Why hasn't magic changed the world?

[Zeropoint]

I've hit a major stumbling block in the creation of a fantasy world . . . it's pretty much brought the creative process to a halt.

 

Why does a world with magic bear any resemblance to the standard generic medieval life?

 

Medicine, for example, is brought up to modern standards or better with healing magic. Plagues aren't going to happen when a simple "Cure Disease" spell can render a person disease-free. Injuries can be fixed with a simple spell--instantly! No waiting for natural healing processes! Infant mortality plummets, population growth soars.

 

Sooner or later, someone is going to create a spell that enhances crop growth. With medieval agricultural technology, even a small increase in the yield would reduce the number of people who needed to work the land to feed everyone, yielding more people to do other things, like culture, trade, manufacturing and research.

 

Communication spells would allow the transmission of information with at least the convenience of WWII-era tech. This would drastically alter the nature of warfare, and trade, and diplomacy, and news distribution.

 

 

 

So, what I'm wondering is this: how can I have magic in my world, but still have a society that more or less resembles Europe between 500 and 1500 AD? Why hasn't magic shaped the world into something else?

 

I can't just "not worry about it" . . . that might be the easiest solution, but my mind doesn't work that way. I HAVE stated that the creation of permanent magic items is difficult and rare, which at least keeps mages from flooding the world with magic toasters, but I need more than that.

 

I'm sure that Herodom Assembled has some answers for me!

[Enforcer84]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

For every magical cure, there is a magical curse. The various forces working against eachother more or less cancel eachother out.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

With the Ministry of Homeland Security on the prowl for new thaumaterrorism? Self-replicating curses infecting the communications networks? News thaumacasts carrying reports of virulent new strains of magical diseases? Some people arguing that modern magic-dependent society is depleting the natural mana of the world, and an alternative magic source needs to be found?

 

 

I'm trying to keep this feeling like a medieval world, not recreate 21st-century Earth with magic instead of technology.

[steph]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Magic is very rare not a common thing

[Teflon Billy]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

I was thinking about different ways magic could change the big picture problems.

 

Computation:

 

A magical computer can solve NP-Complete or even EXPTIME problems in P-TIME (if not instantaneously.)

 

Infinite storage, infinite computational speed, zero heat, zero power consumption (other than maybe the occasional once a millennium recharge spell.) True 100% accurate 3D visual screens with near infinite zoom in/out capabilities.

 

etc...

 

I'd be really curious to hear other's ideas on the effects of pervasive magic.

 

With regards to healing, for my campaign only Priests have access to pervasive and ubiquitous healing magics. Wizards who use arcane magic don't gain access to healing magics until a much much higher level of power (I assess an arbitrary 15 RP penalty on all arcane healing magic. To curtail would-be healing Mages.)

 

Though Parish Priests may grant healing magics (and they do) the people are doctinally guided to go to real medical profesionals (who may be Priests.) However, there is a big injunction against divine healing magic working once someone has reached the point of "aging's progress" basically once someone has started to naturally age and deteriate. Divine healing magic no longer works to extend their life. It will help along a person who's body could naturally get through a medical complication but only needs that little extra boost, (basically doing no better than modern medicine, just more quickly and more cheaply) but it won't do anything extra-ordinary.

 

What it comes down to, the gods that grant divine magic in my campaign are set up to help the society prosper to the greatest measure possible. That means eliminate debilitating injury or handicap (cure blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc...) but the gods want natural order to commence, which means mortals must eventually die.

 

The culture/society accepts this as the natural order of things and once someone starts to slow down they take it as part of life. That they will move on to the next world in a manner and at a time that the gods have set forth for them.

 

In extrordinary circumstances, yes, mortals have been made young again, resurected, revived from death, cured etc... in contravention of these general guidelines. These are what are considered genuine miracles in a world that contains the arcane and divine as part of its natural being.

 

TB

[JackValhalla]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

I rather think that that you are looking at this the wrong way, in matter of principle. Enforcer stated that for every magical cure there is a magical curse, and I would like to expand on that.

