by Seethe347 » Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:40 am
Sufficiently powerful magic is indistinguishable from advanced technology. :D
Anyway, this world could go a number of ways, depending on just how widespread the use of magic actually is.
There could be a system where only the ruling elite are allowed to use magic and unsanctioned magic users are suffered not to live. In this case, we would have a society ruled by powerful wizards (likely calling themselves "priests") who lord over a populace that has no way to stand up for itself. This society would probably become at least as repressed as the most backward societies ever to appear in the history of Earth. In the real world, the ability of the masses to revolt has tended to keep even reactionary leaders from doing their worst. But in the wizard-ruled world, no uprising by the people would ever have any hope of succeeding. Therefore, the leaders could crack down on free-will as hard a they wanted without ever seeing any negative consequences. They wouldn't even need to be nice to keep up their soldiers' morale since they could just mind-control them and force them to fight to the death. Leaders wouldn't really even have to worry about betrayal by their higher-ranking followers since they could just set them up the bomb with magical enchantments that kill anyone who thinks about opposing them.
On the other side of the coin, there could be a world where magic-use is so widespread that even common folk have a repertoir of spells for everyday activities like housework. In fact, it could be that all work is done by magic, leaving people with nothing but leisure time. So what would they do with that time? Well, they could use it to plot against each other and carry out personal wars for the sake of settling grudges and disputes or just to grab every little bit of money and political power they can. Or, they could follow the enlightened path and dedicate all of their time to art and philosophy. They could seek wisdom straight from the very gods themselves while the architectural works they could magically construct would be limited only by their imaginations. They could build vast monuments on the earth and cities of gold that float among the clouds just to show off the extent of their power. They could even create magical vessels to explore the stars and take them to other worlds to which they could spread their culture, correcting the foolish traditions of the natives, educating them and teaching them to walk in their superior ways...
And of course, if there were a magical force in place from the beginning of the world, it isn't unlikely that evolution itself would have followed a dramatically different course. Why, after all, should life wait until it developes sentience before it accesses the underlying mystical currents that flow around it? Rather than depending on sunlight, which can be cut off by something as simple as a supervolcanic eruption or an impact by a large piece of cosmic debris, wouldn't the biosphere be far more stable if it drew the energy it needed directly from the magical force? "Plants" could produce the nutrients they need through magic instead of photosynthesis while animals could use magic to hunt and compete. By the time sentient life actually developes, magic could already be an integral part of nature. Not just the shamanistic and pantheistic magic practiced by some earthly cultures, but a type of magic that can bend and break reality. But what if the source of the magical force was limited? Vast, able to support the entire ecosystem for over a billion years, but still limited. Limited so that just when the world's first sentient race discovers the secrets of interstellar travel, they find that the wellspring of their homeworld is about to run dry.
What if these three worlds existed at once?