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- He/Him
I was making a snarky idea, but to be fair, magic's informational capabilities can also sway things. If a mage-spy can scry on an enemy general's plans, that can make or break a battle or front.
The Influence of High Magic on Warfare
- Thread starter Anchises
- Start date
- Discussion
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- Norway
To take an RL analogy for why I'm hammering on about specifics of magic, "What's the influence of flight on warfare?"
And the answer is something like: it changed a lot and repeatedly depending on the specifics of "flight" and the latest developments and forms that flight took. An offhand summary which no doubt misses a lot:
Air balloons started as primarily reconnaissance and lookout, because the steering mechanism was large and external (read: a rope tied to the ground) and this infrastructure dependency meant they couldn't do fly-overs of the enemy camp unless one had favorable control zones and wind.
Then increased consistency and predictability of balloons, meteorology, and bomb-ology led to drift balloons with time fuse bombs that could overfly an enemy camp and drop firebombs around the right time.
WW1 brought biplanes which were partly back to reconnaissance because now they could do flyover-and-return, and partly shooting down enemy balloons to establish air superiority, and better aimed bombardments since they weren't wind-dependent.
Motorized planes in general are a consequence of having access to very high-density energetic fuels at low prices.
Airplane armament gradually increased over time, leading to the famous WW2 fighter planes, but also increasing dependency on airfields and infrastructure to support takeoff and landing. Air superiority became important because airplanes could (relatively speaking) bomb with impunity and be relatively sure of hitting something in a target-dense area, while ground flak had to aim carefully, lead a moving target, and be mostly stationary itself.
Onboard radar and missiles then led to very long-distance engagement in air combat, and homing missiles also restored the viability of ground-to-air combat that had to fight gravity. The Blackbird partly countered this in turn by being so stupid fast it outran missiles.
New developments in materials and engine technology led to very large bombers.
The invention of the helicopter and VTOL greatly reduced the need for an airfield, making it possible to do pickups and landings in contested territory.
Now in 2024 there's man-portable combat drones shaking things up again.
What's the influence of high magic on warfare? It depends. Not just on the AOE / damage / range numbers, it also depends on cost, infrastructure, lead time, logistics support, fuel supply, and a lot more things like that. Fantasy games (particularly RPGs) tend to gloss over a lot of this because players want to throw fireballs, not play logistics simulator, and then trying to derive a setting from fantasy games results in a bunch of funny questions about where the logistics went.
How many kilos of mana crystals per day are needed to supply a mage squad, for example? How weakened is a mage squad that has to scrounge for mana on site? What's the supply of mana crystals from home look like?
And the answer is something like: it changed a lot and repeatedly depending on the specifics of "flight" and the latest developments and forms that flight took. An offhand summary which no doubt misses a lot:
Air balloons started as primarily reconnaissance and lookout, because the steering mechanism was large and external (read: a rope tied to the ground) and this infrastructure dependency meant they couldn't do fly-overs of the enemy camp unless one had favorable control zones and wind.
Then increased consistency and predictability of balloons, meteorology, and bomb-ology led to drift balloons with time fuse bombs that could overfly an enemy camp and drop firebombs around the right time.
WW1 brought biplanes which were partly back to reconnaissance because now they could do flyover-and-return, and partly shooting down enemy balloons to establish air superiority, and better aimed bombardments since they weren't wind-dependent.
Motorized planes in general are a consequence of having access to very high-density energetic fuels at low prices.
Airplane armament gradually increased over time, leading to the famous WW2 fighter planes, but also increasing dependency on airfields and infrastructure to support takeoff and landing. Air superiority became important because airplanes could (relatively speaking) bomb with impunity and be relatively sure of hitting something in a target-dense area, while ground flak had to aim carefully, lead a moving target, and be mostly stationary itself.
Onboard radar and missiles then led to very long-distance engagement in air combat, and homing missiles also restored the viability of ground-to-air combat that had to fight gravity. The Blackbird partly countered this in turn by being so stupid fast it outran missiles.
New developments in materials and engine technology led to very large bombers.
The invention of the helicopter and VTOL greatly reduced the need for an airfield, making it possible to do pickups and landings in contested territory.
Now in 2024 there's man-portable combat drones shaking things up again.
