Magitech

[D. Gray Warrior]

Magitech is the melding of magic with technology, and shows up in some fantasy works. I'm curious as to what your thoughts on it are.

I kinda want to make a magitek setting myself to do something a little different from the standard pre-industrial fantasy societies that are so common in stories.

However, I think the concept is rarely done right. If you can manipulate magic to the point of revolutionizing society, understand how it works, and create a technology from it, is it still really "magic"?

Sometimes, it seems like the magitech looks just like what we have in the modern world, expert that it runs on magic or has a crystal jutting out of it.

What are your thoughts on magitech, and can it be done right?

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I think for a fantasy world, it works best if the magitech is a different kind of technology from anything we've got. Or if there are different parameters for its use. Or both.

I've got a wip where society is non-industrial, but there are technologies built on magic, and those technologies are the kind of thing a non-industrial society would find a use for. Much of it is what we think of as magic: charms, curses, blocking or breaking curses, protection spells, prosperity spells, that kind of thing. But there are also magic-derived replacements for some of the amenities we depend on: no electricity, but a form of magic is used to create fuel for heating and cooking, eliminating the need to burn wood or fossil fuels. No telephones or computers, but magic users can communicate in a similar fashion using mirrors, a concept that grew out of scrying. And for everyone else, there's a fairly quick mail delivery system using intricate networks of carrier pigeons (no magic in that, they're ordinary pigeons, and that works the way a carrier pigeon system would. Where magic comes in is the protective spells placed on the pigeons, so they don't get eaten by a hawk before they can deliver their message).

 

[Chasejxyz]

My definition of magic is "the ability to psychically exert one's influence onto a system in ways that are outside the natural processes." Flint and steel isn't magic, that's just the laws of nature/chemistry doing their thing automatically (and you are physically imposing your will onto it). Starting a fire with a spell is magic because that spark wasn't going to randomly happen on its own. A machine that automatically creates fire is not magic because it is just flint and steel with lots of extra steps, even though you have no physical input into it (but there's no psychic manipulation of things, either). Is an elon musk brain fitbit magic? You are psychically manipulating your own brain electricity, but that happens naturally already. But you are making those changes which then effects something elsewhere through the computer. But my world's tech is nowhere near that level so I don't have to worry about that yet lol.

Anything can revolutionize society, it just usually doesn't because it's not viable or there isn't a need for it. Cave people probably could have invented some really great oil paints in brilliant hues, but they were too busy trying not be eaten by cave lions to work on that. If you read/watch Dr Stone, you can see that a TON of things are viable with stone age tech...it's just a: no one has discovered invented that yet and b: there isn't a pressing need. There is always need for antibiotics, but there are thousands of tiny steps that need to be taken to get to either sulfa drugs or penicillin. New tech is always EXPENSIVE because it's made by hand, it requires decent knowledge and manual skills to create, it might require hard to find materials.

The clovis people are known for their clovis points, which are incredibly high tech, but there are countless imperfect ones that went into the trash because they weren't easy to make. Not every rock is fit to make these (has to break in a certain type of way), and not every piece of flint is going to work for this. Plus the maker could always screw up and ruin it. So if there's magic to, say, turn a rock into penicillin, that would change society! That would be huge! But if only one guy knows how to do that spell and he never teaches anyone else...it won't do anything. The first use of general anesthesia was by a Japanese doctor in the 1800s, but since Japan was so isolationist, no one else learned about it so western medicine had to develop it independently. What would the revolutionary magic be in your society? Who is able to do that? Is there a way to create a machine or process so you don't need a bunch of highly-skilled people? Is there a way to get the raw material to be cheaper?

Look at the cotton gin, hydro-powered mechanical looms, a part of what made clothes made this way so cheap is the machines...and also slavery. Hershey bars are cheap because they buy cocoa beans from farms that use child labor. Stuff is made in China because they don't have minimum wages like they do in America. Even if we look at "good" stuff like how an individual farmer can grow so much wheat on their own, we still have to consider the countless smaller farmers that went out of business because they couldn't scale to be that competitively priced. Depending on the culture/beliefs of the people of your setting, putting people out of work or shoving kids in coal mines would be morally reprehensible and cause technological growth to stagnate

 

[Queshire]

Magitech is the melding of magic with technology, and shows up in some fantasy works. I'm curious as to what your thoughts on it are.

I kinda want to make a magitek setting myself to do something a little different from the standard pre-industrial fantasy societies that are so common in stories.

However, I think the concept is rarely done right. If you can manipulate magic to the point of revolutionizing society, understand how it works, and create a technology from it, is it still really "magic"?

Sometimes, it seems like the magitech looks just like what we have in the modern world, expert that it runs on magic or has a crystal jutting out of it.

What are your thoughts on magitech, and can it be done right?

Well now, my big question to this is, well, what do you want from your magitech?

True, giant pilotable golems vs dragons is functionally the same as giant mecha vs kaiju, but it brings a different mental image to mind. To me, trying to invoke that different mental image is the point.