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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1683219" data-attributes="member: 6533">Man, leaving in Texas has finally left it's mark, I spent a minute trying to figure out who the specific object of the above you was till I realized that other parts of the country don't have specific second person plurals.I completely agree that a huge part of how magic would affect the crusades is going to be the specific history of its development and discovery.  And that the initial period of experimentation is going to be pretty weird.I would say, however, that DnD magic is probably not so bad a starting point for magic.   The magic system as a whole is probably far more refined then people are initially going to believe or experience it to be, but the spells are the sort of attention grabbers that people are going to develop first.Particularly the divine list.To continue what Mythus was saying, though, let's assume that levels actually exist inside the magic. That they are reflective of some fundamental nature of spell casting.  How long is it going to take you to figure out what exactly qualifies as first versus second level?Particularly when it's probably pretty easy to come up with new spells, but very difficult to come up with anything like a standardized list?Unless, of course, Divine Magic users come pre-equipped with a good knowledge of what they can and can't do........interesting... ...what if arcane magic only looks the way it does because people had a much better initial understanding of divine magic and assumed they would work in similar fashion?One affect of an initial period of discovery is that there are going to be a lot of fairly odd cultish and schoolish effects as everyone tries to capitalize on the little bit of the truth they have, is very distrustful of sharing with the other guy, legitimizing the other guy, and, at the same time, desperately wants the other guys secrets.The Catholic, and too a lesser extent Orthodox, church is probably going to do a lot to see that all magic that has to do remotely with them doesn't go cultish too fast.  But in the Muslim world you are likely to see a huge proliferation of idiosyncratic practices and politicking for influence.The Orthodox/Byzantines at immediately seeing the practical and potential benefits of magic given their much greater knowledge of, well, just about everything scientific, strategic, legal, and economic.A big question I have out of this is:  Will there be outsiders?Historically and in the game a lot of magic is geared towards the reality of outsiders, and if they, or knowledge of them, are proliferating alongside spell based magic you are going to see a big to do.On another note, I think Al-Quadim actually isn't too bad a take on how magic would affect Islamic civilization.  Mind you, it is missing a lot of the Greek, Hindu, and Latin influences that were incredibly important to the Dar-Al Islam, but magic works pretty well in it.Aside from the battlefield, you could argue that some of the armies really haven't embraced it as they should.  And of course it has the DnD assumption that the magic has been around for a very long while.</blockquote>

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