What's the influence of high magic on warfare? It depends. Not just on the AOE / damage / range numbers, it also depends on cost, infrastructure, lead time, logistics support, fuel supply, and a lot more things like that. Fantasy games (particularly RPGs) tend to gloss over a lot of this because players want to throw fireballs, not play logistics simulator, and then trying to derive a setting from fantasy games results in a bunch of funny questions about where the logistics went.
How many kilos of mana crystals per day are needed to supply a mage squad, for example? How weakened is a mage squad that has to scrounge for mana on site? What's the supply of mana crystals from home look like?
- Location
- Leeds
This is true but also boring.
Any answer given could probably be rendered incorrect by adding another detail or clarification to the magic system, which is why I've tried to answer broadly and use plenty of caveats and suggest matters that might need to be clarified as just plain "high magic" isn't enough to explain the setting.
However if we go with the true answer, then the discussion shuts down and for the sake of having something to say I think its worth making assumptions within the boundaries of possibility as long as you make it clear what you're assuming and why.
Generally speaking, if a form of battle would be highly lethal for all participants, it doesn't happen.
I think a probable outcome would be that warfare is the exclusive domain of magic-users, their close retinues of mundane bodyguards, and mundane garrison/policing forces which would only pass as a sort of "poverty army" in conflicts and regions not big enough to attract the attention of any magic-users.
But the question is way too unbounded to make any one conclusion; the frequency of magic, the method by which it is achieved, and the bell curve of destructive power among magic-users are all entirely necessary to distinguish between, say, one scenario where we just get standard warrior-elite warfare but with magical fighting, and another where the dynamic approximates modern great power nuclear standoffs.
If magic is a learned skill with various material requisites, we should expect it to follow all the usual patterns of military centralisation; otherwise, we face an unknown that is irreparable without further contextualisation.
Another issue is figuring out the precise methods by which combat magic works, as those are vital in determining its fitness when compared to mundane weaponry, and the likely dramatic divergence in material culture that would follow therefrom. Until such things are nailed down, the existence of plate armour in our faux-late-medieval setting is entirely unknowable — there are countless paths which would lead to the total nonexistence of such technologies.
The political aspect of things is also bound to be very interesting, since high magic-users in some of their incarnations represent much of the power of a human polity without any of the reliance on a subservient human population. Their existence might pose a significant threat to state formation and high-level organization more broadly, since a few powerful magic-users could handily outcompete nascent polities in military terms; conversely, it's not clear that there would be anything much for them to actually compete over — the magic-users might well want some of the secondary products of civilisation, but not the bulk of the land and population that are most contentious to conventional power structures. Perhaps the outcome would resemble the distanced, submissive sort of relationships that societies tend to have with major deities.
Essentially, this question has far too dramatic an impact for us to have any chance of coming to an answer without OP informing us of precisely and exactly why and how magic works in the setting, free of any big contextual dependencies like a preferred demographic or political or technological aesthetic — such things can only be built up once we are informed enough to plot a path to them through the new martial and civilisational dynamics that the addition of magic to the setting entails.
I just cannot stress enough how absurdly responsive and subtle these kinds of martial dynamics are. We could spend days going through the implications of some little shift in a sword's blade morphology and come out with big conclusions on how warfare was fought; just tossing "high magic" into a setting is like pouring salted gasoline into a power plant's coolant system.
I think a probable outcome would be that warfare is the exclusive domain of magic-users, their close retinues of mundane bodyguards, and mundane garrison/policing forces which would only pass as a sort of "poverty army" in conflicts and regions not big enough to attract the attention of any magic-users.
But the question is way too unbounded to make any one conclusion; the frequency of magic, the method by which it is achieved, and the bell curve of destructive power among magic-users are all entirely necessary to distinguish between, say, one scenario where we just get standard warrior-elite warfare but with magical fighting, and another where the dynamic approximates modern great power nuclear standoffs.
If magic is a learned skill with various material requisites, we should expect it to follow all the usual patterns of military centralisation; otherwise, we face an unknown that is irreparable without further contextualisation.
Another issue is figuring out the precise methods by which combat magic works, as those are vital in determining its fitness when compared to mundane weaponry, and the likely dramatic divergence in material culture that would follow therefrom. Until such things are nailed down, the existence of plate armour in our faux-late-medieval setting is entirely unknowable — there are countless paths which would lead to the total nonexistence of such technologies.
