What would a fantasy soceity look like millenia after it was visited by isekai protags?

Premise: People from earth, of all backgrounds, wind up in another world. They retain the knowledge of their past lives (assuming reincarnation cases). How would society be affected by civilization suddenly having knowledge of things that weren't invented yet.

I'm aware I'm asking a difficult question, but I have my reasons for wanting to make a thread on how a society would be affected by people form earth entering it and bringing with it all their advanced knowledge

That heavily depends on the number of people, their background, and their organization.

If 10 random people were plucked off the street, odds are they would be utterly useless in an Isekai world. I don't mean in the sense of knowledge (though modern hyperspecialization means you would be hard-pressed to recreate entire supply chains) but rather in terms of institutional knowledge.

There are vast, stupendous quantities and varieties of materials and items you can simply order online. Chemicals, metals, crystals, circuits, etc. If you wanted to produce your own steel, doing so is fairly trivial by ordering the goods. Vast amounts of people are involved in their own little corner of the economy, producing stuff for the rest.

In a pre-modern setting, simply getting some good brick, ore and coal would be a huge undertaking. Smokeless powder would be impossible to recreate. Building a steam engine would be a serious undertaking, as you would need to invent and improve basically every single part of it. Plus it would be incredibly difficult to do without modern equipment.

That's another element that's difficult here: a regular lathe or milling machine is already antique by today's standards. If i want highly precise gears made, it's a simple matter of crapping a computer program into a CNC lathe and it'll be made for me. The skills to do so manually are already dying out, and in a medieval fantasy world it would be even harder.

All of this is technology. Some stuff is much easier (regular black gunpowder is surprisingly easy to make) but arguably the biggest impact an Isekai protagonist could have is in incredibly simple stuff. Hygiene and sanitation, financial institutions, workplace optimization, scams.

Actually yes, the biggest benefit would probably be the vast quantities of fraud you can do, based on centuries of fraudsters these people haven't yet encountered. Imagine being Ponzi in a word where your name is not yet synonymous with fraud.

Which brings me back to the first bit i mentioned: A modern economy runs on millions of people's work, each cut up into tiny little pieces. Recreating that from whole cloth would be hard. Convincing people that Germ Theory is real is hard if you don't know premodern methods of making lenses accurate enough. In fact, modern quantum mechanics is effectively impossible to prove to a medieval audience. The tools and institutions simply aren't there, and you'd be a stranger in a strange land trying to convince people of things they have no reason to believe. If you landed there with friends, it would be easier. If you landed with thousands, or tens of thousands, you could get somewhere.

I could see the arrivals becoming something of a curiosity, maybe political pawns, and very possibly subjects of philosophy. (And maybe a cult or two.)

They would be a group that arrived with strange, outside knowledge—much of which is of little apparent use, and which is potentially very hard to prove. (As noted by the poster above me.)

But amongst them, they may carry enough knowledge to be able to prove a few simple things—enough to suggest that their other claims, while not of immediate use, may actually be true. This in turn might spur contemplation and debate around them, or might make them useful figureheads and tools of cachet, etc.

Interesting. I'd have to recalibrate things then.

The general idea is that though enough time and enough people wind up on the same planet, the technology and sciences should advance into levels matching the modern world. Rather than being a One-Man Industrial Revolution like I presume most isekai stories (and maybe Dr. Stone) go for, it is instead of a specialist being reincarnated at the right place and the right time to share his knowledge, granting the natives the means to invent the systems that were in palce on earth or to improve on them.

I'd posit the people that would be more suitable for the task would be Senku-style savants, Renaissance Men or people that researched said men, social organizers and historians of the industrial revolution.

I figured I have to disclose the more ulterior motive for the thread a swell. I'm basically want to try s backstory where because of the influence of people (some Genre Savvy, others not so much) being whisked away from earth and end up in a position where their knowledge is shared with it and becomes part of recreating the systems of the old world.

I'm somewhat cognizant that such a history would have many people that contribute (regardless of their nativity to the world) to it to be bastards. As I am aware that people like Christopher Columbus, Henry Ford and Alexander were utter ever dicks (FTR only Ford is relevant here since the isekai'd figures would be inventors, engineers and networkers. The other two were just general examples).

That can work, especially if more people arrive with similar enough knowledge to collaborate the previous one's.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Oct 7th 2023 at 10:21:06 AM

Yea. the single biggest difficult would be to actually convince people in this new world of anything. if today some random person knocked on your door and was like "i am a dude from another world, i can prove the universe is made of 5 elements, just give me a few hours of your time" you would just... call the police.

