Medieval Stasis
Even if you haven’t heard the term before, all fantasy fans are familiar with the concept of “medieval stasis.” Pick your poison if you want the full diatribe from TV Tropes or 1d4chan, but the basic idea is that history has stopped inexplicably in Medieval Europe. Thousands of years into the fictional past and indefinitely into the fictional future, castles and knights and feudalism dominate the setting. Never mind the fact that this era lasted a bare handful of centuries in our own world.
This becomes an especial problem when you stop to reflect on the material conditions that produced the industrial revolution. Factor in the comparative advantages of advanced dwarven metallurgy, arcane energy sources, and the friggin’ fabricate spell, and you begin to wonder why no one invented a printing press or some clacks towers over the course of several thousand years.
There are a few standard explanations to keep in mind. If you want to explain why your homebrew world has dirt-farming peasants and a dearth of firearms, you can argue that magic outcompetes technology. Or maybe the lifespans of your long-lived races repress the new ideas that come with generational turnover. Perhaps the church considers tech heretical, or you’re living on one of those ancient earths where tech has come and gone multiple times over countless eons, or cold iron suppresses magic, making the stuff contraband.
My own go-to solution is to simply ignore the problem. You only have to worry about this business if your setting has a very long history, and that kind of detailed world-building just isn’t my jam. I’m out here for the adventure story, and it’s enough for me that the world exists. The fact of it is its own explanation. Throw me one of the mildly plausible explanations above and I’m a happy camper. Conversely, I’m very much not a happy camper when a setting insists on overexplaining itself.
What about the rest of you guys though? Do you have a go-to explanation for why your sword and sorcery setting never manages to invent modernity? Are you content to jettison the 10,000 year setting history if it means you don’t have to worry about cultural materialism and technological determinism? And for all the very-serious worldbuilders out there who do engage with this problem, do you have a model setting that lets you whack dragons with sharp objects without sacrificing your suspension of disbelief? Tell us all about your own battles with medieval stasis down in the comments!
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Does this poor technician have a name?
And may we see him again, fighting bravely to break the stasis?
As for explanations why industrialism in fantasy societies doesn’t always catch on… Associations of science with Tinker Gnomes? Gathering lots of metal in one place attracts dragons? Wizard guilds sabotage science to maintain their monopoly? ^^;
We’ve seen him before (granted, first time we’ve seen all of him – the kilt is a surprise), it’s Alchemist!
Is it? I didn’t recognize him as such without the mutant bulk and Abercrombie.
It is indeed none other than our dwarven master of mixology, Alchemist.
He looks so different with his shirt on and without the bulging muscles… ^^;
Most games don’t cover a long enough period that “stasis” is an issue. The GM can just say that guns and trains and printing presses don’t exist right now, and that’s all that matters.
Oh, and no GM should feel compelled to let a PC invent things that break the setting’s technology level. No, your level 3 artificer with Intelligence 16 is not Tony Stark. Build a neat little signature invention that embodies their personal style, sure. Rig up something that solves a situational problem, go ahead. But major technological advancement is the work of generations, and more importantly, the work of lots and lots of people over those generations. The “great man” theory of history is mostly garbage, especially when it comes to science and technology. If generation-defining inventors exist, and they happen to be the PCs, that’s a high-level end-game thing, just like fighters leading an entire kingdom’s armies or wizards building their own demiplanes.
Anyway. The point is, a setting’s technological level, and more importantly technological aesthetic, is part of the setting’s flavour, just like its social setting, politics, magic system and so on. No one player should feel entitled to break that unilaterally. If the GM wants to set the game up to be a world in flux, that’s one thing, but if they don’t, then that’s that. Play a character that belongs in the setting you agreed to play in.
Anyway, the last D&D game I ran was set in Regency England on a fantasy version of Earth, so technology had advanced and was advancing, so yeah, there were guns and things, no problem. The game before that was a Stone Age setting where floods devastated civilization every 1000 years, and powerful hostile animals and dangerous environments made it almost impossible to form large communities, so technology never really got far.
Medieval stasis isn’t (usually) a single-story problem, it’s a worldbuilding problem. Plenty of settings have histories millennia old (sometimes hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes millions), with little to no change happening during that time. No technological advancement seems to happen, ruling dynasties and polities are ridiculously stable, the people who claim their glorious race has roots in antiquity are right in a meaningful way, etc.
Don’t forget to mention the impacts of magic/the innovations of other races that Colin proposed.
It quite like the stone age explanation. Plenty of excuse for a long history without technological advances.
Did you guys play at all with breaking that cycle, or was the campaign all about punching dinosaurs?
The problem comes when you boost it from the literal Stone age and decide to time lock everyone in an age where IRL lasted only 1000 years with major changes IN those 1000 years.
Oh, yeah. The floods were being driven by the spirit of the great river which ran down the middle of the entire world (the world was sort of cylindrical, and the river flowed north-south and wrapped around onto itself, feeding its own power), and when the floods came, the animal totems (which took the place of gods in this setting) all got swept away and didn’t remember anything by the time they got themselves together again, and even changed up their alignments sometimes.
The only people with any knowledge of the previous cycles were a community of drow who lived underground and were protected by their spider totem. They probably could have helped the surface people learn about the nature of the world, but, well, you know drow.
