Masqueradeless Magic

[Mask_De_H]

So I've been reading over the oMage vs. nMage thread and the Unknown Armies thread and wondering how an anti-magic Masquerade could stay in place. If it were to fall, would it even really matter? A supermajority of people already believe in magic so would actual magical effects really change much about the way the world works? I assume it depends on the scale of the magic, given the D&D public works projects threads we've had. But even those are attempts to jump up the tech tree to industrial society from Iron Age society. Does economy of scale favor the crafting wizard or does it favor the water treatment plant?

What would a modern world shaped by magic even look like? Most of the technology that we have or is being developed would be considered magical to people several generations ago. If science marched on the way it did in real life, what niche does that leave for magic? Would we live in a Gernsback future like the After Sundown Storm Lords or the oMage Virtual Adepts want? The lines between science fiction and fantasy have always been blurry because if you squint they're the same thing on different days. How sufficiently unadvanced does magic have to be that it doesn't become technology?

[ishy]

Magic is whatever you say it is.
Technology is either what it is currently, what it has been in the past (or close enough) or whatever you say it is.

People who have to adjudicate how magic works, will mostly do so based upon their limited understanding of the magic rules.

People who have to adjudicate how technology works, will mostly do so based upon their limited understanding of reality as it pertains to the game.

[Cyberzombie]

If you're talking about old Mage (I can't speak for the other games since I don't know them well), Magic is dangerous. The problem in old mage isn't so much about describing what can happen, as saying what can't happen. The big deal with the technocracy is that their fixed rules set what people believe can't happen. And by saying that demons and dragons don't exist, you're protecting the people from demons and dragons.

The world that comes about when magic wins over science is that you end up with a highly chaotic world where anything can happen. It's great for the powerful magic users, because they can get away with virtually any stunt they want. The common man lives in a hellscape full of every imaginary fear he's ever had manifested into reality.

I guess it'd be something like D&D, only a lot less benevolent.

[Mask_De_H]

But as outlined by Frank and AH in the oMage review, the Technocracy has won the battle but lost the war if you go by how people actually think. Science works in spite of anti-vaxxers and homeopathic medicine, which shoots the idea of consensus reality in the head. However, you have people with no talent, linear talent and crazy go nuts talent who want to believe and do running around. They could in turn convince more people that magic is real and change the paradigm against the Technocracy. Even if they fuck up and bring down Paradox, that's still promoting blatantly magical shit. Unknown Armies has the shitty riot rules, but there's still nothing stopping a whatevermancer from blowing people's minds for blowjobs, shits and giggles. Hell, that's Mak Attax's long game.

I know I can make magic and tech fit whatever. What I'm asking is how does a magical masquerade stay in place and what are the implications of it failing. It's a staple of urban fantasy gaming and I want to know why.

[Prak]

Well, in the specific example of Water Treatment Plant v. Crafting Wizard-

The facts in here are wikitruth. I'm not an engineer, or a civil archivist, so I'm just googling stuff and trying to come up with numbers that sound right

Let's posit a lv 20 D&D wizard, and that a gold piece equals a dollar (let's just say).

According to the Saline, Michigan Department of Water Production and Wastewater website, their wastewater treatment facility produces an average of 1.2m gallons of water a day, with a max output of 3.5m. I'm not sure how big that city is, or how it compares, but New York City's packet on their waste water treatment is saying it produces 1.3 billion gallons of drinking water, with no indication of frequency. It's implied that's daily.

Google says the pop. of Saline is ~9000 people, NYC's packet posits 8m residents and workers. I'm not sure NYC's stats are per day, since it results in an average of 162.5 gallons per person. Then again, Saline's plant produces 133 gallons per person, so maybe that's just the typical output of water plants, since nothing says those people actually use all that water.

A level 20 wizard cobbling together the most efficient Purify Water device he can (max CL), can create a device of arbitrary size capable of treating 160 gallons of water per six seconds, or just north of 2.3m gallons of water a day. A single device can almost double the average output of Saline's plant. New York would need 566 to cover the water its plants produce.

