It’s often bugged me that fantasy writers don’t take advantage of the cosmology of their worlds to examine how social, political and economic relations would change in a magically-imbued world. It’s not as if this is without precedent: sci-fi writers do it all the time, but for some reason fantasy writers can’t move past a grotty mediaeval slum, modeled on (usually) the social relations of 15th century Europe – a very poor period of our history that surely would have been completely different if the people there had access to magic. Iain M. Banks has managed to envisage a galaxy with no limits, due to what he calls post-scarcity economics; this is based on the availability of technology that essentially frees humanity from the constraints of limited energy, and the ability to travel very very fast. This kind of technology is available in fantasy worlds too: magic fundamentally breaks the law of conservation of energy, which means that, in theory, the achievements of fantasy societies are only limited by their imagination. How would a society with unlimited energy function? How would class, race and gender relations change in a world where, for example, no one gets the clap and women never die in childbirth? What happens to feudal relations in a society where plants grow magically, and no one ever needs to go hungry? Why don’t fantasy writers try to explore this concept?
I thought I’d take a look at how this works through access to the fantasy role-playing canon. Using the D&D 3rd edition DMG and Players Handbook, let’s consider how we could construct the social relations of a small fantasy town.We’ll take a development focus, just as if it were a poor developing nation in the modern world, so our key interest is to increase wealth by:
- Reducing child and maternal mortality
- Improving agricultural production
- Infrastructure development
- Access to universal healthcare
These roughly mean we’re covering most of the millenium development goals. In the real world, the MDGs haven’t been met, even with all the developed world throwing our aid resources at them; those MDGs that have been met have largely been due to development in China. Some countries are held back by HIV/AIDS, others by war or under-development. Let’s see what happens if a single mediaeval town got to open the D&D Player’s Handbook and make it real.
The Demographics of Faustville
Faustusville is a town of 10,000 people, ruled by a benevolent, enormously intelligent and stunningly good looking dictator called Lord Faustus, who has a harem of 20 incredibly good-looking women, is revered by his people, and has written a book of sayings, The Little Green Book of Faust, that all his people love to hear readings from at their (completely voluntary) 4 hour Sunday community meetings. Everyone loves him, and it is his plan to keep it that way through an extensive development program. By improving the health and wealth of his people he aims to:
- Make them richer (so that he can collect more taxes)
- Make them tougher (so that no one overruns his community)
- Make them love him even more (if this is possible)
From the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide we can estimate the total number of magic-users in this community (see Appendix 1): it’s a surprisingly large number. In fact, there are a total of 118 people capable of divine magic, 128 capable of arcane magic, and 4 semi-magic users (i.e. rangers and paladins). This is without including adepts and bards (the movies in this town will be great!) Fully 2.6% of the community are magically capable, which is not so extreme really. There are only 56 Clerics, which is probably enough to maintain two churches.
Of the remaining people, let’s assume the following:
- Birth rates: birth rates in this town will not be those of a developing nation like Afghanistan, due to the primary intervention I’m going to propose, so I’m modelling them on a country like Chile: about 14.3/1000, or 143 people per year
- The black death: this is the worst disease that can possibly strike the community, and I calculate the death rate for this (from Wikipedia) to be about 1 in 9. That’s right, wikipedia tells me that in 1348 -1350 (two years!) the black death killed 100 million people out of a global population of 450 million – which is about 50 million per year, giving an incidence rate of 1/9 per year.
- HIV/AIDS: if there were to be an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Faustusville, it would strike hard (no condoms – though actually you could probably create them using certain spells). Let’s assume that, like their leader, Faustusites are a bunch of libertines. HIV incidence rates in, for example, Uganda are probably about 0.48 per 100 person years (they had 120,000 new infections last year in a population of 37 million; if you assume 25 million sexually active, this gives you about 0.48 per 100py). Let’s triple this and get 1.2 per 100 person years. Uganda is not the worst-affected country in Africa, but it has a high prevalence and countries with twice its incidence are probably those that are suffering economic consequences from HIV; this is the sort of disease that, if you could magically cure it, you would be well-served in so doing.
So, in this context, what can our noble Lord Faustus do?
Development Through Magic
Clerics and Infant Mortality
The first development goal Lord Faustus prioritizes is infant and maternal mortality. Infant and maternal mortality are linked, and high infant mortality is a key driver of high rates of childbirth. High childbirth rates lead to high poverty. To improve productivity in society and reduce population growth, we need to attack infant mortality. In the real world this involves a complex system of vaccinations, childbirth centres and ante-natal care. In Faustusville, it involves clerics. The primary cause of infant mortality is injury during childbirth,preventable disease and diarrhea, all of which are preventable (except some of the injuries). How can my clerics fix this?
- Cure Light Wounds: My clerics can heal a maximum of 125d8+99 hps per day[1]. No one in my town will die in childbirth due to any of the common physical sequelae
- Cure Disease: My clerics and druids can cure a maximum of 27 diseases per day. No one will get gangrene through industrial accidents, poor birth conditions, or in fact any other possible cause. Septicaemia will never happen after childbirth.
- Create Water: My clerics and druids can create at least 125,000 litres of pure water per day with a mere cantrip, which is enough for a city of 4x the size of Faustusville. No child will ever die of diarrhea in Faustusville
With 143 births per year we’re seeing one every 2.5 days, roughly. I have 10 divine spell casters capable of casting Remove Disease, which means I should be able to have at least one of these clerics on hand at every birth. If the lower level ones can’t handle it, the higher-level ones have Heal. Any trauma that might have long-term effects can be fixed through Restoration spells. My clerics can cast 2 Raise Dead spells per day. There is no reason to expect that anyone should ever die in childbirth.
Note also that Druids can create Goodberries days before birth; women giving birth can take these in the first instance and call clerics later if they continue to experience difficulties. And no one will die from caesarian section: not only can we make holy blades with extremely good surgical properties, but we can heal everyone involved immediately afterwards, and bring the dead back to life if we stuff up. In fact, in the worst case we could just kill the mother, cut out the baby, and bring the mother back to life; done quickly, this could even be more humane (and I have clerics who can kill the mother with a word).
Clerics and Disease
I also have some Paladins. In total, my divine spell-casters can cure 192 diseases per week. This means that they can prevent an outbreak of black death in its first week, and the town is completely capable of dealing with black death, Spanish ‘flu, a full-blown HIV outbreak and ebola all in the same week. It’s also trivial to stock up on remove disease potions; one potion costs 30 xp and 375 gps, and the clerics can make them every day. 375gps is a lot of money, but a wand of Continual Flame will fetch 2000gps, and my wizards can make 16 a month without losing a level – the trade options are huge. This means that in a year we can stock up on enough Remove Disease potions to handle a major outbreak of any single disease. In fact, there is no reason that anyone should ever die in Faustusville except through old age or war. Disease and accidental death are things of the past. Even industrial deaths of the worst kind are completely irrelevant -we have Heal, Raise Dead and Restoration spells, so even heavy industry is largely rendered completely safe.