There was some technological development, though. In the latest cycle, an empire had formed along the river, with bronze age technology. Of course, their dominance merely strengthened the river, so that didn’t help. There was a lot of punching dinosaurs and getting into scraps between tribes, but the party did slowly piece together evidence of the prior flood and the flood to come, aided by ancestral memory from a few bards and lore from some lesser spirits that had survived the floods.
Which is all still a better explanation than “the laws of physics are such that all tech past medieval arbitrarily fails.”
Street Samurai is probably nervously whistling in the distance.
There’s a reason Wizard was trying to get her back to the future: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-googles
From what I understand of D&D 5e, most settings amount to ‘medieval stasis, until someone rolls an artificer (N)PC’.
https://youtu.be/oHLtKaDCUWA
Presumably, any given ‘smart’ NPC becomes that settings Tesla when they start making obscene tech advancements for the sake of their quality of life / economy breaking shenanigans / kingdom building. Just look at the ‘Tale of the Industrious Rogue’ where that goes waaay off the rails.
Well then. I giggled a lot at that.
“Magic….”
Snort.
I always feel a bit like the Tesla PC is Kirk fighting the gorn. Of course you can invent guns, Mr. PC man. You’re being controlled by a STEM kid from another world. Why wouldn’t you be able to apply your future knowledge to weapons design?
I’m trying to remember though… Didn’t Percy over on CR literally get his gun designs from a dream / demonic influence?
Wouldn’t know, didn’t watch CR. But 1d4 chan has a ton of shenanigans stemming from applying modern technological concepts into a medival-stasis world.
Like the schematic for an arrow that creates astral rifts by combining a Bag of Holding with a Portable Hole. Or creating a necromantic computer by using skeletons that obey computer logic commands. Things get even wackier when you use magic to boost technology to limits beyond even modern stuff (e.g. cars that use no fuel, power plants that produce infinite clean energy, a supercomputer boosted by time-warping magic to calculate into the future…). Probably why most settings have tech and magic cancel each other out.
Also, if you enjoyed that artificer vid, this one is good too!
https://youtu.be/ZS4iffhWU-g
“Probably why most settings have tech and magic cancel each other out.”
Which doesn’t make much sense to me. And seems pretty unfun to boot.
Note: Arcanum the video game works but tech is inherently anti magic/vice versa is never the case for any DnD setting I played in.
I’m of the “campaigns are too short for it to matter” camp myself. Most of my games last only a few in-game years at most and are set in separate worlds, so there’s not much time to see the world change (I did once have a one-shot campaign with a sequel set a century in the future, but the original game was spent entirely on another plane of existence and thus didn’t establish much about mortal technology or society). Occasionally I’ll play around with the tech level to make a setting more distinct – for instance, I had one game where the villains had guns and the heroes were starting to develop them as well.
I get the sense that this issue is all about fictional world timelines. If High King Original Gangsta founded the kingdom 1000 years ago, then the setting ought to look different now than in the legends.
Of course, for purposes of a game world, 8th century BC Rome and 5th century AD Western Roman Empire can be conveniently flattened into Gladiator. It’s all about leaving the details vague enough so as not to strain credulity.
Eberron got it.
“Why risk your life experimenting with a volatile substance that can blow you up when you have magic that can do the same effect without the blow you up part?”
True, but Eberron also relaxes the stasis… they’ve moved from a medieval setting to a magi-tech industrial age, and while the world is old, there’s a strong sense of change happening.
I’ve never actually played in Eberron. Is it set in the midst of an industrial revolution? Did some event spark the current state of rapid change?
It is set in the midst of an industrial revolution after basically Magic World War 1, dealing with both the fallout of that and the future of the world.
All the games are set within 1-2 years of the OG book, so basically the GM has free rein to make his own world since the setting isn’t too bogged down by the literally millenia of conspiracies/super characters accumulated over, say, Forgotten Realms timespan.
Eberron has an interesting approach. Any magic up to 3rd level is reasonably common and even mass produced. Anything beyond is conversely much rarer.
Those magic/tech items which do replicate higher level spells are only usable by dragonmarked individuals. So the Dragonmarked houses are very keen on assassinating anyone who tries to disrupt their monopoly by making similar items that lack the prerequisite of being born into the right family.
So your PC can come along and try to make a magic car, but the House that specialises in transport will hire the House that specialises in Assassination to ensure it blows up in a wild accident. So will the House that makes things if you don’t need their services to make the magic car.
IMO, it is set up in this way so as to prevent the inevitable Tippyverse if up to 9ths were allowed.
Still though, the fact that the (adventure) timeline is so short compared to say, FR’s timeline means that you can really fit whatever you want into the “blank years,” like a Magical Modern Age or something.
It’s not as much as an industrial revolution, but it’s a place where magic is low, but wide – that means, you can easily find low level casters, and wands of cantrips and common magic items are REALLY common. They invented magic railway and flying airships powered by elementals and dragonshards (which are a relatively uncommon magic material), and there are countries that have army divisions of people slinging wands of all kinds of missiles (“more reliable than a crude and lowly bow”); and they’ve even created a sentient robot race (Warforged) to fight the war for them. (And now the war has more or less ended, or at least suspended indefinitely, they need to find a way to rehabilitate them into society…) The whole setting is decidedly pulp noir, with all it involves, crossbred with MagicPunk. Because the main concept is, why on Earth would people need to experiment with gunpowder and combustion engines, blowing up people and equipment along the road in accidents, when you have access to magic that can do that for you safe and quick?
