Your World NEEDS an Industrial Revolution (feat. Magic Mouth)

in a previous video I suggested that any fantasy Society with somewhat ready access to Magic should almost never stagnate at a medieval tech level in my view magic should never really be a barrier to progress but rather be co-opted by industrious creative and mad types of people to make both progress and money here's how [Music] the factors which caused the first Industrial Revolution are complex manifold and the subject of many a book and PhD but for our purposes a few key influences will suffice first a surplus of raw material Britain simply had too many things in two large quantities to processes it all using traditional methods this ties into influence number two the Advent of global trade meaning both raw goods and finished products are in constant circulation and the circulation of ideas is also in full force the third motivation is a growing population leading to not only more ideas in the global Marketplace but also far greater demands on agriculture and goods production so people need stuff and that food and the stuff they need is all coming from all around the world the only problem is that cottage industries can't transform raw materials into stuff fast enough using traditional manual labor so to widen this bottleneck we get reforms in labor mostly including Time and Labor saving advancements now in Worlds of fantasy which include magic many similar problems may occur I'm going to be using DND 5e for this as it's the magic system I am most familiar with but this really works with any system which has more than a handful of magical folks so unless magic has solved every problem for every single person there will always be some imbalance in your world now a few ways magic may already destabilized traditional labor include Undead workforces the conjuration of labor-intensive raw material products weather controlling magic and the ability to fabricate complex products using magic alone all of these are possible through dnd's magic and all of these could lead to many industrial Revolutions of their own they may already be changing in the way people work the thing is though while each of these are likely to have some impact on your world if a mindset of efficient labor for capital is not inculcated as it hasn't been for most of human history then these May remain Niche weird developments localized and specialized to certain people or types of project they may help communities suffused with magic Thrive but they might not entirely supplant the old ways unless this mindset shifts we need this critical mass created by social pressure to form the basis of an intellectual framework free Industrial Revolution without an understanding of Labor as a capital producing Affair there's really no point to making your work more efficient and while it's feasible that if every Community has access to all this helpful magic a general satisfaction might emerge which might stagnate process for a Time eventually something must change an incredibly successful cotton working Society May simply get too many orders from all around the world to fill them a growing population May outgrow the ability of magic to adequately feed it or simply some mad fool has a creative idea majors in many settings love to research experiment and find new spell effects or New Uses for spells the one d d play tests have brought back spell experimentation into DND it's been in many previous editions but even in fifth edition Wizards have some access to mess with spells they're constantly learning new spells through their own research and high-level Wizards even gain signature spells that they can cast while breaking some of the fundamental principles of magical spell casting so there's a group of hyper studious nerds who specialize in either a school of spellcraft or a specialized spell itself constantly experimenting and iterating they're gonna make some weird stuff this is actually one of my favorite approaches to World building you start with a simple concept like elves live longer than other folks or sending allows a world to be near instantly globalized and just extrapolate from there it's quite a lot of what I do on this channel but I'm certainly not the first to do it and I'm certainly not the best introducing skerples whose magical Industrial Revolution is genuinely a revolutionary approach to some of these problems and to World building with constraints scurbles takes Concepts common in ttrpg Magic system design and gives clear delineated stages of how this magical period of invention and Innovation and Revolution may impact the world so I don't spoil the supplement for anyone who might want to read or use it I'm going to be discussing the general framework scaffolds users and applying it to one specific example of my own as has been brought up every single time I discuss the most World shaping spells in DND magic mouth has potent effects when looked at through the lens of hindsight the trouble is very few folks might be able to imagine a computer as an end product without developing the thought and the concept through many many stages of innovation the supplement depicts the stages of innovation of any industrialized spell effect thusly they start with an initial innervation which moves in to an eventual public introduction to the product or the spell effect this leads to a widespread adoption as people find Value in it and eventually the scope Alters meaning that everything that was before is simply a precursor to this new use of this technology thus we reach the height of ambition which lead inevitably and inexorably into the terminal events scribble setting is after all a pre-apocalyptic setting on its inevitable March towards apocalypse by one of the Myriad options available each on a variable timer it's such a fun read and very fun to play too so we have our hyper magic wizard nerd who in this case loves magic mouth and a framework for understanding how this spell might develop through a series of Innovations so let's go Martin the mouthy uses magic mouth to organize his life he never needs to remember a command word for any of his magic items he simply Taps the specific item three times and one of the many Magic mouths active in his room will tell him the exact Commander word he needs indeed his front door is also filled with magic mouths and acts as a kind of Proto switchboard as long as people use the pre-prepared system if you have a legal concern for example say the word legal and the magic mouth will then tell you where you can stick your head indeed if a mouth actually recognizes a specific guest approaching then that mouth may have Specific Instructions for how that guest can get in past all of Martin's traps the initial Innovation comes when Martin the mouthy falls out with one of his old friends because he didn't receive a birthday gift from him this year annoyed he modifies the Mounds on the door to say yay if he returns with a present-looking solemn or boo if this friend decides to come to his door without his present this takes multiple castings of the spell but it'll be worth it see another two mouths are listening out for either a yay or a boo and if they hear it they will either give a regular way to enter secretly or insult the friend with the most cutting 25 words ever devised respectively of course and you see Martin has found through his massive study of this specific spell