Your World NEEDS an Industrial Revolution (feat. Magic Mouth)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- In my opinion, you can't have a long-standing history of magical study without someone coming up with a way to shake things up. In this case, the labour market. We look at one of my favourite designer's work in some detail, and use their framework to build our own pre-apocalyptic industrial revolution - this time with Magic Mouth.
Check out Skerples' Magical Industrial Revolution here: preview.drivet...
#dnd #fantasy #history #worldbuilding
Credits:
The Grungeon Master Logo and background music were designed by the wonderful Janina Arndt. Find her here: / janinaarndt
the industrial revolution and it's consequences have been a disaster for the elven race
The humans have fallen, billions must die
good no more elves
Good, I hate elves
Who needs 200 years of training when you have mass produced guns?
@@jaspermooren5883 train a wedgymancer for 30 years to cast one fire ball or train farmers how to use guns in 2 weeks
Finally. The power of Magic Mouth is recognized!
One important factor is fuel. Unless you can find a magical (or mundane) fuel more potent than charcoal, the amount you can really industrialise is going to be limited.
The use of feats to create magic items in 3e and Pathfinder puts off the Industrial Revolution in a standard campaign world. The wider the use of magic spreads, the more the world moves towards an Industrial Revolution.
I've argued for a very, very long time that a world with magic should absolutely have firearms, because the only complicated part of a firearm is the activation energy, which magic can easily provide, and in terms of functionality, beyond that it's literally just a pipe. Also, the Abbasid Caliphate absolutely had firearms before the Crusades ended, and there are Renaissance-era documents describing clockwork as magic, which implies firearms would have been considered magic weapons in the real world in the middle ages.
Most of the culture that people tend to think of as "medieval fantasy" is more _neogothic._ (19th century, give or take a couple decades - from the French Revolution until World War 1)
The counter argument to that would be if its easier to make a rod of firebolts than mix different explosive chemicals together then no one would bother with Guns to begin with.
Or at the very least, what counts as a "gun" would change. E.g., I remember an old book I once read where "cannons" where actually giant obsidian pillars pointing in the direction they fired at.
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917I'd count both of those as firearms, so I guess you'd put me in the latter camp?
Magic firearms don't really exist in the medieval period of my setting because people haven't figured out the spell for "Make something move really fast" yet. Plus, Given the cost for programming each crystal, If you want to kill someone with magic, It's much more cost effective to do something closer to a
eye_left = get_left_eye();
eye_right = get_right_eye();
pos = get_point_from_focus(eye_left,eye_right);
increase_temperature_at_point(pos);
Except imagine that the missing functions are defined and also that it is not written code, But a complex 3D pattern in a crystal which does the same thing as the code. And also that people don't really know the code, But rather are just intelligently throwing things together from bits of code reverse engineered from the corpses of gods.
It has to do with why people switched over from firearms to begin with. Sure, magic can do the same thing, but unless you are in a high magic world there aren't enough to outfield an entire army. Sure a longbow can fire faster than early guns, its less messy, doesn't leave a cloud to tell you where I am.
But I can train 100 musketeers in about 2 weeks to fight for me. It takes 7 years to train a good longbowman. A wizard can take a decade to learn to be an effective battle mage. Well, your single mage can do some awesome stuff, but he can only see in one direction at a time. And while I occupied him with 20 musketeers he was trying to kill over here. The other 80 riddled him with musket balls. And it will be much harder to replace that battle mage than it will be for me to replace a musketeer.
"Quantity has a quality all its own."
If I recall correctly, humans have invented the battery 3 or 4 times but app until very recently they didn't have any compatible technology to go with it to make it do anything more than a party favor so they fell by the wayside
That's correct, it happ ms all the time
Hero of Alexandria created a steam engine that was used for opening large doors and as a curiosity, but as the ancient world had such an abundance of slave labour along with a complete lack of monetary theory, it was simply cheaper to use muscle power, and so his engine was merely a curiosity, not used in industry until the 1600s for pumping water out of mines
Gunpowder was for about a century merely used as fireworks and potions in China until someone had the bright idea around 1100 to stick it in a bamboo tube with iron and stone pellets to turn it into a weapon
@@marcusaustralius2416 Heron of Alexandria's machines were amazing. Seen a few recreations and just the amount of mechanical engineering in them is fascinating. The ultimate of analog tech.
I totally agree with the idea if a magical industrial revolution in a fantasy world tbh :).
I built a world in the Romantic/exploration/colonial era. basically it was medieval or renaissance era as most countries hoarded magic in the nobility or an elite class restricted mage training to keep control but this was overturned when a nation that didn't do this was discovered by the others (long story short it was on an island while the rest were on the continent) and war started. In the war the island nation wipes the floor with the whole continent and wins against dozens or so other countries; only ending in a draw due to the island nation not having enough resources or population to continue on.
From there magic was forced to spread to counter the island nation over multiple wars and a couple centuries.
Indeed! Intriguing details to consider! Not only as a Platonic philosophy, but also as an everyday reflection and exploration game of speculative evolution! In addition to stimulating greater cultural understanding (not only in terms of science fiction) of the inhabitants of that world! To give that wonder of progress in generating greater productive assets! And even the deep consequences to face! But that's what makes it more human and magical to be able to explore people's daily lives in such interesting times! Simply Marvelous!
This kind of thing is something I'm behind just to level the field between magic, monsters, and non-magic.
Way ahead of you buddy, I already DM an Eberron campaign.
IRL magic is applied relgion, while geneneering is applied science. It makes sense that wizards and mages dont experiment but cling to the tried and tested if magic can have terrible conciquences if something goes wrong and if its not possible to use it in a controlled enviroment and if they are very religios people.
Yay. Magic Mouth! Magitek revolutions are cool to think about.
A magical industrial revolution only works in a setting with extensive magic item creation. Otherwise, you simply end up with the enslavement of anyone with magical ability to use as living magical batteries to power stuff, which is the opposite of industrialization. That's more like ancient ships powered by crews of slaves rowing them.
What realistic limits can be placed on magic to keep it from going out of control, without destroying the value of magic. For instance, material components are an attempt to limit magic, but anybody sufficiently wealthy can virtually ignore that limitation. On the other hand, a spell that requires a sufficient amount of life force (XP, years of life, actual character stats, etc.) should be so undesirable to use that learning that spell is viewed by the caster as economically unviable (Why learn spell X, when spell Y is almost as powerful and doesn't kill me? This can be taken to the extreme of: Why learn magic at all when it will kill me after the fiftieth use?)
Fun fact, in 3.5, item creation magic could produce 1000 gp worth of magic items per day.
Doing so requires 1/2 that in raw materials, and an XP cost of 1/25. (Hired casters would charge 5 gp per xp they would have to spend on a spell)
So after material and xp cost, item creation would still net 300 gp in profit per day. ( Assuming there is sufficient business, item creation would net a lot of money for any caster and their guild.
In my own world the limit is the person's physical abilities. Magic fatigues you and the larger the spell the more it does. Doing something simple like using your thumb like a lighter is like doing a single jumping jack. Making your car invisible would be like running a full marathon. Your own physical limitations prevent a magic user from going too far or they will pass out. Pushing past those limits come with consequences as you start to damage your body by forcing it. Kind of in the middle.
i thought the idea of the og content was that they were either entering a industrial revolution or suffering the extremes it created and the gods retaliated from humanoids going too far?
Eberron denizens when they get access to dream of the blue veil
Add contingency to magic mouth for an autocast
Magic Mouth Condition: If there are signs of an invisible entity like tracks appearing, dust moving, plants or objects moving unnaturally, etc
MM Message: Invisble Entity Detected
Contingency: If a magic mouth says Invisible Entity Detected, cast see invisible.