(Also another thing I can’t hype enough for Eberron is that its main great mysteries are deliberately left unexplained and left to the GM to come up with their own version. Like the Day of Mourning, that practically ended the big war by conjuring a big mist over one of the central countries, practically eradicating and/or mutating and distorting all life – there’s no official answer on why or how it happened, so if you prefer it to be a demonic incursion, that’s fine, but if someone else things it’s a failed experiment with an Eldritch Machine, then that works too.)
Which means that perhaps an actual Industrail Revoltuion of magic (possible in Pathfinder since items no longer need xp) might be a cool way to play the setting.
In a very fun Curse of the Crimson Throne-game, my Android Alchemist basically founded Avistan’s first known alchemy factory, to mass-produce antiplague. Talked the church of Abadar into investing in it and got some thieves’ guild experts involved and all.
Everybody in the party loved the idea, and the Abadarans accepted that it was a money-making proposition even after the plague was over.
Yes! Lift the primitive medievalites out of their shit filled fields into the light of tomorrow, glorious envoy of the future!
With that idea there’s at least a little bit of a convenient handwave in that a Golarion android is the product of a high-tech alien civilization, and even if they don’t directly remember any of that stuff, it would still seem plausible that they would be inclined towards industrial or technological solutions to problems, as opposed to simply using magic or classic remedies.
The twist is that my Android Alchemist / Rogue was suffering amnesia due to an accident. ^_^
Unfortunately the DM retired from the paizo forums before the game could be concluded, and I had already taken up my sabbatical from playing RPGs. It’s a shame, really, because one of the other players was trying to figure out just what my Android was; it was fairly clear she was not a standard human being.
Those elements are absolutely not at odds with each other though. Magic is a science and can be advanced/developed as such.
GURPS Fantasy had a nice take on it: Science and technology was possible and thanks to interdimensional travel even available, but…
…all the wizard organizations across the world cooperated to wipe it out everytime it started to get noticeable. Up to and including instigating massive wars and causing “natural” disasters to wipe out the offenders. It helped that most science-minded people would take up magic and thus have an interest in making sure no “natural” science gets done.
Which leads to my gripe about how magic and science shouldn’t be separate and opposed concepts. They were the same thing in our world until people realized that astrology, alchemy, etc failed to have any empirically-observable results—and the two continued to mingle for centuries thereafter. Hell, as late as the 20th century we had well-funded studied on things like psychic powers!
Why should alchemists and chemists be distinct, or artificers and engineers? At best, it’s like engineers refused to use rubber designed by material scientists for their cars; at worst, it’s like software engineers refusing to work with computer programmers despite being basically the same thing.
Once again, I agree.
Alchemy IS chemistry in DnD world. Magic IS science in DnD world.
Alchemy became chemistry and physics in real life; Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist when he studied gravity and physics, while Johann Böttger was an alchemist and chemist (we call them pharmacists now) who helped to develop hard-cast porcelain in Europe while trying to make the philosopher’s stone.
Even priests and monks helped lay the foundation for all kinds of scientific prowess because they sought to understand the divine by studying the ultimate “original text,” the material universe. Mendel was a monk whose work on peas was a crucial component of understanding genetics; Darwin’s studies to become an Anglican parson directly lead to him working on evolution by natural selection.
Then you consider the fact that wizard comes from an old English word that meant wise man, sage, philosopher… The conflict between wizard and scientist (or both against priest) is incredibly ahistorical. The overlap was always there.
Exactly. Which makes “MAGIC* IS ANTI SCIENCE!!1!!” all the dumber.
*In DnD/PF
Personally I too like the “just ignore it” solution, often with a side of “this world is magic all the way down. It doesn’t run on real world physics with magic smeared on top like a too thin layer of butter”.
That is the chemical processes behind fireballs and gasoline simply doesn’t work, things are ultimately made up of a mixture of the Four Elements + positive/negative energy (as well as possibly more exotic stuff like Good and Evil depending on what it is), not atoms from the periodic table, and things fall down because that is the order and nature of things not because mass bends space-time. See also why things fall on the Plane of Air despite it mostly consisting of air.
This is however largely because I like that kind of settings where magic is integrated and part of the whole in general rather than specifically due to considerations about technological stasis.
I do also like explanations about how the kind of fast and comprehensive change aren’t really inevitable they are just something we happen to have right now. Those various explanations pointing to suppression by conspiracies or out-competition by magic feels have a tendency to feel vaguely fake to me, and like it’s misunderstanding what’s going on.
The issue isn’t with uber fast change, it’s about NO change at all over MASSIVE timespans.
If things are made up of such exotic elements, then I expect them to be eventually studied. Saying “lol they can’t be studied” ultimately winds up being a shackle, not good for the game.
Medieval stasis, when you get down to it, is NOT A GOOD THING.
Sure they can be studied. That’s how enchanters figured out how to make those various magical items they make (you know from those thousands of gold worth of magical ingredients, all that money have to be spent on something) and so on.
It just won’t give the same result as our worlds physics gave us.
Well if they give results at all, to the point you can make items, then logically those results must be predictable, like IRL chemical reactions. What you seemed to be arguing for was “physics is totally different so therefore trying to make a car automatically explodes you”/”pistons do not function.”
