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Hey /tg/, question for a kingdom I'm fleshing out for a new setting. It's a pretty standard trope that settings with lots of magic tend to stagnate technologically, because magic-users and to a lesser extent nonhumans out-compete and strangle innovations, but what happens when you're the only kingdom around with magic? Suppose a Pagan king made his realm a safe haven for persecuted magic users and monster races fleeing the same expansionist empire he's fighting: How does this foresighted individual keep technology in his kingdom from halting due to arcane competition while his neighbors grow ever more advanced and eventually overwhelm his descendants?
One idea I had was to have a royal prize in gold, land, minor titles or what-have-you for people who develop mundane inventions that can compete with some service magic users offer in civilian life or on the battlefield, and a sort of medieval research grant program that head-hunts promising people and gives them access to workshops, libraries, and funding to see what useful things come from them. A kingdom that has wizards who can scry still benefits from being able to give all its commanders telescopes.
Thoughts?
>GIF related, how you gonna compete with that?
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Shameless self-bump.
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>>50514061
1. An actual king in a feudal system will not be cognizant of, much less concern himself with some broad sociological force like "technological development". In fact, no one will. There are not going to be enough specialized intellectual laborers out there to acknowledge, let alone assess this kind of trend in any meaningful way.
2. Technology does not know borders in feudal society. What innovations actually happen, as few and far between as they do, are completely outside of state hands, as, again, this whole process is not even understood to be happening by authorities or the population more broadly.
3. The kinds of things you're suggesting are absolutely absurd in nearly every sense imaginable. A feudal realm has no bureaucracy. It is barely a state, with only the most minimal trappings of centralized authority and territoriality.
4. Stop playing deendee. Alignment is trash. Vanican magic is trash. Class based progression is trash. Gamism is trash. Fuck that shit. Play a good game.
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>>50514353
>Stop playing deendee
You really love pancakes, don't you? How about you stop talking about pancakes all the time, you pancake-loving fag?
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>>50514353
1: You're an idiot, anyone looking at history would see the upheaval of the discovery of, say, Iron giving dynamic new conquering peoples the ability to quickly raise massive armies on the cheap and overthrow the dominant civilizations dependent on Bronze and the accompanying trade networks. Looking back on fabled Kingdoms of Magic getting their shit wrecked by neighbors who develop better industrial bases should not be hard for someone with the books on hand and the ability to fucking read.
2: You're an idiot, if a kingdom gets its hands on something useful an uses it to conquer the shit out of its neighbors, the spread of technology across borders doesn't really do shit for their ability to remain independent. Sure, the Mongols brought gunpowder and recurve bows to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but they brought them by using them to siege castles and riddle armies with arrows. On top of this, society plays a huge part: By your logic the tribal confederations and kingdoms facing Roma expansion should have just easily copied their weapons, road-building, and military structure to halt their advance. Obviously that did not happen.
3: You're an idiot, no one said anything about this being a classic middle-ages Europe feudal clusterfuck. Plenty of empires all over the world had functioning bureaucracies, and most of those had kings. Most Early Modern European states had kings, in fact.
4: No one said anything about D&D. You are, once again, completely pulling things out of your ass and then refuting them oh so cleverly. Could be ASOIAF very low, dangerous to use magic, could be Earthsea style language-as-magic, could be Elementalism. The words alignment, class, based, and progression were not mentioned one solitary time.
tl;dr: Your mom is trash and absurd in nearly every sense imaginable.
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>>50514752
>historical forces cause things to happen!
>that means that men in history were aware of and in control of these forces!
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>>50514752
>the spread of technology across borders doesn't really do shit for their ability to remain independent. Sure, the Mongols brought gunpowder and recurve bows to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but they brought them by using them to siege castles and riddle armies with arrows
Eh, most of the central asian and eastern european Khanates lasted longer than Russia has been a thing.also had higher technology than russia ever achieved
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>>50515209
One educated person figuring out a general historical trend is completely implausible?
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