Scientific advancement in a fantasy setting

There seems to be a mild interest in the idea of "modern fantasy" so I'm curious about the idea of scientific development in a world where magic is very much a thing.

What does that version of an industrial revolution look like? Is automation already a thing because golems are already a thing and someone finally puts 2 and 2 together?

Regardless, I imagine any sort of industrialization would be in support of the magic users procuring and creating the necessary components that let them do magic but also being heavily controlled by them as well

If magic is predictable in its causes and effects, it will be incorporated into the body of knowledge of another force of nature like electricity or gravity and used for all manner of practical applications to the extent it can be done so.

The result will be 'magitech', or perhaps 'super science' but the exact type depends on the type of magic available and the limitations it possesses. For instance if D&D magic was ubiquitous society would quickly change in that cleaning products would become obsolete, and basic food and water would become available to everyone, and most diseases and injuries would also become trivial.

Harry Potter strangely enough.

While there are old wizards or witches who are considered great and revered for it, especially Merlin, magic as a whole is seen to advance with new spells or potions being created.

For example: Dumbledore is famed for advancing the field of alchemy (12 uses for dragon blood IIRC), the Weasley twins create new spells for their joke shop and the Wolfsbane potion is a complete innovation that did not exist when Lupin was a student.


New
Discworld has it both ways. You have new wizards finding increasingly efficient and easy ways to perform what were old complicated spells like the Rite of AshkEnt and a magical supercomputer called Hex that can reality warp by breaking physics in new ways thousands of times a second and creates the "real universe" (Roundworld), but at the same time there are no Sourcerors anymore and wizards generally refrain from actually doing any magic, whereas in the old days they were all tossing city-busting megaspells everywhere.

Gate.

The old magic system is based on a poor understanding of reality, so gives poor results. The new magic system, based on a modern understanding, results in a lot more power.

>If you read between the lines you can hear the writers jacking off to their military.

And what if magic is more unpredictable, or for the most part, uncontrollable in terms of its usage, I.E. you have many people with the potential to be wizards, but very few techniques, skills, or spells can be translated between each wizard/sorcerer's own disciplines

Then you have the entire crazy ass nature of divine magic which for almost all accounts are based on the whims of a divine being.

>Gate.
>If you read between the lines you can hear the writers jacking off to their military.
Wait, you're not talking about the "JSDF" Gate are you? Because there was nothing remotely "between the lines" about the jacking off in that.

If magic is based on negotiation such as shamanism, cleric magic, or Hermetic goetia then industrial magic would take the form of expert Guilds of negotiators making long-term covenants with certain spirits instead of individual deals.

If magic is unpredictable in usage, then its industrial applications are limited.

If magic is unpredictable in who obtains it or if it acts as an Art, not a science, then individual mages will be used as keystones in larger industrial operations [for instance if a mage can produce a material on demand, an entire factory could be built around his capacity to do so].

What do you mean a handful of JSDF scouts can't take out an entire convoy of American soldiers? You tellin' me that's unrealistic or something?

>Regardless, I imagine any sort of industrialization would be in support of the magic users procuring and creating the necessary components that let them do magic but also being heavily controlled by them as well

Maybe, depending on the power of an individual wizard. But keep in mind that our world isn't ruled by scientists. If magic requires magic crystals, the wizard doesn't rule; the guy who owns the mine does. Government is still going to be done by people who specialize in governing, not conjuration.

But, depending on how rare mages are, a nation's power could depend on how happy and well-supplied they keep their handful of archmagi. A wizard dying of old age could be the equivalent of a nation's nuclear stockpile just vanishing overnight, in terms of geopolitical effects.

Yeah, the way it works in my current setting is that the local laws of physics are stuff we would consider magic. Like, the periodic table is nine elements, planar theory is an undergrad course in the university, field researchers catalog and befriend nature spirits, etc.

And of course we have to take into account that the modern world would look way, way different then what we know today if we had access to magic, why have massive industrialization, when you can simply have your local mages guild/organization simply conjure your massive strucutres, why have industrialized warfare when a guy with a stick can simply blow up the big hulking metal bricks on land and in the sea.

Even shadowrun was wise enough to have magic suddenly appear out of nowhere in the near future, too many questions to answer if there was magic and dragons and shit abound.

Amusingly, when I started watching the Gate anime I assumed it was intended as criticism of Japanese nationalism. It took me FAR too long to realise they were serious.

