Assuming magic existed similar to DnD, lasted well into the modern age, it wouldn't be so ridiculous a notion to assume that they'd regulate a la gun control right?
I can already picture it now >owning tomes that teach you how to cast fireballs or magic missile get you on an NSA/FBI terrorist watch list >staves, wands and other enchanted items are heavily regulated requiring years worth of licensing and background checks to own; caught with an unregistered magical item lands you a heavy prison sentence >get arrested for performing healing magic without an official medical or religious license to practice it >most item enchantments are kept from public access and only for military and law enforcement >potions are rigorously tested by the FDA before hitting the shelves >illegal to own any kind of exotic mythical creature
>"Top story of the hour: Do minor enchantments cause autism in small children? A controversial new report from the Bureau of Magic, Enchantments, and Alchemy seems to indicate a correlated link between the presence of even minor item enchantments in households with small children and the increased likelihood of being diagnosed with autism. This report drew widespread condemnation from Enchantment rights activists with the National Wizard's Association calling for the resignation of the director of the MEA, quoted as calling it 'divisive fear mongering by those seeking to strip the American magicians community of [their] constitutional rights' and as 'having no statistical basis in this, or any other, material plane of existence."
Kayden Cook
elf suffrage wat do
Elijah Thompson
>Implying Elves are people
Isaac Thomas
>"We take you live to our field reporter, Jim Jackson, whose been covering this breaking story."
>"Thanks, Jackson, I'm outside the local Wizard's Alliance Tower here in Obsidian Keep, Indiana where magicians have gathered since early this morning to protest the MEA's controversial and damning report on enchantments and autism. I'm actually here with the local High Magus , Benedict Phineas Archibald whose agreed to sit down and speak with us. Mr Archibald, tensions are running pretty high this morning, can you elaborate for myself and the viewer audience on how you feel about the MEA's latest report?"
>"Mortal parasites, wreathing in the corpse of this puny materiel plane like maggots in a rotted carcass. I walked creation for 10,000 uninterrupted years, the laws of your sovereigns mean nothing to me - I have split mountains with my fury, journeyed across the 9 elemental plains with nary but my wits and millenia of accumulated intellect, usurped the fetid thrones of devils and demigods with these vary hands. The blind hubris of your sovereigns will usher in an age so destructive that tomes written in blood will fill libraries built of your bones -"
>"Sorry, that seems to be all the time we have. Thank you again for joining Mr High Magus."
>"Hey, no problem, thanks for having me Jim."
>"Now back to you in the study Jackson!"
Colton Adams
>Thanks Jim. After the break, Owlbear baiting. Time-honored tradition or monster cruelty?
Robert Jenkins
>regulate a la gun control
Jaxson Cooper
The world would end up a Magocracy, so magic use would probably be somewhat regulated. Unlike firearms
Henry Morris
I can see it now. A dusty street in a mud-brick town all coated in the cream-colored dirty patina of age and neglect, bombed out sections everywhere. An armored column slowly trundles down the street below where the viewer's perspective is, obviously shot from a shitty go-pro. The camera focuses on a man crouching beneath the window, murmuring something intently and dressed in tattered red robes. When the column gets close enough, he jumps up and shouts one last syllable, and a gigantic fireball streaks out of his hands, shortly thereafter knocking the cameraman to his feet as the blast shakes the whole scene, sending dust cascading from the rafters as a crescendo of "Zarus akbaaaar! ZARUS AKBAAAAAR" drowns out the audio.
Jonathan Myers
>Today the UK has passed a historic vote to leave this material plane of existence, telling the EU an the entire earth to "piss off with that Arabian Nights shite". They are expected to create their own entirely British demiplane. The question remains whether Scotland will go along with them or will attempt to return to the earth minus the southern half of the British isles. Weather forecasters are anticipating major disruptions to the weather systems with a major island chain removed from the earth. With the UK ascending to a higher plane the league of priests are attempting to anticipate if this will help or hurt the Queen's status as a deity.
