those limits, stuff can be combined in new ways if that makes the history/industrial development stuff work smoother. I am totally willing to postulate a Abjuration-only Warmage-type caster or whatever as needed.
3. Stuff will also be excluded if I think it makes the thought experiment less compelling. For example, planar binding -> SLA wish doesn't work, because otherwise history is just "a guy did that, now he's god".

So, let's begin:

Charles Stross writes a series of books called the Laundry Files in which put-upon British bureaucrats and programmers use computational magic to fight lovecraftian horrors in defense of the realm. The series touches on a fundamental disconnect between the way mages operate and the way government operates. Protagonist Bob Howard explains:


[Magicians] don't survive, and they to have unique skill sets, thereby defeating the first principal of bureaucracy: that nobody is indispensable.

By way of example, Bob is the "Eater of Souls". This comes with the ability to do magic without the nasty, setting specific side effects that come with trying to do it using your own brain, and also provides him with the ability to detect and also consume the souls of nearby humans. But importantly, this skill set is unique. Bob is quite useful, but despite that the government can't simply train up another Eater of Souls (the mantle can apparently be passed to a new host, but that requires the current Eater to die). Other mages in the series are much the same.

This means, that from the perspective of the government, Bob is hard to use. You can't simply write up guidelines for how to deploy a SAS unit's Eater of Souls, because there's only one. Therefore, to make use of magicians, the government either has to specialize it's tactics to each sorcerer (expensive and inflexible), rely on the basic abilities any caster can provide (cripples ROI as these are likely far worse than their unique abilities), or deploy wizards in a relatively open framework (encourages mages to become loose cannons, which is potentially dangerous for the government).

It's not terribly hard to develop from something like this to a state of affairs where governments see mages as either useless or threats. Suppose you're a king in a world where mages develop largely unpredictable magical capabilities. Low level mages aren't terribly useful to you. Someone who can cast fireball has some value, as does someone who can cast haste, as does someone who can cast major image. But those people all have value in different situations, so you can't really be bothered to work out magic-integrated tactics at the unit level. Someone who can cast control weather might have enough value to craft your tactics around, but he's also probably powerful enough to depose you.

This, I think, is the starting point for a what the analogy of pre-industrial fantasy society looks like. Casters can't be produced "to order", so to speak, so they are of limited applicability to society as a whole. So how do we set that up?

I think the answer is obvious -- only allow Sorcerers. Sorcerers follow (at least, from an in-game perspective), pretty much the exact paradigm suggested. A Sorcerer gets whatever spells he gets, and can't develop some particular spell just because you need it.

So what kinds of features might society have here?

At first pass, kingdoms are probably going to be ruled by Sorcerer kings (or queens, or other monarchs). Because you have a king, and since that king can't rely on a personal army with mages in it to protect him, he is likely to be deposed the first sufficiently powerful mage to come along and look at him funny. And then that guy gets to be king. Until someone kills them. So kingdoms are unstable, and probably small because you can't muster an army that can hold territory against other mages effectively, so you have to be able to project your personal force to whatever territory you want. Maybe you get loose, psuedo-feudal associations of Sorcerer-nobles.

But that assumes there are no solutions to the problem of consistency. There are. Monsters have consistent sets of SLAs, around which doctrine can be built. For example, all barghests (and particularly greater barghests) wake up every morning with some mobility and buff options, plus charm monster. That's not bad as far as things go, and it's easy to imagine an army of barghest-lead goblins conquering enemies who can't effectively use combined arms tactics with magic. And then repeat for Aboleth or Eldritch Giants or whatever.

But that's not everything. Consider Dragons. Dragons have it pretty good in this state of affairs right off the bat. They're giant flying monsters with SLAs and personal badassery to back them up, already solidly positioned to be rulers of as much territory as they can extract tribute from. But they have a (relatively) unique tool at their disposal -- dragonpacts. From a power perspective, these are pretty bad. But they do give you the ability to give each of your Sorcerer minions a fixed set of abilities, which you can then use as a basis for tactics. Of particular interest are ones that do elemental damage which dragons and half-dragon allies would be immune to.

So you have a world of battling Sorcerer-kings, kingdoms ruled by monsters, and draconic empires where humans serve as knights and lords.

What does an industrial revolution look like in this world?

First, consider what the industrial revolution did in our world, or rather the confluence of social, political, and economic changes that surrounded it did. Note: this is not meant to be a totally accurate historic account.

The most obvious change was the collapse of the feudal system. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the one that's relevant here is guns. Guns were not only an effective tactical counter to the knights that traditional dominated medieval battlefields, they changed the strategic landscape of war. You no longer had to train your entire life to be an effective warrior. Battles were no longer best fought by lining up and charging at one another until one side or the other gave up.

But there were are changes. Colonization (particularly "colonization to exploit natural resources") kicks off. Industrialization amplifies productivity. Transportation speeds increase.

So we would expect that an industrial revolution in this D&Dish world to mimic those patterns. How to go about doing so?

The obvious answer would be to provide some way to better integrate human mages into society. If you could give people a consistent pattern of magical abilities, you could start deploying armies that had magical support at the unit level that was effectively integrated into the army's doctrine. Those abilities would likely be better than what monsters had going on, and if you could give people strategic abilities as well, you could change society off the battlefield too.

That's a pretty good match for Dread Necromancers, Beguilers, and similar classes. You might want to add some more classes (that "similar classes" is "just the Warmage" right now), and give people some additional options for strategic layer stuff, but the basis is solid.

Now the pre-industrial societies of the world collapse. The undead legions of the Dread Necromancers overthrow the gluttonous Khans of the Barghest clan-packs. Elementalists purge the aquatic palaces of the Aboleths. Beguilers run roughshod over the jungle estates of the Leonal. Abjurers topple the mountain fastnesses of the Eldritch Giants. Warmages incinerate Hags by the coven and take their Eyes for their own experiments.

The dragons take longer to fall, because they have something that approximates the fixed-list casters of their own in their pact-bound allies, but this is where the disadvantage of the dragonpacts come in -- they mostly grant combat focused spells. Dragonpacts might give the dragon's armies the tools to face combined arms forces on the battlefield, but they don't do much for the more mundane processes of empire, while animate dead or fabricate do. So eventually, the dragons are simply out-competed.

In this period you would, I think, get a lot of the traditional ideas that are floated for "magical industrialization". walls of fire used as engines. Undead workforces. Constructions of interlocking walls of stone. Communication by divination. Flying machines of various kinds. The possibilities here are quite diverse, and fairly well studied.

One note is the relatively small effect magic has on the overall mode of production. Pre-industrial societies in the real world depended on individual masters, and part of the power of the industrial revolution was replacing those with larger volumes of less skilled labor. You don't really get that here. A factory filled with undead might have the same productivity as one filled with workers at mechanical looms, but the only person working there is a necromancer supervising the skeletons.

