Speculating On Outcomes from How Magic Works

[doctorbadwolf]

So, in my homebrew game, magic items become more powerfully magical the more the user interacts with them, and this can be jumpstarted by being the person who made the thing. Especially if you can harvest the materials, prepare them, and use them to make the thing.

Making things by hand or using things made by hand by someone you are close to is also powerful in terms of offerings to spirits. If you raised the cow and harvested it's milk, and your friend traded you honey from his apiery for some of your chickens or homemade goods or whatever, that offering will have more "juice" than if it's all store bought, and you might even be better off offering something else that you had more of a hand in making, like time+work intensive foodstuffs.

Lastly, gifts can transfer part of the bond with their past owner to a new owner, if treated with respect. Heirlooms can gather quite significant power, as can communal tools that are treated with respect by the group.

All of this also applies to ritual spaces where magic is done, and where items are made.

Now, what I'm curious about is, how would this impact the development of our world, assuming the following;

• A basically optimistic setting, like fantasy Star Trek. Selfishness isn't more useful than cooperation and altruism, most people are good as long as their social order doesn't incentivize and train them not to be, history arcs toward positive progress, even if there are occasional hiccups that slow it down.
• It's the real world, magic is found to be real, Hidden Folk who have been developing magic have always existed
• Physical magic is scientific and measurable, there is a thaumatological field that permeates all worlds and can be interacted with by effort of conscious will.
• Spiritual magic is harder to quantify, doesn't always follow physical laws, and it's own internal laws can change fundementally over time. Gods can create, exist in multiple places at once, occupy multiple mutually exclusive states at once, etc. Spirits are weird and mysterious even to experts.
• Humanity finding out it has never been alone has some rough patches, but within a couple generations things are pretty smooth, overall.
• Physical magic and tech can interact usefully and predictably, and thus start to develop together.

So, like, would we see a drop in automation in order to work physical magical properties into technology?

Would people tend to make their own stuff more, and push back against external pressures to avoid doing so and just buy mass produced stuff?

Would this strongly impact the trend toward urbanization?

What am I just not thinking of, in your opinion?

has anyone built a world like this before?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The first bit of this sounds like David Brin's "The Practice Effect" where the more a thing was used the better it became at being that thing. So poor people were always wearing new shoes and the rich hat the oldest shoes. An consequence of this effect is that manufacturing innovation never occurred since all things got more useful at their function the more they were used.

Now leaving this aside, in my opinion if magic existed and relatively common, it would stifle innovation. My reasoning is that humans, by default think in terms of agency. The rain falls because of action of water spirits and rivers flow for the same reason. Add in magic, where the will of the caster imposes effect on the real world and I think that would reinforce that thinking. Add in that people were in the past persuaded that kings and emperors were divine or at least divinely appointed and those beliefs would be reinforced.
State bureaucracies already acted to stifle innovation that threatened the political status quo (You should read the fun and games Ottoman Sultans had in trying to bring in printing presses in to the Ottoman Empire) . A lot of historical innovation took place in societies out side the great empires.

The machinations of gods are a wild card and can be used to justify pretty much any course of development you want.

In my opinion, tech and science did not have much to do with each other until the ninetieth century or so. Stuff gets invented in time but usually to solve a problem that is known. The better the tech base and specialists with free time to much about with stuff all contribute to invention.

My view of the development of science is as follows, Agriculture leads to a interest in calendars, tilling a field to make a seed bed is a lot of work and if you time it right, in some place you might get two crops in and in some other places timing it wrong could result in losing the crop to a late frost.
Now I suspect that our ancestors knew about the regularity of the heavens even before the invention of agriculture but calendars, astronomy, architecture and trade all lead to development in mathematics. A big innovation was the Greek notion that the world could be understood by reason. This notion (and it took a long while lead to the scientific method.

Magic complicated this and a lot depends on how magic is done. If magic is highly individualistic in practice then it would hinder the notion that the universe can be reasoned out.