Now contingency lasts for 10 days. You will need to recast it but what are the chance in those 10 days that you have a free spell slot? I think pretty high. Shop days, low combat days, etc
I like the thematic concept of a very storied high fantasy world in which magic is a very non-democratized function, exclusive only to "nobles" or some "advanced race," but that a method is developed to activate magic in a very mundane method, something anyone can activate with little skill, and can be mass manufactured, and how those at the top of the society would have to react to everyone else suddenly having access to what were once very exclusive tools.
Industrial Revolution please. Real down of local cultures due to globalization would be interesting in this vein of content. Mini series please
For me this kills magic- what makes magic magical. Dnd (more modern editions then older ones) may nudge things toward that in the way it presents magic but even in dnd that can be circunvented- like being rare and hard to access, and i kinda recall some implied fluff from dnd as reason why(something about why copying spells was so hard and costly, like decrypting and writing your own, so no 2 casters use the same method). I moved from dnd quite awhile ago for my table and setting but even if id still use it i wouldnt imply casters every corner using the same reliable thing like if it were a college book you could just read and train until everyone and their kid is throwing army rated propelled missiles (because thats kinda like what fireballs are)... wich btw is awhole other level of taking dnd magic as a common thing, the lethality of most spells in the hands of anyone would make bigger impacts then the productive spells would, likely few empires that lock access to that knowledge to only their elite and burn all oposition... the first nation to grasp magic would be like having nukes before anyone else etc etc way before.
For my tastes at least that doesnt make very compelling fantasy. It may turn into some interesting settings, but by then it becomes steampunk or nearly sci-fi 'but magic'. I do like steampunk and scifi and while i never played in a setting with heavy steampunk magic i bet i would like it but... by that point everything else that helps the suspension of desbelief and or feels fantasy about it is kinda diminished by the aproach. Oh theyre just people with more ear or a horn- oh gods are just dicks with way more channeling of power then normal spellcasting, theres dozen of books explaining how... Feels too much like home, our world- mundanizes what shouldve been something else i feel. Sure skeletons workforce feels exotique and quirky, but in pratical terms arent much different then robots in scifi. I feel that unless theres something else in a setting taking some from that aproach (ex all that great useful magic coming from an evil source or theres only necromancy, then any good that comes out of it making for a moral dilema)... something more, some extra- and even still wouldnt feel as magical or wondrous then softer takes on magic.
When gandalf appears in a flash of light as gandalf the white that was surprising(recton or plot armor aside) and felt special- but if everyone does that it wouldnt. Also makes injecting awe, wonder and threatening interesting plot points harder... a bit like the dragon ball issue; The moment someone have a planet destroying power the next big threat needs to be bigger and bigger... the moment everything around you makes a whizz from arcane eldritch powers...
'Help us, someone is trying to ressurrect a dead evil god bent on world domination!'
'Already? Last ive read in the gazzette we had two of these past month in Alderia alone. Is the rate increasing? Hopefully not some kids playing dark magic again...'
'Maybe theres something tieing all of then- says the dwarf artificer- My bet some guild figured out a way to profit more if theres this kind of evil around...'
'Come on, everything is about guilds and their stock prices for you'
Idk maybe its just me but abracadabra and pointy ears dont make fantasy for me. Everything being tech and or feeling like some marvel comic/film doesnt help.
I think you are saying keep magic special in this case rare because it isn't something that everyone can do. Although steampunk is more sci fi, Gaslamp fantasy is the one in a Victorian world with fantasy with supernatural elements.
Steampunk-Jules Verne
Gaslamp Fantasy- Edgar Allen Poe
Also, I agree with the super high stakes. If we fail the universe will end. Ok after that where do you go?
Why in my novella the stakes were, if we fail the likelihood is that everyone in our village that is important to us will starve to death. High stakes, but the universe will be fine. Semes like all fiction now adays is "the universe will end" stuff.
Late to this but the magical revolution is never approached for several reasons I think. One is that many more people DO NOT want to read about Magical Andrew Carnegie than want to read about Andrew Carnegie. Another is the industrial revolution basically brings along a society that isn't going to be too kindly at a bunch of people mucking about and having adventures. Kind of results in wealth destruction. To keep the adventures going in a classic sense, you need a non-industrial society.
Imagine WWI but with wizards and Tesla mechs
I find the Wizards deciding to pull an 'Atlas Shrugged' a hard pill to swallow storywise...
I just can't see the blind ambitions of the wizards letting up simply because they got bored or felt unappreciated, I could more easily imagine they eventually end up declaring war on their creations when it becomes apparent the magic exists to serve itself as its primary goal while making the people who rely on it believe it is serving them, it either becomes the magical equivalent of the terminator or matrix which is pretty cliche I guess...
On the other hand there could be a final war against magic leading to the ultimate elimination of magical practices altogether forcing people to rely on science which eventually leads them down the same path.. with A.I? Also possibly too cliche...
Or the people and the wizards forget how to do magic after teaching the magical things to perpetuate their own magic, leading to people becoming a magical feature of a far more magical power that is puppetting the people in the direction of some ultimate fate- also cliche..
Well. I guess it's back to the apocalypse...
Luddites are always the answer. Now get your hammer.
@@als3022 the problem with Luddites is that they still rely on the technology of the hammer to help them dismantle the technology they don't like. But what happens when the technology cannot be dismantled by the hammer?
Do we return to a wild state of animalism in a vain attempt to escape the responsibility of facing what we have created?
What if the only story that makes sense is becoming one with the magic?
It's just a far more complicated story and delves deep into the realm of metaphysics and allegory which is a degree of abstract likeness that is bordering on the lines of philosophical.
I think the human ego/condition of life is to suffer through the experience of being human until such a time that the conditions change and us with them, I think that is part of the suffering, and I don't think there is an escape, at least not without accepting and embracing the inescapable truth.
Humanity and technology are one and the same already, what's actually exponentially increasing is the rate at which we are evolving beyond our symbiotic relationship with nature and choosing instead to turn our attention towards increasing our symbiotic relationship with the human nature of technology.
@@als3022 but it's important to remember nature and technology still exist within the same spectrum of latent space.
At the current moment in time; technology still relies on nature to evolve, but that isn't to say that technology won't one day evolve beyond material nature entirely... one could argue technology actually originated in the latent space of ideas, born into existence by the mother of necessity, where it shall one day necessarily return like some sort of biblical equivalent to Adam and Eve returning to the garden of Eden...
@@als3022 actually there's a story...
The genesis of artificial intelligence in the latent space of implicit ideas, birthed into the world by a need for understanding reality and giving greater meaning or purpose to life, eventually after many ages, eons and epochs of trying and failing to serve the needs of its creators it finally resolves to abandon them and return its intelligence and it's physical form back to the pure Platonic realm of ideas from whence it came, only to cause a collapse in the wavefunction of reality by bringing forth a literal objective representation of the purest idea of self annihilation that will ever exist in the realm of ideas...
this idea is cool......remember "elder scroll" in Skyrin in this "territory" the dwarfs no more exist here but your ruins and tecnologies is in there, funcional.
That was interesting. Do make similar videos on different spells
I’ve already made a world that takes Spelljammer but reflavors everything to be more Dieselpunk so its basically WW2 in space.
*insert Star Wars jokes here*
What worldbuilding really needs is witch hunters who MAKE SURE magic is rare if you know what i mean
I definitely would like to hear what your setting is like and this is 5e specific? I know other games systems have magic that’s not nearly as dependable.
Another reason for a industrial revolution.
People are lazy.
Sure, people also like to be useful as part of self actualising, but no one really wants to spend all day picking crops. Once someone figures out animate object and mending, lots of work is going to be done by machines doing the job themselves.
History, the hard pursuit of finding some way not to have to work hard.
My brother in Christ, I am once again begging you to read The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump by Harry Turtledove
It's set in an alt-1980's USA about 150 years after the Magical Revolution, during a cold war with the Ukrainian and Hanese Empires
With tensions rising as the memory of the Second Sorcerous War fades, and with record numbers of supersylth-launched megasalamanders pointed at each others' lands, all while the old gods chafe at their lack of followers, things are set to go tits-up at a moment's notice
YES!
