Magical Ways to Emulate Modern Techonology

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Wiseman
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Magical Ways to Emulate Modern Techonology

Post by Wiseman »

Okay, if there's need of interesting threads here, then how about this.

I'm doing a campaign with a lot of it taking place in Sigil. I like to have magic be a fairly common thing in my setting, so I started thinking. Advancement and progress is the natural state of civilization, so even if they never discovered things like gunpowder or combustion engines, they would still find ways to advance. So with those thoughts, and having looked into the ebberon thread, why not have magic be used to accomplish those things?

I'd like to find ways to create things like television, radio, vehicles, transportations, appliances, power, and other such things. Though I'd prefer if it was kept in the bounds of the rules as much as possible, I won't really mind if custom magic items are created. Also, if these things are supposed to be mass produced, revamping magic item creation seems like a good idea. (I think there are some things like this already on the site. Links?)
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Post by Dogbert »

Invention is a product of need.

The amount of magic users in fantasyland can be compared to the amount of actual engineers in our world (in addition to both being the "intellectual elite"), and people who can will horses out of thin air without having to feed them or clean their crap are unlikely to ever have a need to create the steam engine.

What I can easily see, however, is a world with telepathic telecommunications, a psionic VR world wide web, illusionary movie theaters, and a wicked version of the UFC with Monks vs Samurai. As a matter of fact, I'm describing the game world I'm using in my current campaign (have I mentioned my complete disdain for vanilla?).
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Declaring the laws of magic to be laws of physics would be a good start. If you threw out some of the 'game conventions' already present in D&D that break actual beliefs about miracles and magic, you could make magic mass-producible.

For example: in D&D, doesn't it take fifty gold pieces' worth of silver to bless holy water? In the real world, people believe that any untainted water that comes into contact with holy water becomes holy water. So it can be extended indefinitely with nothing more than water and perhaps a little prayer/sincere belief.

If you established that it takes magical effort to actualize a contagious link between objects, but that that link can be between as many objects as you desire, it would be fairly easy to make magical radio and television systems. And even in LotR, making palantir was beyond the skill of anyone in Middle Earth, but Feanor seemingly made them by the dozens or even hundreds.
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Post by erik »

I think we've had at least a couple industrial revolution/great leap forward via magic threads which might cover some stuff you are considering.

But if you want TV, can either have custom magic items which play illusions, or a custom scrying item that is programmed to only observe certain "channels".

Radio... as above.

Telephone- use activated Sending.

Transportation- can swap flying carpets with flying carriages. Magic mounts pulling carriages on ground.

Appliances- Continual Light, magic items for create food and water, heat metal/chill metal, fabricate maker-boxes.

Power- What do you need power for?

Things that society doesn't have:
Prediction- crowdsource use-activated Augury/Divination. Change that 73-90% chance of reliability to 99.9999%.
Ring of Locate Object- never lose your keys, or anything, ever again.
Lesser Restoration- never be tired again
Bestow Curse- best at blowjobs
Trap the soul- ship colonists as little gems
Shrink Item- shipping made easy
... and win Agriculture and Healthcare obviously.

What's missing?
- Time keeping. There's a number of things you can do but nothing much better than just making clocks.
- Knowledge. Why develop pathology when you can just cure every disease? Why learn meteorology when some dick can just predict weather and another one can summon rain as needed?
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Post by OgreBattle »

pornography
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Post by Dogbert »

OgreBattle wrote:pornography
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Post by Shady314 »

This reminds me of an Eberron thread on WOTC forums years ago. I also thought about it a lot when cantrips and orisons became at will in Pathfinder.

Prestidigitation gets you dishwashers(that can also change the color of your clothes.) and washer/dryers and hair coloring devices and hair dryers and personal fans. Its a refrigerator and a toaster that can flavor your food. It can be all of those things at the same time.
Breeze gets you air conditioning.
Ray of Frost for freezers or refrigerators if prestidigitation is too weak.
Spark is obviously lighters.
Tough of Fatigue sleeping pills.
Jolt makes defribrillators but you also have healing magic so it probably never actually gets discovered but it is infinite electricity if you allow a magic device to have it on constantly.
Open/Close gets you automatic sliding doors.
Arcane Mark label makers.
Mage Hand is one of those gripping devices for the elderly.