Jaxson Nelson
>magocracy
Doubt it. I'm pretty sure evem with a bunch of Wizards, you'd have trouble fighting the industrialised, mobilized hordes of conscripted firearm-wielding soldiers. They could likely train, outfit, and replace their fallen faster than you could kill them
Mages and Wizards always struck me as highly stubborn individualists anyway. I can't imagine them working together in a massive army without a lot of ego driven friction. More likely, mages would become a reclusive social group with political privileges like the House of Lords
Brody Gomez
Much as modern China is in some ways a technocracy I could see it being a semi-communist magocracy. Lots of infighting and maneuvering, one party controlling things, the common man being treated like dirt.
Carter Ramirez
NSA would be a lot easier
>Detect Evil >"You're good." >Detect Evil >"You're good." >Detect Evil >(BINGBINGBING) >"Gonna have to ask you to step through the anti magic field, sir."
Charles Gutierrez
>Detect Evil >"Gonna have to ask you to step through the anti magic field, sir." >Detect Evil >"Gonna have to ask you to step through the anti magic field, sir." >Detect Evil >(BINGBINGBING) >"Gonna have to ask you to turn in an application to join the NSA, sir."
Fixed that for you.
Jace Murphy
or any smart mage adapts to the modern world and doesnt spend his time in a tower and instead becomes a multi-millionaire with phenomenal cosmic power inventing the first spelljammer and colonizing alpha centurai
Ryan Garcia
>ascending to a higher plane Please! They couldn't climb the political ladder without the European United Mages levitating them from the bottom and top. Best we'll see is some superliminally parallel demiplane in some dark forgotten corner of creation. Now Scotland, thats a land of magical history long kept bottled up. Too long. Whatever they do it will be like a phoenix from the ashes now that they have a chance to remember who they were. Mark my words.
Justin Young
"and who's moral compass are we using here? I'll have you know i've walked the 9 elemental planes before your ancestors had reduced skin pigment! Your class of "morality" has only existed for a universal blink of an eye! By what right do you think you can challenge me on so flimsy a notion?!"
Angel Morales
>"Pissed off Wizards fighting a violent separatist movement"
It's so absurd but I can totally see it. Wizards radicalizing young amateur mages on the internet, Wizard nationalist movements, normies leading pogroms against Wizards and Mages usually lynching weak hedge mages and not Archmages
Evan Smith
The senate votes once again against any regulations on magic following a lone mage opening up a portal to the nine hells. Fortunately no one was injured as the American campaign to "Liberate hell" is ongoing and the portal merely opened to a military base which was happy to be able to breathe non-sulfurous air for the first time in a year.
It would be like gun ownership only if gun ownership required years of intense study for proficiency. High power magic would be like building a backyard nuclear reactor, not owning a nugget.
Isaiah Murphy
I feel like DnD is at a state where archery was back then. Actual dedication required to be decent and deadly but as time moves on we find ways to be deadlier easier with minimal effort like with modern firearms today. Maybe theres modern tomes that you can read with a kindergarten grade literacy level and still fling fireballs around. That or we'd have shits like china eugenics'ing the piss out of sorcs.
>Thirty years ago, when the sky cracked, the assortment of hermeticists, Wiccans, and uncool teenagers practicing magic noticed that their spells were starting to actually work. Never unambiguously. But the perfectly possible things they asked of their magic were starting to happen more often than chance. Of course they ran around telling everybody, and some people did controlled experiments, and finally people started to believe them. A hundred different schools of witches and warlocks went around curing people’s illnesses and blessing sea voyages and helping people find their true loves.
>After that first rapid expansion stopped, the schools started competing with each other. Our magic is good and effective, your magic is evil and worthless. As usual, the well-connected Ivy League graduates won. They declared the Western hermetic tradition to be the One True School, convinced the bigwigs that everyone else was unsafe, and got a state monopoly as the American Board of Ritual Magic. Anyone who wanted to practice ritual magic had to complete an eight-year apprenticeship under a licensed ritual magician or face fines or imprisonment for practicing magic illegally.