However, in this "1 gp=$1" assumption, it costs the Wizard $20,000 to make his Purify Water box. According to this building company website, the lowest cost for a water treatment facility in Michigan is $93k for the City of Marysville, Mi, which has a population just slightly larger than Saline. Though clicking on the link shows that it may have just been for improvements. It also, however, shows that construction of a new plant for Chelsea, MI (Pop. ~5k, Water output .85m gal) cost $4.6m.

$4.6m is enough to build 230 Water Purification boxes, which is to say just under half the number of boxes NYC would need. NYC's Croton Water Filtration Plant Project is estimated to have cost $2.3b, this is 203 times as much as it would cost the wizard to make 566 Water Purification boxes.

Now, granted, it would take the wizard the better part of a month to complete a single box (20 days), or 2 months to create three boxes. Meaning it would take 31 years for a single CL20 wizard to make sufficient boxes to cover NYC's water needs. Croton took roughly 6 years to build, it seems.

So, in general, the wizard wins out on cost, but loses on time. However, if you had 3 CL3 wizards making boxes, they could each make a single box that treated 24 gallons of water per round in 3 days for $3k ea. Each box would have a daily output of 345,600 gallons, with all three having a combines output just northwards of 1m gallons. So in a week, 3 CL3 wizards could cover Saline's plant's average production for $18k. If you had 20 CL3 wizards working on these, they could produce 40 boxes in a week that would voltron together to purify ~13.8m gallons of water per day.

Now, it would take 166 of these 6 8-hour day work weeks to cover NYC's water production (about three years). But it's seriously 20 guys in a workshop, for ~$20m. And that's market prices. It costs them $10m to produce the boxes, so if the city just gives them the materials, and then pays each guy, oh, lets say $100k a year to sit around and enchant boxes, the total cost of the New York Arcana Water Treatment Statue is $16m. If they want two days off per week, it just takes the better part of four years. This crew of 20 guys is still way ahead of traditional construction for the water treatment plant.

Or you give your favourite musician some Guitars of Building.

[Username17]

Magic would change history significantly if it did anything at all. So if you want to set your game/story/whatever in something that is recognizably our world, then you have three choices:

• Magic is new. The reason that magic didn't change the Civil War is because there was no magic during the Civil War. The stars are right, the awakening just happened, and it's off to the races with new magic being discovered all the time.
• Magic has been actively hidden for a long time. While magic has been around for some long amount of time (anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years), and the reason you never heard about this in school is because there is a vast and effective conspiracy to maintain the masquerade.
• History is full of magic, but it was constrained to follow the arc of our history anyway "for no reason." So there was totally a World War 2, and the Blitz happened, but it involved Nazi hawkmen throwing Zeus' thunderbolts at London or some shit.

So if you want people to be roughly as they are now, and you want there to be ancient wizards, masquerade is your only choice. Well, you could also go with "magic has been active on the magic world for a long time and only now is able to cross into our previously non-magic world." That's sort of a hybrid of option 1 and option 2. But from the standpoint of people living on the no-magic world, it sure looks an awful lot like Masquerade.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

I think the idea here is that magic has been around for a long time and there is not a Masquerade and as a result the world does not resemble ours at all. And then the question is: What does the world resemble?

Assuming I understand the question correctly, the answer is dependent entirely upon what kind of magic we're using, so give us some details, Mask.

[Mask_De_H]

I think the idea here is that magic has been around for a long time and there is not a Masquerade and as a result the world does not resemble ours at all. And then the question is: What does the world resemble?

Assuming I understand the question correctly, the answer is dependent entirely upon what kind of magic we're using, so give us some details, Mask.

The question is actually how can a Masquerade stand up in the face of modern belief and modern tech. It's an important question to tackle for a contemporary urban fantasy game because without some far-reaching conspiracy, people can take selfies with sorcerers and the jig is up. How do you avoid that happening with a Masquerade?

From that, I do ask how a Masqueradeless magic world would look like. If it were broken recently, things wouldn't change much, since there wouldn't be much time to research and develop magical tech. It'd be Frank's option one.