Nothing Ever Breaks in Faustusville
Mending is a 0 level spell. My Clerics, Druids and Wizards can all use it, and this means they can easily repair up to 300 or so broken minor objects every day. So if someone has invested a lot of money in a saddle, some good shoes, a large amphora for the storage of oil, whatever – it will last forever, essentially.
Agricultural production, trade and consumption
We have up to 13 Plant Growth spells per day, and my clerics can feed at least 117 people per day just through magic. They can create enough pure water for the whole town, with a lot to spare for storage, baths, whatever. This means that agricultural production in this town will vastly exceed consumption, and Faustusites can trade a huge agricultural surplus with neighbouring towns. We’re probably all very fat. There is no scarcity in winter, because we can preserve food and clerics can create food. In the depths of winter, if every cleric focused all their spells on this one create food and water spell, we could probably feed the whole town. No one will ever starve in Faustusville. No drought will ever reduce agricultural production (we can create rain with the Create Water spell). We can pollute the river with all our effluent, and clerics will just purify it.
Electrification
The clerics in Faustusville are capable of casting Control Water spells that will drive a total of 68600 cubic feet of water into a dam. A 1.6kW hydro-electric dam requires 17200 cubic feet of water flowing from 20′ above the location of the plant, so if we lived near the sea the clerics could produce about 6kW of electricity a day (at least) through this spell; they can add small amounts using the Create Water spell. Furthermore, wizards and clerics can both cast Continual Flame; in about 3 months we could have installed lighting in every house, shop and factory in Faustusville, which never runs out and has significant effects:
- never have to make or buy candles
- factory and shop working hours are extended in winter
- reduced risk of fires
The latter is particularly important; fire was a deadly risk in mediaeval times, and could destroy huge sections of a city at massive cost. Though obviously, Faustusville doesn’t need a fire brigade. We just have a wizard with the Quench Flame spell. But if that doesn’t work, we’ve got huge amounts of spare water…
Magic And Justice
Mediaeval society was capricious and superstitious, with strange methods for determining the truth about crimes and criminals. Not so Faustusville. No one is ever wrongly convicted in Faustusville, and very few crimes go unpunished. This is because we have a wide range of judicial methods at our disposal. Besides the obvious investigative tools – True Seeing, Detect Evil, etc. – we have an excellent selection of interrogation tools:
- Detect Thoughts: Second level! I just need to ask a few questions and my wizard scans surface thoughts. My wizard can be invisible while I do this; we can disguise it as a bar conversation using an Alter Self spell. I have a total of 24 wizards capable of this level of sophistication, so investigations will be over pretty quickly. But I don’t convict someone on the back of this alone, oh no
- Zone Of Truth: Another 2nd level spell. Once we’re suspicious that you’re either a suspect or know something about the suspect, we call you in and slap on the Zone of Truth. You don’t even need to know it’s there – you walk into it and bang! you’re answering my questions honestly. Not only does this mean you can’t hide your own crimes; it means you can’t intimidate witnesses, and you can’t get your family and friends to cover for you. And note: rape is non-existent in my society, because every woman knows that she can make an allegation and the truth will always be discovered. There’s no he-said-she-said in my world, and no false allegations. The only way you can protect yourself is to bribe the wizard who interrogates you; but this is trivial to prevent, because I can roll a die and select another wizard to interrogate the wizard who interrogated you. Which means that no wizard will ever be able to be corrupt. In fact I have enough spells to randomly interrogate every wizard every week as to whether they have been corrupt in the last week – and to randomly interrogate every official functionary every year. I also have Detect Lies spells to back me up. How’s that for “enhanced governance”?
- Commune: If there’s any doubt, I can just ask the gods themselves whether a particular person is guilty.
- Sending: Also note that you can’t run, and you can’t hide. I can send a message to every neighbouring town days before you get there, if you decide to run; and my more powerful wizards can fly or teleport there ahead of you if they know where you’re going. And once I get there I will always find you with my Locate Creature spells. There is no escaping justice in Faustusville, and the right of appeal is absolute: a cleric just asks the Gods, in a Zone of Truth.
And if that fails, I have Power Word, Pain.
This is almost infinitely better than our current justice system. Even the death penalty is pretty simple – I have Slay Living, Cloudkill and Inflict Critical Wounds. You will die when I tell you to, painlessly, and I will destroy the body. Plus, I will resurrect the person you killed, heal any negative emotional effects on the person you injured and/or raped, and if necessary make them forget the whole experience so they don’t have to relive it. And I can use charm person on your friends and family so they don’t resent the act afterwards.
What’s the point of crime in such a world?
Infrastructure Development
Modern society is made much better through paved roads and sewage systems. This is all pretty trivial in Faustusville. We have Shape Stone to make it easy to set up particular structures; paved roads are trivial – we dump rock on them, cast Rock to Mud, smooth it out, and then cast Mud to Rock. We can soften stone to make it easy to work with, then harden stone to make a structure. Paved roads with drainage ditches, sewage systems built through simple magical procedures, and magical methods to purify water and produce water where there isn’t enough, in a society with street lights and house lighting that never go out. We can make dams for water, and we can move water upstream as well as down, so our water wheels and mills never fail to function. If we want, we can build esoteric towers and crazy structures through the work of the Druids of the town. No one needs to live in a hovel, and we will never have a shortage of firewood for heating because we don’t need it for anything else and anyway, we can just grow more with our Plant Growth spells.
Education
This is the best part of the whole deal. There are two wizards capable of casting Permanency, so the spell can be cast twice a day. It costs 500 xp to make Comprehend Languages permanent, so we can basically cast it on every 2nd child, and then every year the wizards will have to go adventuring to maintain their current level. With a bit of research, this effect could be extended to intelligence, so we could cast permanency on a Fox’s Cunning spell, for every 2nd or 3rd child born. Note that this is a bootstrapping process. We start with our existing mages researching this spell, and casting it as much as they’re able (with permanency) on the next generation. As this generation gets older, they select the best and train them to be wizards. The number of children capable of becoming wizards increases, so we get more in the next generation, and so on. Eventually, we have enough wizards to cast Fox’s Cunning on every child; our population is 4 points of intelligence smarter! Which also means it’s better able to cast other spells, so in time will become wiser, tougher, etc. Ultimately, over maybe 4 generations, we’ll find that people of Faustusville roll 3d6+4 in order for their stats – race of essentially super heroes, who never die before their old age, can speak every language, never get sick, never experience disability or madness, and live in a crime-free society.
