How Magic Changes Architecture

[Michael Hopcroft]

This may be too complicated a topic for a forum like this, but there was an episode of Connections (the great science/technology documentary of the 1970s) that made me wonder how magic would change architecture in fantasy worlds.

 

The first question concerns castles and other fortifications. Most fantasy world-builders assume that the medieval model of feudal stone castles would still be used. But all a mage has to do to breach one of those is sneak into the castle's blind sports and hit it with a single Explosive attack spell sufficient to penetrate the stone. In the real world that's exactly what happened when cannon came along, and the result was a new style of fortification called the Star Fort. How prevalent would mages with those sorts of spells have to be before that style of fort would become popular?

 

The second question involves heat and light. It seems to me that mages who were not the adventuring type but were still good at their craft could make good livings helping the nobility or bourgeois stay warm in cold weather with various enchantments. A stone that radiates heat for two or three months at a time would be very valuable -- position a few strategically and you can reliably heat an entire palace, villa or large countinghouse. I don't think D&D ever thought much about the consequences of having Continual Light spells available willy-nilly -- for some reason they never assumed people would light the streets with such enchantments....

 

Without going into mind-numbing detail, how do these magics affect things like this?

[Markdoc]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

The way I treat this is affected by culture and style of magic - so that's another level you have to layer on top of things. But summed up very shortly, I make two basic assumptions.

 

1. I assume that people desire comfort and security in my fantasy game as much as they do in our world, and will pay handsomely to get it.

2. I assume that magic cannot be mass produced, or even produced for free. Doing magic requires a mage and making magic items requires Xp.

 

This has several consequences.

In cultures where magic is widespread, many people will have access to small magics they can do themselves. This means that society will - as a whole - specialize slightly more, this takes some of the rough edges off society. It means that societies of this type will be able to (for example) deal with disease better, feed more people for less effort, make better buildings, etc. As a very, very rough rule of thumb, think of Victoria-era western Europe, outside of the cities. In the countries where my current game is running, which has this "common small magic" approach, it makes a "merrie old England/fairytale" setting possible. Since most warriors will have some battle magic, but few will have really powerful magic, stone medieval-style castles make sense - and so does a warrior caste specialized in magic-enhanced mayhem. The temples, where most mages are trained, serve their communities as combined hospital, library, post-office and community centre.

 

In more magic-intensive (where the magic tends to be be more complex to learn/get ahold of*) cultures, the rich will have access to magic (indeed, most competent magic-users will get rich!). The poor, however won't be any better off than their neighbours in a low-magic-setting. You'll get magical heating, sewerage and lighting if you can pay for it: but without the ability to mass produce, there'll always be more demand than supply - so with limited access to magic, most people won't get it. What that means depends on cultural context: in some settings, you have teeming slums of the worst sort, overlooked by palaces, whose inhabitants never grow old or get sick, and who dine on imported delicacies ... protected by magically summoned dragons and ogres to keep the teeming masses in line. In others, you have what might look a bit like a medieval version of gilded age America: for most people, life isn't too bad - but wealthy families move in a totally different orbit, spending the baking days of summer in their palace up in the mountains, winter on a barge off the Southern coast, chatting with their friends and doing business all over the empire by mindlink, moving from place to place by portal, etc. The very richest can spend time in their orbital castles, or hobnobbing with the tall, elegant Lunar nobility.

 

In those settings, the military tends to look more like the modern western ones - a smaller, professional forces armed to the teeth with the best equipment money can buy. There's no point at all in sending ordinary spearmen or archers against even a single Warguildsman in his flying 20 PD/ED armour, that gives him life support, and doubles his STR - and who wields a lightning lance that lets him fry a dozen men in an eyeblink. Castles in that setting look like a blend of star fort and sci-fi bunker - prepared for assault from ground or air, provided with magical screens and divided into defendable sections with alarms internally to deal with subterranean or teleport attacks. Or for that matter, flying castles with wings of dragon-riders - the equivalent of aircraft carriers.

 

*There are some cultures where powerful magic is not acquired by learning, but by sacrifice/summoning - these tend to be low-tech, anarchic places, since a powerful mage can come from anywhere, which means that power is obtained by taking it and power structures tend not to be very stable.

