So in a world where prestidigitation can light a candle, the military applications of combustibles are limited. The side which attempts to use it risks total annihilation the minute the enemy wizards find their supply.
So, what kind of technology /does/ develop in the Late Medieval and Renaissance, then? Where does military science go without gunpowder? What about transport? How tamper-proof can you make a steam boiler?
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Magical arms race. Always magical arms race.
Depending on how close the setting is to a magic-fueled, post-scarcity society the development of magitech will go hand-in-hand with warfare.
Airships would probably be a thing, since balloons are a lot simpler than aeronautics. Most warfare would be magical bombing and tunneling.
>So in a world where prestidigitation can light a candle, the military applications of combustibles are limited. The side which attempts to use it risks total annihilation the minute the enemy wizards find their supply.
>Airships would probably be a thing,
Um.
WHAT ARE YOU NOT UNDERSTANDING ABOUT NON. FLAMMABLE. HELIUM!?
Core concept, obviously.
Its not at all a magic fueled post-scarcity society. The Guild is very small and limited in scope, and bound by ancient laws, and rogue mages are hunted. Your average wizard could not pull off an explosive fireball, but can certainly light a powder barrel on fire.
>tfw my setting doesn't have natural gas due to the lack of fossil fuels
>no viable source of helium
Camouflage as a formal discipline would likely be developed much earlier. While the notion of blending in and being sneaky was hardly unheard of for obvious common sense reasons, the notion of actually designing formal camouflage patterns as a long sighted, professionally managed process did not occur until World War One in our world.
Meanwhile, in the rocket tag hellscape of a world inhabited by wizards, allowing your troops to get as close as possible to the enemy before being spotted, while ensuring enemy troops are seen first, becomes a matter of incredible importance.
For this reason, improving glass optics would also be a matter of incredible military importance. I mean, they ended up being very significant in our Renaissance period but the race would be so much real-er when it isn't merely a necessity for naval engagements, but for all warfare of any kind. There are by comparison relatively few spells that allow a wizard incredible spatial alertness at a distance that would be worth the spell slot to prepare.
We might also see cryptography enter as a formal discipline earlier. Magic probably cannot decode coded messages, and I iterate again that the war of intelligence is vital in a world of wizardry. The first mechanical code devices would likely spin off very quickly from the printing press (Which is vital for its utility to mass train wizards). From there, we might actually see computing itself as we understand it eventuate very early, especially given the accessibility of small area electrical power in such a setting.
Given the generally stronger understanding of alchemic process, and availability of more exotic biologicals, we might see genetic engineering take off to a far greater extent, coming initially as selective breeding of magic resistant or veiled animals for military purposes, following to surgical and pharmaceutical applications of said animals to invigorate soldiers against magical attacks, and finally to the discovery of genomics.
...that's like saying that the military application of gunpowder is limited as both sides have invented matches.
We need to also consider what kind of magic is used in the setting. If there are components involved, most army trained wizards would probably carry around spell components in bags or satchels in pre-measured pre prepared samples. Taking the ubiquitous D&D fireball as an example, sulfur and bat guano would become incredibly valuable and farmed commodities, possibly leading to the outright domestication of swarms of bats just for their shit. If, being cheeky shits, we replace that guano with Salt Peter or nitre, we see many of the early gunpowder manufacturing norms take place - albiet for the production of spell components, rather than black powder.
then take a giant bag and just fill it with like 50 air elementals
Indeed, we would expect that especially in prolonged and titanic conflicts analogous to the World Wars, strategic control of regions capable of mass producing particular spell components would start to become vital, in much the same way that the world's rubber production was hotly contested in our timeline.
It may even be that most spell components are ubiquitous, but the difference between an area where "Okay yeah we have bats" and one where there are enough bats around to industrialise the harvesting process without even putting out the overhead to domesticate them is huge.
Furthermore, to suddenly strike out at a major enemy bat farm, smash all the cages and set fire to their immediate stores of guano, is actually going to influence the spell preparations available at the warfront.