Conclusion
The D&D magic system is, as magic systems go, pretty limiting, but I think I’ve shown that even under this system groups of wizards and/or clerics acting together can achieve almost anything. As an individual cleric you may not be able to go more than 3 or 4 rooms deep into the dungeon; in concert with 50 others you can build any building, solve any crime, and prevent any epidemic. In short, you can build a post-scarcity economy. And this is not the limit; the DMG tells us that cities of larger than 12000 people have an even larger number of higher-level magicians, and commensurately more lower level ones. The world where these wizards, druids and clerics live will indeed be a post-scarcity paradise. Of course, as our society becomes richer magical technology becomes more common (as it is easier to build and trade). Ultimately I imagine every family will have a few magical trinkets to hand down to their children – +1 charisma, or +1 strength, maybe a ring of resistance +2, ultimately ioun stones and magical mounts and all sorts of other things. And although it might take longer, even societies with a much smaller number of magically capable people will do the same thing, ultimately. I’ve constructed this post-scarcity economy in a society where only 2.6% of the whole population are magically capable, and the vast majority of them are 1st or 2nd level. But even then, it’s clear that no serious problem will ever afflict anyone in this society. Even without experiencing an industrial revolution, it will attain a state where crime is always caught, no one ever dies except by old age, and everyone lives in a good house in a clean and beautiful place. Gender relations can be revolutionized, class relations become irrelevant, and injustice disappears.
But for some reason almost all fantasy literature ignores this kind of concept. The stories remain bogged down in a filthy, primitve, ignorant feudal world, where life is hard, racism and sexism is rife, and injustice is the order of the day. Does it seem reasonable that this is even possible in a world where the basic principles of our mediaeval history don’t apply? And what does this tell us about the imaginary space that the fantasy genre occupies?
Appendix 1: Magical Complement of Faustusville
cleric
1 x lvl 12
1 x lvl 7
2 x lvl 6
2 x lvl 4
4 x lvl 3
12 x lvl 2
24 x lvl 1
Total: 46
Druid
1 x lvl 9
1 x lvl 12
2 x lvl 6
2 x lvl 5
8 x lvl 3
16 x lvl 2
32 x lvl 1
Total:62
Paladin
1 x lvl 9
1 x lvl 8
2 x lvl 5
2 x lvl 4
4 x lvl 3
12 x lvl 2
24 x lvl 1
Ranger
1 x lvl 8
1 x lvl 7
4 x lvl 4
8 x lvl 2
16 x lvl 1
Sorcerer
1 x lvl 8
1 x lvl 10
2 x lvl 5
2 x lvl 4
4 x lvl 3
12 x lvl 2
24 x lvl 1
Wizard
1 x lvl 10
1 x lvl 9
4 x lvl 5
8 x lvl 3
16 x lvl 2
32 x lvl 1
—
fn1: Yes, I calculated this and other spell-level figures. I did this on the assumption that all my clerics had no wisdom bonuses to spells. If they do have wisdom bonuses, their usefulness increases significantly. Same applies for the wizards (and did I mention the movies the bards can make?)
August 30, 2011 at 11:39 pm
I like this post and will put a reply on my blog, but I just wanted to take issue with the last paragraph, where you say “But for some reason almost all fantasy literature ignores this kind of concept.”
Actually, to be fair to fantasy literature, the kind of magic that you get in D&D doesn’t really exist in most settings. In Middle-Earth, for instance, magic is extremely rare, corrupting, and fickle – it just couldn’t be used to advance society in the way you envisage or the D&D magic system would allow. I’d say this is true of pretty much all fantasy settings. So it’s not that most fantasy authors simply ignore the fact that magic could cure all the world’s ills. It’s that it’s fundamental to the fiction that magic can’t do those things.
And I certainly don’t think you can say that there’s something innately conservative about that, because the most progressive authors in the field (e.g. Ursula le Guin) also rely on the trope that magic doesn’t make human society be, like, totally wonderful.
August 30, 2011 at 11:58 pm
Glad you liked it! It’s true about le Guin – she had a whole academy of magic, but in her defense they were required to send a wizard to every town with the specific responsibility of solving the town’s problems (that’s where Ged had his adventure with the dragon, and the mist with the warriors at the start). Also I think the elves of LoTR are partly living in this post-scarcity world, they just aren’t bothering to share. And Saruman definitely uses his magic for revolutionary purposes, just not the kind we would approve of.
A lot of books do construct magic as a very scarce resource, but even then they don’t seem to explore its possibilities for fascism and power – it would at least revolutionize the lives of the ruling classes, who have access to it. Also, this is a hugely valuable thing and people would research it more coherently than they often do in stories. Then we have situations like Eddings’s novels where for some reason the evil bad guy hunted down and destroyed all the practitioners of this amazingly powerful art (or they were were somehow allowed to disappear). How would that happen? It’s like if there was an Industrial and Green revolution all at once, and all the major powers in society said “meh”.
But there are lots, I think, where the magic is actually pretty common – there are guilds and the like. Trudi Canavan, Raymond Feist, anything to do with Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, and a whole bunch of stories going back in time that I forget (there was a dragon-hunting one with a girl wizard who had no control; some other stories with dark winged things; my god I’ve read too much dodgy fantasy in my time). How about Goodkind?
It seems like the plan for a lot of fantasy writers is either to ignore the revolutionary properties of the magic, or to go out of their way to construct a world where magic can’t be revolutionary. Why? When SF has long embraced the liberating potential of tech, why do fantasy writers reject the same for magic, which could ultimately be so much more liberating than tech? And especially, why do fantasy RPGs (where the magic flows thick and fast, as I’ve shown) always construct the same crappy mediaeval worlds? It’s clear from D&D’s city-building rules that the world of Forgotten Realms is ripe for turning into a magically-driven utopia.
I think it’s a kind of conservatism in fantasy – an unwillingness to drop the economics of scarcity that defines mediaevalism. By “conservative” here I mean conservative with the genre tropes, not politically. It’s one of the many ways that the genre stunts itself.
August 31, 2011 at 12:54 am
This sort of thing is what D&D needs more of. Bravo!
August 31, 2011 at 12:56 am
This is certainly an old argument, with much well-trodden ground.
I note that you did not at any point note the cost of all of these spells. Especially the higher-level spells get pricey very fast. And Raise Dead cannot be tossed around nearly as lightly as you indicate.
You also make some pretty broad assumptions about knowledge. Sure, it’s easy to use Rock to Mud to simulate pouring cement to pave roads. If you know the engineering to make the roads stable. That’s not a trivial detail. Similarly, educating the populace on sanitation and hygiene is far more important than casting remove disease every third day, and yet it was very uncommon during medieval times. Simply introducing the ability to produce remarkable effects doesn’t automatically grant the knowledge to leverage those effects.
I will say that I find your “justice” system truly horrific. And, there are stories out there that explore just what happens when you rely on magic of this sort to replace actual judgement. They are rarely pretty.
Finally, it is interesting that you begin the experiment by hand-waving away the most crucial obstacle to your plan: Why do these casters want to do all this work for you? Look at the current efforts to modernize Africa, and it is plain to see that pointing all the resources in the same direction is a mammoth undertaking. Even leaving aside corruption and ambition, simple disagreements in which projects should be pursued will bog down the process.
I think we can safely label Faustusville a true utopia.
August 31, 2011 at 1:00 am
“It’s often bugged me that fantasy writers don’t take advantage of the cosmology of their worlds to examine how social, political and economic relations would change in a magically-imbued world.”
