Power of the Press: Mass produced magic?

[Dogbrain]

Hmm. Offhand, I'd say that writing magic requires a special notation, like music does. This would make it difficult to produce using a standard printing press

Not in Gutenburg's day. Early printing presses used hand-carved type.

 

[nopantsyet]

I've got printing presses in my game, and high levels of literacy as well. Printing presses are unable to print magical scrolls. Movable typefaces could be carved to replicate runes and symbols, but that would not imbue any magical power.

This is why reading a spell from a printed text is powerless. You must learn to harness and expend magical energy, which you bind to the page and text, at which time it becomes a scroll. That's where your precious XP go.

The idea of a magical printing press is interesting; I may have to develop one of those since there is a sophisticated order of wizards. I'm going to have to figure out how much it would cost, then determine a mechanism for fueling it. It would still have to be XP, but whose? (suspicious shifty eyes *activate*)

 

[cybertalus]

What impact, if any, would the good ol' printing press have on forms of written magic? Would it be possible to mass-produce spellbooks with a printing press? (i.e., "My First Little Spell Book," "Wizard Spells for Dummies," etc.) It could be advanced as our modern printing presses, or be as simple as the first one made by Guttenberg.

I would say yes to spellbooks. Despite the costs associated with creating them, spellbooks don't seem to have any innate magical properties of their own. They're just very expensive mundane books full of the instructions a trained caster needs in order to cast spells.

Though one problem initially might be that every wizard has their own spell notation, so if Bigby's spellbooks are churned off the printing press, Evard, Tenser, Khelben, and Raistlin aren't going to be able to prepare spells out of them until they've copied the spells into their own spellbooks using their own notations. If printing spellbooks on a printing press became common what you would probably see happen is that spellbook notation would become standardized over time and wizards would be able to then prepare spells from off the shelf spellbooks.

You might want to ask, however, if wizards would allow their spellbooks to be mass produced, and if there would be enough of a market to justify anyone wanting to mass produce them in any case.

What about magical items that are written objects? Scrolls are an obvious example of such magical items, but what about things such as a manual of bodily health, or a tome of understanding?

I would say no to this for a couple of different reasons. For one thing this ability is somewhere between the power of 9th level spells and an uber-artifact. Wish is the only spell I can find in the core rules which can create permanent magic items. Even a Wish spell can't create a single scroll of Wish, something a printing press capable of mass producing scrolls could presumably churn out by the hundreds or thousands.

Additionally the "flavor" just seems wrong. Magic is powerful, but mysterious. It isn't just science with different rules. Magic can do very powerful things, but each magical effect is a unique expression of a single living (or occasionally undead) creature's ability to use magic. Magic should never be able to be mass produced.

I'm just thought I'd bring this issue up. I won't bring up other issues yet, like faxing/photocopying scrolls, keeping spellbooks as .doc files, etc., that come into question with more modern technology.

d20 Modern allows for spellbooks on PDAs, although it doesn't deal with faxing scrolls (a neat idea though, especially for attack spells-- read the fax, get hit with a Magic Missile), it does have a few spells that deal specifically with modern technology, such as a spell to power electronics when the batteries are dead.

While I don't know what the d20 Future will hold, I just want to state right now that I am vehemently opposed to any form of spellcasting robots, computers, or artificial intelligences.

 

[evileeyore]

Hmmm, why do I have images of rows of presses (or any other machinery for that matter making magic items) attended by chained slaves. They are tired, wasted drained. As workers fall. more are brought in to replace them. The death toll among the workers is high as the machines drain the life essence from the mage slaves...



Hah. I could see a nation like Thay, forcing captured mages to work the soulforges night and day...


Damn that is a very fine and tasty notion for a campiagn...

TTFN

EvilE

 

[Moe Ronalds]

Hmmm, why do I have images of rows of presses (or any other machinery for that matter making magic items) attended by chained slaves. They are tired, wasted drained. As workers fall. more are brought in to replace them. The death toll among the workers is high as the machines drain the life essence from the mage slaves...