I mean, I'm exaggerating here because guano is really quite easy to get comparatively, and fireball is a primitive spell as far as the popular convention of what a wizard can do. But certainly, repeated casting of some spell of note would be of particular tactical or strategic use and thus make the production areas for its materials a flashpoint.
You want to know why the apocalypse happens every thousand/two thousand years in my setting?
Because in the range of that time, people have fucked around enough with magic to create a latent 'field' of wild magic, provoking the forces of chaos (who are powered by wild magic inherently) into catastrophic action.
When the fiends of chaos run out of wild magic to power their exploits, they retreat or 'hibernate' to recover. As magical energy is transferred, never destroyed, this results in 'calm' mana that can be used by MUs to power their spells.
Literally no mortal has figured this out yet.
Sorry I just really wanted to imagine a world where Bat-Farming was a legitimate industry
And while it's true the shit wizards can do get way more complex than fireball, lets be frank - most combat mages would get a crash course in basic blowing shit up and defensive spells and 3rd circle casting is probably pushing it for your average wizard grunt.
but yeah we need more details about the world.
As I just realized that people would not understand why this was thread-relevant because I'm a retard and forgot to clarify, there is no industrialized warfare in relation to magic because everything would get ravaged by fiends if it ever happened.
Imagine if WWIII happened and then demons were powered by the fallout.
well, it's also a good excuse as to why your game world never progresses beyond a fantasy medieval era, and why there's always an ancient ruined civilization who were far more advanced
A great antagonist would be some kind of immortal whose lived through all of it and is the only one who knows, so they go about manipulating the world to try and break the cycle - by killing mages, burning down libraries, sabotaging nation states before they grow so powerful they can threaten their neighbors with war, etc.
Definitely, given the ability for wizards to just burn shit down, farming weird creatures of all kinds is likely to be a thing in fantasy-verse. Having a resource that can self-replicate, where the intellectual labour is in knowing how to prevent it destroying itself (IE how to keep the animals happy and breeding in captivity) is honestly really ideal for the scenario outlined.
I expect we'd see not only bat farms, but also farms for like, half-dragon attack dogs or whatever.
Amusingly, for all that it was merely an average show apart from the memes, Chaika was an incredible show as far as the weapons with which a world war scale conflict in a fantasy setting would be fought. (Namely mass produced magical creatures, with more intelligent summons and familiars gradually replacing the skeleton crews of Mages necessary to coordinate them in the field). Also for showing the inevitable aftermath of such a war, when all these attack unicorns or what have you have gone back to being feral, but at unsustainable populations.
It's actually a well-kept secret by actually immortal but functionally mortal dragons, who secretly stockade items of power to slow the cycle but don't tell the other races because they figure the result would be even worse.
>Mages would side with chaos to keep their power (already happens with some of those in the know, would be on a higher scale)
>MU burnings/witch hunts
>Alternative magic sources being even worse somehow
Plus some races (like dragons and dragonborn) are inherently magical, so they would probably go under the knife too.
>A great antagonist would be some kind of immortal whose lived through all of it and is the only one who knows, so they go about manipulating the world to try and break the cycle
There is a character of this type, actually. He is a dragonborn warlock who has been convinced by the goddess of chaos (and magic) that the only way to make things right is by removing Vancian-style spellcasting as the way of magic and restoring the 'correct' type of magic, which was inherently accessible to everyone, but not very powerful or predictable.
The goddess of magic and chaos wants this to happen because it restores her 'rightful place' as ruler over magic- it was changed before by the other gods after the elves and orcs came and introduced structured magic, which a lot of people took keenly to because it standardized the measure of spellcaster powers (and could be silenced more easily).
She basically got put out of a job (besides dominion over luck), and got pissed, eventually turning evil.
Oh, and another thing:
It's also why necromancy is considered 'evil': sustaining false life where there is none creates a giant disparity of 'reality vs ideal'. This generates a metric fuckton of wild magic, which is what gives most undead their malevolence- a fiend piggybacks them to feed off of that delicious residue.
