I've been asked by my group if they could play a D20 Modern campaign, but in a D&D type setting. They described it as 'if the modern world had D&D instead of its middle ages,' or soemthing like that.
Myquestion is, what kind of difference do you think that would make to society and technology?
Assuming magic were as widespread and available as in most standard D&D settings and was actually handled with a bit of logistical common sense, there should be little or no need for the advancement of technology - it'd just be a case of magic taking place of advanced tech in all of the important areas, i.e. construction, medicine, business, etc. Resources would be readily available with a couple of gestures, and I can see universities being built with the intent to train wizards for very specific functions - and pretty much every "commercial" spellcaster would have access to Permanency.
Conflicts in this case would most likely arise over knowledge and ideology - one faction desiring a magical secret another holds, or strong disapproval of another's laws and ethical codes. Territory is a possibility, but if there is any access at all to infinite planes...
I'd just take a look at a lot of utopia/dystopia books/movies combined with various tales of magical might in settings (such as Netheril in FR), take the "best" features, and run with those.
I agree that a vast amount of technology would be different in how it works, but I don't believe it would be too different in it's application and possibly even appearance. People could have long distance communication devices (cell phones), personal storage devices (pdas), personal conveyance vehicles (cars).
The potential for it making a true utopia is pretty large. Most fighting in the world is over resources; the rest is over ideology. If magic is infinite (if you aren't tapping into some source of power for instance), you're going to avoid resource conflicts.
But, people will always try to profit. Magic would probably be heavily regulated. I see many countries running magic universities. These institutions could be very expensive. Even without government control, I foresee magical guilds/unions which would tax and regulate practitioners, and who would try to limit non-union practitioners.
I'm not sure if you are thinking of using the D&D system for it. D20 Modern made a number of changes to facilitate modern playing (wealth system, professions, ect.)
Now, another thing to think about is the affect of monsters on the modern world. Many monsters would have probably been driven extinct unless they advanced as well. Dragons would be difficult to kill off, due to their intelligence, but they would still have to advance to counter the growing advancements of the humanoids.
Now, since magic can do everything that technology could do, and more, maybe the power curve wouldn't jump quite so much. Magic would be more readily available, especially magic items, but it would still take a 30th level wizard to make an atom bomb.
I think it sounds like a lot of fun.
I'm using the D20 rules, so somewhere in the backstory, there will be a sundering and loss of magic, allowing me to seriously scale back the amount of power wizards and clerics display between D&D and the D20 Modern rules.
What I've got so far is a greater integration of traditional 'monsters' into society. For example, dragons and other flying creatures have largely taken the place of freight and small aircraft, with the result that fixed-wing heavier-than-air machines never caught on. Zeppelins are used for larger passenger flights, and heavy freight.
Automobiles are largely internal combustion (the lack of any really powerful magics would allow steam and the industrial revolution to be largely on-schedule), but pressure from the ecologically-minded elves is ushing new, magically-powered automotives. The power required to make these is immense, and they are still very expensive and labor intensive.
Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, most of the more prestigious schools are arcane universities.
Slavery, Racism, and hate-crimes are perpetrated between members of the traditional 'big five' races and lower, traditionally 'monster' races. The Civil Rights Movement in this universe was largely to secure equal rights for segregated Goblinoid races.
Look into Eberron for a D&D take on 18th/19th century. Of course Eberron is still D&D at it's heart so it's not quite what you're looking for BUT it does have some nifty ideas on progressing the D&D world forward.
Quote from: Elemental_ElfLook into Eberron for a D&D take on 18th/19th century.
I don't see
that at all.
Quote from: Luminous CrayonQuote from: Elemental_ElfLook into Eberron for a D&D take on 18th/19th century.
I don't see that at all.
Really? The Victorian sludge of sharn doesn't ooze out of your book? What about the themes of colonization in Q'barra? Native rights in Droaam, Dargun and Valenar? The slow march of corporate pre-eminence (supported by ever more common magical devices) toppling the ancient regime of Feudalism? The ideas of Democracy in Breland? The last ditch effort to form 'faithful' societies in Thrane? What about the expansion of Khovairic societies into new continents and how the more advanced societies dominate and exploit weaker ones?