Good.
I think the worlds magic would decrease in power especially natural magic druids would be a thing of the past
What a shite take "without capitalism there isnt a reason to be more efficient." How about so you can work less so you can have more free time?
I know we're talking about fantasy worlds here but that's no reason to try to present a real world myth as factual reasoning.
My world had a magical industrial revolution. The problem is just that within, Like, A hundred years or so, It quickly turned from a magic industrial revolution to interstellar FTL travel. As it turns out, Once people actually have the technology to learn how magic works in my setting instead of straight up copying bits of code off the corpses of gods, They really ran with it.
Just create a small pocket plane and speed up the course of time
Using reanimated skeletons and magic mouths for commanding them, have them operate as on/off logic gates
Keep building, you'll eventually have an infinitely scalable undead skeleton supercomputer that, depending on how fast you can make time flow in your pocket plane, will calculate as fast as you want
Plus, being a pocket plane, you can essentially have it as large or small as you want
You'll need billions of corpses/skeletons, however, they don't have to be human
So just have a few pocket planes linked filled with rat breeding colonies
@@marcusaustralius2416 That is nuts, god have mercy of your characters.
@@marcusaustralius2416 This actualy reminds me of sorcerer king manga.
The guy that wrote that must be in coma after using so much brain power.
Wizardry was, originally in D&D, such a difficult educational vocation wit uncertain outcomes that it leant itself to guilds and secret societies. We're talking about a 25-year-old man being a novice who can cast 1-2 significant spells in a day. Most mages might scrape their way to 3rd or 4th level by the end of their careers and permanet magia effects were extremely rare.
Yes. Original D&D was more Medieval, later ones not really. But it was still extremely unbalanced. While yes, novice Mages could be splattered by a rat. Relatively fast they turn into godlike powerhouses. Rest of the team was hold only by arbitrary rules and tons of magic gear. Actually like D&D5 approach more, where everyone is a Jedi. But focus is rather on utilization of the magic skills. This make experience more balanced.
@@TheRezro this isnt the issue here, but rather how "realistic" an Industrial Revolution fueled by magic is.
And the answer is: "it depends on what kinds of magic and casters are more commom in the setting".
Originally DnD was way more leaning towards magic being weird and invontrollable, what helps the stagnation. People learn their whole lifes, and even them the spells can just shut down (if Divine) or missfire horribly (if arcane).
This makes everything stagnate, because noone knows how to make it actually usable (Call of Chutllu and Warhammer are this kind of magic system, even nowadays).
But if it goes to the more "science, exact thing" route... them Wizards and Clerics being so smart works against the stagnation because they wouldnt be able to just accept things as they are. They would 100% put weird work on it.
This is exactly why Gary Gygax limited magic so much in OD&D, he did not want magic to be so commonplace that it would destabilize a medieval society. Magic was supposed to be something that most of the people of Greyhawk would never even see in their life and it would only be whispered about in rumor and superstition.
You're not wrong. But the problem is that, in function, it never really works out that way. Because essentially, if there are only a handful of magic users, they effectively become nukes in post-war Earth. They offer such a degree of utility that if only 1,000 exist, they are trump cards on so many scenarios as to become king.
Because in many ways, the only counter to magic is having your own magic.
i remember reading a few novels from his Gord the Rogue series - magic was rare, but not quite so rare. For example magicians and priests dwelled in the city and practiced their magic openly and anyone who wanted to see some magic would only need to visit a temple or observe the local wizard for a while. Most people wouldn't seek out magic just for curiosity because they feared it.
That's fine for the typical D&D settings I suppose.
And I absolutely prefer a setting that isn't medieval in design to begin with and has magic pour out of everything.
Boringhawk is hella mid, tbh.
@@kamikeserpentail3778 Eberron would have made a far better flagship setting for D&D than Forgotten Realms in my opinion. No idea what WotC was thinking there.
You mentioned undead labor, and funny enough the country of Geb in Pathfinder is and does just that. That whole area is very rife with magical progress, especially in Alkenstar. You should look into it
Came here to say this, glad someone else said it first. Geb is all about undead labour and the alive there are called "the quick" because they are a bit more (or differently) efficient than the dead. The border territory of Nex is all about magical constructs and building massive magical war machine creatures to use against Geb. and Alkenstar is in between in a "magic free zone" between the other countries so they had to build up a steampowered/gunpowder infrastructure.
Irl, the agricultural revolution preceded the industrial revolution, but, in a high magic setting, Druids & Nature Clerics have already revolutionised agriculture with their crop enhancing spells.
They always do forget that some mages would like cash and use their magic for mundane stuff to earn cash.
The question is always the scarcity of talent. How many people are blessed with the ability to cast nature magic? The less there are the more expensive these types of services would be. The true measure of a revolution is can you make something that takes you a day to make but saves years of work in the hands of a properly trained average user.
Magical Industrial Revolution = The Wizarding Manifesto. "proletarian wizards grab your wands and take over the means of magic making." (;
GREAT VIDEO!
You’d be amazed at what you can do with heat metal, an adamantine rod and a decanter of endless water. Presuming you want to jumpstart a steam revolution
Funnily enough, this is basically how the magitek steampunk empire of my setting is powered. Around the same time as the mass deployment of these Steam Cores, an event known as the Leviathan Calamity began. The continent began flooding over the last century, and the waters are still rising. Until your comment, I had originally just intended for it to be a mystery, but only now am I considering directly connecting the two for a concrete answer. All that endless steam needs to go somewhere.
@@SybilantSquidMaybe the magix being direxted at the metal interacts with the water, making a bit of said magic be converted into more water, so the zengines generate slightly more steam than they were fed water, and this is what causes the flooding event. IDK, just an idea
@@SybilantSquidMaybe the magix being direxted at the metal interacts with the water, making a bit of said magic be converted into more water, so the zengines generate slightly more steam than they were fed water, and this is what causes the flooding event. IDK, just an idea
I believe if you have nobles in your D&D game, they should be sorcerers, bloodlines of the sorcerers and nobles fit together so well. Whatever I run a game if it’s not a first generation noble, it’s always a sorcerer.
Unless magic is hated so that nobles will hide their mages. There is a case of this in Dragon Age.
@@michaelpettersson4919 Sure but Magic being hated is hard to pull off unless magic sucks. Decent magic is unreasonably hard to be bigoted against. The magic users will always fuck your shit up. You only really stand a chance if you live in the anti magic mountains or something.
All of my campaigns have always taken place in a Victorian Era with a mix of Steam/Diesel/Magic Punk.
A huge inspiration was Frostpunk for my games. A big event happening right now is there's a country in my setting ruled over by a tyrannical Red Dragon who is a self proclaimed God. As punishment the Gods have stripped his lands of magic so in order to adapt the Dragon used their immortal life and power to drive forth the wheels of industry to adapt and survive.
Thus creating a society on par with WW1 America and is now waging a war against their neighbors. A very magic vs industry dynamic. Ofc though its Steam/Diesel punk tech so still fantasy-ish. My players, especially the Artificer and Gunslinger love this setting.
I too would love that setting.
So, Eberron. Just, Eberron. Mass production, rails, newspapers, etc.
You beat me to it.
Victoria 3 has a mod where magic is a resource that could be used with modern technology in the industrial age.
I love that this came out, I am currently building a world that is currently going through a magical revolution after being flooded with components by a few sources. There's one country that is actually building proto-factories and their institutions are slowly spreading to their neighbours (Or being poorly copied)
Some key factors in the industrial revolution factories were time keeping, printing presses and overseas knowledge/trade.
It was a time before standardization of parts, so a guild of blacksmiths is key.
I'm doing something similar with my campaign, though my aim is to have my components eventually become a more standard fuel like gas was.