I’m glad to see you tackle this theme, it’s one that I have a few times tried to pick away at little pieces from time to time. It’s a far-ranging question that seems to change for me each time I try and ask it.
In some ways though, I wonder if it doesn’t come full circle and reinforce the strange social, political, and economic anachronisms of bog standard D&D. Clearly D&D’s implicit world is not Europe circa 1300 even if it has the technological trappings. The ability for individuals to travel, carry weapons, and rise in prominence as freely as they do; the primacy of standard coinage; the rare to never appearance of serfs in published; etc. all point to a society at least socially and culturally much later in the timeline–or societies evolving around an entirely new dynamic. Perhaps it’s the post-scarcity arc driving this?
August 31, 2011 at 1:15 am
Great post! As far as I’m concerned, this should be required reading for all budding world-builders out there. Lugh has some valid points, but I don’t think they are as strong as he thinks they are. As a matter of fact, i think most of them arise from the exact assumptions that this article attempts to address, mainly that they assume you are dropping magic on top of an existent medieval world instead of working in one that has evolved with magic all along.
August 31, 2011 at 1:32 am
Well, if you are going to go that route, then you have to challenge every preconception. After all, simply having multiple sentient species on the planet is going to skew our development significantly.
Trying to play alternate history with a world that doesn’t even exist is doomed to a spiral into endless arguments. You have no baseline from which to deviate, so stating that any given element is “unrealistic” is impossible to defend.
Instead, come up with a setting that works for you. Maybe it is pseudo-medieval because you are still only a hundred years into the development of the society. Maybe it is post-apocalyptic. Maybe the gods are working to keep mortals down. Maybe it just turns out that the inherent classism of a society based on the skills of a privileged few is simply more likely to be stable under feudalism than democracy.
Or, maybe your setting really is different. Maybe your post-scarcity culture created magical ships capable of space travel, where you encountered other post-scarcity cultures in the Phlogiston.
But, whatever you do, remember that it is almost definitely wrong. Because you can never cover all the angles.
August 31, 2011 at 1:53 am
You don’t have to cover all the angles or spiral into endless arguments, but you should at least consider some of the angles and arguments. Failure to do so leaves you with a jarring system/setting disconnect. It is acknowledged that at some point, when dealing with fantasy and magic you will have to use a little hand-waving and shrugging, but it doesn’t have to be the very first thing you do.
August 31, 2011 at 2:03 am
Sure. But that also means that standard fantasy doesn’t automatically fail to make sense. You just have to consider the angles and bring the setting assumptions back around.
August 31, 2011 at 2:09 am
Good article. I think the answer (as far as literature goes) is that that isn’t what people want from genre fantasy–or at least, that isn’t what the publishing houses and authors think they want.
To many people, what you suggest sounds like science fiction, which is not necessarily what’s wanted by fantasy fans.
In fact, I’d argue that that isn’t what fans tend to want from science fiction. For every Iain Banks or Greg Egan, or Peter Watts, or any number of transhuman-implication explorationists there are 10 Star Wars tie-in novels or Napoleonic wars in space, or near future, gritty militaria.
What does it say about the “idea space” they inhabit? I’d say it means genre’s are inherently conservative things (and I don’t mean that in any political sense).
August 31, 2011 at 3:22 am
Interesting article – you definitely *could* set up your fantasy world like this, if that’s the setting you like. I think that would be a really obnoxious setting, but to each his own. A game set in a society like this might be better served by non-D&D rules: instead of focusing on killing monsters and taking their stuff (no point, when you can just go to the corner magic store and buy it for cheap), focus on abstract actions and goals. There are systems that support this type of play better than D&D does.
A few points:
You’re assuming that every single magic user works for the state, either directly or indirectly.
Also, all magic users are good guys with no ulterior motives.
Abundant sources of XP are required for when they run low.
You assume that your populace is fine with being constantly coerced and mind-controlled by their benevolent but ruthless dictator.
An abundant source of wealth, particularly diamonds, is required for the spells you propose using.
War: if the mechanics of the world support this sort of utopian/dystopian society, what’s to stop the next town over from giving all their warriors +4 to strength and powerful magic weapons, then sailing over in viking ships and reducing Fautusville to a smoking pile of rubble?
August 31, 2011 at 3:32 am
Another thought: check out an anime called “Fairy Tail” where abundant magic *has* created a society somewhat like the one you describe (minus your “justice” system).
August 31, 2011 at 3:46 am
I agree with Lugh and I think he put his point very well. I should have added that, being of a Hayekian/Oakeshottian bent, I tend to think that a technocratic (magocratic?) society ruled from the top down would be either hellish or ineffectual or both.
As for the specific authors… There are very few magic users in the Goodkind books, aren’t there? I haven’t read the Trudi Canavan ones (they look rubbish), and the Dragonlance and other D&D spin-offs don’t really count.
August 31, 2011 at 4:41 am
Since most fantasy novels don’t spend much time discussing infant mortality, and since most everyone the main characters meet have enough food to eat, aren’t scared from diseases or deprivations of youth, and aren’t worried about dying of disease any time soon, I usually tend to assume that there must be some low-level version of this going on anyway.
IIRC, the Guardians of the Flame series touches on this subject briefly, too.
August 31, 2011 at 9:04 am
Hi everyone, thanks for commenting and sorry – I was asleep while you were touring my little utopia. To respond to some specific points, especially those raised by Lugh…
1) where will the money come from!!? and on a related note, why will these people work for me? Note that mediaeval kings were hardly averse to screwing their serfs for all they could get to fund various vanity projects. And in this case I have a massive trade surplus because … magic! … But also, we can kill both birds with one stone by assuming that Faustusville is set up around the strongholds of an adventuring group. Then we have two churches (one of healing, one of knowledge), four wizard colleges, and a Druid grove, all headed by the people who used to adventure together. It’s their shared plan, and their apprentices and underlings will do it because they’re told.
Also, did I not mention that Faustusville’s ruler is
Who could not want to work with a man like that? Also, if you look at the DMG money system, the handful of adventurers setting up this town will start off with about 500,000 + GPs in total, so they can afford to pay for spells for quite a little while until their trade system gets underway – not that they need to, since this is an autocracy in a primitive setting where people serve the King out of fealty (and I have the Geas spells to make them).
2) The justice system: I’m not sure why everyone thinks it’s so horrid. Police interrogate suspects now. In Faustusville, the interrogation involves no violence, and is always successful. Using Speak With Dead to find out who killed Bob is no more invasive than using DNA evidence; it’s just a lot more effective. Look at the Strauss-Kahn debacle and tell me that wouldn’t have benefited from a few Zone of Truth spells. And what are the alternatives in our mediaeval universe? Trial by ordeal, torture, and a complete inability to gather or process any form of criminal evidence guarantees that crime abounds and everyone does what they can get away with.
3) It’s already happening (Got Medieval): that’s a very charitable interpretation of the degree of thought our authors have put into their work, Dr. Medieval. I think it’s more likely that they don’t want to imagine what the world is really like, and are presenting us with a World of Warcraft bubblegum version of medieval life, while claiming it’s realistic because magic is too scarce to be used for the benefit of all (a la Noisms).