I suppose you decide where you want to end up and adjust your ideas to make that happen.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The first bit of this sounds like David Brin's "The Practice Effect" where the more a thing was used the better it became at being that thing. So poor people were always wearing new shoes and the rich hat the oldest shoes. An consequence of this effect is that manufacturing innovation never occurred since all things got more useful at their function the more they were used.

Now leaving this aside, in my opinion if magic existed and relatively common, it would stifle innovation. My reasoning is that humans, by default think in terms of agency. The rain falls because of action of water spirits and rivers flow for the same reason. Add in magic, where the will of the caster imposes effect on the real world and I think that would reinforce that thinking. Add in that people were in the past persuaded that kings and emperors were divine or at least divinely appointed and those beliefs would be reinforced.
State bureaucracies already acted to stifle innovation that threatened the political status quo (You should read the fun and games Ottoman Sultans had in trying to bring in printing presses in to the Ottoman Empire) . A lot of historical innovation took place in societies out side the great empires.

A lot of that would be counteracted by the fact that these are modern people encountering magic, wouldn’t it? Few people today believe in the Divine Right of Kings or the Mandate of Heaven, after all.

I think you may have a point in some cultures and places, though. It’s easy to imagine places that are already being held back by despots falling further behind, barring disruptive change due to people meeting their house spirits and those spirits telling them that the Leader is a donk that wouldn’t know a Divine Right if it guillotined him, or something like that.

The machinations of gods are a wild card and can be used to justify pretty much any course of development you want.

In my opinion, tech and science did not have much to do with each other until the ninetieth century or so.

I’m not sure that can be supported by history. Medieval Muslim “alchemists” invented optics, new distillation methods and tools still used by chemists today, and all sorts of other fun stuff, using the scientific method. In laboratories. With peer review. That cultural order largely got turned against science later by a moralist movement that insisted that math was the devil, but thier work was translated into European languages and taken up by European alchemists, scholars, and philosophers, and while the pop culture reputation of such individuals as secluded weirdo cranks searching for immortality and magical transmutation has a grain of truth, it is wildly exaggerated and the scientific process at work in their efforts is forgotten.

Paracelcus believed in gnomes, but he also invented toxicology.

Stuff gets invented in time but usually to solve a problem that is known. The better the tech base and specialists with free time to much about with stuff all contribute to invention.

Again I think this ignores rather a lot of history.

My view of the development of science is as follows, Agriculture leads to a interest in calendars, tilling a field to make a seed bed is a lot of work and if you time it right, in some place you might get two crops in and in some other places timing it wrong could result in losing the crop to a late frost.
Now I suspect that our ancestors knew about the regularity of the heavens even before the invention of agriculture but calendars, astronomy, architecture and trade all lead to development in mathematics. A big innovation was the Greek notion that the world could be understood by reason. This notion (and it took a long while lead to the scientific method.

I…fundamentally disagree with especially the last couple sentences, but I’ll hear ya out.

Magic complicated this and a lot depends on how magic is done. If magic is highly individualistic in practice then it would hinder the notion that the universe can be reasoned out.

If it is predictable and quantifiable, as described in the OP, then I can’t see it contributing to stagnation. Imagine if magic can be used to decrease the entropy in a complex system of power conversion. That would surely leapfrog related tech years into the developmental future, wouldn’t it?

I suppose you decide where you want to end up and adjust your ideas to make that happen.

Sure, but these discussions certainly challenge one’s assumptions and lead to a fuller setting. I really appreciate your input here.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Ok, how was this magic discovered?
Does it require writing? or math?

A lot of those Arab alchemical inventions required, as a precursor, certain developments in glass and ceramics. What is the base tech level that is needed to discover magic?

Edit:
I guess I am confused by your response. I thought you were wondering how magic would affect the development of societies that discovered it. I was not expecting a line by line critique of my knowledge or otherwise of the developments in medieval Islamic alchemy.

What are you trying to achieve in this discussion?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Ok, how was this magic discovered?

A bit like Shadowrun, but less apocalyptic and dystopian. Also all the folk have always existed, there are 8 other Realms beyond our universe, with some overlap, and there are mortals of some kind living in most of those realms.

