What are the potential applications for the printing press in fantasy settings set in the renaissance?

What are the potential applications for the printing press in fantasy settings set in the renaissance?

>print shop produces cheap books and distributes them widely
>they all contain a disguised extra page that includes a magical glyph
>individually harmless, but they can all be simultaneously triggered to cast an enormous spell across a vast region

Irresponsibly printed grimoires and spellbooks full of typos. Fun for all.

Typesetters.

No sense of right and wrong.

Religions and Magic Schools begin to split up into reformation and counter-reformations movements.

Spellbooks cheaply/widely dispersed.

Now every pumpkin farming peasant has magic, and everyone has TOO MUCH FREE TIME.

Now they might be thinking DANGEROUS IDEAs and want SOCIAL REFORMS.

Bloody peasants.

War Reporting.

Traditionally, The winners of a war would come home and tell how it went. I.E. They beat the savage other people, with honor and grace.

Enter the printing press. Reporters tag along with the warbands, and instead of one bard trying to tell the truth about how both sides were savage and brutal, now you get that story printed, and it's seen in every city on both sides of the conflict.

The public eye turns to national policy in a manner such that it's not entirely up to the government. Enter the Fourth Estate.

Low-level mages have to learn their trade by working in printing press.

Sharp increase in literacy among the craftmen and middle classes.

Op, don't be silly.

Printing presses make knowledge and culture more widely available and standardized across a region. They will do this in any setting

If magic can be transmitted by spellbooks or scrolls, it should be able to make magic more widely available and standardized too, barring exceptions such as spellbooks requiring a human hand.

Honestly, what else do you expect?

Everything that happened in real life but through a fantasy lens I guess. Holy rites and Mystical knowledge can be sold on mass the same way scientific was. If someone starts pringing translated versions of ancient forbidden tomes then knowledge previously only accessible to those who spoke dead tongues is available freely (god damn necronomicons everywhere.) It'll be crude at first but it's basically the start of setting where magic is going to become sufficiently advanced that it becomes indistinguishable from science.

ALTERNATIVLEY if this is a setting where words have literal power the printing press is a very real weapon in the wrong hands. Imagine handing out leaflets with exploding runes on them.

Cheaply printed "magical instruction manuals" of varying levels of fraudulence and danger can be bought alongside penny dreadful style accounts of action and adventure in the streets.

Forgot my damned image.

>get a gift card for your birthday
>wish you were ALL OVER THE PLACE
>card explodes

Taking things to an extreme, what if printed spells in the form of paper talismans and charms became the preferred means of performing magic due to how quickly and easily they can be made and used by the masses?

There's also cultural subversion..

Oh, the dominant religion is here? Well, I have a translated copy of their holy book. I tell people it's 100% accurate, but it's actually 98% accurate. I've altered some key details that bend historical fact to my favor and that implies certain details about some certain dogmatic "facts".

Bam. Now you have a new dominant religion. Congrats on being on the ground floor of the new up and coming Big Thing.

Doubly as good when even the clergy of the first religion are buying your book, because they don't have one of their own.

In response to everyone saying spell scrolls or spell books could be widely produced, there is this from the Pathfinder Inner Sea World Guide:

"Game Impact: A printing press allows for the mass production of written material. While this does not allow for the swift production of magical items like scrolls, nor does it speed the process of creating spellbooks, it does allow for a different feel for player handouts or the rapid dissemination of information. A printing press has no actual game effect in play from a rules standpoint, but its
existence can fuel countless adventure plots."

Pathfinder, mind you, but it makes sense that arcane writings cannot be effectively reproduced with a printing press.

What about an enchanted printing press?

Exactly.

>Printing press built from mystical wood and enchanted
>Moveable type crafted from sorcerous stones and metals.
>Paper and ink are likewise magical and are akin to reagents.
>Rituals and rites need to be performed during the printing

Does it? I mean, aside from game balance reasons, which are whatever, what's different about producing a magical text with a printing press rather than a pen? IRL, ultra-orthodox Jews require that a printed tetragrammaton be treated the same way as a written one, so at least some kinds of magic are inherent to the words themselves. Whatever special procedures are required to write spellbooks should be adaptable to printing them.

More than likely. I don't imagine joe bob farmer is going to suddenly become a 5th level wizard just because spellbooks are being churned out by the dozen. He'd still need someone to teach him how to do it if he didn't have the drive or desire to do it himself.

