D&D 5E World Building: Tech, Magic, and Society

[kigmatzomat]

Other items

Mold earth - those 12,000lb piles of moving dirt are essentially giant power sources for trebuchets. Do you also have a handy river and shape water? Shape a 1,000lb spiked ice ball to use as ammunition.

Comprehend Languages - imperfect but can deal with any written or spoken language as a 1st level ritual.

Illusory script - requires a 6th level spell to defeat, so pretty secure way to communicate. Does require a physical delivery and only lasts 10 days.



2nd level rituals - more rare. How rare? Ehhhh...world dependent.

Animal messenger - usually discounted compared to Sending but as ritual so it can be used a lot. And in very rough terrain (swamps, jungle, mountain) 50mi can represent nearly a week of warning. Doesn't even have to be danger, could be a regular contact of "all is well" or financial interactions, like to describe the size of a harvest or to request items be added to a caravan.
But yes, being able spend an hour-ish casting + 24 hours travel to warn six entities in a 50-mi radius is an immense militaristic force multiplier.

Magic mouth - lasts forever and can't be decoded by true sight so a very good way to send secret messages. Can require a password, a token like a signet ring, or similar. Also requires a physical object.
Can also be used in weird ways. Like having someone scream into it as loud and as long as they can ten times as an alarm/trap. Or to trigger other spells.


Edit: Forgot skywrite. There is a whole thread on that

https://www.enworld.org/threads/skywrite-a-weapon-of-mass-communication-coordination.698259/unread

 

[Mort]

Minor cantrips are.....disturbingly impactful. A 1st level arcane caster is effectively a modern 100hp tractor + combine. Mold earth, shape water plus ritual casting unseen servant & floating disk, a single caster can do the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of people plus numerous livestock.

Need to plow a field? The caster can outrun four sets of ox plows. Need an irrigation channel? Can do more digging than a thousand people in one day. Need to pump water in that channel? Shape water. Harvest crops? Unseen servant. Move a cart's worth of produce? Floating disk.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-magic-and-the-mundane-medieval.692293/#post-8797371

How about sewers? The caster can open and close 3 miles of trench per day. Unseen servants can make simple wooden pipes.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/magic-and-sanitation.696483/#post-8963932

Interesting, but with a big caveat. The arcane caster would have to demean themselves to doing field/other grunt work in place of magical research, other something "lesser" people should be doing.

But that's where variant human comes in. If the campaign has the default be variant human? Well then HUGE portion of the human population (through magic initiate) could take "useful" spells and cantrips. You now have farmhands that can shape water, mold earth, use floating disc or get an unseen servant.

Why are humans the "dominant" force they are - that's why. Other races get some of it (high elves and cantrips for ex.) but not quite as much. Huge impact on world building.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I proposed in other threads these casters should be pampered relative to the value they provide society.

Imagine if the caster got to sit in a comfy chair, under a big umbrella with a fruity drink nearby. Every couple of minutes he walks to a new spot where his spare chair & umbrella is waiting and a new drink. There a servant/bodyguards around, a nice wagon/horse for traveling and sleeps in the best room of every inn or local potentate's house, with the finest foods available.

If you saw the earth moving math where 1 hour of caster replaces 45gp of labor, this pampering would be cheap at twice the price. In theory, a week of "heavy labor" would pay for a year of luxury lifestyle.

A polity would do well to entice those casters to remain, giving them nice homes year round and providing resources for experimentation and additional stipends (maybe for magical materials) in return for taking on apperentices to expand the pool.
Add some cultural pressure for good measures.

Speaking of cultural pressure, Rome had a centuries long tradition where the richest people built public works for the glory of Rome. Many still stand today, or are the foundation for modern roads.

 

[Oofta]

Minor cantrips are.....disturbingly impactful. A 1st level arcane caster is effectively a modern 100hp tractor + combine. Mold earth, shape water plus ritual casting unseen servant & floating disk, a single caster can do the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of people plus numerous livestock.

Need to plow a field? The caster can outrun four sets of ox plows. Need an irrigation channel? Can do more digging than a thousand people in one day. Need to pump water in that channel? Shape water. Harvest crops? Unseen servant. Move a cart's worth of produce? Floating disk.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-magic-and-the-mundane-medieval.692293/#post-8797371

How about sewers? The caster can open and close 3 miles of trench per day. Unseen servants can make simple wooden pipes.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/magic-and-sanitation.696483/#post-8963932

I think you're exaggerating how much a caster could do. Help significantly? Sure. Replace hundreds if not thousands? Nah. You're making a lot of assumptions, a primary one being all dirt being loose. Dirt is petty compacted a foot or so down in many places. If you're unlucky and live in Phoenix they literally needed a jackhammer to dig a hole in our front yard because the soil is so hard.

