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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.
What are you talking about???? Paizo already did an AP featuring magically driven industrialization being a driving factor of the antagonist.
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It seems like a lot of people are mistaking "impressively advanced but highly localized development of technology" for what an industrial revolution really IS which is that the developments in technology are made and the technology shared/stolen/used not only by their trade partners but pretty much literally every nation and group of people who have resources of value to trade for it.
An industrial revolution is something that, as the term suggests, completely revolutionizes how nearly MANY/ALL cultures and nations function on even the most basic level in terms of how X or Y industry works, and as time goes on that technology is developed and tweaked to completely upend even completely unrelated industries.
Lots of you talk about the Azlant and their tech but the point is moot because they were insular, elitist, war-like, and had absolutely NO interest in allowing their wealth and knowledge to spread beyond their grasp therefore no industrial revolution took place as they guarded their secrets, so well in fact, that some even posit that they sacrificed EVERYTHING and possibly even contributed to the death of Aroden as a means to retain it for themselves alone even as the majority of their society had already fallen.
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It seems like a lot of people are mistaking "impressively advanced but highly localized development of technology" for what an industrial revolution really IS
Not for a lack of attempts to clarify, though I understand when then length of my posts is sometimes a sufficient deterrent against their ever being read ;D
Regardless, I wanted to address this because the definition you just used seems to differ in than the one I have been finding:
... which is that the developments in technology are made and the technology shared/stolen/used not only by their trade partners but pretty much literally every nation and group of people who have resources of value to trade for it. An industrial revolution is something that, as the term suggests, completely revolutionizes how nearly MANY/ALL cultures and nations function on even the most basic level in terms of how X or Y industry worksThe first key is understanding that the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production. ... The industrial revolution was about accessing entirely new sources of energy for broad use in the economy, thus drastically increasing the amount of power available for human use. The industrial revolution thus represents not merely a change in quantity, but a change in kind from what we might call an ‘organic’ economy to a ‘mineral’ economy.
I should say that I don't necessarily dispute whether your definition is correct (after all, every field has to define certain terms in different ways, sometimes without consensus!), but rather felt it was worth consideration which of the no doubt several competing conceptions of the industrial revolution applied most accurately to the topic at hand.
(Then again, it seems many are in agreement that the most functional answer for these purposes has already been given in the form of the narrative demands of the world, so it may be well past moot already to redefine what kind of industry we are trying to revolutionize with what kind of production methods (magical or mineral, as it were))
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For what it's worth, I could readily see Azlant growing into a magically-industrialized society even in the face of the need to exploit other lands for raw resources up to the point of explicit evil. I would say they clearly had the magical means of production to pivot from organic economy; the only question for me is whether they were extracting resource from others and selling them the final product (which it doesn't appear they were, then again they had a colony on another planet they easily could have used for this purpose). On the other hand, like Rome they possibly were simply a very high-efficiency agrarian economy with no market pressures to develop the magical techniques to make the jump from muscle-and-stem organic production to magical production.
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As the saying goes. Sufficiently advance magic is indistinguishable from science. Case and point Technomancy.
When it comes to the Inverse Third Law, I believe the descriptor usually changes to "analysed" but you are right, that is pretty well what's going on here.
I maintain in a civilization where magic is a thing, technology would remain stagnant, because it wouldn't be needed. Magic in essence would be technology. Say some words, consume some components, make a few gestures and reality changes a bit.
I don't mean to be pedantic for the sake of pedantry itself, but I have to raise an objection here. You are manifestly right, but I don't think it is accurate to say that technology would remain stagnant--as you say, magic would be the technology of such a society, and it would most certainly continue to advance as theurgists and magicians developed new and better ways to cast spells.
(At least so long as we're talking about a setting where magic does useful things and can be learned by a sufficient percentage of the population such that actually wielding it doesn't become the domain of elites who jealously guard their power as their right to rule)
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I think it is important to focus on power and accessibility to power, and how a game world where the kind of power differentials that exist in the real world would just not make for a very interesting setting.
It is why everything has to be balanced in such a way that the character has to make the accomplishments to achieve power, not their culture or their family or their nation. Certain concessions of being a collaborate game limit how much power one character can have over their peers and how readily power cans be stolen, gifted or transferred. PCs don’t operate with the same rules as NPCs, but as a creative game designer, you don’t really want to using that as your default explanation for literally everything about how the world works.
It works pretty well for power to be something difficult to transfer and generally slow to accumulate, so that PCs get to uniquely special in the world for being able to accumulate power at an accelerated rate
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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)
I wonder what percentage of those capable of spellcasting move beyond first level, and how many are non-adventurer types. We know that skills can be increased just by doing (Legendary Chefs, Master Craftsmen). Can proficiency in spellcasting be improved in a similar way, without "adventuring"?
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I wonder what percentage of those capable of spellcasting move beyond first level, and how many are non-adventurer types. We know that skills can be increased just by doing (Legendary Chefs, Master Craftsmen). Can proficiency in spellcasting be improved in a similar way, without "adventuring"?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)
Rake in the storyline, social, and downtime XP. I know it's not as explicit as in another game system, but I can imagine that there is a downtime activity of 'grind XP' or something like that which is slow and steady but you can still get somewhere with it. Of course, why do that when you can find a forgotten spellbook in some runelord lieutenant's library ...
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This is now reminding me of Dave the Commoner.
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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.
Fwiw, speaking as someone who actively disdains and avoids the "theme park/kitchen sink" design of PF, there is actually a large amount of new lore concerning industrialization and tech in books like Guns and Gears, as well as a focus on other worlds as well.
Personally, my Golarion looks different since the whole point of RPGs is to allow for creativity.
Ps: I still dislike Starfinder just for feeling out of place and bland.
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Fwiw, speaking as someone who actively disdains and avoids the "theme park/kitchen sink" design of PF, there is actually a large amount of new lore concerning industrialization and tech in books like Guns and Gears, as well as a focus on other worlds as well.
Pretty much everything in my post was out of 2e sources, largely Guns & Gears :p
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This might be a bit of a tangent but it is fascinating to me how things may differ from person to person.
The idea that levels or the balance to weapons is canon to lore and not abstractions for gameplay purposes is something that just doesn't come to my mind. But I also don't really consider strictly defined classes to be a thing in-setting either. Both between eratta and edition changes, rules elements change so often that trying to come up with in lore reasons for why things are different just doesn't make sense to my mind?
As for an industrial revolution? I don't really see a universal one happening, one can argue some kind of ones has started in specific places. But as long as the developers and storytellers want the world to be specific way that won't really happen, at least not broadly.