For those unfamiliar with the term, "medieval stasis" is a narrative "rule" that both the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings franchises follow to the letter.
The rule states that in any world where magic exists, the highest level of technological development is that of the Middle Ages because magic eliminates the need for technology.
In one of my games, I wanted to break this convention by introducing the concept of "techno-magic." It was simple, and I wonder why no one else does it.
That's not a rule. It's a narrative device.
If you tell a story that spans a long period of time, you might invoke an excuse why the people in your story did not have an industrial revolution. And for that it is basically not needed at all, because you only show a certain point of time in the story. In other words, the setting might feature an industrial revolution in the future. Our own world does feature very long statis periods where nothing much happened. This is nothing that needs explaining.
Also neither LotR nor HP did bring that excuse.
The magic users in the world of Harry Potter exist parallel to regular human history and tech advancement. The tech advencements are happening. And some of those human inventions are used by magic users. Like bureaucracy. Writing. Even cars and houses. Or iconically: trains. And the excuse why they do not use more, is cultural contempt for human things.
And the people in LotR just did not use everyday magic to solve their mundane problems. Mostly because they just have no magic. Magic is not a trade to be learned there. Gandalf is not a scholar, he is basically an arch angle. The stasis there is more a cultural thing and not a technology question. No great changes in kingdom borders happened over thousands of years. Then again they do have those elves that live those thousands of years. "I was there 3000 years ago" and all that . Even human races that live a really long time. Aragorn got over 200 and the dwarves also usually have live spans of centuries. But that is also just serving as excuses for the stasis.
I wonder why no one else does it
This is done in all shapes and forms. A popular one is shifiting the industrial revolution a bit and having tech work like magic. All of Steampunk works like that. And if you want to go further, you can even have Clockwork tech.
For games, they usually just do not build a complete world. They focus on some aspects.
But even in a magical fantasy setting, you might see an "engineer", that builds pseudo magical effects with apparatus and chemicals.
For true world builing one should consider the effects on a society. How limited is magic. And what can people do with it. How costly is it. If you have to sacrifice a goat every time you want to heat up a kettle of water with your fire magic, that's not gonna happen. And if every human can spark a fire by snipping a finger, that society probably never invented flint and steel, let alone a lighter.
And I am not sure what you mean by techno magic. There is science fiction settings with magic, Even psionic abilities can be considered magic and often appear in sf stories. And one will find examples how those will interact. I am currently thinking about super hero genre. What those heros do is basically magic by another name. Wolverine has future tech implanted into his bones, otherwise he would just be a regular dude that's hard to kill and he has some retractable bone knives. Or that telepath that went into this huge contraption to boost his telepathic powers. That's what I would call a combination of magic ability and tech.
But I guess you are more interested in the world building aspects of societies. How tech and magic interact, when one exists and the other gets introduced. Or how they evolved together. If you introduce tech to a magic world, it is suddenly the mundane people wielding powers that previously only magic users could harness. Like throwing fire balls.
Also, Shadowrun set in an alternate future in which cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures co-exist
I think a number of old RPGs have some amount of advanced tech mixed in with magic (the Final Fantasy series and Chrono Trigger immediately come to mind here).
My own RPG that I’ve been working on has a variant of this that I like, where technological progress is somewhat ‘uneven’ across the globe due to typical historical limitations on travel. For instance. gunpowder-based tech is perfectly common in some areas, still regarded as a bit of an awkward novelty in others where the tech hasn’t fully cemented itself, and completely foreign to countries that don’t interact with those parts of the world.
There are works that pretty much do that. Perhaps is not a mainstream stuff because that (medieval-like settings) are the most common conception for fantasy and magic. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Let me share some comics I know do that do what you may mean.
Saga: Space opera / Star wars-like setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_(comics)#Censorship
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/saga
Mythed Up. Real world like scenarios / slice of life (kinda) story.
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/mythed-up/list?title_no=814884
Cowboys and Dragons: A fantasy western. Yeeehaa! :-P
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/cowboys-dragons-a-fantasy-western/list?title_...