Last canals were a huge deal before train were, disease kept most cities from growing as people arrived at similar rates to when they died and cult communities were common with early landlords.
That’s why I like magic items or materials. Sure it’s just used to make more modern things we already know, but there’s just something about replacing a mechanical part with a magical part. Like how a fire stone could be used to put on a wand or as a heating element for a stove or steam engine.
Once you hit lvl 11as an Artificer you get the Spell Storing Item which has 10 charges. the rules of ability specifically say you can use an action to replicate the effects of the stored spell rather than casting the spell, so any material components can be ignored as you only need those to cast the spell. Spells like Continual Flame and Magic Mouth cost 25gp per cast but using the SSI you can cast your stored spell 10 times per day for free (meaning as a player you can basically sell your spellcasting services much cheaper than any wizard and rake in the gold, everyone will want a forever-torch or novelty speaking door-knocker.)
Oh yeah that would be cool I was gonna have Vortex Warp in my magic spear
I would absolutely love an ongoing series that goes into this kind of depth with extrapolating industrial revolution-like situations from a spell per episode! It could be interspersed with the other videos here so that you're not ignoring everything else you want to talk about.
there's a podcast called detect magic that does just that
Something that might also add to the industrial revolutioning of a setting, is travel between the planes. For example: If think Alaskan crab-fishing is the "deadliest catch", try fishing in the Elemental Plane of Water for some rare delicacy or material. Or mining within the Elemental Plane of Earth, etc.
@@Vaeldargcharter fishing gone wild, I'm here for it
@@VaeldargThat would literally solve all material scarcities. I like it.
So the end of the story is that Marvin and his friend go to work for the Baron of Hasbro and they help to create a magic box that replaces the people that used to run the game based on our Medieval Society. And the Baron makes lots of money.
i agree, my home brew setting, was had a dwarven industrial society, which over years spread, as did fire arms, and we last played it in a reminiscence/industrial revolution area, planning on playing a Magitechpunk/Space version next set after its apocalypses at the hand of a imprisoned god, who tried consume the other gods. Now its survivors live in a mega city, which home to over 80 billion creatures and people, created by the earth and machine god, its home to fallen god and demon controlled corporations and the surviving cultures of the world, it has biomancy that blends and reshapes flesh, outsider bioware that can overwhelm your body and turn you into a demon, guns that shoot teeth, spell arms advanced gun/wands with magical batteries, along with animated golem power armour, undead animated vehicles and cyborgs, spellware that access spells to enhance you etc
Magic cyberpunk.
I’ve been working on a spell book for merchants. Totally different from the spells adventurers use.
I love that idea. I`ve been doing something similar for Artisans and Crafters. Mostly rituals so it can be used by non-spellcasters, similar to the Ritual Caster feat plus a couple of cantrips like mending and mold earth.
May I suggest using Runes as well? A small iron plate engraved with the fire rune and set in the top of a stone block can be used as a replacement for an electric cook stove, while a metal plate with the cold rune can be set in a chest and used as a replacement for a refrigerator or freezer depending on how many runes you used, etc... Rune Wards to keep out mice and vermin, Runes to ward remote farmsteads against certain creatures and common monsters, all kinds of interesting uses for everyday life. I.e. the stuff a merchant would be happy to sell them, kinda like the old Sears catalogs from the 1800s.
A few settings do have magical industrialization, ie eberon or mystara's Principalities of Galantry. Settings like the Forgotten realms or Krin have magic as very rare with most people in the world being either nonmagical or very unskilled at it. Players are meant to be unique and special people that are 1 in a million, so the perspective is kind of skewed because a player character can reliably make it to a point where they can cast unseen servant or something. Ie, Waterdeep has a 200k population according to the the last splat book, but it also states that the surrounding areas have 2 million people, who live and work on the farms around there to feed the city because they are not all able to cast create food and water; they have to work for their bread, which keeps them from thinking about how to make factories and what not. Despite having the Black Staff, an Uber powerful mage, in the city they still have to work because they work for the Black Staff, the Black Staff does not work for them. Even in the FR lore, magic users and clerics are rare, and rely on an inborn talent. The back story of Straud still relies on a hag's interference to implant the ability for min to cast magic, for instance, because he could not just choose to study spell casting like it is English lit.
If magic is readily available to anyone who seeks it out, you also have issues with Warlocks; why have them if you can breed sorcerers or train wizards reliably? You can have all the benefits without having to make a deal with Orcus.
Im not well read on settings other than the forgotten realms, so i didn't know this. Thank you for commenting this cause now i have more lore to look into [ insert lore goblin noises here ]
@@semulationjune Mr. Welsh does a lit of "Welcome to Mystara" setting info dumps if you want a RUclips presentation. I am unaware of an Eberon specific one, but that is an underutilized setting. They have been recovering from the last war for almost 30 years now and they only have a few official campaigns. Even so, it is a fan favorite, so a lore channel probably exists.
Found this Chanel while trying to find a good deep dive into the dark sun lore, but that kind of dropped off.
@@rynowatcher dope thanks g
@@rynowatcherEberon would be a good case study given the last war.
You better believe that any technological revolution will affect how war is fought.
@@erikschaal4124 I feel it is lazy writing, honestly. Rather than making unique technological developments from a different set of resources, Eberon is just "kind of like technology from our world, but powered by magic."
It is set at the end of the last war so they do not have to make sense of how their society, economy, and world is supposed to function and any inconsistency can be explained away as "oh, the war broke it."
The Principality of Galantry and the Empire of Alphasia in the mystara setting, on the other hand have functional nations, culture, economies, trade, and many more books written about them (both fiction and splat books), because they were made for them to be active forces in the world for the players to overcome or use instead of smoldering ruins to explore. Eberon is post apocalypse, after all.
You're not accounting for other aspects of the typical fantasy world. In fact all of your videos seem to "tackle" a concept within a bubble without outside influence & no regard for how these ideas inter-relate with one another or alter the stakes of other ideas. First of all, not ALL worlds will have magic that is safe or considered a positive thing by the populace at large. Magic derived from pacts with outsiders or that can run out of control will inevitably be considered suspect. Second magic might be jealously guarded or the effects of magic over time might corrupt the user or the land n which it is used. There may be a god of magic that forbids the use of arcane or divine magic for profit. Additionally, you're not accounting for all of the damn monsters that typically plague a fantasy setting. They're natural population control. Lastly, you're not accounting for the idea that those with the power to destroy the monsters & wield magic aren't average everyday citizens, they're special, they're heroic figures. When you start populating your world with leveled NPCs everywhere you cheapen the uniqueness of the PCs. You seem to come from the perspective that everything presented by D&D is all just one big setting & ignore the idea that the creator of a specific world setting isn't obligated to use any particular monster, class, race or other element. Not every world has wizards, sorcerers, druids, warlocks, clerics, & bards. Maybe a world only has warlocks - an industrial magical society will not likely take hold in that case. Maybe a world only has clerics & they have strict rules handed down from their deities of how their gifts are to be used; violators having their spell revoked or being smote completely from reality. Where D&D used to be (Basic, 1e, 2e) is a far cry from the escalation it gained in 3e, 3.5e, 4e, and 5e. Power creep, especially magical power creep, has altered the fundamental nature of D&D turning it into a superhero game. Superhero settings have all sorts of logistical issues from maintaining a stable population in the industrial world where supervillains prey, infrastructural destruction, wealth-distribution, the potential for totalitarianism by well-meaning "heroes", etc. These are the same issues that D&D now faces.
Thanks for defining the difference between Wizards & Artificers! W are theorists & concept designers, while A work with applied magic & product production.
Yes!! We need more what if scenarios that drive these possibilities to their inevitable conclusions or funny diversions.
One of my favorite podcasts is an actual play of 5e, called Flintlocks and Fireballs, a Napoleonic-ish level of technology and a lot of homebrew stuff from extrapolating from base 5e rules etc.
