But if Gizbak stops maintaining his Summoning Circle tomes, the whole world of magic will fall apart
But if Gizbak stops maintaining his Summoning Circle tomes, the whole world of magic will fall apart
Or giant megacorporations each hire 200,000+ of them to create products for the non-magic folk to consume.
After a few decades, the idea of being a wizard is synonymous with working 8+ hours a day on magic that no wizard really wants and there is so little new spells and magic being created in the world that everyone wishes there wasn't any.
Then leaks come out that the products these megacorporations create have been slowly killing the planet and they've known for decades. But since they have so much power and money, nothing can stop them until the world dies.
I spend 8 hours a day gluing together spells my company purchased from a proprietary caster’s book to serve increasingly arcane (no pun intended) business needs. In my free time, I like to read about the latest advancements in corporate spellcraft, but most of the new spells are either patches of old spells or new spells that fix problems created by popular spells of the past 5 years. These new spells inevitably introduce new problems that will be “solved” in another 5 years.
Yep, that's exactly it. I'm assuming this is software dev in a nutspell.
Yep. You wouldn't have adventurous magicians going out and casting spells against dragons. The variety of spells known by D&D type wizards wouldn't even be a thing. You'd have a guy who was a specialist in ritual-casting flame spells whose job consisted of continuously heating up cauldrons of metal ore so it could be smelted. If he was jumped on his commute home, he couldn't fight the attackers off with "fireball" or something. Maybe that was covered in school decades ago, but he's spent his entire career doing nothing but that one smelting spell Or, you'd have the "Gate" wizard whose entire job was to keep up a portal for their entire 8 hour shift, so that tourists could pass back and forth.
Stop, I can only get so depressed!
Bro made fantasy stuff into a capitalist dystopia
This comment made me sad.
"If"
You realize embedded systems engineers are real, right?
This makes me feel so much better after spending a morning banging my head against some wild pointer arithmetic, thank you much much! (Ultimately the pointer incantations were successful, praise be!)
Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.
That's literally Megumin from KonoSuba lol. She's supposed to be one of the strongest wizards around, but refuses to learn anything other than explosion magic. Explosion magic is basically useless in most situations, as it just flattens a huge area.
If explosion magic doesn't solve your problems then you're clearly not using enough explosion magic.
Megumin's other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion's damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It's why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.
*I didn't ask how close those buildings are, I said "I cast FIREBALL" *
-Megumin, if they played D&D
Expulooooshon
How people think wizards would talk:
Behold! I have unfurled powers beyond mortal comprehension!
How wizards would actually talk:
If I hear, “why don’t you just channel the infernal essence through an ephemeral plane?” one more goddamn time from someone who hasn’t actually read the fucking rune diagrams, I’m going to lose my shit.
In other words, wizards do exist, they are just called IT specialists.
RTFR - Read the fucking runes!
They would 100% be trying to peddle ape runes inscribed with XP cost (for extra permanency) as the next big investment opportunity
The ape is merely a representational avatar! The true value of the rune lies in possessing it, for it identifies you as a member of an elite cadre of ape rune possessors.
If magic was real, expert magic users would not trust it at all.
"Haha yeah I mostly do transfiguration magic but I do some evocation too occasionally. No I don't eat any transfigured food or do any of that at home or anything honestly I'm surprised it works at all."
Right, so literally computer security
Discworld wizards represent!
Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.
I've been slowly reading through rimworld and honestly I love how Pratchett balanced out the existence of magic by making it such a pointless persuit that wizards are basically just beurocrats
There’d be hair restoration & ED specialized wizards within a year.
Oh great wizards finasteride and dutasteride, give me back my hair!
Read as Greek names it works
Ergo, Wizards can't be exploited by capitalism
That one kind of magic would be capitalism. I mean the situation from OP post is the current state of liberal economics.
Yes
Now that's just academica.
Haha, look, it’s my career!
🫠
no way it's the yomi hustle guy
Grasshopper mind sorcery
So they'd be like cobol developers? From what I know that is basically magic to keep it running
We have this now. Scientists and big pharma.
That's the joke
Hey now, boner pills aren't useless!
Could the same scientists have been working on cancer treatments? Maybe, but it's not nearly as fun to test.