The Elemental Empire - part 6 - Technology and Fantasy

    I talked before about the role of magic in the setting I'm building, and how it differed from technology.  Let me revisit and expand on that by looking at the flip-side, what is technology?

    Of course, I've got an answer for this too - if magic is the invisible emotions of a single individual made real, technology is the invisible foundations of the real lives of the individuals.  Let me illustrate, while watching too much Crash Course World History it struck me about the "agricultural revolution" when people went from hunter/ gatherers to farmers (hi Wikipedia).  A couple of thousand years later and we get the Industrial Revolution (why, hello again Wikipedia).  And I love this last Wikipedia page because it has the quote that sums up all of technology for me: "The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way."  Oh ho, there it is, technology is that thing that influences daily life.
    We humans are tool users.  We didn't get a lot of innate abilities.  We don't have wings or claws, fur or feathers, we don't have a lot of physical advantages when compared to all the other animals out there.  We do have really big brains though, and we like to mess around with our environment.  We use stuff.  The old Star Frontiers game had a great quote about "Mr. Human and his indestructible junk show." (wow, I totally remembered it accurately too, page 7 of the Alpha Dawn Expanded book)  That's us all right, we use stuff - but given that our lives are not based on our natural abilities but rather on using tools, then it seems to be that when we change our tools we change our lives.
    Now, back in the day ovens were big and pretty hard to make.  So (if I'm remembering my limited history knowledge right) some villages would have one big oven that everybody would use.  A communal resource.  But now ovens are much, much smaller, and everybody has their own.  So cooking stopped being a communal resource and became a private resource.  But, we still have communal ovens, we just call them restaurants.  But, at the restaurant somebody else does the cooking for you, you don't have to know how to do it yourself, and so we get the people who rely on restaurants and have no idea about how to boil water.  Technology changes society, and that changes people's lives.  I have no idea about how to raise a cow or butcher it (I do at least know how to cook it), something that a less technologically developed person would have to know to survive.
    This is also one of my pet peevs about Star Trek.  In the Star Trek universe there are replicators that can create anything at will, holodecks that can simulate any reality, and characters make comments like "we don't use money anymore."  Okay, it's the far future, so sure, I'll buy that.  But wait a minute, with such reality altering technology at one's fingertips let me ask you a question: how many characters on Star Trek have tattoos?  Yeah, not many, like 2 maybe 3.  How many people on Star Trek have hair that is not a natural color?  Again not many, if any actually.  Why do I point out such mundane things after talking about super science?  Well, do you honestly think in a future where anything can be created or imagined that everybody would look like a white middle-age middle-class convention?  There is a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where one of the characters creates a holodeck fantasy involving the other crew-members.  I don't remember the details now, but what I do remember is thinking: this would totally be everybody's problem.  If you could create your own physical, interactive reality at will - who the hell would stay in the real world?  Jeez, even today we have the stereotypical kid in Mom's basement playing video games; how many thousands of times worse would it be in a fully-immersive VR world like the holodeck?  That's what I hate about Star Trek, why I've lost my childhood love for it over the years: it presents all these super-technological advances and then acts like humanity and society would look like they do in our modern world.  Hell no.  Granted, the Enterprise is a military ship (spare me the science crap, they all wear uniforms), but the ship does have some civilians and they should be very flamboyant or exotic or incomprehensible by today's standards. (as a side note, I don't have the same problem with Star Wars because it is a fantasy with updated graphics, but I do hate Star Wars for the fact that it sucks at presenting magic as bad as Star Trek sucks at presenting technology)

    As humans, without natural abilities we build our lives around tools, and when tools change (ie, technology develops) our lives and society changes as well.
    Which then raises some big questions about how to handle technology in a fantasy RPG setting, and how that interacts with magic - because people with magic do have natural advantages and so would they even look at technology the same way?  Hmmm.... that's a good question given my Humins all are innately magical and the other races all have some kinds of abilities (since I'm basing them off the standard fantasy races, and they always do something more than humans naturally).  Magic seems like it would be the main force for society, which actually works since it explains why the setting has such low technology, why this is a medieval-based world, it never needed to rely on tools as much, it has relied on it's magic users instead and thus stayed smaller and less developed.
    The big question though, the one that I hate to even contemplate but have to because somebody out there will want it, is guns.
    Damn you Pathfinder for Ultimate Combat and guns.  Not that it started with you, shoot there was the ancient original D&D module that had lasers if I remember right, but Pathfinder was the first mainstream fantasy setting to include guns.  The problem with guns is that they changed everything.  They totally revolutionized combat, making the armor and swords and bows that most RPGs are build on obsolete pretty quickly.  So you just introduced the thing that is going to kill off most of your equipment tables.  Why the hell would you throw a shuriken when you could shoot someone?  But bigger than that, I hate the game for throwing in guns as if they were no big deal.  Again, society and technology are linked, you can't change one without a change in the other.  Guns do not grow on trees, they had to be developed, experimented, crafted.  You need to harvest all the components for gunpowder, you need to shape the metal for the guns themselves.  They are pretty big undertakings, not something that just anybody would be walking around with (and yes, granted you can say the same for plate armor and the like, RPGs are not good about modeling the scarcity of things (since we have to let every player do all the cool stuff)).  And they are a major cultural shift.  Running at the wizard with a sword is crazy-talk; but shooting him dead while he's babbling, oh hell yes!  With a gun anybody can be a wizard, with a gun anybody can do super-human things.  Do you think wizards would like that?  Do you think kings would?
    The gods heal right, not wizards (they can't do that healing thing they just kill everybody) (so are the gods blocking healing magic from wizards? that's the only thing that makes sense), but the gods can heal.  So how are the gods going to react to modern surgical methods that heal people and save lives, CPR that brings back the dead, and when people no longer need to turn to them for healing?  Will they be happy?  Mad?  Destroy the world?

    Okay, so I've rambled for a while.  And honestly, I don't have a lot of hard thoughts right now.  I'm going over the factors in my brain, thinking about how magic and technology are going to react to each other.  And more, the opportunities both offer for storytelling.  I just finished reading David Weber's amazing Safehold series a few months back.  It's an awesome story about far future technological humans who meet an alien species that wipes out all other species once they reach a certain level of development.  The humans fight and lose, so they hide away enough colonists to populate one world, Safehold, and create a religion that prohibits technological development - that way, this last remnant of humanity will not also be wiped out down the road.  But some of the settlers disagreed with that plan, they wanted to lay low and start over, but they also believed it would be possible to defeat the aliens if humans re-developed technology while knowing what they would someday face.  So the books start with a church-controlled world of limited technology, and over the series we see technological developments introduced and how society is radically changed as a result.  And some people take to that change, some hate it, but there is a lot of drama and compelling stories since the fate of the world is at stake.  Not in a stupid superhero "big beam in the sky" way, but a really interesting "what world are these changes going to make for the future" way.  I don't really want to set up this setting to tell the story of how technology changes the world - but at the same time I would be happy to leave some bits in that a GM and players who wanted to tell that story could use.

    I'm going to end this rant here, since it segues well into what I want to explore next: what is a setting good for?  What kind of a tool is it?  Or, even better to say - what kind of a tool am I trying to build for GMs?  I'll go over that next.
    The details are slowly being expanded too, I'm actually getting close to writing some real story and not just all this theoretical stuff.  That writing and revising is a part of what's been slowing down my posting, sorry about that.  I am working on some material though and it will be out as soon as it's ready.  Until next week!