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We have the gunsligner, inventor, vehicles, firearms and many clockwork items... and I know that P2E is progressively moving along its own timeline.
Are we going to get more technologies and inventions in the coming years? I could see classes getting steampunk-esque archetypes and features, and probably a shift in the population's beliefs, such as "maybe magic is fading out".
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One of the key selling points of Golarion is its modularity as a setting, with the hyper-localized thematic niches making it easy for tables to pick and choose. A lot of people - for reasons strange to me, but they're entitled to them - are vehemently opposed to firearms in fantasy, and reject anything that isn't perfect medieval stasis, and Paizo doesn't want to lose them as customers. Don't expect a railroad to open up in Brevoy anytime soon.
Centering guns and tech (whether clockwork, steampunk, or sci-fi) in places like Alkenstar and Numeria helps keep the aforementioned groups appeased, while giving the folks who eat that stuff up plenty of options. It can proliferate - most navies and pirates want cannons, which even the bitterest old traditionalist can appreciate, and we've seen firearms spread throughout Garund somewhat - but it's a dial, like any other setting element.
Pathfinder works in part because Classic Greg can have a game where CRB ancestries go fight a dragon and rule a castle, my friend can do a game about Southeast Asian wandering exorcists-for-hire, and I can do a game about how the rise of the goddess of artificial intelligence impacts everyday life in the Fantasy Indigenous Americas. That ambiguity and the variety it offers is worth a lot.
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We have the gunsligner, inventor, vehicles, firearms and many clockwork items...
Golarion has had those things since skulls and shackles (maybe even before that?) Like forgotten realms it’s a mishmash setting designed to accommodate multiple product lines / genres. Each region brings with it a particular flavor that usually doesn’t overpower the others. So while more products will likely come out to enhance steampunk-esque characters it’s unlikely to have a broader impact on Golarion unless the marketing team believes steampunk will be more marketable than a flexible fantasy setting.
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Also, technology in Golarion tends to be complicated and require great skill to do much with on a large scale. Vehicles, for example have a “level” and a difficulty to pilot. This means that it will never out pace magic as a means of accomplishing tasks.
Firearms that make swords and bows irrelevant will never happen on Golarion. From manufacturing them, to using them, the competitive advantage they experience on earth will never happen in setting. Technology is not making the average person’s life on Golarion safer or easier than magic or pre-industrial revolution technology, so it really isn’t enabling any kind of massive cultural shifts or revolutions.
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Also, with magic and other supernatural phenomena around, technology isn't quite as likely to rise to the top as the dominant force in the world at large - after all, this is a world where a guy in heavy enough armor who's good enough with a sword can go toe to toe with a gunslinger and wizard alike.
We do know that Alkenstar tech is proliferating a bit more nowadays, and we know of places like the Deadshot Lands in Arcadia or Eihlona in southern Garund where that stuff is also very prevalent, but likely not to the extent that you'll see Cheliax outfit their entire military with muskets.
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There's also been golem-powered "printing presses" in my head canon for a long time now, to help explain the mass proliferation of books of all kinds in these massive fantasy libraries.
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There's also been golem-powered "printing presses" in my head canon for a long time now, to help explain the mass proliferation of books of all kinds in these massive fantasy libraries.
There are indeed printing presses in Golarion, it gets brought up in one of the Web Fictions, the Bard one.
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One of the key selling points of Golarion is its modularity as a setting, with the hyper-localized thematic niches making it easy for tables to pick and choose. A lot of people - for reasons strange to me, but they're entitled to them - are vehemently opposed to firearms in fantasy, and reject anything that isn't perfect medieval stasis, and Paizo doesn't want to lose them as customers. Don't expect a railroad to open up in Brevoy anytime soon.
Centering guns and tech (whether clockwork, steampunk, or sci-fi) in places like Alkenstar and Numeria helps keep the aforementioned groups appeased, while giving the folks who eat that stuff up plenty of options. It can proliferate - most navies and pirates want cannons, which even the bitterest old traditionalist can appreciate, and we've seen firearms spread throughout Garund somewhat - but it's a dial, like any other setting element.
Pathfinder works in part because Classic Greg can have a game where CRB ancestries go fight a dragon and rule a castle, my friend can do a game about Southeast Asian wandering exorcists-for-hire, and I can do a game about how the rise of the goddess of artificial intelligence impacts everyday life in the Fantasy Indigenous Americas. That ambiguity and the variety it offers is worth a lot.