The political aspect of things is also bound to be very interesting, since high magic-users in some of their incarnations represent much of the power of a human polity without any of the reliance on a subservient human population. Their existence might pose a significant threat to state formation and high-level organization more broadly, since a few powerful magic-users could handily outcompete nascent polities in military terms; conversely, it's not clear that there would be anything much for them to actually compete over — the magic-users might well want some of the secondary products of civilisation, but not the bulk of the land and population that are most contentious to conventional power structures. Perhaps the outcome would resemble the distanced, submissive sort of relationships that societies tend to have with major deities.
Essentially, this question has far too dramatic an impact for us to have any chance of coming to an answer without OP informing us of precisely and exactly why and how magic works in the setting, free of any big contextual dependencies like a preferred demographic or political or technological aesthetic — such things can only be built up once we are informed enough to plot a path to them through the new martial and civilisational dynamics that the addition of magic to the setting entails.
I just cannot stress enough how absurdly responsive and subtle these kinds of martial dynamics are. We could spend days going through the implications of some little shift in a sword's blade morphology and come out with big conclusions on how warfare was fought; just tossing "high magic" into a setting is like pouring salted gasoline into a power plant's coolant system.
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Screw High Magic that more or less bring in mind things like flight, tossing fireballs, meteors, earthquakes.
We already saw the horror superstition wrought throughout human history and still does in certain parts of the globe where people still widely believe in *magic*.
Now imagine how society and warfare would be like if low magic, such as curses, hexes, vermin manipulation were real.
Your high command? Having a sudden case of severe diarrhea on the eve of battle.
Vermin harrasing your troops.
Light fog scaring the fuck out of you men.
Burning witches ending with blood curses and plagues consuming entire villages and so on and so forth.
We already saw the horror superstition wrought throughout human history and still does in certain parts of the globe where people still widely believe in *magic*.
Now imagine how society and warfare would be like if low magic, such as curses, hexes, vermin manipulation were real.
Your high command? Having a sudden case of severe diarrhea on the eve of battle.
Vermin harrasing your troops.
Light fog scaring the fuck out of you men.
Burning witches ending with blood curses and plagues consuming entire villages and so on and so forth.
Anchises
Leader of the Coconut Tree Fremen
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- Germany
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Yeah like the purpose of this thread is to do freeform worldbuilding. Sure I am taking a more simulationist approach here but the point is for people to come up with their ideas and like share cool and interesting setting building that they did.
I think the idea you can define neat parameters and get the world simulation brewing is wrong. Like I can't tell you how our laws of physic work (both because we as a species don't know everything about them and even more so because I have no clue personally). All I can and want to give is some baseline we can all work from and get talking. And the more I say the more locked in people are into my vision when I want to explore other viewpoint and get ideas I haven't come up with.
The thing is that I am really not sure that I agree with the idea that societies wouldn't enter extremely self-destructive conflict. If throwing hordes of infantry into the grinder gives you an advantage even though it risks serious damage to the social fabric there will be situations where polities feel like they have to make that choice. War is the continuation of political intercourse with other means.
If we have a situation that is analogous to nuclear power stand-offs its absolutely possible things escalate and polities will pursue avenues of warfare that are still existential even if they don't break out the summon black hole spells.
That is an interesting point. The idea of roaming high-end magic users inhibiting the growth of civilization is a fascinating one. Perhaps the most successful polities would be the ones that manage to provide something that interests those high level spell casters to attract their patronage.
I think this mixes well with the question posed here:
So if you want to explore a world where magic users are a serious force that disrupt the process of state formation you would have to answer *how* magic develops and why the first casters that reach the critical mass of spellpower don't just pull up the ladder behind them and actively crack down on others trying to acquire arcane knowledge.
The other big question is of course what do they compete over. If high-end magic users are largely unconcerned with what societies can provide they might as well end up as a sort of kaiju or unpredictable wrathful deities. That is certainly an interesting setting to play around with. Highly mobile societies that have to be adapt at rapidly relocating and bouncing back from unpredictable disasters. Not really at the top of the world's food chain so to speak but trying to survive amidst the conflicts of wizards competing over magical leylines or whatever incredibly powerful wizards would be interested in. The first casters to become that powerful were an extinction-level threat and perhaps what remains of sentient species is still trying to cope with the emergence of such powerful magic users and any attempt to reach their level will inevitably draw their wrath because they do not need more rivals.
