Inverse of Clarke's Law

[Zeropoint]

"Any suffeciently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

 

At least, it seems like it should be to me. I've seen quite a few fantasy settings in which, despite thousands of years of magical research, the world is basically medieval Europe with the serial numbers filed off.

 

However, it seems to me that if magic items are possible, they would be produced to meet the needs that we filled with technology. I'm picturing (for example) a Victorian-analogue level of magical technology, where a man might pack a six-charge fireball wand, ride a golem-powered railway, and send messages via a crystal ball network. Every household would have convenient, safe magical lighting and heating. More importantly, magically enhanced production of normal goods would boost the purchasing power of the average worker.

 

Maybe I'm just thinking about this too much.

 

Zeropoint

[Syberdwarf2]

Actually that sounds like a pretty cool idea. I've never seen or heard of a campaign that dealt with magic in that way. (even though I'm sure they're out there. There'd be all kinds of possibilities for magic-based tech equivalents. I am curious how the advent of mass production would be handled. IRL, of course, this is accomplished with automated robots. Why not an 'army' of skeletons, zombies, or golems filling the roll of robots? This would be very do-able in HERO terms, since the only difference between said magical constructs and robots is their name. They're all automatons, aftrer all.

[Greenstar]

The "Lord D'Arcy" novels (Randall Garrett, I think) very accurately portray this kind of world. They are basically detetive stories (the title character is a Sherlock Holmes equivalent) but the premise is that laws of magic were codified starting around the 12th century. Also, Richard I (the Lion-Hearted) didn't die at Chaluz but lived, became a good king, and now the Anglo-French Empire is the world "superpower" though the Poles are their foil. An excellent, excellent series of stories and now back in print I think.

[Mutant for Hire]

Actually, we had a thread on this on the natoman boards.

 

To reiterate the points I made there, to have common magic items like you describe, you need to come up with mass production techniques for magical items and a shift from artisan wizards to magical engineers.

 

What's the difference? Artisans in the middle ages relied on very simple tools and a lot of personal skill and nothing but personal strength and dexterity in crafting items. When you think about most fantasy wizards, that's more or less the same as well. Their spells are limited by personal skill and the strength of their magic is their own.

 

A magical engineer uses precisioned machined tools and crafts items to high precision, that often tap into artificial power supplies. A wizard learns to cast a sleep spell. A magical engineer designs a schematic so that someone else using precision magical tools, possibly with standardized interchangable parts, can craft an item that can cast a sleep spell.

 

The big issue is where all the power for all these magical items came from. Our own industrial revolution would have been incredibly stunted without huge amounts of coal and later petrolium to make it happen. As magical engineers start machining magical standardized parts to be assembled into magical items, there comes a question of where the power for all these items is coming from.

 

Perhaps architects and landscapers can use mystic geometry to focus the natural flows of magic through the earth and radiating down from the celestial spheres to create mystic focal points for magic batteries to be charged up and used to power magical items elsewhere.

 

One of my ideas was to design a magical steampunk world, where difference engines are used to grind out astrological prognostications and steam powered automata controlled by clockwork guided by bound spirits stride across the land.

 

Incidentally, see Vision of Escaflowne for an idea of what warfare would be like in such a world.

[BNakagawa]

Before you can come up with a satisfactory answer to this question you must first answer another question.

 

Who's paying for this?

 

What powers magic in your world determines society's response to it. If you have to rip still-beating hearts out of sacrificial victims to power your magic, then there's a limitation on how industrialized your magic can be. (it's called a birthrate)

 

If your magic depends on nothing more than the right phonemes uttered at the proper cadence, then you are a good candidate for mass-produced magic. I can easily see a edison style cylindrical recording of the chant powering a gatling style device spewing out magic missiles.

 

If your magic costs you slivers of your sanity, then you probably aren't going to be able to mass produce things as you might be limited on the production side, the consumer side or both.

 

I've always preferred magic to adhere to an oft uttered admonition:

 

Nothing's free...

[JSenecal]

"Any suffeciently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

 

I've seen this line actually used in a story. In a modern day world, technological items (cars, maybe others) where being produced by Native Americans by magical means. And with a much greater efficiency than what could be done using conventional technology.

[Old Man]

So something like the magik'd culture in Harry Potter. They took a lot of magical items and beings for granted.

[Mutant for Hire]

Originally posted by JSenecal

I've seen this line actually used in a story. In a modern day world, technological items (cars, maybe others) where being produced by Native Americans by magical means. And with a much greater efficiency than what could be done using conventional technology.

 

Poul Anderson did the original classic exploration of this in the book Operation Chaos. It's been done a few other times as well.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by Greenstar

The "Lord D'Arcy" novels (Randall Garrett, I think) very accurately portray this kind of world. They are basically detetive stories (the title character is a Sherlock Holmes equivalent) but the premise is that laws of magic were codified starting around the 12th century. Also, Richard I (the Lion-Hearted) didn't die at Chaluz but lived, became a good king, and now the Anglo-French Empire is the world "superpower" though the Poles are their foil. An excellent, excellent series of stories and now back in print I think.