If the jig was up, say, during the Cold War and you could do ritual and fast magic up to about D&D spell level 6, how much does that change the development of technology? Encoded communications would change due to Whispering Wind/Unseen Servant/Message, but there's radio. People can fly solo, but a plane can carry bombs and men and materiel. Summoning creates chaff that's questionably bulletproof and plausibly deniable. Fabricate gets you rare earth metals, which is useful. World hunger can be eliminated with Goodbery dispensers. Prak demonstrated the purify water treatment plants. Is there anything else that would really shake up the world?

[Wiseman]

There are some powerful spells that could be used by terrorists.

Control Weather, Earthquake, Blizzard, Contagion, Planar Binding ect.

[Username17]

The question is actually how can a Masquerade stand up in the face of modern belief and modern tech. It's an important question to tackle for a contemporary urban fantasy game because without some far-reaching conspiracy, people can take selfies with sorcerers and the jig is up. How do you avoid that happening with a Masquerade?

If you want to know how to keep a masquerade going in the face of modern society as we know it, that depends heavily on what your magic does and how many people have it.

If there are thirteen sorcerers on Earth, then pretty much no matter how flashy the magic is, the masquerade will likely stay intact. If one or two of them announce that they are going to be Sorcerer Supreme and build an empire, the vast majority of people on Earth will assume that they are crazy con artists. Consider the amazing magical powers attributed to the various rulers of North Korea and how many people outside North Korea believe any of that shit actually happened.

If you have the magic from Doubt, where your magic is literally incapable of even moving a penny while people are looking at it, even the people who use it on a regular basis will not be 100% convinced that they have magic at all and the vast majority of people will assume that they are lucky or bullshitting or both.

Maintaining a masquerade is only a problem if the magic users are statistically common enough to be relevant demographically and their magic ostensibly looks like something. Remember that while a super majority of people on the planet already believe in magic, those people also believe that the vast majority of claims of magic powers by individual people are bullshit. So there are over a billion Hindus, and the vast majority of them believe that fakirs produce sacred ash from their hands as part of being touched by the gods. But the Muslims right next door to them believe that this is bullshit and instead believe in the miracles called down by Imams. And so on and so forth the world over. Like eighty to ninety percent of the people on Earth believe that magic is real, but only like ten to twenty million people believe that Kim Jong Il's birth caused birds to sing the national anthem of the DPRK. And having footage of birds singing the DPRK national anthem would actually change the number of people who believed in it very little. The vast majority of people on Earth would simply assume it was fake if they saw it at all.

So bottom line: you could give D&D style Enchantment spells to literally thousands of people and it would move the dial on what people believed almost not at all. On the other hand, a few down evokers riding on dragons and the jig is up.

If the jig was up, say, during the Cold War and you could do ritual and fast magic up to about D&D spell level 6, how much does that change the development of technology?

That depends entirely on what the magic does. Being able to study magic for most of your life to cast delayed blast fireball honestly isn't that interesting. Basically it's just that some people are Macguyvers who can jury rig a hand grenade out of bat poop. Harry Potter style killing curses are actually super shitty compared to hand guns. Scrying pools are pretty amazing if you can photograph the stuff you're looking at and almost worthless if you can't.

On the flip side, incorporeal monsters are apparently completely immune to every single weapon that humanity has ever invented or will ever invent, so seemingly you can wipe out all human life on Earth with a single casting of create undead. So there's that.

Basically, most of the stuff that people include in their various fantasy and urban fantasy stories are not game changers by any means. Many of them are simply inferior to actual mundane technological methods we already have. I'm not going to personally rest for eight hours and then spend an hour preparing myself to cast a fucking light spell when a flashlight costs like twenty bucks. However, some magical effects thrown around in fantasy and urban fantasy stories are complete game changers. Like the fucking time travel pendant that Hermione had. The world would be unrecognizable within days of that shit getting out.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

There's another possibility Frank hasn't really touched on, and that's where magic (or alchemy, whatever) works but it sucks. Preferably it's difficult, unreliable, dangerous, not worth the effort or all four.

Then, a gamechanger happens.

You can see this in Charles Stross' Laundry series: magic is just applied mathematics, and it sucked for so many centuries because the bulk of humanity didn't have the raw mathematical knowledge to perform it, and what did exist was dangerous, poorly understood, and not very effective - and even where the math existed, the industrial capacity to make use of it didn't. It's nice to have a working theory of electricity in 50 A.D., but if you don't have the know-how and means to make capacitors and resistors, you're not getting very far.

