[…] time ago I brought up the issue of technological progress and magic. The gist of post was a contemplation on why most of “fantasy” settings seem to stuck […]

My usual solution for a stagnant world is magic ubiquity … there is magic in everything and there is a finite amount of it that continually gets re-used over and over again… there are massive reservoirs of magic like god’s and wizards but every sword and every gear contains magic… so the world could evolve if the large reservoirs would share their power by giving up some… or if people could all agree in investing their efforts towards a certain goal but as it is everyone is squabbling over the use of this resource so things will evolve to a point then will stagnate as there is no free magic to keep it expanding… this leads to conflict over who and how… and the few that know this is how the universe is ordered capitalize upon this knowledge.

I was asking a similar question, “why no guns”?

A gentleman from the GURPS forum suggested that perhaps gunpowder and similar explosives were like crack to fire elementals. So I ran with it, and call it the “salamander curse”. Now my fantasy setting has guns, but beyond a certain level of use they have to either take terrible risks, or use expensive alchemical concoctions that reduce the likelihood of a fire elemental manifesting and explosively dining upon your artillery’s powder supply, or your own personal powderhorn.

I submit the following entry for your amusement.
https://sites.google.com/site/brassbricksgames/firearms-on-aestas

The article makes a really good point, that fantasy worlds are generally stagnant for no good reason. However, the assumptions about the nature of the progress outlined here I take issue with.

It’s well and good for settings like D&D and the like where magic is just a tool or an inborn talent. But I’m not sure such a thing would happen. To start with, knowledge of magic and how it works may be incomplete, meaning that it can’t be standardised and prepared for “production” in the way you suggest. However, my biggest bugbear with the “tool” approach is that it disregards how magic is procured, and how people think about it. If it’s considered a gift of god(s), then there are likely to be taboos and social rules governing its use. If it’s a more “secular” thing, then there may well be a practitioner community with its own (potentially looser) rules. If it only comes at the cost of binding spirits/demons or making pacts with them, then there’s a whole different way of practising it to the hand-waving, word-muttering paradigm.

The best example of how this works is seen in reverse in Warhammer 40,000: technology is the province of priests, who carry out maintenance and production of machines as a form of worship and ritual. This completely stymies technological progress, as R&D is thought of as heresy. A society that sees magic in a similar light would not use it to progress or outside a narrow set of rules, which limits progress. While this seems similar to the “conspiracy theory” of your article, it’s one where no one complains about the conspiracy and is complicit in it; society is structured around the assumptions that reinforce the restrictive use of magic, and so no one but outcasts would question them, and the only people who know enough of the “rules” to break them do not want to. Not because of them wanting to preserve their self-interested position, but because they wouldn’t think to step outside the traditional uses of magic.

Think about how your society functions, particularly for things that people assume and don’t question. Your fantasy society should have similar assumptions, according to different “axioms”. It’s not entirely down to the nature of magic, it’s now society considers it. And that consideration shouldn’t necessarily be as utilitarian as you make out.

[…] Progress in Fantasy Settings (terminally-incoherent.com) […]

I always imagined that the world is whatever the collective consciousness believes it to be. So in the past, there was magic and the earth was flat because thats what people believed it to be.

As the world changes and new stories are told, there is a inertial shift in the collective minds and the world changes. The monsters and fairies disappear, and the earth becomes a globe and is ruled by science.

We shape the world we live in just by thinking about it.

You could also follow up that maybe the reason we are having so many wars and earthquakes and storms is because there are a lot more people now, and a lot more discord in the collective, and the world is being torn apart and re-shaped because of it.

Would be cool if a good fantasy writer picked up on this and did a story.

StuartB wrote:

Also, I’ve appreciated the progress in the Shannara books, although I’ve noticed most fantasy fans don’t like that series all that much…

Ah, yes. Shannara. My main complaint about that series was that it was too similar to a lot of other books. It didn’t seem to have a particular identity, and there were far too many books for it to stay interesting. I can be okay with a single book or maybe a trilogy that is not really original. But Shannara spans truckloads of volumes with that…

Luke Maciak wrote:

Sounds interesting. Reminds me of the Dune universe which got a similar technology downgrade, but for the opposite reason.