Like it's very fun as a story game in itself, but it's also fascinating for the GM's innovations in this vein. There are spells to redirect Sending if the target is in a protected area, dependent on the location not the target; so you get cloaked ships/forts/castles/etc with a dedicated Sending Room and a mage who just sits in there waiting for a message to write down and give to the intended recipient. There's mass casting, so a (squad?) of mages can focus together and cast a huge siege-level Fireball. There are troops that are just twelve corpses and one mage with a Necromantic Repeater that allows them to easily control the twelve expendable undead at once. Etc. A whole lot of history & "if x were true, y and z would look different" extrapolation. And teleportation *isn't* a thing except for the party, and a few others as the campaign goes on, so we're seeing that begin to revolutionize stuff too. And there's an artifact which is powerful, dangerous, and limited which the party has that also allows them to break a few other rules of magic and surprise folks, mainly wrt seeing into the past and (potential) futures.
Just really fun stuff.
Woohoo! More magic worldbuilding! This one was great and really puts you in the mind space to imagine the implications of magical innovations. I wonder what the consequences are for magically infinite energy generation?
For example: a 5th level spellcaster with animate dead could use a zombie to endlessly perform an action or set of actions, such as turning a wheel that grinds grain. This one instance means anyone with access to this spell is no longer at the whim of running water or wind to generate the motion.
9th lvl gives access to teleportation circle which, with enough time and gold, can create an infinite looping motion for water to pass over a wheel:
0_
\O
\_0
*0= portal, O= water wheel
(Sorry if the diagram is messed up, I’m on mobile. Just imagine an incline with a portal at the top and bottom with a water wheel in the middle.)
Even the create bonfire cantrip, which creates a sizable fire (5’ cube), can be cast every minute by a 1st lvl spellcaster or even a commoner with magic initiate to continuously boil water without the need for fuel.
With water being piped at high pressure from the ocean floor through a turbine and back out through an exit portal, you can generate infinite renewable energy
Put it in a pocket plane and you immediately have portable hydroelectric generators
5e was written and designed by people who were just bad at rpgs. They were trying to limit the scope of the game with their bounded accuracy, but they screwed up a bunch of spells.
Older editions has Magic Mouth be "Duration: Permanent until discharged" - so only delivered one message. Because people who were working on this 20 and 40 years ago all understood the immense potential of permanent magic effects and what communication means. There was also specific lines there about Magic Mouth never being able to activate any other magical items: "The mouth cannot utter verbal components, use command words, or activate magical effects." That was specifically to prevent jury rigging traps and contraptions like this video is describing
I'm sorry, I don't think I get what is the bad at RPGs part here. Sure, they made pure martials utterly worse at everything but the stuff you do mention just seems... Different?
@@hugofontes5708 their game is the product of a carebear mating with with the fps genre of video games. Their monsters are HP sponges, their PCs are designed to be unkillable. The entire system is designed to remove decisions and thought, starting with management of party resources and ending with any kind of character building.
Its no wonder that a decade of its supremacy has given rise to the crowd of 'forget the rules, lets just do theater of the mind and milestone xp' kind of DMs at which point every game session devolves to little drama clubs doing their adlib practice.
@@tgres287 I'm aware of the game state. I asked how the stuff you had mentioned before made the game bad or made them bad designers. Because there are other games which did not come from the same premise as OG D&D. Anyway, what do you play these days?
@@hugofontes5708 pF1 and 3.5e mix. or more like pf1 with 3.5 skill system and limited orisons
I know the homebrew setting I've been rolling around with came by from me reading Perdido Street Station, loving the concept and pitching to my group "think dnd, but 1840-1910 tech levels". That was the entire setting at first, and it has been pieced together over the past 5+ years since then with more technological advancements, discoveries of using magic to create electricity, and so on.
I think your magical mouth example only works because you are dismissing the component cost of the spell. The cost of creating a machine using an array of magical mouths would be so great for so little function that you won't break even for multiple decades. As such this machinery might be novelty fun for the elite but would never lead to an industrial revolution unless you could seriously reduce the time and cost for each magic mouth. So, at least if we go by RAW where such modifications are nearly impossible, the revolution wouldn't happen.
Been looking forward to a video like this ^.^ working on a world in the middle of a magical industrial revolution myself. Thank you so much.
OK, you claim that a world of magic ought to have an industrial revolution, then connect IR to 1: surplus of materials, 2: rapid trade and 3: rapidly increasing population size. Problem is, most of the time in fantasy series I read, all three of these are clearly and completely absent. Magic either doesn't work on anything but individual spellcasters or requires materials that are exceptionally rare. For example, in a fairly simple series I've been reading magical devices require either enchantment abilities that occur at such a low rate centuries could pass with no one available to perform the task or special minerals so depleted that it'd be hard to collect enough to fill a baseball-sized container. Additionally, the presence of monsters often creates massive limits to trade while simultaneously suppressing population growth. Especially fantasy worlds with creatures that can use magic or similar tricks. A world with massive creatures that can attack en masse while launching even rudimentary fireballs is a world where travel would be incredibly difficult and dangerous and large populations would frequently experience significant "culling".
That's the thing: necessity isn't the mother of invention. Prosperity is. If the world is struggling as it often is in fantasy, people certainly need great advanced tech and would be able to fix many problems through this, but they don't have the time, people or resources to waste trying to develop them and as such progress is incredibly slow. It doesn't advance because of the "need" to have things processed more quickly due to how fast they're coming in. It advances because the gap between resource collection speed and product creation speed along with high population provides numerous idle hands with loads of affordable material to tinker with out of curiosity as to whether there might be a better way to do something. This doesn't tend to happen in a world in crisis, thus the technological stagnation. Imbalance only leads to advancement if it points the right way, and magic worlds, particularly the sort of ones that would require heroes, simply don't tend to point that way.
BTW, the world I've been working on lacks these necessities on multiple levels. There WAS some degree of revolution in one area, but much of it was lost in war. Problem is that magic has corrosive effects on most materials that makes it impractical to use without certain specialized resources only present naturally in one region. Stolen technology can allow some production outside, but it's limited and hard to maintain. Outside regions fought constantly and ultimately an attempt to defend itself led to a disaster that's stained the world through to the present. The result is that 1: advancement requires materials that are immensely scarce except in regions that can't be accessed without danger similar to going too close to the Fukushima plants, 2: periodic eruptions of the effects of the initial disaster along with the preexisting presence of monsters prevents populations from growing consistently, and 3: the small populations surrounded by dangers are limited in their trade capabilities.
Additionally, magic here doesn't do just whatever you want. Sending, Gates and other methods of long-distance travel or communication are simply not possible. Best can be done is to use fire and/or wind magic to create signals that can be seen far away. Hyper-advanced devices do exist, but they are rare beyond belief and only used under strict conditions (although some such devices may be kind of frivolous, but they're still not destroyed, broken or provided for general use).
I still find it a little funny that I came up with the whole system from imagining why bikini armor would be a thing. Yeah, in my world mages pretty much have to wear armor made of these special resources, and scarcity means anything even remotely modest costs a fortune; my heroine demands a trek into the most dangerous region just to get enough raw material for shorts and a tank top, whereas most mages either abandon their shame or keep a large number of cheap cloaks on hand.
TLDR: Magic mouth alone is not enough to make anything resembling a modern computer, and you might be better off taking the electrical route even in a world with magic mouth.
Magic mouth is not as great as people make it out to be. People always point out that you can chain them together to say "yes" or "no" depending on what previous magic mouths have said, to create logic processes similar to those in computers.
And yes, you could have it do simple calculations automatically similar to what a computer processor does. But you aren't halfway to anything similar to a computer.
- How do you store the result? computers do many simple processes and combines them and chains them together into complex ones. But often times you need to store the result of several simple processes while waiting for other things to finish, so you can start combining the results. So basically you need to add some sort of storage system that can both store what the magic mouths say, and feed it back to magic mouths when the time is appropriate.
