Far future of medieval high fantasy

so basically this is a thread asking for help writing this world I'm working on for this game I have an idea for, basically, your average fantasy world (Tolkien, elder scrolls, whatnot) has exited mediviel stasis and has now entered a period of rapid technological advancement (I'm thinking of having it be around the equivalent of the 1940s era tech) but magic, elves and dwarves, and gods, are still very much around.

Now first I need some questions answered

what kind of tech do you think would have been rendered irrelevant by magic What tech would have been created as a result of magic How can I have guns but still make swords practical

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Here is a quick rule of thumb i work on when i consider technology and magic working together.

Magic requires, no demands that the laws of physics be "loose" for lack of a better word in order to allow the effects to occur. The laws of thermodynamics may be the most obvious victims when Wizards Whip out Wild Wands of Wicked Wind, but I would imagine you would need to take a hatchet to quantum mechanics as well. no Quantum mechanics: no transistor, no computers and who knows what else.

You want guns and swords in your setting? There are two options and it may be best to use both.

1)Adjust the rate in your universe chemicals react with each other in a sort of quick and dirty soft science. If the rate is low then gunpowder becomes anemic and you have to resort to chemicals that are more explosive in our world to get the same results. however: make the rate HIGHER and gunpowder and other chemicals become stronger, so strong in fact that nobody can actually use it, and you can have more fantasy creatures since there body's are able to better and more efficiently process food.

2)In war there are two competing forces: armor VS weapon's ability to penetrate armor. In medieval age armor was king hence the knight and you could make bullet proof arm even in the age of the musketeer, it was just too expensive and was reserved for elite forces like Cuirassiers. When the age of the rifle musket came about armors day was done and to this day body armor is mostly used against shrapnel then bullets (which it can stop, but only against the right caliber). In order to have swords and guns coexist, such as they do in 40k, you need armor to be strong enough to be able to reliably turn a infantry small arm bullet or other projectile. Do that guns become far less useful and you can use your magically created mono-molecular swords (bullets being to small to enchant) to hew though the enemy's armor.

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Depends on how your magic works. If every other person springs from the womb with a fully-developed ability to tell the common laws of physics to sit down and shut up, and can kill everybody with their mind, then I hardly see why anybody would have technology at all. But if that's rare, or needs a whole lot of edumacation, then people without magic ain't gonna wanna wait for the X-Man to become a proper rain goddess. They're gonna run the irrigation systems, elbow grease and all, you know.

Maybe magic looks a whole lot like technology rather than psionics. You can Skype by magic mirror, but if you don't have a magic mirror because the new cleaning lady smudged the sigil so it's currently just a reflective surface until the wizard comes to re-cast the scrying spell, then a telegraph or messenger pigeon will do.

As for weapons: swords don't run out of bullets.

As Faemonic said, you'd still have basic technology — stuff we wouldn't even call technology today. It exists in most Medieval Stasis settings after all.

The thing is, if magic is widespread enough to act as a technology substitute — healing spells, magical communication and transportation, magical artillery, and so on — then there is no reason that "a period of rapid technological advancement" would ever happen. Scientific progress stems from need, and widespread magic removes that need.

Even if such a need does appear, because magic isn't that widespread, the answer will probably come from what already exists and works well enough : magic. The Medieval Stasis would not be ended by a scientific breakthrough (or even by science appearing at all), but by magic becoming sufficiently analyzed and Magitek becoming widespread as a result. The post-industrial-revolution world would then be a Dungeon Punk setting.

edited 30th Aug '15 9:25:31 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

I'm inclined to agree with Faemonic: the answer depends heavily on the nature and availability of the magic in question. A form of magic that is common, safe, efficient, and lends itself well to Magitek seems more likely to become a significant part of the setting's development than one that is dangerous, rare, difficult, and entirely personal (that is, it does not produce magical items).

How magic is used may also depend on how it is viewed in the cultures of the setting: a culture that abhors magic seems to me to be likely to make less use of it (albeit not necessarily no use of it) than one that reveres magic.