Wherever you’re getting your info, it’s not a good source.
Rowling featured automobiles, trains, and modern residences in a folklore-based series full of slave economics and discrimination against Muggles. Regular tech was used to show off how wonderful (mild sarcasm from me here) child endangerment and the brutal labor of a slave class is. The books were written in a city known for its Medieval architecture when home computers and cell phones were generally unavailable to kids and young adults. Being able to message someone or see their face long-distance in real time seemed like magic.
The real-world setting already feels different today to how it did then. But that’s an Urban Fantasy series set in modern times showing modern technology. Certainly not Medieval. It’s obvious in the art and adaptations that the students typically aren’t dressed in Medieval clothes.
As for the other example: Tolkien set his Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth in prehistory, thousands of years before the Middle Ages / Medieval period.
Our real world Middle Ages had robots, computers, skyscrapers, innovative fabrics, and medicinal studies in addition to the remnants of earlier “magic”, or spiritual practices that today’s religions and fantasy fiction pull from. They were “Dark Ages” because of how much oral traditions and long-term records were lost.
Ancient times had technology today’s peoples still trying to relearn. That includes some type of computing, energy storage, and impressive feats of manufacturing and construction that reshaped skylines, shorelines, and our bodies.
One of the reasons I like when classic fantasy and science fiction tropes are mixed, which I’ve seen done since the origins of the genre, really, is it seems more honest about how humans do things.
Many Fantasy writers deliberately simplify as much as they can. There’s a reason the supposedly complicated politics in epics tend to be built on stereotypes. But that’s not the only method already in use.
By the way, much of the history of real-world tech before the Industrial Age won’t likely pop up in chatbots that were built from badly scraped datasets. That’s because what’s been filtered out and manually screened. Just like in the Industrial Age, the best known makers and users are subjects in feminism and Queer Theory studies. Those records are disappearing fast because of destructive political situations, but it’s where to look if you feel like digging into history for inspiration.
To A Fals Fiction...
“Medieval stasis” doesn't refer to the Middle Ages in a literal sense, but rather to the technology used during that era... We all know that Harry Potter is set in the present day, but almost none of the technological elements used by wizards go beyond medieval levels; it's clearly a series that adheres to medieval stasis, and the same goes for The Lord of the Rings.
By “breaking medieval stasis,” I mean, for example, that the wizards in the Harry Potter series might discover how a Muggle computer works and create a device that casts 20,000 spells per second. As we all know, nothing of that nature actually happened in the series.
Post Data: It's incredibly annoying to have to respond to you like this just because you're still blocking me over some stupid argument that I don't even remember in detail anymore...
Please unblock me; if you don't, it would be pretty childish.
The stasis is more about stagnation, not about tech level. But not having a changing tech level will be a part of the statis. The wizards already adopted trains. It's been barely 200 years since we had steam power pulled engines. Maybe in 50 years they adopt eReaders for teaching spells.
Maybe you are not seeking to break the stasis, but to combine tech and magic. You might want to dig into Shadowrun for a setting that explores this concept. They do have magic and future tech, and people there would very much like to combine those two. But in game rules that is very hard to do for a lot of reasons.
Their excuse for the "statis" if you wanna call it that, is the magic attribute of the user. Tech can't have that. So tech cannot do magic. And if you install cyberware into a magic user, that magic user is diminished and can not use magic as good as before. Affecting the real world is also hindered by how artificial a target object is. So enchanting a stone is easy. Enchanting a stone that has been made into a silicon microchip is super hard.
They later introduced some type of tech mage, that would be able to affect tech and the "internet" directly.
Other types of mingling would be a scholar mage using an electronic magic book, instead of a written one. Or to fight super natural beings, that cannot be harmed by mundane weapons, they might fill "magic" bacteria into a projectile and launch it with a modern weapon. Line of sight for spells is also an issue, that can be solved with tech.
That concept of magic is only in living things, would actually be a major issue in most settings, where you want to combine tech and magic. If you allow tech to do magic, that begs the question why humans can do it at all. It borders on science fiction. There the tech does the "magic".