But if you're with a group, you'd have actually decent chances of at least proving you're not completely crazy, and if you have hundreds of people you could actually fulfill many tasks yourself and so avoid having to convince the local blacksmith to waste a weeks' work on (from his POV) nonsensical parts for a supposed "steam" engine. Like, steam engines themselves are thousands of years old and nothing more than curiosities for most of that time. Electrical devices existed for many decades as curiosities before they had any practical purpose. if you're going to a medieval society and insist that if they just help you build a steam turbine it would all work out, their most immediate point of comparison is "this guy is trying to swindle me with a device i know doesn't do anything".

The saying goes that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but for the purpose of an Isekai, convincing someone of a sufficiently different understanding of the universe is indistinguishable from a scam.

Edited by devak on Oct 7th 2023 at 7:23:09 PM

I'm reminded of the 'Lost Regiment series, where the titular unit, a Union regiment from the American Civil War, is transported to a world inhabited by various peoples in mostly Middle Ages time periods. They fall in with a group of Rus, and begin introducing different technologies, medicine, and ideas from the mid-1800's, partly because of what they have on them - the Rus are blown away by glasses - and part because most of the men had been involved in different trades prior to enlisting as soldiers, and their combined knowledge and partnership with the locals lets them recreate most of their society.

The most disruptive element is the idea they bring over. These men joined the army to restore their Union and end slavery, they're not keen on Rus boyars ruling everyone and the serfs being treated as a lower class. The serfs start hearing stories, start talking among themselves, the boyars get antsy about this, someone does something they shouldn't have, and soon enough there's a peasant rebellion. This becomes a full on revolution which, ironically, the Union regiment had initially tried to discourage before ending up helping anyway.

Another element that comes to mind is inoculation. The Rus are understandably very skeptical about putting dead germs into their bodies that supposedly will stop worse disease later on, despite knowing a plague is sweeping the area. Fortunately, the colonel of the regiment is able to convince the patriarch, the main religious leader, to get inoculated publicly with him, and then preach about how safe and necessary it is to do so to ease the fears of the locals.

I suppose that my question then is: Why bother with the isekai element? Why not just... have the inhabitants of the other world develop those things themselves...?

But if you do specifically want this to arise via isekai, then I think that it could work. Specifically, what I think might help is subtlety:

Don't just drop a thousand people into a world—drop one at a time, spreading their arrivals across potentially thousands of years, and each set to provide one small advance in the desired direction.

Better steel. Improved processes. Glass-making techniques. A single chemical formula. And so on and so forth up the tree of technology...

And all presented as just one idea—"hey, you know, if you tried this, the thing that you're doing might work better!"

Or, as a certain person from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power might say:

"Call it a gift!" >:D

Eh. that might depend on specifically which people are taken—and what traits one considers to be untoward, of course.

My thought process is that as I'm delving into litrpg subgenres, I felt that it might be prudent to explore how the would would be affected by the ever present isekai subgenre, even if its an excuse for elements of the status quo for a different one (such as why the fantasy realm mostly resembles the Victorian era to the 1920s more than it does the usual peasant villages and castle forts. and why it references ideas and things that weren't conceptualized back in even those eras).

As for the subtlety thing, that's a good idea. A nudge in the right direction for the first few inventions and mass adoptions, the first cultural shifts.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Oct 7th 2023 at 1:10:51 AM

Hmm... That seems to me to be a little broader than the original question.

After all, the presence of one or more isekai protagonists could affect a setting in a variety of ways, I daresay—not all towards the establishing of a specific setting-analogue.

Quoth the G-Man: "The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world..."

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Oct 7th 2023 at 11:09:35 AM

The existence of people from another world might lead to people from that native setting becoming world hoppers or even creating trade between worlds. I'm thinking of Sandersons Cosmere books where several characters end up becoming worldhoppers after meeting worldhoppers. Of course it depends on how travel b/w worlds is possible in your setting. If visitors (isekai protags) only come there once then their effect might not last a millennia vs. a regular influx of isekai protags. Think of the difference b/w vikings coming to america vs. conquistadors during the age of exploration

Welp, there us an option no ody considered "in universe science fiction writers" or "mytology of the mundane world" Seriously all it takes is 1 autistic history writer to make the "victorian age fiction saga" in medieval times explaining the technology of the "near future". Or the royals favorite horror book series "the Napoleonic war/french revolution".