Fantasy Technology (Beyond Guns & Golems)

[Iota]

When we think of technology in fantasy settings there are several iconic forms that are almost universally included (e.g. firearms, airships, and golems). In fact, it's gotten to the point where including these things in fantasy games has lost its novelty.

What are some unusual "fantasy technologies" you've thought up, discovered in RPGs, or read about in literature that are specifically rooted in a magical world?

Also, feel free to post any other overused fantasy technologies you're tired of seeing - or any that you've found used in an unexpected way that made them interesting again!

 

[Hand of Evil]

One I have thought of interesting is Pathways, Ley lines, the ways and such. You can see them as the internet of the magical world, add pocket demisions such as libraries, dreams worlds, etc and you have the matrix.

Magic mirrors are cell phones.

Then you have portals for travel.

Amimated objects can be big deal, taking the place of things like electic drills and factory robots.

 

[Iota]

Then you have portals for travel.

Portals, especially the kind that are mechanically constructed and then empowered by magic (e.g. the one from the Dragonlance: War of the Twins novels), is the kind of kitsch I was talking about: an exciting fantasy idea, but one that's come to be way overused.

The other things you mentioned were good ways of thinking of magical items as technology, but they missed what I was shooting for (which just means I didn't explain it well).

What I'm looking for is technologies that wouldn't/couldn't develop in mundane settings but make total sense in a magical fantasy world. What would the Renaissance or Industrial Revolution been like if magic was a reality.

Golems are a good example because they are basically robots that instead of relying on complicated motors, sensors, and computerized AI they use magic for mobility, awareness, and decision-making.

Firearms are typically just crossbows with more damage potential, but if we consider how they might have developed in a magical world...we might end up with something more like Potion-Launchers or bullets you could guide with your thoughts. (Priests firing Cure Serious Wounds pellets into the front lines of a battle from long range just makes me chuckle.)

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

Truly magic firearms, in a way more often thought of as wands or rods, can really up the magic/technology ante. A ranger with a scoped rifle that shoots pure energy? That's pretty cool, pretty magic, and pretty "tech."

But, some of the things that I've used in my games or seen in others:

-Transportation: ships, trains, cars, planes/airships, submarines, "walkers" such as large machines that can scale cliffs or large buildigns, or descend down into subterranean depths. Also, purely magical mounts, or mounts that have been created with magical technology, similar to the golem idea though. Escalators, elevators, subways, rooms with "gravity" on the walls and ceiling.

-Weaponry: portable spell "grenades," instantaneous walls for cover, cannon/artillery, small artifices that will quickly devour/destroy anything in their path, anti-damage guns/spells (revert an object to its previous state), all sorts of gravity manipulation weapons, negative energy guns/grenades/cannon,

-Utility: warehouses that shrink all internal items to improve space efficiency, the equivalent of computers, holograms, projectors for information, magical libraries contained within a single small chip/disc/orb, towers that oversee the entirety of the utility of a city/region such as water allocation, food growth, energy consumption, and safety, magical equivalent of satellites (don't require the use of scrying to be able to use) to monitor battlegrounds/cities, construction/deconstruction equipment, base-element decombiners (devices that will very effectively recycle junk or a broken object down into its base components/elements), magical power generators that will create non-magical energy (such as electricity) in order to power lights/vehicles in a city, mills, automated bridges, aqueducts, and hostility detectors to alert authorities to violence.

-General use: thousands of general uses including most modern small appliances (toasters, ovens, vacuums, fans) and generators for hot water etc etc.

In one of my long-lasting campaigns the history of the world described that the original progenitor race had nearly mastered technology/magic, and that they blended nearly entirely. Over millennia, much of their technology had been destroyed or squandered, but what was left was heavily coveted and sought after. The technology was most commonly represented by small orbs of a liquid metal (often similar to quicksilver) that could be converted into a host of items at the imagination of the item's wielder; weapons, tools, magic items, information storage, or healing ability. The party used it most commonly to store information, and the item would "melt" into their body and combine with the magic of their spirit, able to download or upload memories or information. Certain magic/tech items were turned on with a form of ignition with these items.

Tl;dr: everything technological today could be explained with magic.

 

[Rechan]

A double-post.

 

[Rechan]

It's a shame that in almost all settings, undead/necromancy = evil. You could easily have a slave labor work force - even animating teh skeletons of horses for manual labor or moving large cranks. Not to mention things like imprinting a little bit of your memory/soul/whatnot on an item, so that your loved ones can talk to your ghost after you're gone, or at least have a little (intangible) part of you.

