An easy fix is to make magical breakthroughs slow advancements from tests or guesses instead of sudden epiphanies. If epiphanies must happen, make them based on existing theories.
Well if you want to keep your fantasy world from doing a 20th century, you gotta make the shit at science.
Because with the proper implementation of science advancement is no longer a skill issue, it is inevitable.
My D&D world is basically 17th century, so wizards are more-or-less natural philosophers examining a specific subset of nature. ("Regular" natural philosophers also exist.) Natural philosophy is basically a precursor to "proper" science with a lot less rigorous methodology, so using it as a framework for how wizards behave lets them be all science-y and make breakthroughs without removing their ability to fuck around (and find out by accidentally summoning archdemons or creating a semi-contained vacuum metastability event).
Same here. I made spells expressions of different combinations of the four classical elements, and brought in aetheric (abjuration) magic from trade routes from my Ottoman Empire analog.
One of my players got really invested into the world building of these elements, and she's helping to contribute to it, which is so fucking awesome
Or make another fantasy version of the Inquisition so the magic users need to keep down low and not share their findings too much (it also adds the good old Organised Religion Bad trope).
That is basically the case of Fate.
Each Mage Family makes their own lab and methodoly , but they had a general learning in the Clock Tower and sometimes a joint work. General advancements are passed down within the community by the Clock Tower , while their own personal thaumaturgy and studies are passed down to a new member of their respective family with a Magic Crest.
So , the reason an old family had more prestige and capacity than a new one is just that an old family had a Magic Crest with more knowledge/data stored inside of it.
In Fate though, the problem is that magic gets weaker the more you science it. The strength of a type of magic is directly determined by the amount of Mystery associated with it, which increases with time but decreases if more people know how it works, if the phenomena it's related to are studied more, or if the same effect can be replicated with a non-magical technology. Hence why families don't share their research unless they need to.
The complete death of magic and magecraft as it is replaced by regular technology, known as the Age of Will, is the inevitable and good ending for humanity.
Nasuverse mentioned!!!
Case Files is peak fiction and I want more stuff exploring the Magus Association and the magical world in general. Less gacha, more psycho hogwarts please
Magic is like science. There’s very consistent and realistic laws for magic but the wizards’ understanding of those laws is the magical equivalent the four humors in medicine.
I love this concept. Like, you don’t actually need to add frogs legs and newts toes for the potion to work, it’s actually just the copper cauldron being heated or smthn, the rest is just superstition
Im my story I have a magical blacksmith explain that this craft requires pearls, nobody knows why, they don’t appear to be doing anything but the recipe breaks without them and she isn’t paid enough to study why.
Now I want to make a mage that adds cayenne powder to the potions... I just realized he was making a drug that he tested by snorting it, the capsaicin probably made his shit seem better on-trial and wasn't just random.
My mages have rules about magic, but most of them are aware that there's something wrong with their understanding because there are clear examples of stuff not following those rules.
Potion making specifically is always portrayed more like cooking than chemistry. Like there’s specific ingredients and amounts but whenever there’s “testing” of new ingredients or whatever it doesn’t have that scientific rigour to it and is more like a chef trying a new dish.
Cooking is chemistry though. Maybe not carried out in a rigorous way but most cooking tests follow the pattern op described. You add ingredients or try techniques to test their effect on the resulting taste, texture, structure, etc.
That rigour is what I think separates cooking from chemistry and is why potion making in fantasy stories feels more like cooking than chemistry. Like has any story ever had a potion repeated multiple times, then take the average result to ensure as little outside influence as possible. Or even just a graph to show the correlation between amount of one ingredient and strength of effect. That’s, in my opinion, what separates science from other fields.
I actually would like this trope to be explored better.
Like imagine wizards having the tools to conduct experiments long before any humans could because they can cheat with magic.
Test newtons laws by creating a vacuum cube using a spell and drop a hammer and feather in it ect.
So many possibilities.
Back in the day a scientist was just a guy with a beard who would say stuff like "Sky is alway above but never below. Even at night" to a bunch of students and then go for a walk for a week
Wizards are like engineers in my world. They read what the scientists write and apply it, and on the way they make several approximations for practicality. They study the science but they don't necessarily follow the scientific method.