 

Simply put: It is easier to destroy than create.

 

Disease-causing spells would be easier, more prevalent, and more powerful than disease-curing spells. Spells to wound or kill would far outweigh spells to heal. Destroying magic items would be simpler than creating them. Communication spells would be easily negated by jamming spells. The more magic there is in your setting, the less enlightened and prosperous your populations will be. It could very well be that magic is the main reason that the people live in squalor, ignorance and fear. Perhaps, the magic that you could assume would bring them into a utopia is the one thing that is keeping them from advancing past the medieval stage.

[Teflon Billy]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

I rather think that that you are looking at this the wrong way, in matter of principle. Enforcer stated that for every magical cure there is a magical curse, and I would like to expand on that.

 

Simply put: It is easier to destroy than create.

 

Disease-causing spells would be easier, more prevalent, and more powerful than disease-curing spells. Spells to wound or kill would far outweigh spells to heal. Destroying magic items would be simpler than creating them. Communication spells would be easily negated by jamming spells. The more magic there is in your setting, the less enlightened and prosperous your populations will be. It could very well be that magic is the main reason that the people live in squalor, ignorance and fear. Perhaps, the magic that you could assume would bring them into a utopia is the one thing that is keeping them from advancing past the medieval stage.

This would lead to a very very bleak world IMO.

 

Disease is bad enough as it is when merely mundane.

 

Make it a supernatural component to it coupled with, as you state, a natural order of things making it easier to destroy than create and you quickly get apocalyptic chaos.

 

No, for my campaigns I'd insert a that only the darkest evil gods (Thorizdun, Vecna, Hastur, etc...) would go into this level of depravity. All other gods would have a definite interest and would actively work to stamp out this kind of rampant destructive magic.

 

TB

[JackValhalla]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

It would seem then that the best answer is somewhere in the middle, eh?

[Korvar]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

The obvious solution is that magic is rare and/or expensive. So the richest of the rich have magic or magical items, but the lives of the peasantry is unchanged. Your "bless crops" spell isn't going to get cast over the entire kingdom if each casting costs a diamond.

 

Spells that effect large areas - like the kingdom's farmland - could be more subtle. Increasing the yield of a kingdom's farms by 5% would most likely make the kingdom rich, but it would still be a recognisable medieval economy.

 

If Wizards (or whoever casts magic) are rare, then they won't be able to have a major effect on the world, while still having the occasional Wizard's Tower or Castle In The Air.

 

You could go the Ars Magica route - cities have a Dominion Aura, caused by the faith of the populous, which tends to suppress Magic; those with enough True Faith to cause Miracles are about as rare as Wizards. So the end result is that around civilisation (the bits we know most about) there is little magic, while out in the wilds it's more common.

 

Some weird mad bloke, claiming to be from the future, is secretly manipulating events behind the scenes to make sure it all matches his history books...

[OddHat]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

The solution I usually use is "It has, but on the surface things look similar".

 

Don't think D&D. Think the early 19th century mixed with 1980s Hollywood fantasy settings.

 

Somewhere out there, people get miracle cures and have incredible machines. The richest families in a large town or small city have a few pretty nice tools and conveniences. If you're poor, very little of that really affects you. Yes, the whole town can get together and hire a wizard to come slay a dragon, but there's not a magic shop on every corner. Sure, if cousin Billy gets his leg cut off, somewhere there's a Healer who could grow him a new one, but unless you're wealthy or well connected he'll probably have to live with a wooden leg, if he lives at all. War becomes very different thanks to the early addition of reliable battlefield communications and intelligence, and the greatest nobles and richest merchants can communicate easily across the globe, but for most people life is only improved in small ways. Crop yields are a bit higher, child mortality a bit lower, plagues and epidemics less common, population pressures and banditry a bit more common. On the surface, it still looks like Ye Olden Tymes.