4) Hygiene is better than casting spells every day: and here we see some part of what I’m trying to say. I’m envisaging a society that has achieved modern levels (or better!) of healthcare without understanding anything about public hygiene, the germ model of disease, astronomy, agriculture or genetics. They probably still think, for example, that thrush is a punishment for women having sex; but they can cure it instantly. They can’t prevent conception except through the most old-fashioned of methods; there is no form of public health except secondary prevention. What would the social order in such a society be like? How would the justice system I present be warped by their lack of understanding of modern structures of logic (or indeed, of liberalism). Would class systems be entrenched or diluted by this system? Would they develop a new form of public health based on rapid reaction to disease? How would they view madness in a society where madness is instantly curable? What new ideals and ideologies would spring up in a society where nobody gets sick for more than a day? Would disease be eradicated? Would scientists and people proposing hand-washing be persecuted as mad?
Ultimately I think Noisms and trey are right, this is not the kind of thing that most fantasy readers (and probably trey is right, most sf readers) want to see, and genres are inherently conservative. I was aiming at exploring some of these ideas with my Compromise and Conceit campaign – what happens to the social order when you have proof of the existence of God and certainty of the existence of hell? I was also trying to imagine how the industrial revolution would stall and be replaced by an ongoing economy of magical cottage industries, and how Europe’s colonial project would have been made easier and harder by magic. Hence the scary natives, the arms fair, and the growing suspicion throughout the game that everyone was going to go to hell. I think that the genre has lots of potential to explore these ideas, but just doesn’t because it’s not what people expect. And ultimately (contra trey) I think SF does more of this than fantasy, and that’s a shame.
Finally Noisms, the Canavan books are rubbish but of the better sort, if you get my drift. I was really struck by this post-scarcity problem in those books because the lead character is a poor girl who is inducted into a large college of mages (who can do almost anything with their magic). The first time you see her, she is throwing stones at these wizards who’re using magic for crowd control. And I found myself wondering why, oh why are there poor people in this society at all? This is what Iain M Banks does with the Culture – he asks us to imagine technology liberating us from poverty. Why does no one think this can be done with magic, even when you’re reading a book (like Canavan’s or Feist’s) with whole guilds of magic in it?
August 31, 2011 at 12:46 pm
This is very fun and I like it a lot. But it also highlights why, if I want a world that represents our ideas of medieval society but with MAGIC!!! and MONSTERS!!! (and that’s what I want when I play D&D) then I dial down the numbers of wizards and clerics in society.
August 31, 2011 at 1:15 pm
You have to dial it down a lot though. Afghanistan had 1100,000 births last year, and an infant mortality rate of 134 per 1000, so it had about 151,000 infant deaths. That’s … a horrific tragedy when you compare with Japan, which had a million births and about 2000 deaths (<- this is thoroughly and completely a guess). But anyway, to use Afghanistan as an example of the required population distribution of clerics, 151000 births where an infant dies means 413 per day. In order to prevent every single one of those deaths you would need the birth and subsequent complications to be attended by a cleric of at least 7th level. Such a cleric can cast 2 4th level spells per day, which means you would need 200 clerics in Afghanistan to completely eliminate infant mortality[1]. Afghanistan has a population of 30,000,000, so you need 1 cleric of 7th level or higher per 150,000 population. That's a maximum. If half the clerics of that level or higher were 8th level, then you'd need probably 1 per 200,000 population or so. Now, I've noticed in the news recently that people say Afghanistan is a pretty religious society. If divine magic were real, it seems pretty likely that a highly religious country like Afghanistan could cobble together clerics at that rate. Consider, for example, the US, which is apparently a very secular society where non-religious education is valued: 2.9% of the population have PhDs, which is a rate much much higher than 1 per 150000, and requires (in the USA) a total of – what – 20 years of schooling? Do you think that a nation as religious as Afghanistan could field 3% of its population as clerics with divine magic powers? And of them, 1 in 100 could get to be 7th level or higher? Because if so they have more than enough clerics to eliminate infant mortality.
You really have to dial the numbers back, because as soon as even a few clerics get together and decide to fix a problem, their magical powers mean that they can do it very easily.
—
fn1: assuming, of course, that those 200 were able to attend every risky birth, etc. – so obviously there are organizational details that would mean you would never eliminate all infant deaths, but you’d still be able to get rid of most.
August 31, 2011 at 7:09 pm
I dial it back by making the class cleric extremely unusual and mostly having clergy being experts.
August 31, 2011 at 7:26 pm
“In fact, in the worst case we could just kill the mother, cut out the baby, and bring the mother back to life; done quickly, this could even be more humane (and I have clerics who can kill the mother with a word).”
“Hmm Mrs Faustus number 14, this is looking like a tricky birth. Tell you what – I’ll get a level 8 fighter to hack off your head and cut the baby out. Given your hit points and the number of attacks per round they have, it should all be over in about 6 seconds. We don’t even need to worry about hurting the baby, as they won’t have announced an attack on it, therefore there’s no way for them to hurt it. What’s that? Use power word kill on you? No no. No point wasting a high level spell slot on a death spell is there? Bob’ll take you head off then I’ll rez you and you’ll both be out of here before I get another minor action long enough to explain my reasoning again.”
I love healthcare in Faustusville.
By the way, have you considered how the wizards can contribute to health care? If there are a large number of diseases coming up (say more than 27/day) then your wizards could also just turn some of the sufferers to stone, then turn them back at a more convenient time. It’s basically the same as a stasis spell, but lower level.
“And note: rape is non-existent in my society, because every woman knows that she can make an allegation and the truth will always be discovered.”
This one isn’t quite true. You still get the cases where he thought she meant yes but she really meant no. But after that you geas both people to be a lot clearer in their communications about sex and in checking for consent. If she’s too traumatised by it you could also investigate the use of a forget spell if the person moved fast enough, which would revolutionise the entire idea of regretting something for the rest of your life…
“Commune: If there’s any doubt, I can just ask the gods themselves whether a particular person is guilty.”
I wouldn’t trust those guys. Statistically speaking there’s a good chance that at least a couple of your clerics worship god(s) of lies and/or assorted nastiness. The commune spells from those priests should only be used for the divine equivalent of prank calling gods you don’t like.
“Question 1: Is your fridge still running?”
“But for some reason almost all fantasy literature ignores this kind of concept.”
The key theme in Exalted is that the distant past was a wonderland created by superhuman magic users who were able to reshape the world itself. They basically eliminated want in all places they felt like eliminating it then built a society closer to Star Trek than modern life through the efforts of 300 ubermensch. The only thing that tears down such societies is that being a good person, or even agreeing what a good person is, isn’t a valid spell in either Exalted or D&D. Therefore the iron rule of Lord Faustus is closer to a benevolent tyranny than a utopia. [1]
“And I can use charm person on your friends and family so they don’t resent the act afterwards.”