There's also the potential for resource wars here. I'm normally quite opposed to material components, but here they give you something to use as a starting point for replicating the use of natural resources in the industrial revolution. You can have the vast guano farms required to field Warmages in numbers, or Dread Necromancers scheming over access to onyx veins.

Where to go from here? The natural move from an industrialized society is the Singularity, and contemplating what a magical singularity might look like is interesting.

One way to get there is Wizards, who can all share all their research with each other. But that's far from the only option.

Maybe it takes off with the necromancers. If you discover a ritual to turn people into ghosts, you can free your entire society from the fear of death or the need of food and rapidly accelerate into the posthuman future.

Maybe it takes off with the transmuters. Use form changing magic to grant form changing magic which you can use to gain more form changing magic.

Maybe it takes off with the naturalists. Use awaken to turn an animal into a human, then teach it to cast awaken.

Maybe it takes off with the conjurerers. This is the traditional planar binding loop mentioned earlier.

Of course, you don't have to do a rapid takeoff singularity. You can do all kinds of other stuff with this space. What if Stross's Economics 2.0 had access to divinations that see the future (imagine high finance with less ethics and prophecy)? Imagine virtual realities crafted of nested silent images. Imagine civilizations of chained simulacra. Imagine living spells chained up as fonts of magic. Imagine viral curses. The sky's the limit.

So, there's one rough sketch of how a world roughly like D&D might develop through something analogous to the industrial revolution and then beyond. Thoughts? Objections? Counter-proposals?

[Hackulator]

Well one of the things about magic that makes it very different from technology is the number of people required to do things. Part of the reason for the Industrial Revolution is that the rich realized that in order to take advantage of all these advances, they needed people. No one person alone can build and run all the tech necessary for technological advancement.

Magic is very different. Outside of certain specific spells, the majority of magic is performed by an individual. The need to work together to create something greater just isn't there because all the power is concentrated in a single person. This makes the idea of a magical industrial revolution less likely, because the powerful people don't need to share magic with the masses to get full use out of it. That's part of why it makes sense that a lot of fantasy worlds would be stuck in medieval type situations for long periods.

[Darth Ultron]

I think the answer is obvious -- only allow Sorcerers. Sorcerers follow (at least, from an in-game perspective), pretty much the exact paradigm suggested. A Sorcerer gets whatever spells he gets, and can't develop some particular spell just because you need it.

Well, to have an alternative reality were the only magic is Sorcerers is one way to go. So if that was your plan then fine.

A more mutli-magic society has wizards, sorcerers, clerics, druids, lots of smaller caster classes, spell like and super natural abilities, and some odd magic too.

And like other spellcasters, a Sorcerer can both pick the spells they want and can make new, unique spells. Unless your just saying in your example ''Sorcerers get random spells and can't make new spells''.





At first pass, kingdoms are probably going to be ruled by Sorcerer kings (or queens, or other monarchs).


Again, if your example is ''a mundane world with low magic, yet powerful Sorcerers(with random spells and no ability to make new spells)'', then Sorcerer kings is one possibility.

A lone Sorcerer could take over a kingdom, even more so a low magic mundane kingdom. But even if they did, they would still need to rule the kingdom in the right way....and that can be tricky. Using magic to force a whole kingdom to be your personal backyard might work for a while...but likely won't last long.

And your example just flies out the window in a more traditional D&D world of lots of magic.



So you have a world of battling Sorcerer-kings, kingdoms ruled by monsters, and draconic empires where humans serve as knights and lords.

Your example of a world.



What does an industrial revolution look like in this world?

You might be mixing history up a bit too much. Guns got rid of knights, sure, but armies stayed the same.



The obvious answer would be to provide some way to better integrate human mages into society.

This is really the basic idea...if you drop the whole Sorcerer kings and dragon overlords stuff.



So, there's one rough sketch of how a world roughly like D&D might develop through something analogous to the industrial revolution and then beyond. Thoughts? Objections? Counter-proposals?


Well I'd see it as :

1.Education. Starting in the Renaissance Era, you got more education in general. As things advanced, you needed intelligent workers to do them not just peasants. And in a magical world this would include magic . So over time from the 1500-1700's you'd get the general rise in education about everything, including magic. Much like mundane education, magic schools teach people as well.

2.Resource Use. Very basic, and it starts off very small. Someone some where has a fire elemental toad sit under a pot and make hot water. Someone somewhere uses a griffon to fly a message lots of miles in a short time. A clever hound archon makes lots of continual flames. And as the years roll by, all of this is increased. It's not just one guy with a griffon, he has dozens.

And then you have magic and magic items. First sticking to just the ''by the book'' stuff, you'd have a travel/moving company using a portable hole, detecting lies being done in court, and charming and controlling animals (and people, and other things). As slowly, over the years, you get the obvious progression. In 1601 you had a cleric cast zone of truth in court, in 1701 the coutroom is a Room of Trtuh wondrous architecture.

3.Experimentation and creation. For both mundane and magic. New things are created and discovered. All the old ''by the book stuff'' is tossed out.

This all, much like the real world takes us to 1760 ish or so. Except our world has magic.

*Textiles-This world would have all sorts of machines, much like Earth did. But also magic like Unseen workers and creation spells. And the combination of both, like animated cotton gins and Looms of Fabrication.

*Steam power-Again you'd have steam machines, but with magic. And orb of heat metal to heat the water, Mending to fix leaks, steam creatures like steam elementals to help out.

*Iron making-Again machines with magic and elementals.

*Tools-Again, animated tools. Tools with magic like hot knives.

And then it just takes off from there to....well, whatever you can imagine.

[Gildedragon]

The appearance of wizards and circle magic, and later artificers are the individual revolution; a move from artisans to systematically trained experts, the offloading of tasks to devices, and the rise in collaboration would be key.

[Yahzi]

So, there's one rough sketch of how a world roughly like D&D might develop through something analogous to the industrial revolution and then beyond. Thoughts? Objections? Counter-proposals?
The genre "Blackpowder Fantasy" deals with this issue. Probably the best known example is "Promise of Blood (https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Blood-Powder-Mage-Trilogy/dp/0316219045)" by Brian McClelland. It's not about an industrial revolution, but rather about industry and magic together. "His Majesty's Dragon (https://www.amazon.com/His-Majestys-Dragon-Temeraire-Book/dp/0345481283/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501392296&sr=1-1&keywords=his+majesty%27s+dragon)" is also about industry and magic together. Perhaps more to the point is "Sword of the Bright Lady (https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Bright-Lady-WORLD-PRIME-ebook/dp/B00J1HDEH4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1501392413&sr=1-1)," though I have to confess the industrial revolution gets side-tracked once the main character becomes high-level. Which, obviously, is my take on how it would go down. :smallbiggrin:

One of the problems with your analysis is that magic in D&D is very much rational; it acts like engineering more than art. To prevent the Tippy-apocalypse I have to posit ancient forces that eat people's brains when they get too high-level; otherwise things will soon erase the pseudo-medieval setting.