 

As Ken Hite says, start with your end goal in mind and work backwards. Going the other way is a fun exercise, but there's no guarantee you'll end up with a playable setting.

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

I've hit a major stumbling block in the creation of a fantasy world . . . it's pretty much brought the creative process to a halt.

 

Why does a world with magic bear any resemblance to the standard generic medieval life?

 

Medicine, for example, is brought up to modern standards or better with healing magic. Plagues aren't going to happen when a simple "Cure Disease" spell can render a person disease-free. Injuries can be fixed with a simple spell--instantly! No waiting for natural healing processes! Infant mortality plummets, population growth soars.

 

Sooner or later, someone is going to create a spell that enhances crop growth. With medieval agricultural technology, even a small increase in the yield would reduce the number of people who needed to work the land to feed everyone, yielding more people to do other things, like culture, trade, manufacturing and research.

 

Communication spells would allow the transmission of information with at least the convenience of WWII-era tech. This would drastically alter the nature of warfare, and trade, and diplomacy, and news distribution.

 

 

 

So, what I'm wondering is this: how can I have magic in my world, but still have a society that more or less resembles Europe between 500 and 1500 AD? Why hasn't magic shaped the world into something else?

 

I can't just "not worry about it" . . . that might be the easiest solution, but my mind doesn't work that way. I HAVE stated that the creation of permanent magic items is difficult and rare, which at least keeps mages from flooding the world with magic toasters, but I need more than that.

 

I'm sure that Herodom Assembled has some answers for me!

 

 

Ok, this is the reason I came up with my world. Everybody can do magic, just like everyone can sing (but as American Idol proved, not everyone should sing!)

 

Magic is unpredictable and dangerous (or at least seems that way), because of this, most people shy away from the magic fix (adventurers differ because they can actually use magic relatively safely). Sure, a simple wound closure is probably worth the risk, but would you trust a magician not to screw up major surgery? To safely remove the disease without screwing up some unseen delicate balance within the body? What if that disease was actually helping in some strange way? Are you going to trust the healer with something as delicate, fragile and precious as your baby? Adventures might actually know that magic is wonderful, but to your average superstitious peasant isn't going to embrace magic as the ultimate cure.

 

Best to avoid magic unless the need is dire.

 

Crop growth, for instance, how do you know it is safe? Is it really just making the plants healthy (or bigger) or is there something more sinister happening? Again, remember superstitious peasants, kings, and farmers, against the adventures proving that it is all perfectly safe. Better to be safe and not rely on magic to increase crop yields.

 

Communication spells, can you trust a communication from a wizard? Maybe it is just an illusion or a trick. Even if the magician is completely trustworthy, ask him how his spell works. No doubt it is done with some weird supernatural force. Better to trust true messages to messagers who carry encoded messages that he can not reveal the true nature even under torture. Then to trust the wind to carry a message or demons or even angels who serves but one master.

 

Now, after all of this, if you still say that magic can be proven safe, efficient, and all around better than even five-hundred years of future technology, I ask the classic circular arguement, "Why hasn't magic made the world any better?"

 

(This works best if you have proof of several NPCs that screw up magic spells all the time. "Well, justin last month, Sommanex, he done cast a spell to try and fix my cow... and she'n just XPLODED! Now'n you think you can fix my daughter?")

[Markdoc]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Well, when it comes right down to it, most FRP games take place in a "sanitized" environment anyway. When was the last time that one of you players caught an ordinary non-magical disease and died of it - or even got seriously ill? "Medieval" cities in FRPs usually have functional streets, buildings that don't fall down or randomly catch fire, plenty of spacious places to live, stay and work and often have huge sewerage networks, inns that function like modern hotels, temples that function like hospitals, organized full-time city guards who function like modern police, etc. They work like a modern city would work if it was translated back to the middle ages.*

 

So half your work is already done for you. I handle the rest, by making magic relatively uncommon. Not rare, just relatively uncommon. There's a limit to how many spells a magicker can cast in a day and learning magic tends to be a fairly time-intensive proces, so there aren't that many mages: about one percent to a half percent of the population in civilised regions, less in more rustic places.