No, I’m arguing for “physics is different in a way that isn’t conductive to building a car” being a useful way to prevent your setting from having cars.
Cars are not a function of reality more fundamental to the laws of physics such that all hypothetical consistent systems of physics must allow for their existence.
The problem with your arguments isn’t that “the setting doesn’t have cars; that’s bad!”, it’s how your system doesn’t serve to actually ADD anything so much as to just be a thinly veiled excuse to stop tech at medieval levels (barring the fact that medieval levels includes a ton of things like pulleys, metalworking, steel that your “physics” arbitrarily allows).
In such a case, I don’t think that’s a good system so much as an excuse.
Like Bohandas said, you don’t need something that is 1:1 a car, gunpowder, gasoline, you just need things LIKE them. So instead of a car you have a vehicle propelled by “aether” engines or something.
That explanation doesn’t work, because what you need isn’t gasoline and gunpowder, it’s just something that can release energy the way they do. Like in the novel “The Guns of Avalon” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_Avalon)
And fuel for power plants or their equivalent isn’t needed at all. It’s trivially easy to build a perprtual motion machine using a decanter of endless water and a water wheel, and all you need to do to increase the output is to move it up higher and stack multiple water wheels on top of each other.
I tried to have a medieval-stasis setting, then 5E made the Artificer a core class. I could either ban an entire class (In an edition where there are only 13) or butcher my setting. I’m being a mean DM if I ban a class.
I just hate that medieval-stasis doesn’t include hand-cannons/firelances/arquebuses. Medieval guns were a thing. But noooooo, if we include guns we jump straight to muskets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykhhmZ5XTHk
Hwacha talkin’ about? 😛
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQhSXA3AKh4
My personal favourite fantasy rpg is Warhammer Fantasy. That setting actually is moving (slowly) from medieval to industrial but it doesn’t really affect the PCs, partly because the high tech stuff like guns is way beyond the means of most PCs, but mostly because they will almost certainly die before they get to mess with the setting too much.
Our setting is a bit unusual in that the outer planes have much better tech than the material plane. At least one faction of Fey has magitech that’s probably better than even Eberron has. Considering that our main plot has an undertone of the outer planes taking a greater interest in the material plane, and I could easily see a Legend of Korra-style tech jump in a hypothetical sequel campaign.
In the prime material, the main reason I imagine for the lack of tech development is that the High Elves had dominated everyone else for thousands of years, and they were overthrown by their slaves recently enough for the grandchildren of the survivors to be just hitting what they consider adulthood. In short, tech hasn’t had much reason to advance a huge amount yet.
Still, our material plane is only low magic and technologically backwards on the surface. Sure, wizards and such are rare, but alchemists and ritual casters are nearly as common as blacksmiths and carpenters. There’s fluff about how the power of the spirit can aid and protect even warriors who have never used proper magic (read: in universe explanation for people just shrugging off spell effects!).
In short:
It’s really not been that long yet.
It’s not actually as primitive as it looks.
It’s growing before our eyes.
I HATE YOU! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!1111!!!11!!!
(OK, back to real point 🙂
The argument against magic causing stasis is that it cannot cause stasis on its own. Any setting with a magic level equal to normal fantasy levels is basically going to wind up Eberron one way or other, since if magic is sufficient to do [x] thing than naturally people will extrapolate from that and try to solve some other problem that arises from magic doing that thing, and naturally tech progresses.
It is also ignorant to assume that the entire medieval ages was one big brainfart where scientists were killed by the church and were burned as witches; medieval alchemists CONSTANTLY experimented with materials, and the eastern countries were orders of magnitude more advanced.
No but seriously I really, REALLY HATE the idea the comic proposes that tech must ALWAYS BE SEPERATE from magic. Many, many authors disagree with you.
Maybe you could try rewriting the comic’s “tip” to be less restrictive and more along the lines your own opoinion.
My dear gentleperson, the whole point of the comic is to poke fun at the very idea of medieval stasis. The Artists aren’t actually advocating for it one way or another.
Wait a minute… You mean to say that the Handbook gives out suspect advice? Blasphemy!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/statues
Wait… you mean this ISN’T a 100% accurate guide to DnD?!?!
To avoid spoilers, I won’t include the name of the series, but after reading it I began to incorporate the idea that the Gods keep tech locked down. If Arcane or Divine magic was ever too advanced, you’d eventually get stuff like atomic bombs. That’s dangerous enough when Earth people have that capacity, I don’t want a Lich to learn the spell and walk into every major country one after another. Plus the industrial age was terrible for the common people in the city; smoke, bad living conditions, chemicals no one understood and just dumped into the rivers, etc. Benevolent Gods might honestly send their paladins to break such things up before the situation ever grows too dangerous.
Plus, I like the idea that the Gods are a bit more active. I generally make a few low level rituals/spells to fill in niches that encourage people not to look too closely at the issues.
“How do we increase crop yields? Why does rotating crops make them grow better?”
“Because Neral, the God of Farming, requires it as a component for the Fertility rituals.”
Also, I tend to imply that one day technology might get going, it just hasn’t caught on yet. 1000 years ago iron was the hot new thing and steel itself is fairly recent. It’ll get there. Probably.
