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CthuluIsSpy

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Yeah that is a good point actually. If anyone could just generate light at will that would have considerable ramifications.
The question though is how an average Joe would know how to cast a cantrip, and if everyone had natural magic, wouldn't that result in a society that is considerably different from your average fantasy RPG? Wouldn't that result more in a world like Conan or something, where hierarchies are built by the strength of one's magic and everything is at a relatively low technological state? After all, why bother making swords if you can just throw lightning or pop a magical steroid to punch really hard?
 

Delterius

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Magic is hard to distinguish from sufficiently advanced artisanal technique, but industry is what transformed society in a pervasive fashion.
Exactly. More often than not the dichotomy between the natural and supernatural sciences is fake. Because in most settings 'Magic' is little more than some sort of energy which can be directed and shaped with enough study. The idea that magic stunts technological growth and impedes industrialization is nifty but not always true, case in point:

Both Forgotten Realms and it's carbon copy Golarion have ancient industrial civilizations built on the back of magical research. That was the case with Netheril in the Realms and the Shory Empire in Pathfinder. Automated production lines that churn out Wands of Light Cantrip are indistinguishable from similar factories that create lightbulbs. And that's just the post-apocalyptic parts we live in. Both Golarion and Faerun have space faring civilizations that use and instrumentalize magic. And one has to assume that the guy who created the magical space ships know a thing or two about Mechanics.

In Thedas the dwarves developed industrial mining techniques in order to create their underground empire, complete with underwater tunnels that span the continent. They didn't need gunpowder to do so because they had an equivalent in magically aspected fire salts. Their warfare methods, though steeped in tradition, also make extensive use grenades made out of Lyrium. The dwarves also now wish to learn the secret of gunpowder from the Qunari, but to experiment with all substances instead of just Lyrium and it's derivatives.

Warhammer Fantasy is a very high fantasy world where technological, and magical developments are not mutually exclusive. The elves prefer their magic, the dwarves prefer their guns. But the humans and the ratfolk are perfectly capable of not only using both but marrying them into something else. Like the Holy Laser Beams of Hysh firing side by side with Imperial Cannons. And besides it's not like there are no engineers in Ulthuan, or knowledge of magic among the dwarves.

It doesn't even have to be mentioned but Pillars' Eora is also another setting where technological development is done through a mastery of the supernatural.

Shadowrun takes this one step further and treats magical developments as new facets of the natural world. Elves, Vampires, Monsters are all just new genetic expressions caused by an abundance of mana. They occasionally have strange ties with the ancient unknowns, such as Elves quickly re-developing their dead language for reasons that are mysterious, but the fact that Elves can live a long-ass time is simply genetic. The Elves know it and the Elf Supremacist states do their damndest to stifle any research of that fact. Furthermore, the rise of magic also brought with it the rise of hyper technological development as well.

Even in Arcanum - where the natural and the supernatural are deleterious to one another - you still have a world where the greatest impediment to technological accumulation is not the mere existence of magic. It's political and cultural. Magic-users tend to vanquish advanced civilizations. Those civilizations rise up nonetheless. They take their time mostly because the longer lived peoples who hold onto that knowledge - the dwarves - have no compunction to seek rapid industrialization.

Simply put, whenever magic is sufficiently powerful then a magocracy develops. Once the magocracy is in place it will seek to increase it's own power. This will inevitably develop into an advanced civilization, that will likely fall in some way due to the Law of Telling An Interesting Story.

The kinds of settings where I see Magic being an impediment to industrialization are those where the supernatural is steeped in mystery and ritual. If you can't tame it, there's no pattern. If there's no pattern, you cannot industrialize. Say, Mage: the Awakening. Broadly speaking in the World of Darkness the masses lived under the thumb of magic users. It took the rise of an entire new paradigm of reality - rationalism and shit - to displace traditional magic and create the modern world.
 
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copebot

Learned
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Messages
387
There would be no need to rotate crops with spells to either create food, manipulate weather patterns, or bless land to restore fertility. There would have been no reason to enslave Africans to harvest sugarcane if priests and mages could prevent and remove malaria reliably. There would be no need to hunt whales for whale oil with reliable magical lighting, or a means of just producing normal candles more efficiently.

