Arcane
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
90 points (95.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
40828 readers
1096 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sure. Maybe the advanced tech is powered by magic, maybe the "magic" is just lost advanced technology.
Shadowrun… yeah it works
Edit: I just noticed somebody else mentioned shadowrun aswell, well: I second that.
You are going after two different nerd groups, so if you are able to keep them both happy... sure
I always liked the Dresden Files take on technology and magic. It's not that they can't exist in the same universe, it's that magic causes absolute haywire with circuitry. So you can use technology, or you can use magic, but not both.
Definitely not. I give no reason.
This was super common in the 1960s and 70s when hippies where the ones writing sci fi and the thought was that technological advancement would also come along with spiritual advancement to the point of supernatural powers. Star Wars, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others freely blend the supernatural with the technological. Sure it's not D&D magic with fireballs and shit but it's still magic. Further, if you want to look at a modern IP with this vibe look at World of Warcraft, where there are aliens from space with spaceships and shit with one of the most stereotypical fantasy settings you can imagine.
In Attack on Titan, magic (titan powers) had historically an edge over humanity, but the story is in part about how Humanity's technology has advanced to almost surpass those magical powers and shift the power balance.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld the wizards of the Unseen University built a possibly sentient supercomputer out of an ant farm (much faster and more powerful than previous druid-built computers based on standing stones, which were mostly limited to calendar calculations and required regular human sacrifices).
The Agathean Empire at the edge of the disc has little boxes with little imps inside which can paint a picture of what you point the box at in mere seconds.
Later, some Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs trained imps to paint even faster on highly flammable nitrocellulose reels and, moving them very fast and lighting them from behind with excited salamanders, invented moving pictures (and promptly accidentally almost let the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions enter the disc).
Even later, some other Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs created a continent-spanning network of semaphore telegraphs, even managing to send pictures through it.
All while some Dwarves in Ankh-Morpork invented movable type, while getting in trouble with the wizards, who're well aware that you can't use that to print magic books, for the type will remember...
And, all along, deep under their mountains, the Überwaldian dwarves have been digging up and using ancient Devices to power whole cities...
Yes. It's worked very well in the recent Zelda games
Absolutely, there are lots of examples, but the first that comes to mind is Warhammer 40k, they have super advanced technology and magic coexisting and sometimes intermingling.
Like Star Wars?
Dune as well.
Warhammer 40k
Yeah, there are a lot of examples out there.
Star ocean, some final Fantasy, psychics in starship troopers
Sort of dr who? At least the time lords regenerating
Tbf, in Dune all the "magic-y" bits get "scientific" explanations. I suppose you could argue the same with Star Wars and midichlorians.
Most magic books have a magic system that seems to be backed up by sciencey like explanations for their universe.
I can only think of a few that don't, like Harry Potter.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Wizards and spaceships? It'll never work.
Spelljammer was a late 80s cocaine-fueled fever dream.
load more comments
(9 replies)
I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it's FICTION.
Literally ANYTHING works if its written well enough...
Absolutely. Read the nightlord series, just skip through the first half of book one, it's the first thing the author ever wrote and could have used better editing for sure. High tech kicks in at book 3
MCU does a good job. Iron Man is supposed to be science based, and Thor is a Norse god.
I think a better example than Thor would be Dr. Strange. Thor is just an alien, and his people have advanced technology, not actually magic.
Dr. Strange literally uses magic magic.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
— Pratchett, maybe..?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-Arthur C Clarke
Techomages from Babylon 5 come to mind.
"I do think there are some things we don't understand. If we'd be back in time a thousand years, trying to explain this place to people, they could only accept it in terms of magic."
"Then perhaps it is magic. The magic of the human heart, focused and made manifest by technology. Every day you here create greater miracles than a burning bush."
And then...
"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ and we know many things."
I love B5 so much.
I think you inevitably face the whole “magic IS advanced technology” thing. If you actually want them to be different things, you have to have some answer to this.
I think the MCU has done a good job with it, but I'd like to see a non-superhero version of it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yes. Do a time travel story and new tech will be seen as miraculous magic by those pesky Elizabethans.
It did in Final Fantasy VI with its Magitek
Most Final Fantasy games mix sci-fi and magic. Only the specifics of the lore around how it works changes with each FF universe.
We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.
I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.
A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.
Super advanced technology is magic. Hell, regular advanced technology is magic. Just run with it.
You know what, basically any SCP will have varying levels of scifi and fantasy tropes, or sometimes none at all. Bottom line with SCPs is that anything is possible.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/68872/dungeon-planet-the-healer-always-leaves-alive
Found that little gem a few weeks ago and I believe it fits your ask pretty well 1:1
Honestly almost as good as my other favorite the past few years, https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive, but the latter seems to be more active than the former.
Artemis Fowl is a classic example of this. The fantasy world of fairies relies on super advanced technology in their world.
The second Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson gets close. It's a setting where magic meets wild west tech, including guns, cars, and electricity.
I've heard that his next trilogy in the setting will have more of an 1980s tech level.
A couple of Sanderson's short stories touch on space ships, computers, and magic.
EDIT: I didn't answer the question. Yes, I think it can work. I'm also a huge fan of Brian McClellan's Powder Mage books. This mixes musket level tech and industrialization with magic.
The Sunlit Man is even more tech combined with magic. Read that one yet?
What other books do you like in that genre? I loved Mistborn/Cosmere realm and Powder Mage series.
The Sunlit Man was so good. I love books that have fast pacing right from the start, and trying to figure out how the world worked was so much fun.
view more: next ›