Some of those I'll grant you; in other cases, I think you're really reaching. I think that whatever Victorian flavors are present are overpowered and overwhelmed by 1950's/60's elements, which is how I think the setting reads overall.
Consider: The Last War is WW2. The Cyre/Mournhold disaster is Hiroshima/Nagasaki-- nobody knows who or what caused it, but the effect is the same: a halt to hostilities because everyone's panicked and nobody wants to be next. Meanwhile, the five nations still hate each others' guts and strive against each other on the down-low, Cold War style. During all of this, the warforged are reenacting the Civil Rights movement. (They are also another atomic bomb parallel, in the "holy crap, we've created a weapon without fully considering the implications, now what?" sense.)
Politically, Khorvaire is increasingly influential superpowers United States and Soviet Union smashed together. Sharn owes more to NYC than to Victorian anything at all, corporate pre-eminence (by this I assume you mean the dragonmarked houses) is equally relevant in both eras, and Thrane's Culture War is a mirror of reactionary politics that never, ever go out of style.
Moving back a little on-topic here...
Is there anything major I'm missing as far as major influences? Remember, I'm shooting for Modern day with a fantasy past, not a fantasy's future, if that makes sense.
Quote from: Stargate525Moving back a little on-topic here...
Yeah, ah, sorry about that. :erm:
I take it what you want is a way to end up with more-or-less the modern status quo, only reverse-engineered so that fantastic elements replace/cause the stuff we take for granted, yes?
I'd take a hard look at wireless internet and bluetooth telephone earpieces as divination/information magic on a huge scale, with most of these personal connectivity gadgets (smartphones and such) marketed as do-it-yourself missive kits: Telepathy for Dummies.
Do you plan to tackle the space program at all? What about splitting the atom, nuclear power, the Large Hadron Collider, and other technical applications of the sort that alarmists are always claiming will result in scientists accidentally erasing the universe? (Do they have magical analogues? Will they potentially erase the universe?)
I've never felt Eberron was 1950's/60's.
If anything the Last War is more akin to WWI than WWII. The political structure of Khovaire post-war is much more akin to 1920's Europe - old empires broken up, new countries being founded based on the racial majorities that live there. The world fell apart after the war and now all these nations, and corporations (DM Houses) are all viewing to gain the upper hand. Just look at how much the Flying Boats issue has had on the structure and profits of House Orien.
Of course in the end, Eberron is a mix of themes ranging from 1930's pulp, Victorian era, Final Fantasy, Frontier-themes, Points of Light, post-apocalyptic, WWI and WWII all wrapped in a 3.5 D&D package.
EDIT: Sorry, I was posting while the call for :ontopic: was called
Quote from: Luminous CrayonI take it what you want is a way to end up with more-or-less the modern status quo, only reverse-engineered so that fantastic elements replace/cause the stuff we take for granted, yes?
Yes and no. I'm fine with some things, but I definitely want it much closer to real-world modern than D&D taken to its socio-economic extremes.
Quote from: Luminous CrayonI'd take a hard look at wireless internet and bluetooth telephone earpieces as divination/information magic on a huge scale, with most of these personal connectivity gadgets (smartphones and such) marketed as do-it-yourself missive kits: Telepathy for Dummies.
Hmm. The Modern setting actually has surprisingly few divination spells with that kind of power. I do like the idea of it though...
Quote from: Luminous CrayonDo you plan to tackle the space program at all? What about splitting the atom, nuclear power, the Large Hadron Collider, and other technical applications of the sort that alarmists are always claiming will result in scientists accidentally erasing the universe? (Do they have magical analogues? Will they potentially erase the universe?)
Space yes, probably a bit earlier than in real life, and the other technologies are probably held up by a significant amount of magic (containment via wall of force, emergency contingents for teleporting the fuel into a sealed area, etcetera).
If you do still have magic, you could have techno-wizards who can block the circuits of cameras or send emails with their minds (I'm sure there are rules for that somewhere).