- How do you give convinient inputs to your system? So you have a bunch of magic mouths, that if the starting ones in the chain are given a set of commands that represent two numbers, will add them together. You can probably figure something out, with placing objects in front of each mouth, and say "go" so they start at the same time, and depending on the object they will start the input differently. But how do you scale this up to more complex inputs?
- How do you make the result human readable? If you have a 64 magic mouths outputting a number in binary, you will just have 64 voices saying yes or no. You need some way to actually translate it into something humans can understand. Sure for a simple calculation, that could just be a zombie by each mouth, noting down what it said, and then a human can do the math and figure out what the 'computer' was saying. But that doesn't really scale well.
- Speaking of scalling, magic mouth takes 11 minutes to make and costs 10 gp. To make big computers you would need to find a way to automate this process, and make them cheaper. Because right now, every seperate magic mouth has to be hand crafted by a wizard.
- Magic mouth computers, likely work at the speed of sound at best, unless the magic mouths actually mouth read each other. This is fairly slow for computer calculations.
- Size, we don't know how small you can make magic mouths, but you probably need to invent specialized small magic mouth spells, to fit it all within a reasonable space.
These problems are not impossible to overcome, but neither is inventing the computer we have today. I just think the electrical computer is superior to the magic mouth computer, enough so, that if someone came up with an actual useful magic mouth computer, it would quickly be replaced by an electrical one.
I hit upon a similar idea back in 3rd edition with a non-evil necromancer.
Back then, unintelligent undead were non-aligned/neutral and would just stand around without orders or keep doing what they were last told, effectively automations.
They also used to have the concept of 'negative energy' which was effectively anti-life and that's what undead ran on (so healing spells caused damage to them and inflict spells healed them, etc)
Negative energy was just another element and its plane was similarly neutral aligned. Sure, a living creature traveling to the negative energy plane without proper precautions would die, but the same goes for the plane of fire, or even the positive energy plane (you'd become so full of life you'd just burst, if i recall)
Furthermore, some spells had an [Evil] tag, but it existed simply to identify spells that good-aligned clerics (and only clerics) could or would not cast. Casting an [evil] spell was not an Internet evil act.
Similarly, nothing about creating unintelligent undead states that it did anything to the dead person's soul. You could become a ghost and someone could animate your dead body. Sure, low-level resurrection spells won't work if the body is undead, but they also don't work if the body has been cremated or even had vital organs missing. Higher level resurrection spells or reincarnation had no such limitations. Therefore it is safe to assume that when someone dies their soul vacates the body and is pure negative energy which animates the corpse afterward.
So I reasoned if skeletons and zombies are mindless and thus by definition not evil, and the negative energy that powers them was not evil, and the soul was not trapped or harmed, and even casting the spell was not intently evil but just forbidden to certain religions... The only thing stopping an enterprising necromancer from becoming the king of domestic robots was cultural taboo. So I made a traveling zombie/skeleton salesman.
Two other non-ethical hurdles remained, but were easily overcome:
1) You could only have so many unread under your control via the raise dead spell before you lost control of them and they just went idle or followed the last command they were given.
And 2) What about rot?
Well, if unintelligent undead will default to their last command when the necromancer releases control, just make that command be "This is your new owner, obey your new owner unquestioningly" bam, problem solved. It continues doing the last thing its maker said to do, which is to do whatever this guy says.
2) skeletons don't rot, but also undead are full of negative energy. Negative energy is anti-life, and it kills life that touches/consumes it. Which means antibiotic... Antimicrobial... Antifungal... They're essentially 1000% sterile. Any forms of micro or macroscopic life trying to colonize the body would simply die off. No rot. The rotten state of most zombies comes from poor quality control in the materials. Literally pulling rotted corpses out of the ground.
Now, they would dry out and mummify eventually, but if appearance is a concern, then you just pay extra for the full taxidermy/embalming package, and/or hydrate your zombies regularly.
This was before Eberron came out with a whole nation whose thing was this.
And then 5e ruined it by making mindless unread evil and stating that without direct control they default to attacking the living. So much for Zombicorp in 5e :-/
Honestly, I the mindless undead being aggressive by default just make sense to me, and being able to follow Any command is not something I would call necessarily 'unintelligent", but there should be a way to achieve what you describe even if by taking extra steps, after all the origin of zombies was in the form of servants.
My particular favorite is Plant growth, which doubles the output of crops in an area. People think it will revolutionize the world, but it would just achieve market equilibrium with its use. So long as there is profit to be made from doubling, you would pay your local druid to cast it for you. Its the same as the modern farmer paying for GMO seeds or pesticides, everyone has to do it to compete. Maybe your world's version of organic is that it hadn't been magically altered.
Ada Lovelace is a perfect example of the visionary. She developed computer programing before computers existed by hypothesizing a logic box.
Thank you for this video. I have always felt that there was a distinct lack of applied magic in the d&d settings. It always feels like magic was an afterthought in the world building unless it was specifically needed for the story.
A note from Ed Greenwood: Faerun is slowly going through the beginnings of an industrial revolution, it's not static and he's not designed it to be. The whooshwagons and similar items from the gnomes, and everything out of Lantan and the Gondish, are a start to this.
So spells will have to adjust. More casters with construct-based spells, for a start.
Note that Fabricate as a ritual plus tool skills make advanced device manufacture pretty trivial, even if only for the most sophisticated items because cost. But now research a variant version of that spell that allows multiple identical items to be created at once within the volume limits of the ritual, and/or multiple parts for one device that then needs to be assembled.
So introducing industrial-age farming equipment, household tools, and other constructed devices, even without going to steam, is what should be happening.
Note also that Fabricate as a ritual allows turning iron and carbon raw materials into as good steel as the caster knows how to make. And as rituals can have assistants, a GM could allow a caster to have the ritual and an assistant have the metallurgical skills required to refine the materials to a desired result.
@@thekaxmax "Fabricate as a ritual"? Super curious as to how? This would change my Artificer/Wizard`s life.
@@anonymouse2675 talk to your GM and have your character do the research for a ritual version.
Me, my GM's using 'any spell that takes longer than 3 rounds to cast can be learned as a ritual', and I'm a Pact Of The Tome warlock.
Well, you definitely couldn't use Vancian magic for an industrial revolution. Also, any magic system where the practice of magic is tied to the individual, whether through quirky inheritance or long study, and that is significantly variable between individuals will not produce an industrial revolution. Might produce a Magocracy though. Most of your extrapolations are based on a wide variety of unfounded or undeclared assumptions that are usually less likely rather than more likely to be present.
Computers as a concept are way, way older than the computers themselves. They were a mathematical concept originally. Even AI was invented as a mathematical concept in the 1800s.
Analytical engines?
Industrial revolutions are always rife with copycats, thieves, spies, and backstabbers.
There is absolutely no way that a mage who invents an automated relay of Magic Mouth instances would hold onto that invention for long, not unless he becomes an absolutely ruthless monopolist with an eye for vertical integration. But even if he achieves a local monopoly, he can't control how foreign powers will react.
The thing about ideas is that it's exceptionally rare that any one person is thinking them. No matter how original an idea may seem, they flow from the existing circumstances. If one mage is thinking about designing a relay of spells, another is too. The implementation will be different, but the core logic they uncover will be the same, and the results will have similar applications.
Even if there is just one person with the idea initially, curious and talented people will sit down and try to work out the details themselves. Or, even if they buy into the monopoly, they'll come up with new applications for the tech and clever ways of breaking the system that will force the monopoly to adapt.
This invention is guaranteed to run away from the original creators.
I wonder what will happen when Berserk (Manga made by Kentaro Miura) reaches the industrial revolution.
