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Old 07-22-2018, 11:42 PM   #1
dataweaver
 
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Default Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

I'm working on a fantasy setting intended to resemble traditional fantasy to a large extent, with the main difference being the inclusion of ideas from Alvin Toffler's book “the Third Wave”. In that book, Toffler posits that there have been three major transitions in human history, each bringing about a radical change in how society is organized. The First Wave was the introduction of agriculture and the shift from hunter/gatherer societies to farming and cities: in effect, it's what kicked off history. The Second Wave was the Industrial Revolution and the age of machines, with a societal shift toward “mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.” The Third Wave was the subject of the book (written in 1980) and was a prediction of the Information Revolution. The book good into some length about the characteristics that the resulting society is likely to have; and looking back at it from nearly forty years later, it was remarkable prescient.

My idea is to set up a fantasy setting around four traditional races (orcs, humans, dwarves, and elves), each having a society patterned after one of the four stages of development that Toffler outlined: Orcs are nomadic hunter/gatherers; Humans are more or less TL3 representatives of a First Wave society; Dwarves live in an industrialized Second-Wave society; and Elves have a Third-Wave society.

The catch is that even though Toffler presented these as a sequence where each stage is fundamentally better than the ones that came before (in terms of effectiveness), I'd like to play with the idea of these four cultures coexisting without any one of them dominating the others. To that end, I intend to give each race its own style of magic, designed to emphasize the benefits of the Wave that that race represents. In the case of the Orcs and Humans, the idea is for their Magics to make it possible for them to compete with later-Wave cultures without becoming them. In the case of the Dwarves and Elves, their Magics are there to make their societies possible in a setting where technology isn't advanced enough to do the job. Put another way, everyone is roughly TL4; but Orcs are TL(0+4) or TL(1+3), Humans are TL(3+1), Dwarves are TL(3+2) in materials but suffer restrictions that keep them around TL4 overall, and elves are TL(3+5) in areas such as information technology but likewise suffer restrictions that keep them around TL4 overall.

Orcs have a shamanic magic that lets them survive and thrive in “untamed wildernesses”.

Humans have channeling magic that lets them harness ley lines; they use a mixture of Chinese Elemental Powers, Sacred Geometry, and Energy Accumulating Magic that lets them dominate when they have access to Ley Lines, making that their preferred territory (in effect, Ley Lines generalize and expand on the sorts of benefits that agrarian cultures get from rivers).

Dwarves have Material Magic, making them the source for magical items; but the best raw materials are found deep underground.

Elves have mastered a kind of Rune Magic. I'm still tinkering with its capabilities; but they definitely include sensory and communication effects.

That's the basics. I have a few more ideas; but at this point I'm more interested in getting some feedback.
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Old 07-23-2018, 12:30 AM   #2
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

Feedback you say?
How about awesome!
I would like to see to see that get at least a Pyramid treatment but an actual book would be great.
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Old 07-23-2018, 01:42 AM   #3
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

Having no one group dominate due to their TL advantages is fine, but I'm having trouble reconciling what the orcish TL4 nomadic hunter/gatherer society looks like. TL4 presupposes a certain level of settled civilisation, which is a contradiction in terms to a hunter/gatherer society.

By TL(0+4), would you mean that weapons, armour and maybe transport are TL4, without an associated tech/industrial base?
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Old 07-23-2018, 01:53 AM   #4
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

I mean that their magic more or less compensates for their lack of the sort of infrastructure that's required for TL4. Mainly, this only matters for those few game systems where the TL is directly referenced, such as the quality of medical care: Orcish shamans are miraculous healers by TL0 standards, and time spent in their care is treated as if you were receiving TL4-quality care.
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Old 07-23-2018, 02:10 AM   #5
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

Quote:
Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
Having no one group dominate due to their TL advantages is fine, but I'm having trouble reconciling what the orcish TL4 nomadic hunter/gatherer society looks like. TL4 presupposes a certain level of settled civilisation, which is a contradiction in terms to a hunter/gatherer society.