The thing is, once you have magic, technology is just less attractive. People invented vaccines and cures because they were tired of their loved ones dying. But in D&D you just get a 3rd level spell, and poof! your gran will never die of any disease, even if you don't know the name of the disease. So why go through all the effort of science?

There's a study that shows that professional chess players are actually worse than amateurs in some specific situations, such as finding the shortest mate for a particular setup where there is classic mate available, but it's a few moves longer. The experts always see the standard solution right away, and can't then see the easier one. The amateurs are equally likely to find either solution (in the cases that they can find one at all). This is the mathematical problem of a "local maxima."

So in world where literally every problem - including death - can be solved by simply applying yourself to magic, why would anybody start from scratch and try to do it the hard way? Even the Mayo Clinic - the best medicine we have to offer after hundreds of years of heavily financed research - gets curb-stomped by a 5th level cleric when it comes to treating individual patients. Sure, the Mayo can vaccinate billions against diseases... but no one ever set out to solve that problem. They set out to solve the problem of their kid dying from a disease.

I'm saying that science is so hard and ineffective that in a world of magic, it would never get far enough along to even compete. Now, once you get to computers and rockets, you can do some stuff magic can't; but that's at the end of a very long road where nothing really interesting happens for the first 500 miles. Meanwhile, the wizards are zapping the orcs who are trying to eat your face. Kinda hard to stay on that dirt road with that going on around you.

[Endarire]

Two major notes:

1: The industrialization of magic was one focus of my campaign The Metaphysical Revolution (https://campbellgrege.com/work-listing/the-metaphysical-revolution-dd-3-5-module/). A fairly low spoiler plot summary for the first part includes a society that has survived a magical apocalypse (by moving to the other side of the world and learning from their mistakes) held together by a Gentleman's Agreement amongst trade houses. Then the very notion of society is questioned when certain people gain power in seemingly unfair ways.

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

[King of Nowhere]

Well I introduced several such ideas in my campaign world, so here are them, in case you are interested.

- A magical industrial revolution requires more spellcasters. this requires higher education institution (magic universities), as well as other studies because magic isn't always the best answer.

- This system requires stability. You can't have stability if every once in a while some big powerful guy just overtakes the kingdom. high level people really ake an impact in the world

- I then postulated bunkers: a bunker is a place so well defended that even the highest level adventurrers can't get into it. Well, at least not fast; and if they try to attack you, you have the time to call for help. Making a proper bunker costs several millions, but once a nation has one in place, they can be free of high level tiranny. They can control their adventurers rather than the reverse. though in practice high level people will still have a lot of power, they will work with the people instead of using the people.
Bunkers basically divided nations in three categories; the first world, where every nation has a bunker, they have several high level adventurers loyal to them for patriotism or other ideals, and can afford to hire many more in time of need. They are rich, and they can defend themselves. The second world is made of nations that cannot afford a bunker, but they are influent enough that they can make themselves valuable to bigger nations; so they basically become vassals to the bigger nations in exchange for use of their bunkers, and in general protection. And the third world, which is in anarchy as everybody with class levels can carve his own kingdom, until it becomes rich enough that it attracts the attention of someone higher level.

- I then envisioned a situation of multi-sided cold war. With magic, you don't recruit farmers to hold a pike anymore. You stockpile undeads and golems, you hoard diamonds to raise your highest level champions. And unlike mundane weapons, those things never rust or expire. So all the nations have stockpiled huge armies, that would be utterly destroyed in case of war. Nobody wants to fight; the cost is too great, the uncertainty too high. that doesn't stop them from playing a game of brinksmanship and sabotage with their higher level adventurers.

Among the ways magic is used similarly to technology are
- teleportation is the most common way of long-distance travel. there are a handful of 9th level wizards in every major city, and paying 100 gp to one of them is cheaper and safer than undertaking a multi-weekly trip, possibly through dangerous terrain. Some wizards went a step further and they make regular trips from major cities, using bags of holding to carry more passengers or even cargo at a reduced fee. They work like modern air companies; there's even a ryanether, apeing the real-world ryanair. Similarly, trade of luxury goods also happens by teleport. silk or gems are valuable enough that you can stuff them into a bag of holding and teleport. Bulkier items though, like iron or foodstuff, has to be shipped the old-fashioned way.
- undead labour is on the rise. special talismans have been made that let common people order the undead. this is putting the common laborers out of work.
- churches work as major pharmaceutical holdings; 5th levell clerics are common enough, and a mixture of organization, state financing and private insurances ensures that in the first world nobody dies of illness. regeneration is rarer, but also those needing it; in the richer nations nobody is missing limbs.
-science is pretty advanced; there will always be curious, inquisitive people who will use magic to discover stuff like the atomic theory. Technology, however, is mostly stagnant, for the reasons yahzi explained.
- material components have taken the role of strategic resources. Diamonds in particular are useful in a variety of spells and are like oil in our world. Most diamond production is concentrated in the hands of a few incredibly rich people, spoofing the oil sheikhs.
- you can always hire powerful people. They are famous, highly paid professional. There is absolutely no problem to getting someone to cast a 9th level spell for you if you have enough money to afford it.
- for this reason, assassination is out of fashion; resurrection is just too easy. soul binding is the natural solution, but it is absolutely outlawed by anyone and using it is akin to nuking (high level people are the only ones who can soul bind, and they are also the only ones who would risk being soul-bound. they have every interest that the spell never gets used).

ultimately, a real industrial revolution is prevented by the fact that you can't mass produce magic. If you need 100 gp of material components for an item, you will always need 100 gp of material components, you can't shave on costs by doing it in a factory. So the magic industrial revolution is pretty slow by the standards of our revolutions.

EDIT: I have to say that my universe shares several similarities with the tippyverse, except that the turning point of history was the development of safe bunkers rather than the teleport circle. In both cases there are huge concentrations of magical power at the ready and a cold war between several superpowers.

[Gildedragon]

Well I introduced several such ideas in my campaign world, so here are them, in case you are interested.

- A magical industrial revolution requires more spellcasters. this requires higher education institution (magic universities), as well as other studies because magic isn't always the best answer.

- This system requires stability. You can't have stability if every once in a while some big powerful guy just overtakes the kingdom. high level people really ake an impact in the world

- I then postulated bunkers: a bunker is a place so well defended that even the highest level adventurrers can't get into it. Well, at least not fast; and if they try to attack you, you have the time to call for help. Making a proper bunker costs several millions, but once a nation has one in place, they can be free of high level tiranny. They can control their adventurers rather than the reverse. though in practice high level people will still have a lot of power, they will work with the people instead of using the people.
Bunkers basically divided nations in three categories; the first world, where every nation has a bunker, they have several high level adventurers loyal to them for patriotism or other ideals, and can afford to hire many more in time of need. They are rich, and they can defend themselves. The second world is made of nations that cannot afford a bunker, but they are influent enough that they can make themselves valuable to bigger nations; so they basically become vassals to the bigger nations in exchange for use of their bunkers, and in general protection. And the third world, which is in anarchy as everybody with class levels can carve his own kingdom, until it becomes rich enough that it attracts the attention of someone higher level.

