LibriumArcana.Games

Okay this is an ambitious thread. I'm not sure if anyone would even be interested but it's on my mind now.

First, statement of intent. The purpose of this thread is to start a discussion on what effect magical abilities and powers would have on historical human development. I think we can all agree that if you introduce such things to humanity at any point in it's history it's a major game changer and a big POD (Point of Divergence).

In order to have common ground I will provide the set up.

During the rise of civilization, before the founding of Sargon the Great a group of men made an astonishing discovery. They learned honest to fucking God magic.

How does magic work?

Magic works via 3 things, ability, will and symbol. One needs the ability to sense and use the power behind magic. The will to shape it and a symbol to give the spell shape and form. This symbol can be a word, a motion, a shape, an object. The will means that any spell must be triggered by a person.

How do you get the power? 3 ways, you are born with it, you bargain for it or you earn it. There are creatures out there, without physical being but powerful, they are called spirits. If you can get their attention you can cut a deal, power for service. Remember, there's always a price. Earning it, by undergoing a series of ordeals or quests one can develop the power but there's a good chance it'll kill you instead. The ability to use magic can be passed down by your parents. It can also show up randomly in a family tree.

What can you do with it? Magic cannot create something out of nothing or can it utterly destroy anything. You can however... Change things. A magic user can twist and use the elements around him, give form to spirits (this is created out of the molecules of air and earth around you or from a dead or living sacrifice) make the unlikely certain, take or give strength and all matter of things. Doing this is tiring. The more and bigger things you do, the more it tires you.

This knowledge and ability will spread to the 4 corners of the earth, any attempt to keep it secret will fail.

So, how will human society look? How is it likely to change? Will it be a stable society or a unstable one doomed to chaos?

I should note I'm not asking you to chart 6000 years of history here. That will drive us mad. Let's focus on the short term for now.

That's something I've wondered about. But it is going to be enormously dependent on the details of what is possible with this, how hard it is, what resources it takes and so on.

Few questions which will dramatically affect stuff.

Fist, power. Is this magic limited to simple stuff like Prestidigitation, Dancing Lights and Mage Hand, or can it go full bore Wish, Gate and Meteor Swarm? How people react to mages and the level of change they will cause is going to be heavily dependent on whether they're capable of simple but handy little tricks, or whether they're ambulatory WMDs. After all, if Sargon could have had his court wizard cast Teleport Circle a few times, he would basically have conquered much of the planet (setting up interconnected Teleport nodes in the manner of Stargate, and MMORPGs everywhere). I suspect that you were thinking of something intermediate, though.

Second, convenience. Is this quick to use like most standard D&D magic systems, or is it slow and/or hard to do like Incantations and 4th Ed Ritual magic? It may seem like a strange question, but it's really important with regards to how people react to mages. If they need complex rituals to work their stuff vs potentially going off any second, they can more easily fit in. Also, how often can it be used? Is it limited to once in a while when the stars are right, or can it be used freely in the manner of Harry Potter magic?

Third, cost. Does the spell casting cost a lot of resources? If it does, it becomes far easier to regulate, and may become the exclusive province of the courts of kings and emperors. Otherwise, society becomes far more libertarian.

Fourth, is there any restriction on who can potentially learn magic? Related to this, how likely are these spirits to play along with mortal regulatory agencies? Can the spirits themselves be restricted or contained somehow, or are they basically free agents no matter what anyone tries? This will affect how easily power can become stratified.

Fifth, are there potential nasty side-effects to magic, a la Warhammer, or is it entirely safe to use a la Dungeons and Dragons? This will affect how likely people are to fear magic beyond what it can normally do when it works properly.

Sixth, what are the spirits actually like? Do they have ulterior motives or grand schemes like the Chaos Gods, or don't they care, in the manner of the unnamed nobody-really-cares-about-them spirits which power Warlocks in 4th Ed? In the latter case, there might still be mistrust and superstition, in the latter - definite fear.

Seventh, is it possible to detect which spells a person has/is able to cast/has prepared? How easy is it to set up anti-magic zones?

I'm concurring with the Minx on how we get some ground rules here.

In a lot of ways even at the lower power scales this has the potential to bring us several thousand years ahead in technology-equivalent without the several thousand years of social development. Which means a lot of people are going to die very, very ugly. Though it certainly changes the picture in that Fertile Crescent setting, with the assumption that coordinated band of magi can overcome local resource scarcity.

I thought I provided ground rules above about the magic system.

Well, let's talk some parameters and also whether this feeds into communal usage.

Take parting the Red Sea. Can one person do it and how would affect them to do it? Sacrifice of life? Complete burnout?