“terrible for the common people in the city; ”
Medieval times were also terrible for commoners. Every time before the industrial age was horrible for them, and it was only at and after the INdustrail Age that life got better.
Honestly, life is still pretty terrible for the working class. It’s just terrible in different ways (and harder to cleanly define a working class).
No, your perspectives on this are incredibly skewed. Life for the “civilized” man was LAWAYS worse. The homeless man today can at least bum a cigarette or find a shelter with light/running water, a medieval peasant will die in a shit pile at the age of 23.
The classic fantasy theme of order / chaos plays well here. I’m thinking ents and Princess Mononoke wolf gods carefully negotiating with machines spirits.
Also, a little lore question on Handbook World (mostly the hover text):
How DID ScryPhones get invented? Are hey aware of the irony that the tech (becasue it IS tech) they use to document the tech they forbid is leagures more “advanced”?
Also, check out Harry Potter: Rise of the Wizards fanfic chapter 46 onwards for some neat magitech as well.
A wizard did it.
On a personal note, the system I used to represent advancements in magic in my PF campaign was to use the Legendary Games version of the wizard, bard, and cleric to represent the greater advancements of knowledge, and then eliminate needing mundane material spell components as well. I also introduced some “modern” spells like making mount summon a motorcycle. I also made some minor tweaks to some spells as well. Also spellbooks have been replaced by spell datapads (so Blessed Book is now Divine Datapad) and (certain) magic item prices have been lowered
Then I contrasted all this against the Captain-America’d PCs who still use big gilt edged books and the Mount spell 🙂
Was this an explanation for The Gap in Starfinder?
Not really. We never really bothered with the Gap.
I prefer the “shorter history with points where tech goes down” approach. That and a few of the gods wouldn’t be happy with excess tech (fey gods hate all the iron, archons hate the potential human independence, Hellenistic gods are just dicks). There’s still a bit more than usual though, there are probably printing presses in more advanced areas like certain city states and the Draconian Empire.
“fey gods hate all the iron, archons hate the potential human independence, Hellenistic gods are just dicks”
TBH I don;t like this much. “The gods stall/stop tech” a la this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/8eo6ei/the_harpers_enforce_medieval_stasis_in_faer%C3%BBn/
is about the most disheartening and disempowering piece of worldbuilding you can make.
To be fair, an “X hates Y” scenario isn’t always bad. You just can’t make X omnipotent in tracking down Y, and they need a believable justification.
In Magic the Gathering’s storyline, most elven tribes on the main plane of Dominaria hate technology, artifice and artificers, and the like. Their manufacturing capacity is essentially clothes, leather armor, and just enough metallurgy to make arrowheads. Why?
In the past, most wizards with god-like power tended to get their start being articers. The most powerful, Urza, dropped a nuke on an invading army which killed everyone and sank the continent into the sea. The climate changes from the fallout caused a global ice age, maybe a few extinctions.
When he played around with time travel, Urza time-phased his entire magical academy out of existence until he figured out how to save it. Then the entire plane was invaded by oozing cyborg zombies from another plane, killing millions and turning them into more zombies. It got so bad that another wizard time-phased entire countries just so they wouldn’t be invaded. There’s a bit of a mixed message here because most of the people powerful enough to destroy armies of cyborg zombies are… godlike artificer wizards.
So yeah, don’t bring technology into elven forests or they’ll smash it. They’ve literally lived through 3 apocalypses caused by it.
“You just can’t make X omnipotent in tracking down Y, and they need a believable justification.”
So essentially this is a good thing for areas, not worlds. Because medieval stasis is only bad if it affects anything above a nation. Also because “eff you, the gods stop it/the Fundamental Physical Laws of the Universe* stop it” is a bad excuse.
*to quote a comic strip about a player making primitive gunpowder, “What, simple physics and chemistry aren’t allowed? I’m amazed my torch works then!”
Generally speaking, the simplest explanation to all of the above, in a magic heavy world, is that “why change” when magic does a lot of what we want out of technology?
Conversely, for those that do not have access to magic, it is easy enough to suggest that those with power want to stay in power and therefore, they squash any attempts to make the peasant life easier, because why would they want the peasants thinking they can have toast and ice with modern convenience instead of hard learned or won magic spells?
Let’s face it, every high fantasy setting is a Mageocracy, whether you want it to be or not, or else the whole system breaks down.
I tend to prefer a “world on the edge” setting myself. Steam-punk-ish-western-esque, where the highest tech is revolvers and repeaters, steam trains and “generic lighter than air gas” filled Zeppelblimps travel across the sky, but magic still rules the day and the sword resolves more problems than the pen. Goblin engineers make explosives and cannons on ships blast each other on the high seas, while gnomish engineers craft elevating lifts that allow the major capital cities to make towers that rise into the clouds possible…
Basically just a mish mash that needs no explanation from my perspective other than a wizard did it, people don’t like change, or some other platitude, but allows for a setting that gives you the old American west cowboys and injuns and frontier feel to some places, Samurais and ninjas and that Edo period of Japanese feudalism, mongol hordes and great walls, and pirates of the high seas versus the great shipping trade companies all in one. And of course Victorian gaslight city scapes.
It may not “work” in any real world historical context, but who the heck cares, it is fantasy for a reason, make it as fantastical as you want!
“Mageocracy, whether you want it to be or not, or else the whole system breaks down.”