Tenser's floating disk is great but it only lasts an hour and only carries 500 pounds. If you need to haul produce into town, that's a lot of loading/unloading. An ox drawn wagon could carry 3-5 times that much. Unseen servant is mindless, has a strength of 2 and can only do simple tasks. Are you sure they know how to properly tend to crops? What's a weed and what's wheat? Because I don't. Besides, you can only have a handful at a time.

In any case, it also assumes that significant portions of the community could learn cantrips. It could easily be as easy as learning advanced calculus; only a small percentage of people are really able to grasp it.

The list goes on. If you want to do it, cool. You're just vastly overestimating how helpful it would be IMHO.

 

[Umbran]

Okay, so wind up to question 3: Should you use historical models for your D&D world, or does magic throw that off?

Depending what you mean by "model", the answers are yes, and yes.

Why you should use historical models:

1) That is what the players will understand. The characters live in the fictional world 24/7, the players do not - if you use forms the players do not recognize, they have a HUGE amount of information they'd have to not just read, but internalize and remember, in order to make reasonable decisions on actions to take in your fantasy world.

2) The overwhelming majority of GMs are not sociologists or historians. If we try to work by something other than a historical model, we will build a thing that, if you look at it for more than 20 seconds, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The thing will be a metaphorical Alpine Lace Swiss cheese of logical holes and inconsistencies. And then, again, the players (and the GM) will have a hard time making sensible choices in the world. If you are not careful, all of you will just slide into using the closest historical model you can find anyway.

Does magic screw up the historical model? Yes.

Is that okay? Yes, for these reasons:

1) Many players do not care that much. They'll roll with it and have a great action-adventure story.

2) It is an opportunity to play, "What if?" Then you get to do variations on your historical models that the players still get to understand, aren't too much work, but have interesting differences from history.

 

[kunadam]

most talks focus on arcane magic, but IMHO the biggest change is divine magic. Divine magic is more accessible as there are more people willing to devote itself to a deity than to decades of mind twisting study. And this devotion has a very tangible feedback: divine spells. Now, there is no excuse for a hamlet to not to have cleric. Small wounds would be healed instantly. A non-magical epidemic can be curbed by casting enough lesser restoration.

 

[greg kaye]

most talks focus on arcane magic, but IMHO the biggest change is divine magic. Divine magic is more accessible as there are more people willing to devote itself to a deity than to decades of mind twisting study. And this devotion has a very tangible feedback: divine spells. Now, there is no excuse for a hamlet to not to have cleric. Small wounds would be healed instantly. A non-magical epidemic can be curbed by casting enough lesser restoration.

various sources of power may vary in how forthcoming they are with that power.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I think you're exaggerating how much a caster could do. Help significantly? Sure. Replace hundreds if not thousands? Nah. You're making a lot of assumptions, a primary one being all dirt being loose. Dirt is petty compacted a foot or so down in many places. If you're unlucky and live in Phoenix they literally needed a jackhammer to dig a hole in our front yard because the soil is so hard.

That is a regional exception. (Not a small region) And, to be honest, most people eho had never seen it before would consider caliche rock more than soil. Honestly, the line between caliche and sandstone is a pretty fine hair to split. Give someone a block of both, a shovel and a hammer and ask them which is rock and I doubt many people would see a big difference. (Well, the sandstone is probably softer....)

The little water it gets activates the calcium carbonate in the sand, making essentially mortar. It's the raw material for Portland cement in some areas. Even when there are freezing temps, the water is chemically bound up, so doesn't turn into ice, so no frost heave. No organic matter to decay. Minimal insect activity.

Regular rain would actually dissolve it over a decade or five, which I guess is the deciding vote in "not exactly a rock" . I am not a geologist but if I were working in that area, my estimates would be using "excavation, rock" and not "excavation, dirt"

I am a retired engineer. Moving dirt was kind of my jam for two decades. I did cost estimates on Army Corps of Engineers projects and various regional utilities.

 

[Celebrim]

Minor cantrips are.....disturbingly impactful.

Yes, yes they are. This is an impact of 5e on the default setting that the designers seem to not care about. I really detest the unlimited magic paradigm because if you take it seriously then the world is almost unimaginably different.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Yes, yes they are. This is an impact of 5e on the default setting that the designers seem to not care about. I really detect the unlimited magic paradigm because if you take it seriously then the world is almost unimaginably different.

Agreed. And I know why they did what they did (5ft cube is standard size, yadda yadda) but they didn't have the dirt go back in the hole on its own after 1 minute or require concentration for a minute to make it permanent (imperfect but makes it 10x slower), they let the animated water get more than 30ft from the source, etc, etc.

People downplay mold earth in combat, except it's really good there too. It gives between half and full cover for 2+ characters with a single action and no concentration. It can tunnel under various Wall spells. You can bury items 5ft deep mid-combat. You can make a non-resisting creature (i.e. charmed/stunned) into a Restrained or maybe Incapacitated creature by burying them 5ft deep in dirt.