james_davis_nicoll | Overthinking

"Using Basic Roleplaying as the template, with the detail iron quenches magic, who would prevail along the border between a metal-using, non-magical society roughly on par with the Song and metal-shunning society with functioning magic?"

Results so far:

Noticing the spell list in BRP is short on useful utilitarian magic, like light a fire or preserve food.

How does a magic using society secure a source of food? Are we talking sylvaculture here?

Why the difference? Maybe just an accident of geology meant metal working paid off faster for one, whereas it remained a curiosity for the other.

How is it these two groups are only just encountering each other? Which leads to an idea about a world whose Antarctica analog is freezing over, cooling the world and opening land bridges to a continent humans have never visited before.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

autopope

Do Rust Monsters exist in this setting?

If so, it's obviously the mages and their rust monster pets who prevail.

From:

voidampersand

The enemy has catapults. Canisters of iron filings coming your way. You call "here rust monster!" so it can eat the iron that is stuck in your clothing, but it is distracted eating the iron on the ground in front of it. Then it happily rolls over and starts snoring. You throw off your clothes but there is iron all around you and your magic is unreachable. Then the centurions arrive.

From:

graydon

How'd they transport the catapults while suffering from plague?

This is such a squishy scenario; can the magic cause famine among the more technically advanced? If it can, presumably that's what happens in response to encroachment. Tool users lose.

Is the magic slow? Takes generations of rituals to have major (if completely implacable) effects? Tool users win.

What kind of magic are we talking? probability nudges? All-shall-love-me-and-despair? it matters.

How good are the tool-user's factors of production? do they have common measurements? It's important to remember that our experience of "I would life a few thousand of these" would only be possible at all after 1950, and the precursors to it -- cheap steel (1920), bulk steel production (1870), bulk iron (1840), etc. -- are more recent than you think. Song iron is there, but it's not cheap and it's not as such plentiful.

Iron filings you get by filing iron; slow, tedious, and expensive in labour after the iron was expensive to make. Canisters that burst reliably are very modern. I'd be slow to award this scenario to the tool users, especially since the sensible thing to do is walk toward the rust monster so you're closer than any other sudden amount of loose iron.

From:

voidampersand

What is the range of the plague spell? If it is very long, the magic users will dominate continents. If it's fairly short, the tool users can stay behind a hill and lob iron over it.

The most important factor of production would be deforestation. They need quantities of iron. Quality doesn't matter. Standardization doesn't matter.

Balls of mud burst very reliably. But it might work just as well to walk in with wagon loads of scrap iron. It's like throwing steaks to the guard dogs.

From:

graydon

If the magic users are at all smart, they sneak around and plague the tool users' staple crops. It's never direct "try to kill more of them than us" attacks.

They need some good iron for the tools to perform the deforestation, dig the pits for charcoal burning, make the bricks for the chimneys, etc. Speed of production where everything is artisanal is really hard.

Initial relative population is going to matter a lot, here.

From:

voidampersand

Some magic users are smarter than others. One can hope that the smarter and sneaker mages are also better socialized, as in the Commonweal.

Stina Licht's Cold Iron has essentially Roman legions against magic-wielding elves. The "elves" were unbeatable at close range. Until the "Romans" developed cannons.

Martha Wells' Death of the Necromancer has a remark that there haven't been any attacks by the Fae since the completion of the railroad around the city.

From:

graydon

I would haul in Glen Cook's Instrumentalities of the Night, too; someone gets rid of a ~demon by firing the contents of the unit pay chest (= silver coins) out of a cannon at it. Much follows from this.

What I'm most trying to get at here is that the outcomes don't arise from the scenario; they arise from specific choices in constructing the scenario. If you set foot over the magic-user's border and immediately suffer the Pangs of Macha in the presence of immense and voracious ultra-alligators, it won't matter too much if you can make cannon. If you can avoid magic by going armed cap-a-pie the magic users are going to retreat into wetlands. It's all down to the choice of details.

From: (Anonymous)

Are the mages human? If so, we can assume that the iron in hemoglobin and otherwise inside the human body is not enough to stop magic. Then it depends on how creative and organized the societies get. Also "Functioning magic" and "Metal-shunning" are both wide bounds.

Your comment on food magic brought back an old D&D memory:
"Why did you memorize 'Purify Food and Drink'?"
"It works as 'Disintegrate Undead' even if you aren't a cannibal."

Riderius

From:

james_davis_nicoll

Yeah, humans all round.

From:

james_davis_nicoll

Really, all that's needed is for some transportation barrier to vanish, which could be a simple as better boats. Which either or both sides could develop.