The biggest problem is when most setting are just generic medieval kingdom and the mageocracy is just the obligatory token place in the corner, not the norm for some undiscernable reason.
Personally, I like the Starfinder/Eberron route myself with super magitech.
In any case, we still have to remember that xp and leveling up is 1000% an abstraction. “Grinding” should not be a thing, meaningful study to gain xp (as has been confirmed in an adventure) is.
Magocracies should exist about as often as theocracies do in our world—ie, they sometimes exist on their own, but are mostly just one institution supporting another form of government. Sure, mages are powerful, but so are priests, merchants, judges, generals, etc, and it’s rare for those classes to directly control the government. (Aside from some ancient-world examples where the distinction between king, general, judge, high priest, etc didn’t really exist.)
And sometimes the king IS the wizard/caster.
that statement was an abstraction and generality of concept more than a specific theme, but more a point of, if magic doesn’t rule the kingdom in some form or another, then why doesn’t the kingdom advance (as an explanation for that).
I agree, most settings do not really make that a front and center theme, but in almost all of them, the high magic using folk are the adventurers and the “advisors” and war mages that are run by the most powerful kingdoms (tho there is almost always “that one kingdom” that has rules against magic. Similar to “that one kingdom” that doesn’t have adventurers, or “that one kingdom” that restricts races to just one majority, etc… always a few of those “that one kingdom” 🙂
that being said, having an actual mageocracy ruling from the shadows doesn’t exactly seem implausible. No more so than having one running things front and center, or having one of “that one kingdom” that is clearly set in that style.
The major point is that magic and science are essentially one and the same, and there is no reason for any place to not advance.
In my setting, in general, whenever the United Accord of Galaxies discovers a new “Outlands” world, the level of advancement is usually late 18th-early 21st century. This gives the advantage of being able to use a lot of concepts and elements in campaigns.
EDIT: I meant to write late 19th-mid 21st century.
Also, in general, the level of advancement is going to be more advanced than the corresponding period on our world.
EDIT: All of this means that encountering other interstellar/intergalactic empires is a definite possibility.
a setting that gives you the old American west cowboys and injuns and “frontier feel to some places, Samurais and ninjas and that Edo period of Japanese feudalism, mongol hordes and great walls, and pirates of the high seas versus the great shipping trade companies all in one. And of course Victorian gaslight city scapes.”
Funny thing you could have a surprisingly large number of these things at once somewhere on the planet if you picked the right moment of our real history.
The edo period of japan goes from 1603 to 1867.
The last of the Oirat khanates lasted until 1771.
The american Wild West was from 1607 – 1920 (though it moved across the country in that time).
The golden age of piracy lasted from the 1650s to the 1730s.
The first gaslit street in London happened in 1807 and is therefore incompatible with the piracy and the mongols, but if you wanted a Samurai, a Cowboy and an Pirate to have an adventure taking them to the court of a mongol Khan, that’s a thing that could happen in an entirely historically accurate game set in the real world.
And as a consolation price for losing the gaslit London, if you set it in between 1660 and the early 1700’s (not sure about exact date but 1727 is too late) you could add a French musketeer in the classic uniform with the classic look to the group as well.
Medieval times in Europe lasted only a handful of centuries, but if you stretch things a bit and include antiquity, it’s an entirely different time scale with a not-so-different technological level. One fact that blows my mind is that there is about as much time between us and Julius Caesar as between Caesar and the construction of the great pyramid of Giza. The pharaoh Khufu was “antique” for the romans!
Advancements have always been slower the farther back you go (ie caveman times), but it always HAPPENED. What makes no sense is to BEGIN it at medieval times and pretend that everyone stays there for hundreds or tens of thousands of years.
True, but the world looked vastly different even between Charlemagne and the Crusades, let alone between the Old Kingdom and the Renaissance. Technology meaningfully advanced (to pick a D&D-relevant example, plate armor and crossbows didn’t exist until the tail end of what could be considered “medieval times”), political systems rose and fell, and only a handful of political entities lasted more than a few centuries without some major revolution/alteration/conquest/etc.
Exactly. Even if you pull out some reason from thin air (which incidentally always comes off as disempowering, especially if it is gods) for tech stagnation there is really no excuse for the same polities to be ruling.
“Magical Industrial Revolution” is one of my favourite fantasy time periods to explore. That said, I usually freeze things in place and hand-wave it as differing priorities. One of my settings, for instance, never invented more than basic boats. They have plenty of access to water, and there are some curious-looking continents across that water, but A) said water is full of giant ravenous fish-monsters, and B) everyone is too busy getting eaten by zombies to do any inventing.
If your fantasy setting is comfortable and thriving, plenty of invention should be going on. If they’re constantly being attacked by orcs and dragons and world-ending threats and struggling to survive, there’s a lot less time in the day one can dedicate to drawing up plans for combustion engines. Plus, a conflict provides a nice little plot hook to give the players something to do, and I always like plots that are baked into the setting.
Which requires the presence of magic that performs the same functions as technology, which should have the same side effects.
Which simplifies matters and makes people wonder why shorter-lived races without strong political/cultural ties to the dwarves and elves aren’t more technologically advanced. Especially since dwarves and gnomes are traditionally both long-lived and more technologically advanced than their peers.
Which could work, but is really vague and handwavey.