Would it? This question is difficult to answer because we'd all have to settle on specific definitions of what magic is and what it does and it's limitations (as well as our individual autistic desires but that can never be helped)

>Maybe, depending on the power of an individual wizard. But keep in mind that our world isn't ruled by scientists. If magic requires magic crystals, the wizard doesn't rule; the guy who owns the mine does. Government is still going to be done by people who specialize in governing, not conjuration.
>But, depending on how rare mages are, a nation's power could depend on how happy and well-supplied they keep their handful of archmagi. A wizard dying of old age could be the equivalent of a nation's nuclear stockpile just vanishing overnight, in terms of geopolitical effects.

Agreed, but then I think we focus way to much on the idea of wizards being these walking nukes instead of scientist like you describe. I've personally never liked the idea of a wizard being able to solo an army but then again this is what we get for playing DnD and other such games that promote this idea.

Magitech is generally cancer teebeeaych

What else would you call technological devices that incorporate magic into their design?

Arguably, "technology".

Technology

plural technologies
1 a :the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area :engineering 2 medical technology
b :a capability given by the practical application of knowledge a car's fuel-saving technology
2 :a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge new technologies for information storage
3 :the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor educational technology

>. For instance if D&D magic was ubiquitous society would quickly change in that cleaning products would become obsolete, and basic food and water would become available to everyone, and most diseases and injuries would also become trivial.
Assuming, of course it can get past corporate and political sabotage anyway. Lord knows the shit big Pharma would do to keep that stuff away from the masses

Well, considering D&D healing is typically associated with the Divine wouldn't that be the church capitalizing on magical healing? Then again in D&D healing can be reduced to a wand that doesn't require you to spend years reading books, knees bent in prayer and all that other jazz. Just tap your wand and it's just as good, if not better than any other form of medicine.

I facetiously called the aesthetic of an industrial magocratic empire "spiritpunk" in one of my games. Their advancements in magic had gone the way of biopunk, and all their nobles had their flesh and souls enmeshed with magical creatures and spirits of other planes to give bite to their bark. Their farms were carefully segmented druidic groves, their armies were necromantic experiments, etc. Having a familiar was a mark of status and the "muggles" lived in pretty shitty conditions as they couldn't really compete with the protected arcane knowledge of the nobility. Sorcerer kids were taken by the authorities and nobody knew what happened to them (they were mindwiped and ennobled because the soul meshing shit the nobles had been doing had proven to make them sterile pretty reliably)

That's a good argument for 'if you can standardize magic item production then there's no reason why they wouldn't eventually become mass produced'. D&D writers shit the bed when they made their game rules and never stopped to consider what effect they would have on the setting. You can't have a faux-medieval society coexisting with efficient magic, basically.

The nips are a shadow of their former selves. They went to iraq, got blown up once and withdrew all personnel. They always waste their troops in the simulations against the chinks.
Anything about jsdf being good is utter fantasy.

guild wars 2 occasionally paints a nice picture of such a setting, so does the Ivalice setting from final fantasy.

Played a setting like this except any time civilization got too advanced (say beyond steam), one of the gods would come down and smite the shit out of everything, hard resetting them back to the "dark ages" (which really pissed off the other two gods but not enough for them to get off their asses and do something about it) because primitive, uneducated mortals make better worshipers.
We ended up fighting her in the ruins of the one dead civilization that had made it to what could be called modern.

Don't forget Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms setting (available as a tabletop wargame and pen and paper RPG), it's essentially a steam punk setting, but magic is a thing, sometimes in a big way.

The human realms can generate magical energy with steam power, the Elves do that in reverse, using magic to create mechanical power.

/thread

But the weird thing about D&D is they try to have their cake and eat it to by having the specific narrative contrivence of the setting set the rules for how magic works (i.e. the Weave or the fact that arcane magic drains life and some such) but then still how does X bum fuck dirt farming village have enough of a magic walmart to let the adventurers get scrolls and wands and shit to get ready to tackle the cave full of monsters?

Big Pharma probably wouldn't have a chance to spring up, but I suppose your Generic Church of Healing Magic could take it's place.

If Big Pharma got its hands on just straight up magic healing, the first company to get that shit publicly available easily crushes the competition.

I'm a fan of the elements of the Witcher that indicate that people (mages especially) also know a lot of science. Chemistry and Biology and Ecology and such are actually not mystic mysteries.

In a world with magic, all industries would be powered by magic.

