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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8418700" data-attributes="member: 6704184">A bit like Shadowrun, but less apocalyptic and dystopian. Also all the folk have always existed, there are 8 other Realms beyond our universe, with some overlap, and there are mortals of some kind living in most of those realms. So, only like Shadowrun in the basic "suddenly magic is known to exist and also there are trolls and some of them work for CalTrans." setup. But how that all came to light was basically due to it becoming harder and harder to hide stuff, and some of the Wise (term for people who know about the Hidden Folk and magic) came together and decided to be proactive and start sort of shepharding folks toward acceptance of magic and other races, rather than fighting a losing battle to keep it all a secret in an age of ubiquitous, decentralized, largely unregulated, surveillance. And then some Rangers got filmed fighting a feral werewolf and doing magic to bind the poor dumb jerk before he could kill half the small fishing town on the East Coast where he'd grown up, and things come to a head rather quickly from there, and within ten years the UN oversees an international set of treaties with several factions of Hidden Folk to gain their help with certain thorny problems being faced by humanity in exchange for our help with a war in another world, and a recognized place in our world. When this takes place, exactly, is up to the people playing the game, but the era of play is 1990's to 2030's, roughly. You can also play during the era from the 1890's to 2030's, which has a different dynamic, and the 2190's to 2230's, which is the era that this discussion benefits most.The more complex and useful stuff, yeah. Workaday magics don't, but even they are more reliable with formula and or a circle or other focusing tools. But what those tools do is offload some of the cognitive work involved in doing magic, so with practice and a strong will, you can learn to do a lot of simple stuff without any aides, but almost no mortal creatures have the capacity to do the really big stuff without a lot of help. So, if you want magic to help photovoltaic cells translate more photons into electrons and dramatically reduce loss in that system, you're going to want an engineering degree, and some really good computer software. But! Magic does also allow a lot more "garage maker" types to do stuff like taking their house off the power grid, or filtering their water without expensive filters, or like...make a magic sword that uses ritual magic do things to the alloy that would normally require very advanced tools and a lot of power.Certainly hard to invent the alembic without decent materials science, sure. My point was mostly that they were absolutely people using the scientific method before the early modern era, and using it to advance technology. But as for magic, basic personal scale magic doesn't technically require any tools, just knowledge and practice. Advancing the science of physical magic (elemental magics, and stuff like them), as well as the more advanced and complex stuff like creating "shortcuts" in chemistry, achieving transmutation of matter or energy (energy being easier, and matter being historically slow to advance due to the difficulty of it), etc requires various things like advanced metallurgy, and an at least modern understanding of physics and chemistry. One idea I have to the future era is that pilots and systems engineers "mesh" with computer systems using a mix of advanced tech and magics relating to the spirit and mind, so that the system's sensors and such become your senses, allowing a human pilot to operate a fighting rig in a space battle, for instance. So, the need for advanced tech depends on how complex the working and how far outside the immediate influence of a person it is.</blockquote>

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