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r/worldbuilding • … • u/Lapis_Wolf

What would you think if you saw a setting where things like magic and literal divine intervention exists, but normal things explicitly follow real processes and the worldbuilder made details related to how they work when there's no magic involved in something?

For example, you've got mages, wizards, and divine magic, but things not actively touched by magic work like they would in real life. A god can suddenly raise a mountain, but once left a lone, that mountain will be subject to natural erosion and ecosystems adapting and evolving around it. Maybe you meticulously design a spacecraft with real conditions and technical necessities like oxygen generators, material properties for different parts, and water recycling systems, then have a powerful mage raise it far into the atmosphere to save fuel. If you don't use that magic to support the vehicle and its occupants after that point, you have to consider radiation protection, inertia, structural integrity, resource logistics and management, weight, and other things you'd more typically see in hard scifi. Maybe a completely new animal is magically created and released into the world in numbers where the population would be stable, but it starts to adapt, evolve and diverge to survive the environments while the ecosystems and species adapt to or compete with the newcomer like would happen in nature in real life. Would this creative decision be jarring, or would you be interested by any world that included both the presence of magic and realistic processes and conditions for nonmagical things? I have noticed posts going back years saying people are being held back by the desire for realism, meanwhile many still ask about being realistic (including myself, especially earlier when I started sharing my world compared to my later posts asking more about magitech and stuff like that).

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