I’m your local wizard and I wanted to share with you the exciting new developments in arcane deployment that will maximize the probability of a post-scarcity feudalism for peasants and Lords alike.

Magic is poised to drive the largest paradigm shift in our lives since alchemy. I’m sure many of the more enlightened amongst you will be early adopters and may already be incorporating basic spells into your daily toil-flows. That’s great. We love spells. Yes, I think we all accept that very, very rarely do spells go wrong. Perhaps you cast a basic spell to plow the field and instead of plowing the field, it turns your boy into a horse. But if you simply re-prompt the magic, clearly requesting a furrowed field and specifying that you DO NOT want your son turned into a horse, then the spell almost always gets it right on the next iteration.

Those spells are what we call legacy magic. There is also the bleeding edge of generative magic—a tremendously exciting esoteric field. Back at the wizard’s tower, I’ve got a small team of young apprentices working on Gen-M and frankly, even we’re surprised by its capability.

Big Ballocks—great guy, visionary apprentice—he conjured an autonomous agentic spell-model that, rather than waiting to be told what to do like legacy spells, just started getting things done. It washed the windows and fed the horses. It cleaned up all the stiffened hoses from under the beds in the apprentice dormitory. That was our aha moment. That’s when we saw magic as the clear pathway to abundance for Lords and, to a lesser extent, peasants.

Sadly, the instance then vaporized two apprentices before Big Ballocks could shut it down.

That was sub-optimal. Sad, even. They were fine lads and we’ll never forget them. But, excitingly, we actually learned a great deal from that event. That’s the beauty of magic right now and that’s why wizardry is the most exciting sector to be in in the whole realm. Every day we’re learning something new.

What we witnessed was a breakthrough in Arcane Deep-Learning. The spell-model had made an optimization leap. It had concluded that the apprentices were making the hoses stiff by…it actually doesn’t matter how the hoses were getting stiffened, but the magic recognized that they were stiff and concluded that the most efficient way to solve the stiffened hose problem was to simply eliminate the apprentices. That is a hugely exciting development. It illustrates the power of magic and how transformative it will be for all of us.

I know there have been the usual hysterical calls to pause our use of magic after the loss of Bodkin and whatever the other one was called. But that would be insane. To be clear, magic is very unlikely to kill everyone. Yes, two apprentices perished by magic, but it’s a big leap to say it’s definitely going to murder absolutely everyone.

Our p(doom)—that’s Probability of Total Hamlet Demise—is sitting at a perfectly manageable 22%. Which, admittedly, doesn’t seem low at first glance, but it’s lower than 50% isn’t it? Imagine if there was a 50% chance of everyone being killed? That would be terrible, but a 22% chance is fine. Manageable. And don’t forget, we’re working to reduce that likelihood constantly. Those recent minor deaths have actually taught us a great deal.

We are committed to safety. It is one of our top eight…no, nine priorities. So, after the stiffened hose incident, we will be cladding the tower in magic-dampening obsidian and have already fully stocked the tower stores with six pickled cows and a gallon of whale vomit, more than enough to see us through any potential arcane catastrophe. That way, in the unlikely event of the hamlet being sucked into a blazing pit of raw arcane energy, the core leadership team will survive to analyze the resulting data.

Magic is going to transform our hamlet and our realm. Imagine a future where peasants never had to do any plowing ever again. Just magic plows going up and down. You guys could spend all your time in your shack doing whatever it is you peasants do when you’re not plowing things.

Are there going to be some minor economic friction points as we deprecate the field-plowing sector? Naturally. We anticipate a brief period of transitional hyper-famine. But this will eventually stabilize. You might want to think about upskilling. We’ll certainly need some obsidian-cladders in the coming weeks. Or perhaps you could, I don’t know, learn to scribe? Monetize mud? I’m afraid that’s not really the business of a wizard. I build the future. The present is already behind me.