How do you make a setting where Magic and Technology are at odds with one another?

Magic exhibits semi-electromagnetic qualities, thereby fucking technology over.

Meme magic crashing planes in Les Bains?

/thread

Shadowrun does a pretty good job in it. Cyberware cost essence, basically a number how human you still are, and you need essence in order to cast spells.
Magicians are fucked the moment the become known and don't have any kind of big corp behind them. On the other hand if you look like fucking robocop, everyone around you will develop a twitchy triggerfinger.

Shadowrun does it kind of weird, as you can still intact with technology using magic. And don't even get me started on technomancers.

yup, that'd do it

We run 3rd Edition. I always forget that they changed quite a bit on that regard.

But nothing stops the mage from stepping out in full body armour, wielding an assault rifle with underbarrel grenade launcher, or driving a tank.

I thought of this a while back. My idea was mixing magic and tech was banned by the government because the last Great War ruined most of the landscape with maginukes and shit like that. It's just too powerful.

There is a secret police group for each specifically to hunt down people that would mix them. The two compete for funding. Which keeps them on their A-game.

The only issue I have is how undefined "technology" is. Like, is a stainless stain pan technology? Is a shovel? Would you get gestapo'd if you enchanted your bathtub?

You cap the tech allowes into magic, and then have a mage council that decides if they think it's proper to bring in a new idea.

*Cap the year a tech was invented, which can be used for magic.

I'd say you put some industrial interest into it as well, so anything that take fuels is straight out banned largely by aggressive lobbying from the electric and oil industry.

Magic is naturally emanated by some rare material that is extremely valuable to produce the chips, transistors or whatever the people on the technology side use?

This.

Where do we draw the line, when it comes to much technology for the mage?

Your example is like giving a mage a crossbow in a fantasy setting. In my opinion we should draw the line at the really high tech toys, the kind of stuff that comes with a cost. And we're not talking about money here.

That would just encourage me to mix them more. "This is electrically conductive AND magically conductive? Fuck yeah! I'm gonna make a computer with more RAM than disk space!"
Even if turning it into a machine part makes the magical properties inert, I'd just dedicate all my free time to finding a way to make it work for both.

By having a poor understanding of the word "technology" if we go by published works.

You know everything that isn't a natural object performing tasks as designed without human influence is technology, yeah? Clothes are technology. A rock placed somewhere else by man for a specific purpose is technology.

fpbp

For extra points, include (((gnomish))) anti-Semitism.

>Even if turning it into a machine part makes the magical properties inert, I'd just dedicate all my free time to finding a way to make it work for both.
That's what they did during the wars, but the parts run too hot, friction fires are unavoidable and they self-destruct violently, unless cooled, lubricated and fed with fresh human blood.

As a player magitech being insanely powerful would make me want it MORE, regardless of the government. What if magic and tech use vastly different principles and mixing them makes it blow up in your face unconteollably.

Silverfall

You ever played Shadowrun?

It's super easy: instead magic powers necessarily manifesting themselves as "I can unravel the very fabric of reality at will" as the baseline power-level and expectation, make that shit actually hard to achieve.

If the most advanced magic is "I can heal people/throw a fireball/create electricity from my hands" for that majority of users, then it pretty much falls in line the level of technology we have now.

As far as setting it at odds, let just pretend for a minute like you'd have to do anything other than have both magic and technology exist simultaneously for people to find reasons to irrationally choose and fight for one or the other. Religion, money, authority, control, perceived slights and personal damages--literally pick any fucking socio-economic difficulty and a side and the reasons invent themfuckingselves.

"Fuck magicians and wizards and warlocks and their whole lot! My wife was killed in a car accident by a magic user, so they are all horrible!"

"If we all just knew magic, the world's population wouldn't be wage slaves! We wouldn't have people dying from preventable diseases because of money!"

"It's be really easy for me to make a living farming, but some goddamned thaumaturge rolls through and one week my crops are destroyed from a mystical blight and the next week they aren't worth anything because of conjured goods!"

"What do you mean I can't conjure homonculi? I have a god given right to create and control humonoid magical vessels? How is it any different than you getting artificially inseminated to have a child from a sperm donor?"

You'd have to actually be a brainless idiot to make this difficult.