 

The Hero system lends itself to this approach, because in general, the simplest way to get more raw power is to take limitations, which means doing magic becomes more "complex" and/or more "risky". You can tap a lot of raw power by summoning a demon, but then, y'know .... you've got a demon. How societies deal with magic and the possibility of power pretty much defines how your game will look and feel: it affects a lot more than castles!

 

As a very rough guide, I think of my game world like the modern world ... with access to 21st century technology restricted to those who have magic.

 

cheers, Mark

[djkester]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

This may be too complicated a topic for a forum like this' date=' but there was an episode of [i']Connections[/i] (the great science/technology documentary of the 1970s) that made me wonder how magic would change architecture in fantasy worlds.

 

The first question concerns castles and other fortifications. Most fantasy world-builders assume that the medieval model of feudal stone castles would still be used. But all a mage has to do to breach one of those is sneak into the castle's blind sports and hit it with a single Explosive attack spell sufficient to penetrate the stone. In the real world that's exactly what happened when cannon came along, and the result was a new style of fortification called the Star Fort. How prevalent would mages with those sorts of spells have to be before that style of fort would become popular?

 

There is a consideration of sorts. I would suggest. The magics available for destruction are also available for protection. If magic is available to armies in a form combat magics what sort of protective magics exist and how do they effect structure development?

 

In most cases its the ends that justify the means. Meaning that if castles are practical in a game world there must be a reason. My job is just to figure out why.

 

The second question involves heat and light. It seems to me that mages who were not the adventuring type but were still good at their craft could make good livings helping the nobility or bourgeois stay warm in cold weather with various enchantments. A stone that radiates heat for two or three months at a time would be very valuable -- position a few strategically and you can reliably heat an entire palace, villa or large countinghouse. I don't think D&D ever thought much about the consequences of having Continual Light spells available willy-nilly -- for some reason they never assumed people would light the streets with such enchantments....

 

Without going into mind-numbing detail, how do these magics affect things like this?

 

I think its the availability and cost of magic in your world that defines these things. If there are enough mages or works they perform are permanent in nature it wont be long before you have what you describe. I tend to limit these sorts of things in my games.

[Starcloud]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

Magic changes architecture depending on how available magic and countermatic are.

Generally, what limited architecture prior to reinforced concrete and the "skeletal frame support" type building was the material strength of stone and a lot of trial and error of engineering. Where magic can reinforce and support the stone to be stronger, architecture can start looking very modern and fanciful.

Then there's the problem of defense. The more mobile and powerful armies are, the less you want to invest in building fortifications, and the less useful those fortifications are.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

There's a lot of different ways to look at this.

 

Personally, it seems to me that there is "reality" and then there is "genre".

 

When world building it is wise to strike a balance between extrapolating outward from a modern perspective grounded in the real world, vs adhering to tropes and patterns commonly associated with a particular genre.

 

If you stray a little from expectations of the genre, it can be "clever" and "put a new spin" on things, and people will generally like it or at least give it a try.

 

If you stray too far from expectations, it often becomes unrecognizable or alien to the majority of people, for whom the tropes are definitive.

 

 

 

Additionally, there are dangers to invoking "reality" based arguments, but grounding them on something that is unbounded by realistic restrictions. Magic by definition can do anything; technology cannot.

 

We like to say that any sufficiently evolved technology is indistinguishable from magic, but that just means if you can't understand why it works then you can't deal with it rationally. You can't necessarily predict what it will do because you don't understand it. You cannot deal with it systemically or scientifically; you are reduced to superstition and dogmatic ritual in your interactions with it. Appeasing the Machine God vs initiating the activation sequence sort of thing.

 

The opposite is not necessarily true; a sufficiently evolved magic is not necessarily indistinguishable from technology. When magic gets more extreme it is still magic; it does not necessarily become more predictable understandable or bounded by precisely defined specifications. Mundane limitations such as physics, conservation of energy, elapsing of time, distance, even life and death, and so forth are not necessarily applicable to magic unless imposed upon it by some outside force (either in-game or out).

