Divine Council: Exploring Relationships Between Magic and Technology

This blog post may stand alone as a musing on the differing relationships between magic and technology in industrial fantasy settings, but it also refers and applies this to my Divine Council game, which you can read about here: Divine Council Part 1

If you are curious about the mechanics of the original Godstein campaign, you should start at the beginning.

As the Godstein game was reaching its end, I polled players on what went right and wrong in our experimental game. Overall, players were quite pleased with how things played out, but one suggestion that came up repeatedly was the use of technology and a shift to an industrial fantasy setting.

The first Godstein campaign had an implied medieval setting with very little technological influence, but players were hoping to explore a different type of setting and still use the Godstein model with a heavier ruleset. I understand the fatigue of constantly using similar medieval fantasy settings, even though ours was different because the players together created the gods and world, but changing that implied setting in the model would mean overhauling large swaths of the model I put together in my Godstein series, and the addition of a technology system.

Artist: Sanjay Charlton

This is a conundrum because there is no definitive answer as to how magic and technology should interact in fantasy settings, but many approaches that different authors and designers have taken. The initial obvious answer for my settings, since the setting and pantheon are player-created, is to leave the rules of technology and magic up to the gods, but because the players expressed that they wanted a more rules-heavy 4x experience, the rules need to reflect how magic and technology interact. There are three ways to deal with this:

• Magic and technology are adversarial.

• Magic and technology are complementary.

• Magic and technology are independent.

These relationships are explored in different settings, one of which comes to mind is the old PC game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, where magic and technology are oppositional because technology doesn’t work in the presence of magic. Other settings set this up as a complementary relationship, like in Eberron or Final Fantasy games, where magic is seen as an essential component of technology, like a battery. Independent technology/magic relationships can be seen in Harry Potter and Star Wars, where both are kept separate and don’t generally overlap.

A remnant of ancient technological titans from Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

In my game, players play as gods who are guiding a civilization through the ages into what will eventually become the setting for an RPG meant to simulate a living world. This means that each player will make decisions for their own civilization and the tech level and relationships may impact different parts of the world in different ways.

Whatever way I decided to implement technology, it had to be properly supported byu the rules of the game. A 4X gaming experience can only leave so much to the players. In order to be competitive or fair at all, there needed to be rules in place, and the rules would absolutely need to define a relationship between technology and magic, so I wanted to explore the pros and cons of each option.

1. Magic and technology are adversarial.

   1. Pros:

      1. Easier to balance than a complementary relationship. This is the simplest to balance in terms of game mechanics.

      2. Diversity of civilizations. The world would be more diverse- some societies would rely exclusively on magic without worrying about tech at all, some would be low-magic and high-tech, and some would balance the two.

      3. It lends credibility to the setting. It’s easy to believe that the presence of magic may stifle innovation. The more easily available magic is, the more societies would rely on it. Overreliance on magic, or even just a base level of reliance on it to solve problems, removes the necessity for basic scientific breakthroughs.

   2. Cons:

      1. It is difficult for players to create a civilization that uses both magic and technology, and there may not be any civilizations that are sufficiently good in both.

      2. It is possibly overdone. There is a lot of media out there that explores settings with an adversarial relationship of magic and tech to the point where it has become a trope in and of itself. There are many explanations used in these works- magic disrupts technology is one. The presence of magic stifles innovation is another common explanation, and one that seems more realistic to me.

2. Magic and technology are complementary.

   1. Pros:

      1. Player freedom. Supports magitech societies and allows players to dabble in both magic and tech without having to choose.

      2. Credibility. This is as credible as the adversarial relationship, as magic could kickstart and support scientific innovation.

   2. Cons:

      1. “Snowball” balancing. If technology and magic feed off each other, it may be difficult to balance. It would likely lead to a large disparity between low-tech and high-tech societies, or lead to a uniform magitech world with little difference in the technology level of different locations.

      2. If the same characters and societies possess skills in both magic and tech, the two risk becoming indistinguishable from each other.

      3. This makes tech harder to explain and more like an extension of magic. There are likely to be many innovations in the setting that blur the line between the two. This may also be seen as a feature instead of a bug by people other than me who don’t want them separate.

3. Magic and technology are independent.

   1. Pros:

      1. It may be less constraining from a design perspective and allows players creativity without considering game mechanics.

   2. Cons:

      1. Lacks credibility. In a setting with both technology and magic, players will expect some relationship between the two. Science doesn’t ignore anything, so it makes no sense for it to ignore magic, which could probably be harnessed into crystals if it didn’t disrupt technology somehow. It may work for fantasy series like Harry Potter or Star Wars, but for both, the reader may be left with questions about why the wizards don’t use technology or why the rebels don’t try to harness the force more believably.