What that usually works out to is a cross between the Masquerade and Awakening options - the genie in the bottle is that somebody figures out a way for magic to be practicable - alchemy on a grand scale, spells cast via apps on your iPhone, etc. So then you have groups of entities trying desperately to keep the genie in the bottle, cracking down on every graduate student and terrorist that works out that 1 + 1 = Ia! Yog-Sothoth...and of course if the knowledge becomes well known, that's your basic Awakening event as everybody with internet access has the theoretical ability to become a sorcerer (or whatever).

But, the key is the gamechanger - whatever it is, be it a mathematical theorem or a reagent or a reliable infernal pact ("Reverse mortgage on your soul, get demonic powers today!") - which turns a worthless pursuit into something like a magical singularity. And of course that has its own fun attendant things too, like different groups not talking to each other and finding slightly different permutations of the same theorem, having different resources and abilities as a result, etc.

[John Magnum]

Scrying pools are pretty amazing if you can photograph the stuff you're looking at and almost worthless if you can't.

Can you give me the reasoning behind this? It sounds interesting, I'd like to read the thoughts that went into this dichotomy.

[violence in the media]

Scrying pools are pretty amazing if you can photograph the stuff you're looking at and almost worthless if you can't.

Can you give me the reasoning behind this? It sounds interesting, I'd like to read the thoughts that went into this dichotomy.

It's the difference between dreaming that an event happened and having a video of it occurring.

[hyzmarca]

[*] History is full of magic, but it was constrained to follow the arc of our history anyway "for no reason." So there was totally a World War 2, and the Blitz happened, but it involved Nazi hawkmen throwing Zeus' thunderbolts at London or some shit.[/list]

This can be pretty good, though. And is the basis upon which most longrunning superhero comics work.

Also:

http://www.amazon.com/Into-Darkness-Wor ... e+darkness

The question is actually how can a Masquerade stand up in the face of modern belief and modern tech. It's an important question to tackle for a contemporary urban fantasy game because without some far-reaching conspiracy, people can take selfies with sorcerers and the jig is up. How do you avoid that happening with a Masquerade?

If you want to know how to keep a masquerade going in the face of modern society as we know it, that depends heavily on what your magic does and how many people have it.

If there are thirteen sorcerers on Earth, then pretty much no matter how flashy the magic is, the masquerade will likely stay intact. If one or two of them announce that they are going to be Sorcerer Supreme and build an empire, the vast majority of people on Earth will assume that they are crazy con artists. Consider the amazing magical powers attributed to the various rulers of North Korea and how many people outside North Korea believe any of that shit actually happened.

If you have the magic from Doubt, where your magic is literally incapable of even moving a penny while people are looking at it, even the people who use it on a regular basis will not be 100% convinced that they have magic at all and the vast majority of people will assume that they are lucky or bullshitting or both.

Maintaining a masquerade is only a problem if the magic users are statistically common enough to be relevant demographically and their magic ostensibly looks like something. Remember that while a super majority of people on the planet already believe in magic, those people also believe that the vast majority of claims of magic powers by individual people are bullshit.

This stops being an issue when the James Randi foundation gives Gandalf a million dollars. Magic that's testable at all can be proven well enough. Even if its subtle, if it can reliably skew results significantly better than chance, a lot of people will be interested in studying it.

And then you have a setting where The Men Who State at Goats is completely factual rather than merely based on true events.

[TheFlatline]

Science works in spite of anti-vaxxers and homeopathic medicine, which shoots the idea of consensus reality in the head.

Except that anti-vaxxers are pretty much an American thing and even then make up less than 10% of the population (far less, and even in areas that are seeing epidemics where herd immunity slips below 90% it's still like 85-88%) and homeopathy, as in hardcore homeopathy where you put a drop of arsenic into water, shake it, take a drop of that water and put it into another container of water, shake it, and repeat the process 3 or 4 more times then take 2 drops of the "treated" water, is not exactly threatening to tip the scales of popular opinion any time soon.