If you don't have magic, consider the implications on magical creatures who can't access their powers anymore. Many might have been driven to extinction over the years, or ostracised.
Read up on Urban Arcana, the d20 Modern supplement for a heavily magical modern world. That should really help.
Alright here we go, I was kinda discussing something like this with Polycarp and Vreeg last night, how would technology evolve from a setting with magic. This will mostly look at a technological view-point. Now if any of these comments do not apply, disregard them.
Alright, first off if you can conjure stuff out of thin air, that's going to affect pretty much everything. So keep that in mind.
First off, Robotics are going to be essentially non-existant, these will be replaced with golems. And the "assembly line" will probably be invented a LOT earlier.
Anything with electrical circuits is going to be junk. If you have people that can conjure lightning, your electrical systems are essentially super-fragile. They'd be ridiculously easy to frag by anyone with a little magic.
Now, let's talk automobiles. Why internal combustion engine? Why would personal vehicles even be invented? Why wouldn't public transit be a lot more developped? High efficiency trains like in Europe to criss-cross North America. Why use crude-oil based technology? It's a non-renewable resourced, compared to the (hypothetically infinite) magic. Doesn't have to "run on magic" but on some kind of conjured fuel.
If you have teleporting, why would long-rage transportation be invented at all?
That being said, if all "air transport" is replaced by animals, all these animals have to eat. That's a LOT more food that needs to be produced (potentially solved by the "conjure anything" magic).
Another thing, why would dragons want to become glorified couriers? D&D Dragons are prideful to the extreme, no way in heck would go from being the biggest badasses around to courier planes. They might not like people crowding their airspace ether.
Zeppelins and airships make sense, the main reasons they were discard in the real world is because of their low speed (fixed with magic?) and the flammability of hydrogen combined with the difficulty of keeping hydrogen/helium contained. Both of those could potentially be solved by magic.
If there are "fly" spells, maybe heavier than air flight would never have been invented at all.
Politically speaking, with resurrection spells and the whole undead thing going on (liches, vampires, mummies) I don't think the current political climate would look anything what it does like for us.
If there's alchemy of some kind (transforming materials), then material science is going to be affected a lot. Maybe stronger materials will be cheaper or non-existant. This would also change resource gathering sectors, like mining. Why mine for gold if I can transform lead into gold?
Quote from: Stargate525Space yes, probably a bit earlier than in real life, and the other technologies are probably held up by a significant amount of magic (containment via wall of force, emergency contingents for teleporting the fuel into a sealed area, etcetera).
Re: space, consider that in the kind of setting you're describing, "getting into space" might not be the point. Space is the final frontier, and it's always had that "vast new wilderness to be explored" allure. But in a crazy-magical world, maybe that frontier is more than just space. If you have crazy alternate dimensions, parallel universes, black holes that take you back and forward in time, "elemental planes", etc., maybe all those things are up in space, and reachable by spaceship.
Also consider that part of the impetus propelling early space exploration was the desire for a military advantage against Cold War foes: we dreamed of sattelite-guided weapons, moon-missiles aimed at hostile countries on earth, all that sort of crazy thing. Maybe there's some similar magic-inspired reason for the space program (someone discovers that moon rocks are a very valuable magical fuel or something), and there's a race for resources or to gain a technological edge?
Llum, good suggestions, but the majority of those are limited by level. D20 Modern magic only goes up to fifth level, and those are reached at a much later level. This (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/MSRD:Magic#List_of_Arcane_Spells) is pretty much the level and scope of magic I'm working with. As you can see, no teleportation, no flying, and limited 'create out of nothing' spells (though create water would solve a heap of problems in Africa).
As far as automobiles, you get those for the same reasons we did here; a more efficient engine, not based on steam. We got the steam engine because we needed a long-running, powerful, regulated source of energy that we didn't have to pay. I've yet to see a saturation-level spell that can solve those problems as well as a steam engine.
Dragons, I realize might not be the couriers, but eagles, griffins, those kind of animals might.
I agree with the electrical idea; computers are magic, rather than electrical based. This shouldn't change a whole heap; programming is merely done via very complex ritual rather than entering code.
