Reed Richards Is Useless: Difference between revisions
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*** Creating a long-distance fixed-point-to-fixed-point teleportal requires one 9th-level arcane spellcaster who knows the ''teleport'' spell and the Craft Wondrous Item feat, 75,000 gp, 6000 XP, and 75 days. If he knows the Portal Master feat as well, halve the cost and the construction time. While that looks expensive, an average sailing ship costs 10,000 gp (and takes at least a month to build), in addition to what it would cost in hiring a crew, provisions, and overhead. The portal would already pay for itself after moving enough cargo from port to port to fill only eight cargo vessels, and it could do that as fast as you could throw the shipping crates through the door instead of taking weeks of sailing time. By any remotely rational understanding of the economy of scale, every major trading nexus in the world should be linked with these things.
** Teleportation aside (as it is fairly powerful magic), less potent spells should eliminate all kinds of hazards. Even low-level curative magic should prevent folks from dying from anything which doesn't kill them outright. Remove Disease costs a low-level cleric nothing to cast and a few of them could essentially eliminate the danger of sickness in a community (especially if they understand triage). Furthermore, spell casters should be researching spells and making items which aren't related to dungeon-crawling to use in their mundane lives. However, since no player is going to get excited about "Ripen Crops II" and "Plowblade of Quick Tilling," they won't be in more recent (3.0 and later) editions. Earlier editions actually had such mundane magic from time to time.
*** Being fair, given that the typical published d20 worlds have population levels and surplus wealth entirely out of line for realistic medieval economies and more appropriate to a world in at least the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, its entirely likely that they ''are'' using ubiquitous household magic to make up the gap. In fact, it would be a [[Plot Hole]] if they ''weren't''.
* Explicitly enforced in ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'', with the Imperium (or more specifically the [[Machine Worship|Adeptus Mechanicus]]) declaring the invention of any new technology to be Heresy and focused only on recovering millenia-old [[Lost Technology]]. Furthermore, using Xeno technosorcery is strictly forbidden, and while that doesn't stop more wealthy/powerful individuals it isn't exactly helpful to the average human.
** To put this in perspective for those who don't follow the setting, the Imperium consists of countless worlds, some of which are using technology that corresponds to the late Renaissance or earlier. Some humans are living in pre-agrarian societies. In one instance, Imperial citizens traded with a race of aliens, the Tau, for farming equipment. They were declared heretics and punished.
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