In a world without gunpowder airguns would reign supreme.
So presence of the undead is always accompanied by spooky ambient magic effects and wild magic? Sounds neat!
Just make nonflammable gunpowder, duh.
Air compression replaces gunpowder. Windmills. Sail-powered vehicles. Sail-powered robots. Mechanical computers. Windjammers and windmill ships. Airships. Gliders.
As soon as solar power is discovered, electricity will become what starts the industrial revolution. They'll skip straight from steam cannons to railguns.
> fossil fuels
> helium
So can a guy with a match or flint and steel. The only effect it had on real world was that they hide and protect their supply of explosives better.
...
Natural Gas is the IRL source for helium.
Natural Gas is a fossil fuel.
First off, with the agricultural revolution and the printing press, you're going to see a MASSIVE upswing in wizards. I mean everybody and their mother will want to be one and if it just takes time and study, why not?
That'll feedback into the agricultural/industrial side of things as golems take over the manual labor side of things.
In the long term you're looking at a society where everybody knows magic.
>It just takes time to become a doctor.
>It just takes time to become a career politician.
>It just takes time to become a professional athlete.
>It just takes time to become a [ANY PROFESSION THAT REQUIRES A LIFE OF DEDICATION AND FOCUS ON THAT PARTICULAR LINE OF WORK]
No, becoming a wizard isn't just a matter of time investment.
>In the long term you're looking at a society where everybody knows magic.
Maybe cantrips, at the very least. If you need an average or above IQ to cast entry-level spells, then ~1/2 of the population will be "magic-less plebs".
Kids would probably learn simple tricks, like prestidigitation, in primary school.
A guy witha match has to br right here, yo. A wizard can do it from as far as he can see. He can also specifically ignite the fuses of arms held in hands, without having to, you know, wrestle with the guy while carrying a match.
Magic is a talent, it takes more than study. The Guild accepts only the gifted.
Unless you can prestidigitate that flame at a hundred yards or more, you use gunpowder anyways because it's easier to mass produce gunpowder than wizards.
>We've invented flint and steel, time to throw away all of our gunpowder.
While the question "no gunpowder, wat do" is interesting, I can't think straight after seeing an OP so retarded.
Mind you, those with magic will be significantly more successful than ones without it. As golems come into play, unskilled labor will loose demand. They will be forced to either learn some kind of magic or die out. This would take generations, probably centuries to play out though.
In hindsight, bardic magic would be just as valid as wizardry as a field of study. Not sure if you can study to be a druid but as long as you had at least one good mental attribute you could learn some degree of magic.
...actually, this might make a good setting. Keeping track of all the implications would be tricky, though.
That only follows if a guild can monopolize all the arcane knowledge. With the advent of the printing press this becomes almost impossible.
I don't think that's how it works, user. For one, you can't actually see the powder, it's inside flasks and down barrels. The wording of the spell description also doesn't mention gunpowder and at the very least 5e mentions that the max range is 10 feet. Never mind that at 10 feet a musketeer is practically in bayonet range, you'd never get close enough to use prestigination without getting shot at.
Try Protection from Arrows instead. If I remember right, the wording is delightfully open ended as it applies to all projectiles.
>protection from arrows
I still don't get how it protects you from a thrown spear but not one that the guy is still holding onto.
different platonic concepts.
Projectiles are usually pretty light and generally can't course correct after being diverted. Trying to do the same to a thrusted spear would mean overcoming the strength of the wielder as well.
Or maybe the spell has an exception for slower moving objects so you can walk without the spell trying to deflect the earth or pick up an item without it darting away from you.
There's a bunch of reasons but since nobody explained exactly how Protection from Arrows work it's all guesswork.
Since you seem to be operating off 5th editions prestidigitation, as neither 3.5 or PF allow you create flames, maybe you should pay attention to how they actually work.
