Overthinking

[james_davis_nicoll]

"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.

Comments

[autopope]

Do Rust Monsters exist in this setting?

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

[(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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.