Create Water devices need no explanation for how amazing thatd be.
Light means lightbulbs.
Purify food and drink is another obviously amazing one.
Stabilize bandages

This ignores ones that just give bonuses to skills and stuff which everyone would have to have.

Going above level 0 just becomes exponentially mindblowing.
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Post by Reynard »

Modern technologies? High-level DnD is neck-deep in transhumanism.

Either way, if you are introducing advanced technologies, consider increasing the population. The Khorvaire has less population than 13th century France (~15 million people), while being 20 times larger.


P.s. Binding (minimus/metamophosis) instead of Trap the Soul. You are also getting immortality (eternal nagging for 99% of population) on top of it.

P.p.s. you'll be losing Ring of Locate Object instead of car keys.
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Post by ishy »

erik wrote:But if you want TV, can either have custom magic items which play illusions, or a custom scrying item that is programmed to only observe certain "channels".
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Post by tussock »

You need demographics and an economy. How many people can be Wizards (or other casters) and how many of them can cast level 2 spells, or level 3 spells, and so on. The discussion is particularly wanky until there's some hard limits to work with there.

--

Classically, AD&D was assumed to be around 1% Wizards (and subtypes) plus 1% Clerics (and subtypes), with 50% of them being 1st level, and half that every level above.

So for every 12,500 people there is one Wizard-like and one Cleric-like who can at least cast 5th level spells. Raise Dead is thus not common, and there's totally a queue if you're lucky enough for the Cleric to actually be home. In a megapolis, each major church will be lucky to have one Cleric who can do that.

Cults of a few hundred people are very lucky to have anyone with even level 2 spells.

For every 6.4 million people, there's one Wizard-like with 9th level spells or better. The big countries had ~20 million people, and about three such Arch-mages. The Dales only have the one.

--

You can also work by 3e-style economics, which are fucked up, but a valid starting point regardless. Commoners earn 1sp per day, or 3gp per month. One first level spell costs at least 10gp, or 25gp as a potion. Almost everything is massively cheaper to do by paying poor people to do it, unless you are the Wizard and just doing up your own pocket dimension with undying flames.

Item creation takes XP, so no you can't. Permanent spells with material costs have very long payback times, often several years compared to mundane means, so it at least implies very stable cultures with death penalties for casting Dispel Magic.

Anything that frees labour lowers the cost of peasants, and competes against magic for payment, so fuck that, Wizards will not lower their prices. Using Zombies as labour puts labourers out of work, so they will destroy your Zombie and take their jobs back.

--

Given those I think there's one nominally standard outcome. Elminster, or Hallister. High level Wizards live in their own little world, playing Dungeon-Keeper with their morphic dungeons and lightning scorpions, or playing Leasure-Suit Larry escorting their Drow mistresses on inter-dimensional holidays while deliberately not helping make the world any better for everyone else. Low level Wizards try to figure out how to level up without dying, but almost all just die young.

Sigil makes that vaguely interesting because all those Arch-mages from everywhere can visit it and compare the size of their unmentionables while also not helping anyone do anything at all which would make life better for them, but maybe giving you the odd catch-22 mission for shits and giggles.

You could totally play it like Paranoia, where an AM on a self-propelled cart turns up and hands you some super-tech and tells you never to hit the red button, but please carry it to Hades and give it to the man with the green necktie. The adventure starts when the PCs hit the red button.
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Post by Reynard »

One could add something to fuel item creation.

Liquid XP with pumpjacks, OPEC equivalent in Xen'Drik and Argonessen precision bombing peacekeeping interventions?
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Post by fectin »

Here are three prior discussions.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55391
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52620
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53855

In general if you want to avoid planar binding and wish shenanigans, necromancy is the master of industrial revolution. You could probably duplicate electronics entirely by animating a bazillion tiny creatures (algae, maybe?) and giving them logic-gate orders.