Would it? Would the farmer need a blacksmith if he knew the mending spell and could keep his tools in tip top condition or not needing to buy new ones?

How do you provide jobs for people when curative spells can effectively extend lifespans by mitgating injuries and illness that would take a lot of people out of circulation?

Are the druids going to regularly empower fields and control the weather so you always have an optimum growing season? You're going to with a booming population after all.

Why is the farmer even doing the work himself when we can make golems that do it for us?

Why are we trying to shoehorn some medievel setting with all this shit around?

Not necessarily.

A lot of the discoveries of the early 20th century were basically magic, but we still don't have a nuclear power station in every town distributing free wireless electricity from a Tesla tower.

Because it's expensive.

In half of the settings there are wizards that can send lightning bolts from their fingers

They're not going to power an industry by standing their and shooting lightning from their fingers though are they?

>man, I hate my 9-5 job, it makes me feel like a cog in the machine
wizard problems

>an entire convoy of American soldiers can't take out a handful of guys
I don't know, sounds like the entirety of U.S. military actions since 'Nam.

We're talking about japs. You just can't forget the nukes.

Implying wizards have enough slots

An idea hit me. I imagine in a modern style setting plate armor would be better suited for dealing with monsters while knights would be more like modern soldiers in the sense against each other except you'd still have a sword at your hip of course (Mad Jack Churchill mother fucker)

This thread makes me miss Ugly Americans.

Well, there's a limit to analogies. It needn't be a revolution for example, just an evolution. And thinking of such themes is already very complex in real life. Like the fact that Ming China was most suited to industrial revolution but it happened in what was a small underveloped island in comparison. There is much that is counterintuitive is what I'm trying to say.

-Are the golems as cost-effective than a bunch of slaves/peasants/freemen? Do they have the amount of power, automation and mass-production to propel industry?

-If undead last indefinitely, they could provide perpetual engines which can be instaled everywhere and work 24 hours a day, using threadwheels, winches and capstans. But they would suffer the speed limitations of human powered devices.

-Can the local ley line provide motive force? At which intensity? Torque? Can it propel a pipe network of hydropower, or a stangenkunst system?

Way I did it, there's the somewhat generic fantasy empire here in which adventures usually happen, and the magitech triunvirate over the ocean. They have sword-shaped leyships, web-circuits woven by microspiders and alchemical furnaces which separate sea water into refined salt and drinkable water. Fleets of fluyts going through portals exchange this salt all over the world, making them rich enough to develop themselves beyond everyone else. One day or century, the fantasy empire may become like this, but the current disparity is as great as my Brazil and Japan+France. So I get both settings in one.

Not to get into the whole Vietnam shitflinging but there is a difference between one or two guys taking inneffective potshots then running like hell to avoid retaliation (like 'nam) and a small group of scouts from an untested military destroying a professional military unit of superior size, equipment, training, and experience with nothing more than battle rifles from the cold war. One is guerrilla warfare the other is nationalist masturbation.

It's what I'm trying to write.
The world occurs in a cycle of three ages:
Mythic > Mundane > Ruin

The mythic age is hazy and dreamlike because the world is still being formed, and things exist like magic, otherworldly creatures, legendary heroes, and deities personally interacting with men.

The mundane age blurs into existence as humans become more organized into tribes and early civilizations. Some mythic elements still exist as extant records from antiquity depict tales of flying buildings, armor that moves on its own, souls stored in containers, artifacts which were gifted by gods, etc.
However as things modernize - even slightly - say bronze age, all the fantastical elements evaporate from the world, and the mythic age ceases to be something that happened but more a collection of stories from various cultures, some of which would be assimilated into various religions.
The mundane age proper has many parallels with actual medieval history - only there's a longer period of stagnation in the early middle ages as the largest civilizations reach a technological plateau. The late mundane age sees an explosion of industrial technology in 1-2 generations - so fast that armored knights are still around on battlefields now dominated by 18th century-style line infantry and howitzers.
A second technological explosion occurs around 2-3 centuries later though the technology is less realistic, harnessing naturally occurring ores and distilling crystals from them which carry voltaic properties when properly treated.
Electric motorcars are invented before those which use steam and internal combustion. Voltaic pile and electrolytic batteries power most of this one civilization as the technotheocratic trade guild that pioneers this technology jealously guards and claims ownership of all high technology.
Things seem to slip into gaslamp fantasy as heavier-than-air dreadnoughts and gyrocopters dominate the skies.

cont.

cont.

