Redwolf's Journal (continued)

The recent RPG research had me pulling out my d20 Sorcery and Steam book. It certainly didn't have what I was really looking for, but it did have a good section on incorporating steampunk-ish technology into a world. And it brought up a point that, perhaps, hadn't fully clicked in my mind before in the "what's different between magic and technology" debate. Magic (unless deliberately designed otherwise) can exist on its own. Technology, however, requires infrastructure, and that has inherent implications. Oh, a secret inventor/society could create a few prototypes on their own, sure. When you start getting into airships (plural) or mass-produced anything, you need factories. And you need mines. And transport for the parts. And... The making of things en masse almost unavoidably causes a big change in society to support it - something that we have historical evidence of.

Okay, so you're in a fantasy world. The technological level is fairly limited, but there's magic to make up the difference. Now take a look out over the port and start thinking... Ships are good for getting people and cargo around. Handy, that. They don't require gateways or knowledge of your destination, technically, so you can explore with them. That's awesome! I want one of those. But why limit yourself to the seas? With magic, you can have a ship that can soar through the air, or cross planes! The form of a ship, however, is designed with the sea in mind. If you take that out of the equation, you should actually build things differently, shouldn't you? Let's start with the bottom of the hull. That's really only suited to sitting in water. If you don't want to be limited to seasides, what then? Well, if you make the bottom flat, at least it can sit upright on the ground. Heck, that's a really good place to put some sort of entrance or loa...

Cracked is occasionally an amusing read. Today's list doesn't really contain any surprises for me, but the bit about standard time zones phasing in within about fifty years on either side of 1880 strikes a chord. Just a few days ago, my thoughts we wandering over how radically the evolution of transport and communication has changed life and how that really kicked in with the railroads. Before that, a lot of things simply didn't matter because they were days or months distant, rather than hours or days. Pondering that also calls up previous thoughts of how any world with common or powerful magic would radically change. So many settings take this for granted. The "dark ages" were dark partly because communication and travel were difficult, dangerous, and time consuming. Simple sending spells and some airships or teleportation magic could easily cause an explosion of civilization development along the lines of telegraphs and trains in real history. Unless you ar...

Guess the folks at Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast must just be into changing things this year. Starting their next "big" expansion in October, Magic gets few alterations they've announced: - "Intro packs" instead of theme decks. Seems like a fine idea to introducing new players, but I probably would have hit the existing fat packs for this instead of the theme decks. - Fewer new cards per year. Yay. Even when I was buying a booster box for each expansion, I felt there were an awful lot of cards I never saw myself. - One common in each booster pack will be replaced with a land. Eh. I can understand the desire to give new players more access to lands (being a fundamental part of the game), but I don't like this way to do it. To people who have tons of land, it's a waste of a card slot. To those who are new, it doesn't give them enough land to do anything with. - One in eight booster packs will have a new "mythic rare" rarity card inst...