LC, good ideas. Gives me something to think about.
Hear me out for a second re: computers/electronics vs. lightning magic.
Frankly, I'm not sure it would totally eliminate viable electronics (though it would probably relegate it to a quirky li'l niche.) On the contrary, the existence of lightning-flinging wizards might make the understanding of electrical principles even more important to understand, as a countermeasure. (The guy who has pissed off a thundermage is probably going to want to surround his house with heavy-duty lightning rods and other grounding measures, for example. And he's always going to wear rubber-soled shoes, and he's never going to play golf in the rain.)
Electrical technology seems like a logical way to marry circuitry and magic together (if that's something you wanted to do)-- imagine a magic-user who could (carefully) power/recharge his own powerful electronics by pumping them full of lightning. (I just realized this is basically half the plot of Back to the Future. You may count that as a pro or as a con, I guess.)
I see trains powered by a golem-like construct. Kind of a hamster wheel on a grand scale. Make a construct that just turns the gears for a train. It requires a large influx of magical energy to get it started, then it would be self sufficient.
I think you need to decide on where magical energy comes from. Is it something theoretically unlimited. like Earth's magnetic field? Is it generated by the practitioner (and thus a Golem would need regular infusions of energy from spellcasters)? Is it a force of nature (and thus would be depleteable?)
Quote from: Luminous CrayonHear me out for a second re: computers/electronics vs. lightning magic.
Frankly, I'm not sure it would totally eliminate viable electronics (though it would probably relegate it to a quirky li'l niche.) On the contrary, the existence of lightning-flinging wizards might make the understanding of electrical principles even more important to understand, as a countermeasure. (The guy who has pissed off a thundermage is probably going to want to surround his house with heavy-duty lightning rods and other grounding measures, for example. And he's always going to wear rubber-soled shoes, and he's never going to play golf in the rain.)
Electrical technology seems like a logical way to marry circuitry and magic together (if that's something you wanted to do)-- imagine a magic-user who could (carefully) power/recharge his own powerful electronics by pumping them full of lightning. (I just realized this is basically half the plot of Back to the Future. You may count that as a pro or as a con, I guess.)
I can see where you're comming from, but this disregards that the voltage and current (amperage) inside a lightning bolt is orders of magnitude higher than what nearly all electronics can handle without frying.
Also, on that list of spells that Stargate gave there are several spells for both divine and arcane (starting at 1st level) that completely wipe an electronic device. If you cast that on a modern car it would literally become a piece of junk. Most things literally cannot function without computers, and that just isn't a viable option in a world where those kinds of thing exist.
Quote from: XeviatI think you need to decide on where magical energy comes from. Is it something theoretically unlimited. like Earth's magnetic field? Is it generated by the practitioner (and thus a Golem would need regular infusions of energy from spellcasters)? Is it a force of nature (and thus would be depleteable?)
I think these are the most important questions in the thread so far.
Quote from: Luminous CrayonQuote from: XeviatI think you need to decide on where magical energy comes from. Is it something theoretically unlimited. like Earth's magnetic field? Is it generated by the practitioner (and thus a Golem would need regular infusions of energy from spellcasters)? Is it a force of nature (and thus would be depleteable?)
Agreed. I'm inclined to rule it as a renewable resource, tied into the Earth's magnetic field or something similar; you can deplete it locally, but it regenerates relatively quickly.
Quote from: LlumI can see where you're comming from, but
anything like[/i] as simple as "welp, magic's in, so electronics are obviously, automatically out." In fact, I think that's pretty dismissive of some potentially interesting possibilities!
[/quote]
This is true, there are ways around it. Sphere of Invulnerability gives immunity to spells from levels 1-3. So most of the electronic wiping things are safe, also it's a 4th level spell. But that means you need bigger magic guns then them just to use electronics.
Now as for the hardware issue, lightning strikes cause us tons of problems on a hardware level, and we've been using eletronics for a long ass time.
