Alberich wrote:Graybeard wrote:Certainly true for "combat" magic. However, these people aren't fools. It has already been established that mining is important to the economy of Goriel, and that's a dangerous business. A miner that didn't exploit all available technology, including thaumato-technology and maybe also dwarven tech, to meet those dangers would be behaving irresponsibly, and furthermore, would be ceding a competitive advantage to other operations that did use those technologies, particularly since magic seems to be "free" once you know how to use it.
But the talent and skills seem to be rare outside Tsuiraku and the Elven Territories -- and I could see a socially primitive country like this having settled into a "medieval" view of wealth production. Not, "I've got these mines. How can I make them produce more?" but "I control this land and these mines, and it generates this much revenue per year; and if I want more, I need to get control of more land." (By violence, purchase, marriage, or whatever.)
I'm not so sure about that "medieval" view. The reason, simply put, is magic -- magic plus the fact that the Errant World is generally a pretty well-connected place, despite the backwardness of some of its countries. There were two reasons why real-world mining and agriculture were done at the subsistence level in the Middle Ages. One was that that was
sufficient given a rather sparse population and lack of infrastructure to make it beneficial to swap goods with distant lands. The other was that technical knowledge, and engineering state of the art, was insufficient to make advanced technologies widely available. The first of those no longer applies in the Errant World, what with the existence of airships (which presumably have a magical component) and warp gates (which certainly do). The second may well still be true in non-magical technology, but the magical word is definitely getting out. Sarine
remarked once on how quickly Farrel is catching up, a remark precipitated by magical travel. We don't "know" how magically capable the Northern Confederacy is, but given that their capabilities for non-magical weaponry are more advanced than anyone else's (Poe said so once), one wouldn't think they'd be averse to learning magic where it helps them out; they're hardly stuck in the primitivist rut of the main population of Veracia.
Curiously, the situation that comes closer to what you're thinking of may be later, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, rather than medieval times. When the Davy lamp was introduced, to reduce the number of explosions in underground mines, the result was that the number of accidents
increased for some time, because availability of the lamps didn't expand as rapidly as the mining did. Why not? Because the mine owners made the miners
buy their own lamps -- and
Davy lamps weren't available at the company store. Now
that is the kind of perverse behavior that might occur in Goriel. However, miners there don't
need to buy lamps; they just need to know how to use free, inexhaustible magic. So I still don't think the situations are similar.
Alberich wrote:Veracia hasn't been portrayed as a country that uses magical enhancement to "mechanize" its farming or fishing practice, either in the game or in the comic. They're not stupid either, and being more civilized (and at peace for longer) than Goriel, they'd have greater opportunity to exploit their own economic resources. There'd be many obvious ways this could be done, if magical talent were so common. Instead, you've got a priestly class, with a subset of magicians, and the real talent seems to be concentrated around the Patriarch. The human parts of the ES/ER world, as I understand them, are overall magic-poor.
Well, two points. First, we really haven't seen enough of daily life in Veracia to know what the peasant life is like, but at the minimum, Suzie, the whore's daughter who saw through Sarna's illusion, would have been taken by her mother to a "healer" to have her vision "defect" addressed (never mind that it was an extra skill, not a defect), if only they'd had more money. The availability of at least some minor bits of magic there may be greater than we perceive it to be. Second, we already know that there is one locale in the Northern Confederacy -- Santuariel -- that is not magic-poor. (Leah and Riley pointed out that Ianilis' omega-cures were causing problems in town, since it was well known for magical healing that became a trade commodity in dealing with other towns nearby.) Where there is one, there will be more.
On balance, I don't think we can assume Goriel to be magic-poor at all. Clearly there would be limits on how it's used there, similar in concept to the limits in Veracia, but probably quite different in implementation (i.e., who would be allowed to have what skillz). But it would be there, I think.