E.g. for a tv screen, build an e-ink knock-off by spraypainting these things half white, half black, then order them to roll different sides toward the glass based on some stimulation.

You can transmit signals by haunt-shifting these tiny undead and having them haunt a network of cables (essentially phone lines). Wireless is a little harder, but likely doable via relay towers.

Vehicles run fine off of steamballs or undead power. Really spiffy ones use haunt-shifted spirits, but that's pricey.

Most appliances do fine with skeleton power; stoves/ovens are the only exception I see offhand, and they're simple enough to not be worth solving.

Power can economically come from a steamball, from zombies, or from water pressure (create-water reservoir, decanter of endless water, create-pit pump, etc).
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I don't think undead are a reasonable power source, since they're probably powered through draining the life energy out of the world.
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Post by Aryxbez »

Occluded Sun wrote:I don't think undead are a reasonable power source, since they're probably powered through draining the life energy out of the world.
Depends on the Metaphysics that ye choose for Necromancy. In the case of someone wanting a magic replicating tech campaign, I'd imagine it would just be "another energy source".
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Post by fectin »

Occluded Sun wrote:I don't think undead are a reasonable power source, since they're probably powered through draining the life energy out of the world.
They are explicitly powered by energy from a specific other plane.

More generally though, I can't account for your unstated house rules. Even if your statement were less directly contradicted by the rules, there would be no more reason to believe that it was correct than to believe that light spells cause turbocancer. Those might be interesting plot elements in some specific game, but they are not supported by the 3.5 system.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

The Negative Energy Plane, and the 'negative energy' from it, is specifically opposed to life and existence. Saying that something is powered by 'negative energy' and saying that it destroys energy are equivalent - not only semantically, but within the rules of D&D itself.

Trying to use the undead as a power source is therefore doomed to failure.

However, you might be able to draw on the power of the Plane of Fire to power steam engines.
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Post by Aryxbez »

Have you not read the Tome of Necromancy that I just linked?? (I linked it to Wizards forum, because wiki's have issue taking URL tags).

It's a seperate plane of existence, that is sure, dangerous and antithesis to your health, but it's not taking away from the material planes life. If Necromancy is just another fuel source, then skeletons don't go around murdering (unless ye direct em, which case they're no worse off than a trained animal).

It's like saying getting your power source from the Plane of Fire, is draining all the fire and combustion in the world.
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Post by hyzmarca »

The easiest way to get modern technology in Sigil is to remember that it's fucking Sigil and that there are portals to everywhere, including countless worlds with Modern or better tech. If you know how to open the right portal, you can just import it from Taiwan like everyone else.

But if you don't want to open that can of worms (there are arguments both ways, really) the most broken way to do it is with Polymorph Any Object and a guy who knows what a television is. PAO can turn a rock into a TV, permanently. It can also turn an arrow into a nuclear ICBM, but I digress.

And if you don't want tech at all, but just want magic, that's doable to.

There's always the necrocomputer made from a custom demiplane full of skeletons moving colored marbles from one plate to another, for example.
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Post by nockermensch »

Negative energy is bizarre. As written, it's a great method to sterilize food or medicine, because it destroys life but leave the rest untouched.

You could go and actually create rules that make bringing Negative energy into a prime material plane bad, but then you're into house rule territory already (maybe if you expose food to negative energy you end with food full of undead bacteria, or whatever)
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Post by Stahlseele »

is there a create light spell? make it direction and focus it. bam, lazer done.
how much can you shrink stuff?
build something full sized, shrink it down. have instant miniaturization of tech.
if you know the principle behind stuff, you can make integrated circuits and the such.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Negative energy doesn't have to be the equivalent of radioactive toxic waste or anything. But there would be clear reasons why using lots of undead to do things would have seriously bad consequences, why the undead tend to hunt down the living if left uncontrolled, and why druids hate them so much.