You might want to look at Brandon Sanderson's The Alloy of Law, which is essentially a fantasy universe (specifically, the setting of the Mistborn series) that has moved on to a "Wild West" technological level. The main form of magic in that setting is somewhat common, but also somewhat specific and limited in application, and thus technology isn't enormously impacted—save for certain, specific differences.

Conversely, while Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle, while admittedly employing a setting that isn't yet out of Medieval Stasis, includes some quite interesting applications of its magic systems, including handheld lights, refrigerators, an anti-arrow safety device, and so on.

I strongly disagree: while such a setting is plausible, and could well be quite interesting, I don't believe that it's necessary. I feel that magic could well stand separate from the laws that we know, or even be an explicit breaking of them, without requiring that they be otherwise weakened.

(In fact, if I recall correctly, the above-mentioned Kingkiller Chronicle at least somewhat includes thermodynamics in its main magic system: while magic-users can move energy around rather effectively, they can't create it out of nothing, and will tend to lose at least some energy in the process. In all fairness, the setting does seem to also include more "magical" forms of magic as well, from what we've seen thus far.)

edited 30th Aug '15 7:05:54 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

My Games & Writing

First of all I would like to thank all of you for the feedback.

Now i should probably give my own input here. It seems like most of what you're saying here is "magic makes technology irrelevent", however, I think there are some things that magic just won't be able to do, like make 10000 calculations a second, provide safe and affordable lighting to homes, or transport hundreds of people across continents. However, I realise that the component tech (and probably more inportantly history) of these will have been completely useless

For example; the computer, witch was created in wwII to aid in breaking the German cryptography, witch, in a world where no such event took place, wouldn't exist

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• Make 10000 calculations a second : thousands of spirits bound and imprisoned in a time-dilated pocket dimension.
• Provide safe and affordable lighting to homes : devices that cast and dismiss a simple light spell at the flick of a switch.
• Transport hundreds of people across continents : mass teleportation, or portal networks.

... The possibilities are endless.

Of course, if you have defined very strictly what magic can and can't do, then some areas where it doesn't apply will be filled with technology instead. If there are no teleportation whatsoever, then there will be steamers and trains, then internal combustion engines, leading to cars and planes. But maybe the steamers will in fact be powered by a magical engine, one that is compact enough to work on cars and aircrafts, then engine technology has no real reason to go beyond that ; and if as a result oil never becomes a major ressource, then jet engines will probably never appear when planes need to go faster, unless a magical equivalent is invented.

On the other hand, just because an event that, in our history, led to a particular invention, never happens in your setting, doesn't mean that invention will never happen. Yes, the first computers wouldn't have existed if not for WW 2, but computer-like devices existed before that. More importantly, these first computers were invented to crack German codes. Unless magic enables completely secure communications, cryptography will remain important for all militaries. And if there are no magical mean of brute-forcing ever more complex codes, then some sort of computer — which may or may not include magical components — is bound to appear.

edited 30th Aug '15 9:50:33 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

While necessity is indeed the mother of invention, invention tends to get up and keep running when necessity has stopped.

Every technological advancement (save a few) since about 1990 has had no real drive behind it except "This can be done/improved".

Before 1990? The Cold War provided the advancement drive. Before that, the World Wars. But since there are no global-scale world conflicts at the moment - and yet, we still seem to be moving forwards - maybe all we need is a kick in the pants to get started.

On cryptography: Cryptography, at its basest, is simply rewrites your message into something unreadable for most people, which only makes sense for guys you send the message to. Alchemist (allegedly?) doing it all the time with their convoluted Conlang, poems and proses that doesn't makes sense, carefully arranged cyphers, and so on and so on. Modern cryptography simply makes the process simpler by mathematical formula.

Spirit with buttload of encyclopedic knowledge and/or strong enough sentience should be able to process the data, although not necessarily (maybe?) in the same way computers do.

That was what Bob do, after all.

