Answering before watch the video: that depends on the magical system. For most systems I think the answer is yes. If you get some Universal divination power, that gives you answer about all objective matters then all Technological Revolutions are likely to happen a lot faster, Agricultural included. Usually Agricultural Revolutions happen because of magic, in our (arguably) real world. Is the sort of knowledge attributed to divine intervention, so "Divine Magic" so to speak. Would be interesting to go in the opposite direction and ask "which Magic System would likely prevent Agricultural Revolution?". Anything that allows you to create food and objects of use from magical energy, if common enough, should do the trick. People will not invest the effort needed to pass the difficulties of start an Agricultural System if they can get what agriculture gives you easier, and faster. Maybe something that depends on people being strict carnivores. Your mage can heal the entire tribe, and turn them into super-strong werelion, but only those who have not eaten any crops, roots or vegetables, for the last 5 years. Magic don't help those who eat plants. Or magic depends on spirits that consider any sort of "violence against the earth" insulting. So, you lose all magic if you start hurting the ground to plant your food. And magic gives you more advantage than planting things.
The latest discoveries published about Gobekli Tepe & other related sites tend to point to sedentism happening before agriculture. The agricultural revolution would occur in a different way than it did in our world, but growing your food near the city you already live in would certainly be a thing.
I keep the development of people a lot more consistent with how it is in our world by having my magic progress slowly. All early humans know is that certain materials can do weird things, but stone age humans did not figure out how to replicate these processes. This wouldn't happen until earlier civilizations formed and certain members of these societies took on roles similar to ancient Greek alchemists; they ran experiments, invented spells, etc which all lead to the development of refined magic systems. Since magic isn't used by everyone, there is also some need still for scientific innovations.
I like these ideas, they're well thought. My spelling was off, my apologies. It's a good argument for two distinct forms of magic, one reminds me of summoning from JRPGs, the other is mage-drug which is pretty uncommon but not unheard of, but you went further than that and extended outward to justify why certain things might be smaller, might be larger, might be faster or slower in development and might be missed entirely; which I quite enjoy. Thanks for your thoughts, longform.
In the Elemental scenario they would cultivate the resources they need to consume for magic. Farming would just be different. You would cultivate the four elements to your greatest extent.
Thinking about it this way opens up some truly unsettling and frightening implications... what if early cultures started out with all the same magical practices, but they actually *worked*...
Regarding agricultural revolution and population explosion. What if balance was a central tenet of belief? The spirits made it clear that the world (or the spirit world) enforces a balance, providing for need but not greed? What if the mesolithic peoples know from experience that if they let their numbers get too high, death will take the surplus and possibly more besides -- either from disease and starvation, or perhaps just bad luck, animal attacks, etc?). The people would discover some kind of birth control right quick. Perhaps divination will show an auspicious time to have a child, and children not born under spiritual blessings are considered unlucky?
For being born at auspicous times, the primary species in my world is nocturnal. All childbirth takes place under open sky and any child born in the light of the sun is deemed "sun-cursed" and traditionally killed right after birth. Some tribes have taken to using drugs and/or magic to accelerate or delay childbirth to ensure nobody is born in daylight, but for the rest, this is the primary form of population control (even if not done for population control purposes).
Really glad I found this channel, this info/ideas you present here are all things I had banging around in my head that I wanted to solve for my prehistoric setting. Video is very info/idea dense but still very easy to parse.
Oh yes! Even as a child I was quite sure that Spirits inhabited everything, everywhere. Not sure why, just always have! You are quite an interesting person! I really enjoy your talks!!
I mean thats true but only if *one* guy has magic and the magic is sufficiently powerful. If all the magic you can do is shove people around then, while you might pose more danger than another foot soldier, that attention would bring an arrow or a spear your way that'd stop your rampaging. If everyone can throw fireballs everywhere, then war will still be balanced and a great fighter would be just as great compared to his peers as irl.
Well one way to solve for that you make me just a very small part of the population like 1% or under so you're just not going to have two measures in a battle or it's extremely rare probably done on purpose somehow
How does your elemental consumption system lead to earlier fire control though? You need to inhale smoke from a specific type of wood, for which you need fire to begin with. Then you have to to discover that when you build your campfire with a certain kind of wood it has that effect, which I imagine would take a while (and only happens at all if you live in an area where that tree grows at all). Overall a very interesting video, this is a topic I have thought a lot about, I'm building a fantasy world from the stone age while taking my own magic systems into account.
A bushfire could teach the mage what they need to know and once they've mastered the technique, they don't need to protect their fire anymore, making a fire becomes easy.