So, only like Shadowrun in the basic "suddenly magic is known to exist and also there are trolls and some of them work for CalTrans." setup.

But how that all came to light was basically due to it becoming harder and harder to hide stuff, and some of the Wise (term for people who know about the Hidden Folk and magic) came together and decided to be proactive and start sort of shepharding folks toward acceptance of magic and other races, rather than fighting a losing battle to keep it all a secret in an age of ubiquitous, decentralized, largely unregulated, surveillance.

And then some Rangers got filmed fighting a feral werewolf and doing magic to bind the poor dumb jerk before he could kill half the small fishing town on the East Coast where he'd grown up, and things come to a head rather quickly from there, and within ten years the UN oversees an international set of treaties with several factions of Hidden Folk to gain their help with certain thorny problems being faced by humanity in exchange for our help with a war in another world, and a recognized place in our world. When this takes place, exactly, is up to the people playing the game, but the era of play is 1990's to 2030's, roughly. You can also play during the era from the 1890's to 2030's, which has a different dynamic, and the 2190's to 2230's, which is the era that this discussion benefits most.

Does it require writing? or math?

The more complex and useful stuff, yeah. Workaday magics don't, but even they are more reliable with formula and or a circle or other focusing tools. But what those tools do is offload some of the cognitive work involved in doing magic, so with practice and a strong will, you can learn to do a lot of simple stuff without any aides, but almost no mortal creatures have the capacity to do the really big stuff without a lot of help.

So, if you want magic to help photovoltaic cells translate more photons into electrons and dramatically reduce loss in that system, you're going to want an engineering degree, and some really good computer software.

But! Magic does also allow a lot more "garage maker" types to do stuff like taking their house off the power grid, or filtering their water without expensive filters, or like...make a magic sword that uses ritual magic do things to the alloy that would normally require very advanced tools and a lot of power.

A lot of those Arab alchemical inventions required, as a precursor, certain developments in glass and ceramics. What is the base tech level that is needed to discover magic?

Certainly hard to invent the alembic without decent materials science, sure. My point was mostly that they were absolutely people using the scientific method before the early modern era, and using it to advance technology.

But as for magic, basic personal scale magic doesn't technically require any tools, just knowledge and practice. Advancing the science of physical magic (elemental magics, and stuff like them), as well as the more advanced and complex stuff like creating "shortcuts" in chemistry, achieving transmutation of matter or energy (energy being easier, and matter being historically slow to advance due to the difficulty of it), etc requires various things like advanced metallurgy, and an at least modern understanding of physics and chemistry.

One idea I have to the future era is that pilots and systems engineers "mesh" with computer systems using a mix of advanced tech and magics relating to the spirit and mind, so that the system's sensors and such become your senses, allowing a human pilot to operate a fighting rig in a space battle, for instance.

So, the need for advanced tech depends on how complex the working and how far outside the immediate influence of a person it is.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Edit:
I guess I am confused by your response. I thought you were wondering how magic would affect the development of societies that discovered it. I was not expecting a line by line critique of my knowledge or otherwise of the developments in medieval Islamic alchemy.

What are you trying to achieve in this discussion?

I hardly went line by line, but I get what you’re saying. I tend to get distracted and “in the weeds”, is all, especially when a topic I’m very interested in comes up, like Medieval (especially Islamic) Alchemy.

Anyway, I want to hear hopeful at least a few people’s take on a magical future that doesn’t lead to dystopia or apocalypse or both.

I’m interested in your perspective, especially because I see magic as more likely to accelerate advancement than to slow it down.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

So this is like, the magic was always there, not like Shadowrun where there was no magic and then it apocalyptically returns or the novel Warspell: The Merge where magic appears in the modern world but no apocalypse.
So my question here is: back in the days when the Roman emperors were claiming personal divinity and persecuting Christians why did they not establish a monopoly or near monopoly on magic. Use that resource to bolster their claim to divinity and prevent the rise of Christendom or failing that why not between say 1240 and 1500 AD when the Church pretty much had an iron grip on the faith and intellect of Europe did not the Papacy do the same?

