Economical Magic

The Blacksteel Press Star Chamber had several meetings over the last few weeks and one of the topics that came up was how enough magic can really wreck the economy as we think we know it.

Thanks to our old friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Most fantasy worlds are effectively some level of analog to the middle ages in Europe.  That means, in short, a very agrarian economy dependent on plentiful human and animal labor to get things done, and not all that many clever mechanical or scientific advantages (at least until you move along into the later part of the period).  Having a wizard who invents a spell to harvest all the wheat in a single casting would be pretty disruptive to that economy.

For our purposes, we limit how common magic is, and the areas where it is applied.  In A Songbird’s Tale, for example, we meet very few casters of any type, and the vast majority of them are based out of a major settlement.  Most of their magical activity is focused on healing, with a little bit in item creation, but you don’t see Joe Wizard hanging around the sawmill using his thamaturgical skills to split logs.  That work is done the old fashioned way.  In the Neversleep Scrolls, there is quite a bit more magical activity; but Arathes is a very large and wealthy city and there are a lot of spellcasters involved in the day-to-day of that place (even though they’re not supposed to be using major magic inside city limits).  Dueling Wizards has several wizards (it’s right there in the name) but I can’t think of a single public service activity any of them performs over the course of the story.

That said, we do have a pretty healthy proliferation of magical stuff - trinkets, potions, and items that have magical effects (the most in Arathes, naturally).  We’ve kind of made the assumption in worldbuilding that a lot of people who are capable of mastering the arcane arts settle down someplace quiet and safe and make stuff to sell to people who are going to go out and do something dangerous.  There aren’t all that many of the wise and learned who want to go see the business end of a giant’s club all that closely.  They are wise and learned, after all.

All these efforts at limiting the impact of the arcane are intended to keep the world recognizable; otherwise we’d have to spend all kinds of story space explaining why nobody has a job anymore (the Wizard Gusathamus made a spell that picks the grapes *and* turns them right into wine).  The point of the stories is to engage the reader with a fun fantasy tale that’s about an interesting crisis or conflict, not bore them to tears with a treatise on the economic impact of stonemasonry spells on the building habits of northern Aruthien.

If that’s really a tantalizing tale that holds audiences in thrall … somebody let me know, all right?