“A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s particular form of magical realism was once described to me as such: Making the mundane seem fantastic and the fantastic seem mundane. In his short stories, particularly The Most Handsomest Drowned Man and A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, Marquez made the magical happenings feel like everyday occurrences, while the way people responded to those events seemed outrageous because they were exactly how you would expect them to react if the magical nature of the occurrence wasn’t there. Skipping literary criticism or explanations of the stories (I suggest reading them, though – they’re very good), I’d like to focus on how we can use this in our fantasy games.
The World Is Magic
One of the unifying aspects of almost every fantasy RPG setting, even the homebrew ones, is that magic and gods are real, and everyone knows it. There is no room for blind faith in most fantasy, where faith healing is the entire basis for the healthcare industry. Being brought back from the dead may vary by setting, but the powers of healing by channeling magical energies doesn’t.
So what is a surgeon in fantasy land? Of what interest is biology in a world where the jump to germ theory might never need to be made because curing an outbreak of cholera would not take John Snow’s investigation as much as it would take a few goodly Priests casting healing spells. The Priests could, like Snow, track the outbreak to a shared water source like a well, but science again might hit a wall there with the Priest simply casting a purify spell on the well and being done with it.
Similarly, to what end is combustion engines when you have magic to propel trains and drive the engines of war? Does one bother investing in gunpowder development if magic missiles exist? Do chemical reactions go any further than what is needed for the kitchen? Do people invent TNT when it’s much easier to get a bit of bat guano and a decently powerful local Mage to clear rocks out of the field or blast tunnels into the mountains in search of gold?
This is why magical realism is important. The mundane activities of scientists are even more extraordinary when there are simple magical solutions. Why would the world need industrious creators and inventors that break down the world into small interlocking parts to see how it works and then build strange tools and machines from those parts?
I’m reminded of a line from the cartoon The Tick, in which the heroes are at a convention for mad scientists. One exhibition is “room temperature fire” to which the main character asks, “What’s the point, man?”
What’s the Point, Man?
If every problem can be solved by praying to a responsive God or casting an arcane spell, what, indeed, is the point of science? It’s not for the betterment of the everyman, as is often the stated goal of science (though often it is just the enrichment of the ruling class…) Science doesn’t make money in a fantasy world, so it is probably not taken up as a serious profession. Those who study the sciences might actually be considered quite mad, as occasionally happened to scientists in our own past.
Money often drives innovation. Scientists work their asses off not only for the love of discovery and the joy of problem solving, but for the much more pertinent monetary reward.
But, in a fantasy setting they have magic for that.
Science? What is it good for?
There’s no money in it, there’s no prestige, and everything can be done cheaper and faster with magic. Why would we use science in our fantasy roleplaying games if it makes no sense.
Because science is fantastical in a world where magic exists. The most strange discoveries in a fantasy world are not the ley lines of magical energy that create pathways for almost instantaneous travel through magical wormholes. The more impressive discovery would be that germs cause sickness, time can be told by winding up springs, or explosions can be caused by sopping up a spilled chemistry experiment with a cotton cloth. These things, in the fantasy world, would be amazing not only because they are interesting truths but because they are almost worthless knowledge. They make no money and can be replaced cheaper by using magic.
Being a scientist in a fantasy setting is almost as futile a proposition as being a wizard in the real world. The mundane is fantastic, and the fantastic is mundane. And that’s where science seems to be best served in fantasy settings, as a strange obsession for those few willing to live in poverty for discoveries that make very little difference.
Using Science To Solve Problems
In our games, then, the best examples of scientists would be obsessed creatures searching for answers that magic and gods can’t (or won’t) provide. Perhaps they are looking to create a new type of magic for the everyman through alchemy (the grandfather of chemistry). Maybe they study biology in the hopes of ridding the world of diseases that people need to rely on Priests to cure. Or they may have darker intentions, searching for weapons of war that can combat the tyranny of the magically adept.
Whatever their drive and area of study, it’s important to recognize that even the most ardent student of science will probably use magic to aid their research: asking eldritch creatures about the mysteries of the microscopic world, using magic to forge the lenses needed for microscopes or telescopes, finding old wizard tomes of recipes for strange concoctions. Magic is a tool to be used and a good scientist uses every tool available in their quest for truth.
To bring science into your fantasy world, you need a problem that can’t be solved by magic and which the upper class find desirable to solve. Gold leads the way toward advancement. The mundane solution to a fantastic problem is to put a bounty on it. If there’s money to be made from it, science will follow.
- Science in a fantasy setting becomes the fantastical element, while magic becomes mundane
- Science is an unrealistic goal when magic exists
- To develop science, there must be a problem that 1) magic can’t solve, and 2) that the wealthy/rulers want solved
- Magic is a tool in the scientist’s toolkit
- Money fuels innovation in science