Which doesn’t work unless the reason for that cycle makes sense.
Which only works if you also remove other iron from the setting. Which in turn works if you’re going for a Greco-Roman Bronze Age sort of look, but not so much if you want medieval knights in shining armor.
I tend to be a bit more involved in worldbuilding (when not running a game in an existing world), so my solution is a bit more involved. Whether I just write the world as having been different in the past (and presumably also the future) or include elements of technological/magitech depends on the mood I’m in when I make the world and what I have in mind.
That’s true for basically any kind of world I build, whether it’s for a TRPG, a more traditional story, or just for fun.
I’m somewhat more haphazard in my world building I suppose; mostly I need the factions to hold together, so the bulk of my writing goes towards the movers and shakers; the drivers of the situations the PC’s will find themselves in. I tend to find that’s the biggest contact point between players and the world, with the world essentially being window dressing. That can be borderline heretical to state, but it’s really not inaccurate.
I thinking through these things, though. At least enough that if someone asks the odd question I have some kind of response.
I 1000% agree with this. Especially how every fantasy writer thinks that in medieval times the church was anti science; it was not, if it were they would not have gunpowder. And even if it was, the fact that Europe had gunpowder was because PEOPLE IN GENERAL wanted to advance, even in medieval times.
Never mind how population sizes in DnD are tiny even compared to medieval times (ESPECIALLY when compared to the Eastern world (Arabia, China) which were as a rule always higher populations)
(note: “this” means GreatWyrmGold)
Cool, I have a new nickname.
The idea of the church being anti-science comes from some (admittedly influential) conflicts between people theorizing in ways that undermined the church’s orthodoxy. They were, to my knowledge, never opposed to new technology (with exceptions for new technology whose use was deemed against doctrine, e.g. safe abortions), perhaps in part because even the stupidest bishop could recognize how things like gunpowder could be used to strengthen their power.
Moreover, this whole line of causality is only applicable to Abrahamic-style religions—few non-Abrahamic religions put stock in orthodoxy (proper belief), instead focusing on orthopraxy (proper practice). The Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around? Neat, but we still need to sacrifice these canaries to Pelor or whatever to keep him happy.
Of course, most Western fantasy religions are similar to Abrahamic ones whether or not that makes any sense, so maybe this is a misplaced point.
Your last point is hinting to how most fantasy worlds make very little sense in terms of how they often incorporate the assumptions of the people who write them.
The biggest one is all the modern sensibilities on gender equality, racism, morality etc. Because the OOC reason is that making sexism/racism/mass slavery the assumption is REALLY bad for RPGs. But also on things like cleanliness/germ theory, b/c if we actually were using medieval standards of medicine the Heal skill would kill you, not heal 1d4 points of damage.
Among other things.
I mean… they didn’t have germ theory, but medieval doctors had SOME idea of how the human body worked. They knew how to set bones and stuff, and some of the traditional medicinal herb things had some useful properties to them (as determined through trial and error). This is actually a situation where having a deity of healing or knowledge who actually communicates with their followers would be very helpful. You’d assume they would pass along some useful anatomy tips. In fact, given that those tips can repair multiple axe wounds in a day or less, I’d say their medical knowledge is better than our present-day understanding!
Originally, in my underworld setting, I had a convoluted and somewhat contrived explanation about high tech polymers and metallurgy being unstable, limiting technological development essentially to steel work and work with mystically stable metals and alloys. While I think it’s a better explanation, there are things about it that seem a bit weird.
These days I just let things compete 1 to 1 and if anyone says that Weapon A should be better than Spell B (or Weapon B or Whatever), I simply shrug and say maybe whatever it is was stronger than you thought.
But mostly… people haven’t asked for a deep explanation about it. They’re just having fun with the occasional tech drop, which is just basically another magic item.
The lovely thing about Pathfinder is that there’s rules for that. A starship crashed onto my campaign world less than a century ago. My PCs have already negotiated with an AI, offering a sample of the tiefling skill monkey’s blood so it can study this novel force they call “magic,” to say nothing of this “coherent, tangible evil” thing that’s apparently built into him on a biological level in exchange for a quest MacGuffin.
The greater worlds of technology and magic aren’t incompatible so much as just not much involved with the PCs, though they have encountered one plan-hopping robo-archeologist. (An archeologist who studies ancient robots, not one who is a robot… probably.) It’s a big universe out there, and an even bigger multiverse. They’ll find out just how large in time.
But what IF the PCs decide to get involved? Also, I would like to think that the concept of magic is universal in the universe, sort of like the Force.
The official Pathfinder lore regarding the alien technology is that the civilization that made it, the Androffans, didn’t seem to have magic for whatever reason. It’s possible that they never realized you could get stuff done by waving your hands around in these precise ways, or maybe they had a lot less magical creatures and stuff because their planet didn’t get the same amount of attention from the various planes. Regardless, the civilization was eventually blasted back to the literal Stone Age by their local gods who were mad they weren’t being worshipped anymore. And then other, bigger gods destroyed those gods because they were so horrified by that decision. So make of that what you will. (From a meta perspective, it is clear the real reason for this is so that civilization wouldn’t show up again in the present day outside of their 9,000-year-old crashed spaceship. Personally, I think it would have been cool to leave that door open.)