 

Richard I a good king, now THAT is fantasy.

 

What happened to John and the Magna Charta?

[Ternaugh]

Originally posted by Mutant for Hire

The big issue is where all the power for all these magical items came from. Our own industrial revolution would have been incredibly stunted without huge amounts of coal and later petrolium to make it happen. As magical engineers start machining magical standardized parts to be assembled into magical items, there comes a question of where the power for all these items is coming from.

 

Perhaps architects and landscapers can use mystic geometry to focus the natural flows of magic through the earth and radiating down from the celestial spheres to create mystic focal points for magic batteries to be charged up and used to power magical items elsewhere.

.

 

And imagine that more and more items are using that natural flow of magic, that the flows of magic are not infinite, and that soon, there will be a "mana crisis". Mix it with a suitably-altered Victorian age, and you have an interesting Steampunk/Magepunk crossover, where the players could be agents attempting to gain mystic real estate or defend it from the treacherous spells of foreign governments. You could even have a strange type of "smog" hanging over cities as a byproduct of releasing all of that energy in a concentrated location. And what lurks in the swirling mists would be best left to a Victorian horror tale.

 

Of course, YMMV,

 

Joe

[Legendsmiths]

For a look at a modern world impacted by industrial magic (and light, couldn't resist), war golems, zombie-slave labor, take a look at GURPS Technomancer. They discuss circles of mages that can put stuff into orbit, transmitting magic power via power lines, dragons as soldiers, flying carpets, etc.. It's perhaps a little more modern than you would like, but the economic impact is discussed and is probably extensible.

[Zeropoint]

As mentioned above, the key factor in the industrialization of magic will be the ability to use some source of energy other than the personal power of the mages involved (and that this source be readily and cheaply available). Obviously, if this is the desired effect, then the thaumaturgical laws governing the game world need to be designed accordingly.

 

I suppose the next question to consider is: does all this magical development somehow prevent technology from working, or does it just hold back technological progress, as people turn increasingly to magic? Or, do magical and technological development continue in parallel?

 

And finally, if magic is well-understood, operates according to fixed laws, and can be expected to uniformly produce the same results given the same initial conditions--is this still what we're thinking of when we say "magic"?

 

Zeropoint

[Zeropoint]

I've flipped through a copy of Technomancer, and it is quite similar to what I was thinking, at least in the attitude taken towards magic.

 

Zeropoint

[Mutant for Hire]

Originally posted by Zeropoint

As mentioned above, the key factor in the industrialization of magic will be the ability to use some source of energy other than the personal power of the mages involved (and that this source be readily and cheaply available). Obviously, if this is the desired effect, then the thaumaturgical laws governing the game world need to be designed accordingly.

 

The scale of magical use depends on the level of personal power available. Now magical items that can tap into the personal power of non-magicians are likely to become popular. When you think about it, a sword or hammer is an item that does just that, why not something more exotic for more mystic effects.

 

But there's a limit to people using magical items that way and in the end people are going to want to find ways to tap into power other than personal power. And every nation in the world is going to be greedy for as much magical energy as possible.

 

And of course there's the fun issue of renewable versus non-renewable magical resources.

 

I suppose the next question to consider is: does all this magical development somehow prevent technology from working, or does it just hold back technological progress, as people turn increasingly to magic? Or, do magical and technological development continue in parallel?

 

Depends on whether you're talking about our world or an alternate timeline where magic is the laws of nature. Where natural philosophy goes in the direction of alchemy rather than chemistry. To some extent, to a scientist there would be no dichotomy between magic and science. Magic would become part of science, part of the basic laws for manipulating the universe.

 

It's like distinguishing technology based on the manipulation of electromagnetic forces from technology based on the manipulation of gravitational forces or the weak and strong nuclear forces. Scientists don't make that distinction. They consider everything part of a greater whole. If there's magical enery states and magical forces, they merely become part of science.

 

And finally, if magic is well-understood, operates according to fixed laws, and can be expected to uniformly produce the same results given the same initial conditions--is this still what we're thinking of when we say "magic"?

 

Now you're getting down to base philosophical questions. But then consider the whole point of the thread. Any sufficiently technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. And see my point about magic and science above. In the end, there is no such thing as magic, per se. There is merely a different set of rules of science.

[Mutant for Hire]

Here's a some notes from a technomagic world that I was coming up with, a steampunk world. I like to think it is a good example of something clearly magical becoming as stable and reliable as modern science:

 

One of the great virtues in the art of thaumaturgy, the invocation of daemons (not demons, but daemons in the classical Greek sense), was the developments of mathematics and their impacts in numerology. It was well known that by invoking various numerological principles on the True Name of a daemon various properties of the daemon could be derived. It's order in the celestial heiarchy, its powers and dominions, the constraints that were placed on it and so on.