The spell has a range of ten feet. Only ten feet. It also works off line of sight and line of effect. So you need to be able to see it and have access to it. In addition, it only works on candles, torches, and campfires. It cannot light barrels of gunpowder or anything else, as its effects are clearly defined.
So, setting off gunpowder is going to be just like real life, needing an open flame from some other source than a low level spell. The spell changes nothing.
>as long as you had at least one good mental attribute you could learn some degree of magic.
That's how it is in my setting. The various spellcasters are split into "force of will", "faith", and "applied knowledge", and further subdivided into innate or learned.
The odds of someone having below-average aptitude for all spellcasting methods is slim, and such a person would already be a non-entity.
If you let an enemy get to your gunpowder stockpile, you're fucked, it doesn't matter if he's a wizard or not. That's why you store it in locked room and under guard... you know, like in real life.
And if you're using 5e... most spells specifically can't affect held or worn items (which is bullshit from versimilitude perspective, but understandable from gamist PoV). You can get fireballed while hauling an open bag of gunpowder, and nothing would happen (well, beyond you getting fireballed).
If your world doesn't have gunpowder, sure, why not, if nobody has discovered it before. But having it available and not using it because some wizard could possibly set it on fire is stupid reason.
details ahoy!
That actually happened! Summoning is verboten for combat, as a large portion of the former Imperial Heartland is overrun by demons. Luckily, they're on the other side of the part that's overrun by undead. For certain definitions of lucky.
So, it goes like, the world was once united by an Immortal Mage-Emperor who was generally a pretty cool dude, and he formed the Guild, and the Guild is like a world-spanning non-governmental entity and it trains all the wizards everywhere and those wizards sometimes serve in the army, but they never target other wizards or use certain forbidden tactics, such as the aforementioned summoning, or using fire on boats, or etc.
Sorry guys, my bad, OP here, I'm not playing D&D it was just a convenient touchstone.
You need to say that in your initial post. What system are you using, or is this just some idiotic wank about whatever random idea the spell might be able to do? Without rules defining what the spell can do, there is no way to answer the question.
What's the range of the spell? How much can it affect? What's its limitations? Does it have spell components, a focus, or nothing needed to cast it?
This is why we use actual systems instead of whatever random bullshit you idiots want to pull from your assholes.
Its enough that you can't use gunpowder or oil, man. Its happened, and it blew up, and it was catastophic, and its not going to happen again. I wasn't asking about the spell at all. I'm asking what a world without fossil fuel and gunpowder looks like circa 1700.
Then you should have just said that you fucking moron. That weird tangent about the prestidigitation spell was utterly unneeded and led to a lot of pointless confusion.
You need to learn how to formulate a question better without unneeded information.
You done now? You gonna be ok? I know you wanted this to be an argument, but its just not.
No I didn't want an argument, I want you to learn from a mistake and be a better poster. Are you so up you own ass you can't recognize someone trying to get you to be a better person?
Seriously, learn how to format a statement or question without unnecessary information. It will help you in a fuckton of other areas in life.
>Where does military science go without gunpowder?
We go exactly where it went: Air pressure.
Its not like there was a bloody 200 year period where it looked like pressurized air rifles was going to be THE FUCKING OF THE CENTURY.
Its literally just a pressure tube used to fire metal pellets.
how is this any different than some fuck having a match? And even when you consider range, it isn't like the gunpowder is going to be held in tissue paper bags, and a match is going to have to do a little work to say spark a powder horn.
Especially the powder horn of someone who is probably moving, or really far away from you. Also taking into account that they're trying to shoot you.
Ain't going to do shit to cased ammo, which would probably actually spark that's development.
>getting this mad
Lmao dude
>Natural Gas is the IRL source for helium.
Whuh?