Yes, the PCs from my Iron Gods campaign spend their time after the campaign ended arranging an industrial revolution in Numeria. Ordinarily, this would not matter, but I arrange crossovers between my previous campaigns and my current campaigns. keftiu's avatar android Casandalee visited Nirmathas to interfere in the Ironfang Invasion: How can I remove slavery from Ironfang Invasion? comment #3.
Furthermore, the fantasy genre changes over time. When Dungeons & Dragons was new in 1978, the Middle Earth novels of J.R.R. Tolkien was the most iconic fantasy story. Thus, the purists loved that setting. Steampunk had not been invented yet. That was 44 years ago and we have seen more fantasy stories set in 16th- to 19th-century settings, in addition to urban fantasy in 20th- and 21st-centurey settings. Some people want to roleplay characters from those more modern stories.
Likewise, we have the Realm of the Mammoth Lords for a more primitive setting, too. Golarion is a patchwork world where different countries reflect different eras.
Paizo appears to be developing industrial fantasy settings for Pathfinder. But these new settings are not going to eliminate the old settings.
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The Roman Empire had the potential to undergo industrial revolution, but found that people were much more easier to come by.
Similarly, I feel like magic being near-ubiquitous may prevent said revolution from catching on in a lot of places when it otherwise would.
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Given that magic is still around (but maybe not AS strong) in Starfinder timeline, I don't see "magic fading out" as a thing.
I also don't see Golarion as a whole moving towards industrial revolution (in any time frame of "soon", obviously is happens by the time Starfinder is set), although some places are far more advanced than others it's still a very limited scope that doesn't seem to be rapidly spreading like you expect with an "industrial revolution".
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There's also been golem-powered "printing presses" in my head canon for a long time now, to help explain the mass proliferation of books of all kinds in these massive fantasy libraries.There are indeed printing presses in Golarion, it gets brought up in one of the Web Fictions, the Bard one.
Indeed. They're a level 9 item, published in Gun and Gears, and cost 600 gp.
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The Roman Empire had the potential to undergo industrial revolution, but found that people were much more easier to come by.
Similarly, I feel like magic being near-ubiquitous may prevent said revolution from catching on in a lot of places when it otherwise would.
In Golarion, it doesn't even take magic though. Technology just doesn't work the same way it does on earth. On earth, making the discoveries is usually the hard part. Once a discovery has been made, it spreads quickly and average people can use it. We don't live in a world where people have levels.
On Golarion, technology is inherently complex in a way that requires levels of specialization that require more than just spending x years in school. Some nations have some means of creating enough experts to field a couple of airships, but they will never be able to mass produce the expertise and proficiency to make those technological marvels work better for armies that siege weapons, or giant beasts of war.
We can say it is the influence of magic overall I guess, as that is probably the easiest way to explain why the world itself works so differently, but bullets in Golarion just don't shred armor so much better than a sword that teaching someone how to point a gun is more effective than teaching them how to wield a blade, or shoot a bow.
These things probably seem like semantic squabbles for many people, but for instance, repairing a printing press is very, very difficult in Golarion. It is just as easy to learn how to conjure up a permanent wall of stone with magic as it is to build a printing press. Which of those two things are most people going to set out to learn how to do?
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A lot of people here are making assumptions in both directions between rules and setting/lore.
While the foundation of technology is present in Golorian and thus an industrial or technological revolution could happen. Is that the story that the devs want to tell? Is it one that many people want to play? Will it sell? In lore things work fundamentally similar to how they do in real life so anything is possible. Magic is fairy common as well and as players and gms we can decide how common. However there are many things that limit access to both magic and technology in setting, mostly money and prestige. As players we get to handwave access to lots of things. Bun npcs have to take traditional routes. Sandpoint one of the most well known towns in setting has a population of 2k and has around only 10 named npcs with casting ability.
Jumping to technology Numeria the town of Torch which is one of the only places on the whole planet that Skymetal can be forged doesn't have anyone who can even make tech because most Numerian tech is beyond even current real technology.
The biggest in universe reason stopping/slowing advances is the lack or centralized government and trade. Alkenstar keeps its tech to itself. The technic league hoards the tech in Numeria. Than we have world ending disasters nearly twice a year when is there time to organize to even begin a revolution?
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One of the things about tech is that it propagates when it is the clearly superior answer. If guns are clearly better, then guns will dominate, people will seek firearm tech, the tech will spread, and eventually everyone will be using it.
