Was looking to share some thoughts for a personal setting, so I hope this is the right section!
While I enjoy hack'n'slash in ancient, abandoned dungeons with monsters and magical trinkets as much as the next guy, I can't help but wonder how things would play out if magic did exist. Diviners in public relations? Life insurance pays to resurrect you? Zombie labor puts many out of work? That's just the modern era. The standard fantasy land, complete with medieval stasis and a shortage of guns, would be changed beyond comprehension.
How can we have dungeon-delving and logically extrapolated magic in the same setting? Try a technological singularity, but with wizards! Here's the gist of it:
- History is dotted with lost, magically talented civilizations, many of which ended due to highly destructive, magical conflicts.
- Modern civilization recently experienced such conflicts, but barely avoided becoming completely bombed back into barbarism.
- The few parts of the world that were hardly touched live in a near-utopia, but competing ideologies have led to a cold war.
- The rest of the world is still reeling from the conflicts, and must contend with magical disasters, rogue magicians, and monsters.
- Yes, there are abandoned, underground structures you can clean through hack'n'slash, and some are stashed with magic items.
If an analogy is required, think one-part D&D, another Gamma World, with a dash of Paranoia on the side. Ideally, it will have its own system, if not be entirely system independent. The setting should cater to games and campaigns of varying seriousness, and be open to modification as needed.
I can't imagine it's much, but I think that's a decent starting point. Any thoughts?
Yeah this could work but it needs to be done right, not magic as electricity please! Magic is magical due in part to its scarcity and uniqueness, where everyone has a cantrip up their sleeve and is making international calls on their magical wands, it's a bit less so. One movie that handled it well was 'To Cast a Deadly Spell', a bit more modern than what you're talking about but still quite creepy because the magic had Lovecraftian overtones.
I always thought Alphatia, in Mystara, was a good example of a magic-based society. It would by definition be classist, because magic is something only certain people can ever do (in D&D, not in real life where anyone can do magick).
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