Does high magic = high tech?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I've been on a lot of threads describing non-traditional high magic settings and scenarios and vice versa.

In most of these, magic seems to either replace technology or cause social changes similar to those created by technology.

Populations becomes more urban, the upper ranks of society become more complex and fluid, education increases, people have greater access to items of personal power, transportation gets faster, and war becomes a lot more about fire power than strength of arm.

Or magic creates horrors similar to our own nightmares about an increasingly technological future. Such as the wasteland of DarkSun or the oppresive urban magocracies of some homebrewed settings.

I think we can be a little more creative than that and actually envision worlds in which magic changes history rather than speeding it up.

I mean I could see the Fae occupied magic forest becoming the norm for most populations in a truly high magic setting.

Equally, the Summerians believed they lived in a high-magic settings, would the presence of DnD magic actually change their culture all that greatly. Civilization might adapt to a more Summerian style of living in the face of undeniable magical reality. A culture in which cities are defended by god-kings and sorcerors are slaves/servants of the people or itenerant peddlers obliged to special laws for quality control and ethics. A world where people buy their magic from gods in a manner analagous to , but far stranger than, our own purchasing of power from utilities.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Or magic creates horrors similar to our own nightmares about an increasingly technological future. Such as the wasteland of DarkSun or the oppresive urban magocracies of some homebrewed settings.

Did somebody mention my name?

I think we can be a little more creative than that and actually envision worlds in which magic changes history rather than speeding it up.

Well, some effects of magic on society in my setting deliberately resemble the Age of Industrialisation - party because that time had one of the greatest expansions of urban areas in human history, and my setting does focus on cities...

But in other areas, such as space exploration, I have tried to move away from technological parallels...

I mean I could see the Fae occupied magic forest becoming the norm for most populations in a truly high magic setting.

Well, there are a few areas that are controlled by the fey and other sylvan creatures in my setting, and all but the most greedy of humans know enough to stay away from them. There's a reason why they have successfully defended their homes for millenia...

Equally, the Summerians believed they lived in a high-magic settings, would the presence of DnD magic actually change their culture all that greatly. Civilization might adapt to a more Summerian style of living in the face of undeniable magical reality. A culture in which cities are defended by god-kings and sorcerors are slaves/servants of the people or itenerant peddlers obliged to special laws for quality control and ethics. A world where people buy their magic from gods in a manner analagous to , but far stranger than, our own purchasing of power from utilities.

I will probably throw in some cities and regions like this as well. Sure, the main areas deliberately resemble Central, Northern, and Western Europe during the Industrial Age to some degree because I wanted to give newcomers a firm handle on my setting.

But I want to explore the City in all its forms, and there are still plenty of regions that need some more details...

 

[Drawmack]

My take on this is that there is always a power-center for a world/civilization.

These power-centers can be one of three things science/magic or religion.

No matter what the power-center is the civilization will progress contingent upon its morals and standards. I find it interesting to have a world that is mixed, with the different races having vastly different social structures as well.

Take, for example, the europeans before the industrial revolution. They had cities and many people lived in them however over half the population lived in hamlets, villages and on farms. Along comes the industrial revolution and all of a sudden (over the course of about 100 years) farms can get vastly larger, there is more work to be had in cities, etc. So what happens is only logical, the country population shrinks and the city population grows.

Now take the northern tribes of the native americans. They were, generally, a nomadic people who did not own large amounts of personal possessions. Most of the goods belonged to the tribe as a whole. If this civilization gained the industry, without european influence, then were would it have gone? I think it would have progressed to have metropolitan areas, but those areas would have consisted of stores, factories and just enough people to man those. There would not have been huge sprawling cities. However, if instead of science you have magic then you don't need people to man the factories and such so you get huge factories and mall like complexes standing on there own with people coming to them when they need something.

Here is how I resolve the issue. The humans in my world are a science based culture and a majority of them live in and around cities. There are three major human cities (freeport, bluffside, and a homebrew).

