D&D General The Transition of a D&D World into the Industrial Era

[Celebrim]

I guess it depends on what you decide magic can do. The big ones for me are:

a) Can magic make a perpetual motion machine directly, by causing a wheel to magically spin, for example.
b) Can magic make a perpetual motion machine indirectly, by for example forcing a djinn to power a wheel perpetually, or by eternally extracting heat from a bound fire elemental?

If magic can make perpetual motion machines, this is going to have a huge impact on industrialization. Available energy is the limiting factor in almost any project. Technology is driven by increased access to energy. If you have unlimited energy, you can accomplish pretty much anything you want to accomplish.

Another big question to answer is whether universal education can increase the number and level of magic users available in the setting. That is:

c) Can you train in a university a 10th level wizard?

If wizards of a sufficiently high level can be produced simply by expert training, then you can commoditize magic at whatever level is then available. Wizards of sufficiently high level if they can be commoditized can directly replace a lot of mundane technology with much simpler magical equivalents. You don't need heat pumps to refrigerate things if instead you can just use a spell to continuously chill a bit of metal or the environment around an object. You don't need to burn things to heat things if you can do the reverse.

If you can commoditize sufficiently high level magic, then you have Clark tech which outperforms most real world technology in various ways.

The final question I think you need to answer is:

d) Does commoditized magic have side effects that would not be obvious in a world with less prevalent magic?

That final one is a biggie, because pre-industrialized societies simply couldn't have imagined many of the dangers that industrialization brings about - habitat destruction, extinction of species, persistent pollution, and even things like flour explosions in industrialized mills. We are still working out the side effects of our technology right now in the real world, and I think a magical industrialized society if anything would have bigger surprises to uncover in the inevitable side effects. Occasionally this has been explored in fiction, such as Niven's "The Magic Goes Away", where industrialized magic leads to the discovery that magic is a finite resource that is being depleted at an exponentially faster rate.

 

[generic]

Okay, so, having seen the excellent replies to this thread, I've decided to share some basics about the current state of the IR in my setting:

Weaponry: Firearms like the rifle, musket, and other Renaissance arms are common enough to be recognizable, but are currently only available from specialist gunmakers, often conscripted into the service of a lord, guild, or nation. Swords, glaives, scimitars, daggers, and the such have yet to fall out of use, due to the inaccuracy and tendency to malfunction expressed in many firearms. Cannons have been improved upon to the extent that they are now fairly reliable, and not likely to explode while being used. Explosives are still unreliable and volatile. Phosphorus-based packet bombs are the most common among criminals.

Manufacturing: Textiles are manufactured in advanced workhouses, replete with mechanical looms and such. Steel mills are rudimentary, but exist, and produce steel at a steady pace. Simple, but low-quality weapons like molded daggers with sharpened edges have been produced en masse. A booming trade in textiles has catapulted one of the four most powerful nations on the continent into market dominance.

Farming: Basic mechanical tills have been invented, but not made ubiquitous. There is no mass collection of seeds, and planting and harvesting are still largely done by hand. Tilling has been mechanized, but other methods remain medieval. However, irrigation has been greatly improved by the introduction of ubiquitous and long-lasting steel irrigation pipes (although steel will rust, the farmers use it because it is an improvement on hand-irrigation).

Sanitation: The mass manufacture of steel pipes, thanks to the aforementioned steel mills, has led to improvements on and additions to ancient stone sewer systems in major cities. Washbasins, manually-filled tubs, and their like remain common. Many latrines in major cities are now emptied by pipe, into existing sewer tunnels. The nobility and merchant class have the luxury of personal water systems, with pipes and valves, in their homes.

Locomotion: Remains primarily medieval. Simple steam-based, coal-fired engines have been built and used in wheeled carts and the like, but horses, as well as other beasts of burden, are still the most common form of transport.

Electricity: Basic batteries have been built, and electricity has been discharged at high voltage by mortal-made devices. The most rudimentary types of capacitor, large and impractical, have been invented. Electricity has not been channeled for any useful purpose (unless you count pseudo-scientific medical quackery as useful) as of yet. It has merely been stored and channeled. Materials of monstrous origin helped with the early introduction of batteries.

Mass Destruction: No weapons of mass destruction, other than magical ones, have been created.

Automation: A method of mechanized bookbinding and pressing has become common enough that newspapers have made their way into common society, and pamphlets containing short stories or religious fables are sold.