Make it a theme, not the narrative.
>in this area you meet these kinds of enemies
Don't tell them beforehand. Don't have a completely free caracter creation.

You could also introduce a type of drawback; mana interferes with tech and tech interferes with mana.

What if look at magic from a shamanistic point of view? In order to use magic, you have to live in harmony with the gods, nature and spirits. And these see technology as a threat against them because it's not natural. So in order to become the best possible shaman, you need to disconnect yourself complete from technology and if you go the technology route you lose all the shiny magic. You could try to balance both out, but this way you're staying mediocre at everything.

1930s Fantasy America Equivalent

Mages are essentially akin to the Aristocracy in Victorian England, in the sense that they find their lifestyle and order slowly dying out.

Casting fireballs certainly isn't as charming now that you can fire a pistol faster than you can chant an incantation.

Mages are rare and costly, coal and diesel provide much better sources of fuel than simply hiring a mage to, for example, cast a levitation spell (which would also require expensive regents) to make a Zeppelin fly.

Enchantment? Can be useful, but also incredibly frustrating and expensive since the only way to "enchant" a firearm is to carve sigils and use a bit of magic on each individual bullet, most simply don't carry any form of magic.

Using magic to communicate over great differences? Started to die out with the advent of the telegram.

Magic to make farmland more fertile? Still used, but generally poorer farmers rely on simple fertilizer.

Mages as a whole slowly feel themselves becoming obsolete, with Mage guilds across the world struggling to pay their bills and funding themselves primarily through essentially party tricks at best to entertain the rich and famous. They're looked down upon heavily by (extreme left) Labor Unions because of the "Evil oppressive wizard" stereotype, while the Nouveau Rich and Middle Class see them mostly as a quaint relic of the past. Philosophers smugly discuss the end of the "Tyranny of Magic Users" without a single shot being fired, while their "clients" basically see them as mostly overpriced alternatives to useful technology.

There's no war, no shots being fired, simply Mages grimly realizing their way of life may be going extinct.

Magic is a living force that interacts with the mortal world and propagates itself through use, and technology is the cage it is constantly fleeing.

Magic can't survive without a presence in the world. It wants, NEEDS to be used. So it offers part of itself to mortals and entwines itself with the world and creatures it can, making its anchor into the world more secure and making itself able to grow more powerful and absolute.

But our world is one of order and rules. Magic is whimsical and undefined by nature, but it has to settle itself into 'rules of magic' to interact with our world. Chaos filtered into order.

But this makes magic vulnerable. The more rules magic follows, easier it is to codify and understand those rules. You better you understand magic, the more you can control magic. If your understanding of magic was ever comprehensive, your control over magic would be absolute. The very force of magic itself would be your slave and plaything.

Magic doesn't want to be controlled, so it has to constantly change its nature and tactics and rules as best it can, such that a small number of wizards and magical creatures can propagate it in our world, but it is still rare and inconsistent enough that it is hard to codify and follow its patterns. At the same time, it pushes those that use it to attack those that use technology. Science is inherently about expanding understanding of the world and learning to reproduce and control it. It is everything Magic fears. If the magic users kill off the science users, magic promises that they can be allowed to use even greater and more powerful magic, as the risk of doing so will be less.

Technology users, for their part, see magic as nothing more but another force to be studied and controlled. If magic could ever be tamed, the results would be incredible. Everything would be possible. Solving Magic is the key to understanding everything else.

Magic requires it's user to channel extra-dimensional energies through their bodies, said energies tend to leave behind a kind of fallout that warps the fabric of the universe, warping the laws of physics (which is why technology tends to break and/or work differently in places where there is a strong magical presence.) the tech faction sees magic use as a crime against nature and persecutes mages as criminals.

Class warfare. Magic has been a closely guarded secret for generations, and only the elite have regular access to it, quickly bringing natural adepts into the fold from the lower class.
Technology, however, is now widespread after a nano-bot infection occurred and spread virulently. it does not affect those that have magic in their veins. most people only have a basic level of nano-bots in their systems, however, certain people (computer geeks and the like) have discovered that, under somewhat controlled conditions including taking more nano-material into your system (usually by ripping it out of someone else), you can adapt actual machines into your body, including forcefield generators, power cells, laser rifles and the like. Most people view this as being a terrible practice so it is equally uncommon as the magic practitioners.
now, magic users have long practiced the arts and are extremely adept with it. most, however, know little of combat techniques.
in all, probably less than 1 in 5k can use either magic or technology, even fewer can use it accordingly for rpg purposes.

