Quote Originally Posted by Ionathus View Post
I think another reason is because the people who grew up in a society shaped by access to magic, truly shaped by it and not just "having a light veneer" of it, might not even be people to us in the traditional sense. We're talking alien-level cultural shift here, maybe even all the morals are different. That's a hard book to read, I'm not sure anyone's ever written anything even close to that. Maybe the final few far-far-future scenes of "The Last Question" by Asimov are the closest comparisons I can think of.
There are people who get closer than others. Brandon Sanderson, to give him due credit, really does think about magic systems and the impacts that they would have on the worlds he builds. I wouldn't say he goes all the way, and some of his systems makes more sense than others, but when you read his books you can definitely tell that he's trying to grapple with the issue even if he doesn't always succeed. Asimov, as you noted, was also a very systems-focused author and did in fact grapple with questions like this, just often scientific ones as opposed to magical ones. The best example I can think of his would be Nightfall, which is entirely about the consequences of a planet where night only occurs once every few centuries and the massive cyclical social upheaval this causes.

One of the reasons a lot of authors don't do this is because they aren't interested in telling stories about systems. Modern creative storytelling (whether it's movies, books, games, etc.) has a notable character-focus bias, to the point that many authors can't be bothered to get real world systems that can be easily googled correct (the Questionable Content threads in the webcomics section contains numerous remarks by various posters regarding errors of this kind), never mind trying to balance fictional ones against anthropology and biology and so on. Lots of authors and setting designers simply don't want to consider how society is shaped by anything at all, never mind fictional forces, they just want to write stories about people in society as they imagine it being.

That's fine, so far as it goes, but problems arise when the amount of supernatural stuff in a setting, whether in quantity, power, or abundance makes it impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief that these elements would not drastically reshape society. Temeraire, as mentioned, completely fails this test, and I made it only halfway through book one. Novik, to her credit, seems to have learned from this and structured later works in dark fairy tale realities where it was very clear that the fictional setting was never meant to hold together at all.

The trick, in setting design, is precisely how much supernatural stuff can be added to a setting while still managing to maintain the 'a light veneer' dodge with underlying social systems broadly unchanged so that the setting retains verisimilitude, assuming that is a goal. Unfortunately, from the TTRPG perspective, the answer to that question is 'not very much at all' which fights against the publication impetus to cram as much stuff into a setting as possible. For example, the initial publication of VtM, with just a handful of clans of vampires all respecting the masquerade and a fairly modest list of powers available, was just on the edge of plausibility, but once additional supplements came out with mighty elders, crazy Sabbat serial killers, bizarre multi-layered conspiracies, and world-spanning magical rituals the Masquerade idea quickly became a joke.