Yrth's history and MAGIC - does it make sense

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by nik1979

If more mages means better education. What happens to your medieval setting when education more accessible or that effective?

Doesn't really require more people than in the medieval clergy, who were generally educated.

[Jasonft]

I might have missed it, but I don't think anyone has mentioned two of the biggest things mages could do to actively aid strategy and tactics for something like the Roman Legions (I don't know the Banestorm setting).

Blessing and Divination.

Blessing - Imagine a three point blessing tied into an item. Imagine the army commander poring over maps and intelligence reports trying to decipher the enemy intent/ capabilities/ location/ weaknesses. Now imagine he is getting a bonus of three points to all of the necessary skills because he is wearing a certain necklace.

Now imagine that not only the main commander, but also their half dozen closest strategic advisers are all wearing holy symbols of their war god that bear level three blessings and are in that tent together trying to plan strategy and tactics.

A three point boost, especially if it applied to more than one command officer in the planning tent would make for a *huge* synergistic benefit.


Divination - Simple enough. Find a local cow if you are a 'good' race or a captured enemy officer if you are 'evil' and cut them open to read their entrails. Ask whatever question is deemed most critical by the aforementioned strategic conclave.


Both of these are fairly simple effects, require little to no additional effort on the part of the mages and both could easily have huge problems as soon as they hit the borders of a low mana zone.

Having the blessed items with thee officers in the battle would also do wonders for the command and control for their side during the battle itself.

I don't know offhand just how difficult they are to make, but if your side's war god priests can make them I see soldiers making a point of snapping up blessed items before going into battle. Even if they get burned out, that benefit they give at the end would be more than worth the cost to many a soldier.

Matter of fact, blessed items might be one of the War god's church's main sources of revenue...

[Lord Curlyton]

But wouldn't it backfire? Suppose both sides use the Blessed Item/Divination trick. Side A does counsel X amount of time before battle and gets what is presumably the best strategy to go into battle with AT THAT TIME. Side B, however, does its counsel Y amount of time before the battle, where Y < X. The strategy they would get would in theory be better because it would include the updated situation post-Side A's consultation. So unless Side A does another counsel they are at a marked disadvantage, having a dated war plan. This leads to a game of god-chicken where each side tries to hold off consulting until the last possible moment so they don't get out-maneuvered. That or both sides agree upon a mutual time when they both consult.
In the end that method totally stifles any sort of military creativity and/or lulls the side(s) using consulting into the sense that they always have the best possible plan. And when inevitably things go awry (or the other side decides to ignore their consulting and go it how they feel) we all know how people tend to react to the unexpected....especially when you've conditioned otherwise. I'd say after the first couple major military disasters, especially ones in which one side did not use consulting, that the market would dry up considerably. Military failures tend not to be conducive to a general's health.

[nik1979]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Doesn't really require more people than in the medieval clergy, who were generally educated.

But weren't many of the universities run by the clergy?
Come to think of it, Literacy would be a certain limiter of mage population. I'm sure some mages can do without literacy, like tribal mages and those with magical based powers (advantages). Also, teaching style can also affect the quality and quantity of students and there after professionals.

Apprenticeship is a very slow process but given that magic has a critical failure chance to summon a demon, I think it would be the only method of teaching other than in a classroom. As I remember reading in my history that in around 19th century, the way people were expected to learn were vastly different from the way things are run now. I remember reading about not-being to ask questions, discussion and anything that may slight at the authority of the educator or upset the POV of the time (like the world is round or flat etc.) that can come up as heresey.

Another thing about Church Run Educational institutions is the amount of theology and "non-technical skills" required to learn. Religion is a key element in any medieval society given how hard life was and how simple it was. Religion, culture and non-canon beliefs, were usually part of any standard education. Local history was also a key knowledge required of many scholars, so was many artistic skills (check out Don Quixote as a great reference of the role of education and scholars to the state in the more advanced 16th C; it is also a great reference to Role-play how people talk if you're into that). The bottom line about religious-institution run schools is that they prioritize the molding of "character" and the moral uprightness of an individual over their technical proficiency.

If you want to move religion to a minor role, you can look at classical era thinking and education which focus more on humanities than theology. I think megalos would be more in that strain. Although you just substitute theology with philosophy. Classical education has a lot more math into it as it is part of their philosophic tradition.

another avenue to look at is the medieval education of Korea and China, but I'm clueless about them except that they had universities around the time as the west.

[Jasonft]

Playing God Chicken is a fairly amusing image if you think about it.

Certainly the opposing camps of mages would effectively cancel out. Unless one was significantly more powerful it's almost inevitable. It would suddenly become critical to know exactly what the other side's magical support looks like.

It would also become very critical to have spies and assassins taking pot shots at the enemy commanders and mages. Even if they don't kill the target they still make them burn up the blessing on the item.

But the advantage of having such when your opponent does not is huge. Sufficiently so that every army commander worth a damn would know the value thereof.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by nik1979

But weren't many of the universities run by the clergy?
Come to think of it, Literacy would be a certain limiter of mage population. I'm sure some mages can do without literacy, like tribal mages and those with magical based powers (advantages). Also, teaching style can also affect the quality and quantity of students and there after professionals.

Apprenticeship is a very slow process but given that magic has a critical failure chance to summon a demon, I think it would be the only method of teaching other than in a classroom. As I remember reading in my history that in around 19th century, the way people were expected to learn were vastly different from the way things are run now. I remember reading about not-being to ask questions, discussion and anything that may slight at the authority of the educator or upset the POV of the time (like the world is round or flat etc.) that can come up as heresey.