Well, in Golarion, they're not. The gunslinger with a firearm may be able to compete with the fighter that carries a longbow, but he's not claiming overwhelming advantage... so people mostly don't carry guns. So it goes, up and down the chain. Tech is offering more ways to do things, but it isn't offering clearly better ways to do those things, so no revolution occurs.
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Yeah, the Steampunk stuff is just to support the corners of the setting where that stuff fits. There's sort of an artificial (narrative) barrier between the various meta-regions that exists to ensure that they keep their identity. So in Andoran industrializes, that's going to potentially affect Cheliax, but wouldn't really affect Varisia or Brevoy.
This is weird and artificial, but it's in order to allow people to run whatever kind of game they want in Golarion.
I mean, in my version of Golarion there's a spaceport on Sarusan.
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It's also worth asking what, specifically, we mean by Industrial Revolution. Even the term itself is sometimes disfavoured by historians who de-emphasise the notion that the process of industrialism was really much of a 'revolution' in practice. On top of that, there is quite a lot more to industrialism than simply inventing new technologies, so if all we want to see is steam engines or trains, that is an entirely separate question from whether we want/expect to see societies beginning to industrialise.
In any case, as has been pointed out before I got here, the Inner Sea can generally be compared to Renaissance, while the actual tech level varies from one region to another. In many cases there doesn't always seem to be a large difference between what is possible through technology and what is possible through magic, so there doesn't seem to be much impetus for societies (and more to the point, leaders of those societies) to push for advanced technology over advanced magic.
Not to say that this means nobody wants to advance the sciences in Golarion. Obviously that is also not true. Simply that interest in science and technology is so far only keeping pace with the utility of having a handful of mages and clerics on staff. The main places where it makes sense to focus on technology is either where magic doesn't work very well, or where technology is powerful and readily available. Meanwhile, everywhere else will continue to make use of whatever technology is available to them while the odd inventor tinkers away in their lab coming up with the next big idea which may or may not spark waves in their society, and meanwhile may or may not blow up catastrophically.
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There's also two further things to consider: one, that magic and science are absolutely not separate things in Pathfinder, and two, that "Golarion" doesn't make much sense to be talked about as a collective whole.
On the first point, the two disciplines have a ton of overlap. Lirgen launched a space exploration mission using magic to build their craft. A magical airship appears in one of the 2e Adventure Paths, presented as a marvel of engineering. Rahadoum trains alchemists, inventors, psychics, surgeons, and wizards in their esteemed academies. Ancient fey presented the native Arcadians with their first firearms, those designs having been innovated upon in the millennia since. Unless driven by incredibly unique circumstances (i.e. Alkenstar being in a place of wild/dead magic), there's really no real reason to see a divide between the magical and the scientific.
As for the latter - Golarion is simply too damn big, and is broken up into implausible hyper-local niches for gameplay reasons. Irrisen has technology from 1920s Earth next door the faux-Neolithic Realm of the Mammoth, itself a short hop away from supertech Numeria, and yet each has retained its own separate tech levels. Firearms do seem to have proliferated across the northern half of Garund, and yet most Mwangi antagonists are still coming in with swords and claws. Port Valen's Ulfen live like classic vikings while the city of Segada has massive outdoor elevators. I wouldn't expect too many advancements to ever hit the entire setting, to preserve that modularity for gameplay reasons.
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Alkenstar keeps its tech to itself. The technic league hoards the tech in Numeria.
Small nitpick, but both of these are wrong. Alkenstar enjoys a brisk trade in exporting firearms; there's caps on it to try and keep their monopoly secure, but business is booming. Guns & Gears goes into good detail about this, especially in how they're arming Vidrian's navy with cannons, and I think the Lost Omens World Guide had cool art of Golden Road caravan guards with jezails. The Gunworks keeps busy.
The Technic League is dead and broken, crushed by the events of Iron Gods - assuming we sync up the passing of time IRL and in-setting, that's just shy of eight years ago. Kevoth-Kul rules the country without them now, but I don't think he has a firm enough grasp on the 'state' (in as much as Numeria has such a thing) to stop technology from getting out. The World Guide presents the land's technological wealth being scattered across a number of independent feuding warlords, any of whom I bet you could bribe with fine Ustalavic coin to steal some choice pieces.
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I mean, Alkenstar is capable of producing far more arms and ordinance than they are able to put to use for themselves. If they were going to hoard it for themselves, the gunworks would go dark from time to time, but it does not.
They keep the best, most dangerous stuff for themselves or for special orders from trusted partners, but Alkenstar needs trade to survive.