Also realize that even the "debate" about creationism is, for the majority of the planet, settled. The US, Turkey, and like Afghanistan still think that's a "raging debate". And let's not forget that all this pseduoscience and anti-intellectualism actually strives really, REALLY hard to claim to be scientific. Even in defying science outright it still tries to wear the robes of Science.

And even then, the pendulum swing between... I'll call it romantic pseudoscience and rational thought is easily tracked through cultures. Nobody believed in anti-vaxxing and homeopathy was publicly a joke back in the 50's and 60's when science was going to the moon and eradicating smallpox and polio. And before that explosion of science you can find mysticism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and before that the industrial revolution, and before that the resurgence of "romantic" supernatural beliefs and so on.

I'd argue that the Technocracy in the Mage game may lose battles but won the war because even the hardest of the anti-vaxxer anti-intellectual will prefer not having his family eaten by a dragon, and that's the technocracy's basic bargaining chip.

[Username17]

This stops being an issue when the James Randi foundation gives Gandalf a million dollars.

Why would you think that? The James Randi people demonstrated that the creation of holy ash was simple sleight of hand and completely mundane. And yet, more people continue to believe that shit than there are people in the United States. If the Randi foundation decided that one mentalist was indeed legit and they couldn't come up with a better explanation than that he had magic powers, it would convince literally millions of people that that particular mentalist had magic powers.

But remember, fifty six million Americans believe that they have personally seen a ghost, and 142 million Americans believe that ghosts are real. Can you honestly say that the Randi foundation admitting that they have been defeated by a self proclaimed sorcerer would create as many believers as already exist?

Also realize that even the "debate" about creationism is, for the majority of the planet, settled.

Unfortunately, no. A majority of everyone everywhere wants schools to "teach the controversy" about creationism. Seriously. There are no countries on Earth where even a slim majority supports not teaching creationism. Sad, but true.

In a survey carried among 10 major nations, the highest proportion that agreed that evolutionary theories alone should be taught in schools was in India, at 49%.

Hilarious note about the results from India: only people who knew what Darwin's theory of evolution was elected to answer. This skewed the results to be more favorable towards evolution, and it still didn't get to the magic 51% of people saying that it should be the only theory taught to students in school.

What you have instead is a total consensus of people who actually know the subject finding that creationism is bullshit made by charlatans and evolution is an actual science backed up by volumes and volumes of tests and observational data. So expert recommendations about school curriculum always tell creationism to piss off. But the lay public still gets creationism from church and science at school and wants schools to teach the controversy because they think there is one to teach.

-Username17

[ishy]

Except that anti-vaxxers are pretty much an American thing and even then make up less than 10% of the population (far less, and even in areas that are seeing epidemics where herd immunity slips below 90% it's still like 85-88%) and homeopathy, as in hardcore homeopathy where you put a drop of arsenic into water, shake it, take a drop of that water and put it into another container of water, shake it, and repeat the process 3 or 4 more times then take 2 drops of the "treated" water, is not exactly threatening to tip the scales of popular opinion any time soon.
[. . . ]
And even then, the pendulum swing between... I'll call it romantic pseudoscience and rational thought is easily tracked through cultures. Nobody believed in anti-vaxxing and homeopathy was publicly a joke back in the 50's and 60's when science was going to the moon and eradicating smallpox and polio. And before that explosion of science you can find mysticism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and before that the industrial revolution, and before that the resurgence of "romantic" supernatural beliefs and so on.

Heh, if only that were true. In the Netherlands we just had a measles outbreak last year in the 'biblebelt', precisely because people there refuse vaccinations.

Homeopathy is weird. You can get a university degree in homeopathy. There are apparently quite a few doctors here who have a degree in homeopathy.
If I visit my GP, they actually have a homeopath on staff.
And when I asked some of the doctors I play D&D with, they replied that they did believe in homeopathy, though when I tried to tell them what homeopathy actually is, they didn't believe me because it sounded too crazy for anyone to actually believe in.

[DEBO]

Unfortunately, no. A majority of everyone everywhere wants schools to "teach the controversy" about creationism. Seriously. There are no countries on Earth where even a slim majority supports not teaching creationism. Sad, but true.

That doesn't sound right.

Firstly, my gut reaction is that in any country where the major religion that supports the idea of theistic evolution there literally is no controversy to teach. This would include Catholicism.