The products would be slightly cheaper but still more expensive then what the regular joe could normally afford no doubt from the cost of making the inks and special typesets used.

depends on how much the ink costs and the type blocks last for

The power and complexity of the spell may be what dictates the quality and rarity of the materials needed to make the press, type, paper and ink.

>A simple spell to increase the size of a farmer's vegetables might only require a relatively simple woodblock print on a ready scrap of paper in commonly available magic ink.

>A complete grimoire, standard issue at the capital's mage college, requires dozens of sorcerous inks, several types of paper and moveable type in several magical materials.

Nice idea

or the warbands beat the shit out of all reporters and gets the church to accuse them of heresy, as they should, fuck journalists

As much bait as it may sound, etched porn pictures of elven maids will happen, unless you don't have human-like humans in your setting. Kama-Sutras depicting each and every race are possible, and worse, lucrative.

Also, people will buy "wonder booklets". They will be small, perhaps one page each, showing things that amaze. Monsters, foreign nations, all those things that appear in the setting's Guide but the average peasant only heard of at most. Those will get a lot of things wrong by mistake or to spice it up.

Printers may supplant bards in the rumour department.

The gods might order their clerics to perform book burning as to destroy written lies about themselves, erase not! necronomicons and cursed grimories. That doesn't have to be exclusive of monotheistic religions.

And the bard PC may or may not like to find out someone wrote a song of his and spread it around. The same might happen to the druid and his oral traditions.

Just from seeing how mages use simply words to make magic, peasants get the idea that words have power by themselves, truth or not. People start to hang written stuff in themselves, like in Warhammer or african warriors whose name I don't remember.

Settings such as Full Metal Alchemist might have issues. Perhaps that was the reason that nation was so autoritary in the first place, to prevent widespread alchemical shenanigans.

>A group of elven rangers shows up to punish you for your desecration of the World Tree.
>A group of dwarven berserkers shows up to punish you for your destruction of the Dwarf King's Crown.
>A group of arch mages shows up to punish you for your spreading their mystical secrets.
>A group of inquisitors shows up to punish you for your conducting of heretical ceremonies.

>All at the same time.

The printing press raised indirectly IQ and a significant step forward in technology. If it appeared in a fantasy, magic heavy world, I like it would herald a move away from magic and more to technology to overcome problems.

That or a civil war, tech vs magic. Fucking love that shit.

A move away from magic or the breaking of the good ole boys club associated with it?

Obviously it depends upon how magic works in setting but the various cabals of wizards could make bank by controlling how knowledge of their abilities is distributed and offer to teach it at a premium. This would be my answer as to why the king isn't a wizard because the wizards are to busy running their reagent/printing business and getting people to pay to come to their schools.

>wizards are to busy running their reagent/printing business and getting people to pay to come to their schools.

Nooo, the Wizards are losing their monopoly on scrolls and magical written works. Now it can be stamped out and given to a cheap hedge wizard to impart a magical spark upon.

Knights have tempered shields against flame, reflective mirror surfaces to deflect magic missiles, grounding cables running down from the shield, down their arm and body to their boots to dissipate lightening attacks.

The wizards are scared, reckless and worried their power is fading.

Books.

Books with explosive runes.

Books with explosive runes on every page.

Books with explosive runes on every page fired by catapult.

>Knights have tempered shields against flame, reflective mirror surfaces to deflect magic missiles, grounding cables running down from the shield, down their arm and body to their boots to dissipate lightening attacks.

Disregarding everything else why is this never a thing? I realize people just want ye olden fantasy but seriously I would think people would find ways to counter at least monsters who can do shit like spit fire and lightning at you and that sounds perfect and in line with some ideas that I've had for more tame magic.

>Magical realms undergoing the early stages of an industrial revolution
>Alchemist boom making potions cheap and accessible to the common class
>A Middle class forms of people who have some but not great magical talent
>Prestidigitation on foodstuffs makes cross-ocean travel possible, and new worlds are discovered
>Everybody wears fluffy collars that get progressively bigger until you reach the queen who's head looks like an ant on a dinner plate

I want to play this setting.

>>A Middle class forms of people who have some but not great magical talent

This would be a fascinating premise to work on. The transition from the old world into the new world where there is actually a middle between the nobility and everyone else beneath them in terms of wealth (or even nobility becoming the middle class as the barriers between them widens)