You could take Transmutation to its next step: Biomancy. custom limbs, significant cosmetic changes, changing people to adapt to new environments, creating Beneficial viruses/bacteria, etc.

Things like cryogensis would be possible. Not by freezing, but putting in a temporal state with Petrification. Yes yes, flesh to stone is high powered - but what about with a medusa on call? All you need is something to reverse the process. Think about it - put the king's brother or nephew in stone, in case a king down the line can't produce an heir. You could treat prisons the same way.

Wind Dams: sort of like how you dam up a big river and channel or harness the flow, coastal areas could do the same to ward against weather like bad storms or hurricanes, giving them a channel not in the path of cities to blow. Same with blizzards.

The question is how widespread or common are we talking? For instance Eberron is very wide magic - lots of low level items, but very few high level things. For instance, a fishing net that has a charm to lure fish in would be in line with that kind of small scale items. Eberron also has mage-bred animals, magically engineered to be tougher, stronger, produce more, and do a variety of other neat things.

Instant transport of goods by way of teleportation boxes. Put something in the box, it appears in a corresponding box. You couldn't select the destination, and maybe you could only use it once a day, but damn, it would cut down on the cost and time of caravans. A similar arrangement could duplicate items, cutting on time/cost.

On a more grand scale:

Underwater cities (or at least, areas). Nagical air, or creatures that convert water to air, or something like that to sustain it.

Honestly, don't look to replicate Existing technology - replicate Sci-Fi ideas with magic.

 

[Rechan]

This is almost more Psionic than magic but:

The Living Library

Imagine you just read a book. Can you remember most of the salient points? Good.

Now imagine a space where all the books there were in your mind, fresh, as if you had just read them. You didn't need to read them - you already have them. So in order to search, you just need to think, and let the facts roll out. While you're here, you know everything that is within the library's walls.

This doesn't mean that anyone can walk in and get all the world's info and walk away, instant education. Human memory is limited, and it degrades over time. You try to remember an important fact and get only half of it - missing the name of the guy who said it, or the exact phrasing, or even confuse two things with one another. Same idea. And yet you still have the general jist.

 

[Iota]

The question is how widespread or common are we talking?

I'm fishing for ideas both large & small. I'm working on a homebrew campaign where both magic & technology have flourished over the past 50 years (purposefully accelerated by powers behind the scenes) leading to all sorts of interesting developments. So, all sorts of "fantasy-tech" ideas could prove useful.

 

[Quickleaf]

If we just take agriculture, there is a huge impact that magic could have, but that are rarely seen in most D&D worlds.

Let's assume that the good people of our fantasy world have been using bamboo to pipe methane since the equivalent of 900 BC. Hey, Chinese salt farmers were doing it to evaporate seawater around that time, so it's not unreasonable to assume that some entrepreneurial mage developed a way to control the methane flow and burn it for a stove or a lantern. However, that sort of technology is extremely rare and wouldn't see widespread use until the medieval era.

It's important for what comes later though...

Starting from the premise that magical transportation & portals are in the setting, that implies a broad exchange of goods, which, on a large enough scale, could be equivalent to the Columbian Exchange. On the mundane level this means trade goods like spices, potatos, steel, etc become widespread, but it can also be spread of disease, ideas, magic rituals, special components, plant-like monsters, etc. And the old demon of colonization.

That's a good start, but where we really want to get our fantasy world is a kickstart into the industrial revolution with the tractor and the combine harvester. Can we do it? Does golem begin with G?

So now that we've got mechanized ag and large-scale animal farms, we've got more people, and all of us together are making a lot of methane. And thanks to that good old mage centuries ago that methane stove/light idea has finally caught on. And there you have a late medieval setting with...

Golem Tractors & Harvesters
UPS (United Portal Service)
International Exchange Markets
Methane Biodigestors
Gas-Burning Stoves
Street Lights

For a great discussion of this sort of thing, the best source I know of is Magical Medieval Society (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/produ...d=2018&it=1&filters=0_0_0&manufacturers_id=72).

 

[Meatboy]

In the last campaign I ran the PCs were placed smack dab in the middle of a civil war on the cusp of the magical revolution. It all begins with some guy having the idea of "hey lets not spend years teaching our sons to swing a blade lets see what we can do when they all learn to wield magic."

A couple of inventions from that were "war wands" equivilant to guns they were single shot and used a "dragon's tooth" which is a magically charged slug of metal that you can recharge via ritual. I never got around to using it but there were airships too that were fueled by magic. And to start off the adventure the PCs picked up a book, that was part of a set, and that whenever anything was written in one book it appeared in the other.