>Most terrestrial helium present today is created by the natural radioactive decay of heavy radioactive elements (thorium and uranium, although there are other examples), as the alpha particles emitted by such decays consist of helium-4 nuclei. This radiogenic helium is trapped with natural gas in concentrations up to 7% by volume, from which it is extracted commercially by a low-temperature separation process called fractional distillation. Previously, terrestrial helium was thought to be a non-renewable resource because once released into the atmosphere, it readily escapes into space.[5][6][7] However, recent studies suggest that helium is produced deep in the earth by radioactive decay, and that large untapped reserves may exist under the Rocky Mountains in North America and in natural gas reserves.[8][9] Geologists/Researchers of Durham and Oxford universities found large quantities of helium within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley. [10]
Looked it up, at least on the srd we're talking a match with a range of 10 ft, vs an old medieval handgonne with a range of 20-25 paces (that would be the range you could probably hit a man sized target, which translates to something like 80-125 ft depending on the definition of paces that was being used).
Hell if anything the wizard is probably firing the guns, think of all the time, effort and easily failure prone complexity you could avoid if the person holding the gun was also the firing mechanism.
This t b h
Why bother with gunpowder or spells when you can just make a metal pipe with a magical air pressure device to use as a rifle
Air magic would also be used for artillery if course, it's the same thing only bigger
Not to mention of course slamming two pieces of magically enriched uranium together.
Steam power will inevitably be invented by any civilization that can boil water. And why would they? For one, wizards and sorcerers are not going to stand around wasting their valuable talents on menial labor. For another, despite teleportation being a thing, there are still no ways for a magic-using civilization to move large, heavy loads. Trade and construction would benefit immensely.
>teleportation
How long would it take to develop a spell that just teleported the effects of another spell?
Like teleporting the blast of a fireball into an enemy city. A couple of thousand times.
It depends on how magic interacts with magic in the setting.
Most methods for counterspelling or dispelling magic are explained as identifying the spell, then "doing the opposite" to cancel it out. If there's no way for magic to affect magic beyond that, it wouldn't be possible.
This is actually the case in a series of books. Saga of Recluce, pretty good stuff. Even the weakest chaos mage can set off the local equivalent of gunpowder at range, so while rifles and cannons have been invented they are used only rarely. I think there are instances of them being used in the books. Rifles are actually better than cannons because they require less powder, and a mage would have to concentrate on each individual powder horn for smaller effect. Getting to the main powder storage before the battle works pretty well though.
Order mages, on the other hand, can make metals that fuck with chaos mage abilities, and thus are able to have a nation with fully functional ironclad steamships that happen to be invisible.
>his setting has wizards
*closes thread*
...
>his setting has psions
*closes close*
I love how they tried to balance everything around having the dragonmark houses.
Yeah, we have all this cool shit that could blast normal airships out of the sky.
Too bad you need a 9-12th level character to be able to use these cool things, that are shackled by prestige classes or feat/race combos. We also tell the gm that these levels are uncommon in the continent they are used on, making some fuck piloting a elemental vessel at the level or above the monarchy of almost all nations and most pcs in games focused around there.
Strike! made it fucking worse, 4e just upped everyone's level and gurps is a fucking mess.
>his setting has allows one to play something besides a white male fighter
*closes pleb *
>his setting has races
>his setting has genders
>his setting has classes
*closes bourgeoisie*
So in a world where a torch can light a candle, the military applications of combustibles are limited. The side which attempts to use it risks total annihilation the minute the enemy peasants find their supply.
So, what kind of technology /does/ develop in the Late Medieval and Renaissance, then? Where does military science go without gunpowder? What about transport? How tamper-proof can you make a steam boiler?
I mean... how is a lv1 wizard using a cantrip any different from a private using a wood match? It's tiny, concealable, and a good one can light under nearly any conditions short of totaly underwater. Yet highly flammable munitions have been used since the Turks figured out how to jam a chinese firework into a tube and aim it.
Because a match or torch doesn't just /happen/. The guy has to get all up in your gun-toting grill with his fire, presumably running, not easy to do with a lit match. A wizard can do it from afar, without you even knowing he is there.
...
you
I like you
>compressed air isn't super fucking flammable
Also, those require some pretty sophisticated metallurgy.