 

So in my game, plagues can still happen, but they will tend to get choked off when they hit more sophisticated areas - and wealthy people don't die of the plague. Magical plagues, on the other hand can still happen and tend to be devastating because they can kill a whole city in a day, far faster than the magical healers can heal everybody. Wealthy people, in fact, do live disease free lives generally: they can afford magic. Poor people - who can't always afford the services of a magical healer, don't.

 

Spells to boost crop fertility certainly exist and do allow higher population desnities than might otherwise be the case, but in general magicians have better (meaning more lucrative) things to do than help some rustics make more sugarbeet. Magic is usually only used for crop magic when there's some kind of emergency - which since weather control spells exist, usually means malign magic. Compare it to real life: for a long time feudal landowners knew the value of fertiliser, deep tilling and adequate water for crops. And for a long time they did nothing about it: preferring to spend their time, money and effort on more interesting things (like better armor, a fancier house, nice clothes, etc). Such innovations only crept into general use very slowly.

 

Communication, combat and travel magic have (in my world) drastically altered the nature of business, diplomacy and warfare. Empires can be larger and more cohesive, important messages don't take months to travel long distances, and multinational corporations exist carrying on trade across whole continents. The old medieval armies with knights and levies only really exist in very backward places, having been replaced with smaller, more "modern" magically supported forces. But the same kind of people are still in charge, and Tim the peddler can only look enviously up at lord Salwark's flying merchant galleon as he plods onto the next village with his goods on his back.

 

Unless you deliberately choose not to make it so, you can't have more magic than you have magicians, so there's not likely to be enough to go around: and there's no equivalent to production-line production. So you are unlikely to have cheap magic for the masses.

 

So ... you can have a world that is "recognisably medieval" but if magic is at all common, it's unreasonable to expect it to be really close to what existed. My advice for a fantasy game - pretty much before anything else - is to work out how you want magic to work -a nd then build the world to conform to that.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*Amusing side-note: when my wife started playing FRPs she expected the "medieval" cities to be .. well, you know.. medieval. So she started asking questions like "why does this place have a huge inn, with private rooms and stuff? Do they get a lot of nobles staying here? Are we allowed to stay here? Why do they have a full time city guard? Is there a war on? Etc etc. It took me a while to get the message across that "actually we are playing in the 1950's Hollywood version of the middle ages - that's why"

[azato]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

If healing is in the realm of clerics this is a possible solution. It seems that often the clerics are nothing more than mages who can wear armor and use weapons. Their spells and restrictions often do not set them apart. But consider this - if the source of the cleric's power is from a deity, then such actions may not be in the interest in the deity. What if the gods behaved like the Grecian gods (or for that matter and pantheon of your choice), bad mannered people with great amounts of power. Any of the mythologies are full of changing loyalties and plots and misadventures of the gods. They do not behave in ways that we consider normal and have an agenda which is not always amiable to us humans.

 

If such is the case a clerics deity may not allow them to heal or cure a disease. It may be "part of the plan' for a plague to strike. It may be in the form of a punishment. It may be that such maladies are under the jurisdiction of another deity and they cannot interfere.

 

Regarding the crops - do not allow megascale. Mages will have very nice gardens and perhaps a nice farm, but it will be very limited.

[Fitz]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Regarding the "easier to destroy than to create" thing:

 

You could consider entropy as a sort of current in which everything sort of drifts along. Magic could be used to alter the rate of flow, or even reverse it. Magically speeding the rate of entropy would be relatively easy, just like poling a barge down a river. Slowing the rate of entropy would require a great deal more effort, and actually reversing it would require even more.