 

The great breakthrough in thaumaturgy came when a young thaumaturgist asked if the work could be done backwards. That is, whether or not he could specify the properties of the daemon and to work backwards to encode up a True Name based on the type of daemon he wanted and then to try to invoke that True Name.

 

Much to his delight and surprise, the ritual worked. It was mind numbing mathematics to totally define the basest level of daemon. It was clear that one could only summon a daemon of a given rank if all the powers and properties of the daemon were defined and then worked mathematically.

 

As a result, the quest of thaumaturgists for the true names of higher powers has proceeded unabated, and generations of thaumaturgists have been doing nothing but mathematical analysis of the true names of daemons in conjunction with hard study. The theoretical thaumaturgists and the experimental thaumaturgists exchanging data and theories.

 

The invention of the analytic and difference engines was a great boon to this work. Complex calculating engines devoted to the work of grinding out the true names of daemons are to be found in every major center of thaumaturgy. The printing press was a godsend for the mass production of handbooks of names for the most commonly used daemons invoked.

[Greenstar]

Originally posted by Agent X

Richard I a good king, now THAT is fantasy.

 

What happened to John and the Magna Charta?

 

It's been a while, but as I recall, Richard had a "change of heart" after his near-death experience. Jonh never became king, Arthur survived and succeeded Richard, I think. Not sure it ever talked about the Magna Carta, but I got the imoression that it wasn't as "needed" because Arthur was more leineint than John with the barons.

 

Also note that there apparently was no Hundred Year's War, and instead the Angevin Empire sort of absorbed the rest of France and such. At the time of the stories they own Great Britain, France, "New England" (North America) and "New France" (South America). The Scandanavian nations are alled to them, Germany ( a collection of small states) is neutral. Poland seems to own most all of eastern Europs and probably Russia to the Urals. Not at all sure about what happened to Italy and Spain.

[Balok]

Another potential source would be the "Wizard of Fourth Street" series of novels, by Simon Hawke. Unfortunately, you'd have to find them at a user bookseller now; they've been out of print for years.

 

In the first of them, the world is on the edge of economic collapse in the near future, when a man looking for firewood cuts down a particular tree and frees Merlin from imprisonment. Over time, Merlin helps society rebuild itself, but using magic install of technology. Tech works fine, but the energy sources are very expensive by comparison.

 

White magic works from the user's own internal energies; necromancers can accomplish the same thing without tiring themselves by draining the lifeforce of others -- a criminal act investigated by the magicians of the Bureau of Thaumaturgy.

 

Vehicles are piloted by specialist mages who have mastered flying spells, but perhaps not much else. Only the truly talented can master the whole panoply of magic. There are magical computers built from self-aware processors, and so forth.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Lord Darcy and his sorcerous assistant, Master Sean, are among my favorite characters in fantasy fiction. But then again I'm a closet Holmes nut and love a good mystery.

 

I've always wanted to see some RPG company get the rights to Lord Darcy's world for more than just detective work. Things like espionage and counter-espionage, political intrigue, and the like would go naturally with that setting, especially in palces like Germany and Italy where Seska , the Polish secret service, is especially active.

 

The Angevin Empire is also an example of an inherently unstable political system made stable by subtle social programming. Everybody has a place, everybody knows what their place is, and everybody is pretty much content there. Nobles weild great power but bear great responsibility, which they take very seriously and rarely abuse. Even peasants are treated well by the society, with their medical needs attended to by mendicant friars and priests and magic making the crops grow more successfully. No famines here!

[PhilFleischmann]

There is at least one point being missed here: that of the applicability of magic "energy." Real technology is based on physics, which behaves in predictable, logical ways. Magic is under no such restriction. You can burn fuel to generate heat, convert it into electicity, and use it for countless different functions. A magic fireball won't necessarily work that way. Obviously, it depends on how the GM wants to define magic for his campaign. I, and most GM's I know (in many gaming systems) want they're fantasy worlds to be at least somewhat like the real world at some historical period.

 

For example, kings still build castles of thick stone walls even though magic exists which could potentially allow someone to fly over, walk through, or teleport beyond them. If you want castles to make sense in your game you have to have some reason why they're still useful despite magic. In my campaign world, there exist fairly common substances which can be added to castle walls, making them "Affects Desolid" etc.

 

Which brings up another point to consider when thinking about magic-based technology: Anti-magic. As I use my computer, I know that no one can simply wave his arms and mumble some syllables and cause it to stop working. If "dispels" and "suppresses" are also commonly accessible, that will also keep magic in check.

 

BTW, you've got the inverse of the quote wrong. It should be:

 

Any magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.

 

As an example, the technology of evaporating sea water to get salt is not particularly advanced, and it is therefore easily distinguished from magic.

 

I've seen another inverse of Clark's law which you might also find interesting:

 

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.