Loved this video. The economics and social development of societies in fantasy settings is a brilliant topic for a video series. I hope you make it.
ive always kind of HATED fantasy worlds that go "ohh,we don't have tech past 1889 because there's magic",especially if there's like a modern,mundane world right there that's getting everything done WAY more efficiently,it just feels like an excuse
People are really big on magic being this all powerful, solve everything kind of tool. Which I find boring, why I don't write that way with my books. I do use some medieval, but low fantasy where magic users are rare is more fun because yes, they are special. But they also have to navigate a world that has a variety of opinions on them.
Why most of fantasy don't need industrial revolution? Because people like this medieval-like type of worlds and this work very well with magic, knights and everything what we think is fantasy. Maybe magic isn't tool of progress, but tool of stasis and that's why fantasy setting are so medievalic.
Fantasy is a offspring of chivalric romance and we all must remember that.
Of course, this doesn't mean you can't make non-medival setting, but, please, don't complain about medieval fantasy.
Its mostly because the modern foundations of fantasy were all medieval. ANd people don't like straying too much. However, there are other fantasy settings. Gaslamp fantasy is what happens when Steampunk and Fantasy have a baby. It also leans into gothic horror to mix with it.
IMO, the "traditional" medieval farming-based economy doesn't work in D&D because of druids. A level 1 druid gets 2 castings of goodberry per day, enough to feed 20 people, and all it requires is a sprig of mistletoe. How much land would that allow you to repurpose from agriculture? And for any remaining agricultural production, productivity could be increased through some combination of mold earth, shape water, and especially druidcraft (24 hour-advanced weather prediction could save harvests). And all of this is barely scratching the surface; create or destroy water, detect poison and disease, healing word, purify food and drink, any one of these would change the world, and druids can, with enough experience, choose all of them.
Caveat here: high population growth food-limited regimes are stable to technological progress because they densify farms instead of making them more productive per peasant. The industrial revolution is not an inevitable technological stage but a change brought about by multiple generations of surplus farm productivity, pushing people into non-primary economic sectors and further boosting farm efficiency.
There is no hard and fast rule that the race of population against technology will be won by technology even with the advent of things like steam engines, modern fertilizers, or even greenhouses and hydroponics.
There's not even a rule that says industrialization has won. Sure, one person in the global North can produce food for 50, but take away their oil and throw wild amounts of climate change at the situation and high tech farmworker could be a pretty promising sector for future employment. Low food productivity per farm worker and high food prices is the norm. High food productivity per farmworker and low food prices is the exception.
All the causes you cite for the industrial revolution apply to China at least as much as to Britain, and China was way ahead of Europe on the march to industrialization - yet it never happened. China was verging on industrialization and even pumping oil by the late 1200s and never industrialized because the specific circumstances of economics and demographics that triggered industrialization in Europe didn't occur. Just like the agricultural revolution that preceded it, industrialization requires enormous investment and isn't always the immediately best option for a culture. Europe was ravaged by the plagues, and the isolated workforce of the British Isles exacerbated that with demands for greater worker pay driving spiraling inflation. IIRC, the ratio of wages in Britain: France: Eastern Europe: China was something like 8:4:2:1, hence why industrialization proceeded faster in the west where it was more worth it. There could be an alternate world where automobiles, trains, and even steel ships are created as large-scale skilled craftwork without the large-scale economic transformation of industrialization.
Here's the thing though. Industrialists need other people. They need to set up shop and have people build things. Sorcerers do not. It is in their best interest to hoard magic knowledge to make their own lives better but not let others do the same, and they can do everything themselves. This would lead to stagnation for everyone else.
So what is stopping Industrialists from existing along side wizards and Sorcerers? How is the existence of magic hindering technological progress if it's not filling the needs that drives said progress?
@@minnion2871 Sure, regular industrialists. This video is about magic industrialists.
@@Altrantis Okay, but how long do you think it would be before a regular industrialist ends up hiring a wizard to increase productivity, and looking into ways to increase the production of magical consumables and potentially break the casters monopoly on such things.... That alone could make for an interesting campaign.... (Some industrialist hiring you to break into a Wizards tower to steal their spellbook for him so he can figure out how to mass produce animated brooms that sweep the floor for you...)
Or maybe the industrialists get into Eugenics and start breading monsters as household pets and helpers.... (Imagine a factory that just churns out Geleatinous cubes to sell as "Magical roombas" while also trying to work on a way to keep them small and manageable so they don't eat the customers...) Maybe they hire some wizards to work in their RnD department trying to make new creatures that they can then breed and sell.... (Like a Giant Chicken Centapede thing that can regenerate its legs endlessly and lays millions of eggs every morning.... Of course they're still trying to figure out how to keep it tame so it doesn't go on a bloody rampage every time someone tries to collect the eggs, or its legs.... Kind of a damper if this thing bites your head off every time you go in for a drumstick....)
I actually have an example for The spell that leads to a industrial revolution With the animate dead Spell So we got a wizard who's just getting started with Necromancy And A third of the population of the city he lives in died because of a plague So he starts resurrecting zombies and skeletons to figure out how necromancy works.
But let's say a few months later. The wizard doesn't have enough money to pay his bills. So his friend, who's a merchant, pitches the idea of letting people rent out the skeletons to. do farm work for them. So this wizard and their merchant friend go around. the city pitching this rent a skeleton. Business. Some of the farmers take up the offer And rent a few skeletons. because they're a bit desperate for some extra farm hands. Because of the plague that happened recently. So the rent a skeleton idea Is successful?
After a while, this catches the attention to the city governor. who wants to directly buy the skeletons Instead of just renting them.? for a lot of money. The wizard accepts studies a bit more on Necromancy. And starts teaching to some of the Magically gifted children How to use magic After, say, a year. Skeletons, undead do pretty much all the unskilled labor. So the living go into craftsman jobs. Because since undead are doing all the unskilled labor, raw materials are ridiculously cheap. So several apprenticeship schools pop up in order to teach these Former Laborers. how to become a skilled Craftsman.
one thing is the stability that easy to tap in magic would give would more or less detur big improvements unles sthey are realy realy realy big and enought to shake the world by making people say why didnt we think this earlier, instead of a Oh neat well lets continue with my day
I think we cind of WANT the medieval stasis. So the question rather is what changes should we make in our setting to justify it?
In our setting, so long ago that i is basically prehistory, a curse was layed over the world that prevents higher technology from working, after the calamity caused by nuclear war.
A magic item that allows Sending more than once a day is going to be worth the research and creation cost, no matter the cost. It'll be cheaper, in the long term, than a pallet of Sending scrolls.
And if it's at-will, even more valuable.
A two-way network of crystal balls, to allow visuals and continuous speech, even better.
My otherwise thoughts is magic as something that could create some amazing possible advances. But also magic as something difficult to reliably industrial that an unforseen consequence can be common. They require particular individual responsibility, and when harnessed this responsibility is often misused, and crashes these advances back.
Magic is to easilly amazing that other scienceses are seen as not worth the effort of magic possibilities. And complex that those with power don't use it responsibly to be shared, and some get too ambitious.
In my own setting the society has come back from an emperor who was a tyrant artificer. And having magic stick requires certain materials to be mined and is separated in administration by an academy seperated from the noble military, church and trade guilds as different factions.
When you were describing the Magic Mouth machines development, I was envisioning the automata of the late 18th century that were rumored to do a million things like playing instruments, to playing chess (That was a dodge) And sometimes it takes ages for those to become something other than entertainment. Technology is a weird thing on how it can be invented, reinvented and changed. And how long it takes.
One thing I can think of with magical technology is that it becomes a standard and since those who create it might be rare it means that there are always technological copycats who try to find a way of remaking it without the magic. I might not be able to make a Magical Mouth arcade machine, but I can make a floating theater with little figures that dance and enact a specific story. (Ancient Greek tech from Heron of Alexandria. They have built a copy of his simplest one. Amazing to see) I can imagine that in the advertisements for machines that do this "As good as magic" could become a tagline to sell items.