Can this be communally practiced? Could numerous people in concert do something on that scale and create a tremendous phenomenon of that scope?

Could a person turn the Dead Sea into a freshwater lake? Again, could this be communally done?

I guess that's my biggest question here, because if what is impossible or incredibly, life-threateningly exerting for a single individual can be distributed, then this is going to accelerate social development in a big way.

Any which way you cut it, the magically adept become the new overlord class in very short order. The first thing that we figure out how to use our new toys for is how to make the other guy miserable, and if this scorches the earth so to speak things will get very ugly.

Looking at it in terms of framework, assuming there isn't the magical equivalent of a nuclear holocaust early on, then what likely happens is that some aspiring Cyrus the Great comes along and figures out how to incorporate this into an imperial framework and goes on the march. Creating an organized system will allow the magically adept to efficiently feed their population, breed like rabbits in comparison to everyone who doesn't organize a medicinal magic system, and they'll be unstoppable on the war march. The ability to use this for signalling and communication will allow the creation of large-scale empires and then if they don't destroy each other they'll likely settle down into some kind of MAD scenario where they try to find newer and nastier ways to war-magic each other while building up their ability to hold ground.

In the meantime, the mundane who don't develop it are going to pick fruit, hew wood and haul water, while constituting the grunt end of the war machines who have to do all the obnoxious work of suppressing partisans and covering the flanks in the big fights while the magic users go all CGI on each other.

It'd be an interesting scenario to formulate for a fiction work or a game setting, really. Especially if it really tapped into that Gilgamesh/Sargon era that doesn't get much attention these days. Harry Turtledove (I know, I know) had a pretty decent one back in his earlier days about neo-Babylonian societies, where each city had its own god and the locals had to dance the fine line of working with them and essentially manipulating them into working toward the city's ends while stroking their godly egos. (Between the Rivers.)

Not quite your scenario, but something in that line.

A lot will also depend on whether the muggles are able to band together and deal with the mages, at least in principle. If the mages are so powerful that this would be impossible, or at least, very hard to do, they can set themselves up as gods. On the other hand, if magic is highly utilitarian, but the mages are squishy or otherwise encumbered by long casting times and preperation times, then they may end up be serving muggle rulers.

Josh wrote:In a lot of ways even at the lower power scales this has the potential to bring us several thousand years ahead in technology-equivalent without the several thousand years of social development. Which means a lot of people are going to die very, very ugly. Though it certainly changes the picture in that Fertile Crescent setting, with the assumption that coordinated band of magi can overcome local resource scarcity.

If they can overcome resource scarcity, and not simply provide expensive ways of doing stuff that was impossible before. If the latter, then mundane society will continue as before, but a lot of tax money will go into the advantages the magi can bring about.

The Minx wrote:A lot will also depend on whether the muggles are able to band together and deal with the mages, at least in principle. If the mages are so powerful that this would be impossible, or at least, very hard to do, they can set themselves up as gods. On the other hand, if magic is highly utilitarian, but the mages are squishy or otherwise encumbered by long casting times and preperation times, then they may end up be serving muggle rulers.

Not to mention the whole concept of how you determine who the magi are. What you get in the lower-power/more encumbered scenario is probably some real witch hunts in places.

Having thought about this for a bit.

Take parting the Red Sea. Can one person do it and how would affect them to do it? Sacrifice of life? Complete burnout?

A single person could do something like create a bubble or an icepath for his/herself. Parting the red sea would not happen.

Can this be communally practiced? Could numerous people in concert do something on that scale and create a tremendous phenomenon of that scope?

You can work communally, but it's dangerous for you. For one thing you're utterly open to the others in your group and your group will not be able to act quickly or multitask well due to the demands of the linking. In short sneaky people can kill you by linking and a single mage can in an ambush batter apart the link and kill several members.

Could a person turn the Dead Sea into a freshwater lake? Again, could this be communally done?

Did I not say you could change things? This is a change is it not? You would have to change the salt into something else or find something to do with it however, as you cannot destroy it. Yes, you would need friends to effect the entire Dead Sea.

Minx, I would prefer you move away from the DnD spellbook. As I have outlined, the limit is you cannot create or destroy things. You can change them however. So a magic user could make a fire using heat in the air for example, his surroundings would get colder as a result though. You can turn water to ice or vapor or back again, turn rock into sand. Etc. You can make yourself and others stronger, faster. Teleporting isn't going to be possible. Nor would seeing the future, it hasn't happened yet. One can use a spirit to look at events happening else where however.

Oh nasty nasty on how the linked magic can be borked up.