The cost of abusing magic might even produce a kind of early exhaustion of the *people* who are able to share their knowledge about magic, or to actually participate in the magical rituals and responsibilities. Nomadic life isn't as taxing as we tend to imagine it, but humans have a tendency to ride right up against their means, living to the full extent of the capacity of their resources. it takes generations and eons to learn, culturally, the necessity of preservative traditions and restorative stewardship of the land, and the technology of industry can completely disrupt and eclipse those conventions very easily. i am rambling though
Even with magic, guns would be usable. They are the Great Equalizer. In the real world, they allowed peasants to become soldiers with just a few weeks training, while the sword or bow required several months or even years of training. Magic would either need a lot of experience to efficiently wield as a weapon or be a tightly guarded secret onyl the powerful and holy have access to. Guns would re-balance the battlefield. My culture has achieved the digital age a lot faster thanks to magic, without ever going through the steam, diesel and atomic age. Virtual Reality is only possible because the spirit/astral realm is real, with deep dive VR technology being just technologically enhanced meditation. The primary magic form in my world is Qi/Internal Energy based, with some minor assist from spirits. Spirits don't really have much power in the physical realm. The people were hunter/gatherers for an extended time since their Qi magic made them better hunters through physical enhancement (more stamina, more strength, more speed). Agricultural and pastural settlements really only became a thing due to direct divine meddling (The gods didn't intend for agriculture or pasturals, they just messed up and couldn't be bothered to undo their mistakes).
I’d say the animals/environment having magic as well would be a partial answer to the earlier development. The agricultural revolution will take longer if an entire town can be wiped out by a particularly big and possibly bad wolf.
In 11:45. The first case, where you have spirits helping, will lead to growing population (you have all food you need, no cultural reason_ like contemporary feminist ideology and urban lifestyle contingencies_ to not have children: so, baby boom). Eventually spirits will not find you preys, because there is just no more animals to hunt. Unless the spirits can produce an infinite supply of animals, perhaps open the doors to infinite parallel Universes. Or unless the spirits keep human population from growing, somehow. In the second case, the dietetic one, my impression is that you just have magical agriculture. Is not that you didn't had Agricultural Revolution. You made your Agricultural Revolution faster, and better, using magic. For all practical purposes that is a Agricultural Society.
I don’t know that you’d have a population explosion. If the spirits gave humans reproductive control, you might not. But very interesting thoughts all round :)
I keep magic fairly rare in my setting, as I'm afraid it would just become "electricity but different" if it was commonplace. Still, it would invariably alter the way civilization progresses and discovers new technologies, so it's great to come across a detailed discussion of that topic. With the way my magic system works, I think it would lead to technology developing more quickly (since magic users would be able to mentally sense the underlying mechanisms of combustion, wind/water currents, etc.) I'll elaborate on how this would likely play out, both to clarify my thoughts for myself and to satisfy the curiosity of anyone still reading (wall of text ahead). Early humans with access to magic would become social and religious leaders on account of their ability to create favorable conditions (starting fires, sheltering from storms, etc.) In the process of doing these things, some of them would realize alternate ways these things could be done. By examining the underlying process of combustion, some fire mage (I still haven't settled on a name for my magic system, so for now I'll just default to _mage)_ would realize that fires could also be started by applying friction to fuel. Water mages would gain insight into conventional means of sanitizing/purifying drinking water and cleaning wounds. These groups of early humans would take one of two paths: 1) Magic-wielding leaders would prioritize the study of nature (along with physics, chemistry, all the sciences) and would share this knowledge with their tribe, which would lead to the tribe progressing in much the same way homo sapiens did on Earth, albeit at an accelerated rate. They would progress very quickly through the stone, bronze, and iron ages, and establish large city-states and kingdoms. 2) The magical leaders keep this knowledge to themselves in order to preserve their own position. If everyone knew how to make tools, grow crops, and manipulate nature, the value of magic users would be somewhat diminished as they would no longer be the sole source of these things. These people would likely remain nomadic or semi-nomadic and would worship their magical leaders as gods or prophets. Even after scientific knowledge became more widespread and eventually reached the Nomads, many would still retain faith and adhere to their own ways. This would result in a world where scientifically-advanced medieval/renaissance era societies are contemporary with stone-age tribes that are more reliant upon magic (and probably more adept with it). Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.