- I then envisioned a situation of multi-sided cold war. With magic, you don't recruit farmers to hold a pike anymore. You stockpile undeads and golems, you hoard diamonds to raise your highest level champions. And unlike mundane weapons, those things never rust or expire. So all the nations have stockpiled huge armies, that would be utterly destroyed in case of war. Nobody wants to fight; the cost is too great, the uncertainty too high. that doesn't stop them from playing a game of brinksmanship and sabotage with their higher level adventurers.

Among the ways magic is used similarly to technology are
- teleportation is the most common way of long-distance travel. there are a handful of 9th level wizards in every major city, and paying 100 gp to one of them is cheaper and safer than undertaking a multi-weekly trip, possibly through dangerous terrain. Some wizards went a step further and they make regular trips from major cities, using bags of holding to carry more passengers or even cargo at a reduced fee. They work like modern air companies; there's even a ryanether, apeing the real-world ryanair. Similarly, trade of luxury goods also happens by teleport. silk or gems are valuable enough that you can stuff them into a bag of holding and teleport. Bulkier items though, like iron or foodstuff, has to be shipped the old-fashioned way.
TP circles would allow the costs to drop between metropolises and allow the movement of heavier goods; ditto for portals. 75 K is a fair bit but moving only 100 people a day at 1gp it would take 2 years to pay for it; a solid investment for a city. Heck that sort of price makes it viable for having all manner of small towns linked to portals.
If one accepts that a portal would take a couple decades to pay off, the cost may drop down to a single silver piece.

Note that this means roads kinda fall into disrepair. Adventurers are the folk that do the land treks.



- undead labour is on the rise. special talismans have been made that let common people order the undead. this is putting the common laborers out of work.
- churches work as major pharmaceutical holdings; 5th levell clerics are common enough, and a mixture of organization, state financing and private insurances ensures that in the first world nobody dies of illness. regeneration is rarer, but also those needing it; in the richer nations nobody is missing limbs.
-science is pretty advanced; there will always be curious, inquisitive people who will use magic to discover stuff like the atomic theory. Technology, however, is mostly stagnant, for the reasons yahzi explained.
- material components have taken the role of strategic resources. Diamonds in particular are useful in a variety of spells and are like oil in our world. Most diamond production is concentrated in the hands of a few incredibly rich people, spoofing the oil sheikhs.
- you can always hire powerful people. They are famous, highly paid professional. There is absolutely no problem to getting someone to cast a 9th level spell for you if you have enough money to afford it.
- for this reason, assassination is out of fashion; resurrection is just too easy. soul binding is the natural solution, but it is absolutely outlawed by anyone and using it is akin to nuking (high level people are the only ones who can soul bind, and they are also the only ones who would risk being soul-bound. they have every interest that the spell never gets used).
There's actually a fair few ways to prevent rezzing.
Thianium, an urn from Drag Comp, using corpse to create an undead and stuffing the undead into a Portahole, aging the target. Also considering that these means simply put assassination in the same finality it is conventionally: the people interested in assassination would still use it. Yeah all these tools would be illegal but that changes nothing.
Soul-binding assassins would be very discrete as to their ability, and very paranoid.
Also rezzing is still expensive. Even ordinary assassination would give folk time to plot and move. And the heirs of assassinated nobles and royals would have an interest in rezzing/reincarnation not taking away the goods that they just inherited. If only because, say true rez: king is killed in battle, 180 years later someone finds their corpse and brings him back to life... there's an inheritance crisis there.


ultimately, a real industrial revolution is prevented by the fact that you can't mass produce magic. If you need 100 gp of material components for an item, you will always need 100 gp of material components, you can't shave on costs by doing it in a factory. So the magic industrial revolution is pretty slow by the standards of our revolutions.
Artificers can drop costs by a fair bit.
Warlocks also obviate material components for spell items; though it requires a high level warlock... But because permanent use-activated magic items acrete faster than they are destroyed...
Items like Lesser Schemas and Eternal Wands essentially industrialize basic spells, allowing the creation of other magic items.

[Darth Ultron]

ultimately, a real industrial revolution is prevented by the fact that you can't mass produce magic. If you need 100 gp of material components for an item, you will always need 100 gp of material components, you can't shave on costs by doing it in a factory. So the magic industrial revolution is pretty slow by the standards of our revolutions.

It does depend if this is true or not. This is the sort of thing that goes beyond the written rules.

If you will ''always'' need 100 gold peaces worth of something, then the mundane industrial revolution will have a huge impact on that. The mundane industrial revolution makes things cheaper. So by say 1870 or so ''100 GP'' to Magic, will be like ''one penny'' to the mundane world. So a spellcaster can but lots of stuff no problem. For example a a pound of sugar cost four cents in 1901. So if had a bad writer make the ''rules of reality'' in 1901, they would write something like ''this spell needs one pile of fine sugar worth five cents''. So time passes, and in 2017..well a spellcaster can buy tons of sugar no problem....with like the pennies they have in their sofa cushions.

[Florian]

The industrial revolution was (arguably, is) the most significant development in human history. Over a relatively brief span, a large portion of humanity went from subsistence farming on the edge of starvation to a world with commercial air travel, food plentiful well beyond the point of excess, personal automobiles, and every other commodity associated with modern life. Faced with the fictional world described by D&D, it is natural to ask what the industrial revolution might look like there.

The industrial revolution has a very important start with the black death. The halving of the general population, but especially the skilled workers, set up a situation up the social structures that broke feudalism and that in turn led to the industrial revolution.

[Cosi]

Magic is very different. Outside of certain specific spells, the majority of magic is performed by an individual. The need to work together to create something greater just isn't there because all the power is concentrated in a single person. This makes the idea of a magical industrial revolution less likely, because the powerful people don't need to share magic with the masses to get full use out of it. That's part of why it makes sense that a lot of fantasy worlds would be stuck in medieval type situations for long periods.

Economically, that's not really true. As long as you avoid the 3e situation where casters have the ability to become totally self-sufficient by the time they have any meaningful economic impact, casters are going to rely on non-casters for things those people have comparative advantage in. I agree that you get different social dynamics than the real industrial revolution, but that's a good thing. It's a waste of suspension of disbelief if you postulate magic just to make magic trains instead of regular trains.


And like other spellcasters, a Sorcerer can both pick the spells they want and can make new, unique spells. Unless your just saying in your example ''Sorcerers get random spells and can't make new spells''.

It's not random. It's that, from an in-world perspective, the spells any given Sorcerer has are unpredictable. If you have a Sorcerer that knows fireball, short of something like psychic reformation or PHBII retraining, you can't make him know lightning bolt. You can't do that with a Warmage either, but you can know exactly what every Warmage you train is going to get in advance when you start training them (modulo half-a-dozen or so spells from Advanced Learning). With a Wizard, you can just have him swap spellbooks another Wizard who does know lighting bolt and have two Wizards who know both spells tomorrow.