The elves and gnomes are magically bassed cultures. They have technology that far exceeds the humans (including refridgerators, freezers, stoves and TVs) but they do not live in huge sprawling cities. The elves have one city, their capital, and that is carved out of the side of a granite cliff face. The gnomes have one ''city'' but mostly live in hamlets and villages. The reason is that elves and gnomes use magic to communicate that therefor do not need to be physically close to be in touch.

The dwarves also live in huge cities but this is because they like to stay as close to the mines as possible. Acctually my entire dwarven empire is nothing but huge cities carved into adjoining mountains. They trade with other races for farmed goods and livestock so they have no need to raise their own.

What this leads to is very few unpopulated areas on the world. You are always in or near some sort of civilization. Maybe your in fields or a village or a hamlet but there are very few vast expanses of truly unspoiled countryside around.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

A Mixed Bag

Why Jürgen Hubert, I had no thought of your setting in my head when I wrote the original post.

Though I really do appreciate your elaboration on the diverse nature of your much discussed setting.

When I talked about fae forests I had in mind an idea of a druid dominated society in which nature really would be kind and loving. People blessed by the society would wander during the day gathering fruit from whatever trees were in season, need no protection from the beasts who protected them and left enough meat from their kills to provide them with protein, gather clean water from special vines, leave the waste to be absorbed by the hyperactive forests, and generally lead the life imagined by impressionist painters when they painted Polynesians. They would 'pay' for their paradise with massive prayer ceremonies at the proper lunar moment and children given up to be druids to maintain it and rangers to guard it from external threat.

The Summerian society would be the cleric version of same.

Wizard would be something like the Nexus towers, nod to Jürgen, or nation of villas and academies in which non-wizards are pledged to the support of particular wizarding 'families' and enjoy the benefit of cutting edge magical items in return for making the Wizard's lives as comfortable as possible, beyond what the wizards could do for themselves, and generally working to protect them from having to deal with nations that wouldn't understand their need to plumb the depths of knowledge.

I really don't know that the 'natural' order of things is to move into cities. The move out into the Hamlets of the middle ages seems to me to be just as natural a move as the move back in at the end of the period.

Further, I see technology as allowing one men to stretch his labor over more resources where magic is more stretch fewer resources into more labor.

Example: tech means one man can farm two lots of land, magic means one lot can produce more than two umagicked lots of food. High magick would have effects on the use of labor very dissimilar to the effects our technology has.

 

[Celebrim]

Any magic that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology.

That doesn't perforce mean though that a society with a sufficiently advanced practice of magic will necessarily look like a modern industrial setting (any more than a speculative far future society need look like a western european feudal state).

For example, either a technological or a magical society could severely restrict access to the technology such that the average citizen was completely unable to understand and in many cases even use the marvels available to the select few. A variety of social stratifications could occur depending on who had at some time in the past monopolized the marvels. A society could be ruled by 'God Kings' with powers the orinary citizens could not understand, or by a powerful clergy, or by some other sort of aristocracy.

When discussing any relationship between magic and technology, I can't help but thinking about Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' or 'Book of the Long Sun' series.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

How do you mean indistinguishable?

I don't know about the whole magic=tech principle. I mean an effect is an effect is an effect I accept.

If dynamite can put a whole in the ground of the same and in the same time as a dig spell, than so be it. And I grant that magic is a technology in that it employs techniques.

I freely admit that magic can be used to mirror the changes technology brings and creates, but...

...it seems to me magic is much more its own reward to learn than science or technology is. I mean if I learn astrophysics I have to have a huge amount of infrastructure in place to be of any use at all to say American society and myself. At the very least there have to be really sophisticated universities in place to employ me and then some sort of cultural context, like an obsession with space, in order to get me prestige beyond that of a crank.

An equivalent mage, let's say a ninth level conjurer or diviner, doesn't need nearly as large a support structure to be able to support his or herself, and the context for gaining prestige is present in the fact that most human beings value the very basic services he or she can provide, like refraining from summoning something to beat you or looking up your secrets and selling them to someone.