I tried Dune once when I was little, I was maybe 12 or 13. Obviously I didn’t finish it, and never picked it up since. Everybody tells me I should give it a real try, maybe I’ll go to the library and pick up the first one ;)

Excellent! And now I have some new books to read and much to ponder…

Also, I’ve appreciated the progress in the Shannara books, although I’ve noticed most fantasy fans don’t like that series all that much…

@ alphast:

TIL that Earthdawn and Shadowrun are set in the same universe. Funny story – when I was freshman in HS, Earthdawn was published in Polish for the first time (I lived in Poland back then). So all the RPG press (and my I mean the one monthly and one quarterly-or-whatever-the-fuck-we-manage polish magazine devoted to role play) were all like ZOMG, Earthdawn, Earthdawn, Earthdawn. My gaming group was kinda ambivalent about the whole thing – we had our hands full with Warhammer RP, Star Wars D6, Mutant Chronicles, Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire the Masquerade. So we never got into it.

Still, funny that despite reading all that Earthdawn coverage, I never actually stumbled on Shadowrun thing. Perhaps it was because Poland was totally camp Cyberpunk 2020 back then (with fully translated set of core books and expansions) and Shadowrun was only played by those who could read obtain and the rulebooks po angielsku. :)

@ Eric Daum:

Man, you say that without explaining… Now I need to do research. :P

@ joek:

This is true. Still, I think that Japan example could be put under my option #3, since the technological stasis was mostly forced from up above by conservative, traditionalist the ruling class. It worked so well in Japan probably chiefly thanks to geographical features – they were a secluded island nation which was mostly culturally homogenous. They could adopt this non-technological stance because they didn’t really have that much outside pressure from neighbors.

Shit like that wouldn’t fly in Europe which was a boiling pot of conflicting cultures locked in endless one-upsmanship match. If you fell behind technologically, your kindly neighbors were more than happy to steam-roll you with their better armed troops and annex your territory to theirs.

Typical fantasy settings usually have warring kingdoms, different sentient races competing for primacy and usually at least one doomsday scenario in progress. That sort of thing suggest all these forces should be in a progressive arms race just to keep up.

@ Morghan:

This sounds eerily familiar, but I can’t figure out where I’ve seen it. Perhaps I simply had a similar idea at one point or another. :)

Oh, do your players call them tech-tards? Cause now I think they will start. :)

@ FX:

Sounds interesting. Reminds me of the Dune universe which got a similar technology downgrade, but for the opposite reason. It was actually the escalating arms race that became the limiting factor. At some point they invented and perfected force fields. They were able to miniaturize them to the point where you can wear one on your belt or wrist and it would stop any high speed kinetic projectile, but still allow for normal interaction. So when most people worth killing started habitually wearing these nearly 24-7 conventional guns went out of use.

Beam weapons on the other hand went out of use because they had a nasty ability to glitch out and short circuit these fields creating nasty force feedback shock wave equivalent to thermonuclear detonation. So these types of weapons got banned for obvious reasons. Suddenly the most effective way to kill a man was to use a knife at short range. Either that or poison.

Why knife and not a sword for example? Well, swords, sabers and rapiers need to be swung or trusted with considerable kinetic force and so most of killing blows would get nullified by the shield even at the close range. You can’t really jab, stab or slash someone wearing a shield – the only thing that works is slowly and gently skewering them.

Which is why Paul Atreidies initially gets his ass whooped by Fremen in crysknife combat – he was trained in shield aided combat which emphasizes slow, methodical movement and strategy, whereas the Fremen would be fast and ferocious with their blades.

One “fantasy” setting, that your post reminded me of, is actually the Avatar series (The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra). Some of the ideas that you express here can be seen in those series.

In The Last Airbender the fire nation is displayed as technological advanced, having tanks and later ballons and even air ships, while the other nations are portrayed as pre-industrial relying on their bending (the “magic” in this universe) to do most of the daily and/or hard work. The fire nation even sees these benders (excluding their own fire benders) as a threat and tries to eradicate them by using their technology.

In The Legend of Korra the setting is more of a turn-of-the-century one (19th to 20th) with early cars, pervasive use of air ships and electricity. During the later episodes of the first book (half a season) there are early biplane airplanes and even Alien-style battle-mechs. The conflict has shifted from one nation against all others to non-benders against benders and a critically part of that conflict is that the non-benders utilize the new technology against the benders.