Now, dismissing it out of hand is kinda ignoring stuff. But I'm going to say that in a world where those data erasing spells exist that nothing close to our level of electronics could exist. Not even close, anything that depends on computers would always be in potential for causing catastrophe/becoming junk by any chump with access to these spells. This isn't even taking into account magic items.
So yes, raw electricity in very rugged applications, could probably be finnagled. Anything that involves computers or micro-circuitry is a pipe-dream in this world.
Quote from: LlumNow, dismissing it out of hand is kinda ignoring stuff. But I'm going to say that in a world where those data erasing spells exist that nothing close to our level of electronics could exist. Not even close, anything that depends on computers would always be in potential for causing catastrophe/becoming junk by any chump with access to these spells. This isn't even taking into account magic items.
Unless the major systems (the ones that run lots of things across a large area, etc.) are protected by some form of magical or antimagic shielding.
You could consider implementing more urban magic as the cities grew in size, like in the book A Madness of Angels.
It could be things like melding into a crowd, crafting magical graffiti, or conjuring spirits of the city.
Quote from: LlumNow, dismissing it out of hand is kinda ignoring stuff. But I'm going to say that in a world where those data erasing spells exist that nothing close to our level of electronics could exist. Not even close, anything that depends on computers would always be in potential for causing catastrophe/becoming junk by any chump with access to these spells. This isn't even taking into account magic items.
Yes, I addressed that, if you already out-gun everyone magically, you're set. Why are you using electronics then? Who knows.
This also means you can't have any kind of data in the actual machine itself. Really limiting what you're doing as well.
Quote from: LlumYes, I addressed that, if you already out-gun everyone magically, you're set. Why are you using electronics then? Who knows.
Perhaps because not everyone is a magician?
Just a random thought: One possibility you could have for magic is that it works through intense force of will. In large cities magic becomes complicated because of so many wills working at cross purposes. In this sense, TECHNICALLY, everyone is a magician, but only those who are really talented can actually affect reality with it. Magic items (including magic-technology) take a lot of magical energy to run, etc. It's understood that to actually possess the magic to be able to affect the working of an existing system is very rare.
Just a thought. May or may not work for you.
Well, if magic were real and it could do things better than muscle, then humanoids would naturally evolve to either be better than magic or to all be magical. 4E D&D creates a world where this doesn't happen because magic is just as good at killing than martial is, and anyone can really learn rituals (which is the real magic).
I really like the way 4E did things in that regard. Rituals are like cooking: anyone can do it, you just need the ingredients and to follow directions, but not everyone can do it well. Then some people have innate magic (wizards, clerics, ect.).
Religious institutions and wizard-run magocracies/corporations/dictatorships would likely be the major forms of government. Xeviat, you make an interesting point about ideology and resources; I can imagine a kind of cold war scenario between wizards and clerics coming into being.
For a look at a more clearly 19th century world with magic check out Iron Kingdoms (http://privateerpress.com/iron-kingdoms).
Quote from: LlumYes, I addressed that, if you already out-gun everyone magically, you're set. Why are you using electronics then? Who knows.
The thing is, you only need one magician to ruin your day. One guy who casts the wipe-data spells like 3 times could seriously mess up almost any system.
On a side note, looks like Minor Sphere of Invulnerability can be dispelled by Dispel Magic. Both are third level spells. Makes it a lot less reliable.
Quote from: LlumThe thing is, you only need one magician to ruin your day. One guy who casts the wipe-data spells like 3 times could seriously mess up almost any system.
I don't quite see why this is so much of a problem. Lots of mundane stuff could easily ruin your day. One pyromaniac with a gas canister and a lighter could burn a building. But this is not a major problem because there just plain aren't that many pyromaniacs around, and police tend to track down those who
do cause trouble.
Now setting buildings on fire, I'd imagine should be much easier than actually learning lightning magic. So why would there be so many crazy sorcerers with lightning spells going around ruining electronics systems for kicks? And if you end up antagonizing a magic-user who knows lightning spells, you should
expect to have your hardware wrecked. Then again, if they know how to create actual lightning (as in about a terawatt of peak power), having your cellphone/PC/whatever wrecked should be the
least of your concerns...