I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of magic technology. Not just Eberron’s magic-tech, or Skerple’s excellent Magical Industrial Revolution, or even Atomic Skies “building a spaceship in D&D” blog series, but the idea of really looking at how magic would impact a societies technical development (which is a rant for another day) and what could actually be built with the tools magic gives. I’m going to rant about that now for a minute.
In many settings, magic is rare enough that it seems to be reserved for ancient, long dead empires or the realm of gods (this is due to D&D’s general post-apocalyptic atmosphere- it’s more fun when the greatest treasures in the world are impossible to recreate and require a bit of archeology to discover, let alone the social flexibility apocalypses offer).
It’s also true that magic can also be much more available; Eberron and the Forgotten Realms seem to have magic shops in any town of reasonable size.
Nod is a very high magic setting, but has an extreme divide in how that magic surfaces across the globe. In the larger civilizations buying “normal” magic items (anything in the DMG) is easy, but that luxury is fairly rare across the world (in other words, the empires are high fantasy while the rest of the world is sword-and-sorcery).
In Nod, technical development is incredibly uneven. With magic, science is learned in a different pattern than in real life. You can learn about germ theory through the use of a shrinking spell before you learn that the Earth rotates the sun. The theory of relativity might be discovered before the theory of gravity. It’s one of the reasons mad scientists and crazed wizards are so common, especially around ancient ruins.
Ancient civilizations are the worst; Nod is constantly torn between two stages: “Building up the greatest civilization in the history of the world” and “everything is on fire as it burns into ash and memory”. Imagine the fall of the Roman Empire if the Romans had figured out nuclear fission and literally nothing else.
Physics is the hardest; in Nod, physical laws are not set in stone. There can be exemptions, exceptions, and situational circumstances in which they are selectively ignored. These are things which slow “scientific” progress down, but never or rarely stop it entirely.
The other big problem is that the smartest people (or at least, the people with the highest intelligence scores) tend to become wizards. While some wizards delve into study and lore, many focus on making magic items or attaining personal power. Studying magic also leads to emotional instability, so some destroy their notes in fits of paranoia.
Arcane Engineering
So now that brings us to the meat of the post; what can you build with magic? Not “this is a magic mecha, it is entirely made of living metal that responds to the user and-” but “what could an inventor like Da Vanci actually build if he had access to the techniques, materials, and items basically assumed by playing D&D?”
I submit to you, the creed of the magic engineer-
“That which seems insurmountable is not,
That which is looks insurmountable is a result of a lack of wits,
That which is truly insurmountable can be gone around and avoided entirely.
The greatest minds do great things with little.
It is with the small that we shall become huge. It is no challenge to do great things with great magic.
Ancient Relics and unpredictable artifacts are not the way to true power.
True power comes from the steady and reliable, the ultimate forces of the universe. Arcana, Physics, Engineering, and Chemistry are the building blocks for all creation. Ignoring three in favor of one is the most idiotic a man can be. While a foolish man will use brute force to overcome an obstacle, a wise man will carefully consider how to apply his force- conserving his strength and leaving him refreshed after.
Complexity in Science is greater than complexity in magic, for magic is fickle, and liable to change. Science is unwavering, yet magic allows us to truly tame it. Arcane powers can be lost, yet science is eternal. The Great Paradox: If Science is greater than all magic, how can we tame science with magic?“
The College of Engineers- the least sexually active out of all the Bardic colleges- hold that there are five broad types of magic interactions with engineering.
The first is Physics Denial Devices: Anything that defies physics in a repeated, reliable way. The bread and butter of Arcane Engineering. Subcategories include “It’s Bigger On The Inside” Containers (bags of holding), Mass Generators (decanters of endless water), Energy Generation (everburning torches [and yes, everburning torches do not provide heat, but light is still energy!]). Just this stuff is enough to build a workable perpetual motion machine.
The next category is Meta Materials. Anything that doesn’t behave as a normal material should. Giant spider silk, regenerating troll flesh, yellow rock, godbone, etc. Stuff that doesn’t follow normal properties (no floating materials as a rule though- can’t make flying ships too easy!)
Material Manipulation is anything that changes or alters the state of a material- most spells/effects fall under this category. Enchanting an item to be +2 would be a Manipulated Material (which Gladus the Craftsman was known for arguing be a category all its own).
Complex Arcana is anything that requires user interaction to function within strict bounds- a wand of fireballs, pipes of blasting, etc. Golems and undead are often folded into this category, whether fairly or not.
Mystic Arcana is anything that has unpredictable rules or results; rings of wishing, decks of many things, dimensional rifts. Arcane Engineering based on these principles are almost always over-complicated pieces of art, or absurdly unstable.
So what can you do with these building blocks? Consider:
* A wooden-frame submarine, coated in sea-serpent scales and sealed with sovereign glue. Ballast empties into a waterproofed bag of holding to allow it to rise and sink, and rowing skeletons allow slow movement underwater.
* A plumbing system fueled by decanters of endless water, allowing for modern luxuries surrounded by medieval squalor.
* Any of da Vinci’s inventions- great place to start for what you could build with renaissance technology and magic.
* Potentially several types of flying contraption
* Automatic Mills
* Potentially Industrial-Age Machine