Culture: Nobility retain much of the power in high society, but merchant's guilds and powerful gangs challenge leadership structures. The monarchic system of one of the main four nations is collapsing due to political unrest, while the theocratic parliamentary-autocratic system of another one of the four nations is undergoing change. Irreligiosity is spreading among some groups, but religion remains a strong factor in the lives of most individuals. Policies based explicitly on bigotry are still rather common.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

One of the things I could see having a massive impact is the printing press. Specifically, to spells and scrolls. Can they be mass-produced or do they still require arcane efforts that prevent anyone from just setting the type and getting an instant scroll or spellbook?

Even beyond that, mundane books (other than the old and rare) would be just common items, not potential treasure worth plenty of GP as they might be in traditional D&D, where each book is hand-written.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Electricity: Basic batteries have been built, and electricity has been discharged at high voltage by mortal-made devices. The most rudimentary types of capacitor, large and impractical, have been invented. Electricity has not been channeled for any useful purpose (unless you count pseudo-scientific medical quackery as useful) as of yet. It has merely been stored and channeled. Materials of monstrous origin helped with the early introduction of batteries.

Does the pseudo-scientific quackery with electricity and magnets, actually work? Remember the laws of physics and biology can be slightly different from ours, or does using a magnet to cure illness actually require magic.

Also does this world have Artificers and other types of Technomancers?

 

[Celebrim]

One of the things I could see having a massive impact is the printing press. Specifically, to spells and scrolls. Can they be mass-produced or do they still require arcane efforts that prevent anyone from just setting the type and getting an instant scroll or spellbook?

While it's conceivable that a spell book could be mass produced, that would only really matter if you can mass produce wizards. Also, depending on your reading of the rules and the edition we are talking about, the magical language of spells may in fact be unique to particular wizard, so a mass produced spellbook may not have as much utility as you think. Some editions have required that spells be handcopied before they could be used, and have required the use of magic just to perform this act.

As for magical scrolls, generally D&D has always held that they require magical inks, which require rare materials and significant skilled hand labor to craft. As such, the limiting factor in the production of scrolls have never been the time to write them out, but the time required to produce the ink. If you can't mass produce the ink, then it doesn't matter if you can mass produce the scrolls.

 

[generic]

Does the pseudo-scientific quackery with electricity and magnets, actually work? Remember the laws of physics and biology can be slightly different from ours, or does using a magnet to cure illness actually require magic.

Also does this world have Artificers and other types of Technomancers?

The quackery is more akin to electroshock therapy from the real world than anything beneficial. It is quackery at its finest.

Also, no, and no.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Sounds a lot like our ZEITGEIST setting! Magic vs Technology is a really fertile ground for fantasy storytelling. Steam pushing out the fey, and the dire consequences thereof.

I've seen magic vs technology so often now I personally would be much more interested in a subversion: What if magic played nice with progress for once? What if the scientific method was used to break radical new ground in spellcraft? What if the printing press revolutionized the production and use of scrolls? What if modern engineering built bigger and better vehicles for traveling the planes? What if faeries carried rifles and dragons ran industrial empires?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

While it's conceivable that a spell book could be mass produced, that would only really matter if you can mass produce wizards. Also, depending on your reading of the rules and the edition we are talking about, the magical language of spells may in fact be unique to particular wizard, so a mass produced spellbook may not have as much utility as you think. Some editions have required that spells be handcopied before they could be used, and have required the use of magic just to perform this act.

As for magical scrolls, generally D&D has always held that they require magical inks, which require rare materials and significant skilled hand labor to craft. As such, the limiting factor in the production of scrolls have never been the time to write them out, but the time required to produce the ink. If you can't mass produce the ink, then it doesn't matter if you can mass produce the scrolls.

One could say that the definition of industrial revolution is the discovery of ways to mass produced that which had previously required intensive individual labor.

And one of the more important tricks to this accomplishment is the standardization of measures and practices. So I think it's safe to say that, even if traditionally wizards had idiosyncratic magical languages, that would soon cease to be the case.

 

[Storyteller Hero]

The videogame Final Fantasy VI has a high fantasy setting that is arguably experiencing an Industrial Revolution. Magic has been militarized and enhanced with machines that can store magical energy as well as utilize magic weapons of great destructive capability.

Mechanical vehicles that run on magic and possibly channel magic into attacks are a natural course of development when technology and magic coexist.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The quackery is more akin to electroshock therapy from the real world than anything beneficial. It is quackery at its finest.

Also, no, and no.

For the record: ECT as practiced today does have some well tested clinical uses and is not quackery. But obviously there are a lot of bad things you can do by running an electrical current through the human body if you do it haphazardly. That's what you meant, right?