Why would players want to create mage PCs in this setting? It's the meme of mages being gods in dnd but in reverse.

>Magic and Technology are at odds with one another?
Sounds like the Amethyst setting, to me...

My guess, same reason why they'd make a monk over a fighter - a caster would never be unarmed.

>How to avoid magitek
This is probably shit and/or overdone already, but:

The moment you enchant (or let magic spend too much time too close to) anything more complex than a wristwatch it gains sentience. Even the lightest enchant will do it if left unchecked for too long. The cutoff is generally the presence of electricity or chemical reactions.

Magitek sentience is a cold, otherworldly, twisted kind of sentience akin to (and, in fact, just as unnatural as) the undead's. The results are pretty unpredictable, especially when AI gets involved. And trust me, you don't want AI to get involved. But it usually results in the machine shutting down, breaking or going berserk. If it can't tear itself apart (and god does it want to), it often seeks the death of whoever was responsible with their abomination of an existence.

For this reason, people who've tried to enchant their guns because it "can't possibly be that bad", and people who've tried to weaponize this effect by enchanting enemy technology, rarely live to tell the tale. Their pathetically spectacular deaths (and the side casualties) have led to the whole practice being banned pretty much anywhere civilized.

>a caster would never be unarmed
If magic requires trinkets or not not even that may be an excuse.

You definitely aren't going to be treated as a god, but the one thing mages have going for them individually is *adaptability*.

Do you require regents? Yes. But out of all the characters you have the most uses assuming you use your head.

The thing is that society as a whole has made mages a lot poorer, things like that are not going to change. A mage can still be just as deadly as they were ages ago, but they are not as vital to civilized society as they may have once been.

You can't cast as fast as someone can fire a bullet, but you can bet a fireball to the chest is likely much more deadly than a bullet. Powerful archmages can even act as human artillery.

The problem comes in that the various other functions mages were useful for? Yeah, they aren't as necessary for them anymore. Society has gradually been weaned off magic that mages are earnestly having some trouble figuring out just what the hell they are supposed to do.

Let me put it like this: a guy with an assault rifle and body armor is par of the course for a war. A guy with an assault rifle and body armor in a *gang* however, can be a real game changer. Mages could generally find themselves more involved with criminal syndicates.

Imagine if, in edition to some heavy equipment, street gangs had a guy that could summon magical constructs made of concrete. Sure the military could take those things down, but a street gang armored with civilian weapons generally? They'd be fucked. Imagine if a gang had access to a guy that could cause an explosion as large as an artillery strike? You've got artillery that's *extremely* mobile and that you're capable of *hiding*.

Mages would likely have to learn some skills from Rogues, to keep their heads down and focus heavily on cunning, but when they play their game smart they aren't on "equal" terms by any means with a guy who only has a gun.

It's basically what separates Batman from a common street brawler.

Magic actively corrodes the laws of reality, and supplants them with a new reality where reality as we know it no longer exists. Technology actively reinforces the laws of reality, making it more difficult to use future instances of magic.

Magitech isn't a thing sane people use - the magic breaks down the tech, and the tech breaks down the magic. In the few instances where it does work, it's either based on alien laws of physics and therefore serves to decay reality like its magic, or it's extremely short-lived and as dangerous for its user as its target.

Do what Angels and Demons does.

You have the !Illuminati versus the !Catholic Church in regards to the overall view of magic being a matter of the Divine versus something that can be understood through scientific reasoning.

Fast-forward a few centuries when the Church isn't actively trying to shutdown scientific research into magic and trying to mend some ties until remnets of the science cults arise to exact their revenge.

Runescape solved this problem decades ago. Equipping melee or range armour decreases magic accuracy.

t. Veeky Forums

that just creates a lot of rapid switching between armors and weapons. Thanks though

go read SAGA

That was already in Arcanum.

Unless that's what you mean.