 

You might also consider the idea that while magic could adjust the rate and/or probability of things happening, it can't just make something out of nothing. A spell may massively improve the yield from a crop, but in doing so it might drain the soil of nutrients to such an extent that it would take several years to recover. One might heal a wound by magically speeding up the body's natural recovery rate, but in doing so you might actually starve your patient to death if you can't get enough nutrients into him while he's healing.

 

The idea that magic works within the laws of physics rather than breaking them willy-nilly can go a long way to making a home-brew magic system consistent and predictable for both the players and the GM, and it also makes it easy to decide whether or not a given spell definition fits within the overall framework.

[dustytomes]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Oddly enough the plague was one of the things that elevated the position of peasants in medieval times. No plague, the peasants stay peasants and feudalism continues on unchecked.

[BNakagawa]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

My solution is that healing or curative magic uses 'white mana' and plague or poisoning magic uses 'black mana'.

 

These two are always start out in equal quantities, and the more white mana one uses, the more black mana replaces it. So, if you cure every wound and disease, then sooner or later some necromancer is going to empty all the graveyards and raise a zombie army or some plague mage is going to wipe out half the county with some disease. Then the bad guys run out of mojo and it goes back to square one again.

 

This keeps things in a sort of equilibrium.

[Drhoz]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

because training a wizard or other magic-user is a decades-long and massively expensive project. That also explains why PC wizards gain experience so much faster than NPCs - after a 15-year apprenticeship, your NPC court wizard then spends every hour of the day trying to keep on top of the cholera outbreaks.

[Spence]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

While magic is "common" it is wild and fickle mostly manifesting in the "magical creatures". Magical types (magi, wizards, clerics and so on) do not create magic as much as tap the magical energy and mold/channel it. Only a very small percentage of the population can even tap in. Of those that do the majority die when they fail to achieve control and are overwhelmed by too much energy. The very small percentage of the survivors either find other magi as teachers or create their own path of power.

 

For the vast majority of the population, they may see magical creatures or beings, but to actually see a practicing magic wielder is a once in a lifetime experience. And since Wizards will only visit an area if it is "interesting", the peasantry probably don't look forward to the visit. After all, interesting to a wizard usually means a body count somewhere.

 

As far as changing the world? Wizards may be powerful, but in the big picture they are just a fart in a whirlwind

[Basil]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

I've hit a major stumbling block in the creation of a fantasy world . . . it's pretty much brought the creative process to a halt.

 

Why does a world with magic bear any resemblance to the standard generic medieval life?

 

Medicine, for example, is brought up to modern standards or better with healing magic. Plagues aren't going to happen when a simple "Cure Disease" spell can render a person disease-free. Injuries can be fixed with a simple spell--instantly! No waiting for natural healing processes! Infant mortality plummets, population growth soars.

 

Sooner or later, someone is going to create a spell that enhances crop growth. With medieval agricultural technology, even a small increase in the yield would reduce the number of people who needed to work the land to feed everyone, yielding more people to do other things, like culture, trade, manufacturing and research.

 

Communication spells would allow the transmission of information with at least the convenience of WWII-era tech. This would drastically alter the nature of warfare, and trade, and diplomacy, and news distribution.

 

So, what I'm wondering is this: how can I have magic in my world, but still have a society that more or less resembles Europe between 500 and 1500 AD? Why hasn't magic shaped the world into something else?

 

I can't just "not worry about it" . . . that might be the easiest solution, but my mind doesn't work that way. I HAVE stated that the creation of permanent magic items is difficult and rare, which at least keeps mages from flooding the world with magic toasters, but I need more than that.

 

I'm sure that Herodom Assembled has some answers for me!

 

To pull together some ideas mentioned, plus some of my own:

 

Those who can work magic are rare. Very rare. Like one to four per million rare. Then they need training. Years of training. Decades of training. And a major part of that training will make the apprentices very very conservative in outlook --- after all, magic is enormously powerful. Screw up a spell and the Dungeon Dimensions empty into the world. Magicians have to be the carefulest a human can be.