This approaches a topic that frequently gets debated in Exalted forums. Forcibly adjusting someone’s mind is basically mindrape. Is it better to mindrape someone into doing what you want them to do, or just threatening to stick a massive sword up their ass [2]?
But I’ll drag myself away from my pet RPG and instead give you other instances of such thoughts in stories:
1. In the Earthsea novels, Wizards and other spell workers perform just such roles. The problem is their ability to cure disease/heal appears to be much lower
2. In the Spellsong Cycle by L.E. Modesitt there is a section that talks about how the creation of better roads is probably going to be the most lasting change that the sorceresses can leave to their country. Wider spread changes are prevented by a) shortage of spellcasters and b) magic does a terrible job affecting living things, which prevents effective healing
3. The Eberron setting for D&D postulates wide spread usage of magic to partially replace technology. There is no description/reason for why your example doesn’t occur, though I do recall that the high level characters are less common, so fewer resurrections but more continual flame torches.
4. The Glantri setting in basic D&D was wizard heavy and talked about how magic was used there to provide all sorts of conveniences of modern life. But clerics were outlawed, so even though force field umbrellas were relatively low cost the health benefits you postulate are unobtainable.
5. The Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher has everyone able to use some level of magic, including frequent healing magic [3]. This is shown to retard certain lines of thought as the heavy prevalence of (in D&D terms) of high level casters leads to no need for effective usage of large numbers of lesser abilities – why have effective crossbows when you have a couple of hundred Knights who can shoot perfectly over more than mile and the powerful casters can slaughter thousands? Unless of course you need to kill millions.
[1] And let’s not forget that there is basically a 1 in 9 chance that Lord Faustus is a Chaotic Evil dick who kills babies for lols.
[2] This is Exalted I’m talking about. There are no swords that can’t double as surfboards.
[3] Separately I do recommend this series. Jim Butcher is an easy writer to read and his ideas in this series are interesting and highly enjoyable. It’s basically about how brains are more important than being able to throw a massive fireball.
August 31, 2011 at 8:36 pm
Having now plowed through others posts, I have to back Noisms and Got Medieval on some points. Your utopia is prevented or made more difficult/less effective as:
1. The fascist outcomes of unequal power distribution offset the revolutionary potential of magic.
For example, even though your level 12 cleric would love to help they’re generally adventuring to prevent the cleric of Bane in the next town from raising a massive skeleton army. Cause the one thing that last longer than summoned food and water is a massive skeleton army that could sweep across the land.
2. The stuff you’re talking about is already happening. For example, name a fantasy book with common magical healing where death in childbirth is talked about as anything other than a shock? In most cases the suggestion you make of a dirty medieval world isn’t born out.
Though I acknowledge your bubblegum WoW world as a possibility, you should acknowledge that the opposite proposal is also possible and that it would look identical unless the author wanted to do a multi-page dissertation on how his local lord tore himself away from his harem enough to organise a utopia.
For example, Shadowdale is a bucolic farming community that spends around $0 on defence because they know that a bunch of high level adventurers will always slaughter the low to mid level armies sent against them. Neverwinter only has a plague cause the plague is explicitly immune to magical healing.
On the topic of other novels:
I disagree a little on Trudi Caravan. Her novels have magicians either as a individualist assholes who prey on other magic users for strength or servicing the aristocracy to create a fantastical world where disease is banished and buildings are magically strengthened to allow impossible design. But they don’t trickle down to the masses.
And Feist has no magician’s guild in one world until Pug forms one at Stardock. After which they immediately become a self interested group of stick-in-the-muds that are only interested in magic and themselves. Prior to that magic is strictly a master to apprentice arrangement. In the other world the magicians have schemed to accrue absolute power to themselves. In both worlds the healing effects are pretty short on offer while the blowing shit up catalogue is massive.
“How would they view madness in a society where madness is instantly curable?”
Best thing about this is how widespread the problems it could solve are. We could prove whether the London riots are caused by poor socialisation corrupting the rioters mental state as that’s potentially qualify as a form of madness. If cure madness stops you from rioting, you’re free to go. If it doesn’t your sent to the gallows for a quick hanging followed by resurrection and a bill for a diamond. Nothing like a taste of death to remind you to play nice. And if you don’t pay the bill we don’t rez you next time.
In contrast to fantasy novels, if you want a setting that really fails to make sense, look at comics. Reed Richards can invent anything you want to heal people, move things or destroy anything you dislike. But healing is unchanged, transport doesn’t involve teleportation unless you are Reed Richards (and the story needs it) and despite his endless money from government contracts it seems that the government still has more tanks than mass produced death rays.
And unlike magic, the science that Richards constantly invents should be a transformative force, because while a cure disease spell requires that you’re level X a healing ray can be mass produced in China the instant it’s invented, so the offsetting of good and evil shouldn’t stop normal people taking advantage of the inventions of both good and evil inventors.
Comics are a fantastic example of why fiction in general is conservative. If your thesis goes off on too wild a tangent then people can’t relate.
Let me give you another example of conservative fiction. Iain M Bank’s Culture novels are about a bunch of people who hang around all day with nothing to do or want. But there is a goal of transcendence that they could aim for an achieve if they wanted. But his novels aren’t about that, because if he modelled his story realistically where a society based on science and discovery is going to be totally unable to resist conquering that next mystery then his novels would only be about Sublimation.
You heard me. Culture novels are too conservative. 😛
September 1, 2011 at 10:35 am
These comments are excellent! I’m glad my readers are enjoying this little thought experiment, and if I get time I’m going to add to it tonight … though I have to prepare for a trip to London, so maybe I won’t be able to.
Paul has a good point that Faustusville’s health care system will, like all systems, run up against cost constraints at some point (we’ll look at that in more detail later), and certainly reducing the number of spells used is a good idea. So in the first instance, developing good hygiene and improved ante-natal care would help, but ultimately there will come a time when we have to decide how to kill a mother in labour. And Paul is right, by dropping the Power Word, Kill spell you essentially double the cost-effectiveness of your healthcare, so you might as well just bring in the 8th level fighter. Though I think there would be trickiness in determining whether it’s a significant reduction in cost-effectiveness to cast Forget, or just to purchase a single vorpal sword for the town. I think I’ll establish an institute for researching this – let’s call it the Faustian University for Costing Knowledge and Understanding.
Following on from Paul and Got Medieval, I’m willing to credit the possibility that this stuff is happening in the world’s we read about, but just isn’t mentioned (our nerdy proclivities aside, it’s not exactly the stuff of legends, is it?[1]) And you’re right about Trudi Canavan having the benefits of magic only available to upper class people (I recall various wizards were tied or allied with various houses). This kind of social order is believable and interesting (though sometimes Canavan was a bit preachy about the class politics, i thought).
I also like the turn Paul’s comments have taken towards a dystopia, and I can see we need to keep him away from the magic toys.
—
fn1: Although Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers contains long tracts that are basically essays on how he would organize an army. “Is this going to be a lecture on military organization or another bug hunt?” The movie did a good job there, I think…
September 1, 2011 at 4:18 pm
Wait. More series occurred to me. According to you this shouldn’t be so easy.
