What Should a Fantasy University Be Like?

many fantasy settings contain University analoges where gowned teachers and various students go around studying magic this sort of thing has become very popular and there's an entire fantasy subgenre about people going to schools that teach magic for instance but so often these boil down to training schools for youths or technical colleges where people are taught the secrets of a trade again the secrets of making magic who's doing the actual research and what should fantasy Academia look like [Music] Anyway our earliest universities traded primarily in three disciplines theology medicine and law after all these are the three areas where it is really quite important to have qualified learned professionals matters of one's Immortal Soul bodily health and the law are critical matters where you don't want just anyone able to weigh in authoritatively but the first hurdle we face in seeing University type institutions established in a fantasy world is that in ours at least powerful monotheistic Fates are The Originators of these institutions from the oldest universities the Arabic madrasas to those which swept Europe by papal dispensation houses of learning originate as a place to ensure that students of Faith with their most important of jobs are getting things right but how could a university operate as a unified system under polytheistic Faith structures in which any God is likely to have its own Mystery cult detractors and schismatic debates without organized or at least semi-centralized religious Authority it's hard to imagine any such University set up by a mystery cult getting widespread attention power or authority any such institution needs the backing of an authority recognized throughout the land then the monarch indeed as we move further into the history of Academia we do see more monarchs setting up universities or colleges to glorify their name fill their courts with wise learned folks and to attract intellectual Elites so you see founding a university is like um funding a group of particularly clever people to sit around all day and share their wisdom it's expensive and and in the short term seems like a waste just bring the clever people directly into your court as your advisers instead then you have the best information so we can't just use any Monarch in essence we need a stable wellestablished monarchy likely with a significant urban center before the notion of a house of learning makes more sense than a series of dedicated ated Apprentice master style relationships but to the central question what should a fantasy University actually be involved in studying I would be silly to not at some point mention the Unseen University which like all things praet is deeply parodic in tone vindictive astronomy esoteric studies and extreme horiculture all sound like wonderful courses of study but in Lar large part indicate a somewhat postmodern Academia replete with bloat and redundancy as mentioned early universities do have a specific and direct point to them not to train the next generation of extreme horticulturalists but to provide learning and authority to those who weigh in on those most important of matters I'd like to look at this from two different perspectives slightly more grounded fantasy with less available magic and divine influence and then a DND D styled fantasy world at the end as a point of contrast comparison and Intrigue so lowish magic not massively active gods for this sort of world I would expect those three major historical strands theology law and medicine to dominate but depending on the potency and frequency of magic it is possible that magical research will be a fourth critical subject subject curiously a lot of the work done in our own oldest universities lay in the translation and debating of older texts not just in theology either natural law was a foundational Concept in legal philosophy coming from the Greeks and Medicine still owed an awful lot to Greek anatomy and galenic humus in fantasy worlds with an ancient empire aesthetic which In fairness is a lot of them academics can expect to be polymaths translators interpreters and scientists seeking to both understand ancient wisdom and apply it this of course necessitates the assumption that the Ancients were right or at least had some insights lost to modernity which in some cases Even in our own world is occasionally dubious medicine and law are both philosophical and practical Pursuits based largely in observation and adherence to texts there's likely not too much systematic change in these subjects perhaps new forms of legal protection against magic or legal documentation through magic or different diseases curses and ways of healing but at least in terms of faith I actually do not know of any traditional University structure in our real world's history which doesn't presuppose a monotheistic faith in its theology at least in its foundational Mission other than of course universities that seek to be secular impartial and all of that situation but I don't think there is a single polytheistic University excitingly this puts fantasy in kind of a novel spot how could one study the structures and truths of the Divine without access to each divinity's Mystery cult oracles and seers who represent these Divine actors most closely well there's a few ways firstly broad philosophical or logical examinations of the divine order systematic theologies which seek to map the Divine to the heavens perhaps investigative work to determine the planer or Divine locuses of the God's power attempts to link astrological symbology to Divine attitudes or actors would be likely as approaches as would translations and reinterpretations of ancient myths in an attempt to place these stories these ancient tales in to the modern or natural world think something like the Mormon attempts to map the travels of Jesus in a way that suggests that he visited America similar geographical arguments are likely to take place whether University or the commissioning Monarch is placed in a geographical alignment with some huge important religious situation that they feel it's good to be associated with after all we must remember that founding a university is a PR decision the Monarch must be flattered and a great way to do this is to use Divine Theory to justify their rule their wealth or their Wars another possibility is that we observe a sort of syncretism take place where the theological University establishment seeks to establish itself as a body of knowledge which precedes all of these separate disperate mystery CS perhaps these theological academics seek to create a streamlined version of their entire polytheistic Faith or to create a calendar of worship designed to honor every deity in the best way for those faithful folks who may seek Perfection perhaps even a systematic and syncretic attempt to amalgamate all of the individual myths surrounding each deity perhaps creating some Grand synthesis of every foundational myth each given its own place in a very carefully work out history and each hammered into one single narrative that makes logical sense this would be similar to bead's history of the English people or the collation of the original Torah but entirely for divine interconnected drama think the sagas of Ragnarok mixed with James Usher's attempt to date the Bible uh which found that the world's origin was in 404 BC old school theology like the this contained a lot more maths philosophy and science than most people imagine I use science and quotation marks here because theology was technically a science and some of the cleverest Minds pondering these ideas and and theories and practical conclusions were within that border but it is true that uh early theology had no access to any scientific method finally depending on the danger presence and variety of monstrous beasts in a world like this it is likely that medicine expands its remat somewhat into the world of