But it would be even more interesting to think about a world where even extremely powerful wizards have things they need from broader society. Instead of competing over land and population they might require as many well educated and trained apprentices as they can get. Because high level magic is incredibly complex and even with magical immortality you just need many brilliant minds to develop and hone your magic further in a constant arms race with other competing wizards. Or perhaps even incredibly powerful wizards require labour on a grand scale to maintain and build their eldritch machinery. Of course those things boil down to competing over land and people again one way or the other quite often.
Incredibly powerful almost godlike wizards being forced to manage vast and sprawling bodies of apprentices with the inevitable betrayals and powergrabs being the stuff of legends. A constant tension between withholding knowledge to secure your position or revealing more to your brilliant apprentices so they can improve their research and give you a leg up against external rivals.
The idea that bodies of magic users would shroud themselves in mystery and superstition deliberately is a fascinating one I think. Monopolization of knowledge and magical understanding could be a huge factor. Because if you can keep people ignorant you might not even have to use the flashy meteor strike magic all that often. Because low magic would be indeed devastating to societies that don't have the knowledge to deal with it.
A society with ubiquitous magical healing would be pretty unimpressed with giving high command diarrhea but one that doesn't have any knowledge of curses beyond knowing for sure those weird magic guild types can throw them around would probably freak out. Heck a lot of perfectly mundane scenarios would absolutely be explained with magic.
To circle back to warfare perhaps the rules of warfare would develop in a way where magical escalation is tiered. Low magic is fair game but using high magic is a serious escalation that invites retribution by outside powers.
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Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
Something similar happens in The Drawing of the Dark. Powerful wizards are capable of some relatively impressive feats, IIRC, but two opposing wizards in close proximity effectively cancel each other out, leaving both sides unable to use powerful magic except truly heinous and ruinous spells (sacrificing the souls of thousands of people, for example) ... but leaving relatively weak magic unaffected (like foxing beer).
So I'll clarify that I'm talking about battles here much more than I am polities or societies — those absolutely do fight very viciously on occasion, often because they have their backs to the Red Queen's wall and have little choice.
On the level of any one given all-out battle, the complication is generally that you have a bunch of warriors, you want them to fight, but:
— most of them value keeping their lives over anything else in the world
— knowingly getting into a no-holds-barred knife-fight is consequently counter to their values unless you can threaten them with something worse
— unfortunately, they collectively control all of your capacity for threatening people with something worse
So effectively you, as a commander, are mostly powerless to make them do anything they think would turn out to be a bloodbath. Bloodbaths can naturally happen, but generally because of extenuating circumstances that the army didn't have time to adapt to — that's why the ones that did occur, or at least were rumoured to occur, are so outsizedly famous; the kind of suicidal dedication it requires is exceptional. Sparta lost an army to be a minor roadblock to the Persians, and still Thermopylae has been revered for some 2500 years purely on the basis that they signed up for a bloodbath.
Generally there's an average level of risk that human combatants are willing to tolerate, and it's kinda final; when you see shifts to more intensive forms of combat, these are most often the result of social or material developments that make that higher-intensity combat less risky — body armour and group coordination are the big standbys of historical warfare in that field, though the introduction of magic might well introduce others.
A product of this is that cannon-fodder is, historically, a lot rarer than some expect. Where you see poorer, less well-equipped combatants on a battlefield, it's generally because they're compensating either with lower intensity or with greater coordination. One narrative that comes up pretty frequently is a transition from uncoordinated, low-intensity, and lightly-armed skirmishing to more intense, well-equipped but still uncoordinated conflicts as a class of elite warriors predominate, to intense, coordinated, but poorly armoured fighting as centralized states subjugate the elites and open up participation in warfare to a greater demographic and economic range.
If we applied the same to magical combat then maybe we get a distinction between hedgewizards playing hot potato with fireballs on the one hand, sorcerers loaded down with staves and warding talismans and flying carpets and such duking it out on the other, and a bunch of fresh apprentices all taught magic missile and a single one-size-fits-none counterspell beating both.