Secondly, that bit you quoted is from a survey that is 5 years old and polled only 11,000 people across only 10 countries. Also, the results for Great Britain indicated that 38% of people believed "Life on earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection in which God played no part" while only 21% said only evolution alone should be taught. So nearly 45% of people who said evolution, and very specifically NOT God, was responsible for human life, thought evolution shouldn't be the only theory taught? This implies at the very least that the question regarding what should be taught in schools was badly worded or was vague (the results table only mentions "Other" theories rather than specifically creationism). Maybe there's a bunch of people who consider teaching other theories to mean, 'addressing other theories and explaining why they're wrong' as oppsed to 'schools should teach creationism'? In anycase, equating that survey to above conclusion seems wrong. I couldn't find the data from the international surveys.

Is there other data you are referencing, or is the part I quoted hyperbole? Maybe I'm just being naievely hopeful, because if it is actually true, sad indeed.

EDIT: On Homeopathy: Were they confusing it with other natural remedies?

[Username17]

A substantial number of people believe that evolution happened and still think that crazy alternate theories should be taught. Because while they personally think that betting on the thing that all the scientists say is a good idea, they also don't understand how one sided that "debate" actually is and want both sides to be given equal air time.

Look, people are frankly kind of dumb when it comes to evaluating evidence and arguments. Especially arguments about subjects that they have little knowledge or specialty in.

-Username17

[kzt]

Part of the issue is that the version of evolution that is typically taught is overly simplistic. It's like the 6th grade version of chemistry.

[hyzmarca]

This stops being an issue when the James Randi foundation gives Gandalf a million dollars.

Why would you think that? The James Randi people demonstrated that the creation of holy ash was simple sleight of hand and completely mundane. And yet, more people continue to believe that shit than there are people in the United States. If the Randi foundation decided that one mentalist was indeed legit and they couldn't come up with a better explanation than that he had magic powers, it would convince literally millions of people that that particular mentalist had magic power.

I'm more concerned with the fact that Project Stargate existed. The DIA and the CIA spent fairly large sums of money trying to get useful intel from remote viewers. If that really worked though, it would have sociopolitical impact.

If you've got functioning precogs, even if they're rare, you've also probably got a world where 9/11 didn't happen.

[kzt]

If you've got functioning precogs, even if they're rare, you've also probably got a world where 9/11 didn't happen.

Yup. Even if you can't see the details of the plot, the broad outlines would be easy to see. A bunch of FBI agents get called at midnight to catch one of a particular set of early morning flights to LA, to travel armed and and to bring their MP5 in their carry-on luggage.

[Username17]

Considering that it is historical fact that President Bush was given a memo entitled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" and chose to not read it or respond to it in any way, I would say that our world is in fact completely compatible with having precogs in it. If precognition is rare and doesn't always work, then it could totally exist in our world right now and the world wouldn't have to look any different than it does.

A very small number of people are able to consistently beat the market and make big money buying and selling bonds. Maybe Warren Buffet is actually a precog. While he makes money on most of his trades, he still loses money sometimes, so maybe precognition isn't infallible. Or maybe it actually is infallible, but doesn't give him all the answers and sometimes he has to wing it. Or maybe it is infallible and it gives him all the answers, but he has intentionally decided to lose money on some trades either to play a longer game or just to throw people off his trail.

But the specific example of 9/11 holds no water. The intelligence community basically did call that one, and no action was taken because the chief executive was a pin head. That's entirely consistent with precogs actually existing if that's the kind of magic you wanted to have. I'd like to say that it rules out George W. Bush in particular as being a precog - but it doesn't even do that because the bogus war on terror he declared in response got him re-elected by a narrow margin and funneled a huge amount of money to his friends.

-Username17

[Prak]

I don't know the whole mechanism of the FBI, but doesn't kzt's scenario just require that the higher ups at the bureau act on info from precogs?

[kzt]

Well, yeah, you can see how much support there was for the idea that terrorism was a major threat in The Declining Terrorist Threat published on July 10, 2001.

"Judging from news reports and the portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism."
...
"The greatest risk is clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia -- or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia -- you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear."