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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8418660" data-attributes="member: 6704184">A lot of that would be counteracted by the fact that these are modern people encountering magic, wouldn’t it? Few people today believe in the Divine Right of Kings or the Mandate of Heaven, after all.   I think you may have a point in some cultures and places, though. It’s easy to imagine places that are already being held back by despots falling further behind, barring disruptive change due to people meeting their house spirits and those spirits telling them that the Leader is a donk that wouldn’t know a Divine Right if it guillotined him, or something like that. I’m not sure that can be supported by history. Medieval Muslim “alchemists” invented optics, new distillation methods and tools still used by chemists today, and all sorts of other fun stuff, using the scientific method. In laboratories. With peer review. That cultural order largely got turned against science later by a moralist movement that insisted that math was the devil, but thier work was translated into European languages and taken up by European alchemists, scholars, and philosophers, and while the pop culture reputation of such individuals as secluded weirdo cranks searching for immortality and magical transmutation has a grain of truth, it is wildly exaggerated and the scientific process at work in their efforts is forgotten.  Paracelcus believed in gnomes, but he also invented toxicology.  Again I think this ignores rather a lot of history. I…fundamentally disagree with especially the last couple sentences, but I’ll hear ya out. If it is predictable and quantifiable, as described in the OP, then I can’t see it contributing to stagnation. Imagine if magic can be used to decrease the entropy in a complex system of power conversion. That would surely leapfrog related tech years into the developmental future, wouldn’t it?Sure, but these discussions certainly challenge one’s assumptions and lead to a fuller setting. I really appreciate your input here.</blockquote>

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