Posit: Banestorm on Merlin ...

[LoneWolf23k]

I imagine the elves could negociate a deal with the goverments of the Earth: "Let us build homes in some of your woodlands, and we'll teach you what we know about magic."

[DocRailgun]

For the most part, your point is valid. However, there WERE a number of immortal elves that had been alive since before the last time the Horrors came (Alachia, for instance). They perhaps didn't have their own society apart from the human society they infiltrated and lived among, but they did have their various cultures and politics behind the scenes.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

What about the original question?


To eliminate it early, the Shadowrun reality isn't a valid comparison, since fully-developed non-human cultures didn't show up instantly.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I'm reluctant to dig out my copy of that or Technomancer, so I'll just ditto that. I've always found Merlin's magitech to be highly questionable, given the relatively limited timeframe in which all the advances supposedly took place. It seems more like a world where magic has existed for for longer than a number of decades.

Some things move fast once they start to work in an industrial society. There is no real reason to believe that working magic would not follow that progress.

Magic "existed" in Technomancer's world for thousands of years, and people had worked out procedures. They were just lacking something, kind of like computers before the transistor or aircraft before aerodynamic theory and gasoline engines. Compare progress of computers from 1950-2000 or of aviation from 1905-1955 for examples of equivalent progress to the advances in magic in the Technomancer world from 1945-1995.

That's why its technological magic. The basis paradigm in Technomancer is that magic explodes out with the same velocity as the other 20th century industrial technologies. A slower progress is of course possible - you could have it follow the same curve that SF writers thought computers would follow in the 1950s, so that even 500 years in the future they're still loading programs manually into multi-ton clanking vacuum tube electronic brains. But Technomancer follows a very different path by definition.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Some things move fast once they start to work in an industrial society. There is no real reason to believe that working magic would not follow that progress.

Magic "existed" in Technomancer's world for thousands of years,.

That would mean it was low mana before the hellstorm.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That would mean it was low mana before the hellstorm.

That is correct. Possibly with normal mana pockets in some areas, and according to some theories, with high mana zones during some periods of antiquity. See "Mana Levels" in GURPS Technomancer, sidebar, p. 14.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I'm reluctant to dig out my copy of that or Technomancer, so I'll just ditto that. I've always found Merlin's magitech to be highly questionable, given the relatively limited timeframe in which all the advances supposedly took place. It seems more like a world where magic has existed for for longer than a number of decades.

And just from skimming Merlin's text in Infinite Worlds, a small timeline:

1945 - Trinity Event
1968 - Teleportation spells used to put up Hermes orbital station (not clear in text if that's just parts to assemble or whole station in one launch)
1974 - 101st Spellborne used to install pro-US leader in Vietnam
1979 - Special Forces flying carpets into Tehran
1990 - Berlin Wall just "vanished into thin air"(!) one day
2000 - CIA stops plot to attack World Trade Center with zombies

Teleportation spells that have the range and capacity to reach LEO in only 23 years is the only thing that looks a tad quick at first glance to me, without knowing how the Berlin Wall went "poof". At second glance, military grade flying carpets actually seem a bit slow in coming, IMO.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by capnq

Teleportation spells that have the range and capacity to reach LEO in only 23 years is the only thing that looks a tad quick at first glance to me, without knowing how the Berlin Wall went "poof". At second glance, military grade flying carpets actually seem a bit slow in coming, IMO.

The thing that was curious to me was how the knowledge of all the spells appeared so quickly. I found that unlikely in the extreme. DP's post above suggests that the time prior to Trinity was not wasted as far as magical development was concerned, suggesting that much of that knowledge already existed, but was suddenly made much more useful.

[Dalillama]

It makes a very interesting secret for Area 51 to conceal though... Maybe a few Elves were pulled through, and caught by/allied themselves with the U.S Government. IIRC, the 3e version had "Seelie abductions" replacing alien abductions/UFO phenomena. Elver exploration parties sent through the Hellstorm to find the missing, maybe?

[Captain-Captain]

It's also VERY posible that the trinity event unleashed demons as well as introduced magic on the ahem industrial scale found in Technomancer. Who is to say that some of the initial advances were made with contractual help from demons?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

It's also VERY posible that the trinity event unleashed demons as well as introduced magic on the ahem industrial scale found in Technomancer. Who is to say that some of the initial advances were made with contractual help from demons?

Since demons appear even in relatively small atomic piles, I'd think it's a given that demons were summoned by Trinity.

The passage on kinderrmagic indicates that spell magic in general is easier to come by on Merlin-1, possibly because of the great diversity of legendary backgrounds giving many more "correct" methodologies for spell magic.