Question: If the settler-mages share their magical knowledge with all their people, how do the nomad leaders retain their lock on knowledge? It feels to me that the nomads would gradually get squeezed out, much as they were in our world with the advent of farming. Because the settler magic offers more people knowing magic and benefitting from magic, they will grow until they displace the nomads entirely. And any nomad who leaves their tribe and settles could potentially learn magic from the settlers? Or no? Because that would accelerate the slow death of the nomads. Of course, if the settler kings still kept magic tightly under wraps and maybe just teach their priests or something, that might result in exactly the scenario you paint above of 2 separate developments, nomads and settlers. Just food for thought and building out additional details :D
@@JustInTimeWorlds Great questions. I'm still in the early stages of worldbuilding and haven't yet decided whether magical potency is a skill you can learn through study or just something you're born with, but I know it will be exceedingly rare. Too rare to become an ordinary practice among any population, so most of the work will still be the old-fashioned way in the "settler" society. To your first question, the "settler-mages" as you call them (which I like) would be teaching the rest of their people the science behind everything, rather than passing on spells or rituals. The majority of the population is still confined to the same limits our own ancestors were. The nomadic societies (the ones where the magic users either don't learn or don't teach the mundane ways of doing things) would have to be geographically separated, preventing them from following the settler-societies' example. Because of this isolation, they would not come in contact with the settlers until the following/worshiping their tribal leaders was culturally locked in. Some would still break off and join the settlers later in history, but the nomadic lifestyle would continue in some small capacity. So yes and no to the nomads being "squeezed out." They wouldn't be out-competed via magic, but they would probably struggle to keep up in terms of expansion and control of natural resources. I always envisioned the nomadic peoples as being small, secretive groups that avoid the more powerful kingdoms, preferring to live in the wilderness that they're familiar with. They would persist with smaller populations and less infrastructure but more in touch with nature and magic.
Ok, unos cuántos pensamientos: I. Sé que oyes mis pensamientos: Miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau. II. Creo que con un sistema mágico de sacrificios podría dar cómo resultado, en un futuro, que se creen bebes en úteros artificiales para tener sacrificios infinitos o, también, podría hacerse un único sacrificio para exigir que ya no sean necesarios los sacrificios. III. Creo que el hecho de tener agua y comida gratis en cantidades industriales podría favorecer a todos, digo, solo tendríamos que cubrir cada centímetro de suelo tierra adentro con árboles frutales y hacer rituales para que llueva. IV. Coincido en que habría avances que llegarían antes en un mundo mágico, pero creo que los avances sociales llegarían a la misma velocidad, es decir, que, si bien, tendríamos bronce (cómo los helenos) todavía seríamos una sociedad que solo realiza actividades que necesita y poco más, en vez de sentarse a crear historias y experimentar. V. Veo difícil que lleguemos a un siglo XXI D.C cómo lo conocemos (lo digo por experiencia propia, demasiados papeles llenos de líneas de tiempo alternativas), por lo que sugiero que la historia, y sus secuelas, deben centrarse en cómo es el mundo y cómo este va cambiando, mas nunca avanza en la misma dirección que el nuestro. VI. Creo que la magia en una historia no solo debe estar integrada en el mundo, sino que también debe ser algo a lo cuál se le pueda contrarrestar con las armas de la época (algo así cómo para "Avatar: La leyenda de Aang" el sistema de verdaderas artes marciales para controlar los elementos calza bien en un mundo medieval, pero no necesariamente europeo), de esa forma nadie está over powered y todos tienen oportunidad de brillar (en lugar de que solo brille uno y que el resto sean unos inútiles que solo repiten "estoy ayudando" cómo si fuesen loros) creo que algo cómo la fuerza de un gorila o ser tan rápido cómo un guepardo podría ser útil, aunque un sistema de magia que te permita controlar animales también serviría (algo así cómo pokémon, pero sin que estos besen el suelo que pisas y pudiendo hacer cosas por su cuenta, además de solo valerse de su fuerza o su velocidad, en vez de poderes sobrenaturales).
So an interesting effect of your elemental magic consumption (or really any elemental magic system) is that it would radically change the progression of your technological path. For instance why would you develop pottery as a technology when you can simply shape stone in all of the same forms, even assuming you can't turn iron ore into iron and steel via earth magic fire magic would let you make a simple campfire hot enough to smelt the far more abundant and more readily available sources of iron without mucking about will all of the trouble of mining and engaging in trade routes for tin and skip that whole bronze step in metallurgy entirely. But more importantly you wouldn't need anywhere near the infrastructure to preform industrial processes, so a group of hunter-gatherers could produce goods in a temporary camp that should require a permanent settlement to mine ore make charcoal smelt iron and produce all of the tools necessary to do all of these tools to do so before finally making finished iron or steel goods. So instead of a huge amount of industry and the attached merchant class to make all of this happen you need one earth mage and one fire mage or one earth/fire mage to simply extract and purify the ore and then to smelt that ore and then to finally shape that ore (which presumably that first earth mage could do).
@@JustInTimeWorlds That being said you would still be limited technologically by the lack of a sedentary place to store written records. That being said all of this is starting to sound like a precursor to how elves are often depicted.
@@TheMichaellathrop You can solve the records problem by having an extra dimensional space to park records. Or by having a sedentary settlement supported by hunter-gatherers where scholars work, but don't farm.