- Location
- Leeds
Conflict is inherently self destructive, however its worth pointing out, actually we're probably better at avoiding those extremely self destructive wars than you're granting.
Throwing more hordes into the grinder as you put it, tends to be pretty rare.
Stuff like WWI was the result of multiple rapid technological developments and as soon as people had backed down international rules against the use of the sorts of chemical weapons got deployed and people have been generally okay at following them?
Things like the Thirty Years war weren't as destructive to Sweden who was committing troops as it was to the Germans who's land was being fought on. And even then, the Germans recovered within generations.
Theres only one nation I can think of who fought a war so hard that it put their countries population on a downward spiral ever since (and won at least) and that was Russia in WWII.
We haven't had a single nuclear war since the first two bombs were deployed against Japan. And nuclear powers have been at war, nuclear powers have lost wars without using them, see Vietnam and both the USSR and American invasions of Afganistan.
Mad Max but with Dragons please.
Might finally have to try dall-e or some other AI Art for that.
I don't disagree, which goes back to where we started:
How do they manage to defend themselves if the magic shields you've provided them don't scale.
I suppose existing in a mutual state of MAD is a possible answer. Spells are short ranged and movement options sparse so theres a lot of patrolling and scrying to stop people approaching unvetted.
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That's only true for very specific and limited definitions of "self". If we consider the entirety of humanity as one organism, the conflict indubitably results in limited self-destruction. But for one society, one polity, one community? Absolutely not. For most of history, waging successful warfare has had among the highest dividends of any activity a group could engage in. Unsuccessful conflict naturally less so, but failure is not inherent; thus neither is self-destruction.
I think it's also important to determine whether we're talking about conflict as a symptom, or conflict as a process.
The latter, taking into account all the motivations and consequences integral to it, is most frequently a constructive process rather than a destructive one; conflict is frequently the price and prerequisite to attaining degrees of coordination otherwise unachievable, and thereby a substantial driver to many of the the populational, economic, and technological changes we have a tendency to consider positive.
Now the above refers to armed conflict, as I assumed that meaning from the context of your post; if we would talk of conflict as simple disagreement of any kind, then my words do not apply. But if a world without armed conflict is an improbable hypothetical, one with no conflict at all is purely fantastical.
- Location
- Leeds
Self destructive is not the absence of profit. And profit is without cost.
Opportunity cost, externalities, the simple loss of life...
Drinking alcohol is self harmful, however there's a difference between a managed consumption and alcoholism. But that doesn't mean just because your intake is managed and you aren't an alcoholic that its not harmful.
I guess maybe I misunderstood what you and Anchises were talking about, however when he starts saying throwing bodies into the grinder for an advantage I think the intention is clearly meaning conflict treating society as an organism and not at an individual level.
What I essentially mean is that warfare does not inherently destroy communities that partake in it. Fighting other groups can make a community larger, healthier, and safer. If engaging in warfare was truly self-destructive then it would be far rarer than it historically has been, the sporadic domain of doomed, low-fitness societies.
Instead, most of the largest, wealthiest, and most well known societies of history hold those positions because they were good at making conflict work for them, not against.
I wasn't dealing with the individual level, though the same can apply there dependent on circumstances; many warrior-elites throughout history have derived great benefits from their participation in conflict, but equally as many or more people have of course found the experience tragedic.
Instead, most of the largest, wealthiest, and most well known societies of history hold those positions because they were good at making conflict work for them, not against.
I wasn't dealing with the individual level, though the same can apply there dependent on circumstances; many warrior-elites throughout history have derived great benefits from their participation in conflict, but equally as many or more people have of course found the experience tragedic.
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- Location
- Leeds
As proven by the continual existence of any given society. Nobody would ever disagree with that.
Self destructive behaviours can run on a spectrum from very little harm to suicidal.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My first thought is how warfare among Great Plains natives changed when firearms were introduced.
When everyone was armed with muscle-powered weapons, pitched battles could be reasonably safe. Armor made of thick leather, or multiple layers or leather, sometimes with sand or gravel glued in there somewhere, could keep people reasonably safe. When muskets entered the picture, though, armor was useless and pitched battles would lead to unacceptable casualties for both sides.