Regarding making swords as useful as guns, there's quite a lot of ways to do this.

Magic force fields that stop objects moving at certain too-high speeds - sword moving with some 60km/h passes, bullet moving with half a Mach does not. Thus killing something inside such field requires swords.

Magical creatures that can only be killed by substances that don't make good bullets - gold, for example. Sword can be coated with gold, but I'm not sure if gold-coated bullet would be remotely practical.

If you use some sort of runic magic, then there exists capability to add runes on sword, making them super-sharp, protecting the bearer etc, but bullets are too small for such engraving.

Creatures commonly faced, like orks or dragons, have skin that deflects bullets but can, for whatever reason, be pierced by a blade.

Enemies are so numerous and resilient that even using machine guns, battle still ends up in close combat.

Of course, if you want your world to combine blades and guns, then remember such a combination does exist in reality - we have bayonets.

Rejoice!

The easy way to limit the practical use of guns, is to limit their production. Or rather, the ease with which gunpowder can be produced.

Charcoal being rare is right out, so that leaves sulfur and saltpeter. Assuming a medieval setting, I think they'd come from salt domes and deserts, so pick one to remove or make extremely uncommon.

...at least, this is a way to make melee weapons a reasonable choice when your characters are on a budget. (Why would you use swords over polearms or bows and arrows? And I don't mean that derisively - if there's a good justification, great, but there needs to be one. The easiest way to avoid dying in hand-to-hand combat is to avoid getting that close...)

No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying that it depends on how your magic works. So what if you think magic won't be able to do things? It's magic. It's not real. It does anything. Unless YOU put rules to it, unless YOU take responsibility as the author, until YOU clarify the most basic rules, then magic does everything. Auguries to make calculation magic. Elemental manipulation to make light magic. Teleportation is magic.

Unless you tell me why not in a way that fits into a consistent underlying system, what you think about magic isn't going to be what I think about magic. I think of magic as sparkly multicolored CGI fumes that just makes stuff happen.

If you want a clearer answer, you must explain how your magic operates, what the magical limitations of your idea of magic really is.

The same works for technology. I forgot the movie where people stopped an alien invasion by hacking into the alien computers, on alien computer systems that should have been alien to us. It's fiction technology, though, so unless there was any reason in that fictional universe why not then the screenplay writer can just write that one person typing very fast on a Mac can just do that.

You have a word, "magic" or "technology": those words mean nothing without rules. Nothing. They confer zero limitations in fiction, unless you decide on the new physics of your world.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke

"'Sufficiently advanced technology', my ass" - Harry Dresden, regarding his breathable-bulletproof-fireproof Badass Longcoat.

(It's Independence Day, but our computer technology is implied to be reverse-engineered from the alien's, therefore it makes perfect sense </petpeeve>)

The more relevant quote is "any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science". Ergo, when the scientific revolution happens in a high-magic setting, it will incorporate magic — possibly at the expense of real-life sciences that would be redundant.

edited 31st Aug '15 12:19:09 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Well I'll just go through how I might do it.

In most cases magic takes some form of strain on its user, in the form of using the common fantasy element of mana. Thus mana is little more that energy which is controlled by ones will. Now in most cases one magic user can't perform some magic as they alone do not have enough energy in them and this usually means that a group of wizards will have to pool their energies together.

But what if you aren't in the council of elders but an entrepreneuring(not sure of the word or spelling) young magic user, well how about building a nice big power plant to expand your energy pool.

Now of course that only helps someone nearby expend more magical energy, but luckily there's another common form of magic that is useful here, sigils. So you get a chair and you put an engine in it, give it a small table or something like that, draw a little diagram on it, take your stone slab and write your controll sigil. Stick it under the table, BAM you got a motor vehicle.

Stick an umbrella on it in case it rains.

Then you put a little enchanted piano out of sight, there's your radio.

And of course the trumpet, to tell someone to get out of your way.

edited 30th Jan '16 1:33:02 PM by zoraxbrooks

"Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?" -Sun Tzu-