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The Transition of a D&D World into the Industrial Era
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7876416" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I guess it depends on what you decide magic can do. The big ones for me are:</p><p></p><p>a) Can magic make a perpetual motion machine directly, by causing a wheel to magically spin, for example. </p><p>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?</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>Another big question to answer is whether universal education can increase the number and level of magic users available in the setting. That is:</p><p></p><p>c) Can you train in a university a 10th level wizard?</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>If you can commoditize sufficiently high level magic, then you have Clark tech which outperforms most real world technology in various ways.</p><p></p><p>The final question I think you need to answer is:</p><p></p><p>d) Does commoditized magic have side effects that would not be obvious in a world with less prevalent magic?</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7876416, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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