From:

magedragonfire

Or advances in the dragon/giant eagle/pteradon breeding programme.

From:

graydon

Boats, energetically, beat the snot out of anything you have to pay the energy cost to lift the load.

Traditional "better boat network" steps involve replacing portages with dams and locks, digging canals -- so your giant badger breeding programme -- and control dams to store water/prevent flooding. But also demand; demand creates supply, so people have to want things a lot to justify the capital costs.

If the magic-users breed the best silkworms, or dye-producing insects/trees/things, and the tool-users have better looms (well, duh), on the one hand, and the tool-users have (comparatively) cheap iron bars, which means the magic-user ability to summon fire elementals as refine copper is vastly enhanced, there's an opportunity for mutually beneficial trade, here. Which would lead to the better boats.

From:

magedragonfire

Aaah, but the boats will not replenish their energy requirements out of the hides of your (potential) enemies.

...Although I suppose that would depend entirely on whether or not the society with the giant flying carnivores is more inclined to trade or war.

From:

mindstalk

Glorantha had a barrier on travel between the two main continents imposed by an angry wizard; I think it goes down before a RQIII game starts.

RQIII spirit magic (the most common kind) includes Ignite, also Repair and Heal as mentioned. Endurance converts magic points to fatigue points -- Instant/Permanent, not duration. Bladesharp and Bludgeon are meant for combat but plausibly could increase tool effectiveness too.

Divine magic has Bless Crops and Cloud Call, with big enough effect areas to be useful. Divine magic and Sorcery have water-breathing spells.

No food preservation, though.

From:

dagibbs

I would assume that the magic list is not complete, just as I would assume that the skill list is not complete -- just that both focus on the spells, and skills, that murder-hobos would be likely to care about.

Now, I don't know BRP -- so purely extrapolating the spell list from RQ, the societal affect of "repair 1" on so many broken things, and "heal 1" on many minor injuries that could otherwise get infected, should have some fairly amazing productivity benefits, that I'd be inclined to bet on the society with functioning magic.

From:

mindstalk

"How does a magic using society secure a source of food? Are we talking sylvaculture here?"

Agriculture is literally a Stone Age development -- the Neolithic. Don't need metal for farming or herding or fishing.

Though sylviculture can be more attractive with the right magic: ability to delay nut/fruit production to more convenient times, or space it out over the year (I exclude "instant/accelerated harvest" as Too Good; you can't magic fruit faster than normal, but you can put it on hold), ability to ward away pests like squirrels.

Bujold gave her Ranger-like Lakewalkers a magic crop. Plunkins are tubers that grow in water (no worry about having enough water), easy to plant and harvest. I've imagined leguminous potato-likes that are toxic until cooked.

From: (Anonymous)

Plunkins = duck potatoes (Sagittaria latifolia)?

From:

graydon

Note that Eastern Woodlands cultures in NorAm had a)chestnut and chestnut-adjacent tree crops (~one quarter of the eastern woodlands were chestnuts!), b)stable -- recent news about a still-productive after a century of neglect example -- multi-crop garden setups, and c) maize, beans, and squash.

This all got done with neolithic tech; the magic-using society could do at least so well. Field agriculture is NOT a requirement in general, it's just associated with being domesticated by wheat.

From:

violsva

stable -- recent news about a still-productive after a century of neglect example -- multi-crop garden setups

Do you have a citation? Not skeptical, just very interested.

From:

graydon

Popular survey article talking about a particular example in Alaska.

I'm biased, but being domesticated by wheat turns out to be wildly sub-optimal outcome. The indigenous peoples of the Americas had way, way better agricultural practices than anybody seems to have managed in Eurasia, and we need to learn from their example.

From:

mindstalk

There were chestnut forests in the Mediterranean. Possibly forest farming in India and Africa, I dunno. And it's not like the Americas didn't use grain, like maize.

I've wondered why orchards weren't depended on more, since productivity seems high for less labor. One answer might be warfare: if your enemies burn your land, having one year to the next harvest beats having ten years. "Against the Grain" ideas about states favoring grain taxation might be another. Orchards might let you be freer -- up until a neighboring grain state conquers you, because it's a state.

From:

graydon

Grain is useless without the infrastructure to convert the stored form into the edible form. (grinding and baking or malting and brewing, generally. Rice is different but not that different.)

