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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 9055957" data-attributes="member: 63">I sometimes run games with the premise that magic requires power sources, and high level magic requires you to bond to a mighty source of power.With priests, you need to be sufficiently ordained in your religion for you to be permitted to tap into the collective prayers of the faithful. It's not the god that grants the power; the god is just the focus of everyone's devotion, and that devotion is the actual source of the power.With wizards and such, they've got to do the Magic: the Gathering style thing of traveling to different places of power and completing an adventure to link to its mana.In this framework, magical spells of the highest level are always possible, since once you have access to the power, it can do all sorts of stuff based on how creative you are (as long as the outcome matches the theme of the magical power source). But what changes over time is how organized are the systems of helping people learn how to get the power. In the Stone Age, one dude managed to kill a dragon and toss it into a volcano, and he became a mighty fire wizard. In the Bronze Age, a cabal of fire wizards pass down the secrets of various monsters that are good to kill and offer to the volcano in order to enhance their power. By the Iron Age, the wizards have learned how to share that power among all their members, but they guard it jealously, and they've managed to steal some secrets from other wizard orders about how they got their powers, so now they can do more than just fire, but also necromancy!And then if we got to the Renaissance, academies would open up teaching people the basics of wizardry, and for the sake of protecting their nations kings would empower the wizard cabals to train war mages, and the peasants would be required to raise cattle to be used as food for the great beasts that must be sacrificed to various fiery pits - volcanoes sure, but also man-made furnaces. And the middle class would make a living crafting high quality arrays of magical foci that the royal wizards would use to focus their power.And then in the Industrial Age, the principles of fire magic would lead to the development of arcane engines that harness mundane fuel like coal and turn it into a mighty battery for spellcasting. But you'd still need the training to harness it, so even if a 1st level wizard had the control wand necessary to access the power of an arcanotechnological furnace, he'd need practice to pull off more than a burning hands.But that's just one dynamic possible.</blockquote>

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