By TL(0+4), would you mean that weapons, armour and maybe transport are TL4, without an associated tech/industrial base?
This reminds me of Deserts of Kharak, with high-TL nomadic factions living in large hoverbarges.

Or how about something like Mortal Engines, only more orkytech?
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Old 07-23-2018, 02:34 AM   #6
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

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Originally Posted by dataweaver View Post
I mean that their magic more or less compensates for their lack of the sort of infrastructure that's required for TL4. Mainly, this only matters for those few game systems where the TL is directly referenced, such as the quality of medical care: Orcish shamans are miraculous healers by TL0 standards, and time spent in their care is treated as if you were receiving TL4-quality care.
I have done the same for my world.
Dwarves are pretty much alt tech with reliable magic that might as well be science. Medical healer types can buy up TL limited to First Aid and Esotoric Medicine making it as good as UT Physician. Alchemy and herbs instead of antibiotics and such.
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Old 07-23-2018, 03:25 AM   #7
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

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Originally Posted by dataweaver View Post
Orcs have a shamanic magic that lets them survive and thrive in “untamed wildernesses”.

Humans have channeling magic that lets them harness ley lines; they use a mixture of Chinese Elemental Powers, Sacred Geometry, and Energy Accumulating Magic that lets them dominate when they have access to Ley Lines, making that their preferred territory (in effect, Ley Lines generalize and expand on the sorts of benefits that agrarian cultures get from rivers).

Dwarves have Material Magic, making them the source for magical items; but the best raw materials are found deep underground.

Elves have mastered a kind of Rune Magic. I'm still tinkering with its capabilities; but they definitely include sensory and communication effects.

That's the basics. I have a few more ideas; but at this point I'm more interested in getting some feedback.
I can imagine the hunter-gathering spirit-orcs.
The humans seems to be pretty classical fantasy humans.
The dwarves also fit many fantasy dwarves with their industrial focus.

But I am having trouble imagining the elves. Are you thinking a natural tree-internet that allow them to tap into and gain information about anything in a forest. and to be able to communicate instantly through a 'root system' or something like that?



Btw. you could also play up the historical downsides of each of these waves. The orcs are obvious they are very dependent on the seasons and weather and have to follow the herd animals. They WILL run into conflict with the humans who needed ever increasing lands for farmland as well as the dwarves who might stripmine an area the orcs used to use as hunting grounds. To be a powerful orc, means being a good hunter or have a strong connection to the spirit world. And having a big strong family.


Humans, can have any of the typical drawbacks of nobility vs. peasants. Of women becoming second class citizens and religion being a dominating factor. They are still very much dependent on the seasons to survive. To be a powerful human means being born to it. And to have a lot of land or to be able to get high in the church hierarchy. There is little room for social mobility (which is good as that encourages the typical low status adventures that make up most PCs).


The dwarves could also have typical capitalism along with their industrialism. Here it's not religion or nobility that matters. But money. They might have working class and upper class dwarves. They might have a problem with civil unrest. Workers organizing in unions and a lot of wealth centered on a very few. To be an important dwarf means having a lot of wealth, this is typically accomplished by owning a lot of important factories/mines and have a big work force under you.
(Possible dwarven subplot: someone is trying to create automatons to replace the working force. This might lead to upheavals as the working force finds out about this and fear loosing their jobs and being thrown to the street)


But what about the elves? Maybe they have become very self centered and care more about how the other elves perceive them than what they actually do. With constant information they might spend a lot of time focusing that information on each other. Here neither money or family or religion is important. The most important ones are the 'celebrities', who have a lot of say as many are interested in following them. But how do you become a 'celebrity'? It might be through entertainment; poetry, theater, musical capabilities. But it might also be through daring adventures.



All in all I think this idea goes a long way to explain some of the typical personalities of the calssical fantasy races. :D
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Old 07-23-2018, 04:36 AM   #8
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
This reminds me of Deserts of Kharak, with high-TL nomadic factions living in large hoverbarges.