Piers Anthony had magic as a transformative social force in his Incarnations series. Basically magic was was as effective and common as science.
Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series have people on magic horses who turn up and (frequently) do exactly this. As well as magic healers in most towns.
September 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm
You’ll want the Paladins near the entrances to the city. They can detect evil and you don’t want evil people in the city. 🙂
September 1, 2011 at 10:54 pm
[…] to flog the dead horse of post-scarcity fantasy, I thought I’d bring my day job to bear on the task, and test the cost-effectiveness of a […]
September 1, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Similar exercises have been described on the Wizards of the Coast character Optimization boards.
If D&D 3.x rules are followed, Lord Faustus will only exist if the great god Pun-Pun and the Omniscifer allow him to exist. Even then, he’ll face competition from the Feudal Lord of Wal-mart build.
Yes, D&D rules produce nonsense if followed literally. That is because D&D is designed to be administered by forgetful, illogical humans who don’t have enough time to argue out the consequences logically.
If you really want to simulate a world, start with a computer. Look at Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. There’s a lot of bright people working on such simulations.
September 1, 2011 at 11:34 pm
hahaha, in Faustusville I think the opposite holds true.
September 1, 2011 at 11:38 pm
So Paul, is your argument that actually fantasy writers are fond of writing post-scarcity literature, and it’s actually SF that is conservative?
(bearing in mind that the reason the Culture hang around is that they like to meddle, and I think this was explicitly stated in a recent novel – it’s not that the Culture novels are conservative, it’s that the Culture are radical in a way that not everyone is entirely comfortable with. This is part of the beauty of the Culture novels. You know that the Iridans suck and need to be conquered, but you’re gunning for them all the way because they’re the underdog and they should be able to choose their own destiny; but at the same time you know they are an anachronism that should convert or die. The novel Consider Phlebas challenges all of your impulses at once, which is why it’s so much fun.)
September 2, 2011 at 6:48 am
I think that fantasy probably is the more radical of the genres. Let me give you a single example.
In the fantasy Culture novels by Iain M. Banks a series of benevolent Gods have set up an elaborate charade of being Minds. These beings use a mix of hidden magic and GSV avatars to service a society of billions.
Now some may say that the Culture novels are sci fi, but they are mistaken. There is not a single scientific idea expressed in these novels that is not much more clearly explained using a magical model, probably derived from the banal D&D magic system given its reliability.
September 2, 2011 at 9:18 am
Nobody mentioned it, but if everyone can walk down to the Repair Shop and have something repaired, they are more likely to break it.
Give a teenager a $400 cell phone and tell him you have insurance so if it breaks he can get a new one. Dollars to donuts that phone will get dropped in the mud and slammed in a locker a dozen times a day.
The benefits of living in Faustusville are countered by the dangers. If your high level people spend all their time fighting off wandering monsters drawn in by all the wealth and magic present, they aren’t around to cast high level spells. If they sit around using magic on the town, all the wandering monsters just scramble through the streets biting people’s testicles off.
Other communities nearby and other adventurers will destroy the seemingly high defensive qualities of Faustusville. If Faustusville has everyone rolling 4d6+4 drop lowest for stats, then everyone in the world does that and it’s not special anymore. The extra +2 you get to hit is balanced by the +2 that every other person in the world has for AC. Besides, there is a reason Permanency doesn’t list Fox Cunning as a possible spell: you can’t do it. It’s not a matter of researching some alternative.
If every village in the world has agricultural surpluses, there is no agricultural trade. Instead you see fewer farmers and more specialist craftsmen who make goods that the now-richer townsfolk can buy. The agricultural surplus is exchanged for a material goods surplus, effectively in luxuries like transportation and commuication and entertainment.
As for Raise Dead, not every diamond will be worth 5,000 GP. The villages sited on diamond mines will be well-exploited by their neighbors, probably changing hands frequently through warfare. The scarcity of diamonds large enough for Raise Dead will make those diamonds unobtainable. And, raising someone from the dead costs the subject a level, which means all the zero-level townsfolk are assed out.
The XP costs for your education system are recovered through wizards adventuring, but adventuring is a dangerous profession. How often does an adventuring Wizard die in a way that is impossible to recover through Raise Dead? And Comprehend Languages doesn’t let you speak or write, so everyone in town would be able to read and listen to each other but would be completely unable to formulate coherent speech or text. I suppose you could use the Comprehend Languages as a little boost, but the kids would still need a lot of work, you still need schools and teachers, etc.
I agree that you can’t assume everyone in town will work for the common good. Half of everyone will be on the Chaotic side of Chaos or Neutrality, and as such more interested in personal gain than helping the community. That means people need to pay money for those Cure Disease spells. But a normal dude might not have the money! So you need to tax the wealthy to provide for the poor, and yes you still have poor in this context because they can’t afford the health care. Of the half of the spellcasters who are willing to work for the common good, some will be opposed by the efforts of elements in the town who are diametrically opposed to the status quo. Some at least will hate the ruler for invading their minds even though he bribes them with cheap food and consumer goods. So some percentage of the do-gooders will be countered in their efforts by an equal percentage of blackguards, perhaps the 1 in 9 that are Chaotic Evil?
As use of antobiotics encourages growth of antobiotic-resistant germs, so too would use of Cure Disease promote magic-resistant diseases. With no sanitation or nonmagical healthcare knowledge or infrastructure, you could see magic-resistant plagues sweep through the populace or destroy crops.
You mention use of magic to move water for use in hydroelectric power. Why would these people know anything about electrical infrastructure? Why would they know anything about engineering to produce the dam, the road, the sewer, water pipes, etc? If these are people who had always lived with magic, there is no reason for them to have ever developed sciences beyond agriculture, pottery, textiles.
Having the high-level adventurers living in the town as a group is cheating the rules. The demographics already accounted for that. The 12th level Cleric IS the high-level retired adventurer. There simply is NOT a higher level Cleric PC living in the town. If we allow for that, we might as well throw out the whole demographic table and just say a wizard did it. Conversation pointless.
I do agree with you that unrestricted magic turns the game into Star Wars. But you took a magic system and ignored a whole bunch of its restrictions, and didn’t catch a bunch of likely outcomes.
September 2, 2011 at 7:45 pm
If this was facebook I would have ‘liked’ that last comment by 1d30.
September 5, 2011 at 7:12 am
Yes, that comment was very good (thanks for joining in, 1d30),and it was good because it was doing precisely what I was be,owning the absence of in my initial post. It was imagining magic as a cultural and economic force rather than something bolted onto a medieval society with no deeper influence. 1d30 was discussing the ramifications of testing magic in terms of it’s temporal effects if a society were to seriously consider using it to improve their lot. And some of the comments again make clear the possibility for magic to revolutionze a medieval world, 1d30 points out that with everyone getting magical enhancement at birth, then 4d6+4 is not special anymore- which is exactly my point. Just like in the culture, you have a society where people are stronger, tougher and smarter than they used to be- society has leveled up. But most fantasy novels don’t show us a society of supermen. He speaks of exchangin an agricultural surplus for a material goods surplus. This is the essence of development! It’s exactly what the industrial revolution gaveeurope, but achieved through magic. This is what I’m asking for- fantasy which engages with the idea of magic influencing society rather than standing outside of it.
