Red: Wouldn't these... consolidate access to magic into the hands of the ruling class?
No, for the same reason that censorship and media control--practiced by essentially
all medieval European monarchs--did not make the ruling class uniformly well-educated. Exerting supervisory control is not the same thing as applying it to yourself. Many medieval monarchs were nearly illiterate, having received almost no formal education, and some did not even speak the native language of the country they ruled, e.g. Richard the Lionheart did not speak English. For much the same reason that
economic and
secretarial concerns were often fobbed off onto civil servants, despite being of absolutely vital importance to the state, control over knowledge and magic does not imply that the monarchs MUST become spellcasters in their own right.
Some would have. Cleopatra, for example, or Alfonso X of Castile (also known as Alfonso the Wise.) But many would not, because politics often
doesn't leave room for research or religious vows. Political power is difficult to maintain, and doing that
and being a devoted practicing priest or avid scholar is not easy.
Purple: Mages could also pay people and treat them with respect. Again, for me at least, this is a more fundamental question of why non-magic users are even in charge at all. These sort of answers only prevent the overthrow of a non-magical government, but it doesn't explain that governments existence in the first place.
It is already an established fact that people must
learn how to use magic, yes? Even Sorcerers, "born" with their power, do not manifest full 20th level spellcasting in childhood. Hence, power structures will form
before magical knowledge is gained, not the other way around. As a result, there will be at least
partial--and much more likely full--non-magical aristocracies formed well before any magical aristocracy can form. Because all it takes to get an aristocracy started is
bigger-army diplomacy.
Gold: And these are just using spellcasters to protect you from spellcasters, while enforcing that only spellcasters you approve of are allowed to operate. Which, why can't all spellcasters be branch families of the main nobles, who instead of providing soldiers for the King's wars, provide magical services? And thus, magic is an intrinsic part of the ruling class.
But, firstly, "magic is an intrinsic part of the ruling class"
isn't what is being argued. What is being argued is "the aristocracy will be EXCLUSIVELY comprised of magic-users,
being a magic user will
make you part of the aristocracy, and this state is completely and absolutely inevitable." Magic being factored into--subservient to, and at times conjoined with, the ruling class--is a completely different state of affairs, and quite compatible with what I described, yes.
Secondly, as already stated (by me) and, indeed, already
granted by the OP, Clerics--as in, true
ordained priests, not just allegedly-deified leaders (a practice
very unlikely in a world where deities actually exist and compete with one another)--have something interfering with their plans for global magocratic domination:
doctrine. Interventionist deities enforcing moral rules are gonna be a real pain for Clerics. Further, any religion which is likely to have a lot of followers is essentially guaranteed to have pro-social doctrines, because religions with
anti-social doctrines
will lead to the destruction of the societies that host them, that's literally what "anti-social doctrines"
means. So these are spellcasters already (a) part of a separate hierarchy, and (b) bound by rules that inhibit them or lacking sufficient followers to declare hegemonic control, on top of being (c) limited by actual deities who, even if they're evil, have a vested interest in maintaining certain kinds of social order.
Right, but the power to protect your loved ones can lead to political power. That's why kings started existing, they were protecting their people.
Actually, as I'm given to understand, most early civilizations--which usually had absolute monarchs--began through that person being the in charge of the
food. Because if you were the one overseeing the food stores, you had the power. Other forms included controlling access to water (the "hydraulic empire," believed to be responsible for stuff like Mesopotamia and early China), or being the war-leader everyone else looked up to (more common in nomadic or pastoralist cultures, e.g. Arabia or Mongolia.) "Protection" was usually less important than either
administration (getting resources from where they were abundant/excessive to where they were deficient, e.g. the bureaucracy in China needed to control floods and support rice farming) or
conquest (because land was WAY more valuable than people until the Industrial Revolution.)
The power to earn money gets you money, and money leads to being part of the ruling class, because that is the entire point of wealth. It is the ability to direct people to act in the manner you want, by taking their man-hours of labor and utilizing it. Unless you are dragon sitting on wealth that exists for the purpose of you sitting on it, then wealth makes you part of the ruling class by default.
It...really doesn't though. There have been wealthy non-ruling-class individuals for tens of thousands of years, and there have been members of the ruling class who possess almost no
money but who have loyalty or faith behind them to keep them going. Money is far from a guarantee of being part of the ruling class.
But that is, in part, the question. What resistances would the body develop that do not lead to the magical power simply ending up far more likely in the hands of the already rich and powerful.
No. There is no
question involved here. There is only the bald
assertion that spellcasters will take all of the temporal authority (note: NOT that the aristocracy will keep magic under their thumbs! That's a completely different thing!), and that this conquest-by-magic, whether it be via diplomacy or war,
will always happen no matter what.
I have provided a counter-assertion: "You are assuming that
absolutely nothing else will change. That assumption is faulty." It is thus incumbent upon the person asserting the absolute inevitability of universal magocratic rule to demonstrate that no, nothing whatever could possibly prevent this from happening, not on me, because
I'm not the one making claims of historical inevitability.
Why would they have to be a Tyrant? Good Kings exist. Why is it that having magic and ruling automatically makes them a tyrant?
Because, as stated above, these magic-users are explicitly
taking power from existing rulers. One cannot usurp the power of existing, legitimate rulers without...y'know...being a tyrant.