I care about more about the first cavemen that killed a fire-breathing dragon with only wooden sticks and rocks. There is no way a caveman could live in anime fantasy filled with monsters. Unless monsters came after the first human army was built. Of course, humans are stronger in anime. Fast healing, strength of a hundred earthling, high IQ, and so on. Just imagine the first holy weapon was a sliver rock on a stick and a caveman clubbing the Demonlord to death with it.
And this is why I always laugh when people bring up historical accuracy. Look skew at any fantasy world and it comes apart right there. How the heck did humans survive long enough to get social enough to work together and kill the monsters? :D
@sharojak9401 They don't shoot fire from their nose, fly, or chase people down for easy food. Only way cavemen could cause dragons to go extinct without magic, anime super strength, lucky shot, or a lost of large numbers of cavemen; is to steal their eggs faster than they can reproduce.
@@davidsnow7193 Even dragons have weaknesses. We can exploit those. Maybe it likes meat. Kill a mammoth, place the corpse nearby to lure it in, steal the eggs. If there’s two we can still kill them. Yes, it would be hard, but that does depend on the setting. It could be an Adult Dragon from DND and then we are screwed, but it could also just be a large lizard with appropriately stronger scales and a varying competence at breathing fire. Dangerous but killable. Especially if you piece the throat. After that the fire breathing gets dangerous for most dragons too.
@@davidsnow7193 Now I want a story of epic fantasy of a brave band of dragon egg poachers.... (A poached egg is only a poached egg if it's stolen from the dragon's nest at the dead of the night)
But the thing is it’s your world,,, you don’t have to draw a literal hellhole if you don’t want you. You can say “the spirits punished them for the human sacrifice and it never worked” as an excuse. This would also force a limitation on magic and how powerful it can be and pressure societal development. It’s also like,,, it’s just triggering for so many people and it’s like for what we don’t do that anymore and haven’t for centuries it’s not something on people’s minds so it doesn’t need commentary
Considering the fact that we still have hunter-gather societies today (despite capitalism's best efforts), I think the two magic systems you developed here would make the agricultural revolution even more drawn out than it was historically, in so far as even fewer places would find agriculture useful until populations became much larger. A good reference book on prehistory (written by an archeologist and an anthropologist) is "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity". They deal with topics such as the barter myth, how the agricultural revolution didn't happen everywhere because it wasn't useful in all environments, and how hunter-gatherers had much more complex economics and governments than we often give them credit for. Another good book (though poorly written) is "The Civilization of Perpetual Motion", which talks about how nomadism and statelessness are still in existence today because they are still the best ways to use some environments for optimal productivity. Another thing to keep in mind is that our ancestors were highly cooperative before they were even human, and that the first tools that facilitated even more cooperation were likely sticks and stones, not fire. Archaeologists often glorify stone tool use because it shows up easier in the fossil record and it shows off humans as hunters, but diet studies have shown that just as important was the digging stick, which allowed us to harvest hidden roots, tubers, animal nests, and club to death smaller animals. Fire was important, but our first tool revolution were sticks and stones. And this brings me to my last point of interest: What is the criteria that allows for the discovery and use of magic? Since our Australopithecine ancestors were probably using sticks and stones and our oldest hominin ancestor (Homo habilis) was definitely using sticks and stones as tools, and Homo erectus is generally accepted to be the first human species to control fire, at what point does magic become controllable for a species? Is it a high degree of cooperation, and if so, are there other animal species that meet the "criteria of cooperation" to have discovered magic (like other primate species (chimps, bonobos), elephants, whales, corvids, and parrots? What about ants, bees, and termites?)? Is it the ability to use tools to modify one's environment, a sort "criteria of tool use" (In which case almost all birds who must learn how to build nests or use tools to find food, tool using dolphins, beavers, prairie dogs, several primate species (including all the great apes), etc. may need to be considered as potential magic users (Also, several species of of so-called "fire-hawks" in Australia!).)? Or is the intentional ingestion of non-food edible materials (like purgatives or hallucinogens) mean that most animals have a chance at wielding magic, but they must also cultivate some sort of "criteria of intent" in order to use it (In which case, I look forward to element-using crows in a city near me!)? As someone trained in animal cognition and behavior, I love playing with ideas of other animals as magic users and how that would affect ecologies and human-animal interactions!
What do you think? Would the agricultural revolution happen if people have magic?
Perhaps on a smaller scale?
Answering before watch the video: that depends on the magical system. For most systems I think the answer is yes. If you get some Universal divination power, that gives you answer about all objective matters then all Technological Revolutions are likely to happen a lot faster, Agricultural included.
Usually Agricultural Revolutions happen because of magic, in our (arguably) real world. Is the sort of knowledge attributed to divine intervention, so "Divine Magic" so to speak.
Would be interesting to go in the opposite direction and ask "which Magic System would likely prevent Agricultural Revolution?". Anything that allows you to create food and objects of use from magical energy, if common enough, should do the trick. People will not invest the effort needed to pass the difficulties of start an Agricultural System if they can get what agriculture gives you easier, and faster.