>The other schools went underground but never disappeared completely. After a decade of irrelevance they found a new champion in Robert Anton Wilson, who proposed a theory that directly contradicted the urbane hermeticism of the Board. According to Wilson, ritual magic is to Reality as the placebo effect is to humans. Tell a human that a sugar pill will cure their toothache, and the pill will make the toothache disappear. Tell Reality that a ritual will make rain fall, and the ritual will cause a downpour.
Nathaniel Allen
>Wilson teamed up with Robert Shea to perform a series of experiments testing his hypothesis. In their work Placebomancer! they tested two rituals to produce rain – one invoking the demon Amdusias, the other the demon Crhvano. Both produced the same couple centimeters of rainfall, even though Amdusias was a Great King of Hell who had been known to occultism for hundreds of years, and Crhvano was a set of seven letters pulled out at random from a bag of Scrabble tiles. As long as they gave the ritual a sufficiently ominous ambience, both invocations worked alike.
>The American Board of Ritual Magic answered the challenge by getting Wilson and Shea locked up for unlicensed practice of magic, then paying for a series of TV ads where attractive women in robes told viewers that their children were too important for the government to allow charlatans to go on practicing untested magic spells. So much for that. A few licensed magicians complained, or poked at the boundaries that the Board had set for them, but whenever it became too much of a threat the Board would revoke their licenses, and there the matter would rest.
>For to get one’s magician’s license revoked was a terrible thing. Who would trust a placebo given by a doctor stripped of his medical diploma, dressed in street clothes, working out of his garage? A magician who lost his license would lose the ability to convince Reality of anything. The American Board of Ritual Magic, originally a perfectly ordinary example of regulatory capture, had taken on ontological significance.
>So nobody had been too worried when young apprentice magician Dylan Alvarez had pissed off one too many people, gotten expelled from the Board, and vowed revenge. He was just an apprentice, after all, and anyway he’d lost his license. Good luck convincing the universe of anything now.
>But Alvarez had realized that there are people without medical degrees who hand out convincing placebos. They just don’t do it by pathetically begging people to believe they’re doctors. They do it by saying they’re better than doctors, that they’ve discovered hidden secrets, that the medical establishment is in cahoots against them, but they’ll show the fools, oh yes, they’ll show them all. A good naturopath armed with a couple of crystals and a bubbling blue solution can convince thousands, millions, even in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence. Ambience, they realize, is really a subset of a stronger power. The power of narrative. The literary tropes declaring that, given A, B is sure to follow.
>All the other shmucks who had been expelled from the Board had begged to be let back in. Or they’d tried to hide it from Reality, to claim that they were really magicians after all, that the decision had been unfair, didn’t count, wasn’t a big deal. Reality hadn’t bought it.
>Dylan had declared that if the Board had set themselves at odds against him, so much worse for the Board. And Reality had eaten it up. Now an entire guild of people who prided themselves on remaining on the right side of narrative tropes had to deal with a devilishly handsome rebel with a cause who had sworn to dismantle their entrenched oppressive bureaucracy with fire and sword, and who did clever witty things like hide in a wine cellar so that a magically-charged pendulum would track his real-world location underneath the floor rather than his analogical location on a map.
Matthew Harris
I'll be honest with you - this sounds REALLY British. Americans aren't half so big on regulations and licensing. We're biggest on the stuff that makes you money. Wherever we can get away with it we flaunt every regulation there is.
Andrew Cruz
Okay, that's top-tier.
Ian Wilson
It's written by an American doctor. So he's probably thinking about things like the cost and time required for FDA approval of generic drugs.
