Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 culture20 Jun 24, 2006 18:46:43	I just realized that with the magic available in (A)D&D, science on Mystara should be very advanced for a middle-age culture. For example, due to spells like clairaudience and clairvoyance, the speed of sound should be known in multiple mediums. The speed of light should be known to mages for the same reason. Of course, Contact other Plane and Commune could produce scientific knowledge beyond ours. Perhaps these spells helped the Blackmoorians in their study of the Beagle's equipment? Can anyone think of other post-renaissance discoveries that magic would help discover?
#2 zombiegleemax Jun 27, 2006 17:00:25	Had a group discover alot of science with magic. The party was made up of three Glantrian Wizards. One was in to using magic to understand living bodies, one was into mechanical contraptions, and the other was into alchemy based explosives. Most of the games we ran was actualy research and spell development. Something the player were into, not me the DM. The mechanical mage used ice and fire spells to test various metals for duriablity, and eventualy developed stronger alloyes. The life mage developed a few simple detection spells that could find hp, illness, and basic information like heart rate and body temp. It wasn't long before she had a very sound and modern understanding of biology and anatomy. Eventually getting to a understanding of nerves and nural pathways. A she went deeper and deeper into the working of the body she discovered the mico-scopic world. The alchemy mage got into this and got deep into modern chemistry with protons, electrons and such. Eventualy developing spells to see actual atoms. This is a valuable lesson. Open ended magic can be very bad. This lesson tells me that Blackmoor could have easliy happened in a world of magic. A little tech to spark a wizards mind and a generation's time and BAM!! High leve Mage-tech. The saddest part was how it wasn't any one spell or magic. The player presented me may spells that were simple and very resonable. The trick was that many of these spells build on to each other. OD&D creation spells lend themselves to knowledge of construcion and engineering. Floting disc and fly could lead to understading of weight to thrust. Which it did for my game.
#3 eldersphinx Jun 28, 2006 15:08:05	Just as a thought - science is not always the same as technology. Science is knowledge of how the natural world works. (And when you have magic, Immortals, et cetera in place, such matters become more complicated. Imagine trying to deduce meteorology principles from firsthand observations, frex, on a planet that's had one radical axial shift and at least two major areas of tectonic collapse within the last five millenia.) Certain principles of this are rather well known. Technology is the application of science for tools - and more importantly, the ability to widely apply science to make tools, by all people. To get real technological breakthroughs, you first need high-scale food production to increase population, then urbanization, then design of engines, task specialization and eventually industrial assembly. It's not hard to see fairly significant scientific advancement in Mystara that ends up being on the same scale as Greek mathematics or medieval theology - an excellent mark of education and intelligence, but not causing a massive change in overall standard of living or kicking off an Industrial Revolution. 'Course, if an Industrial Revolution-style event does kick off anywhere, it'll sweep the planet within a century or two, transforming it beyond recognition...
#4 culture20 Jun 28, 2006 17:59:34	I just realized something... A mage might know the speed of light, but he would never think of the speed of light as an absolute (like Einstein), leading to Special or General Relativity: The very nature of the clairvoyance that allows the Mage to determine the speed of light (instant sight at a distance) would disprove the idea that information can not travel faster than light. And Teleportation disproves the idea that Matter and Energy can not travel faster than light.
#5 zombiegleemax Jul 15, 2006 6:33:16	Perhaps teleportation works by creating a wormhole? The light speed limit is not broken.
#6 johnbiles Jul 15, 2006 23:19:08	Teleportation has to work in some way by bending or bypassing space because you can teleport into sealed locations which would block normal movement.
#7 eldersphinx Jul 15, 2006 23:46:15	Perhaps teleportation works by creating a wormhole? The light speed limit is not broken. Well, that's the other side of the coin. In a universe where energy can be spontaneously evoked from empty air, gravity can be negated by a mage of middling talents, and gates and vortices exist to places where the very nature of matter is profoundly different, is there even such a thing as a 'light speed limit'? The Enlightenment was in no small part due to advances in technology and recordkeeping allowing smart scientifically-minded individuals to really begin distinguishing between what was observed to be possible, and what was not. On Mystara, kicking off such a wave of discovery would be exponentially more complex. How much use is the scientific method of "make an experimental trial, change exactly one environmental trait, keep all other environmental traits the same, repeat the trial and chalk up any differences to the changed environmental trait" in a world where wiggling your fingers can take you to a completely different plane of existence?
#8 Cthulhudrew Jul 16, 2006 12:56:50	Perhaps teleportation works by creating a wormhole? The light speed limit is not broken. Isn't teleportation supposed to be transport through the Astral? Or dimensional folding? I can't recall for certain which it is. I know that at least in the Gold Box, a teleport spell cast in the Astral (with its strange dimensional effects) worked like a dimension door spell, and a dimension door spell worked like a fly spell (due to the dimensional "shifting" that occurred when a person who has 3 dimensions loses a dimension in the Astral).