A lone Sorcerer could take over a kingdom, even more so a low magic mundane kingdom. But even if they did, they would still need to rule the kingdom in the right way....and that can be tricky. Using magic to force a whole kingdom to be your personal backyard might work for a while...but likely won't last long.

I discussed that. In such a setting, kingdoms are likely to be small and/or unstable. A Sorcerer can't effectively control a large kingdom, and a kingdom that isn't ruled by a Sorcerer can't prevent one from taking over.


And your example just flies out the window in a more traditional D&D world of lots of magic.

Sure, but the exercise is about considering how such a setting might develop. In the real world, we didn't just have all of modern technology appear simultaneously ex nilho across the globe. It was developed unevenly over a long period of time across the globe, and having different combinations of technologies resulted in different social, economic, or military paradigms. Having infantry facing off against machine guns gives you trench warfare. Replace or supplement those infantry with tanks and you get blitzkrieg. Sure, neither of those are how modern wars with drones and high altitude bombers are fought, but those are paradigms that did exist historically when we didn't have the tools we have today.


The appearance of wizards and circle magic, and later artificers are the individual revolution; a move from artisans to systematically trained experts, the offloading of tasks to devices, and the rise in collaboration would be key.

Circle Magic is powerful, but it doesn't seem all that impressive from an industrial standpoint. What particular things were you thinking people would do with that?

Artificers are interesting, but it's worth pointing out that magic items aren't like technology. Technology in the real world is subject to decay and incremental improvement. Magic items are traditionally subject to neither of those things. The One Ring's power was undimmed despite it sitting around for centuries, and no one ever made a One Ring v2.0 that was better.


One of the problems with your analysis is that magic in D&D is very much rational; it acts like engineering more than art. To prevent the Tippy-apocalypse I have to posit ancient forces that eat people's brains when they get too high-level; otherwise things will soon erase the pseudo-medieval setting.

I don't think that's true. By RAW, you have the ability to satisfy Mazlow's entire hierarchy of needs way before you ever get teleportation circles. The question isn't "why don't high level people transform the mundane world" but "why do high level people interact with the mundane world at all".


1: The industrialization of magic was one focus of my campaign The Metaphysical Revolution (https://campbellgrege.com/work-listing/the-metaphysical-revolution-dd-3-5-module/). A fairly low spoiler plot summary for the first part includes a society that has survived a magical apocalypse (by moving to the other side of the world and learning from their mistakes) held together by a Gentleman's Agreement amongst trade houses. Then the very notion of society is questioned when certain people gain power in seemingly unfair ways.

Definitely interesting. It's a somewhat different vibe though, particularly the focus on magical items rather than spellcasters.


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

Not really. Tippy is looking at what the endgame of a magical society looks like, while this is more concerned with how such a society develops.


This system requires stability. You can't have stability if every once in a while some big powerful guy just overtakes the kingdom. high level people really ake an impact in the world

Definitely an important point. You need some way to get spellcasters on board with helping rather than controlling society. To some degree, this is self-reinforcing. If you have spellcasters enforcing your laws, that tips the calculus for future casters away from "try to conquer the world".


I then envisioned a situation of multi-sided cold war. With magic, you don't recruit farmers to hold a pike anymore. You stockpile undeads and golems, you hoard diamonds to raise your highest level champions. And unlike mundane weapons, those things never rust or expire. So all the nations have stockpiled huge armies, that would be utterly destroyed in case of war. Nobody wants to fight; the cost is too great, the uncertainty too high. that doesn't stop them from playing a game of brinksmanship and sabotage with their higher level adventurers.

I'm not completely sold on the idea of a magical cold war. For one thing, it risks falling a little to close to "real history, but with magical aesthetics" than "history based on magic" for my taste. For another, the logic of MAD makes much less sense in a world with apocalypse cultists. If your plan is "kill everyone everywhere", being told that using your weapons will result in you also dying may not matter to you.

[Gildedragon]

Circle magic serves to boost the CL of spells like fabricate, true creation, animate dead etc...
Also magical nuke: OP dispellings

As to Artificers and Tech: they lower costs of magic items, increase their availability, and boost their efficiency.
The One Ring is a bad example (as it is an artifact with undefined abilities). But artificers boost the number of Rings of Invisibility available.

[Darth Ultron]

It's not random. It's that, from an in-world perspective, the spells any given Sorcerer has are unpredictable.

Even 'in game', a Sorcerer can pick their spells. Plus they can find spells and learn them.



Artificers are interesting, but it's worth pointing out that magic items aren't like technology. Technology in the real world is subject to decay and incremental improvement. Magic items are traditionally subject to neither of those things. The One Ring's power was undimmed despite it sitting around for centuries, and no one ever made a One Ring v2.0 that was better.

It's true in the rules there is no magic decay, but why would you say magic has no incremental improvement? Even the basic rules are full of more advanced, improved and greater magic items and spells. Exactly like some spellcaster said ''I can improve that''. The One Ring was just bad writing.

[King of Nowhere]

I'm not completely sold on the idea of a magical cold war. For one thing, it risks falling a little to close to "real history, but with magical aesthetics" than "history based on magic" for my taste. For another, the logic of MAD makes much less sense in a world with apocalypse cultists. If your plan is "kill everyone everywhere", being told that using your weapons will result in you also dying may not matter to you.

And that could be a nice plot hook.
Yes, there are plenty of threats to peace. Pretty much every nation or religion has some fanatics pushing for open war. At least three missions I gave the pcs so far involved someone trying to start a war. In fact, it is likely that a total war will erupt when the pcs are high level, triggered by the high priest of vecna trying to raise to godhood and most good-aligned powers trying to stop him.


TP circles would allow the costs to drop between metropolises and allow the movement of heavier goods; ditto for portals. 75 K is a fair bit but moving only 100 people a day at 1gp it would take 2 years to pay for it; a solid investment for a city. Heck that sort of price makes it viable for having all manner of small towns linked to portals.
If one accepts that a portal would take a couple decades to pay off, the cost may drop down to a single silver piece.

You know what, when I made the setting I extrapolated the consequences of the magic I knew, but I totally missed teleportation circle. That comes from learning most of my D&D from videogames. Now I will have to houserule that there are no teleportation circles in my world, otherwise parts of the setting will become inconsistent. It would not evolve to a full tippyverse, as cities can station troops ready to teleport to protect their farmland, but it would definitely affect trade. powerful nations have a gnp of a few billions gp, there's no way they would not build permanent teleportation circles.



There's actually a fair few ways to prevent rezzing.
Thianium, an urn from Drag Comp, using corpse to create an undead and stuffing the undead into a Portahole, aging the target. Also considering that these means simply put assassination in the same finality it is conventionally: the people interested in assassination would still use it. Yeah all these tools would be illegal but that changes nothing.
Soul-binding assassins would be very discrete as to their ability, and very paranoid.