The technocracies technological production needs just don't seem to be as necessary in the context of high magic.

I keep thinking about Neal Stephenson's . Diamond Age with regard to this issue, but I'm not sure why. It's either becuase it's both a great vision of high magic society and proof that magic and tech are indistinguishable at a point or the heuristic that describes the divide between the two ideas. I'm not sure yet.

 

[Celebrim]

"...it seems to me magic is much more its own reward to learn than science or technology is."

And your educational background is in what? Somehow I'm not sure that many scientists I know would agree with that.

As for astronomy itself, cosmology has indeed become something of an abstract science (though that has become a choice not a necessity), but astronomy was the first applied science man developed and was with writing the chief magic that magicians practiced (and guarded) for it let them break the riddles of time and space.

I don't think you make a good analogy.

Modern society is increasingly complex so that any one individual is dependent upon a great many other individuals to achieve the wonders the rest of us take for granted. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced magical society is not so different. D&D may be 'high magic' but it seldom takes into consideration the social effects of the magic it proposes. It is not too much to suggest that a complex magical society could arise where in the wonders we accomplish today would generally require the assitance of an army of craftsman, scribes, and wizards of various orders just as scientific endeavors require a host of engineers, programmers, technicians, and scientists of various orders. I think that gamers simply convienently overlook such complexity.

Moreover, we can look back into the not too distant past to see a time in which science and the endeavors it undertook were simple enough that a single man could hold in his mind the sum of human achievement. There are no more Thomas Edisons or Leonardo DiVinchi's out there, not because they no longer make geniuses like they use to, but because they make so many today and today so many are required to advance knowledge a discernable degree.

If you were an accomplished engineer of the mid to late 19th century, you could from scratch reassemble the whole of modern machinery if you put your mind to it. Surely this is the sort of reward in your own labor that you describe? A workspace, tools, and funds to purchase raw materials like steel, coal, and copper are about all that is needed to produce marvels the like of which the world had never known.

It was not for nothing that the first airplanes were built by men who more commonly built bicycles. And heck, bicycles are themselves a marvel. I've sometimes wondered to what use say Trajan or Diocletian would have put to the ability to build a modern bicycle. Would Legions have rushed from place to place on the back of bicycles?

And there are yet huge amounts of infrastructure that is implied in the production of steel, coal, and copper for are 19th century engineer.

If you will consider the matter more closely, there is a huge ammount of infrastructure necessary to support your average D&D 9th level conjurer. Consider the value of the material that went into the construction of his spell books alone! Add to this the cost of components when he wishes to produce any sort of enduring miracle, and the labor that must go into it, and I think you will see that there is just as much infrastructure going on behind the scenes were gamers need never pay attention to it as went on behind the scenes with the Wright Flyer or the Monitor.

I think the problem would become more acute in a society that depended upon the creation of golems, teleportation circles, and other magical labor saving devices.

I agree that the Diamond Age is an example of line blurring between magic and science - but which is it, magic or science? Is Gaimen's world something that is possible, or is it merely fantasy to imagine a world were tools and servants grow like fruit on trees? Certainly we are dealing with something far more plausible than FTL, and yet FTL travel is never labeled magic. I can state with certainty that any society capable of FTL travel has the problem of production so throughly licked that the Diamond Age in whatever form is certain to be a prequisite. Heck, I believe any society out among the stars must first have equally defeated the production and labor problems just to get off thier rock whether FTL is possible or not.

For my part, I think nano-tech is not likely to be quite the cure-all that some would ascribe it to be. Its advantage is probably equivalent to that of agriculture, and profound as that may be it doesn't lick the production problem on its own anymore than Honda has beaten the android problem. There are problems of energy production and even some problems like ambient energy polution and incidental archaeforming that we haven't even begun to widely consider. And yet, skeptical though I may be, we are standing already on the verge of breakthroughs in cybernetics and artificial intelligence which are likely to be equally profound. It took the microwave oven about 40 years to move firmly into the field of vision of the average consumer, and it will probably take cybernetic implants and artificial life just as long (or longer) but they are now no longer speculative. They _will_ happen unless the next dark age occurs more rapidly than I can foresee.