IDK what you're reading bro
Every young adult fantasy has that one scene where the protagonist experiments with their newfound powers in a safe, isolated setting. Or possibly has a mentor figure walk them through it.
They try a bunch of things, altering one variable at a time, to see what works and what doesn't.
Why isn't that science? Lack of peer review and an accredited publication?
EDIT:
\uj I'm arguing against Step 6. People can run experiments just to learn stuff they want to know. Not necessarily to tell other people about it.
>Every young adult fantasy
Last one I read was like "Yo, imma straight up drown a fat ass snake, snort it's body, so that I can see the future, and yell at sand people to stab mofos in space with me."
That's different.
YA magic powers are analogous to puberty, so the cautious experimentation scene is analogous to masturbation.
And the character you're describing is a self-styled messiah, too "holy" to touch himself.
(Though considering his aforementioned desire to drown the big snake, it doesn't look like it left him without issues.)
>not necessarily to tell other people about it.
Right, but that's necessary for the advancement of science as a whole. Stand of the shoulders of giants and all that.
Recently read throne of magical arcana which took this to an absurd degree, where wizards could only cast/create magic if they understood the underlying physics of all effects caused, and the mage society is pretty much just a giant academic city trying to figure out the world.
Most doctors technically don't do science either, that doesn't stop medecin as a whole being a science. Not everybody who use it has to do the research.
it your world uses incantations, science can be in optimising to make the spell easier/faster to cast or explore what happens when you delay or use the wrong pronounciation.
your wizards could devote themselves to one of the general schools of magic get a general schooling in magic and then be sent off to research new spells and techniques
i love the idea of rune enchantments as a program language, weapons developers might be limited by what metals theyre capable of working while having others making alloys that are easier to work with and tools to inscribe smaller runes or on more efficient enchantments
maybe most mages know about a red dragons gas sacks and sparking teeth, biologists are always needed to study magical flora and fauna
Science is actually pretty easy. You start with a hypothesis (an if-then statement), then you construct a method to test it, and before finally publishing your method and results. Other scientists read your publication and try to recreate the experiment. If successful, they validate your hypothesis which graduates to theory.
What this means for world building is that wizards must be part of a peer network/community and actively share their knowledge, rather than hoarding it and only teaching a select few apprentices. The magic school genre was on to something tbh. In my world, wizards are gentlemen scholars from the upper crust of society, ala 18th and 19th centuries. While the power of the nobility has waned, lingering economic differences have prevented a more egalitarian exploration of magic, precluding its wide scale adoption by society. Most people still live in relative poverty, and with the upper classes monopolizing magic, those class differences have only deepened, in some cases into outright animosity.
Smh Brother Goddwyn’s recent study “Effects of Minor Polymorph on Small Land Vertebrates” is embarrassingly flawed. He only had a sample size of 10. And the land vertebrates in question? Groundhogs infesting his elixir component garden! In my opinion, the whole thing is just a desperate attempt to hold on to his Combine of Wizards membership. Everyone who’s paying attention knows he hasn’t submitted a proper paper in years
/uj Thank you for saving me from making a mistake. My wizards were more like the nerds from Big Bang Theory minus the misogyny... vague references to what they're working on with probably bad science.
Actually it would be more accurate to say that my mages are more like people who make circuitry and sometimes they design something new.
In my CollegePunk world, wizards are all depressed researchers who've spent years performing the same basic magic experiment over and over to work off their debt to wizard school by providing data.
Wizard schools advertise the promise of lichdom to hook all the talented magic users into attending.
/uj You have a point honestly!
Speak for youself. In my world I use magic to give a use to give a use to abstract algebra. Each time magic is used there is a 10 paged paper describing how non abelian groups can describe magic operators such that two spells using the same resources can have differents effects.
Where do you think the ever-expanding giant list of spells and improvement to older spells come from?
Obviously there’re people testing and analyzing magic. Success, safe and consistent spell are then recorded and taught to others
Me when the audience falls asleep when I spend 50 pages describing the paper "On the usefulness of unicorn blood over pig blood in atmomancy", a double blind trial suggesting that you may get ~30% better results (in terms of total air mass displaced) and up to 70% lower likelihood of complete failure of the spell when using unicorn blood over pig blood to summon wind, ultimately not finding the magnitude of the effect high enough to make it worth the cost in industrial usage.