Each and every one way to prevent rezzing is heavily frowned upon. High level adventurers don't fear death, because they know exactly where they will go - good adventurers will go to a nice place, and evil adventurers will be top dogs where they'll go, so none of them risks much. trapping the soul, however, raises the stakes a lot. they would not be happy about it. high level adventurers are the first to have an interest in soul trappings not being used. then again, someone may try to do it and hope to hide himself well enough. it's very difficult and very risky and whoever does it will need a very strong motivation.
anyway, assassination is still used, but more to send a message than to remove someone. You kill a king to show that a nation is weak and ruin its chances at alliances. or you kill a king while leaving fake evidence (including something that you assume would fool divinations) that somebody else does it, then you hope the two nations will fight and get weakened so you can step in and take both of them. both those scenarios happened in my campaign. Otherwise, if you want to remove someone, you put him in special antimagic jails with padded walls and stuff to prevent prisoners from suiciding. In the worst case, you drug them into a coma until they die of old age. as the soul is still free to go to its final destination, those methods are not frowned upon.
And of course, if you kill a high level adventurer, you get to steal his gear, so even if he's raised you seriously crippled him.


Also rezzing is still expensive. Even ordinary assassination would give folk time to plot and move. And the heirs of assassinated nobles and royals would have an interest in rezzing/reincarnation not taking away the goods that they just inherited. If only because, say true rez: king is killed in battle, 180 years later someone finds their corpse and brings him back to life... there's an inheritance crisis there.
In a world with resurrections, the laws will take them into account. different nations will have different laws, but an old king coming back from the dead would not spark a succession crisis. heirs scheming to prevent a resurrection is a definite possibility, though. the safest way to prevent that is to buy a life insurance; basically you pay a bunch of money to a church and they agree to raise you if you die. major religions are very powerful; they have the financial power of a pharmaceutical corporation and the political power of the pope in the middle age. if you get a contract with them, you're pretty much guaranteed. Of course, you're not guaranteed if you're simply put in prison.


It does depend if this is true or not. This is the sort of thing that goes beyond the written rules.

If you will ''always'' need 100 gold peaces worth of something, then the mundane industrial revolution will have a huge impact on that. The mundane industrial revolution makes things cheaper. So by say 1870 or so ''100 GP'' to Magic, will be like ''one penny'' to the mundane world. So a spellcaster can but lots of stuff no problem. For example a a pound of sugar cost four cents in 1901. So if had a bad writer make the ''rules of reality'' in 1901, they would write something like ''this spell needs one pile of fine sugar worth five cents''. So time passes, and in 2017..well a spellcaster can buy tons of sugar no problem....with like the pennies they have in their sofa cushions.

ok, but the caster still needs the same time. ok, the rules state that you need 1 day for every 1000 gp of cost, but even if inflation and industrialization bring down the cost of the material components, making, say, a +1 sword would still require a wizard 2 days of work and 80 xp. It's harder to get a scale economy going. plus, many of the most useful material components are rare gems, so their supply is limited, and conjuring them by magic is too expensive. there are several source books that contain ways to circumvent that, but depending on what sources you are using, it is fully possible to have magic that can't make a scale economy. There are some virtuous circles (like, more wizards make for a richer society, and a richer society can spend more mooney to train more wizards) but they are slow.

So, basically my world sits on a saddle point. If nothing goes wrong, it will eventually reach a singularity. If something goes wrong on a large scale, it may fall back to a high fantasy world. I'm not much interested in a high fantasy world and I have no idea how to even conceptualize a post-singularity world, so I focused on a world that is moving from one to the other.

[Gildedragon]

And that could be a nice plot hook.
Yes, there are plenty of threats to peace. Pretty much every nation or religion has some fanatics pushing for open war. At least three missions I gave the pcs so far involved someone trying to start a war. In fact, it is likely that a total war will erupt when the pcs are high level, triggered by the high priest of vecna trying to raise to godhood and most good-aligned powers trying to stop him.


You know what, when I made the setting I extrapolated the consequences of the magic I knew, but I totally missed teleportation circle. That comes from learning most of my D&D from videogames. Now I will have to houserule that there are no teleportation circles in my world, otherwise parts of the setting will become inconsistent. It would not evolve to a full tippyverse, as cities can station troops ready to teleport to protect their farmland, but it would definitely affect trade. powerful nations have a gnp of a few billions gp, there's no way they would not build permanent teleportation circles.

Portals are good options then. Mostly permanent and require both sides to agree to the two way creation.

I figure a typical sign of warming relationships is to gift a city with a portal keyed to one's portal-hub town.

Minor Schemas of Forbiddance are probably key in a city's safety. Wards are slowly covered in the spell. Sanctum War Forbiddance probably -the- spell to be using.

And cities probably built on the inside of Etherealized mountains



Each and every one way to prevent rezzing is heavily frowned upon. High level adventurers don't fear death, because they know exactly where they will go - good adventurers will go to a nice place, and evil adventurers will be top dogs where they'll go, so none of them risks much. trapping the soul, however, raises the stakes a lot. they would not be happy about it. high level adventurers are the first to have an interest in soul trappings not being used. then again, someone may try to do it and hope to hide himself well enough. it's very difficult and very risky and whoever does it will need a very strong motivation.
anyway, assassination is still used, but more to send a message than to remove someone. You kill a king to show that a nation is weak and ruin its chances at alliances. or you kill a king while leaving fake evidence (including something that you assume would fool divinations) that somebody else does it, then you hope the two nations will fight and get weakened so you can step in and take both of them. both those scenarios happened in my campaign. Otherwise, if you want to remove someone, you put him in special antimagic jails with padded walls and stuff to prevent prisoners from suiciding. In the worst case, you drug them into a coma until they die of old age. as the soul is still free to go to its final destination, those methods are not frowned upon.
Those ways of perma removal sound a lot more work than thianium.
It is super illegal... but then again so is black lotus extract so, yanno: potato potato.


In a world with resurrections, the laws will take them into account. different nations will have different laws, but an old king coming back from the dead would not spark a succession crisis.
Wouldn't it? It'd make power very unstable. Succession would be tricky... unless there's a statue of limitations after which returning from the dead has one return as a new legal person.


ok, but the caster still needs the same time. ok, the rules state that you need 1 day for every 1000 gp of cost, but even if inflation and industrialization bring down the cost of the material components, making, say, a +1 sword would still require a wizard 2 days of work and 80 xp. It's harder to get a scale economy going. plus, many of the most useful material components are rare gems, so their supply is limited, and conjuring them by magic is too expensive. Ambrosia hospitals to pay for XP prerequisites and XP components (esp for true creation)
If Temples are so big, ambrosia harvesting just makes them more effective. It might not be expedited to the point of null costs but...


So, basically my world sits on a saddle point. If nothing goes wrong, it will eventually reach a singularity. If something goes wrong on a large scale, it may fall back to a high fantasy world. I'm not much interested in a high fantasy world and I have no idea how to even conceptualize a post-singularity world, so I focused on a world that is moving from one to the other.

