The Magic of Magicbuilding: Playing Catch-Up

Welcome to the Magic of Magicbuilding, our little spinoff feature that focuses specifically on building a magical system for a fantasy setting.  This week, we're finally getting around to that whole "magic affecting the speed of technological development" thing that we were trying to consider last week before we got sidetracked.

By the way, the effect of magic on technological development?  Less than you might think.

What We Have So Far

We are specifically considering the period of time between when our magic system first takes on the basic form that we've established- casters carefully crafting sigils that effectively allow for predetermined effects at the cost of flexibility and mild backlash on the caster- and when the knowledge base of the system will be broad enough to permit the next development, treating sigils as a language that can be learned, read, and edited.  This is roughly 2000 years and spans the shift from roughly Bronze Age-era technology to that of the Iron Age.

Our goal today is to go through the various technological advancements between these two time periods and determine which, if any, can be replaced with a working knowledge of how to craft a sigil well enough to create an effect similar to that found in the spellbooks we spent about a month making.  When considering the effect of magic on technology, we are going to bear in mind that magic can only be swapped in if the casters involved know what they're doing; for example, smelting iron may be fairly straightforward for someone who can create a hot enough flame on command, but combining iron and carbon to create steel would actually take longer if the smiths involved aren't accidentally doing so by using specific carbon-heavy fuel sources.

As previously established, we aren't interested in being super accurate about our technological advancements.  We'll get some example keystone technologies from 4X games, and use those to figure out broadly what's going on.

Scientific Victory

For each of the technologies we're interested in, we're going to both describe the technology and also the various ways that magic may impact that technology.  Once we're done, we should have a list to draw some conclusions from.

Construction.  We're starting with, roughly, the advent of writing in our setting's civilizations.  By this point, our people are already capable of basic construction, as well as large-scale, simple projects.  Creating an analogue for Stonehenge, for example, would be possible by a single person with access to the stones used in the project.  Construction represents the point at which craftsmen discover the concepts of reinforcement and geometric design.  Magic doesn't replace this knowledge; it simply makes following through on that knowledge much easier.  Combined with the extra space and resources provided by our setting, we can safely assume that even back in the Bronze Age, every family could afford their own home.

Iron Working.  Fun fact: Smiths of the Bronze Age knew about and could work iron.  They simply didn't want to.  Bronze could be worked at lower temperatures, and cast bronze can be crafted far more intricately than iron.  This is one of the reasons why, even as late as the Victorian Age, brass and bronze were used for delicate gears, not iron or steel.  Bronze was as strong as iron in most of the ways that mattered, and better in a few of them (such as corrosion resistance).  The reason for the advent of iron wasn't because it was an improvement over bronze; it was because bronze required tin, and the Bronze Age collapse of international trade made tin hard to get hold of.  Iron, the most common metal, had no such problem.

Magic changes this equation.  While magic can't create bronze or iron, it certainly makes working both of them easier.  Iron becomes a more viable construction material when it can be cast, like bronze, something possible with high-temperature smelting furnaces.  This in turn makes cheap metal projects, such as nails, horseshoes, and metal-clad wheels, a reality far earlier in history than normal.

Horseback Riding.  Our world doesn't have horses, and in fact, hooved animals are a terrible body plan.  That said, the principle behind horseback riding is still present- "hey, wait a second, why don't we have this animal do the work for us?"  Here, the big obstacle is normally time.  It turns out you can partially domesticate wild animals in a single generation; for example, foxes born in captivity demonstrate traits similar to dogs.  Complete domestication requires a breeding program and a few generations to weed out the most troublesome aspects of a given animal.  Magic at our current level will have no impact on that breeding time, though communication with mounts via fae magic will make giving commands easier.

Optics.  Crystalline lenses date back to roughly the same time period as the end of Egyptian pyramid building.  It took thousands of years to craft lenses with enough precision to do anything more complicated than focus light and make rudimentary telescopes.  As it happens, earth magic specializes in sculpting materials like crystal with precision.  This has some interesting implications, although until other sciences catch up to the magically-crafted lenses, mostly what this means is that our people will have cheap eyeglasses several thousand years early.

Engineering.  The difference between Construction and Engineering is math.  Before engineers developed practical mathematical applications, all construction was based on experience; afterward, an engineer could look at the math in a design and determine whether it would work without having to actually build it first.  This allows for far more complex construction.  Unfortunately, aside from maybe some magical hologram models to help visualize, magic isn't going to help with this shift.  Unless you count using magic to build schools as helping, in which case it will help with that quite handily.

What Is It Good For?

Out of the technologies we've looked at, exactly one gets an appreciable boost from the presence of magic.  The rest, including those that we would need to develop to get to the next stage of magical development, benefit from magic, but only in the sense that their utilization becomes easier.

What this means for us is that the transition from "copying sigils that work" to "learning how to 'program' magic" is likely to take just as long as if magic weren't present.  However, the presence of magic will drastically change what happens when those technological developments occur.  Our civilization will advance at the same pace as those found on Earth, but even its poorest people will have their own homes, rather than communal housing or hovels.  Glasses will be cheap and effective, made with crystal lenses and bronze frames.  Draft animals will be common, branded with communication symbols to make directing them easier.  Buildings are made of stone and wood, reinforced and joined by iron parts; thanks to the combination of low gravity and early adoption of iron reinforcement, 16-story buildings are possible before people even develop the rounded arch.  With room beneath the branches of the hyperforests, our world's cities will be inclined to build upward instead of outward, creating cities with similar populations but much smaller footprints.  Around the same time in our history that Rome was starting to develop outward, our world's people would have apartment buildings, running water, heating and cooling systems, and internal lighting.

What does this mean?  Our people won't be any more advanced, technologically, than Earth's people... but you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Conclusion

We now have a pretty good image of commonly used magic in the city.  We have spellbooks, we have dungeons, and we have monsters.  We only need one more thing to complete the basic fantasy setting: adventurers.

Next week, we'll look at some.