Inspired by post 34 in this thread and something I’ve been mulling about for some time (long commute to work!).
For the purposes of plot some-time in the near future Bob the minorly godlike posthuman entity has been messing around again and has merged two different versions of Earth, the one we all know and love with high-tech, computers, nuclear weapons and furbies and a different version of Earth where magic is real and so are various fantasy creatures, technology has stagnated at a fairly low-level as magic is generally more useful for getting things done.
Basically science and technology still works but so does what is thought of as classic magical abilities (something like that in Harry Potter but everyone can learn it, at least to an extent, but its like becoming an engineer for example, takes years of study and some people are better at it than others), there are a lot of weird new creatures running around, some sentient and semi-humanoid (werewolves, vampires, ogres, kitsunes, mermaids, centaurs etc) which are humans who have been transformed into these new species and those which are sentient and non-humanoid and were never human (dragons, griffens, kraken etc) and non-sentient non-human creatures which are basically new animal species.
How would the world adapt? I imagine magic would be studied as a new branch of scientific enquiry (ie it has its own rules and regulations, something can’t happen just because you want it to), there would be a lot of questions re the legal, religious and social status of new sentient species (lots of exciting and fun new prejudices and what about inter-species dating) and the more dangerous non-sentient species would quickly be hunted down and kept to more manageable levels. It would be interesting to talk to a non-human sentient, I imagine they’d have a quite different way of looking at the world.
The clothing industry would have a boom fitting out peoples new bodies and transportation and other items would need to be remodeled, how would you design a car that could be used by a centaur for example?
Magic users wouldn’t be held quite in the awe as they were before:
“AVADA KED-”
BANG
“Glock 17…”
Dragons would be no match for an AH-64 Apache gunship and werewolves would think twice before attacking someone knowing they’ll be hunted down by angry night-vision goggle wearing villagers wielding AK-47’s with silver-tipped bullets and not merely pitchforks.