The key thing from a world-building perspective is that industrialization is the process of turning a food surplus + sanitation + better transportation + better communication + stable government, which creates a lot of surplus people who are no longer needed as agricultural labor, who then move to the cities to work in factories, as artisans lose social and economic importance due to industrial competition.

Fantasy is about the social world before those collective developments, but just like the real world before the first English Industrial Revolution, there were tons of unevenly distributed technological and artisan-crafted marvels. Large portions of the world were still unmapped until relatively recently, and I think part of the fantasy fiction spirit is also about reviving the adventure of exploration and the mystery of an unknown world full of strange creatures, savage humanoids, and utterly alien civilizations.
 

KateMicucci

Arcane
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Sep 2, 2017
Messages
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You have people wearing armor from 16th century that was specifically designed with guns in mind
this should be tattoed on the backs of every gun-phobe from here to cathay

people who can't stomach the only early modern fantasy in the world because it's not '''''''''''''''medieval''''''''''''''' enough are below contempt. medieval fantasy settings have been garbage for 40 years now and they still ask for more of that same slop.
Guns have been in fantasy since at least 1516 when one of the villians of Orlando Furioso used one. This is supposed to take place during the reign of Charlemange.


XXVIII
"Besides, that both his puissance and his might
Are such, as in our age are matched of few,
Such is in evil deeds his cunning sleight,
He laughs to scorn what wit and force can do.
Strange arms he bears, unknown to any wight,
Save him, of the ancient nations or the new:
A hollow iron, two yards long, whose small
Channel he loads with powder and a ball

XXIX
"He, where 'tis closed behind, in the iron round,
Touches with fire a vent, discerned with pain;
In guise that skilful surgeon tries his ground,
Where need requires that he should breathe a vein.
Whence flies the bullet with such deafening sound,
That bolt and lightening from the hollow cane
Appear to dart, and like the passing thunder,
Burn what they smite, beat-down or rend asunder.

XXX
"Twice broken, he our armies overthrew
With this device, my gentle brethren slain;
The first the shot in our first battle slew,
Reaching his heart, through broken plate and chain;
The other in the other onset, who
Was flying from the fatal field in vain.
The ball his shoulder from a distance tore
Behind, and issued from his breast before.

XXXI
"My father next, defending on a day
The only fortress which he still possessed,
The others taken which about it lay,
Was sent alike to his eternal rest:
Who going and returning, to purvey
What lacked, as this or that occasion pressed,
Was aimed at from afar, in privy wise,
And by the traytour struck between the eyes.
 
Joined
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Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
In Forgotten Realms, magic isn't some type of "advanced technology" they don't understand or something that can be classified next to technology. The weave is a product of Mystra, which could arguably be interpreted as making all magic-users some form of cleric, I suppose.
Basically, it's inherently supernatural.
 

Delterius

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In Forgotten Realms, magic isn't some type of "advanced technology" they don't understand or something that can be classified next to technology. The weave is a product of Mystra, which could arguably be interpreted as making all magic-users some form of cleric, I suppose.
Basically, it's inherently supernatural.
Hasn't stopped anyone from studying it like it's physics and hasn't stopped civilizations from engineering themselves a magical industrial age. In fact, the 'weave' is ridiculously straightforward. It's supernatural capability is almost nill. At the end of the day the mass produced Wand of Light Cantrip is no different from the mass produced lightbulbs and 'Mystra' willed it so.
 

KateMicucci

Arcane
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Messages
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That feel when you're trying to play a PnP game and your friend keeps saying

"Guys what if we used this [magical device] to build a rail gun? I'm an engineer so I can't help but think this way haha"
 

Delterius

Arcane
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Entre a serra e o mar.
That feel when you're trying to play a PnP game and your friend keeps saying

"Guys what if we used this [magical device] to build a rail gun? I'm an engineer so I can't help but think this way haha"
try playing mage the awakening with a chemistry graduate

'hey if we combine plembonium with potassium and then add some kosher hydrogen then we have a mini nuke and, also, the changes are so minute it can't cause paradox right'
 

Mauman

Learned
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Messages
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Mask of the Betrayer is better than Torment. You're 15 years late.