monsters after all plen the Elder wrote or in fact made up that hedgehogs store Fallen fruit on their spines ancient writers were fascinated with explaining natural beasts imagine their investment in Beasts of the mythical and magical kind the true nature of the troll including experiments on regeneration The Mating and breeding habits of Cobalts and theories that overly gorged Cobalts can lay dragon eggs sometimes anything is on the table besides unlike understanding how hedgehogs act understanding the beasts who ruin civilizations is an eminently practical concern witchers spring to mind as a practically focused Exemplar of this very idea but any Kingdom with a monster ecologist in Residence rests a little safer at night especially when that knowledge starts to trickle down or be given out to the Learned men of medicine dotted around a country of course it is worth noting that folk belief is likely going to be more useful than the scribblings of a tenur armchair expert owing largely to the Gulf of experience between one scholar and Millennia of lived experience but any researcher who starts from folk belief and extrapolates using dissection anatomy and magical investigation would indeed Advance understanding significantly these are some absolutely huge changes to be made to General University structures no longer do we have priests in training studying for a single unified organized Church nor medical doctors in training leaving University to establish a practice solely to treat humans we can go further and we should if the world justifies it so a DN D World what will the most dedicated nerds do when given funding and time to figure things out we can forget the three core subjects or at least expand them significantly in d and d a a complex plane of cosmology is like a thing and studying it tells us exactly where the gods live what lines of power link our world closely to others and where the worst threats are likely to come into our world systematized geometry is the truth of a planer situation and that can only get more complex when we imagine that planer geometry is filled with impossibilities infinite planes and pin pricked sized enclaves of vast realities maths at least on the cosmic scale is going to get very important and very weird academics will not just be fighting over cernus or bra's Mod Solar models but infinitely more complex models of the universe and surrounding planes including spatial geometrical impossibilities and don't say they won't we have been trying to map our own world since before we could sail the Seas our own arrogance is a feature of many other fantasy species too wanting to map the cosmos will certainly be a massively important race and goal for any academic that wants to give it a go magic at least in a wizardly sense is a classic staple for a reason in D and D world's magic can be taught which means that universities are likely to become a hot bed of Majors fast mostly students from wealthy families paying inordinate amounts of money to be trained the study of magic is like a whole thing and has been done well to death even so many times in fantasy media but what isn't covered nearly so often is using magic to study not necessarily in the sense of automatic annotating quills or magical memory techniques but applying magical tools to discover results identify is the clearest and most dull example what does this ancient mysterious item imbued with magic do no okay that's the answer ancient text in a dead language even warlocks can sometimes handle that translation at least as an academic exercise is likely to be nowhere near as critical when magic is involved as we don't need breakthroughs like the Rosetta Stone when comprehend languages exists instead like the early medieval scriptum books and Scrolls would simply be copied magically into modern tongues although a skilled translator would still be massively useful to translate anything in a nonliteral sense so translation is certainly still a skill that's likely to be needed just more more interpreting literal meaning in a appropriate way magic gets most potent though when we think to experimentation divination spells in short solves the risks in experimenting and even the need to do proper experiments let's say a mage wants to discover what happens exactly when a bag of holding goes inside a portable hole auguy he now knows that his plan to put them together himself will lead to Woe or bad bad things so he sets up a Contraption in a stone box miles from civilization Clairvoyance now he can see the experiment with no risk to his own safety from start to finish but we can go further suppose he has a theory as to where this combination explosion or implosion spits out its debris then a reasonable next step is to commune with a deity hopefully a of knowledge the Mage presents their Theory such items are destroyed entirely along with any sucked through the rift that is created the answer no curious new Theory everything sucked through the rift isn't destroyed it still exists somewhere yes good it must then go to another plane of existence then the as yes suddenly the Mage would know the critical information without being put at any risk but why stop there by employing mathematical and statistical Theory commune takes on a whole new layer of potential binary search for instance allows the answer to any question with a defined set of options to be gathered in just a few yes or no answers you want to know where in the cosmos A Certain object is list every plane split that list in half and ask if the object is anywhere in the first half of names repeat this for just a few questions and you will know exactly what plane this object is in you could even theoretically use this to grid search a whole plane of existence with just a few spell slots and this is also potentially doable with contact other plane too which gives you more questions but less specific expertise the only way this fails is if it's in a place you missed on your list or if nobody not even the Gods in the cosmos knows the answer at which point you hand that question off to a doctoral student and set them on a case to figure it out be the first one in history to know that answer this doesn't just work for finding things testing theories diagnosing maladies and even identifying monsters can all be done this way assuming the list is complete and if it isn't again that's just new research to be done through this and other more complex iterations of maths and a reliable font of knowledge we can know everything we don't know much faster this I think is why there's such an association between D and D styled wizards and mathematics as much as Ed Greenwood and elminster would deny it with an understanding of things like this and of the potential of chained magic maths Wizardry becomes an immense Force for quick answers to questions nobody has asked for Millennia it is for this reason that I believe mathematics both theoretical SL geometric and practical SL statistical would be University subjects in any de D and D University in addition in terms of pler existence there's also pler law to have a think about it's very likely that Fay and devil law will be studied clearly for contracts immutable forces and anything that is going to trip up a mortal in negotiations there will be experts in pler law absolutely studying in your best universities but I feel I've rambled pH a little too long there is more to say but I really shouldn't keep you I hope this has been enough to stoke all those fires of imagination and get you thinking about what assumptions are left uninterrogated in your world building let me know if there's any other such topic I should be covering but with that said I've been Tom otherwise known as the grunon master thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: The Grungeon Master

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Id: YAhxaqeBqm4

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024