Also, gods tend to get persnickety if their wishes are ignored. Doing things like sending blights upon crops, monsters to ravage the countryside, or just old-fashioned earthquakes, meteors and tsunamis. If a god tells their cleric to tell a king to do something, that god is expecting it to get done. Why would they be upset if they could cut out a step and just tell their cleric, who is a king, to do the thing? That seems like a full on win for the god in question.
For any of a variety of reasons. Understanding that mortal proxies are imperfect, and that the training to become a monarch leads in rather different (and often contradictory) ways to the training to become a devout proselytizer. Knowledge that such concentrations of power lead to undesirable abuses. Potentially, outright prescient knowledge.
Some deities will want cleric-queens and priest-kings. Some won't. Many will understand that upending the social order
solely to put someone you like more in charge is a great way to break everything. Even the evil ones. Overturning existing hierarchies is always a dicey business, and
some kind of existing temporal authority is almost guaranteed to exist separate from ecclesiastical authority.
So are we saying that it is impossible to have a kingdom that respects nature and doesn't cause issues with a druid's spiritual oaths? And really, most of these "spiritual commitments" are not stated, so while they can be theoretically why druids do not rule nations, they can also be written such a way as to not prevent the rulership of druids. It becomes a pure world-building choice.
I didn't say it was completely impossible. I said it was a huge impediment--which it is. Druids cannot wear metal armor, nor use a variety of weapons that are kind of important. They are instructed to avoid the creation of large urban settlements and industries. That's a
huge problem for any prospective druid-queen. How can you develop an aristocracy, a druidic magocracy, while
not having urban centers and
not using industry?
But what those obligations are are completely up to the deal struck. A warlock could easily make a deal for the power to save their people, become a king, and in exchange they simply protect the ancient forest, send a few of the people to the forest to train to become druids in service to the fey, and have a festival every year.
Now who's inventing worldbuilding? What's good for the goose is good for the gander:
you don't know what kinds of entities are present. Thus, we must assume that if they grant great power, they
ask for great power in return. Isn't that the most logical state of affairs, in the absence of further information? That they expect an equal exchange?
Useful, but with little utility in actually
taking over. Which is the assertion involved here: that magic-users are
guaranteed to eventually usurp all political authority and replace or absorb any existing ruling class into themselves. Also,
Crawford has explicitly said you are incorrect: you can read the
writing, but you are
not given instantaneous understanding of all coded messages. The writing will appear to you in code, but it being written in Old High Jinnistani calligraphy won't prevent you from reading the words. You just might not have any idea what "sunset dog potato"
means. According to the official Sage Advice entry, you can get the
linguistic meaning of a magical rune. That's quite different from being able to decode coded text.
Technically,
not always armored; not even "always magically protected from blows." Yes, you can cast
mage armor at-will, and it has its usual 8-hour duration. That means needing to remember to maintain it at all times (something far from guaranteed, just as "wearing armor whenever you're outside your bedchambers" is far from guaranteed)--and it also means never sleeping more than 8 hours at a stretch,
ever.
Skills anyone can acquire purely through background.
Okay. I genuinely don't see how this leads to inevitable victory. Is it useful? Sure. All magic is
useful. I don't see it providing some utterly uncounterable absolute-victory edge here.
Again, useful, but all it really does is give you firsthand accounts. Spies don't suddenly become obsolete because you can do that--and the target humanoid must be
willing, so you already have a planted spy to make use of this. Genuinely not seeing the utility here.
Certainly useful if the dead have useful secrets to tell. Good for extracting info from dead scouts, for example. But, again, this is no slam-dunk "magic inevitably wins forever, period, no questions," neither in isolation nor in concert with the others.
Useful. Still not seeing the slam-dunk.
I'm well aware of the utility of not needing sleep.
It's still not a slam-dunk win button, neither in isolation nor in concert with the others.
And all of these are able to be done, at-will, as much as you want. Without even getting into cantrips or spells. The pure amount of safety you can have by always being armed and armored is useful by itself, while many of these others give you options for diplomacy or communication that cannot be matched without magic.
Again, I disagree. The only two things here that are remotely major in effect and non-reproducible are Aspect of the Moon and Whispers of the Grave. Far Scribe is literally just having
sending, which magic
items can do just fine, TYVM--that's a prominent trope in fiction, actually. (Consider the Castlevania Neflix show, or linkpearls in FFXIV.) Gaze of Two Minds adds no meaningful utility over just having spies you trust to infiltrate a location to begin with. Beast Speech, more or less the same deal, since you can
talk to animals, but that gives you no special ability to train or exploit them. Beguiling Influence is literally just a fast-track background replacement. Eyes of the Rune Keeper is very useful for ordinary communication, e.g. making an unbreakable message in a language only you and your recipient can read (analogous to the Navajo code talkers in WWII), but it can't break ciphers.
Finally, Armor of Shadows isn't some total-protection thing--it's literally 13+Dex AC, and provides no special help while you're asleep. Enemies who attack you while you sleep have advantage, and if they make the attack within 5 feet of you then all hits are critical hits. Even if they only have a pitiful +3 to hit and you have maxed-out Dex, they'll hit more than 50% of the time (51%, if you want to be precise.)
Mage armor is not particularly effective protection against assassination.