Revisiting the original question, I think that you'll see a lot of initial chaos as everyone works out the rules and goes nuts with such sensible pursuits as carving penis graffiti into the desert and killing each other en masse. Eventually like I said some sort of visionaries emerge who create the social structures that can form functional empires. Security mechanisms will come with that to allow larger-scale collaborative projects and punish sneaky little bastards who would bork your group effects, some sort of super-magic-police.

Now, question about the 'born with it'. Is this a heritable genetic trait, a prenatal exposure, or some sort of weird wildcard? Because if it's a heritable trait, it would seem that there'd likely end up being a fairly inbred batch of magic nobility working to squelch the other forms of magi in order to maintain their position.

frigidmagi wrote:Minx, I would prefer you move away from the DnD spellbook. As I have outlined, the limit is you cannot create or destroy things. You can change them however. So a magic user could make a fire using heat in the air for example, his surroundings would get colder as a result though. You can turn water to ice or vapor or back again, turn rock into sand. Etc. You can make yourself and others stronger, faster. Teleporting isn't going to be possible. Nor would seeing the future, it hasn't happened yet. One can use a spirit to look at events happening else where however.

OK, it was mainly to see the scale of power involved, but the "no creation" thing is pretty useful information.

I guess this would mean that they can create food out of air, water and soil just like that. It would only be necessary to produce about a pound of food and two pounds of water per day per person, after all. Depending on how many people get this ability and the mass they can work with on a daily basis, this might lead to an abundant society.

The Minx wrote:I guess this would mean that they can create food out of air, water and soil just like that. It would only be necessary to produce about a pound of food and two pounds of water per day per person, after all. Depending on how many people get this ability and the mass they can work with on a daily basis, this might lead to an abundant society.

I'd think from the fact that we seem to be working with a limited number of magi that their exertions would be better served creating sustainable conditions long-term. For example in the Fertile Crescent, they could turn back the salinization of the local water table and keep the soil fertile long-term. Unless/until you have enough magi in the population pool that it becomes worth diverting a whole sector of them to agricultural production, there's much better things to have them working on than feeding the population. I mean, in this scenario simple manual labor isn't going to be in short supply.

Still and all there would be explosively-growing populations as a result, especially because they'd revolutionize medical care in similar ways. However, it's interesting to think about the fact that they can change things, which I'd take to mean they could also cure illnesses and heal wounds. So a whole lot of medical science flat out doesn't have a great deal of drive for development. Who cares what causes disease if you can huff and puff and wave your wand at it?

Question for Frigid... could they reverse the aging process? Whole new can of worms there.

Desalinating/irrigating large parts of the countryside is not a trivial task, though. Wouldn't it be easier to just make the food? Also, they would have to understand what's going on with the soil. Did the ancients understand how this stuff worked?

Either way, this is basically entropy-reversal, as far as I understand it. That's going to change society dramatically.

We still need to know how easily the magi can be regulated, and how many/few there are. Since:

• If there are few, and if they can be regulated easily, they will become the most valuable resource kings and emperors will fight over.
• If they are many and cannot be regulated, there probably won't be any kings or emperors at all.
• If they are many and can be regulated, the world will probably become ruled by orders of magi, not muggles.
• If they are few and cannot be regulated, they become the kings and emperors, and possibly manipulated by their muggle courts.

It'll also be important to know how quick and efficient this power is, since that affects whether it can be used as a weapon. That ties in with the regulation angle. Regular people can't control a Dr Manhattan (even if he can't teleport), but if you have a guy who has to undertake a long and laborious ritual to do stuff, that changes things a lot.

On the short term making the food is easier possibly, but on the long term the growth of the empire is probably best served by creating as much arable land as possible. I'm assuming some sort of middle path of magi availability, where they could feed the population but doing so would require sufficient numbers as to take them away from other large-scale projects. In that case, you'd want to create as much fertile soil as you could and then apply the mugglepower that you'd have in much, much larger numbers toward tilling the soil while the magi cure cancer and invent Titan rockets and shit so we can make the moon before the BCE flipover.

I'm a dreamer, what can I say?

Eugenics, and lots of it, as soon as people figure out you can be born with magic. You thought people harped over marrying into royalty? Wait until a magic-based empire starts trying to breed for magical ability. Instant caste system: the hereditary sorcerors have an incentive to keep things in-house, breeding mages with mages. They'd probably have to acquiesce to contracting stud services from their males, however, to keep the mundanes from drowning them in swords. Worse, those outside that power base are going to be more and more inclined to turn to the Warlock path of magic, deal-brokering. Assuming there's a non-infinite quantity of spirits willing and able to provide power, and assuming that the relatively benign ones end up...saturated fairly quickly, that's going to be a nasty, nasty situation. Earning it via ordeal...how? Who sets up the ordeal, and how does that differ functionally from service? If it's a spirit either way, what does the spirit gain from setting up an ordeal as opposed to locking a human into lifelong servitude?