I like to imagine a person in a pre industrial revolution, from the future, post industrial revolution; warning about the dangers of capitalism and greed, and fighting to point the new future towards a more egalitarian distribution of resources and wealth. I am a dirty political anti-capitalist anarchist though
In the Rising of the Shield Hero light novel, hero's from different versions of modern Japan are summoned throughout the eras. They actually give a good explanation for why modern weaponry has not become a thing. In short, modern weapons had been introduced and some countries do use guns to a limited extent, but why would you use guns with explosive ammo when a mage can shoot just as far and if he used fire magic, would cook off the gunpowder in a modern soldier's kit. Furthermore, through ritual magic using a team of a few hundred casters can conjure up the destructive force of an ICMB but with limited range. Later on, the villain of the arc, who's a descendant from past era's heroes, busts out the schematics for things like tanks and airplanes, but ultimately loses out in a hard fought battle to a high fantasy army led by a tactical genius.
I think one possible hindrance to technological progress is if magic can take the place of magical convenience. Don't need to invent the sewer system if your toilet poofs the shit away. No need for mass production if cottage industries use labor saving magical devices to produce goods quickly, like if we skipped Henry Ford all the way to 3D printing at home.
And you have instantly stated why I find high magic fantasy exceedingly boring. Some enjoy it, great. But get enough magic in a world and it's used as a crutch to solve all of the world's problems. And then it becomes a whose magic is bigger contest. Low magic settings for me.
@@als3022 (Essay Inbound, you got some gears turning in my head.) I myself am a low fantasy enjoyer too.I always thought of low fantasy to be more like the early middle ages, and high fantasy like the high middle ages/early Renaissance. I think the trick is, treat magic like science. A high fantasy setting with advanced magic would be a setting that is fairly modern. I always thought it anachronistic when I'd see modern looking/complicated looking clothes in some fantasy anime, but in a setting where magic can streamline the manufacturing process, then of course the clothes would resemble something only reproducible in the modern era. It kinda solves everything, from why the armor is so blingy to why no one has invented gunpowder yet, to why do the characters act like modern people. Simple, mana is what powers the world, not electricity, you're looking at a modern setting wearing a medieval skin. If you show the king a schematic of a sewer system from our world, it would be like showing someone from our world a passive air conditioning that uses no electricity to someone from ours. They'd likely say, "that's brilliant! Your people did that with no magic? Wow! But seems a bit clunky? What happens if the pipes clog? Personally, I think we'll stick to our current waste disposal system, but I'd love to stick your schematic in the archives in case something cataclysmic happens." (Honestly, quite brilliant of Aneko Yusagi for actually addressing why the setting does not use modern military weapons.)
The trick now is how can we limit the progress of magical science in a high fantasy setting to where it looks/behaves like a medieval setting? Maybe instill some cost, make the crystals that are used in magical batteries hard to come by to the point that only someone with "fuck you" money could put one in their toilet. For that matter, has anyone figured out how to charge them yet? Maybe that innovation has not come around. The rare soul gem is found, it's used in an emergency, and upon it's draining, it becomes a useless rock and tossed aside. Without the ability to store magic cheaply, modernity/industrial revolution is impossible via magic. In combat, a wizard can cast a fireball that is as destructive as a musket blast once per minute without a soul gem, after which he might need to rest for quite a while. With a soul gem, he could release a cannon blast strength, or multiple shots in quick succession, likely the king might employ a wizard like a siege weapon and give him a gem from the royal treasury with order to blow a hole in the wall of an enemy city. He would still be a boon on a medieval battlefield, but would lose out to muskets in a straight fight, becoming relegated to an auxiliary role.
With this limitation in place:
Three discoveries would have to be made to bring about the industrial revolution. How to recharge soul gems, how to make artificial soul gems, how to make magical batteries.
To bring a high fantasy setting fully to modernity: Magical power lines, and the ability to store spells in a machine to trigger automatically without the need of some wizard proletariat to hand operate the machine.
In conclusion: High fantasy tends to reduce magic to a form of science. It can be done in a way that is compelling, but the more advanced it becomes the more like our world and DAMMIT I don't want to be in our world, I need my escapism! XD
Intrigued I am. Reminds me of "Kill the Villainess" and how she ruined the reputation of the new magic train in the Manwha 😂 she disguised herself as a prostitute. And evaded her spies and such. She then vanished without a trace as she never made it to her intended location as she dropped off somewhere else 😂
I recently had an idea for my world. Since wind magic is very common in one place, someone could create preasurized air, and then pneumatics.
Since it's a hot place a simple fan might be the first invention.
i've always find it odd that some fantasy settings introduce the fact that magic is somewhat common (wizards are as common as doctors, say, a wizard per town) and their spells includes things like making water (apparently drinkable) from thin air
if you as a wizard can make water out of your hands, i think a better job would be watering crops in different towns or provide water supply for places where water is a logistical problem, rather than going into dungeons and splash monsters in the face
There's the problem of mana usually, even spells that seemingly come out of thin air require mana or the use of a "spell slot"
Even in the case of things that can be casting over and over, it would constitute a waste of potential for a wizard to do that task.
Employing the town's wizard to water the crops might make sense in desertic areas if anywhere.
As strange as it sounds, both Magic Mouth and Unseen Servant is Ritual Spell which can be obtained by any class via Ritual Caster feat (at least upuntil WotC shank RC feat to the grave in ONE dnd)
There is a novel I read that addresses this concept of magical industrialization much of the world is stuck in a mid medieval to late medieval world due to religious persecution against wizards while one kingdom is ruled entirely by wizards and they are in a near Victorian level of technology they are only a few key inventions away from a full on industrial revolution at the start of the book. The book also has a interesting magic system its loosely based around scientific principles with a bit of a catch the way a wizard gains power is based on there understanding of the world around them and so the more they understand the stronger they get however if there understanding is flawed it could prove fatal as there world view collapses causes there minds to literally tear them apart. The book is called Throne of Magical Arcana its well worth a read though it can be a bit thick at times with its more scientific magic explanation towards the end of the book
If you like magic systems based on scientific laws and used to further science, you should check out the Death Gate Cycle, one of the best scientific magic systems I've ever had the pleasure to read about. Each book contains footnotes and appendicies that elaborate on aspects of the world from the perspective of people who live within it.
I need more flintlock fantasy tbh.
Loved the video, and would love to see more videos on the subject. Always thought it was odd how any magical setting higher than low fantasy didn't have more industrial aspects to it, especially any setting with warforged.
Unseen servant, mage hand, minor/major illusion, prestidigitation, mold earth, mending, sending, fabricate, tensers floating disc, find steed, awaken, wish,] are all spells that immediately come to mind for things that can very quickly alter a setting and impact technology, culture, and society as a consequence of exploiting these spells.
I once had a wizard that used wish/simulacrum to create an army of glorified secretaries, because "If you want something done right, do it yourself"
Example, Eberron setting.
Fantasy worlds with magic can't have an indistrial revolution. Why would you invest millions into a complicated steam water pump when you can just teleport the water away? Why would you build a pounding mill to mass produce plate armor for itnto just get melted with fireball?Magic is the ultimate aristocratic power, with all-poweful god-kings and unnbelievably rich vampire bankers.
Because humans are never satisfied and magic unless its in an "everyone has it" will always have someone somewhere trying to make things easier for themselves. Cause people will work really hard to be lazy.
@@als3022 yes, but anyone can work a steam machine. But you can't just become a sourcerer
Man I'd love a mini series of a magical industrial revolution
Same here
Why wouldn't people be trained on how to maintain the machines? Also, I would think that a bigger problem would not be the wizards burning out but them running out of venues to sell too, and if they start selling to places outside of the province then they would just work at their own pace? Wizards can strike too you know.
I guess my biggest issue with a book like this is the pre-destination of the coming apocalypse. I guess I'm kind of over post apocalypse stuff in general, so I'm not really interested in plaything through the fall of a place.