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World Building: Tech, Magic, and Society
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9051946" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Unless you are genius like Tolkien and can devote a significant amount of your lifetime to inventing things, you should heavily draw upon real world cultures in order to derive your setting. Ideally, you do this as something other than pastiche - "Fantasy Egypt" for example - by mixing and matching ideas and cultures freely to create something that feels original. But even pastiche is probably better than what most people can invent on their own.</p><p></p><p>Real world history and even real world stories about magic are predicated on the idea that magic doesn't exist or at least is exceptionally rare. The people that told the stories about magic weren't stupid. This does as you've noticed create a problem if you have ubiquitous magic in a fantasy setting. There are basically two choices. Either you assume a pervasive high level of magic in which case you have some sort of 'Magic as Technology' society which draws heavily from the modern world like for example "Eberron" or the world of Max Gladstone's "Craft Sequence", or else you assume that while low level magic might be pervasive high-level magic remains exceptionally rare allowing for a more traditional Middle Earth or Hyperboria inspired fantasy world set in a past that never was. Neither is wrong, but both require careful thought to do well.</p><p></p><p>I tend to do the later one. In my campaign, low level magic is ubiquitous, and society has carefully prepared defenses against it on the expectation that it exists and understanding of what it is capable of. High level magic exists but is too rare to drastically impact the global economy. Certain adaptations have been made to the RAW to support this in various ways such as changing pricing structures of magic items to make some high impact magic items more expensive, making some low level magic less expensive, nerfing certain spells (such as the range of teleport magic), creating various low level inexpensive defensive magics that can help counter ubiquitous low level threats, adding rules that make heavy infantry formations more resistant to magical attack as well as non-magical attack, and kind of in the background assuming magical contamination or residue is a real worry if you overuse certain sorts of magic (elemental magic and necromancy in particular) and that in the world's past there was a magical catastrophe when mortal magic got out of control that colors the perception of magic by both mortals and the gods. All these things help preserve a system that works and isn't easy for the PCs to break. </p><p></p><p>And yes, D&D magic - even low-level magic - means that certain technologies are available to the society that exceed even what we have available now. So if you aren't careful, you end up with a high science-fiction setting. If you don't embrace that ahead of time by considering the consequences of a world filled with casters of 11th level or higher, then you are going to have problems as the PCs start breaking the culture by accelerating the technology to where it should be as implied by your demographics. </p><p></p><p>On the other hand, if there are like 1 11th level caster per 100,000 people, then that high magical technology might exist but it simply wouldn't be affordable enough to be ubiquitous. Wizards of sufficiently high enough level to change the world will tend to be subtle, independent, quick to anger, and want to keep their head down so they don't become targets, living in towers working on projects that interest them intellectually or personally. They won't normally be working like IT professionals and engineers in steady 9-5 jobs, schlepping for some king who wants a boring infrastructure project most of the time. Occasional spectacular things will exist as monuments to some past wizard's power, but there won't be global teleportation circle networks because there just aren't enough 17th level wizards devoted to that pastime.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9051946, member: 4937"] Unless you are genius like Tolkien and can devote a significant amount of your lifetime to inventing things, you should heavily draw upon real world cultures in order to derive your setting. Ideally, you do this as something other than pastiche - "Fantasy Egypt" for example - by mixing and matching ideas and cultures freely to create something that feels original. But even pastiche is probably better than what most people can invent on their own. Real world history and even real world stories about magic are predicated on the idea that magic doesn't exist or at least is exceptionally rare. The people that told the stories about magic weren't stupid. This does as you've noticed create a problem if you have ubiquitous magic in a fantasy setting. There are basically two choices. Either you assume a pervasive high level of magic in which case you have some sort of 'Magic as Technology' society which draws heavily from the modern world like for example "Eberron" or the world of Max Gladstone's "Craft Sequence", or else you assume that while low level magic might be pervasive high-level magic remains exceptionally rare allowing for a more traditional Middle Earth or Hyperboria inspired fantasy world set in a past that never was. Neither is wrong, but both require careful thought to do well. I tend to do the later one. In my campaign, low level magic is ubiquitous, and society has carefully prepared defenses against it on the expectation that it exists and understanding of what it is capable of. High level magic exists but is too rare to drastically impact the global economy. Certain adaptations have been made to the RAW to support this in various ways such as changing pricing structures of magic items to make some high impact magic items more expensive, making some low level magic less expensive, nerfing certain spells (such as the range of teleport magic), creating various low level inexpensive defensive magics that can help counter ubiquitous low level threats, adding rules that make heavy infantry formations more resistant to magical attack as well as non-magical attack, and kind of in the background assuming magical contamination or residue is a real worry if you overuse certain sorts of magic (elemental magic and necromancy in particular) and that in the world's past there was a magical catastrophe when mortal magic got out of control that colors the perception of magic by both mortals and the gods. All these things help preserve a system that works and isn't easy for the PCs to break. And yes, D&D magic - even low-level magic - means that certain technologies are available to the society that exceed even what we have available now. So if you aren't careful, you end up with a high science-fiction setting. If you don't embrace that ahead of time by considering the consequences of a world filled with casters of 11th level or higher, then you are going to have problems as the PCs start breaking the culture by accelerating the technology to where it should be as implied by your demographics. On the other hand, if there are like 1 11th level caster per 100,000 people, then that high magical technology might exist but it simply wouldn't be affordable enough to be ubiquitous. Wizards of sufficiently high enough level to change the world will tend to be subtle, independent, quick to anger, and want to keep their head down so they don't become targets, living in towers working on projects that interest them intellectually or personally. They won't normally be working like IT professionals and engineers in steady 9-5 jobs, schlepping for some king who wants a boring infrastructure project most of the time. Occasional spectacular things will exist as monuments to some past wizard's power, but there won't be global teleportation circle networks because there just aren't enough 17th level wizards devoted to that pastime. [/QUOTE]
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