...if rezzing is a non issue then you've hit the singularity. Rezzing is expensive. Very expensive; even Revivify is nothing to sneeze at.

For now temples might keep their super efficient schemas of Sanctum Resurection, Forbiddance, etc under wraps...
But wizards and artificers would be working on making the costs lower.

Also a huge burden reducer: amulets of transference. Taxes to be paid in XP for the building of state projects.

[logic_error]

The appearance of wizards and circle magic, and later artificers are the individual revolution; a move from artisans to systematically trained experts, the offloading of tasks to devices, and the rise in collaboration would be key.

Very much this. We would see the rise of Artificers and Magecrafters. Think engineers and scientists. Assuming INT and WIS are distributed in a Gaussian, we would a have a significant number of divine and arcane casters to be able to cast daily spells. If they take ranks in craft skills and feats they would *invent* new devices and machines that do the same job as industrial machines. This would probably happen from the top; i.e. INT 18 guy inventing a machine/technology that becomes mass produced later. Same for magical science.

[logic_error]

A longer answer:

Cosi, we have had this debate before, haven't we?

As a preamble let us talk about why D&D rules are not a good place to start talking about realism:

Magic in D&D is NOT science per se because there are no known laws (read, limitations) on magic. Magic harnesses energies beyond mortal understanding (TM) and thus D&D casters are just formalizing magic, not really understanding it. They do not have models or explanations for spells levels or what makes some spells certain levelled (Glitterdust anyone?). So, as I see it, magic is practically unbounded. To make it worse, the most economically oriented spells are *low levelled*!! This was explicitly in the rules because the designers wanted the game that was made for *adventuring parties*. But the social implications of the rules were left unexplored, with a status quo imagined for medieval or close to medieval societies as fantasy tropes. We have to see D&D as a game *first*, a simulator *second*. Many of you seem to think that D&D rules are somehow sacred words of God. Not so. Even by the rules, a DM is supposed to have the final word on the rules, just so that the game can remain true to *the DM's* sense of realism about the setting.

With that in mind, we should think about how the rules as they are, within the limits of reason, affect the game world.

A magical society that actually uses magic as described in D&D to its full effect, where deities/faith grants magic powers, education can *teach* magic, low-level spell provide services mildly useful to adventurers but broken for the purpose of social organization, such as create food and water, fix stuff etc, we would enter an era completely beyond our current scope of understanding within a few generations. Economics as science deals with distribution of *finite* resources such as goods, services and time. D&D pretty much makes a lot of these irrelevant (water out of nothing, food out of nothing, clothing out of nothing, shelter out of nothing). Education will become easier with Psionic powers. Rule of law with divine spells. The direct intervention of Deities/faiths in form of granted spells, the presence or Paladins will make a strange hyperactive moral system possible that will make people very narrow-minded about certain issues. Access to divination and transmutation magic will make most mundane crime go away. There is a good chance that the national borders of D&D settings would be based on theocratic doctrines instead of linguistic and/or racial ones.

These are some of the positive things that you can expect.

However, there is a good chance that rules as reading would destroy the world as soon as a crazy man reaches level 9. With access to level 5 spells, he would probably summon unthinkable horrors out of the D&D mythos to invade the material plane and most low-level creatures would end up being fodder or be possessed by malevolent entities. This, by the way, is the most likely scenario.

[King of Nowhere]

Ambrosia hospitals to pay for XP prerequisites and XP components (esp for true creation)
If Temples are so big, ambrosia harvesting just makes them more effective. It might not be expedited to the point of null costs but...



...if rezzing is a non issue then you've hit the singularity. Rezzing is expensive. Very expensive; even Revivify is nothing to sneeze at.

For now temples might keep their super efficient schemas of Sanctum Resurection, Forbiddance, etc under wraps...
But wizards and artificers would be working on making the costs lower.


Never said rezzing is not an issue. It is very expensive, and only powerful people have access to it. 30k gp are nothing to the budget of a large nation, as long as it doesn't happen too often. If there was a major war going on, everyone would chew through their diamond stockpiles pretty fast. but important people don't die every day.

As for this ambrosia, I've never heard of it in D&D. Ok, I know that in some books they made ways to save most of material components and xp, but I'm not using those because I didn't want my players to start getting money for nothing with crafting. this in turn prevents a full-scale industrial revolution.
Of course, depending on the books you're using and the magic you're allowing, you may end up in fairly different scenarios.

[Darth Ultron]

With that in mind, we should think about how the rules as they are, within the limits of reason, affect the game world.


There is also the problem that we don't have a base line to go from. The D&D default world of like 1400 is a silly joke. Somehow, the default world has had magic for a couple thousand years, but is somehow also just like Earth was in 1400. And even with the 'magic apocalypse' in the back story, the world still has tons of magic. And if the 'magic apocalypse' was any time past yesterday, they could rebuild quickly enough.

So to really answer the question we'd have to think a lot more like ''what if cavemen discovered magic''?

The Rules also have the silly power problem. By the ''rules'' things ''too powerful'' don't exist...because it would be unfair to the player characters. If the game has 2nd level player characters, their can't be 20th level dragon demi god foes for them to fight. But when you take away that silly fairness rule...well, there is no limit to the power. Just one being of power can have a huge impact....and like 25 can change the world.

[Cosi]

Circle magic serves to boost the CL of spells like fabricate, true creation, animate dead etc...

True, but obviously less of a transformation than the emergence of those spells in the first place.


Also magical nuke: OP dispellings

Dispels have a CL cap. Buffing your caster level just makes you beat dispels, not make them super good.


Automatically resetting traps of Lesser Telepathic Bond and Sending could lead to hive minds.

That's mental communication between independent minds. Generally, hive minds are a single mind controlling multiple bodies.


Wouldn't it? It'd make power very unstable. Succession would be tricky... unless there's a statue of limitations after which returning from the dead has one return as a new legal person.

Not necessarily. Dying might make you no longer king, even if you get better.

[King of Nowhere]

I think the most sensible law for succession is that once a king is crowned, he is the legitimate king, and all others lose legitimacy. if an old king returns from dead, still the crowned king is king. mind you, if the old king was popular, he may still gather followers and spark a revolution or coup, but the law would be clear; the crowned king is king, and an older king has lost any right to rule.

[Yahzi]

So, as I see it, magic is practically unbounded.
It wasn't supposed to be. From the earliest edition, gold = XP, which meant that xp (i.e. levels) was a finite resource just like gold.

What I've done is make that relationship explicit. XP is farmed from peasants, just like gold (i.e. taxes). It can also be stolen, so going out into the wild and murdering monsters (and their peasants) is a viable economic activity.

It is surprising how many of these kinds of problems are solved by this approach. I also changed the XP curve to double at every step, solely to keep 17th level game busters down to one in a million.

Toss in a regular reoccurring apocalypse from brain-eating squids, and you can justify the classic D&D mileu pretty well.