Assuming that humanity doesn't self-destruct in a sorcerous armageddon, which is less likely than I might like given all the things that can go wrong here, fast forward a good long while. Are there still non-powered humans? Given the fact that magic can be hereditary, between social pressures (I want my kid to be able to spew fireballs from his eyes!) and simple evolutionary selection, does homo sapiens magus simply supplant non-magical humanity given enough time? If so, how did the spirits react to that trend, as the selection of people willing to sign up for servitude or ordeals got smaller and smaller and finally vanished?

If a highly-magical humanity even bothers with science, there are some really interesting possibilities there. Once detection instrumentation advances enough to actually watch what's going on, and once the scientific method exists, human scientist-magi will be able to watch matter-transmutation in realtime at a molecular and eventually submolecular level, just to name one fantastic potential advance.

One thing that bears thinking about: how reliable is magic in gaining information, stuff like scrying and such? Also, how easy/hard is it to block or fool them? Divinations are typical of classical ideas about magic, and they are often a highly undervalued in fantasy, both games and writing.

As a real-world example, how much different would things have been today if Saddam and Osama could have been located immediately with a simple spell, rather than taking years of cat-and-mouse games to find them? Of course, counter-measures might exist in such a case, but whoever has more magical resources would presumably prevail.

Unless the effect of the countermeasure is like fog or static, and countermeasuring is disproportionately effective.

(I like inventing new verbs.)

If it took for example three magi to undo the effects of one disrupting magi, that would make the requirements truly onerous as it scaled up. Now if you go the other route and make it straight power to power, then we if we up the number of magi in society over time via eugenics we start seeing truly 1984-esque scenarios.

None of you are thinking about this properly. You assume for example that there will be regulation of magic like there might be regulation on who gets to own what sort of armor based on social class. No. With magic, the rules of who is in what social class, and who rules over who change. To put simply, there will be no muggle kings. A wizard wants to be king? Does the current king have wizards? No. Then if the wizard is halfway intelligent, he will be able to take the crown. Probably by himself. If the king has wizards, why is there most powerful wizard not king? Afterall, he could easily usurp the crown.

So, forget the idea of muggle governments. In the Nash Equilibrium between wizards and non-wizards as rulers, to be a wizard is the only evolutionary stable strategy.

Ahem. None of us? ;)

Uh, I was pretty much assuming that there would be magi overlords, excepting the prospect that they would be constrained by further restrictions on the casting of magic, such as long prep times, big blatant signs they're doing it (that could be interrupted by, say, a hail of arrows) and so on.

Obviously though if it's a genetically heritable trait then most likely it eventually does win out and the whole world goes magic. I vaguely recall a series based in something like that, called Darksword I believe. The 'sorcerors' were those who worked metal and used technology.

White Haven wrote:Ahem. None of us? ;)

My apologies. That post had been sitting for a while.

I suppose I'm the authority since I came up with the rules for this

Anyways looking at the questions and considering them...

Josh wrote:Now, question about the 'born with it'. Is this a heritable genetic trait, a prenatal exposure, or some sort of weird wildcard? Because if it's a heritable trait, it would seem that there'd likely end up being a fairly inbred batch of magic nobility working to squelch the other forms of magi in order to maintain their position.

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: If you have a Daddy Wizard and Mommie Wizard, then most of the time (somewhere between 75 to 90%, I'll have to check something). However remember you can also gain magic power via deeds (undergoing the trails and ordeals) or by bargaining(hey spirit of the waters!)... The children of these people tend to have magic as well, although not as often (let's say about half the time?). And you don't need magic power to contact a spirit, just the right knowledge and materials, pulling them into our world is harder. Think of it as the difference between sending someone an email and sending them a package. Lastly some people just pop up with inborn magic despite having no magical ancestors. This might happen in out of a hundred viable births or so.

Not all wizards are equal however, some are just better or stronger then others. This is alot like being born with a talent, it's not equally spread out and the talent levels of your parents won't stop you from being born magically weak. I'm sure my answers are giving CT nightmares now.

Minx wrote:I guess this would mean that they can create food out of air, water and soil just like that. It would only be necessary to produce about a pound of food and two pounds of water per day per person, after all. Depending on how many people get this ability and the mass they can work with on a daily basis, this might lead to an abundant society.