Evan Turner
Problem of course being witch hunts... Guns are treated as they are in America because they were a man made invention used to feed a family. Magic is of the DEVIL and used in EVIL ways (even though most people would learn just basic shit like minor healing, werelight, lighting a fire cantrip)
Luis Rivera
This. We're almost as shifty on regs as the muslims are on pig meat. Best way to look at this is our bridges. 90%ish of our bridges are considered highly dangerous and in need of immediate repair. We don't repair them immediately, or ever, because that shit costs money and we have zero legal requirement to do so immediately and they seem to be standing up to their current use. We also cut literally every corner we can with new bridges because legally we can just pay a small fine the contract no doubt took into account. Then when a bridge breaks every other year or so we go "oh no! We'll do better next time!" And make a bunch of new laws that amount to slightly higher fines the next contract will take into account just as we take into account all the money we save cutting all these corners.
Tl;dr look how opposed we are to gun regs and licensing and realize we're that way about literally everything to about 4/5th of the same degree. Our buildings? Same as the bridge example. Our laws? Same. Our military? The exact same except we specifically go out of our way to find the cheapest option THEN cut corners.
Matthew Harris
Oh. Well, yeah. But those guys are assholes.
Bentley Mitchell
>New survey says 90% of dimensional bridges are unsafe. What does this mean for people vacationing in Sigil?
Benjamin Anderson
>FDA Approves new cure for Stygian pox, drug companies pricing it at $80,000. The same Cure disease scroll costs a mere $400 in Canada.
Christian Perry
Cheaper healthcare and more money maintaining the insane amount of dimensional roadways our country has. People seem to forget that while we are but one country a single states 4 dimensional manifold pathway and bridge system has the same footprint as most european countries let alone the size of our entire country.
Liam Williams
What I'd like to know is how this is going to affect the status of multi-dimensional fracking on the plane of Elemental Earth. We need those bridges to import our oil and mana crystals!
Jacob Bailey
Modern day attempt at a hostile takeoverwuld probably fail because a snuper round is a sniper round. Back in ye olden times it probably would have worked though, meaning there would be history of this happening. Hell, some countries probably would have become magocracies long ago and just never stopped being one in some form or another.
Look, those souls deserve a fair shot at democracy, just like everyone else. These conspiracy theories about us being there just for the Hellfire are way off target.
This is assuming complete mastery. If I want to be a chemist I have to spend years of intense study in order to master the general basics and be called a chemist, and then further study allows me to specialize. Learning to build a certain type of bomb is as easy as (carefully) googling. I don't see why learning a cantrip would be different.
Mason Gutierrez
>Planar Environmentalists are complaining that fracking is weakening the boundaries between the elemental planes of water and fire. Congressman Vizarbrax, what do you think? >>The Magic community hasn't reached a consensus on whether or not the deterioration of barriers between planes is man made or not, and to assume that it is would be reckless not just for the American economy but for the interplanar trade market as well.
Brody Roberts
America will be fine. At our outset we realized the usefulness of dimensional railway travel and dimensional leylines as a cheap method of moving freight and persons across the vast expanse of our country. As the demand for personal travel transitioned to hyperdimensional planes and personal leyline carts the pathway to pure and cheap freight on the lower dimensional railways parallel to the leylines themselves was opened. As a result we can move bulk anything much more cheaply and efficiently than other countries who didn't need these amenities early on and thus never developed them for use as we did.
That is literally the premise of the anime Someday's Dreamers. It follows a young mage off to Tokyo to complete her magic training and register as a full mage. When it isn't being a dry romance or slice of life thing, it goes into the organisation and laws pertaining to said mages.
Jonathan Gonzalez
While the discoverer of the milk plane, a Mr. Mark Polonopolis, originally thought it was a plane of catgirls it was later discovered to be the plane of milk, with him having stumbled directly into their city on one of the larger deposits of cream. To be accurate, he first arrived directly in the middle of a bed of catgirls at a brothel, which may explain why he was so lax in learning details on that trip.And every other trip he took back there.
David Rivera
Holy shit. Someone else has suffered through that slow moving dreck?
And yet I still have nostalgia goggles for it, seeing as it was the first non-DBZ anime I saw.