 

As modern people, we tend to like neat, well defined, predictable, and reliable systems, and magic systems designed by modern game designers tend to reflect this predilection. In settings with "magic" that works more like "science" but without those pesky "realistic" limitations mentioned previously, you can build up an internally consistent "high" fantasy with fantastical structures and no adherence to the genre expectations of a very muddled pulp-fiction melange of medieval Europe. It would be a pretty serious undertaking to get right, and in the end might be unrecognizable or unattractive to players for whom the result is too far outside their comfort zone.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

Now, having rained all over the parade a bit, here are some ideas on how magic might affect the design of fortifications:

 

It's all well and good to just start of and say "well, fireballs are a lot like explosive shell ordinance, which has a historical parallel that we can extrapolate from", but really why bother? From a modern perspective we know that eventually ordinance gets to the point where someone can drop a destructive device pretty much where ever they want from pretty much directly above your head, and walls become pretty useless vs that sort of threat. Thus, modern cities generally do not have walls. If working force field technology existed that could change, but we've been living without walls now for a long time so clearly there is not a huge demand for city wide force bubbles yet.

 

So the real question is, if you want to work the fireball angle, is how prevalent is magic that can render fortifications irrelevant? If it is an edge case, then it wont have a very big impact on the overall picture; if most foes are still restricted to man on man combat, defensive fortifications are still going to offer attractive benefits to defenders.

 

If its a situational risk bounded to individuals (ie magic users) then it can presumably be countered by other similar individuals; thus you get into the "my magic users to counter your magic users" model, which most fantasy gamers are comfortable with as its very gamist and offers opportunities for a small group of special people to shine.

 

If it is the common case and is endemic then traditional static wall defenses are going to disappear and the more effective tactic will be to engage opponents away from the cities of value taking you into more of a WWI / WWII model.

 

If magical weapons are equivalent to nukes with over the horizon screw you capabilities, then you are into WWIII territory and almost all traditional defense models are completely useless; diplomacy, mutually assured destruction schemes, and really extreme or even farcical point defense systems (satellite or jet fighter based interdiction systems, etc) and survival plans (underground bunkers, air force one style flying safe houses, etc) are the norm. Some "traditional" engagements fitting the WWII model will continue to be fought against opponents that don't have the really nasty weapons, but superpowers with the big guns will either dance around and avoid full frontal conflict or else just go at it and annihilate one another.

 

 

 

So...you can go this route and laboriously reason through it all and painstakingly build a setting from the bottom up to follow a "real world" parallel track reasoning from wherever magic is similar to technology and what effect that technology had in a historical context.

 

But really...why bother? In the end you're just creating a Modern game with an alternate SFX trapping. If this is the sort of game you want you might as well take Dark Champions off the shelf, the ultimate vehicle, etc, apply a "fantasy" SFX to the weapons and vehicles and so forth, and just run a Modern game "set" in a fantasy milieu. It would work more or less the same as building the equivalent from the ground up and save you a lot of time.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

If you abandon the real world parallel however, and ride the vector of "given the reality-altering properties of magic, what effect would it have on society" then you can get into some really interesting territory. This is a real creative exercise, vs the more derivative and contrived magic ~ technology approach.

 

 

You basically have to decide, what elements of recognizable reality do I want to retain? Because really the only limits here are those you impose yourself.

 

Is there even a physical world at all, in the traditional sense? Is anything actually real, or is everything a magical construct, or are the primordial components of a concrete firmament so easily manipulated that they are effectively fluid?

 

Is space even meaningful? Dimensional boundaries? Is there even a singular reality? All these things are not necessarily a given in the face of sufficiently advanced magic.

 

 

How about commonality? Can everyone work magic, or just a few god-like beings? Are people even people in the normal sense, or are we dealing with consciousness here? Is there even a "meat reality" at all? What does it mean to be a recognizable being but not have the ability to "do magic"? Is doing magic a binary ability, or are there levels of power / capability? What does it mean to be weaker or stronger?

 

Are there any sort of "rules" or "restrictions", or is anything at all possible?

 

And in the end, whatever you decide, is it gameable? Can fun be had playing it?

 

 

 

Basically, you need to set certain stakes in the ground about what is and isn't possible before you can reason about what affect such magic might have on your world. Presumably in your setting, explosive blasts is not the sum total or high water mark of magic, yet that is the stake in the ground you have given us. Do you want us to reason from an assumed "D&D" level of magic, inferred from your off-the-cuff mention of D&D's lack of consideration for such things? What kinds of options are available?