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I guess the best answer is that it will happen eventually, given Starfinder's setting. Whether it happens NOW may be a fine question (or quest!) for a home campaign. And don't forget that even in Starfinder there's a feeling of 'which works better for the task, magic or tech'.
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I guess the best answer is that it will happen eventually, given Starfinder's setting. Whether it happens NOW may be a fine question (or quest!) for a home campaign. And don't forget that even in Starfinder there's a feeling of 'which works better for the task, magic or tech'.
Starfinder and Pathfinder have already diverged, timeline-wise; Nocticula is still her old self in SF.
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I guess the best answer is that it will happen eventually, given Starfinder's setting. Whether it happens NOW may be a fine question (or quest!) for a home campaign. And don't forget that even in Starfinder there's a feeling of 'which works better for the task, magic or tech'.Starfinder and Pathfinder have already diverged, timeline-wise; Nocticula is still her old self in SF.
Paizo was explicit in saying Starfinder canon would have zero impact on PF canon, so while we can speculate re: Pathfinder morphing into Starfinder, SF canon doesn't qualify as evidence.
The Nocticula example demonstrates this, and that the inverse might be true as well, PF changes don't ripple into SF. Since the settings both serve the highest purpose as RPG platforms, canon conformity matters little compared to giving us whatever our current narrative needs, as with say comic books.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yep. But don't have a continuity between games looks like lazy and boring. I know that can do a tremendous work to make both lore linked but without it both scenarios loses much of its greatness.
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As long as Starfinder doesn't claim things of pathfinder deities that isn't true in pathfinder, its all fine :D
Like, all that it matters is that starfinder is plausible as alternate future to pathfinder, not that things can't happen in pathfinder because it didn't happen in starfinder. So it matters that deities are same characters in both timelines pre start of Gab, but in starfinder timeline something might have happened in future to change them (or in case of Nocticula assuming they don't retcon that, she didn't succeed at redemption yet because things happened bit differently during AP portion of Gab)
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"I don't know why it happens, but everytime we develop some new weapon that looked incredibly promising, it ends up being balanced with already existing options. It's frustrating, but also reassuring I guess..."
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"I don't know why it happens, but everytime we develop some new weapon that looked incredibly promising, it ends up being balanced with already existing options. It's frustrating, but also reassuring I guess..."
It may be that one of the things that happens along the way is that there's a change of management in the divine realm and someone takes the limiters off.
Like, say, some inventor from Alkenstar makes the trip, passes the test of the Starstone, and starts pushing.
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Mechanically we know that the options have to be balanced around be accessible to players. If it's not balanced then either you can't allow players to have it, in which case you really shouldn't bother publishing it or you have to restrict it via rarity which some people ignore (and have an imbalanced game) or you enforce the rarity and no one can access it (and so it's kind of wasted space).
You're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
While I hated guns targeting touch AC in PF1 (because so many high level monsters were built with high natural armor and had virtually nothing for touch AC) in PF2 I look at guns with great...apathy/disappointment.
Aside from role play reasons, nothing jumps out to me as a reason to actively pursue guns over a short/long bow.
Not saying I have a solution to this problem. But new options need to be balanced for players, but it also creates an in universe problem of "why bother" when the new options aren't any better than the old options.
In our universe, guns took over because bows took a lot of effort to train to be good with. Whereas you could give anyone a couple days training with a gun and have them be sufficiently good. The gun was a successor to the crossbow. Crossbow were fielded because they didn't require the training bows did. Guns were a better crossbow.
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This kind of thing not only does not exist in the Inner Sea region or Golarion at large (with possible exceptions being whatever Formian colonies might exist in insular pockets) it is something that is actively being avoided at all costs by the developers and authors of the system.
One could argue that you could simply use Magic to replace the need for the insane amount of manpower and to improve the raw materials + shipping + processing > refinement + manufacturing that is needed but you're still missing the inherently capitalistic and predatory operators who would have to wealth and power to make this happen, again another thing that the setting avoids like the plague in all cases except for the largest and most powerful nations that are EXPLICITLY E-V-I-L and with whom other nearby nations would almost certainly unify against to dash against the rocks if they developed such a powerhouse industry that would certainly crush their own economies if left unchecked.
In short, industrialization on a VERY minor, to the point where it is practically negligible, does and can exist but the kind of revolution that humanity underwent over the last 300 years is not likely to occur unless one (or a coalition of multiple) nation with imperialist goals becomes overwhelmingly dominant while their peers and neighbors either submit or choose to look the other way for the purpose of maintaining their own autonomy/reign/sovereignty and/or personal profit.