      2. Hard to incentivize diversity among civilizations. In Harry Potter, the wizarding and the muggle worlds are kept separate, but this is hard to incentivize in a game world if there are no consequences for using both magic and technology without just outright banning the use of both together and forcing players into a binary dichotomy.

I realize that I listed credibility as a benefit to both an adversarial and a complementary relationship between magic and tech, despite being completely different relationships. I think either work, as it makes sense that in a world with magic, magic and technology would need to interact in some way for the world to feel credible. This applies whether that relationship is for magic to stifle innovation due to providing a solution to the problems that people may look to science and technology for, or if it supplements innovation by providing power sources and interactions that may incentivize study.

After weighing my options, I decided on an oppositional relationship between the two, with a way to invest resources into mitigating the oppositional factor. I did so because I felt that it would lead to a world with more diversity between civilizations and it would be easier to balance in terms of game mechanics as it would force players to make a choice between the two.

Theme

In the divine council game, I decided to think of the mechanics as magic = how much the god can do, and technology = how much the society can do. More technologically advanced societies should be more reliant on themselves and less reliant on their gods, while less technologically advanced societies would be more reliant on their gods.

In the campaign, this is intended to allow the gods with lower tech civilizations more latitude to act independently by giving them more mana generation (which is directly tied to their magic rank- for more on what mana can do, see my post about its implementation in my last Godstein game), but the players who had societies that focused on technology are going to act with more power given to them by that technology. Thematically, this is meant to reflect the idea that a society with a powerful god granting them magic will have less incentive to build things and act on their own than a society with less divine intervention directly in the society. This does imply that in this world, all magic comes from the gods, but that seems alright, as the purpose of rules is to define immutable laws to simulate the physical and metaphysical world that even the gods must obey.

Mechanics

As stated in the last post, each player had 100 points to invest in the attributes Warfare, Psyche, Magic, and Creation. You may notice that technology isn’t one of these attributes. I instead decided to make it a derivative secondary attribute, which would be ranked from 15 to 1, same as the other attributes, with 15 as the highest and 1 the lowest.

The formula I used was Technology = Warfare Rank + Creation Rank - Magic rank, so both the warfare and the creation attribute would buff the player’s tech rank while magic would be a detriment.

It’s also important to summarize how technology works in this game. At the beginning of every round, starting in round 1, a d20 is rolled for the whole group to see. If the d20 is less than or equal to a player’s technology rank (remember, it’s a number between 1 and 15), then the player gets 1 tech point that round. Tech point are spend on technology in a fairly basic tech tree sorted into tiers with prerequisites in lower tiers. Tech varies in cost between 1-3 tech points each, depending on the tier. Some of the strongest technologies are at the bottom of the tech tree.

Additionally, there is a way for some players to steal technology from other players using spies, and a player may spend an action during the round (they get 3 actions per round) to share technology with each other.

The players could also purchase an ability with their attribute points called Magitech, which did the following:

Magitech - 10/20 points

10 pts: Your Magic rank won’t be subtracted when determining your technology rank.

20 pts: Half of your Magic rank will be added when determining your technology rank.

They only had 100 points to spend, so 10 or 20 points was a lot considering they also had to split them between the other attributes and abilities. Keep in mind that attributes were bids against other players, so an investment in magitech has a significant cost.

Results

I have only started running my new Divine Council game and as there is a fog of war to maintain, the amount of information I can share here is limited, but here are some observations:

Across 15 players, the total number of attribute points invested in each attribute is as follows:

• 433 in warfare

• 398 in psyche

• 294 in magic

• 420 in creation

The players’ understandings of the detrimental effect of magic on technology were seen in the bids for those attributes, as magic had the lowest cumulative bids. I believe that magic will be plenty useful for the players who took it, as it has many applications in the rules, but it was the less popular option of the two.

The game has yet to really begin, but the gods are created and they are currently terraforming the world to suit their gods’ images. As expected, most of the gods with a high magic score have a low technology score and vice versa. There are a few who have high scores on both, thanks to a few well-planned investments into magitech, but those gods are weak in other areas. Overall, this approach seems to have panned out well, at least initially.

I am still working on the release of my game documents. There will be a well-formatted supplement coming about the Godstein method, and I am cleaning up the document for the 4x game rules for release to a broader audience, though that one may just be a pdf drop. This unfortunately means a lot of changes and rewrites to suit groups of different sizes (mine is 15 players, and the document was written for a game with 15 players).