Another commenter here observed that fantasy is heavily influenced by the protestan work ethic and I think that’s partly true. Fantasy worlds are strongly built around the idea of not being able to get something for nothing. You work all your life to build a subsistence-level farm that the barbarians sweep through and destroy in a day, etc. But magic is explicitly a technology in which you get something for nothing. So why don’t fantas worlds include more of that idea?
I am traveling at the moment, accessing my blog on an iPad through a dodgy wifi connection in a second-rate London hotel, so responses will be a little intermittent. Please have at it in my absence!
September 8, 2011 at 4:43 am
Not convinced that magic is a something for nothing deal.
Wizard magic requires (usually) years of study and risky experimentation. While clerical magic requires faith, often some religious training, and gods/powers. Both require infrastructure: schools, academies, churches, bureaucracies and often their magic requires props, some expendable some not, which are often hugely expensive in their own right. That is a lot of resources tied up in creating wizards and clerics and the system can be disrupted or destroyed.
Such a system as Faustusville would seem likely to develop a caste system pretty quickly: user of magic at the top, skilled people (including fighters and such) in the middle and everyone else at the bottom.
September 10, 2011 at 2:12 am
[…] like the world Hunt has created, and I think it provides interesting insights into the kind of post-scarcity fantasy that has been under discussion here recently. The world of these books includes clockwork-run […]
September 11, 2011 at 9:50 pm
‘As for Raise Dead, not every diamond will be worth 5,000 GP. The villages sited on diamond mines will be well-exploited by their neighbors, probably changing hands frequently through warfare. The scarcity of diamonds large enough for Raise Dead will make those diamonds unobtainable.’
Ah, but if the spell requires 5000 gp of market value, then as big diamonds become unavailable, smaller diamonds will cost more, and raise dead spells will require smaller diamonds!
September 12, 2011 at 9:38 am
@zhai2nan2: Good point. Also devaluation of the currency is actually a good thing from a wizard or clerics viewpoint. Projects like golem or magic item creation would also come down when viewed in such a world as they all require X gp of components too.
Therefore the first thing that Lord Faustus should do is issue a fiat currency that’s allegedly linked to the gp. Over production of that currency would (as long as there’s no run on it) greatly decrease spell costs.
September 17, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Interesting idea, though it would require the sort of thinking that went on to create the original series of Star trek, where the federation is seen as this utopia. Then you will get the one person who sees other uses for the tecnology/magic, and utopia will crumble. See for example the ability to beam things through the shields on the ships. Sure, you don’t do that to people as the result could get messy or have bad long-term useages.. but beam in a powerful enough bomb to the bridge or the engine-room and you just wiped out that ship.
One fantasy bookseries that do deal with an all-magic world is the Darksword trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
So instead of this utopia, I think a far more believable useage of magic would be magical guerillas or nukes. Warfare would be messy…
September 19, 2011 at 4:07 am
Thanks for your comment Magnus. I will be putting up a book review soon that has a bit moire to say about magic and war in this context. But first I have to go to Iceland.
September 19, 2011 at 4:15 pm
I´d recommend taking a look at the “Labyrinths of Echo” books by Max Frei for inspiration on this topic.
It depicts a world where there´s no difference between doing something and using magic, for example fine cuisine: a distiller doesn´t just make fine whiskey, each bottle is also a spell potion, a cup of coffee is also an anti-depressant spell, a good meal also cures disease and so on.
The autors most outstanding feat maybe the lack of real world analogue things. In a society where everyone can use “Silent Speech” (Telepathy), why should anyone think about creating telecomunications?
Before critics chime in: It clearly is an society of over-abundance that once steered very close to disaster from power abuse and that event shows stronly: Police as in regular law enforcement has a small presence and is quite lax, internal security, enforcing the strict laws of magic, on the other hand, has a licence to kill on sight, if need be.
October 11, 2011 at 10:10 pm
[…] might explain why these communities have never gone for post-scarcity fantasy. When you have an infinite lifespan, no intervention of any kind to improve quality of life is […]
June 18, 2014 at 10:34 am
This might explain why these communities have never gone for post-scarcity fantasy…
Because it would be boring as hell. Oh and when your PCs show up they’re labeled as dangerous and disruptive sociopaths subdued and mind wiped in under a week. Boy don’t that sound like fun?
June 18, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Thanks for commenting Ad Astra. I think actually that adventure could be quite entertaining – the PCs rock up to some new kingdom and everyone seems suspiciously happy, clean and polite, then they get this secret police attention, start thinking they’re in a Stepford Wives scenario, but really it’s just that the kingdom has a long history of people trying to come in and steal their stuff. Ultimately the PCs end up having to run away from some crazy secret police …
Also these communities don’t have to be utopias of liberal thought – they might actually be very restrictive and punish anyone who deviates. For example, it might be a Lawful Evil wizard who implemented the program, and the society still has slavery, debt bondage and legal murder. This would be particularly terrifying because it would be a potentially very expansionist nation state.
This theme is a central driver of the conflict that makes Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels interesting: the Culture is a post-scarcity high-tech space-faring society that appears like an anarchist utopia, but it meddles in other cultures in a way that is decidedly sinister, and a lot of the story hooks arise from those cultures (strangely!) not wanting to be meddled with. There’s no reason that the same conflicts couldn’t arise in a post-scarcity fantasy setting, and of course the PCs could be at the centre of such conflicts. With, as you say, the threat of being mind-wiped if they’re caught …
August 29, 2014 at 11:51 am
I started to analyze this phenomenon and made a module (the start of a campaign) available to play. It’s called The Metaphysical Revolution. It’s here:
http://campbellgrege.com/work-listing/the-metaphysical-revolution-dd-3-5-module/
August 29, 2014 at 1:30 pm
That’s interesting stuff, campbellgrege! And I think it gets at some of the things I’ve been talking about. Did you build the follow-on RPG system?
August 31, 2014 at 8:07 pm
I run a game that has drifted in this direction over the years, although it’s never had the rigorous analysis on display here. There’s industrial magic, which is common and fairly cheap, but mostly useless to adventurers, and an odd assortment of battle spells and items the players focus on. The balancing factor is the role of quasi-magical forces, which limit the human population to defined areas. So in town, everyone is basically well-fed, healthy and engaged in social games. Out of town it’s a free-for-all.
January 30, 2015 at 6:01 am
Greetings, faustus!
For Fate and Destiny RPG (on CampbellGregE.com), I did not build the turn-based RPG framework from the ground up. My partner, Nanaki did that. However, I did tweak it to be optimized for user-friendliness and efficiency.
In addition, I did do the code for the final minigame based on hints left to me from Nanaki. There were portions of the map dedicated to this minigame, and I knew the theme; therefore, I built it from there.