So warfare refocused around raids and ambushes, starting fights when the enemy couldn't fight back effectively and retreating before they can organize a counteroffensive. If magic comparable to light artillery is common enough for any army to have a few such mages, this is the most practical form of magic.
You might also draw inspiration from the World Wars. WW1 saw clashes between world-class armies with artillery comparable to heavy artillery, and WW2 doctrine reacted to both lessons learned in WW1 and more recent technological developments. Of course, this probably requires non-evocation magic; tactics which depend on quick long-distance communication aren't gonna work if your communication tech is limited to flags and yelling.
When everyone was armed with muscle-powered weapons, pitched battles could be reasonably safe. Armor made of thick leather, or multiple layers or leather, sometimes with sand or gravel glued in there somewhere, could keep people reasonably safe. When muskets entered the picture, though, armor was useless and pitched battles would lead to unacceptable casualties for both sides.
So warfare refocused around raids and ambushes, starting fights when the enemy couldn't fight back effectively and retreating before they can organize a counteroffensive. If magic comparable to light artillery is common enough for any army to have a few such mages, this is the most practical form of magic.
You might also draw inspiration from the World Wars. WW1 saw clashes between world-class armies with artillery comparable to heavy artillery, and WW2 doctrine reacted to both lessons learned in WW1 and more recent technological developments. Of course, this probably requires non-evocation magic; tactics which depend on quick long-distance communication aren't gonna work if your communication tech is limited to flags and yelling.
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- Attached to a wall
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- She/Her
Many men dream of greatness in battle.
However no one hears of the greatest battles in history.
Battles that have not shed a drop of blood.
Battles fought behind closed eyes and in troubled minds.
The nightmares showed them how they could lose.
Phobias causing commanders to march their army without sleep.
Until the army keels over in exhaustion, subsumed by dreamless slumber.
Forever.
Or retreat.
And go back to their hovel.
Where they dream soundly and softly
This is why we pay tribute to the Dreamweavers.
They keep us safe, without spilling a drop of blood.
However no one hears of the greatest battles in history.
Battles that have not shed a drop of blood.
Battles fought behind closed eyes and in troubled minds.
The nightmares showed them how they could lose.
Phobias causing commanders to march their army without sleep.
Until the army keels over in exhaustion, subsumed by dreamless slumber.
Forever.
Or retreat.
And go back to their hovel.
Where they dream soundly and softly
This is why we pay tribute to the Dreamweavers.
They keep us safe, without spilling a drop of blood.
I am not saying that warfare causes "very little harm", but rather that it causes (that is to say, can cause) massive benefit.
If I only cut myself mildly with the kitchen knife, that's indeed still self-destructive; if I get paid 1000 bucks for donating blood to a hospital, that patently isn't. What I am stating is that warfare, successfully waged, frequently falls into the latter category rather than the former.
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- Location
- Leeds
I feel like we've pointlessly hyperfocused on this part of the sentence
And ignored the actual point.
And I think its becoming pretty apparent that we're derailing over pedantic quibbling about what constitutes self destructive behaviour.
Do you have widespread examples to the contrary of what I was saying that would support Anchises statement:
I don't think there's been any hyperfocusing, really. I'm not addressing your post in its entirety and never did, only the statement that conflict is inherently destructive.
For this to be pedantic, quibbling, or a derailment one must assume that my critique of that specific sentence of yours was part of a greater devalidation of your stance as a whole. Insofar as I am concerned, it wasn't.
If you want my thoughts regarding Anchises' post, then look no further than the reply to it that I posted previous to our current discussion. Any questions you have that fall outside of its subject matter, I am of course happy to answer to the best of my ability.
For this to be pedantic, quibbling, or a derailment one must assume that my critique of that specific sentence of yours was part of a greater devalidation of your stance as a whole. Insofar as I am concerned, it wasn't.
If you want my thoughts regarding Anchises' post, then look no further than the reply to it that I posted previous to our current discussion. Any questions you have that fall outside of its subject matter, I am of course happy to answer to the best of my ability.
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- Location
- Norway
I took a break because I was getting annoyed. I was harping on specifics because I felt OP's question had a bit of "do my homework for me" to it, wanting answers to a poorly-phrased question. I will try to contribute more possible speculation.
So. What's the deal with gold in high magic fantasy settings?