Maybe something that depends on people being strict carnivores. Your mage can heal the entire tribe, and turn them into super-strong werelion, but only those who have not eaten any crops, roots or vegetables, for the last 5 years. Magic don't help those who eat plants.
Or magic depends on spirits that consider any sort of "violence against the earth" insulting. So, you lose all magic if you start hurting the ground to plant your food. And magic gives you more advantage than planting things.
The latest discoveries published about Gobekli Tepe & other related sites tend to point to sedentism happening before agriculture. The agricultural revolution would occur in a different way than it did in our world, but growing your food near the city you already live in would certainly be a thing.
I keep the development of people a lot more consistent with how it is in our world by having my magic progress slowly. All early humans know is that certain materials can do weird things, but stone age humans did not figure out how to replicate these processes. This wouldn't happen until earlier civilizations formed and certain members of these societies took on roles similar to ancient Greek alchemists; they ran experiments, invented spells, etc which all lead to the development of refined magic systems. Since magic isn't used by everyone, there is also some need still for scientific innovations.
That's also a good way to make it feel real.
I like these ideas, they're well thought. My spelling was off, my apologies. It's a good argument for two distinct forms of magic, one reminds me of summoning from JRPGs, the other is mage-drug which is pretty uncommon but not unheard of, but you went further than that and extended outward to justify why certain things might be smaller, might be larger, might be faster or slower in development and might be missed entirely; which I quite enjoy. Thanks for your thoughts, longform.
Glad you enjoyed them! I haven't used either of those systems in fiction, but they are quite fun. I might find a purpose for them yet.
In the Elemental scenario they would cultivate the resources they need to consume for magic. Farming would just be different.
You would cultivate the four elements to your greatest extent.
Thinking about it this way opens up some truly unsettling and frightening implications... what if early cultures started out with all the same magical practices, but they actually *worked*...
Right? Divination, spiritual guidance, shape shifting...
Regarding agricultural revolution and population explosion. What if balance was a central tenet of belief? The spirits made it clear that the world (or the spirit world) enforces a balance, providing for need but not greed? What if the mesolithic peoples know from experience that if they let their numbers get too high, death will take the surplus and possibly more besides -- either from disease and starvation, or perhaps just bad luck, animal attacks, etc?). The people would discover some kind of birth control right quick. Perhaps divination will show an auspicious time to have a child, and children not born under spiritual blessings are considered unlucky?
For being born at auspicous times, the primary species in my world is nocturnal. All childbirth takes place under open sky and any child born in the light of the sun is deemed "sun-cursed" and traditionally killed right after birth. Some tribes have taken to using drugs and/or magic to accelerate or delay childbirth to ensure nobody is born in daylight, but for the rest, this is the primary form of population control (even if not done for population control purposes).
Great points on restraining the population explosion.
Really glad I found this channel, this info/ideas you present here are all things I had banging around in my head that I wanted to solve for my prehistoric setting. Video is very info/idea dense but still very easy to parse.
Welcome to my tiny corner of UA-cam. Glad your enjoying the content.
Oh yes! Even as a child I was quite sure that Spirits inhabited everything, everywhere. Not sure why, just always have! You are quite an interesting person! I really enjoy your talks!!
Thanks :)
What aspects were magic could definitely affect history one man can change the course of the war
I mean thats true but only if *one* guy has magic and the magic is sufficiently powerful. If all the magic you can do is shove people around then, while you might pose more danger than another foot soldier, that attention would bring an arrow or a spear your way that'd stop your rampaging. If everyone can throw fireballs everywhere, then war will still be balanced and a great fighter would be just as great compared to his peers as irl.
Well one way to solve for that you make me just a very small part of the population like 1% or under so you're just not going to have two measures in a battle or it's extremely rare probably done on purpose somehow
How does your elemental consumption system lead to earlier fire control though? You need to inhale smoke from a specific type of wood, for which you need fire to begin with. Then you have to to discover that when you build your campfire with a certain kind of wood it has that effect, which I imagine would take a while (and only happens at all if you live in an area where that tree grows at all).
Overall a very interesting video, this is a topic I have thought a lot about, I'm building a fantasy world from the stone age while taking my own magic systems into account.
A bushfire could teach the mage what they need to know and once they've mastered the technique, they don't need to protect their fire anymore, making a fire becomes easy.
The cost of abusing magic might even produce a kind of early exhaustion of the *people* who are able to share their knowledge about magic, or to actually participate in the magical rituals and responsibilities. Nomadic life isn't as taxing as we tend to imagine it, but humans have a tendency to ride right up against their means, living to the full extent of the capacity of their resources. it takes generations and eons to learn, culturally, the necessity of preservative traditions and restorative stewardship of the land, and the technology of industry can completely disrupt and eclipse those conventions very easily.
i am rambling though
Great things to think about!
