Why are all High Fantasy settings set in the past, don't they also progress into the future? What would a world like that look like? Where magic and tech progressed at the same pace.
Some idea's form a quick google search
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>>46619932
if magic and science both exist in the same universe wouldn't someone try to combine them at some point
>>46621100
I would think so technomancy would be a huge field of magic.
also magic could be used as an unlimited source of power
Also necromancers keeping themselves alive with tech
>>46619932
Doesn't Shadowrun meet that qualification? Isn't that literally what Shadowrun is supposed to be? High Fantasy tropes dropped into a near-future cyberpunk environment?
Also, if you want, read about the planet Q'Sal, which is in the Warhammer 40k setting, introduced in the Black Crusade RPG. There are details in the Core Rulebook and the Tome of Fate splatbook. Q'Sal is basically what you'd get if you took the average Imperial Civilized World and had everything somehow powered or influenced by Tzeentchian sorcery. The oligarchs who rule the various city-states are themselves referred to as Sorceror-Technocrat.
Actually, come to think of it, 40k would be exactly what you're looking for if you removed all the grimdark and made it more noble bright. 40k was originally just supposed to be the "IN SPAAACE" version of GW's original Warhammer Fantasy setting. That's why so many of the factions are like fantasy races, such as the Orks (Orcs), the Eldar (Elves), and the Necrons (Tomb Kings).
Yea, shadowrun is a shot in the right direction. but it has to much of a familiar feel to it,in a world of magic and tech the world these peoples live in would be vastly different from from what we have today. I would think the biggest city's in this world would be utopian? also its cyberpunk ....
>>46621964
So maybe start with things like Shadowrun and 40k and remove lots of the more grim and dark aspects of them. Also, consider futuristic inventions and high technology, and just make them "magical". Maybe magic becomes a sort of energy source to power complex machines and technology, the way electricity does know. Think of things that we'd normally use technology for, and then replace the "tech" mechanism with a "magic" mechanism. Like maybe car engines, instead of using fuel for combustion, actually has some kind of flame spirit causing the combustion instead of spark plugs or whatever is used in a real engine.
>>46619932
>Why are all High Fantasy settings set in the past, don't they also progress into the future?
High fantasy is magic-as-technology.
So your question is wrong from the beginning.
>Why are all High Fantasy settings set in the past, don't they also progress into the future?
You have to drag nerds kicking and screaming out of their autistic comfort zones
t. manic pixie dream girl
Technology progesses to save mana, which is getting pretty short in supply; Though it's never created or destroyed, there's only so much of it left untapped.
It very much depends on whether magic can be harnessed by machinery, or mastered by everyone, or scaled to industrial levels. The answers to these questions vary greatly across published works of high fantasy, and are foundational to what you are trying to build.
>>46623299
>>46619932
Science is the process by which we come to understand the universe we live in.
Magic is what we call hypothetical events that can't be understood by science. Which is to say, a magical event defies causality. Shit just *happens* without anything causing it to happen.
Say you live in a universe where people go around "casting magical fireballs" at hordes of enemies. In that universe, that's technology. There is a process that can be learned, understood, and recreated. It's not clear what that process could be or what physical laws could make it possible, but over there causality is preserved, so it's not magic.
What you're really asking is, "What would a universe with slightly different physical laws (that let you cast fireballs) look like? What would a technologically advanced civilization in that universe look like?"
It depends.
But it probably doesn't look all that different from our own. Education and application of the scientific method would be important. Information economies would be dominant. Energy budgets & standard of living could be higher or might be about the same - we live with shocking amounts of power at our fingertips.
If we assume that causing magical events requires only knowledge and will, scarcity might be less of an issue on a global scale, but poverty would probably be even more closely linked with educational standards. So you still have a basis for social and economic conflict, since not everybody can know everything - and knowledge is power.
So a plausible high-fantasy near-future setting looks like our world, but moreso. Information sharing magic/technology is massively optimized and rapidly becoming even moreso. Intellectual property rights are the core issue of the era, and intelligence augmentation research is the name of the game.