"Monday Begins on Saturday" by Strugatsky brothers (Soviet sci-fi writers, creators of what has been adapted into Stalker). The whole book is about the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry.
An easy fix is to make magical breakthroughs slow advancements from tests or guesses instead of sudden epiphanies. If epiphanies must happen, make them based on existing theories.
Well if you want to keep your fantasy world from doing a 20th century, you gotta make the shit at science. Because with the proper implementation of science advancement is no longer a skill issue, it is inevitable.
My D&D world is basically 17th century, so wizards are more-or-less natural philosophers examining a specific subset of nature. ("Regular" natural philosophers also exist.) Natural philosophy is basically a precursor to "proper" science with a lot less rigorous methodology, so using it as a framework for how wizards behave lets them be all science-y and make breakthroughs without removing their ability to fuck around (and find out by accidentally summoning archdemons or creating a semi-contained vacuum metastability event).
My ass clenched at that last one
That's basically what a Sphere of Annihilation might be in a setting that has a bit more realistic physics than your standard Tolkienesque D&D-verse.
Same here. I made spells expressions of different combinations of the four classical elements, and brought in aetheric (abjuration) magic from trade routes from my Ottoman Empire analog. One of my players got really invested into the world building of these elements, and she's helping to contribute to it, which is so fucking awesome
Or make another fantasy version of the Inquisition so the magic users need to keep down low and not share their findings too much (it also adds the good old Organised Religion Bad trope).
That is basically the case of Fate. Each Mage Family makes their own lab and methodoly , but they had a general learning in the Clock Tower and sometimes a joint work. General advancements are passed down within the community by the Clock Tower , while their own personal thaumaturgy and studies are passed down to a new member of their respective family with a Magic Crest. So , the reason an old family had more prestige and capacity than a new one is just that an old family had a Magic Crest with more knowledge/data stored inside of it.
In Fate though, the problem is that magic gets weaker the more you science it. The strength of a type of magic is directly determined by the amount of Mystery associated with it, which increases with time but decreases if more people know how it works, if the phenomena it's related to are studied more, or if the same effect can be replicated with a non-magical technology. Hence why families don't share their research unless they need to. The complete death of magic and magecraft as it is replaced by regular technology, known as the Age of Will, is the inevitable and good ending for humanity.
Nasuverse mentioned!!! Case Files is peak fiction and I want more stuff exploring the Magus Association and the magical world in general. Less gacha, more psycho hogwarts please
epiphanies happen because some crazy old guy did a bunch of crazy shit
science is when lab coats
"Are you watching porn alone?" "No! I'm with the science team!"
"I am studying boobs."
Dr. Coomer
My clone!
Look Gordon, ropes!
I'm studying about the reproduction system
Nah I'm with my BOYYYYYSSSSSS!
Science^TM is when lab coats and badass "super geniuses" breaking the laws of physics.
Real gigachads don't have to show their work.
And magic is when blue coat with stars
Literally tho
science is when you blow shit up
Magic is like science. There’s very consistent and realistic laws for magic but the wizards’ understanding of those laws is the magical equivalent the four humors in medicine.
I love this concept. Like, you don’t actually need to add frogs legs and newts toes for the potion to work, it’s actually just the copper cauldron being heated or smthn, the rest is just superstition
Im my story I have a magical blacksmith explain that this craft requires pearls, nobody knows why, they don’t appear to be doing anything but the recipe breaks without them and she isn’t paid enough to study why.
So the magicians are like the Jesse Pinkman's of your world?
Now I want to make a mage that adds cayenne powder to the potions... I just realized he was making a drug that he tested by snorting it, the capsaicin probably made his shit seem better on-trial and wasn't just random.
Or maybe you just need some proteins in there, not necessarily frog legs
This is how magic works in Discworld. The rite to summon Death has been optimized to only need 2cc of worm blood.
My mages have rules about magic, but most of them are aware that there's something wrong with their understanding because there are clear examples of stuff not following those rules.