Even with magic, guns would be usable. They are the Great Equalizer. In the real world, they allowed peasants to become soldiers with just a few weeks training, while the sword or bow required several months or even years of training. Magic would either need a lot of experience to efficiently wield as a weapon or be a tightly guarded secret onyl the powerful and holy have access to. Guns would re-balance the battlefield.
My culture has achieved the digital age a lot faster thanks to magic, without ever going through the steam, diesel and atomic age. Virtual Reality is only possible because the spirit/astral realm is real, with deep dive VR technology being just technologically enhanced meditation.
The primary magic form in my world is Qi/Internal Energy based, with some minor assist from spirits. Spirits don't really have much power in the physical realm. The people were hunter/gatherers for an extended time since their Qi magic made them better hunters through physical enhancement (more stamina, more strength, more speed). Agricultural and pastural settlements really only became a thing due to direct divine meddling (The gods didn't intend for agriculture or pasturals, they just messed up and couldn't be bothered to undo their mistakes).
That's a fascinating approach to the astral plane.
An important consideration I think you might’ve missed is… what if the animals have magic too? Think that could be a good followup.
I’d say the animals/environment having magic as well would be a partial answer to the earlier development. The agricultural revolution will take longer if an entire town can be wiped out by a particularly big and possibly bad wolf.
In 11:45. The first case, where you have spirits helping, will lead to growing population (you have all food you need, no cultural reason_ like contemporary feminist ideology and urban lifestyle contingencies_ to not have children: so, baby boom). Eventually spirits will not find you preys, because there is just no more animals to hunt. Unless the spirits can produce an infinite supply of animals, perhaps open the doors to infinite parallel Universes. Or unless the spirits keep human population from growing, somehow.
In the second case, the dietetic one, my impression is that you just have magical agriculture. Is not that you didn't had Agricultural Revolution. You made your Agricultural Revolution faster, and better, using magic. For all practical purposes that is a Agricultural Society.
I don’t know that you’d have a population explosion. If the spirits gave humans reproductive control, you might not. But very interesting thoughts all round :)
I keep magic fairly rare in my setting, as I'm afraid it would just become "electricity but different" if it was commonplace. Still, it would invariably alter the way civilization progresses and discovers new technologies, so it's great to come across a detailed discussion of that topic. With the way my magic system works, I think it would lead to technology developing more quickly (since magic users would be able to mentally sense the underlying mechanisms of combustion, wind/water currents, etc.)
I'll elaborate on how this would likely play out, both to clarify my thoughts for myself and to satisfy the curiosity of anyone still reading (wall of text ahead).
Early humans with access to magic would become social and religious leaders on account of their ability to create favorable conditions (starting fires, sheltering from storms, etc.) In the process of doing these things, some of them would realize alternate ways these things could be done. By examining the underlying process of combustion, some fire mage (I still haven't settled on a name for my magic system, so for now I'll just default to _mage)_ would realize that fires could also be started by applying friction to fuel. Water mages would gain insight into conventional means of sanitizing/purifying drinking water and cleaning wounds.
These groups of early humans would take one of two paths:
1) Magic-wielding leaders would prioritize the study of nature (along with physics, chemistry, all the sciences) and would share this knowledge with their tribe, which would lead to the tribe progressing in much the same way homo sapiens did on Earth, albeit at an accelerated rate. They would progress very quickly through the stone, bronze, and iron ages, and establish large city-states and kingdoms.
2) The magical leaders keep this knowledge to themselves in order to preserve their own position. If everyone knew how to make tools, grow crops, and manipulate nature, the value of magic users would be somewhat diminished as they would no longer be the sole source of these things. These people would likely remain nomadic or semi-nomadic and would worship their magical leaders as gods or prophets. Even after scientific knowledge became more widespread and eventually reached the Nomads, many would still retain faith and adhere to their own ways.
This would result in a world where scientifically-advanced medieval/renaissance era societies are contemporary with stone-age tribes that are more reliant upon magic (and probably more adept with it). Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.
Question: If the settler-mages share their magical knowledge with all their people, how do the nomad leaders retain their lock on knowledge? It feels to me that the nomads would gradually get squeezed out, much as they were in our world with the advent of farming.
Because the settler magic offers more people knowing magic and benefitting from magic, they will grow until they displace the nomads entirely.
And any nomad who leaves their tribe and settles could potentially learn magic from the settlers? Or no? Because that would accelerate the slow death of the nomads.
Of course, if the settler kings still kept magic tightly under wraps and maybe just teach their priests or something, that might result in exactly the scenario you paint above of 2 separate developments, nomads and settlers.