Sure they could, but that will eat up raw materials. If you want to make a pound of flour, you're gonna need a pound of soil/sand/whatever you're using (and we've broken more laws of physics right there). Plus it'll take time to make enough food for everyone, the more complex a change you make, the longer and harder it is, simply because more can go wrong. Let me give an example.

I am a magic user, I want to make a burst of fire that jumps from my hand to the fireplace. I need to draw in enough heat from my surroundings (there's a hidden problem here some of you may catch) to cause flame. The air and ground around me will get colder, because I am thieving heat from them. But since this is simple (heat move from there to here) it can be done fast.

Now I am a magic user still, I want to turn a pound of dirt into a pound of bread. This is gonna require alot of concentration and time, because I am literally changing the arrangement of molecules and atoms around to effect this and it's very possible to get something wrong. The level of concentration and effort is going to be tiring to. Magic bread is likely more expensive then the stuff farmers grow.

Remember nothing is free in this system, you have to pay something to get something and the more complex or difficult or big a task, the more you have to pay.

White Haven wrote:. Assuming there's a non-infinite quantity of spirits willing and able to provide power, and assuming that the relatively benign ones end up...saturated fairly quickly, that's going to be a nasty, nasty situation.

First off, welcome to the discussion!

There is a non-infinite amount of spirits, that said there are a damn lot of spirits. At this point in history there are more spirits then humans (human population in Babylonian times being what, several million people?) We should be thinking on the Shinto or Animist model (if you need a modern example, look at the Exalted RPG) where there are spirits for everything. Of course the spirit of the oak tree out back doesn't have that much power to give, the spirit of the ocean or the sun however... There are also non-natural spirits, comparable to demons and angels and elementals and so on and so forth, ancestral spirits and more. These are all going to vary on the pole of benign, malicious and uncaring.

That said the spirits aren't human. A spirit that delights in death, pain and fear doesn't care who you do it to as long as it's done. It literally does not give a shit if it's your mother whose heart you ripped out, or the bandits who killed your wife and sold your kids into slavery. Either way works. The spirit of happiness and light doesn't care who you do good to, if you singly handily support an orphanage of made up of children of your nations worse enemies or if you reform your own system with free health care so there are more healthy soldiers to crush your enemies. Spirits are like that.

[Earning it via ordeal...how? Who sets up the ordeal, and how does that differ functionally from service? If it's a spirit either way, what does the spirit gain from setting up an ordeal as opposed to locking a human into lifelong servitude?/quote]

Good question, the answer is no one is setting up the ordeals. It seems to be for lack of a better term, a mechanic part of the rules of magic. They differ a bit from culture to culture and even person to person, but tend to require alot of privatization and sacrifice. Some friendly spirits actually taught humanity about ordeals, but you don't need to deal with a spirit to do one. Let me be blunt, doing this has a damn good chance of killing you and will most certainly scar and mark you for life. You have to really want this. For example, a Sun Dance would make a good basis for part (note, PART) of an ordeal. Sometimes a quest (which will come to you in a vision) will be part of it.

But after the ordeal, the magic user is a free agent with his own native magical powers.

Minx again wrote:how reliable is magic in gaining information, stuff like scrying and such? Also, how easy/hard is it to block or fool them?

Keep in mind that scrying is asking a spirit "go look over there and tell me what you see." Spirits can be fooled or confused or blocked or even bribed to go away. So the answer is... very easy. To throw in some folklore, various herbs and spices can be used.

So eventually we probably do end up with a sorcerous population with anywhere from one third or less of non-mages born in any given generation. Of the ones not born to the craft, it can still be obtained, and that gets us something of a scenario akin to that one Turtledove series where most everybody is magical, the name of which eludes me.

That means that initially we're going to end up seeing various magical analogues to modern technology and eventually beyond, but I do come back to where we're going to end up with certain quantities of ignorance in areas where there just flat-out isn't the drive to understand things that already work. Sure, as society normalizes around this new structure you'll have plenty of people researching theoretical subjects that aren't life-critical, but the priorities for 'life critical' will be so very different for this bunch than it is for ours.

Long Answer: If you have a Daddy Wizard and Mommie Wizard, then most of the time (somewhere between 75 to 90%, I'll have to check something).

That would depend on the the genetics but... Something like 75-100%

Not all wizards are equal however, some are just better or stronger then others. This is alot like being born with a talent, it's not equally spread out and the talent levels of your parents won't stop you from being born magically weak. I'm sure my answers are giving CT nightmares now.

Not really. Someone can be magically weak for any number of reasons. The genetics controlling magic itself might just be binary yes or no to magic, but other personality traits (such as a short attention span, lack of raw willpower, not being capable of thinking on one's feet, whatever) might make someone relatively strong or weak for any number of reasons mechanistically.