[logic_error]

It wasn't supposed to be. From the earliest edition, gold = XP, which meant that xp (i.e. levels) was a finite resource just like gold.

What I've done is make that relationship explicit. XP is farmed from peasants, just like gold (i.e. taxes). It can also be stolen, so going out into the wild and murdering monsters (and their peasants) is a viable economic activity.

It is surprising how many of these kinds of problems are solved by this approach. I also changed the XP curve to double at every step, solely to keep 17th level game busters down to one in a million.

Toss in a regular reoccurring apocalypse from brain-eating squids, and you can justify the classic D&D mileu pretty well.

Ah, Birthright. Someone, please resurrect that setting.

[Darth Ultron]

ok, but the caster still needs the same time. ok, the rules state that you need 1 day for every 1000 gp of cost, but even if inflation and industrialization bring down the cost of the material components, making, say, a +1 sword would still require a wizard 2 days of work and 80 xp. It's harder to get a scale economy going. plus, many of the most useful material components are rare gems, so their supply is limited, and conjuring them by magic is too expensive. there are several source books that contain ways to circumvent that, but depending on what sources you are using, it is fully possible to have magic that can't make a scale economy. There are some virtuous circles (like, more wizards make for a richer society, and a richer society can spend more mooney to train more wizards) but they are slow.


With industrialization, things become less rare. Salt was Rare back in 1300 ish, but in 2017 you can get salt no problem. The same is true of Rare gems, but a bit less so. And once you get to the point of magic mines, creation spells and planual mines....

There are also the ''alternative spell component rules'' and ''power spell components'', and ways of making spells not need material components. And there is always custom spell research to change a material component too.

The important thing is the RULES can not change (you know, ''officially''), but the world will change around them.


I can see a world were everyone is at least a bit of a spellcaster, like:

Sorcerers/Bards: Artists, entertainers, singers, actors, politicians, and such
Clerics: Doctors, Nurses, specialty jobs
Druids: Animal and plant and nature related jobs, zoo keepers, farmers,
Wizards: Professional skilled jobs

And there would always be a bit (like 20%) of cross overs. Like a Wizard singer or a Cleric mechanic.

And the classes would change over time to not be so much ''letsz go lootz a dungeon!'' .

[Yahzi]

Ah, Birthright. Someone, please resurrect that setting.
I always wanted to play in that setting, but never got the chance. At some point I got the impression that it was full of additional (and typically poorly thought out) mechanics.

I have, in fact, resurrected the idea, only adding a single mechanic (XP is a tangible substance you can harvest from peasants). Check out my signature if you're interested.

[VoxRationis]

The thing with magic's capabilities is that it typically mirrors not industrial technology, but the technologies we could be presumed to have in some future date. D&D magic draws heavily (particularly in earlier editions, but the influences are felt even now) from Vance's Dying Earth series, where magic is not the fundamental skill on which to build a greater society, but rather the remnants of civilization that developed all that and more, but then collapsed for various reasons, ages and ages before the characters were born. (This is why so many classic settings have ancient magical empires, incidentally.) So looking at it like "What can I do to industrialize with magic" is sort of looking at the matter backwards. People already industrialized, both with and in a fashion that produced magic, and the stuff you've got is bits and pieces of that. It's a little like picking up an iPhone and a 3-D printer, in the absence of anything else, and saying "I bet I could mass-produce with this." You're picking up the end-piece, the apex of a culture's technological progression (not that I'm all that enthused about the iPhone, but whatever) and trying to rebuild that culture with that. Long before your wizard learned Fireball, someone went through and discovered exactly the principles of how to do magical fire, and worked their way up from lighters or fireplaces to the long-range magical explosive you see today.

[Yahzi]

Vance's Dying Earth series, where magic is not the fundamental skill on which to build a greater society, but rather the remnants of civilization that developed all that and more, but then collapsed
Exactly right. Vance's stories are full of bizarre artifacts that no one understands, let alone ever thinks of recreating. At one point Cugel terrorizes some thugs with a tube of toothpaste, because no one knows what it does and everyone knows ancient devices can be deadly.

But of course Vance's stories are dystopian; there is no saving the world quest, because the world is lost. There is no restoring the empire or righting ancient wrongs. What people want to do with D&D conflicts rather violently with what it was designed to do.

I think my system gets around that, though, by positing a limiting factor on magic (XP) that is less oppressive than sheer fatalism. :smallbiggrin:

[King of Nowhere]

magic is not the fundamental skill on which to build a greater society, but rather the remnants of civilization that developed all that and more, but then collapsed for various reasons, ages and ages before the characters were born. (This is why so many classic settings have ancient magical empires, incidentally.)
Going on a tangent here, but I have to say the "ancient superadvanced fallen empire" has far deeper roots than that. Fantasy if full of them because even nowadays it draws heavily upon the inheritance of tolkien, and tolkien was fulll of great ancient empires and saw history as a progressive fall of humanity. This in turn happened because tolkien was heavily influenced by romanticism, an artistic and culltural movement that spurred at the beginning of the industrial age and saw progress as bad, because it put most emphasis on the bad sides of industrial revolution.
Romanticism originated in the industrial revolution, but it has more ancient roots. Ultimately, I've seen the concept be dated back to the roman empire; the romans were extremely advanced in engineering and architecture, and people who came after them could not replicate their feats until the XIX century. so for almost two millennia everyone could see those ruins of this society that was supposedly more advanced than anything of the time (not true; the romans were more advanced in some fields, but they didn't have mechanical clocks, had farming techniques more primitive than the middle age, and were generally more backwards in a variety of other things) and get the impression that progress goes backwards.
But probably it goes even deeper than that; already in the Iliad we get the concept that there was a mithical ancient time of gods and heroes, and that modern people just cannot compete.
So... who knows? Probably it goes back all the way to when the first man-ape learned to talk, and it uttered something of the "when I was younger, the grass was greener" variety

[VoxRationis]

Well, yes, there is definitely a cultural line of thinking that supports advanced fallen empires, but they're also a necessity in old campaign settings because they prop up a series of assumptions in the magic system. (And, incidentally, the Illiad and whatnot were inspired by memories of the grandeur of Mycenean civilization by the Greeks living after the Bronze Age Collapse, who wouldn't be able to aspire to that kind of architectural achievement and societal complexity for some time.)

[Yahzi]

already in the Iliad we get the concept that there was a mithical ancient time of gods and heroes, and that modern people just cannot compete.
So... who knows? Probably it goes back all the way to when the first man-ape learned to talk, and it uttered something of the "when I was younger, the grass was greener" variety
"The idle chatterer is the sort who sits rightdown beside someone he doesn't know, and starts out by speaking in praise of his own wife; then he recounts the dream he had the night before; then he relates the details of what he had for dinner. Then as matters progress, he says that people nowadays are much more wicked than they used to be" - Theophrastus, 2,000 years ago.

Nothing changes. :smallbiggrin: