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What natural laws need to be be broken to prevent tech from advancing?

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Nytemare3701:
I'm trying to nail down a new natural law that prevents the Digital revolution from catching on in an Eberron-style world. Industrialized magic is fine, but I want to prevent tech itself from ever being significantly advanced in this world, while also giving my players free reign to invent anything they want.

Electromagnetic Variance: Nicknamed the Hogwarts Effect, the presence of magic causes fluctuations in electrical resistance on larger scales. A microprocessor could never function outside of a dead magic zone, a quartz watch would gain and lose time at random, but a traditional spring watch would be functional.

I'm not well versed enough in physics to know how intrinsically the fundamental forces are tied to electrical resistance. Can you introduce something like this without breaking the fundamental forces as well?

Maybe I'm overthinking this. Is there a particular point in the "tech tree" of human advancement between the industrial revolution and the digital age where we can just...make that particular thing not function?

Solo:
Ambient magical energy functions like radiation, overloading electronics.

nijineko:
I suggest Klatuu's method. You may also want to prevent the reactions of heavy elements like plutonium and uranium, as well as explosives such as gunpowder and nitro, not to mention other high explosives.

You could have magical theory and magical physics supplant certain chemical and atomic interactions within the area in which mana is dominant.

I recall reading a story of an intragalactic civilization where it had been discovered that the laws of the universe were variable, depending on where one was. This necessitated having multiple types of ship drives mana-based, psi-based, tech-based, and a few more odd ones for those pockets of the galaxy where really different laws worked (such as renting and harnessing space-whales to the starship in a region where only biological entities could move through space). As they traveled through the galaxy, they had to switch from drive system to drive system based on the local laws of physics.

awaken_D_M_golem:
Real Life, atomic theory may have been discussed by the ancient Greeks, but exclusively in Philosophical and Theological terms.


Otherwise there really isn't any "lightning" per se.  Rather there's an intersection of Air + Positive, which creates Lightning in the same way Fire + Water annihilate each other.  Eberron's planes are violating the law(s) of gravity already multiple times over. 

So let's say the smallest Lightning anything would be a shock from socks on carpet, meaning a telegraph would be big thick badly refined copper wire, powered by captured lightning elements, who aren't happy with the situation, call Elder grampa to hurry over and wipe everything out. 

Constructing something like this ---> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
... is some special form of impossible, like the Machine Of Lum The Mad artifact, even gawds can't do it no more.

FireInTheSky:

--- Quote from: Nytemare3701 on March 24, 2017, 07:24:50 AM ---Electromagnetic Variance: Nicknamed the Hogwarts Effect

--- End quote ---

Shouldn't it be called the "Dresden Effect"?

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