OOC, it's usually cribbing from real history and from previous settings, but IC, something is a little weird, particularly if mages can make gold, and extra weird in D&D where a bunch of spell components are listed by price, such as Circle of Death: "The powder of a crushed black pearl with a minimum value of 500 gp".
These two can be used to solve each other to some extent if it turns out gold is a magical reagent, a solid form of magical energy, which can be consumed for spells. It might not be literal 79-proton gold, but some similarly valuable substance in magicland which translates as "gold" because it occupies the same niche. Gold is mana crystals.
Perhaps the gold-maker-mages and the gold-consuming-mages have reached a state of economic equilibrium where making gold is about as profitable as other mage jobs, and buying magically created gold is about the same price as buying mined gold.
Alternatively, the gold-maker-mages run an extremely secretive cartel. Solidifying magical energy into gold for high density, easy transport, consumption, and currency is the most lucrative skill in the world and they will murder to prevent it getting out.
RPG Adventurers who cast three spells on four people and then take an eight-hour rest to regain spell slots can get away with using ambient magical energy. War mages who are expected to cast much bigger AOEs for longer need to absorb (energy from) gold to function.
A spell like Circle of Death can theoretically be cast from 500gp of raw gold, or maybe a bit more with an inefficiency modifier for gold as a universal material component, but that weighs ten pounds and adventurers do not feel like carrying around an extra ten pounds per spell, so they pre-format the magical energy into a black pearl. War mages who have the support of army logistics and caravans can use gold, and will. An army in the field consumes prodigious amounts of provisions and pay, which have to be kept constantly supplied or the army disintegrates, and a mage similarly consumes lots of gold to keep operating at high magic scale and not fall back to casting Magic Missile like it's a slightly more powerful arrow.
Magic items for use by non-mages are either trivial toys, or require gold-fuel inputs to function, making them too expensive to run continuously.
Gold for a high magic army is like JP-8 fuel for a modern army. The supply is vitally important to keep the army moving and functional, and even if a Teleport spell can solve some of the delivery, there's still 1) getting it from mines and suppliers to teleport departure, 2) getting it from teleport destination to various mages and commanders.
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It makes a more interesting creative exercise if mages need an economy behind them and therefore can be analysed through a socio-economic lens just like any part of a historical society.
Reagents can be a good way of factoring that into a magic system. You could go with some crude oil-like strategic resource that has a dominant role, but I don't see an issue with lots of different idiosyncratic spell components—if you need crushed black pearls for a spell then you'd better buy them, or conquer or colonise or vassalise somewhere that has them, or use an alternative spell that serves a similar role but with more economical reagents for the time and place. In this case the breadth of your trade networks would be an important factor in your society's capacity to bring magic to bear as a solution to its challenges, military or otherwise.
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
I'm not sure how it'd effect the greater socio-economic and warfare-oriented side of things - my mind is blanking right now and it'll probably take a few days of mulling over to figure things out - but this is an easier justification is there's any kinds of Similarity laws for magic in the setting. If Similarity is in play, then you can use that to invoke a relationship between Gold and Fire, where Fire is energy - and, more specifically, Fire is Life. Raw life force is often invoked as a potent source of magical energy, but Casting from HP is, well, dangerous, and using someone else's life force runs into problems of morality and potentially practicality. Sacrificing gold may not be as efficient/effective as sacrificing a person, but is probably easier to do in a lot of cases, and unlike people, gold ... really doesn't have many practical uses outside currency for an ancient-to-medieval society, AFAIK.
Similarity would probably let you take the further step of 'actual amount of gold -> value of gold in other objects,' too, although it might not, and even if it did I'd expect a steep drop in efficiency/effectiveness.
- Pronouns
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That also suggests animal sacrifice as fuel, particularly for more pastoral societies whose wealth is largely in livestock anyway—which may create a cultural association between blood sacrifice (potentially taboo) and less 'civilised' rural people who can't afford to power their magic by other means.
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
Animals, didn't even think about those.
It would also create a hilarious bit of white elephantry among wizards: someone gifts a small, physically weak creature that is expensive to keep alive (a songbird, or a koala, or something like that). The creature is technically very valuable, if only because it's so expensive to upkeep, but isn't worth much magically because its actual life force is so small. You can bet there'd be centuries of wizards trying to game the system and make magic accept the gold value of an otherwise worthless creature instead of its actual life force.
