Feudal society

>Feudal society
>Replace knights with wizards

What changes?

High school history classes suddenly becomes much more interesting

"Knight" Tradition gets so much more rare, since the destructive capacities of one can level everything in a x^y radius around them.

Also, knights were unconnected to feudalism as a system. Feudalism means that one pyramid you always saw in high school.

Wars become a lot flashier and less like a tin-can big-band.

General lack of knowledge of right and wrong in the lower aristocracy.

Also Michel Bay makes history films now.

Try something like tevinter.
>Mainly slaves.
>Slave owners are mages.
>All slave owners practice magic.
>Mainly corrupt but a common hatred of other non-magical people causes their drive for war.

A young preacher named Abel Christ has his congregation destroyed...

...What kind of magic do they have? That changes things a lot or a little.

Due to magic taking a lifetime to study and being a dangerous occupation, the nobility is pretty tightly focused on everything going to the wizards and the wizards maintaining control over holdings and being the strong arm of the country.

Only the most wealthy and devoted magicians can actually fight for king and country as a wizard. A country will produce two to three truly capable wizards in a generation. As such, wars are fought not with masses of conscripted peasantry or mercenaries, armies only act a bastion against physical invasion, the real battles are fought over crystal ball and scrying pool, hexes are planted and curses flown between the towers of a nation's rival wizards. Wars between two country's wizards are silent and horrifying affairs, where each belligerent's forces convene - that means the nobility's children who are studying magical arts who form a War Council, and woe betide the nation with sickly offspring, or none at all. From there they combine their magical knowledge and power to try and cripple the enemy nation any way possible, and collateral damage, if the war gets bad, can be devastating. Holds can be abandoned, left destitute, home only raving madmen and demons. When the war reaches its final stages, this is often when actual soldiers are sent out under the watchful protection of the nation's magicians, to occupy the enemy territory.

Outside of the terrible wizard wars, the people are expected to comply with the demands of the magic nobility however they may be desired, and it is the peasantry's duty to provide. Be it as experimental subjects, conduits, secret sacrifices or simple labourers to collect or manage magical materials and ingredients, the peasantry must obey. If a peasant somehow shows capability for magic, it's up to the temperament of the ruling wizards of the day - some might take them in as students, a great honour, or string them up in dungeons as traitors for daring to rise unnaturally above their mundane stations.

Centuries later games tend to suffer from martial dominance, because everyone knows what magic can and can't do, or thinks they do.
But fighters? Sky's the limit.

Every village has its own guardian wizard. Only one though, because it imposes a hefty tax burden to support one wizard with his tower, apprentices, library and the use of specialised suppliers like alchemists and apothecaries.

Most wizards aren't lucky enough to be granted such a living from the crown so they become mages-errant and wander the country offering their services for hire wherever there's war or trouble. Without a proper library or rare reagents these hedge wizards' powers are strictly limited, so most dream of making one big score and defeating a recreant magister so they can plunder their manse, or distinguishing themselves on the battlefield so some lord will take them into his court.

So I guess not much changes, except there's more work for scribes and less for armourers.

>Aristocrats
>Having a sense of right and wrong

Knights were second from the bottom, between peasants and nobles.
At least in the UK circa 1066 onwards.

The power structure would be somewhat more unstable, considering magic is a talent and with wizard you can suddenly have your underling being stronger than you, whereas with knights it was mostly about resources (land, money for horses and equipment, manpower).
Also, the most a knight could do is burn some villages and shit, if it's the kind of wizard who can cause earthquakes and natural disasters history in that universe should be pretty fun

>That one pyramid

I don't imagine it'd stay feudal for long. The wizards would be significantly more dangerous than a knight and it'd upset the balance of the feudal system.

A knight still has to fear a peasant revolt if he takes too many liberties, purely because he can only fight off so many other opponents at a time, despite his armour and training. A wizard can just sit in his tower and launch magical artillery at the revolting proles.

Wizards could basically lord it over non-wizards and treat them like a chattel slave class.

>Knights
>Actually protecting peasants

lewl

I say this as a staunch Republican who believes the French Revolution was a good thing: the Feudal system had a time and a place where it was the best viable system, and knights actually generally did their job of keeping the land safe from bandits and outside threats.

The big problems didn't arise because literally every single individual knight was an asshole who raped peasants for shits and giggles, but because wealthy commoners started replacing knights and the noblesse d'épée (the nobility that had a privileged status as warriors due to being the only ones able to afford arms and armor) transformed into a noblesse de robe (glorified civil servants who did nothing to deserve the privileges they inherited).