 

So, you have 1-4/1,000,000, extremely powerful, and utterly conservative mages. Naturally they'll do all they can to keep the world/the culture from changing, and power in their hands. Thus, the culture will be fairly much like historic medieval culture(s). And, as a bonus, you've explained the common fantasy trope of tens-of-thousands of years of history!

 

You also have, will ye n'ill ye, a mageocracy (in effect if not officially). Still, that has possibilities.

 

 

BTW, one way to bring this home to the players is to, each time a new character is being created, make the player roll 7d6. If they all come up 1's, say "Congrats! Your character can be a magic user! Don't want to be one? OK, here's a chit good for one mage PC. You can trade/sell/give it to anyone you like, for any COMPLETELY OUT OF CHARACTER exchange you like."

 

This gives a 1-in-279,936 chance of anybody being a magic user, or about 3.57 mages per million inhabitants. A bit high, but workable.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

BTW' date=' one way to bring this home to the players is to, each time a new character is being created, make the player roll 7d6. If they all come up 1's, say "Congrats! Your character can be a magic user! Don't want to be one? OK, here's a chit good for one mage PC. You can trade/sell/give it to anyone you like, for any [b']COMPLETELY OUT OF CHARACTER[/b] exchange you like."

 

This gives a 1-in-279,936 chance of anybody being a magic user, or about 3.57 mages per million inhabitants. A bit high, but workable.

 

In the interests of realism, if any die comes up 2,3,4 or 5, the character should be limited to peasantry.

[OddHat]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

If you want "realism" in your fantasy game, say goodbye to magic, miracles, and monsters. If you want your characters to be demographically average folks, they're now illiterate peasants without weapon skills who'll never see more of an adventure than being slaughtered by bandits or soldiers.

 

Of course, not many players would stick with a campaign like that for more than a session or two.

 

If you don't like D&D magic and magic users, don't use them. There's no rule that "Fantasy" has to mean a Gary Gygax hodgepodge.

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Besides the rarity of magic users (which solves things), there's also the point that wizards are often isolated scholars and/or hermits who are "subtle and quick to anger" when one meddles in their affairs.

 

People might not have ever conceived of wizards being useful to the general populace because by and large they're not interested in improving society. That would be to adulterate the purity of studying of their art for its own sake. If remaining focused on study was not sufficient, it might even be that Wizards are so powerful that they live secluded lives of principled restraint, above the concerns of the mortal plane. Wizards are much more likely than other folk to know when they're being used for some high and mighty scheme that would, more than likely, merely raise some upstart lord's political profile, rather than advance any meaningful aims of the wizard.

 

It might also be that lords who might order such widespread change as a wizard might accomplish would be reluctant to be dependent on outside power. Either as a matter of personal hubris, or as a pragmatic requirement ("why not just follow the wizard? He's the one with the REAL power here"), it might be that nobles are aware that for wizards to use their power in this way is to also give them political power, and no noble worth his salt would willingly cede the least political power that he had to give. Of course, that assumes that nobles even understand what magic is capable of, and that they have the imagination to think of it as a kind of technical mastery that would solve problems they have in areas unrelated to arcane knowledge.

 

That such imagination is the product of a modern mind, not a medieval one is perhaps the easiest way to solve this question.

[Basil]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

In the interests of realism' date=' if any die comes up 2,3,4 or 5, the character should be limited to peasantry.[/quote']

 

So, your a peasant 2186 times out of 2187?

 

Nah, that's a little bit high.

 

 

[Spence]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

So, your a peasant 2186 times out of 2187?

 

Nah, that's a little bit high.

 

 

 

Shhhhh ..... don't let the cat out of the bag......

 

some of the peasantry don't realize they are peasants.......

[Curufea]

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world?

 

Magic should change the world - most High Fantasy games are not that similar to actual medieval times. Usually they increase the dangers to compensate for the advantages of magic.

 

However - if you don't want it to change the world significantly, don't use much magic. Try a low fantasy game. Don't have miracle cures. Have magic be only useful for specific things - not everything.