What if our technology now is magic all on it's own?
>>46625797
What if Technology was just a way to look at magic?
>>46625797
>>46625851
I don't think you know what words mean.
>>46625646
That's one way of putting it. Here's another way:
Magic is all practice, no theory. It works in the wild, but when you try to write it down it never seems to work - that's why grimoires are so hard to read, because they were so hard to write. It's not a repeatable process because it won't work for everyone the same way. Maybe there are a billion factors working with each other to make magic weird, maybe it is knowable if we someday build a computer powerful enough.
To us, today, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if we could understand how Necrojillo and Sons reanimated a graveyard and outbid their competitors on the Interstate contract. It doesn't matter if we could do math and find out how we missed President Carabas being a man-sized cat for his entire first term. There's no system, there's just weird things that happen, most of them just outside of our field of vision, reconstructed from rumors, built from hearsay, and then the next-door neighbor summons a balor and there goes the neighborhood.
Endless Legend. Though to be fair its 'magic' is just super advanced technology left behind by post mortality post scarcity aliens.
>>46625797
By their nature, magic is what cannot be explained or reproduced by science, and technology can be. A magician may know the process for creating a fireball, he may even pioneer ways at making it a better, burnier fireball via experimentation and study. However, at the end of the day, he's not 100% sure how or why the fireball works, just that it works. Thus 'magic' becomes the supremely theoretical branch of science. Because we understand how certain parts of the process work, ex, rune 1 + crystal = fireball means we can use technology to streamline the effect, or even use magic to streamline our technology such as superheating metal for forging in a way that wouldn't be practical with available materials and processes.
As a result, such settings would have large numbers of anachronisms, not because magic and lmao old-fashioned fantasy, but because magic would make it unnecessary to advance technology in certain directions so long as it can be relied upon.
>>46625895
Cont. Take cars for example. Magitech cars would probably still run on steam, since binding fire and water elementals together into an engine to hate fuck each other into generating power de-necessitates using oil, which was only adopted because it was cheap easy and plentiful.
Tanks? Also unnecessary as we know them, thanks to enchanted armor. We would.probably still have guns because they're more efficient than crossbows, but soldiers would probably still be clanking around in full plate because magic.makes it both economic and practical. I'm sure someone would find a way to combine magic with the guns too, making them magic.gun Knights.
The affect on social progress would be interesting. Would the industrial revolution still result in the empowerment of the proletariat? The printing press becomes even more important as it opens up magic to the masses - as I imagine a press is still faster than even an enchanted self writing quill.
>>46619932
Magic IS Tech tho.
Sorta.
I mean, science is just figuring out the laws and limits of reality, and then powergaming them til' you get something useful. Technology is the tools we get out of it. It's a process.
The idea that a flamethrower and a scroll of fireball aren't both pieces of technology is a shitty one.
So yeah, a Future Fantasy world would be one where you can get a minor in Planar Geography and you drop by the CVS for a potion of Cure Cold.
>>46625952
Medical technology? Dominated by magic. Potions and spells are the order of the day, practical knowledge of human anatomy is widely available but mostly niche. Microbiology is certainly not needed. Doctors remain half philosophers, half apothecaries.
Our advanced scientific knowledge suffers, but practical and engineering ability improves. Going to the moon is still an undertaking, but much less difficult. Many forms of manual labour become more or less obsolete, overall global populations decrease because having large families is decentivized despite survival rate being way up. Hunger and disease are rarities, while violence and armed conflict is more popular than ever thanks to eases in the economic and logistical burdens of conflict which have made war a less and less frequent thing today.
>>46626040
>the economic and logistical burdens of conflict which have made war a less and less frequent thing today.
Are you saying this is the case in our world? Because I'd say that rather than war costing too much, it's much cheaper for central governments to crack down on rebellions and wide-scale brigandage, providing a stronger deterrent.