This does three things; it concentrates storage, it concentrates power (owning a mill is part of being elevated to nobility in Anglo-Saxon law; way back in the neolithic you use up young female slaves on saddle querns... the point being that having control of the convert-to-food process is a power concentrator), and it gives you a continuous static defense problem. The continuous static defense problem -- even if the field crops are fine, if the mill burns you have a problem -- begets standing armies. Everything else in Eurasian history follows directly from standing armies. (Once you've got the standing armies, you patriarchy, god-king autocracy, field-taxes, et multi-cetera, but it starts with defending the beer and bread supply begetting standing armies.)

Indigenous food production in NorAm was diverse in ways it's difficult to emotionally understand. You would get one cultural group using layered gardening, corn-beans-squash but not as field crops as such (no plow! not plowing deeply offended settler observers), aquatic plants, and tree crops in the same area at the same time. In terms of return for energy input people keep having to roll saving throws against disbelief at the resulting numbers. These cultures were vulnerable to attacks on food storage in early winter but not vulnerable to famine to anything like the same degree Eurasian cultures (with much more concentrated agricultural production) were.

(You can still get nice chestnut flour from Italy. It's not the same stuff as the North American version, and it's never had staple-status the way ~chestnuts (there's a lot of tree specifics involved and since there was an extinction event around 1900 there's a lot of questions) did for the Creek tribes in what is now the US southeast, for example.

From: (Anonymous)

My recollection from a history of ancient Greek warfare was that they spent a lot of time trying to "ravage" their rival's farmlands as they lacked the engineering technology to defeat city walls. But it was basically impossible to efficiently destroy olive groves. Tended orchards don't have enough dried plant material on the ground to support a forest fire, plus the trees are spread out a bit for maximum production and for ease of tending. The trees themselves are nice and healthy and moist so they won't just burn if you hold a torch to one. Even building a bonfire at the base or a tree requires lots of dried wood for the bonfire, and where did they get that? The orchard might be more flammable in a severe drought, but in a year like that armies aren't in the field, as everyone is home trying to keep their families from starving. You can chop down the trees of course, but it's hard and tedious labor with your bronze or stone axe, one tree at a time, and if your raiders are split into small groups to make the chopping more efficient, then those groups are vulnerable to being destroyed by the enemy's patrols.

--
Nathan H.

From:

violsva

Thank you!

From: (Anonymous)

I'll just leave this here: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=balanoculture

-- Tim S. Macneil

From:

kjn

Likely whatever culture that is able to support and maintain a greater organisational cohesion, specialisation, and complexity. Which pretty much depend on the ability to generate a reliable food surplus.

If we are to look at various historical models here (and simplifying wildly) we can take the American frontier (that Bujold used as a model, based on the Midwest rivers in the early 1800s), but I think either Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, or China and India might also be interesting models to look at.

From:

graydon

Take a look at post-Columbian-interchange China in particular; different crops (maize) meant different land use meant long-term stable social structures collapsing. Introducing either magic or iron tools to a neolithic culture would be similar in outcomes.

From:

kjn

I think one need be careful there with the word "introduce". If all it means is "expose" then it doesn't necessarily have any lasting impact, or even simple use. Adoption and production is where it's at. If we are to take North America as an example, my impression is that the horse had a much greater impact on Native American life than iron tools or gunpowder weapons, both of which the Native Americans happily used, but were unable to produce themselves (at least not without turning into some variation of European society).

One interesting take on magic users—incompatible with iron—ruling over a technological society is in The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick. There the magic users are dependant on controlling a layer of people with limited magical powers that can handle the dragons, i.e. huge magical war machines made out of iron.

From:

graydon

Definitely "have heard of it; have six examples" doesn't count. (Have clear the hilltop forests to plant maize, choking the rice paddies with new and siltier runoff, did count.)

Horse consequences are geographically bound; not so much in the Eastern Woodlands (or Pacific Coast), extensive much on the Great Plains. This is a complex and vexed question and the reasons for introduction (the fur trade reorganized a lot!) matter, too.

Nothing about technology requires iron, or even ferromagnetic metals. We're used to using a lot of iron, but iron, copper, lead, and glass -- the basic toolkit of the 19th, with sides of zinc and tin -- can as easily be aluminium-magnesium-titanium, tungsten, copper, and glass, with those same sides of zinc and tin. You're at that point obliged to magically refine things instead of electrolytically refining things, but that's kinda what the fae are presumed to do.

From:

scott_sanford

Note too that the Native Americans never got to a steady state with their horse cultures. They got horses, adopted horse-based life styles, and got displaced by expanding European cultures within a depressingly few generations. Professor Devereaux examines this in more detail (and observes that much of Game of Thrones seems to be made by creators who never saw a horse).

From:

mindstalk

Access to guns definitely changed Native American warfare, how it was conducted and probably fueling more wars between tribes. Not sure about hunting or settlement patterns.