My point is that any thing known to threaten those in power will result in those in power trying to control and co-opt that thing. That is why one gets inquisitions and secret police.
A strong case could be made that the Inquisition was antithetical to the Gospels and the message of Christ but we had one anyway because it was necessary to enforce the doctrines needed to underpin Papal political leverage. People do this sort of thing and why did it not happen in your world or more pertinently why did not magic reinforce these tendencies? Given that magic would overawe the superstitious and reinforce the notion that the status quo was back by divine will.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

A couple of relevant questions occur to me.
Can anyone do magic (I suspect so but want to be clear)?
Are there people that are naturally magical (aka sorcerers)? And how numerous are they?
What happens if one get a spell or piece of magical research wrong? on the scale of: nothing, your brains dribble out your ears, the resulting explosion kills everything for a 1000 meters.
All of this will have a profound impact on how magic is viewed in a society.

 

[Ixal]

Now leaving this aside, in my opinion if magic existed and relatively common, it would stifle innovation. My reasoning is that humans, by default think in terms of agency. The rain falls because of action of water spirits and rivers flow for the same reason. Add in magic, where the will of the caster imposes effect on the real world and I think that would reinforce that thinking. Add in that people were in the past persuaded that kings and emperors were divine or at least divinely appointed and those beliefs would be reinforced.
State bureaucracies already acted to stifle innovation that threatened the political status quo (You should read the fun and games Ottoman Sultans had in trying to bring in printing presses in to the Ottoman Empire) . A lot of historical innovation took place in societies out side the great empires.

The machinations of gods are a wild card and can be used to justify pretty much any course of development you want.

In my opinion, tech and science did not have much to do with each other until the ninetieth century or so. Stuff gets invented in time but usually to solve a problem that is known. The better the tech base and specialists with free time to much about with stuff all contribute to invention.

My view of the development of science is as follows, Agriculture leads to a interest in calendars, tilling a field to make a seed bed is a lot of work and if you time it right, in some place you might get two crops in and in some other places timing it wrong could result in losing the crop to a late frost.
Now I suspect that our ancestors knew about the regularity of the heavens even before the invention of agriculture but calendars, astronomy, architecture and trade all lead to development in mathematics. A big innovation was the Greek notion that the world could be understood by reason. This notion (and it took a long while lead to the scientific method.

Magic complicated this and a lot depends on how magic is done. If magic is highly individualistic in practice then it would hinder the notion that the universe can be reasoned out.

I suppose you decide where you want to end up and adjust your ideas to make that happen.

This is imo a rather flawed way of thinking brought on by our real world experience that magic is not science.
But in most RPG worlds magic and divine intervention is real and thus part of "science". Sure it would not automatically mean that people would apply scientific principles to it, but there would still be innovation, just that some of that innovation would be in magic and rituals. The same way that some people pushed science in the real world some people would push the field of magic and innovate. Same for divine intervention. Just read through how refined ritual offerings were in the Roman Empire where they tried the best to get the gods to accept their offerings to the best of their knowledge.

Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice

Part II of a series at the underpinnings of ancient polytheistic (Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Norse, etc) religious practice.

acoup.blog

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This is imo a rather flawed way of thinking brought on by our real world experience that magic is not science.
But in most RPG worlds magic and divine intervention is real and thus part of "science". Sure it would not automatically mean that people would apply scientific principles to it, but there would still be innovation, just that some of that innovation would be in magic and rituals. The same way that some people pushed science in the real world some people would push the field of magic and innovate. Same for divine intervention. Just read through how refined ritual offerings were in the Roman Empire where they tried the best to get the gods to accept their offerings to the best of their knowledge.

Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice

Part II of a series at the underpinnings of ancient polytheistic (Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Norse, etc) religious practice.

acoup.blog

It is not about real world science so much as an assumption that magic is rare and dangerous. Which is my default. If the practice of magic requires and complex and esoteric education then magic will be mostly confined to those classes that have the time to learn such things. In my opinion such institutions are conservative in nature and more so if magical mistakes result in environmental catastrophes.
If on the other hand, every blacksmith and carpenter needs a basic magical training then magic is more widespread and harder to police.