Bullshit and speculative heresy. good, evil, and law have never been found snd probably never will as they are moral constructs made solely by us where, infact, we know that the plane of milk not only exists but that its inhabited and its main tourist attraction, Île de la Crème, is visited by millions every year. I'll also have you know that i routinely skip over to the egg and butter dimension for brecky as its a short jaunt than the market.
Samuel Young
They used to burn witches for a reason.
Carter Edwards
Well of course they did. Women can't be trusted at the best of times let alone when they have a modicum of power such as fireballs and newtification.
Nicholas Miller
I heard the milk and butter planes are one vast plane
Owen Richardson
how else are we supposed to see sweet magic in action
Connor Campbell
Not a prayer. DARPA would still be a thing, you know. Testing weapons/spells gets easier and still moral when you test on magical constructs made identical to humans. The governments won't care that any old fartbag can cast Finger of Death because anyone important can just be Resurrected, plus fucking magic items bro. PotUS has a magic ring embedded in his body that grants straight up magic immunity. He also rocks a Glock 9mm +7 with Unlimited Ammo (+5 Shocking Burst) that casts CL18 Greater Dispel (single target) on hit.
I care more about the implications if combined with current tech. "Bag of holding" fuel tanks for everything from lawn mowers to spacecraft. Just imagine the change to spaceflight when you don't have to push the mass of your fuel or payload anymore! Shipping is completely changed too, and all with just a single magical dweomer. Shipment too big for a magic bag? Get all the company wizards together to teleport that shit. Warfare? Magical small arms can pierce modern tank armor, and deliver anything from fireballs and lightning bolts, to mass charm on hit. Magical artillery could probably genocide everything. 155mm MIRV Wail of the Banshee.
The God of Armored Vehicles allows his clerics to summon a divine APC with angel crew. The Atom God allows his clerics to cast fucking nuclear explosions and summon divine fusion plants. The God of Computing allows his clerics to form a telepathic link to a single nearby computer, at will.
Hell, druids would all gather together, chant for 20 minutes, and BOOM! Global warming fixed. Mass Fox's Cunning fixes Africa in a week. "House's battery is running low I better go stand in the yard and lightning bolt the roof." Goggles of Detect Evil for Airport fags so they can fuck off looking in my shoes.
Kevin Robinson
Nope. Entirely seperate by way of almost full of water and almost no water at all. Île de la Crème is in fact a natural land formation but only the cosmic churning of the big bang could churn the buttermilk demiplane into its own whole plane of butter.
Brandon Thompson
Bump
Daniel Miller
>Goggles of Detect Evil for Airport fags so they can fuck off looking in my shoes. or just, you know, magic yourself to your destination and avoid that garbage altogether.
Samuel Collins
Necromany would be like hard drugs. It would be illegal almost everywhere, but have specific usefulness in everyday life, and some people would heavily abuse it. >exterminators use necromancy to unleash zombie rats to kill rats in your home. >they "install" a zombie cat to protect your home for up to 6 months afterwards! >people practice necromancy for fun in secret, eventually illegal underground rings are formed where necromancers bring their greatest creations in for zombie cock fights. >crime syndicats steal bodies to sell to necromancers for their craft >necromancy is deemed a war crime because it desecrates the fallen and can break peoples minds having to shoot the man they were just fighting alongside. >scientist uses necromancy to try and engineer an undead virus that feeds off a specific bacterium to try and cure a flesh eating bacteria, creates a new super virus that causes people to never lose old skin causing mass flesh rot
I could go on.
Julian Kelly
The plane of milk has been downgraded to a demiplane after the cosmological society agreed on a standard uniform classification system. The demiplane of milk just fails to meet all the criteria.
Jaxon Rodriguez
Bunk and slander! Define these "criteria" and how the plane of Milk doesn't meet them. Its an entire plane made of milk and various milk byproducts! What more do you want?!
Cameron Perry
Wizards have no sense of right and wrong, so it makes sense to regulate tomes that teach spells without any applications besides murder.
An untrained person has no way to identify what the magical object in their possession does. The potential danger becomes obvious after some careless person permanently disfigures their neighbour after mixing up wands.