Just food for thought and building out additional details :D
@@JustInTimeWorlds Great questions. I'm still in the early stages of worldbuilding and haven't yet decided whether magical potency is a skill you can learn through study or just something you're born with, but I know it will be exceedingly rare. Too rare to become an ordinary practice among any population, so most of the work will still be the old-fashioned way in the "settler" society.
To your first question, the "settler-mages" as you call them (which I like) would be teaching the rest of their people the science behind everything, rather than passing on spells or rituals. The majority of the population is still confined to the same limits our own ancestors were. The nomadic societies (the ones where the magic users either don't learn or don't teach the mundane ways of doing things) would have to be geographically separated, preventing them from following the settler-societies' example. Because of this isolation, they would not come in contact with the settlers until the following/worshiping their tribal leaders was culturally locked in. Some would still break off and join the settlers later in history, but the nomadic lifestyle would continue in some small capacity.
So yes and no to the nomads being "squeezed out." They wouldn't be out-competed via magic, but they would probably struggle to keep up in terms of expansion and control of natural resources. I always envisioned the nomadic peoples as being small, secretive groups that avoid the more powerful kingdoms, preferring to live in the wilderness that they're familiar with. They would persist with smaller populations and less infrastructure but more in touch with nature and magic.
Ok, unos cuántos pensamientos:
I. Sé que oyes mis pensamientos: Miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau, miau.
II. Creo que con un sistema mágico de sacrificios podría dar cómo resultado, en un futuro, que se creen bebes en úteros artificiales para tener sacrificios infinitos o, también, podría hacerse un único sacrificio para exigir que ya no sean necesarios los sacrificios.
III. Creo que el hecho de tener agua y comida gratis en cantidades industriales podría favorecer a todos, digo, solo tendríamos que cubrir cada centímetro de suelo tierra adentro con árboles frutales y hacer rituales para que llueva.
IV. Coincido en que habría avances que llegarían antes en un mundo mágico, pero creo que los avances sociales llegarían a la misma velocidad, es decir, que, si bien, tendríamos bronce (cómo los helenos) todavía seríamos una sociedad que solo realiza actividades que necesita y poco más, en vez de sentarse a crear historias y experimentar.
V. Veo difícil que lleguemos a un siglo XXI D.C cómo lo conocemos (lo digo por experiencia propia, demasiados papeles llenos de líneas de tiempo alternativas), por lo que sugiero que la historia, y sus secuelas, deben centrarse en cómo es el mundo y cómo este va cambiando, mas nunca avanza en la misma dirección que el nuestro.
VI. Creo que la magia en una historia no solo debe estar integrada en el mundo, sino que también debe ser algo a lo cuál se le pueda contrarrestar con las armas de la época (algo así cómo para "Avatar: La leyenda de Aang" el sistema de verdaderas artes marciales para controlar los elementos calza bien en un mundo medieval, pero no necesariamente europeo), de esa forma nadie está over powered y todos tienen oportunidad de brillar (en lugar de que solo brille uno y que el resto sean unos inútiles que solo repiten "estoy ayudando" cómo si fuesen loros) creo que algo cómo la fuerza de un gorila o ser tan rápido cómo un guepardo podría ser útil, aunque un sistema de magia que te permita controlar animales también serviría (algo así cómo pokémon, pero sin que estos besen el suelo que pisas y pudiendo hacer cosas por su cuenta, además de solo valerse de su fuerza o su velocidad, en vez de poderes sobrenaturales).
Great suggestions
@@JustInTimeWorlds Gracias.
These are some cool ideas. Thanks for sharing them.
You are welcome!
So an interesting effect of your elemental magic consumption (or really any elemental magic system) is that it would radically change the progression of your technological path. For instance why would you develop pottery as a technology when you can simply shape stone in all of the same forms, even assuming you can't turn iron ore into iron and steel via earth magic fire magic would let you make a simple campfire hot enough to smelt the far more abundant and more readily available sources of iron without mucking about will all of the trouble of mining and engaging in trade routes for tin and skip that whole bronze step in metallurgy entirely. But more importantly you wouldn't need anywhere near the infrastructure to preform industrial processes, so a group of hunter-gatherers could produce goods in a temporary camp that should require a permanent settlement to mine ore make charcoal smelt iron and produce all of the tools necessary to do all of these tools to do so before finally making finished iron or steel goods. So instead of a huge amount of industry and the attached merchant class to make all of this happen you need one earth mage and one fire mage or one earth/fire mage to simply extract and purify the ore and then to smelt that ore and then to finally shape that ore (which presumably that first earth mage could do).
Yeah, you could have hunter-gatherers who have our level of technology, but driven by magic :D
@@JustInTimeWorlds That being said you would still be limited technologically by the lack of a sedentary place to store written records. That being said all of this is starting to sound like a precursor to how elves are often depicted.
@@TheMichaellathrop You can solve the records problem by having an extra dimensional space to park records. Or by having a sedentary settlement supported by hunter-gatherers where scholars work, but don't farm.
