The Magic of Magicbuilding: Swords and Sorcery

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 going to get a little derivative by adding a staple of fantasy: the adventurer.

What We Have So Far

As of right now, we are aware that our setting is going to be (when finished) a mixture of modern technology and modern magic.  As of last week, we've built our setting up to the end of the Bronze Age / beginning of the Iron Age, with some features that are far more modern thanks to the relative ease with which certain modern amenities (heating and cooling, cooking, and running water chief among them) can be replicated with basic magic.

For those trying to keep track of where we are "historically," as in how closely the technology level of our setting measures up to the real world... we're around the switch from BCE to CE.  Due to the lack of major wars and the subsequent collapse of trade routes, our setting doesn't really have a reason to switch from bronze working to iron working until smiths figure out how to reliably make steel.  Before that point, steel will rarely be made by accident, and most of the iron being worked will be meteoric iron- thanks to its mixture with nickel, meteoric iron is both easier to use and lasts longer than regular iron.

None of which matters when it comes to magicbuilding, save that it informs us what our first adventurers will be wearing.

Why Adventurers?

Thus far in this series, we've taken a pretty realistic look at how magic and science would blend as a civilization develops.  Because of that, some readers might ask why we suddenly want to toss something as "game-like" as adventurers into the mix.  The answer is that adventurers are going to be more prominent in our setting than armies. They will be the most heavily armed and prominently magic-wielding characters in the world.

That's also pretty normal for a fantasy setting featuring adventurers.  The difference here is that adventurers aren't actually any more powerful than regular people; the armies are simply that anemic.

This explanation would work better in the worldbuilding series, but briefly:  Our magical world is ridiculously large, with a surface area 100 times that of Earth.  As a result, major civilizations are routinely thousands of miles apart, and just on the logistics front alone, wars are basically impossible.  On the local scale, wars also tend to be impractical; with all the room available, any kind of violent disagreement is most easily solved by simply leaving the area.  As a result, while there is still the need for defense, that defense is only meant to drive off predators and monsters, not other people.  The soldiers of our world, then, are much less common, and are basically professional hunters.

Adventurers, on the other hand, have the same role in this setting as they would in any other.  As previously established, our world has dungeons, and those dungeons are intended to draw in monsters and extradimensional creatures.  The dungeons are also designed to draw in people, though not to kill them; instead, it is hoped that the people will help contain and kill the monsters and extradimensional creatures.  In this fashion, our world subtly works to get rid of what it (to the extent that we treat it as a thinking being, which it isn't) perceives as, effectively, an infection from other realities.  The people who enter those dungeons earn their coin by slaying monsters, retrieving anything worth selling, and heading back to town; occasionally, they might accept more mercenary jobs that are in line with their expertise, such as monster extermination.  They would, in other words, be adventurers.

Introduction to Adventurers

"Adventurer" as an occupation would pop up at the same point we are currently at technologically, mostly for economic reasons.  Before people can train themselves to hunt monsters, there has to be enough prosperity for at least one social class to have free time.  While our people have several modern amenities, being able to pop down to the corner store for some corn dogs and beer when they get hungry isn't one of them.  Food production still takes as long as it always has, though the work itself is at least less back-breaking thanks to using earth magic to make soil arable.  It isn't until the iron plow appears that even those without access to magic can make a go at large-scale farming, and that is one of the first major inventions of the Iron Age.  Once it enters use, farmers have the option of working larger fields and becoming more prosperous, or working the same size fields as ever and suddenly having free time.

Either way, it is that first generation's children who will likely begin looking at adventuring as an occupation.  The very first adventurers will be those with the excess time, energy, and income necessary to outfit an expedition into the high-risk, high-reward dungeons.  In this regard, they're effectively our world's version of Vikings: people willing to take a risk that bloodshed will lead to riches.  The first Viking expeditions were made up of farmer-soldiers, and it was only later that being a Viking became a way of life.  In fact, the two biggest differences between real-world Vikings and our world's adventurers will be that real-world Vikings were big on slavery, and that real-world Vikings were notorious for giving up their swords in exchange for farmland.  Our adventurers won't find much opportunity for slavery, and won't find any farms in the dungeons.