a way to issue the material components of it so such frivolity is perfectly Fair Martin and his friend get a good laugh out of this and the friend suggests they might make something of it they're a Bard and they think it might be a method of actually telling a tale that can be interacted with by the audience on the fly without the need for improvisation The Bard can record dozens of lines which ask the audience to choose their own adventure and a Magic Mouse device with thousands of relays can be made which plays the whole adventure for an audience they work hard on Marvin's mouthing manipulable machine and debut it for the first time at the local Monarch at a grand ball they've just got a tiny booth in the corner but this introduction is a success every single Noble wants a go on the game but only one such device has been made every party that doesn't have the adventure game is a failure and a laughing stock and Martin and The Bard are hard at work on building another of these machines while the first one is loaned at Great expense to anyone who can afford it and wants to impress their guests finally the second machine is complete with help from Martin's second year Wizarding students and this one is bought up by a local theater they pay up front in cash in hopes that placing the machine in their Lobby might draw amazing crowds which might want to come and visit their performances of course the machine can also be a revenue stream of itself because it's in this theater one copper a play they were right now the public have had their hands on this adventure game and they're in love it has attained true widespread adoption but a colleague of Martins the count has had an idea he's seen the popularity of Martin's machine and decides it may be also useful as a labor saving device not simply for entertainment see the count is disappointed that many of the jobs within the great City are given over to folks who just Parrot information he wonders if Martin and his bardic friend could build him a fleet of mouthing manipulable machines capable of counting coin taking orders doing basic sums and quoting prices or information or and I quote any of the other menial tasks these imbeciles do the count is fabulously wealthy after all and the theater money is very useful too so Martin employs his second year Wizards full time and gets to work by the Year's End Martin's mouthing manipulable man is operational it can do basic calculations any necessary for managing a shop front anyway they can answer basic business queries and critically can operate infinitely people are only really employed now as security guards and Sheen Watchers special drawers in the machines are opened and closed with internally spoken command words and the customers are happy with the efficiency savings and not having to count out their own money and make sure it's right the world of Commerce is different the scope has altered it's time to reach the dizzying heights of ambition of this project see now Martin's City never sleeps mixed with the wonderful things that fabricate stone-shaped sending and magehand have done for the industrial life of people solving complex manufacture excavation construction mass communication and perfectly replicable mass production respectively the actual working folks are mostly reduced to well enough paid supervisors and managers of the machines just to keep them happy and keep the economy ticking over after all people need money with which to buy things after all this is the most prosperous City in the region those tourist greeting machines are going very well and this is of course the home of the interactive Adventure game and goodness knows they're still being produced Now by almost every wizard in town the counts city is one of perfect service and games with new twists on the formula emerging every week it's a golden age of entertainment and prosperity if it lasts oh dear it didn't the problem with mechanizing your entire Workforce removing the need to calculate and placating them with Escapist fantasies is that when the overworked Wizards reach a Breaking Point and can't or won't continue to build these machines there's nobody really left to maintain them in fact there are very few folks left in the city who actually have practice in operating as efficient members of the workforce with no new machines there are no new games and if the machines aren't being fixed people are start to notice a few minor errors in some of the cashier's boxes but they're more worried that there's no more light entertainment and no more magic Mouth music boxes Mass popular culture is dead as soon as it is birthed and who's to blame Martin and his mouths either the upset ex-workers tear down the Mages for their strike or they tear apart the very machines that have liberated them from labor after all this it seems Martin and the count are gone vanished and those minor errors which started occurring unnoticed seem to make a little more sense as rampant inflation hits the economy it turns out that trusting Nims machines only made sense while the going was good while they were stripped of the greedy ambition of man the city is a mess of smashed mechanized cashiers but at least there are arcades to play the old favorites this is a rather humorous extrapolation intentionally so but we can clearly see the blueprints of the type of extrapolative World building you can do to manufacture an industrial revolution all you need is one person to change one aspect of how the spell Works through experimentation and you get a runaway steam train of advancement sometimes you don't even need to change the spell at all scurple's magical Industrial Revolution does what I've just done eight different times for eight completely alternate topics as well as having so much other great stuff for this style of game in it and you do need a few of these on the go just to keep things interesting and really give your world that sense that oh gosh everything is changing after all revolutions are never stable and many things always have to happen for them to build on each other and create that Groundswell that changes the way people think about how they work I hope this has given some insight into developing your own magical Industrial Revolution and also given some insight into that magic mouth computer argument it is entirely possible to reach a computer instead of where we ended up but each stage needs to be motivated by the state of play and the context of the world around it you can't just invent the car without having first figured out hundreds of different uses for the wheel on an axle that's just civilization thank you for watching as with every topic but very few more so than this I feel like there's a lot I didn't quite get to cover if you'd like more videos in this vein please do let me know by subscribing to the channel and commenting that you want more it really gives me a clue in what to make next I'd love to turn this into a mini series on how spells and magic may be used to power an industrial revolution specifically the Unseen servant anime dead and magehand but I'm getting ahead of myself so with all that said I've been Tom otherwise known as the grungeon master thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: The Grungeon Master

Views: 29,094

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Id: hrmQRBI42sY

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023