I care about more about the first cavemen that killed a fire-breathing dragon with only wooden sticks and rocks. There is no way a caveman could live in anime fantasy filled with monsters. Unless monsters came after the first human army was built. Of course, humans are stronger in anime. Fast healing, strength of a hundred earthling, high IQ, and so on. Just imagine the first holy weapon was a sliver rock on a stick and a caveman clubbing the Demonlord to death with it.
And this is why I always laugh when people bring up historical accuracy. Look skew at any fantasy world and it comes apart right there. How the heck did humans survive long enough to get social enough to work together and kill the monsters? :D
My man, we killed Mammoths.
@sharojak9401 They don't shoot fire from their nose, fly, or chase people down for easy food. Only way cavemen could cause dragons to go extinct without magic, anime super strength, lucky shot, or a lost of large numbers of cavemen; is to steal their eggs faster than they can reproduce.
@@davidsnow7193
Even dragons have weaknesses. We can exploit those. Maybe it likes meat. Kill a mammoth, place the corpse nearby to lure it in, steal the eggs. If there’s two we can still kill them. Yes, it would be hard, but that does depend on the setting. It could be an Adult Dragon from DND and then we are screwed, but it could also just be a large lizard with appropriately stronger scales and a varying competence at breathing fire. Dangerous but killable. Especially if you piece the throat. After that the fire breathing gets dangerous for most dragons too.
@@davidsnow7193 Now I want a story of epic fantasy of a brave band of dragon egg poachers.... (A poached egg is only a poached egg if it's stolen from the dragon's nest at the dead of the night)
@justintimeworlds Yes. Also, what if magic also existed in the other eras, including the future?
So, we just worldbuilt Avatar: the Last Airbender?
But the thing is it’s your world,,, you don’t have to draw a literal hellhole if you don’t want you. You can say “the spirits punished them for the human sacrifice and it never worked” as an excuse. This would also force a limitation on magic and how powerful it can be and pressure societal development. It’s also like,,, it’s just triggering for so many people and it’s like for what we don’t do that anymore and haven’t for centuries it’s not something on people’s minds so it doesn’t need commentary
💯 that is definitely a viable option depending on the world and story you have in mind.
Whatever the what if scenario, there will never be Humanity without war, and all it’s evil’s, because it’s inherent to our nature.
Considering the fact that we still have hunter-gather societies today (despite capitalism's best efforts), I think the two magic systems you developed here would make the agricultural revolution even more drawn out than it was historically, in so far as even fewer places would find agriculture useful until populations became much larger. A good reference book on prehistory (written by an archeologist and an anthropologist) is "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity". They deal with topics such as the barter myth, how the agricultural revolution didn't happen everywhere because it wasn't useful in all environments, and how hunter-gatherers had much more complex economics and governments than we often give them credit for. Another good book (though poorly written) is "The Civilization of Perpetual Motion", which talks about how nomadism and statelessness are still in existence today because they are still the best ways to use some environments for optimal productivity.
Another thing to keep in mind is that our ancestors were highly cooperative before they were even human, and that the first tools that facilitated even more cooperation were likely sticks and stones, not fire. Archaeologists often glorify stone tool use because it shows up easier in the fossil record and it shows off humans as hunters, but diet studies have shown that just as important was the digging stick, which allowed us to harvest hidden roots, tubers, animal nests, and club to death smaller animals. Fire was important, but our first tool revolution were sticks and stones.
And this brings me to my last point of interest: What is the criteria that allows for the discovery and use of magic? Since our Australopithecine ancestors were probably using sticks and stones and our oldest hominin ancestor (Homo habilis) was definitely using sticks and stones as tools, and Homo erectus is generally accepted to be the first human species to control fire, at what point does magic become controllable for a species? Is it a high degree of cooperation, and if so, are there other animal species that meet the "criteria of cooperation" to have discovered magic (like other primate species (chimps, bonobos), elephants, whales, corvids, and parrots? What about ants, bees, and termites?)? Is it the ability to use tools to modify one's environment, a sort "criteria of tool use" (In which case almost all birds who must learn how to build nests or use tools to find food, tool using dolphins, beavers, prairie dogs, several primate species (including all the great apes), etc. may need to be considered as potential magic users (Also, several species of of so-called "fire-hawks" in Australia!).)? Or is the intentional ingestion of non-food edible materials (like purgatives or hallucinogens) mean that most animals have a chance at wielding magic, but they must also cultivate some sort of "criteria of intent" in order to use it (In which case, I look forward to element-using crows in a city near me!)?
As someone trained in animal cognition and behavior, I love playing with ideas of other animals as magic users and how that would affect ecologies and human-animal interactions!
I would love to play rpg with you
Heh, I wish I had more time to run games. I miss student days. All night RPGs were the best.