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Not to mention Starfinder's and Pathfinder's lores being directly tied together would turn Starfinder into a prophesy machine for Pathfinder, which goes against the main conceit of the Age of Lost Omens.
Huh. There's a thought. Starfinder used to be the fate that was in store for the Pathfinder Universe... before Aroden's return was somehow thwarted, shattering that link to the future.
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So Gab is result of time paradox of Aroden having died and thus it being logically impossible for him to raise starstone into space station? ;D
Dark Truth: The Gap happened basically 10 minutes into the future relative the Pathfinder timeline, but in this timeline Aroden actually did return 100 years ago, not dying. The repercussions of this event were actually so cataclysmic that his last act as god of humanity was to raise the Starstone to the new space station they were building right before the gods collectively vanished the planet.
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Not to mention Starfinder's and Pathfinder's lores being directly tied together would turn Starfinder into a prophesy machine for Pathfinder, which goes against the main conceit of the Age of Lost Omens.
That conceit is pretty essential for an RPG where dice rolls can thwart destiny.
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Also while I'm here, I was meaning to come back to this thread with something I'd just found and talk a bit more about it, but I forgot on my day off and now I'm back to work in an hour...
Right after viewing this thread last week I came across a blog post about why Rome never underwent any kind of Industrial Revolution, which I think could potentially be informative or instructive to analysing fantasy worlds for signs of industrialization.
Why No Roman Industrial Revolution
It is a bit of a longer read, and it's much more applicable to Earth history, not Golarion history, but fellow history and spec fic nerds might be enticed. For those who don't have time or inclination I can summarize lightly:
First thing to get out of the way, even though it's been said many times, many ways: Golarion is a fantasy world, it's not beholden to real-world economic factors. I think this bears re-stating because a lot of the factors which come up in the blog post are unknowable from our perspective because fantasy economics tends to be one of those details that matters less than detailing the mechanics of swords and fireballs. It just doesn't matter enough to the playing of the game to be worth the pedantry.
That said, if you're still with me the blog post gets down to the business of defining its terms and historical schools of thought, then comes out with the fact that we've only ever seen one example of Industrial Revolution (Britain) happening on its own (without influence from a working example), so it's hard to draw meaningful guidelines from such a small sample size.
Nevertheless, the thesis can be boiled down to the idea that a series of incredibly specific factors had to fall into place for Britain to industrialise, including but not limited to:
- Nation had demand for coal b/c its wood reserves were depleting
- High demand for coal triggers a need to pump water out of coal mines which isn't just adding more muscle power.
- Invention of the flying shuttle created demand for a machine which could spin threads faster
- New spinning machine meets up with the upgraded steam engine which has been iterated on thanks to its extensive use in coal mines
- All this happens in a country which has an extensive empire to sell mass-produced texiles to while drawing up their raw resources.
Essentially, Rome was a highly efficient agrarian economy, which despite looking to us like it was on the cusp of taking off just by virtue of its high production, was actually no where near the specific set of conditions which caused Britain to make the jump from mostly muscle-and-plant-based to mostly coal-based production.
TL;DR I think the biggest factor in play here is that on Earth, when industrialisation kicked off, it wasn't because the steam engine was invented and technology marched foward, it was because the steam engine was invented at a time and place when it was economically viable to use and improve upon. The steam engine by itself is nothing without some reason to improve upon its design. On the other hand, in Golarion when somebody invents something or wants to improve upon its design to the point where it suddenly becomes useful or efficient, they only have to just do that because having cool steam and clockwork based technology is the goal in and of itself.
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** spoiler omitted **
THIIIIIIIIS. Look at the giant piles of bison skulls from American history and tell me Golarion needs a railroad. I admit, I've given this a lot of thought, and I cannot extricate the reality from the fantasy here. Some things cannot be simulated in game, it's just not possible.
Maybe in the Darklands...but that's about it.
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The only thing in Golarion that has really changed in recent years is the failure of true prophecy. Did true prophecy hold back technology in any way? That would be the most promising lead for a possible industrial revolution.
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TL;DR I think the biggest factor in play here is that on Earth, when industrialisation kicked off, it wasn't because the steam engine was invented and technology marched foward, it was because the steam engine was invented at a time and place when it was economically viable to use and improve upon. The steam engine by itself is nothing without some reason to improve upon its design. On the other hand, in Golarion when somebody invents something or wants to improve upon its design to the point where it suddenly becomes useful or efficient, they only have to just do that because having cool steam and clockwork based technology is the goal in and of itself.