If knights didn't do what they were expected to do, the entire system would've collapsed much earlier.

>The wizards would be significantly more dangerous than a knight and it'd upset the balance of the feudal system.
Not unless the belief that nobles are inherrently superior (see Gobineau for the most radical example) is actually true and generally speaking higher ranked nobles are more powerful (and kings take great pride in being direct descendants from dragons, fae, demons or other non-human beings with incredible magic potential). In such a case the king would be the king by virtue of being (one of the) strongest mages around, and the 'knights' would be wizards who are strong enough to destroy entire brigades of normies but would still have to fear counts and dukes.

Peasants who happen to be born with great magic potential would probably either be adopted by a noble family or killed outright as to not disturb the existing balance.

You make a good point there. I've actually been reading up on France pre-Revolution, and it wasn't great. Economically they were only good in the early portion of the 17th century due to frugality, not modernization, and as soon as the bishop in charge died spending went out of control again; the king didn't really care about the kingdom and mostly left things up to squabbling advisers; France made poor decisions abroad, such as in the War of Austrian Succession, or tethering itself to an unprofitable alliance with Spain, whose ruler only cared about her children.

But probably the most damning thing in the long-term was that the peasants were being taxed fairly heavily. The clergy mostly got out of taxes, and the nobility in theory had to pay roughly equal taxes as the peasants, but they got to avoid most of it, and many times tax collectors undercharged them for what they still had to owe. For the most part the peasantry were okay with this as long as the king (and therefore the country) was strong, and Louis XV was an able but apathetic ruler. Even if Louis XVI had been a good one, he'd inherited a lot of problems XV had never cared to fix.

It's still pretty interesting how France survived in a quasi-feudal state for so long, after many other power states in Europe had shifted into a more early modern system. It shows how the system is viable with a strong ruler and stable economy. But it really did work best in the Middle Ages.

Sounds a lot like master of magic

You're right there, though Louis XIV's biggest strength was the masterful ability with which he managed to utterly sideline the nobility (often to the benefit of the bourgeois). One or two more rulers like him and France might've actually managed to modernize without a revolution. Sort of. His biggest flaw was probably outliving every successor he had groomed.

>Louis XV was [...] able
That's the first time I've heard that.

Shit chart of feudal society, its missing the clergy and artisans which would be there own separate classes.

I will readily admit that I'm not sure how trustworthy my book is; it's almost a century old now.

But it made the argument that Louis XV showed moments of real intelligence and even strength of will and other useful traits. He just never devoted those towards actually running his kingdom properly; at best it was towards matters of the Bourbon dynasty. He tried to follow in Louis XIV's footsteps by making himself the sole ruler without advisers, but it was a hollow gesture from a man with no interest in the burdens of state and politics. All he really did was hunt and let mistresses and advisers really make decisions, and obviously not all these decisions really worked to benefit France.

Never heard of that, had to google it. Seems like it might be fun, actually.

I just like the idea of magicians not being laser blasting superheroes, that's what most magic these days seems to me. Just superpowers, rather than a mortal attaining a station above mundanity through study, practice and danger, ending up with vast and unseen powers stretching through astral realms instead of just casting a really big fireball at a group of dudes, although fireballs are also fun. I like mystical magic rather than purely practical magic.

If you had that kind of magic being used, potent but not flashy, a practice that takes lifelojg dedication, I feel you'd be less likely to have a magocracy, since you can't be ruling, you need to be studying. Also divine right with monarchs and stuff, but the wizards probably know that isn't real.

Reality.

War becomes vastly more destructive and quickly loses it's appeal.

Aye, but most merchants wouldn't have been part of the pyramid, especially if they lived in a chartered city. They'd sorta be a C-shaped thing going to monarchs.
It's almost as if real history is too complicated to represent in a simple graph

Just like dynamite or the gatling gun, or nukes...

Wizardy instead of knighthood would probably mean - unless a culture has rules that basically say only men, or only women, can use magic - that wizardhood would be more egalitarian. Wizards also would be able to actively serve for longer than knights.

Martial prowess would likely be seen as a job left to the non-nobles, but there would be more professional groups of infantry, rather than a focus on cavalry that formed around knights. So an equivalent to huscarls would last longer, or professional infantry from the 15th century would happen more quickly.

Not in any good rpg system, the wizard can't do that without being offed by a 100 peasants archers.

>Death count is several orders of magnitude higher than previous
>The deaths themselves are varied, puzzling and hilarious

Bad idea. Wizards are the worst!

unless the wizards have the ability to cast magic without incantations, combat gets -slowed- the hell down.