Perhaps when we get a better notion of both 'sufficiently advanced' magic and technology means to the other, we will be able to say something more definate.

 

[Chrisling]

Most RPGs treat magic as something a person does, rather than something that they are. A rare few games manage to pull off the notion that magic is not a thing you do, it is a journey you take. In many systems of mysticism, whacky IRL stuff, the ability to do amazing things is a <i>coincidental.</i>

The best way to make a game, IMO, that magic isn't another tool to be used to subjugate the world of nature to the will of people is to make the process of being a magician a mystical experience that precludes, say, a technological lifestyle. After all, if the purpose of magic is the journey and blasting orcs is just a side-effect of the trip to perfection, will the wizards have any <i>urge</I> to see their individual journey to perfection subverted by a bunch of thick-headed people without the creativity and will to make the trip on their own?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

ahha, the thread takes off

Wow!!! I really appreciated the drawing out of the associations between the astrophysicist and the magician. I had just picked it since it was a high degree requirement field, and my friend who is in it does not plan on earning a $60,000 a year sallary.

What I meant to draw out of the analogy was that a more 'practical,'the quotes acknowledge the point about the importance of time keeping and astronomy, but equally complex skill like petrochemical engineering still requires a much more complex social context to be a valuable mode for the society than fifth level conjuring spells. Even the nineteenth century engineer can only recreate his own technology for his own context. I would doubt his ability to create useful hunting tools from flint and wood, for instance. A cleric who can cast cure light wounds and create water is valuable anywhere, the nineteenth century engineer is probably more of a hinderance than an asset in either the Kalahari or Afghanistan.

This is true of technical writers, english majors, and astrophysicists, our professions are limited by the society that created them. Magicians are limited more by the cosmology that makes them possible.

I do wonder about the level of need high level magic users create from a society. Thus my earlier thought on a nation of Renaissance villas and nieghborhoods providing just those limited services the wizards require for their schemes to be achieved. I mean the weirdest resource is experience. Would a society creating lots of high level wizards have to 'create' adventures that would challenge them without the risk of killing off the training they had invested? Would a 20th level wizard who wanted to make one more permanent spell have to pop off to the arena and 'defeat' a dungeon full of trainers?

I certainly do not mean to denigrate the value of modern education. Any disadvantages I point out here are strictly comparative, and I leave out my own gratitude at existing in such a situation only because it is more than a little off topic.

 

[drnuncheon]

I think what a lot of people are getting at in the magic v. tech discussion - although nobody's quite saying it in these words - is that magic, at the core, is for mages, while science and technology is for everybody.

If a mage researches a spell, he can use it, other mages can use it, but Joe Peasant down the street can't - it's just funny marks on a piece of paper to him. Even if he were shown the gestures to make and taught the words, it wouldn't work for him - not unless he became a mage himself.

With science, on the other hand, Joe can benefit from, say, crop rotation even if he doesn't understand why it works. He doesn't need to have a certain spell on his spell list to use a tool made from a better grade of steel. He can be 'shown the gestures and taught the words' and it will work for him.

With magic items as opposed to technological ones - magic items, because of their extremely high price and the requirement of dedicating one's very life force to their creation, are going to be like Rolls Royces - status symbols as well as useful tools. Even if there are mages under every rock, ownership of even the cheapest magic item is going to be beyond the common man. That's why I have a hard time believing in a society that depends on such things - if they're out of reach of all but the elite, society as a whole is hardly going to depend on them. Joe's life isn't going to be changed if his lord has a golem servant anymore than it was changed when his lord started wearing plate armor instead of mail. It's only when the changes come down to the level of the average person that the quality and character of life really changes - and that will happen with science & technology much more readily than it will with magic.

J