Actually the heresey issue wasn't the real reason that questions weren't allowed. The real reason had to do with the way things were learned. In this largely illiterate world nearly everything in the medieval period was oral and done in rhyme to facilitate Mnemonic memorization - even reading and writing. In the most skilled (couriers and jongleurs) this Mnemonic memorization was nearly "photographic" for poetic oral messages.

While effective for day to day recall even these methods were not enough for the merchant or scholars so they turned to a late classical book called Ad Hermmium which described the Memory Theater method.

Here is a summation of the description James Burke gives in his TV series and book the _Day the Universe Changed_ - episode/chapter "A Matter of Fact":

1) Set up a mental image of a familiar building or location.

2) mentally walk through it setting up 'scenes' of the material to be memorized every 30 feet or so. These 'scenes' were in themselves a series of memory triggers. The 'stronger' the scene the better. Ononatopoeia (words that sound like an action) was of great help in this part of Memory Theater.
3) To recall something you simply mentally walk through the building and 'triggered' the 'scenes'.

In the Middle Ages the mental building would be a Cathedral and over 1000
different scenes would be inside.

This is the real reason you didn't ask questions: it messed up the memorization and recall of information.

But Yrth (like D&D) is not set in the Middle Ages as we like to think of it; that view is more along the lines of the High Middle Ages (c1000-c1300). Nearly every pseudo-Middle Ages setting is really a mixture of the Late Medieval (c1300-c1500) and early Renaissance periods with gunpowder either outright eliminated or rendered so ineffective that no one but an idiot would even try to use it.

While gunpowder gets much of the blame for ending the Middle Ages the truth is it had been know to the Europeans as early as 1250 and didn't really become an effectively weapon until the mid 1500s. The real invention that ended the Middle Ages is one that ironically Banestorm expressly states as existing on Yrth: the printing press. Even without it you still have the Copy spell which has much the same problems.

In our world the European printing press was invented in 1436. In 1490 Aldus Pius Manutius started on his endeavor to publish every major Greek Classic known, a goal he archived by the time he died in 1515. Even by then the printing press had become something that no one could truly totally control.

The true power of the printing press was driven home to even the most wooden headed of leaders in 1546 when Martin Luther's 95 Theses found their way into the hand of the printing press owners. Within 14 days the 95 Theses were all over what is modern day Germany and it took them only another 14 days to be all over the Europe.

But the power of the printing press was not just the insane out of control speed that new ideas could spread but the way it could for good or ill by the weirdest twists of fate make a leader immortal. Some 400 years after he died a novelist chose the name of a then totally forgotten ruler of a then equally obscure backwater than had been called Wallachia as the name for his main antagonist. Eventually people would look for the man behind the fictional creation and as a result the name Vlad Tepes Dracula has become better recognized than nearly any contemporary rule of those days.

[Lord Curlyton]

Meh, maybe I just see too many possible variables for it to be effective, even in a Yes/No format with multiple questions. I mean, how could you really know what the best possible plan of attack is months in advance, assuming you started querying the war-god then? How specific do these questions have to be, especially considering divination is notoriously vague, more so if the question is broad ("Can we win?" for example). Yes/No is also rather limiting when you think about it as in this case most of the work should probably have been done already and all War God can provide is an affirmation of what you already knew.
And what if the Q&A session ends up with a "You're screwed"? Pretty good way to kill morale, there.
Bah, I need to sleep. 2 AM here.

[StevenH]

Taking the "generals are in the tent, divining your plans" concept a little further....

If this procedure is done over a long enough time, I would imagine that someone would write down the set of questions that get you the most useful answers. Eventually, after asking the same questions (in various slight variations) a form of natural selection will give you the most efficient set of questions to use. This is especially important when you realize that for this technique to be useful, the diviners are at a penalty of at least -4 (10 hours to 4 days), and more likely -5 (4 to 40 days) due to the Time Penalty. After all, it takes a while to make plans based on the information gained via the divination and put them into motion.

There is also that "muddling the vibes" penalty if the question is asked more than once a day. Does that mean by the same person, or in total, regardless of who asks? Does the magic know that Bob already asked that question over in Kethalos, so George is prevented from asking it in Megalos? Or does it only matter that the individual diviner hasn't requested the information on that subject more than once?

If it's the former case, then it pays to "burn through" the most obvious questions the enemy might ask, in order to give them an extra penalty when the enemy gets around to asking them. Then it comes down to the Game of God Chicken again as the diviners race to ask the questions before the enemy does, and the answers cease to be as important as the act of asking the questions.

I think I favor the diviner developing some sort of "pattern" when the question is asked that makes it harder for that individual diviner from getting a good answer when asking again. Sort of like preconceived notions; they color everything later, like being set in one's ways prevents you from thinking outside the box without a lot more effort.

To be honest, I am glad I haven't had to worry about divinations in any games I have been in or run. No one bothered to make a character with divination skills. Thank goodness. Especially since I would probably run divination as reading a "possible future" rather than "the future".

[Lord Curlyton]

Which is precisely how I would run it. The gods can give you the most likely outcomes, but even they can't tell you the exact results, thus the vagaries inherent in divination. Then of course there is the maxim "The gods favor those who ask the least of them" (from Jason and the Argonauts at least). I would definitely enforce that. My War God would enjoy seeing a general that comes up with an ingenious plan and pulled it off rather than one that constantly bugs him for help.