Because a match or torch doesn't just /happen/. The guy has to get all up in your gun-toting grill with his fire, presumably running, not easy to do with a lit match. A fire arrow can do it from afar, without you even knowing he is there.
Precedent!
>Magical Training {Regional]
>You come from a land where cantrips are taught to all who have the aptitude to learn magic
>Every crafter and artisan, it seems, knows a minor spell or two.
>Prerequisite:
>Int 10 or Cha 10, elf (Evereska or Evermeet) or human (Halruaa or Nimbral).
>Benefit:
>You can cast three 0-level arcane spells per day as either a sorcerer or wizard (your choice, so long as you have a score of at least 10 in the ability that controls the spellcasting for that class). You must make this decision when you first take the feat.
>Thereafter, you have an arcane spell failure chance if you wear armor and are treated as a sorcerer or wizard of your arcane spellcaster level (minimum 1st) for the purpose of determining level-based variables of the spells you cast.
>If you choose to cast spells as a sorcerer, the DC for saves against your spells is 10 + your Cha modifier. You know two 0-level spells of your choice from the sorcerer/wizard list.
>If you choose to cast spells as a wizard, the DC for saves against your spells is 10 + your Int modifier. You have a spellbook with three 0-level spells of your choice from the sorcerer/wizard list. You prepare your spells exactly as a wizard does.
>Special:
>If you already have levels in sorcerer or wizard, increase the number of 0-level spells you can cast per day by three.
>You may select this feat only as a 1st-level character.
>You may have only one regional feat.
Sure it would. For example, I remember having seen an official D&D module that had a (cursed) ring that would fireball the wearer when teleporting. If you can create something like that, you could probably create a sphere of metal that would cast a fireball centered on itself upon teleport.
My point is, you don't have to affect magic itself. If you can put magic into something else and affect that, it would work just as well.
And if so, teleportation (and spells that prevent it) would be central to the arms race.
>not going to happen again
Bullshit. People will just use countermeasures, like water soaked gunpowder and magical dessicant in a funnel.
You can't dessicant the lot of it in an instany, but can do so with about 5 minutes of work close up
Fucking easy problem to solve.
>With the advent of the printing press this becomes almost impossible.
>pissed off ex-guild wizards publishing backalley zines full of illegal spells and political rants about the corrupt/stuffy/elitist Guild
Compressed air isn't flammable. Why do you think firefighters take air into fires instead of oxygen?
>critiquing dialogue technique
>via getting mad
>Bolshevik wizards hatching up a plan to overthrow the government, redistribute the means of production
Just like your link says, all commercially available helium is extracted from natural gas fields. What's so hard to understand?
>Strike! made it fucking worse
Literally what does Strike have to do with this
The bigger problem is how magic improves guns. True Strike basically makes any first level mage a sniper. Protection from Arrows is effectively kevlar. Flame Arrow when applied to ships would be Death in the age of sail.
It comes from gas fields as it is readily accessed due to natural gas harvesting. It does not come from natural gas or the biological process that creates natural gas.
The natural gas itself isn't necessary if you are just going for helium.
So you're talking about teleporting magic bombs? That could work.
Some kind of high-powered artifact that's set to split the thaum or something on impact.
To be fair, matches weren't invented until the 1800's.
But a rudimentary lighter could have been gained from a 16th century pistol (or just the pistol itself), so your point still stands.
The introduction of prestidigitation would lead to exactly zero differences between realistic and fantastical combustible use, assuming similar occurrence rates between an army wizard and an early pistol, and an infiltrator with a torch.
Stop shilling Strike!
Why does Veeky Forums keep shilling Strike!?
Theoretically, you could prestidigitation as an alternative to matchlock or flintlock igniters. This would make guns more reliable and faster to load since you don't need to worry about priming the pan.
You could also do things like casing True Strike on sharpshooters. It's actually plausible that magic would make guns even more fearsome rather than rending them useless.
>magically-augmented firearms
This is the best kind of magitech.
Strike! had a lot of stuff tied to Eberron and a lot of places have the two conjoined at the hip.