[Roy_The_Ruthles]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

You need to define what the abilities of your magic system are, before you can build your culture. Two dimensional fortifications may be untenable if people can launch mental attacks from the horizon, or if flying is so common that armies can fly over your castle. These are just two examples of ways fortification technology would need to adapt. Could you be more specific in your setting?

[lapsedgamer]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

This is why I really don't like high fantasy as such. If the D&D world were ever really thought out and handled the way that it might be by someone who was into this sort of speculation, the campaign world would look more like Star wars than the Lord of the Rings.

 

In LOTR, the magic was over the top, but not ubiquitous. You had a few items of power that were in the hands of major characters, and the disposition of these items changed the social and political landscape of the entire planet. All of the magic users were at least semi-divine in nature. You couldn't just go to school and learn to be Gandalf. Gandalf was an entity of unearthly nature. There was balance in that a well-trained hero could face down a magical being if the moment was right (dramatically appropriate).

 

LOTR is then used as the basis for D&D. D&D at its heart is tactical simulation, so the creators set about quantifying everything. For a lot of people the game wouldn't be any fun to play if the DM said, "Well that exists you will never get your grubby mitts on it, even if we play for ten years." So you end up with write-ups for stuff that the average fantasy author would rightly use as a plot device. Now someone sees the write up and covets the item, so that they can win the game. As Shrike said above, we as gamers tend to like things that are set up this way. We quickly move into the realm of MAD (Mystically Assured Destruction).

 

It starts with Sting being written up as a +2 dagger, and next thing you know you have Red Dragon squadrons defending the flying evil fortress from the hero, He in turn must throw the Orb of Eternal Cold into the only chimney leading into the Hellfire Furnace that powers the whole thing so it will be destroyed before it come in range of the good guy's fortress. In D&D games that I have been in, magic is so prevalent, that it has been commercialized to a ridiculous extent. You could go to a shop in town and buy an item. What!!? What major fantasy series have you ever read where the heroes could go to a store and buy a magic sword like we buy the newest IPhone?

 

Personally, I was always more into low fantasy because it avoids this type of thing generally.

 

In a round about way, I guess I am saying that magic shouldn't change architecture that much, unless you as the GM have set out to tell that kind of story. At that point just set things up like a Champions or Star Hero game and sub in "it's magic" for rubber science.

[Starcloud]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

In D&D games that I have been in' date=' magic is so prevalent, that it has been commercialized to a ridiculous extent. You could go to a shop in town and buy an item. What!!? What major fantasy series have you ever read where the heroes could go to a store and buy a magic sword like we buy the newest IPhone?[/quote']

 

Stephen Brust's "Vlad Taltos" series. Magically enchanted items are common enough there are, in fact, stores for them. Mind, the enchantments seem to be minor ones; keeping a blade sharp, keeping it rust free, enhancing the balance... There are a few, much more expensive and time consuming to get weapons. The Soul Stealing Morganti. Those are illegal if you're caught with one.

Then there are the actual artifact level weapons.

 

But apart from that, there are examples of magic items for low level, domestic use. Well, if you can afford them. They're still expensive and near impossible to get for commoners, but nobility can afford 'em.

 

All of this, though, is because of the increased availability of magic after the interregnum. Everyone who could still cast magic during that time got very, very good at it, and when the Orb came back, that skill translated as a massive power boost. And the techniques used became more effective, and more easily taught, which leads to most Dragaeran nobles being able to cast at least a few spells, etc...

 

It's not at the "Magic replaces technology" level and probably never will be, but you can combine easy availability of magic with a fantasy setting without rendering it unrecognizable as fantasy.

[lapsedgamer]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

I read some of those Brust books many years ago and thought that they were very funny and entertaining. I don't remember the magic weapons store, but I have to take your word for it since my memory of the plot details is not very good. I would be foolish to try to challenge your recollections since they seem much fresher. "There's no future in it"

[Starcloud]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

It would be easy to miss the reference. Apparently buying magic weapons is, at one point, so common for Vlad it's just a throwaway couple of sentences in one of the early books.

[Outsider]

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture

 

More rooms without doors.