So... if there isn't much of a commercial use, they don't bother? That... would make sense.
I can see a war or conquest pushing technology though :S
BTW, I can see magic and tech coexisting, like in Starfinder, but given the new material, I was curious whether the setting itself is "moving along" the times :P
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Technically there was an industrial revolution in Golarion so if it can happen once it can probably happen again. Now mind you that one looked absolutely nothing like ours but hey you had airplanes, public transportation, and other pieces of powerful technology.
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I mean, Azlant was like a Star Trek level civilization but they also had magic, so the question is less "what can be built?" and more "what can be rebuilt 10,000 years after the Apocalypse?"
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We also don't know exactly how much of Azlant's advanced stuff was magically bolstered versus purely "technologically" driven. So while stuff may have been mass produced, it wasn't necessarily driven by:
1) moving from hand production to machine production
2) new chemical and iron production which facilitated these machines
3) the use of steam and other power sources to power machines
The result of these things was an unprecedented increase in the amount of goods produced, which also led to a rise in population as scarcity had been reduced.
The same thing could be accomplished solely by magic.
Heck, prior to PF2 people would argue that you could have tons of magic powered things, or simply magically make food, water, and goods.
Anyways, none of that is why Golarion isn't entering an industrial revolution.
The real reason is, narratively that would be a very different setting than the one Paizo wants to present. At least for the whole of Golarion. You might have isolated countries that are on the cusp, I could see Alkenstar potentially being on the edge. But I doubt Paizo wants to throw all of the setting into the Industrial revolution because it would be a substantial change to the overall setting.
Maybe that can be a thing for PF3, 10 years from now we can have a steam punk PF3 setting.
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We also don't know exactly how much of Azlant's advanced stuff was magically bolstered versus purely "technologically" driven.
For the purposes of talking about the overall effect on the setting, I don't think it necessarily matters what the split is. Magically-driven industrialization is still industrialization (and still beyond the scope of the stories Paizo wants to tell).
TBH the lack of magical industrialization probably stands out even more, since there are arguments for why technology hasn't proliferated, but magic being ubiquitous is part of the setting.
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We also don't know exactly how much of Azlant's advanced stuff was magically bolstered versus purely "technologically" driven.For the purposes of talking about the overall effect on the setting, I don't think it necessarily matters what the split is. Magically-driven industrialization is still industrialization (and still beyond the scope of the stories Paizo wants to tell).
TBH the lack of magical industrialization probably stands out even more, since there are arguments for why technology hasn't proliferated, but magic being ubiquitous is part of the setting.
Agreed. With this high magic setting it's hard to explain why there isn't a greater level of industrialization than we see, except that it's not the story Paizo wants to tell.
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The Jistka Imperium's artificers were advanced enough to cram human souls into immortal mechanical bodies 7,000 years ago. An innovation like that is tech and magic both, and what science looks like pretty much everywhere but the Mana Wastes.
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It may also depend on how common magic actually is. As far as I know, anyone with a PC class is relatively rare by definition, and that includes the casters. Have they ever said how common casters are? (Or even how common fighters and barbarians are versus some humanoid who grabs a sword?)
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It may also depend on how common magic actually is. As far as I know, anyone with a PC class is relatively rare by definition, and that includes the casters. Have they ever said how common casters are? (Or even how common fighters and barbarians are versus some humanoid who grabs a sword?)
Estimations of the in universe writer of Travel Guide is thus:
About one in every fifth person is capable of some sort of magic (such as innate spells common to their ancestry or having learned couple cantrips and one useful spell to their lives and nothing else) while about one in twenty is actively practicing magic as full spellcaster (so stuff like wizards and sorcerer who put effort to master their abilities) while in theory everyone could be wizard/druid/cleric/etc if they have time/teacher/mindset to do so.
(by same estimation, in locations with extremely high amount of magic such as Nex and Thassilon, about half of people are capable of some sort of magic and about third have developed it to a craft)
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while about one in twenty is actively practising magic as full spellcaster (so stuff like wizards and sorcerer who put effort to master their abilities)
I cannot believe how close my random mouthfeel guessing came to an official answer! Most pleased to have this estimate to use.
(for what it's worth, my nonsense methodology: I guessed back in 1e that maybe 1 in 10 people had character class levels (vs. NPC levels) and roughly half the classes published were spellcasters, arriving at roughly 1/20 casters, 1/20 class-level martials, and the remaining 9/10 NPC commoners, warriors, and aristocrats)