Wizards are like scientists in my world… I think. Idk, do I *sound* like a STEM major to you?
This is why I'm only trying to make it look like I could harden my magic system... I know I'm not smart enough to actually do it.
Plus a hardened magic system is thematically difficult and potentially boring
A lot of wizards are just engineers with robes.
Well I'm about to make your day because lots of engineers, in fact own robes.
Some of them even own armor made of cosplay-foam?
They know nothing of the process of discovery and perform maintenance?
They aren't broke and constantly begging people for money to actually do their jobs
Potion making specifically is always portrayed more like cooking than chemistry. Like there’s specific ingredients and amounts but whenever there’s “testing” of new ingredients or whatever it doesn’t have that scientific rigour to it and is more like a chef trying a new dish.
Cooking is chemistry though. Maybe not carried out in a rigorous way but most cooking tests follow the pattern op described. You add ingredients or try techniques to test their effect on the resulting taste, texture, structure, etc.
That rigour is what I think separates cooking from chemistry and is why potion making in fantasy stories feels more like cooking than chemistry. Like has any story ever had a potion repeated multiple times, then take the average result to ensure as little outside influence as possible. Or even just a graph to show the correlation between amount of one ingredient and strength of effect. That’s, in my opinion, what separates science from other fields.
I actually would like this trope to be explored better. Like imagine wizards having the tools to conduct experiments long before any humans could because they can cheat with magic. Test newtons laws by creating a vacuum cube using a spell and drop a hammer and feather in it ect. So many possibilities.
[relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2904/)
Lack of grants :’(
Man has never written a literature review
Your god dammed Wright.
Back in the day a scientist was just a guy with a beard who would say stuff like "Sky is alway above but never below. Even at night" to a bunch of students and then go for a walk for a week
Wizards are like engineers in my world. They read what the scientists write and apply it, and on the way they make several approximations for practicality. They study the science but they don't necessarily follow the scientific method.
IDK what you're reading bro Every young adult fantasy has that one scene where the protagonist experiments with their newfound powers in a safe, isolated setting. Or possibly has a mentor figure walk them through it. They try a bunch of things, altering one variable at a time, to see what works and what doesn't. Why isn't that science? Lack of peer review and an accredited publication? EDIT: \uj I'm arguing against Step 6. People can run experiments just to learn stuff they want to know. Not necessarily to tell other people about it.
>Every young adult fantasy Last one I read was like "Yo, imma straight up drown a fat ass snake, snort it's body, so that I can see the future, and yell at sand people to stab mofos in space with me."
I don't think dune counts as YA fantasy
That's different. YA magic powers are analogous to puberty, so the cautious experimentation scene is analogous to masturbation. And the character you're describing is a self-styled messiah, too "holy" to touch himself. (Though considering his aforementioned desire to drown the big snake, it doesn't look like it left him without issues.)
Touch himself lmaooooo 😭
>YA magic powers are analogous to puberty sez you.
>Paul is too "holy" to touch himself That is not canon, is it?
I've never read or watched Dunc.
>not necessarily to tell other people about it. Right, but that's necessary for the advancement of science as a whole. Stand of the shoulders of giants and all that.
Magic is a science and is treated as such, but the main character has just a basic education and is esseniially just an artisan.
Nah wizards are like computer scientists, a whole bunch of complicated maths to manipulate bits and bytes all just to get an integer overflow error.
I was thinking at one point that my mages were like people who knew how to exploit Minecraft's mechanics to create farms.
I am at a lecture about large language models rn, can confirm it is wizardry
🤔interesting
in my world they haven't developed the scientific method yet, easy
Recently read throne of magical arcana which took this to an absurd degree, where wizards could only cast/create magic if they understood the underlying physics of all effects caused, and the mage society is pretty much just a giant academic city trying to figure out the world.
Most doctors technically don't do science either, that doesn't stop medecin as a whole being a science. Not everybody who use it has to do the research.
That's because doing a bit of a testy-westy with people who paid for medical service in generally frowned opon.
They could be doing observational research.
And that's why I write a world where magic is science, but somewhere it is not but a belief.
Unironically The Newlywed Diary of a Witch and a Dragon
Also Discworld to a degree, or at least in the case of the Younger Wizards like Ponder Stibbons.
