I kind of had this idea for a setting in where the common D&D style adventuring parties were just becoming obsolete has...

Why would they become obsolete with the beginning of an industrial revolution? It's not like they created tanks overnight.

Yes. I find the idea of a dying heroic age very interesting

Weaponry more easily produced.
No need for "professional" adventurers when you can train the locals with some weapons and deal with any threat out there

Well, what about the threats meant for high level adventurers? Those can't be easily replaced not even by armies.

I doubt local militia would have any better luck storming a powerful magical dungeon with or without guns. Sure they'd be more effective, but some things just require a good wizard.

Or can magic be more easily mass produced /trained too?

All of the dragons have turned into bankers since it has all of the advantages of being a dragon except without the whole adventurers marching into your cave to murder you.

The era of small volunteer armies largely composed and headed by landed elites came to an end in the 1790s, right around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the ability to produce arms on a national scale (combined with a strong central government) allowed the French to recruit massive conscript armies with relatively little training, experience, or recruitment filters.

Would magic also scale to the advancement of technology (i.e. become easier to train and mass produceable).

Depends on setting

I don't think it would go away. More likely the job gets less glamorous as PCs become agents of the industrial empires.

Well yes, but it stands to reason that if magic were not replicable, then there would still be a value in experience magic users.

Maybe not as independent as before and more organized, but still necessary despite the times.

Woah, imagine trying to meet a dragon banker so you can withdraw from your account.
>"I n-need to withdraw some money to arrange for my daughter's wedding. P-please?"
>Single plume of smoke from dragon's nostril
>"Maybe she make do without a wedding..."
>Scramble backward in fright

is right, to fully appreciate The Last Hero you need to read most of Pratchett's books. But that's not a problem since every single one of them is amazing.

This kinda sounds like Shadowrun: victorian edition.

>adventurers becoming obsolete with the industrial revolution
What?

Wouldn't that make wandering expert strike teams like adventurers even more valued, since you could rely on them for tasks you can't with conscripts, and because you don't need to deal with them like they're nobles?

Thread Theme: youtube.com/watch?v=9oIWi3IK3RI

Eberron.

The Last Hero is an interesting example. Discworld sort of skipped over the D&D medieval fantasy era of heroes and adventurers. This is partly because wizards, druids, and clerics are all established professions with no need or desire to go adventuring and partly because Discworld was written before AD&D 2nd Edition became huge and overwhelmed RPGs with the D&D party trope. Most of the officially recognized by the populace heroes of Discworld are Fighting Man, sword-and-sandal type barbarian heroes, with a few Thieves hanging around them to do Thief things. Discworld starts with them living in a late medieval world that quickly starts advancing into the Renaissance around the time of Men At Arms and becomes Industrial after, arguably, Soul Music or The Last Continent but certainly after The Fifth Elephant.

The Last Hero specifically does require you to at least read Interesting Times beforehand to get the full impact of the story, though I truly think Cohen's story arc requires you to read
>The Color of Magic
>The Light Fantastic
>Sourcery
>Guards! Guards!
>Moving Pictures
>Troll Bridge
>Interesting Times
to get the FULL effect of The Last Hero.

Also good would be to read
>Faust Eric
>Men At Arms
>Feet of Clay
>Jingo
to get a good sense of the other heroes in the story and see how the world goes from sword-and-sorcery to modern sensibilities and pseudo Industrial Revolution.

It's a sad plot point in several Discworld novels that the old heroes are hanging up their swords or dying out as a profession. We even meet the last barbarian hero in Sourcery, and after that all we see or hear about are the remnants, becoming city watchmen or opening inns or dying to aged monsters in the high hills that nobody fears. Even the dragons are gone which is important to Guards! Guards! and the magic isn't going away, it's being tamed.

IDEA: What if, before the Industrial Revolution, the world, due to its magic nature, was much more dangerous to explore, resulting in a much less, well, explored world, beyond some safe and well-established trade routes between nations? That could create a setting where Industrial-age adventurers, aided by new gadgets, explore the world's many fantastic and magical unknowns for the first time. Basically, a more dangerous world leads to humanity not being able to learn as much about it until much later in its technological development.

I actually (used to) run a DnD setting a lot like this. The world is growing harsh and cold, magic weapons are being produced in mass for Imperial conscript armies, adventurers are being bought out by mercenary companies or corporate interests to act as glorified pinkertons, and the dragons have been dead for centuries.

But the important thing is that the main characters, the players, still need to have an impact on the world. Yes, socio-economic factors lead to WWI, but one angry slav with a shitty gun is what started it, little people can still chsnge big worlds.

All that was once innocent and wild and free in Discworld slowly starts being ordered and classified and turned to the power of man. It doesn't mean magic is gone; the goddess of steam is a bloodthirsty fucking train, for example but that it's becoming recognizably imitatable, so that instead of being the province of the learned, the exceptional, or the very wealthy it becomes mundane, accessible, and an everyday miracle. In that world, there is no place for adventuring heroes, because the threats don't come from things they can defeat. The foes are rich conspirators plotting to usurp power in a democratically tyrannical society, the corporate raider who steals a company and squeezes it for every drop its worth, and the entrenched racial hatreds of a thousand years of war.

Don't forget that the cobbler gnomes of fairytales end up being workers on the railroad.

How do you make this a playable scenario?

I think he would let you withdraw from your account. I remember about a screencap on why dragons would be effective bankers around here.

The witcher. World is changing, monsters are almost all killed, they're building things like sewage treatment plants, the region is getting united under a rather progressive regime. And Geralt is one of the few walking fossils of an era long past.

>Mercenary work would most likely be done now by more proper mercenary corporations, ala the Freikorps.
Or a standing army that has purpose beyond "let's make a desperate last stand against the invading hordes of orcs!"

>What about dungeon spelunking?
Maybe there are no more dungeons to be explored/cleared, or it falls upon architects and nascent archaeologists to explore such dungeons and preserve culture/magical artifacts intact.

Kind of how modern medicine made exploring the Dark Continent a possibility. Just replace gorillas and shamans with gnolls and...gnoll shamans.

That's the meta plot for a lot of westerns: Men who make their own law becoming obsolete as civilization and law spreads.