Research into refining the ore and crystals from which batteries are derived deeps and produces more fantastical results: directed energy weapons, anti-gravity, a Philosophers Stone-like universal solvent, prosthetic organs, gene splicing/grafting, Aether bombs.
This technology grows and proliferates faster than it can be understood and controlled, the ensuing wars between fractured remnants of nations with no shortage of weapons begins to throw nature out of balance.

The age of ruin blurs the lines between the real and surreal. Kings, chancellors, arch-priests, and even generals are superseded in importance by doctors who become the de-facto rulers. The most highly sought-after technology is that of longevity.
Rulers live centuries as their bodies are taken apart and put back together, replaced by harvested organs, grown organs, and clockwork. So-called aether plagues wipe out the majority of humans leaving pockets of communities who are born and live their entire lives in underground hives. The surface is populated by mostly clockwork hybrid men whose brains have atrophied, leaving them as automatons who go about pre-programmed tasks and never die but simply get rewound.

cont.

cont.

Certain lands in the north are ruled by vampiric humanoids that are said to have emerged from underground in the mountains. Their blood is thick and black like tar, and their skin is withered and necrotic, leading the most powerful and influential of their kind to cover their entire bodies with golden ornamentation - especially masks which are modeled in the faces of angels. They are unaffected by the highly distilled and highly toxic crystal-based power sources.
Sea currents change without warning or explainable reason. New constellations appear in the the night sky, and the hours in the day fluctuate. Geological features as large as mountains disappear overnight.
The world slips into a state of undefinable murkiness where dreams and reality are indistinguishable. Then its as though myths are real again. Only no one remembers that there was ever a stable mundane world. The world seems like it blinked out and then back on, but of course the absence of things like language, memory, or even linear time render it impossible to tell if the world has ended or a new one has just been born.
And the age of myth begins once again: similar but different like someone is reading a script but messing up some of the words, skipping a sentence here and there, or ad-libbing from time to time. Also there is no way to know how many times this has already happened.

bampalamp

For the past few years, I have been compulsively running a setting with spaceships, world-terraforming, Dyson spheres, laser guns, ansible-internet-connected computers and smartphones, televisions, memory uploads and VR sensoriums, mind-recording and mind-resleeving into new bodies, artificial intelligences, bioaugmentations and cybernetic implants (some of which are hereditary), controversies over implants, cloning, nanomachines, and so on. People travel to different planets. There are megacorporations.

However, all of it is literally magic, and the setting is Planescape's Great Wheel (focusing on the Outer Planes) with a touch of 4e's World Axis.

The spaceships are highly advanced spelljammers, world-terraforming is an alchemical balancing act of Inner Planar elements, the Dyson spheres hook up directly to the Inner Planes of fire/radiance/positive energy, the laser guns project arcane force, the ansible-internet-connected computers and smartphones are matrices of divination and illusion, the televisions work through scrying, the memory uploads and VR sensoriums work via the Society of Sensation, the mind-resleeving into new bodies is advanced reincarnation at the hands of the Believers of the Source and the Dustmen, the artificial intelligences are incorporeal constructs, the bioaugmentations and cybernetic implants are biomancy (also hereditary), there are huge controversies over things like altralothic implants, the clones are illusory simulacra and necromantic clones, the nanomachines are elementites, etc.

There is planet-hopping, plane-hopping, constellate-petting, exploration of the uncharted reaches of the infinite multiverse, portal networks ranging from intra-city to inter-planar, and Dyson capital ships that enshroud stars. The Great Wheel's factions are cyberpunk-like monolothic megacorporations, only with more benevolence and PC-appeal.

Is this a setting that anyone would find entertaining? What can better sell people on "sci-fi by way of magic"?

Honestly sounds pretty cool user. Got a setting doc or something?

Writing up a formal setting document is something I have been trying and failing to do.

I have mostly been relying on notes in my head (and a scant few notes written for the players' benefit). I have run about ~380 sessions of this so far across multiple games, with major setting details distorting and changing across games as new ideas come to my mind.

Sadly, various changes have been controversial amongst the group of players I usually GM for, and a few have already dropped out of that pool due to the setting heading in directions they were uninterested in.

As a note, despite the pictures I am posting, I do not actually rely on a sci-fi aesthetic most of the time. I primarily use a fantasy aesthetic.