Contrasting a high magic society to the rest of a setting

[Xervous]

Hard to answer without knowing what magic can do in your setting. But:

* Fantasy magic often makes it easy to make light, so nighttime would probably be bright and colorful like the modern world. Burning stuff for light sucks. Perhaps everyone has their own magelight, rather than streetlights, to avoid being too modern.

* Real people tried to use magic to control fertility and cure disease. If these people are good at it, the women may be bolder and less 'modest' compared to women elsewhere, much like modern women, since they don't have to fear pregnancy or STDs.

* There are various things what would work better if you've strongly established what low-magic and -tech society is like: dark, high child mortality, prone to famines...

* If it's a system like 3e D&D, then assuming everyone has access to Prestidigitation effects is a good approach. Lots of bright colors, as people have said, and changes of color, sometimes odd smells...

* If they can use their magic to improve farming, then you may have a lot more people who aren't farrmers, and living in cleaner and healthier cities than elsewhere. Perhaps less smoky cities and houses, if there's magical heating.

* Some systems allow mental contact, but only with people you know well. So it's not entirely like having cell phones.

* Messenger pigeons are something settings tend to overlook anyway, but if magic means intelligent birds, they're even more useful, since they can fly back and forth, or find people in the field, or spy on people from above and report; pigeons can only go home. Small flying fairies can take a similar role.

* If it's really high magic they may not even have farming as we know it. A potted food plant in the living room produces fruit or tubers for the whole family in a day, sustained by magic rather than sunlight... perhaps it's rather bland, and the natives use Prestidigitation to make it taste how they want; the PCs take a morale hit since they're stuck eating the equivalent of unseasoned potatoes for all their meals.

* If they can have lots of teleportation circles, then maybe what they don't have are roads. And what looks like multiple cities are actually one big 'city': sometimes you walk to the next neighborhood, and sometimes you walk through a circle to the next neighborhood. This would also make conventionally besieging such a city rather brutal: civilians can evacuate, supplies and more troops can come in, the attacker is doomed. And maybe instead of being one locality, like Ireland with magic ore, it's actually a 'city-nation' of enclaves spanning the world, existing wherever the ore is found, linked by teleportation.

The general scope of common magic spans up to roughly 7th level D&D spells with a handful of caveats, mainly long distance teleportation being dependent on from/(usually) to circles established on leylines, no resurrections, the planes being much harder to reach out to and generally more malicious/alien. Pardon my facepalming, plentiful (or at least more commonplace) teleportation seems to be a given with the details I’ve arranged. Objects of convenience and importance, while mass shipping handles bulk.

I’m not averse to the notion of magical street lamps as it’s a clear follow on to standard oil lamps that were used for untold centuries. See how quickly electricity was put to lighting when people figured out it could serve that function. Though if I keep the magic rock rare enough that allows for a clean upper class / smoky slums dynamic.

Farming and its relationship to free time / economic specialization is a really good point to have brought up. I’ve seen historic numbers placing 70-90% of the population as farmers up until recent technological developments pushed the yield rates beyond 100 peoples worth per farmer. Magical combine harvester doesn’t have quite the right feel for technological progress and scarcity, but augmented plants and livestock (maybe even naturally occurring to some extent) could explain a moderate shift in production rates without placing undue strain on verisimilitude. Could also look to historical estimates of yields to have parallels to draw on societal state.

I am totally running with animal messengers for all sorts of things. The party’s squirrel prophet will utter the timeless words immediately “I want one”.

So a colorful world towering taller than the lands around it but at the same time smaller due to ease of communication.