Hah. I could see a nation like Thay, forcing captured mages to work the soulforges night and day...


Damn that is a very fine and tasty notion for a campiagn...

TTFN

EvilE

An overly ambitious business man once tried this in a (thankfully dead) campaign of mine, though he had only a single machine and it created a variety of magical items. It was a fun fight when they tracked him down, with them pulling random objects off the rack and seeing what they did. "What do you MEAN those were golden prayer beads!?"

 

[AFGNCAAP]

Thanks for the replies! Keep `em coming!

Y'know, I completely forgot about the spellbook-PDA mentioned in d20 Modern--it's a good example about 1 of the issues I was trying to address regarding magic & technology.

OTOH, it does bring up another issue: does it matter what sort of media/material a spellbook is made with? Would there need to be some sort of special magical process needed to "enchant" a PDA to work as a spellbook? Does a mage need a special sort of paper & ink for a spellbook, or could he/she have a "spellbook" consisting of a yellow legal pad with the spells written in permanent marker (Or for that matter, spells written in crayon on sheets of newsprint)? Would a mage need to hunt down rare & expensive materials for a spellbook, or would he/she merely need to go to Hobby Lobby or Staples for materials?

But, back to the issue of a printing press. There are 2 reasons why I ask this question:

1. Is a spellbook an inherently (though slightly) magical object itself since it contains spells, or is it just like any book, merely consisting of a cover, paper, & ink?
2. If a spellbook is essentially no different than any other mundane book, then could the knowledge & power contained within it be readily distributed by a means of mass production such as the printing press?

IMC, one of the ways that I accounted for the (relatively high) amount of literacy in the world is because an esteemed dwarven craftsman invented the printing press. Religious texts were the first things to be produced, but this technology has grown & gained many new applications--it's used to print official announcements/notices (instead of some clerk writing them down); oral literature, ancient tales, & other literary/artistic forms of expression are being preserved through printing; in essence, the world is becoming literate. (Also, many non-religious texts are being printed/produced in the Common language, so the proliferation of Common-tongue speakers & readers is increasing).

For me, I always thought that a spellbook is a highly personal object, linked to its writer to some degree. The expense of an item is due to the masterwork quality of the materials needed (the high-grade paper, the sturdy cover, and the pure, fine quality ink). In addition to this, I always thought that a mage expended a tiny amount of magical energy during the process of writing/binding a spell into a spellbook.

Now, I don't think that it's to the extreme of being able to rip out pages of a spellbook & use them as scrolls (although wizards do start off with that feat for free at 1st level)--I don't think they're that intensely imbued with magical energy. However, I would think that it's just enough to prevent the process from simply being mass-produced.

OTOH, if a spellbook is merely just a book, & there is no fraction of energy spent while scribing the spells, then in essence the wizard is simply manually copying information from 1 written source to another (albeit on high-grade materials). In that case, mass-production isn't prohibited: the print type need only be finely made to be clear & exact, the ink be of the right mixture, and the paper be of the needed quality; after that, it's off to the presses.

This, in turn, has an impact on the world. Magical academies (esp. for wizards) could commision the printing of "basic" spellbooks for beginning students--perhaps spellbooks printed with all 0-level spells, then with a bunch of blank pages for the student to record spells that he/she learns later.

Opinions? Ideas? Comments?

 

[Ace]

IMC Scrolls are magic items -- essentially the spell is imbued into the paper -- You couldn't (without some infernal machine anyway) mass produce them

Spellbooks OTOH are just textbooks with fantaststically complex instructions-- Every time you want to prepare a spell you need the formula to find the and absoarb the spell energy

Since the printing press does exist Mass Produced spellbooks do also -- I don't mess with the special ink rubbish

OTOH since spellcasting is roughly as complex as Nuclear Physics combined with Mysticism and Computer Programming it requires specialized training and a good deal of intellect (aka Wizard levels) to use them

 

[s/LaSH]

Cybertalus mentioned the un-interchangability of magical notation between wizards. That's a big thing. If spellbooks are indeed nonmagical, the only thing stopping anyone from printing 'em off is the fact that nobody could use them. They'd have to do some serious research to understand each page, presumably the result of days, weeks, years of research and experimentation on the part of the original wizard. And that research would, as Ace puts it, be on a par with university-level specialist science.