We're going to skip the first adventurers.  What we're interested in are the people who think that fighting monsters is a viable career, not a one-off treasure hunt.  To get an idea of what they would be like, we can look, again, oddly enough, at the Vikings.  Once "going a Viking" became an option, the Vikings roamed from Northern England down to the eastern Mediterranean, where the Byzantine emperors employed them as elite mercenaries.  Combined with our knowledge of how adventurous mages would need to work and the known dangers of dungeons, we can get a pretty good idea of what your typical adventuring group would look like.

  Lightly Armored, Heavily Armed.  Bronze armor would be available to adventurers, but it's fairly expensive and of limited use when fighting monsters that will mostly be using magic or natural weapons to fight.  Your typical adventurer would be outfitted much like a hunter, with thick leathers as the norm, probably accented with a few select metal pieces, such as vambraces (anyone who has fended off a wild animal will understand the desire to reinforce their arm against bites).  They'll also carry multiple weapons: one pole arm, such as a spear, which would be quite effective in the hallways typical of a dungeon; one personal weapon that can be used in a confined area when the spear can't, such as a spatha; and a utility weapon that can cover edge cases, such as a dagger.  Those who focus on magic as their main weapon will pass on the two-handed or heavier weapons, but still use the others; unlike in games, most people don't just shrug if magic fails and mutter "Guess I'll die, then."  They pick up whatever is handy and fight for their life.

  Organized Expeditions.  It's entirely possible that adventuring parties could enter a dungeon, clear it, and wander back out within a few days, laden with goods.  It is far more likely that such trips will end in disaster, however.  Many, if not most, monsters are larger than people, and even with force multipliers like weapons and magic, the monsters have better odds of winning a given fight than the adventurers do.  What's more, the odds don't drastically change over time.  A "Level 20" warrior who has been adventuring for decades will die just as quickly from the bite of a monster as a complete rookie.  The only real difference is that the veteran warrior knows the bite is coming.

The successful adventurers, then, will be those who treat dungeon delving as the risky venture it is, moving as slowly and carefully as possible.  We're talking "maybe one fight with a monster per day" levels of slow, careful exploration.  Even under those circumstances, the goal is to fight in such a fashion that nobody gets injured at all.  Our adventurers should look at a trio of goblins (or our world's equivalent) and decide to backtrack to a safe location where they can plan an ambush, rather than a single member hopping out to casually slaughter them.

  Field Dressing.  Real-life hunters of exotic animals will take every bit of an animal that can be sold and leave the rest to rot.  Adventurers will likely do similarly, and what's more, they're likely to have a member of the party that specializes in the process of dressing kills.  This isn't a job for a henchman; whoever retrieves the saleable monster parts is the reason the party gets paid at all, and they'll likely be treated as the most important member of the party.

  Aesthetically Ugly.  As mentioned, we can get a good idea of what adventurers are like by looking at the elite Viking mercenaries.  They popped up in several cultures from the 9th century to the 16th, with some holdovers (such as the Swiss Guard) still in existence to this day.  One of the standout features of all these different groups?  They dressed like they had just mugged several clowns.  This was an intentional choice.  When they were active, brightly colored clothing was some of the most expensive options you could own, and combined with their high visibility, they sent a message.  The message was essentially, "I'm so good at fighting that I can afford this outfit and afford to stand out wearing it."

  We can therefore conclude that adventurers will have the same atrocious taste in clothing.  Sorry, but if you want to demonstrate your success as an adventurer, you'll have to put on the rainbow-colored hot pants.

  Bandit Bait.  Banditry was, historically, an option when trade was lucrative enough to justify it or when Vikings felt like being ironic.  For example, many of the farmers Vikings fought on the eastern shores of England were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in the area.  We've already established that, distances between civilizations being what they are, there won't be much in the way of external trade to prey on.  That leaves bandits with one prominent target: adventurers, returning from a dungeon with sacksful of goods.

  Adventurers, as previously mentioned, are heavily armed, so this is going to deter your typical bandit.  Most likely, the bandits who attack adventurers will be opportunistic adventurers themselves, people who decided it was easier to take out a tired expedition than it would be to mount one themselves.  Because of how rare even local wars are, this means that adventurers will likely have the most experience with fighting not only monsters, but other people.

Conclusion

We now have a good idea of what a typical adventurer looks like, but we aren't done yet; we still need to cover the typical adventuring party.  Chances are it won't be a team of 4 to 6 people who are careful not to pick the same occupation.  We'll get to that next week.