In my settings, I imagine that somewhere there is a desert that was once a thriving land, and in the center there is the remains of an ancient city that was the home of the first necro-powered society in the world, before it was fully understood how the undead actually worked. That culture used the moving dead to create an epic civilization, like the Industrial Revolution only easier, then the populace sickened and died and the land withered.

Now the undead are mostly inactive without surrounding life energy to fuel them. But the occasional looting adventurer party treks to the center of the desert every once in a while, seeking the treasures of the lost city...
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Post by Seerow »

Occluded Sun wrote:Negative energy doesn't have to be the equivalent of radioactive toxic waste or anything. But there would be clear reasons why using lots of undead to do things would have seriously bad consequences, why the undead tend to hunt down the living if left uncontrolled, and why druids hate them so much.

In my settings, I imagine that somewhere there is a desert that was once a thriving land, and in the center there is the remains of an ancient city that was the home of the first necro-powered society in the world, before it was fully understood how the undead actually worked. That culture used the moving dead to create an epic civilization, like the Industrial Revolution only easier, then the populace sickened and died and the land withered.

Now the undead are mostly inactive without surrounding life energy to fuel them. But the occasional looting adventurer party treks to the center of the desert every once in a while, seeking the treasures of the lost city...
Oh I like that. Especially the explanation that the Undead use surrounding lie energy to animate, because it would automatically:

A) Discourage large groups from going on. Large Groups allow for more powerful undead to animate that their numbers can't handle. (ie a group of a few hundred low level soldiers goes in guarding a couple dozen technicians to excavate, they end up awakening a dracolich that they don't stand a chance against. Meanwhile party of 4-5 6th level characters simply don't have enough combined lifeforce to make that happen)
B) Automatically allow for level appropriate encounters for lower level parties, as higher level characters have more life force, which in turn allows more/more powerful undead to raise in response to their presence
C) Could possibly tie into a mechanic where the longer a life form stays in the area, the more life force is supplied to the waiting undead, making it very hard to push into the heart of the desert where all of the really good stuff is hidden, because on top of the undead gaining power as you gain power, they also gain more power the longer you are there. Combine with some standard anti-teleportation measures and you have a great setup for a time sensitive undead dungeon adventure that strongly discourages the party from resting every couple of encounters.
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

Tenra Bansho Zero has a number of conceits I like:

1. The hearts of Oni can be used to power large machines like giant robots. Considering Oni here are sexy noble savages and not the cannibalistic giants of traditional lore, this can lead to some interesting drama when the miko go hunting for them.

2. Buddhists, in addition to firing swastika-shaped lasers and doing wire-fu, have a number of practical things they do with magic, like smelting Hihi-Irokane steel, and exorcising the souls out of rogue robots.

3. Magic mirror internets. Magic mirrors are important for a lot of purposes beyond internets, they're also how people manage to pilot complex machines in a world of crap-covered peasants. So the aforementioned lemon-powered television, except cooler.

4. Onmyoji can use their pokemon for a number of purposes beyond murder. There are flying shikigami all over the place spying on everything, like some sort of drone-fueled nightmare future. There's also shikigami that can do transmutations, which, while forbidden from breaking the game by making dirt into gold or ambrosia, are otherwise able to provide mass-labor geomancy for fun projects like turning a small mountain into a skull-faced castle, or turning the one settlement of crap-covered peasants who actually like you into a metropolis.
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Post by Stahlseele »

@Seerow
I see one glaring problem with that:
What about cities?
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Seerow »

Stahlseele wrote:@Seerow
I see one glaring problem with that:
What about cities?
What about them?


The way I read Occluded Sun's post was that the desert was the site of an ancient city that was run on necromancy. So that desert, ie the old city and surrounding wasteland, are all one big adventure location.

Cities elsewhere don't run into the same problem because they don't have heaps of deactivated undead sitting around needing residual lifeforce to rise and restart their murderspree.
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