"Oh, I say these words and... um, the guy forgot to title the spell. I guess he recognises the words. Well, if I'm lucky I can point at a distant site and hope the spell doesn't rip my finger off, it could be too powerful. But if it's not ranged... or if some of these symbols are interchangable with other symbols and the guy just remembers his range variables by heart... this is too dangerous, dude."

So what really needs to happen is for someone to start printing magical textbooks, each one detailing exactly how a spell was researched and what each part of the process does, resulting in a unified language of magic (I know draconic is supposed to fill this niche, but it's a language spoken by thousand-year-old snakes, it's not going to be perfectly understood by humans). It means you have far less spell content per book, but each spellbook teaches just about anyone how to cast that spell. (They still have to be literate and capable of handling the energies, but this way they know what the spell does, they know how it does it, and they know if they're up to scratch.)

It's a revolution, baby.

 

[cybertalus]

I don't see the notation issue as an insurmountable one, more of something which would slow things down. Afterall I recall reading somewhere that there was a time when musical notation wasn't standardized, but eventually it became so due to the convenience offered by the printing press.

Instead I see standardization as a gradual development. Some overworked wizard with five apprentices decides to try to speed things up by having an identical spellbook of cantrips printed up for each of them. He then teaches all five of them the exact same notation system he used for those cantrips so that it's easier for him when he's checking over their practice scribings. This works out so well that he does the same thing when he begins to teach them first level spells. So now the wizard and his five apprentices all use the same notation system for cantrips and first level spells, but unless they come back to him for further instruction when it comes time to learn higher level spells, their notations will begin to diverge starting with second level spells.

As news of this practice spreads among the wizardly community there would probably develop a number of competing "standards" which eventually shake out to one or two major ones, perhaps with some slight variances. Though depending on the nature of the world and the wizards in it the standards might very well never develop for high level spells. Sharing knowledge of low level spells is one thing, but a cautious wizard isn't going to be too keen to make it easier for his rivals to learn more powerful spells which they might use against him.

Also once notations shake out into a few standards, I would say that it would make it more difficult to decipher the older handwritten spellbooks (who here could read an old illuminated manuscript with the same ease they can read a modern paperback?) and spellbooks based on notations not related to the standard one (sure all the humanoid races of the surface may share a notation, but even if the drow have the printing press I somehow doubt that they'll want to use the notations of the hated surface dwellers).

does it matter what sort of media/material a spellbook is made with? Would there need to be some sort of special magical process needed to "enchant" a PDA to work as a spellbook? Does a mage need a special sort of paper & ink for a spellbook, or could he/she have a "spellbook" consisting of a yellow legal pad with the spells written in permanent marker (Or for that matter, spells written in crayon on sheets of newsprint)? Would a mage need to hunt down rare & expensive materials for a spellbook, or would he/she merely need to go to Hobby Lobby or Staples for materials?

Crayon on newsprint would be doable I think, but not durable. Spellbooks are a wizard's only means of preparing their spells, and since that is such a vital part of a wizard's life, it makes sense for them to go for the quality craftmanship. A wizard doesn't want to be camped out in a dungeon only to find that the ink has bled through from sleep onto magic missile and now it's impossible to read, and thus impossible to prepare.

And even if a wizard starts out with a spellbook from a printing press, the printing press is a long way from the typewriter or a word processor, so any spells the wizard learns from scrolls, other wizards, or as a result of ongoing research will need to be written down in an old-fashioned sturdy, high quality spellbook.

 

[cybertalus]

double post