I'm not going to argue that Obsidian hasn't made some great games in it's run, as they have. Mask is definitely one of them. So is New Vegas.

My response has more to do with the realization as to what Obsidian has become now. A husk of it's former glory.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Mask of the Betrayer is better than Torment. You're 15 years late.

I'm not going to argue that Obsidian hasn't made some great games in it's run, as they have. Mask is definitely one of them. So is New Vegas.

My response has more to do with the realization as to what Obsidian has become now. A husk of it's former glory.

Husk of its former glory? That's BioWare.

But Obsidian, going from NWN2 OC in 2006 to Deadfire in 2018? From Dungeon Siege 3 in 2011 to The Outer Worlds in 2019? Eh...

There's been a certain decline and there's been a generational turnover of talent within the company (the loss of Chris Avellone alone was a huge blow), but "husk of its former glory" is too strong an expression. They were never that great in the first place and the culture war stuff is distorting everybody's view of it.
 

Nano

Arcane
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Messages
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Husk of its former glory? That's BioWare.

But Obsidian, going from NWN2 OC in 2006 to Deadfire in 2018? From Dungeon Siege 3 in 2011 to The Outer Worlds in 2019? Eh...

There's been a certain decline and there's been a generational turnover of talent within the company (the loss of Chris Avellone alone was a huge blow), but "husk of its former glory" is too strong an expression. They were never that great in the first place and the culture war stuff is distorting everybody's view of it.
Come on dude. Most video game companies don't release any good games at all. Old Obsidian had several, so what if there were some duds in the middle too?
 

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
I just don't see the logic in the world suddenly stopping at an arbitrary technological point all because of some men with silly hats, unless there was a concerted effort to suppress it as part of some sort of political power play.
In many fantasy settings, including D&D, the gods derive their power from how strongly people believe in them. If a technological revolution occured and people started relying more on technology and less on magic, they would naturally become more skeptical of the gods. So the gods would have an incentive to let technology remain stagnant.

Zelazny's Lord of Light has a pretty cool take on this concept.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
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Come on dude. Most video game companies don't release any good games at all. Old Obsidian had several, so what if there were some duds in the middle too?

Rough gem-era Obsidian: kotor 2, Mask of the Betrayer, Alpha Protocol, New Vegas

Polished turd-era Obsidian: Dungeon Siege III, South Park, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Deadfire, The Outer Worlds, Grounded
 

Old Hans

Arcane
Joined
Oct 10, 2011
Messages
1,443
the gods derive their power from how strongly people believe in them.

that happens in real life too. remember Nammu the ancient Sumerian god? Used to be big man on campus back in the olden days. Now he's a big fag loser no one cares about
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
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In D&D it's actually in the lore that the Harpers go out of their way to prevent technological progress. Dunno if there's anything similar in Pathfinder.
If your objective was to trigger me by conflating the Forgotten Realms with Dungeons & Dragons, consider it mission accomplished.

rawImage.jpg
 

FreeKaner

Prophet of the Dumpsterfire
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Rough gem-era Obsidian: kotor 2, Mask of the Betrayer, Alpha Protocol, New Vegas

Polished turd-era Obsidian: Dungeon Siege III, South Park, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Deadfire, The Outer Worlds, Grounded

South Park one was good. Tyranny has all the makings of a good game in it but it was ransacked for resources. PoE1/Deadfire have many faults but they are playable with occasional enjoyable parts with White March being a really good campaign when ignoring rest of second half of PoE1.

Outer Worlds, on the other hand, is a thorough disappointment. Not only because what it is, which is dull and uninspired, it is also an already overdone type of setting because of popularity of Fallout 3 & Borderlands but also miserably tryhard at it. Space Opera is appealing, why go back again to retrofuturism? If you are going for retrofuturism why not make it more different than an era that has many overlaps with Fallout's retrofuturism? It is so disappointing especially when compared against the expectation when Tim Cain and Boyarsky got together again.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
the loss of Chris Avellone alone was a huge blow
I'd have to question that. In retrospect, and from what leaks I've seen here, my reading is that he was already sidelined in New Vegas, and then completely sidelined after Alpha Protocol.
 

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