Our entire life as a whole would be drastically different.
Just think of how different the medical field would be.
There could be enchanted items for weight-loss, shape-shifting in place of plastic surgery, spells that could dissolve a tumor.
The possibility could be endless.
But on that note, for everything that was good, there could be ten more than were bad.
Perhaps the government would have done away with open or free use of magic. There would be a branch of the government that used magic, and a task-force used for the sole purpose of getting rid of people with magical capabilities or tendencies.
You could take that story and run really run with it.
In fact, i really like the idea. It seems to be one of those things that hasn't overly been touched on too much.
I mean, there a million different medieval fantasy stories. It would be refreshing to see a new take on the fantasy genre.
[Minor Spoiler Warning]
--if you remember from DragonAge, the Templars control of the Circle of Magi was shaky at best, or at least that's how they felt, after the whole tower thing. I think that feeling would only get worse with time.

Self-sustaining as a factor of stability in society
Re: Zac, RedFawks

I think perhaps a good analogy to Zac's vision of magic is computer literacy. Anyone could learn and become a hacker and steal a lot of money or to kill a lot of people. But not everyone would do it.

The bottomline lies on whether magic allows the users to be self-sustaining. If magic allows users to be completely self-sustaining sub-groups, then society as we know may break into fragments. Otherwise, having magic may not be very different from having science or technology as we know today. In that case, magic is just a way of life, like talking on a cellphone.

Imagine that there is a technology you can own that sustains your needs to live and gives you extra power to do things without getting caught. That sounds like a problem for a society, regardless whether the means are magical or technological.

Therefore the concept of having fantasy in modern world could go either way. It could be a world like ours but with a different favor, or a world that is borderline unstable.

Didn't really read everything... but if you want an example of modern day fantasy, look into Piers Anthony's Incarnation of Immortality series.

Final Fantasy VII comes to mind.

You might want to widen your mental image of magic.

In a lot of conventional fantasy games, magic just does things we can do now with various gadgets. Summon fire & lightning? Communicate across long distances? I can do all that with stuff in my kitchen.

Have a glance at Harry Potter. They venture into modern London a bit and wear suits sometimes. Their magic isn't *just* things you could do with napalm and a machine gun. They turn people into animals and weird stuff.

That's no SO original, but if your magic has any reason to coexist with modern technology, they need to meet different ends.

Deformalize it. Go nuts with it.

Having magic would make the world radically different. It's not a matter of "modern world" + magic. Magic would define the world the same way technology defines the world. The reason is basically that society takes the path of least resistance.

For example, given real physics, the path of least resistance to destructive weaponry was gun powder. If you instead have people running around who can fire lighting from their faces, you have a whole different least resistant path. Either you figure out how to commodotize the magic, or you incentivize "magic artisans" with employment opportunities.


One example I can think of is wood. It used to be that creating lumber-- that is, straight pieces of wood for building-- out of raw trees was difficult and time consuming. You used to have to hire craftsmen who could convert wood into lumber. That was their job, and it required special tools and skills to do. Later, lumber was commoditized: machines can convert trees into lumber. You don't hire someone to make lumber anymore... you just have your carpenter go to the lumber store.


So if you think of "traditional" fantasy magic, you might need silver leaf and eye of newt to create a fireball spell. If you're a warlord you employ an alchemist to figure that out, then you get down to cultivating leaves and newts, you set up a factory for combination and packaging, then you train your standing army in the use of fireball packages.


In a world where this sort of scenario is possible, there is absolutely no line between magic and technology.

Consider that technology is just figuring out increasingly clever ways to take advantage of the laws of physics to do interesting and useful things for us. If we live in a world where newt eyes produce fire, then that's just a different physical law, so in using that, you're not doing "magic" any more than Edison was doing magic by doing tricky things with electromagnetism.


So, realistically, what has happened in the past is that someone figures out something useful by chance, and we today have highly refined versions of whatever they figured out. For example, people would wash their clothes down stream of sacrificial altars. The reason is that the fat from those who were sacrificed acted as a form of crude soap. People eventually figured out that it was the fat, and were able to use that. Later we figured out the actual chemicals and what they do, so we can produce soap en mass, and we can make similar products out of similar chemicals.

Back to our eye of newt, the reason it works isn't some nefarious newt/fire spirit: it's that fire newts have "HotStuffitanium" in them. Now in modern times we have figured out how to harvest hotstuffitanium without newts, or we've created synthetic hotstuffitanium, and now we have weapons that spew fire like nobody's business, all based on the original "spell" of silverleaf and eye of newt.

Think about how magic could have realistically affected the ancient world: communications, transportation, medicine, everything would be fundamentally different.

Re: Pete Michaud

Loved your thoughts on a world that has broken down magic into its driving ingredients to be used in derivative functions and devices. "Hotstuffitanium" LOL!

However, what I would like to point out is that magic of let's say the Harry Potter variety just seems to be some invisible force in "wizards" that can be commanded with words. There doesn't seem to be any physics behind it (except for the potions category, but "Hotstuffitanium" never seems to come up. Instead Rowling just runs with "fire can be intrinsicly produced from a magical newt's eye by a skilled wizard."). So in this branch of magic literacy and being multilingual would take presence over discovering the chemical workings of ingredients.

Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that most authors, Rowling included, use a faulty heuristic when writing about magic in modern times, that heuristic being to imagine the closest thing that actually exists (the real, modern world, in this case), then adding or subtracting features from it to approximate what they are trying to imagine.

It's that same cognitive malfunction that Hollywood exploits in doomsday AI scenarios:

an AI without emotions (meaning, a human being minus emotions due to them being inhibited) gets zapped by lightning and becomes a malevolent killing machine. This is basically impossible--an AI without emotions is fundamentally different than a human with emotions inhibited; the likelihood of emotions arising at random from a fundamentally different class of entity (even if it DOES have superficial similarities) is the same as a rock arbitrarily transforming into a bowl of petunias after being zapped by lightning. It's apparently possible, but the odds are (literally) unimaginably small.

So my post was a response to the above: trying to break out of the notion that the modern world with magic would in any way resemble our actual, modern world + magic spells... it almost certainly would not.