Magic that fucks around people's bodies is not something you want administered by quacks. There is a reason we do not let just anyone prescribe pharmaceuticals either.
Once some teenagers die from drinking some street alchemist's potion of Bull's Strength the public will demand potion safety. Again, we do not let just anyone manufacture pharmaceuticals either.
In many places regulating mythical creatures would not require anything beyond that which is already in force to regulate regular creatures.
Hunter Scott
It's a demiplane because it hasn't caused lesser planes to branch off from it like the primary planes. I swear you millennials take this thing to personalty. it's just a minor plane, idk that it was on your kindergarten planes chart.
Hudson Lee
Did some asshat cast Blind on you when it came to how its demiplane of buttermilk was churned into a plane solely of butter? A whole plane due to the expansive effect if churning.
Carter Miller
Wat do about sorcerers who have natural magic?
Oliver Lewis
One of the pillars of a State of Law is the monopoly of the use of force to make legal rulings obligatory.
Now, the thing is. Would magic in this world be tied to an object? Lets say, you can only cast fireballs if you have a fireball stave, or is it a world where you read a fireball tome and forever it's in your head as a known spell?
It's hard to imagine a world where just by knowing a spell you are considered by the state like a dangerous person.
Well it kind of happens with Government Secrets
Luis Lopez
Good luck trying to enforce it in a setting which has literal gods of which some embody aspects of magic themselves.
Brody Edwards
In most settings magic is hard or at least restricted to the naturally able or academically gifted.
A "gun control" setting - though the proposers may not realize it - makes magic easy as hell and done by tens or hundreds of millions of people, especially red-state people.
In a world of pdfs, a world of lightning links and solvent traps and wrist braces, a world of machine shops and even 3d printers...magic is a time-proven, ultra-reliable force that everyone with the equivalent of a highschool shop class can exploit at will - and the law can't stop them. It can't even credibly pretend to stop them, outside Orwellian hellholes where law-following citizens get oppressed and petty criminals do as they like anyway.
Carter Hall
Yeah but think about it. In a setting with gods where one god may want to have magical "gun control" so to speak on magical spells while another wants it to be unrestricted for the pursuit of the art or knowledge and then you end up with different gods on different sides and politics to it. Either way some sort of war on it will happen and depending on the victor will be the outcome of what happens. Actually come to think of it that's not a bad hook for a couple of campaign settings.
Tyler Baker
I think software is a better analogy than guns. On one side is the difficult, awkward, but freely accessible and theoretically-superior open-source arcane magic. On the other is the walled-garden of god-compiled magic that does 95% of what people want better than what 95% of people have the skill for, for the low low cost of your worship and tithing.
Jordan Lopez
That analogy actually sounds much better. I am still going to try and start my fantasy magical war though just to amuse my players.
Cameron King
bump
Jonathan Jenkins
my jaw dropped so fast it popped
>drug dealers and rich people would still be loaded with magic tho >creepy old guys with beards still wanting magical freedom and citing anecdotes from the Great Magic Wars would face heavy stigmas >police organizations would fabricate claims of suspected magic use as an excuse to loot people's homes during natural disasters
Jonathan Taylor
>government employs hundreds of high-level sorcerers and wizards >your streets are patrolled by novices who can barely keep a lid on their ice wands >local gangs of magic users regularly rob, murder, and rape with ill-got magic items at their disposal >high council elects that civilians are too irresponsible to be trusted with magic and should be disarmed or restricted in its use >militias of fiercely nationalistic yet anti-government elves emerge, patrolling neighborhoods and having long, boring standoffs with local guardsmen meh
Joseph Walker
Anybody have ideas what special privlages or penalties a mage in the military would have in this setting?
Joseph Rivera
OP I finally have an idea to run a campaign based on this image.
Noah Sanchez
For another magic anime set in a modern day setting i suggest wizard barristers which are essentially mage lawers that defend other mages in a society that demonizes them.