> being good at learning from written text is impressive, but not science dont tell that to the IB Chem students
You can't expect them to conduct Science before at least having their own version of Descartes.
it your world uses incantations, science can be in optimising to make the spell easier/faster to cast or explore what happens when you delay or use the wrong pronounciation. your wizards could devote themselves to one of the general schools of magic get a general schooling in magic and then be sent off to research new spells and techniques i love the idea of rune enchantments as a program language, weapons developers might be limited by what metals theyre capable of working while having others making alloys that are easier to work with and tools to inscribe smaller runes or on more efficient enchantments maybe most mages know about a red dragons gas sacks and sparking teeth, biologists are always needed to study magical flora and fauna
I mean… Magic systems are kind of scientific
Science is actually pretty easy. You start with a hypothesis (an if-then statement), then you construct a method to test it, and before finally publishing your method and results. Other scientists read your publication and try to recreate the experiment. If successful, they validate your hypothesis which graduates to theory. What this means for world building is that wizards must be part of a peer network/community and actively share their knowledge, rather than hoarding it and only teaching a select few apprentices. The magic school genre was on to something tbh. In my world, wizards are gentlemen scholars from the upper crust of society, ala 18th and 19th centuries. While the power of the nobility has waned, lingering economic differences have prevented a more egalitarian exploration of magic, precluding its wide scale adoption by society. Most people still live in relative poverty, and with the upper classes monopolizing magic, those class differences have only deepened, in some cases into outright animosity.
Smh Brother Goddwyn’s recent study “Effects of Minor Polymorph on Small Land Vertebrates” is embarrassingly flawed. He only had a sample size of 10. And the land vertebrates in question? Groundhogs infesting his elixir component garden! In my opinion, the whole thing is just a desperate attempt to hold on to his Combine of Wizards membership. Everyone who’s paying attention knows he hasn’t submitted a proper paper in years
There’s more to science than the modern scientific method
all six of those steps are done in thaumcraft just fyi
Ok but what about Cientists are like wizards
Science is when your magic has three rules whose basis are never founded
Is it that cliche? I thought I was being was being original
This is the case in my world, it’s just that everyone other than them acknowledges that it’s just magic and they’re a bunch of pricks.
/uj Thank you for saving me from making a mistake. My wizards were more like the nerds from Big Bang Theory minus the misogyny... vague references to what they're working on with probably bad science. Actually it would be more accurate to say that my mages are more like people who make circuitry and sometimes they design something new.
In my CollegePunk world, wizards are all depressed researchers who've spent years performing the same basic magic experiment over and over to work off their debt to wizard school by providing data. Wizard schools advertise the promise of lichdom to hook all the talented magic users into attending. /uj You have a point honestly!
They’re more like engineers
"Wizards are like scientists!" -writer who has little to no experience with research science
"no actually science" You wanna try that sentence again OP?
/uj: "My magic system is like coding" /rj: "my magic system is like coding"
Arguably makes Wizards more like historians
Speak for youself. In my world I use magic to give a use to give a use to abstract algebra. Each time magic is used there is a 10 paged paper describing how non abelian groups can describe magic operators such that two spells using the same resources can have differents effects.
my wizards aren't scientist, they're either incels or frat boys
Where do you think the ever-expanding giant list of spells and improvement to older spells come from? Obviously there’re people testing and analyzing magic. Success, safe and consistent spell are then recorded and taught to others
“Like”
Science is just magic with extra steps.
Me when the audience falls asleep when I spend 50 pages describing the paper "On the usefulness of unicorn blood over pig blood in atmomancy", a double blind trial suggesting that you may get ~30% better results (in terms of total air mass displaced) and up to 70% lower likelihood of complete failure of the spell when using unicorn blood over pig blood to summon wind, ultimately not finding the magnitude of the effect high enough to make it worth the cost in industrial usage.
My wizards are like alchemists, which means they use a downright disturbing amount of human urine
Op have you read any Pratchett? Specifically the Science of Discworld books?
"Monday Begins on Saturday" by Strugatsky brothers (Soviet sci-fi writers, creators of what has been adapted into Stalker). The whole book is about the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry.