Live From Yrth

“What magic is this?” he asked with more than a little awe in his voice.
“No magic at all,” I replied, “it's a Bessamer Process Furnace. It makes steel. Makes more steel in an hour than all the smiths of Megalos make in a year.”
“But I thought you were a mage.”
“I am a mage, but not here in the Great Desert. Nobody is a mage here, there's no mana.”
“There's some mana, where we imported it,” Geff chimed in, not mentioning how.
“Imported?” he asked, “To restore the mana to the interior you would have had to start at the edge and create a path to where you wanted magic, and to erase that path with destroy mana would have risked losing your magery.”
“True,” I said, “but we didn't do that. What we kept in our minds, that the Ministry of Secrets wanted erased, allowed us to do things with magic that are beyond their limited imagination. And what we can do without magic is staggering! You'll notice that we have water here, we make it rain.”
“What I intend is nothing short of a revolution. A revolution in technology. A revolution in sociology. A revolution in politics. Without these, I don't get my train set.”
Geff rolled his eyes in response, "1:1 scale train set..."

Explanation of the above:

In a world of Tim's, where the players made themselves as characters, I supposed that I had become a Great Mage on a ringworld and ran a railroad all the way around it.

Not that I am a bold and intrepid maker and shaper of events large and small in real life.

If Geff and I were dumped into Yrth two things would confront us immediately. First is the Ministry of Secrets attempting to erase our minds of anything that upsets the medieval apple cart. Second is Geff's health. His asthma will require either tech for medicine that doesn't exist there or learning enough magic to just cure him. The process of two thirty somethings learning to use magic in a guild ruled setting and not being revealed as outsiders would make us a lot leaner and meaner than we are today. I am supposing that we succeeded and are now getting bitter about the whole nobility and commoner deal.

Naturally we have both read the books that spell out the setting and have a huge advantage over other outsiders that would have been pulled into the world.

I know just enough about the tools to make the tools to bootstrap some of the tech. There is going to be a learning curve as we translate the things that we have read about into things we are building.

We also think from reading about the cosmology of the Yrth system that going out and getting a small meteorite would create a high mana zone centered on it. Knowing how to use magic and knowing about general conditions on the moon would allow us to go there and gather some of this mana-rich material. This would allow us to make a small area in the no-mana Great Desert where magic works.

The next bug hurdle would be the lizard men of the Great Desert. I know more than enough to make a Maxim and gun powder. That should secure us against them. And with no magic, we don't need to worry about scrys or reverse missile.