Has Magic Affected Your Architecure or Urban Planning?

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I have a world where portals for transportation is common. Trade would be far easier and you'd have less spoilage if you could travel an hour to the portal, pass through and then another hour's travel to your destination.

The side effect is that moving military forces into a country's territory would be super easy. There was an accord after a war that employed portals. Only a few portals exist that will take people to other countries.


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You'd have to put constraints on the availability of such magic. Stuff that powerful is likely to have a ton of implications you don't realize.

I'm thinking about uses for smaller portals. You could have portals in toilets to teleport waste someplace far away. Portals in your office with addresses above them through which you can send letters and messages. A small portal in your door to serve as a dragon door for your shoulder-sized dragon.

 

[Saigonnus]

You'd have to put constraints on the availability of such magic. Stuff that powerful is likely to have a ton of implications you don't realize.

I'm thinking about uses for smaller portals. You could have portals in toilets to teleport waste someplace far away. Portals in your office with addresses above them through which you can send letters and messages. A small portal in your door to serve as a dragon door for your shoulder-sized dragon.

Firstly, the portals are stationary objects (doorways) and cannot be moved. That limits the effectiveness somewhat. Imagine sending troops into a portal, and find an enemy force guarding it. Would eliminated the surprise attack.

Secondly, after the war, the accord basically limited who can use the long-range portals. It is enforced using specially tuned charms. No charm, no pass. The charms are awarded by the reigning monarch or the trade guild, the secret of how they are made a closely guarded secret.

As for waste disposal, they use pipes that purify the water as it passes through it. Within a mile all trace of human waste is gone and what is poured back into the lake/river/ocean is perfectly clean.


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[Orc Knight]

To necro this thread a bit. Magic has affected both architecture and urban planning on Eld. From the wood elves building entire cities around and in the world tree's (some they burned down in wars) to the orcs and trolls simply trying to build a fortification that the Golden Queen can't simply charge through. Given the nature of the world and the closeness to it, many are also living ecosystems. In all environments, from under ground to under water. As with the architecture and engineering, this also leads to the rather strange request of trying to fortify a house and find a bed to hold up to a couple's rather rambunctious love making.

Also the sheer size of all those in the world and the other creatures in it. Verdant's Tooth is a dragon and lizard folk sanctuary and is build with wide lanes, roosts and a more open environment. Even with their shape shifting, they still prefer places inside cave like caverns or the open cliffs. It is also near the ocean and plains for easy hunting and if one ends up there, do not be surprised to served live rats and pigs as food. And magic makes it all work out. That and a bit of heavy lifting. It reflects the dragons needs and the world around them.

 

[Drakevarg]

For me the answer is "kinda-sorta/used to."

Magic in my setting is difficult to interact with as it's alive, capricious, and often arbitrary, as mortals can only use it by proxy through dealings with spirits. So nothing as obvious as "wizards make crystal spires because they can."

However, in the Mythic Era before recorded history, there was an empire of flying cities, held aloft by a complex melding of engineering and occultism. Things eventually went wrong and these cities fell from the sky, most into the ocean where they were lost and forgotten to the point of mythology.

Before even that, though, there were the Titans. Apex beings on a level playing field with dragons (which today are so securely at the top of the food chain that it's not uncommon to worship them as gods), they built architecture so grandiose and enduring that even after a cataclysmic event so devastating that it left two new moons in the sky, some of their ruins can still be seen in the modern day, so old and massive that if it weren't for their unnatural shapes they could be mistaken for geological formations.

Since mankind's entire history has taken place around these structures, they've learned enough from their design that humans have been building skyscrapers since before they figured out how to make a fire hot enough to smelt iron. Not exactly magical in origin, but certainly fantastical.