... You'd have some incredibly skilled 'weak' wizards as well. Pests are everywhere, and cats would have to compete with desperate mages who are willing to use rodents as spell fodder. Or else you'd have places where there are just no animals at all except pets, and all of a sudden it's very creepy. Weak-but-skilled mages would accompany pretty much every remotely successful army, to keep pests and vermin from getting into food supplies.
Hm. Life force would also implicate plants as a source of magical power, wouldn't it? You'd have wizard colleges/communities cultivating forests as an emergency reserve ... that would impact metallurgy a lot. The Romans IIRC burned quite a lot of woodlands due to needing much hotter fires to get mass-produced steel. If those trees are protected by wizards who do not like their groves being cut down for such mundane purposes .... On the other hand, you might be able to get wizards to create magical fires hot enough for smelting, but what could you offer the wizards in return?
It would also create a hilarious bit of white elephantry among wizards: someone gifts a small, physically weak creature that is expensive to keep alive (a songbird, or a koala, or something like that). The creature is technically very valuable, if only because it's so expensive to upkeep, but isn't worth much magically because its actual life force is so small. You can bet there'd be centuries of wizards trying to game the system and make magic accept the gold value of an otherwise worthless creature instead of its actual life force.
... You'd have some incredibly skilled 'weak' wizards as well. Pests are everywhere, and cats would have to compete with desperate mages who are willing to use rodents as spell fodder. Or else you'd have places where there are just no animals at all except pets, and all of a sudden it's very creepy. Weak-but-skilled mages would accompany pretty much every remotely successful army, to keep pests and vermin from getting into food supplies.
Hm. Life force would also implicate plants as a source of magical power, wouldn't it? You'd have wizard colleges/communities cultivating forests as an emergency reserve ... that would impact metallurgy a lot. The Romans IIRC burned quite a lot of woodlands due to needing much hotter fires to get mass-produced steel. If those trees are protected by wizards who do not like their groves being cut down for such mundane purposes .... On the other hand, you might be able to get wizards to create magical fires hot enough for smelting, but what could you offer the wizards in return?
I'm not sure what's so weird about D&D listing minimum component prices; it's to my eyes just a simple way of imposing (or at least attempting to impose) a resource economy on magic without spending reams explaining the precise economics of every single material component involved (which would probably take several sizeable times if covered in any detail). Taking the abstraction to the extreme is novel, but certainly isn't making things simpler here, even as it strips away a good bit of the flavour and subtlety of magic having material requisites in the first place.
If people can cast without using gold like you suggest with "adventurers", that seems contrary to D&D where the components are obligatory, and it raises a great many questions as to what this alternate ambiental source is and what limitations are on it.
I also very much disagree with the presumed dichotomy between adventurers and militaries; putting aside for now that "adventurers" in the meta-TTRPG sense are an artificial concept with no grounding in reality or in really any quality high fantasy setting I can think of (and that we likely can't speak of militaries in such a singular sense unless we commit some simplification like anachronously retrojecting their modern forms and tendencies) the existence of logistics doesn't mean that armies will just lug a bunch of gold around instead. It's the opposite — logistics is an absolute nightmare and no sane person is going to intentionally skip a process that would massively streamline the operation and increase tooth-to-tail. It would be like trying to fuel a modern armoured battalion with charcoal. The only advantage of gold I can see as you present it is flexibility, and while warfare is certainly very mutable, I'm not sure that's enough to counterbalance things; it also applies far more strongly for "adventurers" who would constantly face unpredictable scenarios.
P.S. "Numismancy" sounds like a fun name for currency-based magic. "Numisma" has a fun coincidental similarity with "numen", even.
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Aren't you just describing the OOC part of the OOC/IC dicotomy that Exmorri recognises?
From a game balance perspective its entirely logical for D&D to do this. From an in universe perspective it becomes weird. Materials themselves aren't weird, a pearl of ___ size is understandable, however the game balance things comes back because DM's might have no idea how to price pearls, and therefore everything has to have a universal price that they can be compared to... which isn't how the world works if you think about it.
Could I use less a smaller black pearl if I lived further from the ocean and thus they were rarer and more expensive? If I live in a gold rush town and gold is relatively cheap do I have to use a pearl which is larger or smaller?