Or how about something like Mortal Engines, only more orkytech?
The orcs are inheritors of precursor magipunk battlemechs that they have no understanding of how to create, but can manage to jury-rig repairs to get them back in the field?
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Old 07-23-2018, 07:12 AM   #9
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

I'm just looking at the synopsis for Tofler's Future Shock, and it's interesting that it lists one feature of post-industrial society as being increased nomadism:

- To follow transient jobs, people have become nomads. For example, immigrants from Algeria, Turkey and other countries go to Europe to find work. Transient people are forced to change residence, phone number, school, friends, car license, and contact with family often. As a result, relationships tend to be superficial with a large number of people, instead of being intimate or close relationships that are more stable. Evidence for this is tourist travel and holiday romances.

I don't know how far you want to pursue that with your elves, but it could lead to an interesting juxtaposition with the orcs.

The preceding paragraph is also interesting with regards to long-lived elves:

- People of post-industrial society change their profession and their workplace often. People have to change professions because professions quickly become outdated. People of post-industrial society thus have many careers in a lifetime. The knowledge of an engineer becomes outdated in ten years. People look more and more for temporary jobs.

Not sure what to make of either of these points yet, but they'd be things I'd be turning over in my mind for setting ideas.
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Old 07-23-2018, 09:31 AM   #10
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Default Re: Three-Wave Fantasy Setting

The elves in this setting? As I said, they use Rune Magic. But that's not enough definition; so here's some more:

A big part of elven magic is that it's all in your head. But paraphrasing from the last Harry Potter novel, “of course it's all in your head! But why in the world would that mean that it's not real?”

I'm thinking that their magic should be a form of Glamour (GURPS Fantasy, pp.20–21): elven magic that affects the physical world is ultimately illusory, and depends on the subject buying into it in order to function. This can be good or bad: if you're being attacked by magical missiles, you can downgrade the resulting injury by means of a “disbelieve” roll (Perception or Will?); but if an elf conjures up a crystal bridge to help you cross a chasm, you need to accept it in order to cross. For the most part, Glamoury tends to be used for entertainment purposes, where matters of belief are less important. The elven bard is definitely a thing.

On the other hand, I'm thinking that Conditional Termination (Thaumatology p.242) should be a staple of elven magic, and a way to get around the dependence on belief: adding a terminal condition to a Glamour makes it either resistant or immune to disbelief; but once the condition is met, the Glamour dissipates. And adding a terminal condition takes more effort, in proportion to how unlikely the condition is to occur.

There's also a certain amount of subtlety to elven magic: out of sight, out of mind; or, put another way, if you don't see it, you can't disbelieve it. While elves can do flashy Glamours (and, as mentioned above, bards often do), they tend to prefer magic that isn't obvious when they need more permanent results.

Elves also have a strong connection to the fae. For the purpose of this setting, I'm thinking of using something like GURPS Fantasy's Faeries: living illusions. They hail from an Otherworld that elves can access mentally through meditation: it's a Platonic realm where concepts take physical form. It also serves as a magical “internet”, and accessing it is an experience not unlike Cyberpunk's Netrunning. In this regard, the Fae are roughly analogous to Tron's Programs, except that they can be brought into the “real world” — as the aforementioned living illusions. They can also be bound to physical objects: trees work best (think “dryads”), but other natural features can host them (think more generally of “nymphs”). An elf can even bind a faerie into a properly crafted object like a bow or a staff, resulting in a “Willful Weapon”: elves frequently talk to their tools, and with good reason. In case you missed it, this business of binding Fae into objects is the elven version of the Third Wave's ubiquitous computerization.

Finally, I'm thinking that elven magic might have a strong element of contracts in it: oathbinding may be a central feature (which also relates to the aforementioned Terminal Conditions), and may be the primary means of interaction between the Elves and the Fae; but it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to just the Fae.

I think that gives the elves a lot of magical options with a distinctly “Third Wave” feel, but with a major restriction (it's all Glamoury) that should keep them from dominating the others.
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