>>46626040
Effects on social politics are mixed. The proliferation of knowledge brought about by the printing press is a major blow to the Old establishment because it enables anyone to learn magic, but at the same time it makes it easier for existing governments to hold onto power without facing strong opposition or upheaval. The vestiges of old society remain dressed in new cloths. Think post colonial but pre ww2 and I imagine that's how things are politically. Empires still rule the world, and while war is even more bloody savage and stalemating than ww1, healing magic makes the death rate much lower. The romance of war is never out to lie by stern reality when one can lose ones legs to a mortar but then get better in a matter of days, if not hours. Disease is prolific but controlled, and becomes more about supply and logistics of curatives than any understanding of microbiology.
>>46626056
People are worth more alive then dead. Even foreigners. This is a pretty new state of affairs. Globalization and industry in the last 100 years has made trade more cost effective then just killing your neighbors and taking their shit.
http://youtu.be/NbuUW9i-mHs
Inb4 destiny, Warframe
>>46626098
Trade was always more cost effective when a strong government was active. Also Azerbaijan invaded Armenia last week. Both were plenty globalized.
>>46626146
Both are decent examples of advanced tech being magic which sort of works, but again isn't quite the same. For a setting to truly have magic with advanced technology, it cannot be truly explained. Once a thing can be explained and it's rules fully understood, it becomes a technology. Science is the process of understanding these facets of existence. Thus, hermetic magical studies are a form of science, but one that must remain entirely theoretical for something to continue being magic and not wibbly wobbly quantum physics stuff.
>>46626098
>>46626056
Basically this.
War is negative sum and the true cost of fighting one has really only become understood recently.
These days it's basically only used by - or sometimes against - individuals who subscribe to a negative-sum theory of economics and achieve enough political power to put their perceived short-term personal interests ahead of everyone and everything else.
It happened a little bit like this: the US and the USSR developed nuclear weapons at about the same time. Strategists naturally started thinking about the long-term implications and came to understand that they were now in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma.
The two countries could cooperate, in which case both would profit to a degree. One country could "defect" - perform a massive unilateral first strike - in which case they would profit enormously. Or both countries could defect, in which case pretty much everyone would die.
The theory of it works out in such a way that if you are playing a series of these games, you should always cooperate, and only defect in retribution for a defection in a previous game... UNLESS there is a stopping point. If there is a last game in the series, then after that point no retribution is possible. So both parties have great incentive to defect in that last game. Which means that YOU should defect in the game prior to the last game, as should your opponent. Which means that you should defect even earlier than that, etc, etc, etc
Once nukes are on the board, mutual destruction is the rational result. This is what the Cold War was about. But the same types of logic can be applied even to limited wars - the potential cost of "defection" doesn't have to be infinite for mutual defection to be a really fucking bad idea. Cooperation is more profitable.
>>46626328
And in a world with magic, I don't imagine we have nukes. At least, not non-magical nukes. Indirect fire weaponry beyond cannons probably never progressed too far because magic made it unnecessary. So I don't see us developing middle systems beyond rocketry, not when ordinance can be magically guided. Meanwhile, because.magical is pure theory, there is always a potential counter for any spell waiting to be found. As a result, MAD is anything but mutually assured. The loss of necessary jobs for unskilled lower classes brought on by arcane automation and shortcuts means that either families grow smaller, or there's a large unemployed lower class. And the army is a perfect place to put them. I see such a world as being much more conflict oriented by cultural mores and necessity.
>>46626404
Tenuous and contingent, but not implausible.
Could be the basis for a good setting.
>>46626461
What if magic is actually a technology to make the improbable become probable. Normally the universe will end in heat death before you can for example phase through a wall via the atoms in the wall aligning perfectly. But with magic, you somehow increase the probability to 0.9999.
>ctrl+f
>spelljammer
>0 hits
Seriously
bump
Would computers ever be invented? Would the need for them ever arise?
>>46627949
For the same reason they were invented here?
Doing complex calculations is hard and boring, so you make a machine (or in this case a spell or monster or spirit or enchanted item or whatever) to do it for you.
>Ctrl+f
>Final Fantasy
>No results
Seriously the modern games are literally futuristic high fantasy.
>>46628270
But they suck.