Pathfinder’s ancient Atlantis knock-off Azlant actually created a few space colonies via magic teleportation (including a Moon terraforming attempt). Most of these died off after Azlant was hit by an asteroid, but a few hung in there, and one of the minor powers in the space-themed sequel game Starfinder (which does a really good job of combining magic and technology in civilizations that see no contradiction between them) is one of those surviving colonies. (They are more magic-themed than typical of a Starfinder civilization, I think.)
On the topic of the Azlanti Star Empire… they are so powerful that in the AP where you face them , if you eff up and they get their new super stardrive they immediately conquer Absalom Station, No battle, just “the Azlanti win.”
On the topic of the Androffans… that whole thing is weird by virtue of being written by James Jacobs who has this weird dichotomy (going from the Ask JJ thread) of both proposing that magic progresses the world and then writing shit like “the gods destroyed all tech and destroyed a ton of objectively good things.” Personally I would have liked their civilization to collapse because of TECH going wrong Fallout style, so JJ’s decision is really baffling.
So make of that what you will.
PS: On the actual mechanics, magic can be USED anywhere (ie a wizard will not suddenly be unable to magic on Earth), but whether people gain the actual knowledge to use it is a different matter.
playing pathfinder on Golarion, so I guess the developers have handwaved this somewhere to confine tech to the Starfall region.
My personal approach would be that, on this topic, all the gods are of the same opinion:
„We Will Suffer Non Of That Shit!“
It doesn’t matter that maybe one or two want to destroy the world, or what other grievances they might have between each other: Anything above traps and simple clockwork is a magnet for lighting bolts.
People start building complex machinery, and they’ll think sooner or later: Some other stuff is a waste of study time and goats (magic and gods).
Generally I don’t allow gun powder in my campaign: It puts too much power in the hands of peasants.
“, all the gods are of the same opinion:
„We Will Suffer Non Of That Shit!“”
I refer you to the link I put into one of my posts. “The will of the gods” is one of the most handwavy, disempowering things ever. Literally to the point that the gods look like BBEGs for forcing the people to toil in medieval savagery forever.
but when your cleric, druid, paladin or whateverdivinespellcastingclassyouliketoplay gets their spells „the will of the gods“ is ok?
There is a big difference. Spells are granted just be being a cleric and having a connection– they’re not consciously granted.
Meanwhile, stopping all tech is not only a conscious decision, it would fly in the face of the portfolios of some gods, particularly the ones most involved with it.
and quite frankly, if the churches (pretty much all of them) had their way, we‘d still be stuck in medieval savagery. The Amish do it more or less self inflicted/voluntarily to this day, because: bible.
But that’s the difference of of a world with gods and a world without them.
Why do you think evangelicals hate D&D so much?
First off, the RL church is not anti science as has already been explained. But we’re getting off the track and this is a debate I don’t want to get into.
So let’s get into DnD gods and the presence of literal deities OF tech and innovation and civilization to worship. Which just makes “the gods stop tech” even dumber since it goes against some of these deities literal portfolios.
no need to go in to a tangent debate over the churches stance on technology NOW. I‘m talking about the churches in medieval times. The „if gods had wanted us to fly they would have given us wings“ times. That was the „God does not want us to cut open dead people to find out what they died from“ time.
And what better way to stop crazy inventions than to have tinkerers worship a specific deity. Gives that deity a direct link to the greatest minds.
It’s a conspiracy I tell you!
Replying to your last post Agi:
Read GreatWyrmGold’s post. There was no reason for the church, even in medieval times, to actively try to stall technology/medicine. The major witch burnings happened in the Renaissance.
Getting back to the subject, fantasy worlds still have literal deities of civilization and technology. And most good deities would support advances since the benefits of the Industrial Age are very high, especially if you could research magical ways to reduce pollution, which would incidentally keep nature deities happy too. So I would expect them to be an order of magnitude at least more coordinated in research/advancements.
Re: the church
looks like we don’t so much disagree about the facts and more about interpretation and putting them together.
I‘m sure by now the church has realized that bulletproof glass comes at the price of telescopes (pointed at the stars), I‘ll let you figure out what I refer to by yourself.
Re: Tech in fantasy.
I play Pathfinder (Golarion setting)
I handle it the way I posted when I DM.
Not my problem if that doesn’t fit the system or setting you play.
Calling >my< explanation for >my< setting „dumb“ is impolite at best and I hope we never meet at a gaming table.
“Pathfinder (Golarion setting)
I handle it the way I posted when I DM.”
But… Golarion isn’t medieval stasis. Under your explanation entire countries in that setting should not exist.
Not to mention the literal hundreds of tech/chemistry/alchemy stuff and how the future of Pathfinder is Starfinder.
Once again, I am not bashing your games, I am saying your method flies in the face of what Golarion is.
And all of this is not even taking into account the many MANY cases against medieval stasis I and others have made in the comments.
Your ignorance of this issue shows me there is probably no point to arguing with you anymore, but I’ll bite:
The Amish are not representative of all protestants because they are a small faction, otherwise all protestants should be amish. Likewise, the crazy fundamentalists claiming DnD is the devil aren’t the majority of Christians.
There is no point to arguing the medieval church since your points have already been refuted, so back to fantasy: you do your thing with your games, but I would think that there is no reason for the gods to stop tech because a. Industrialization/technology generally helps people and b. gods of tech and civilization would be all for it.
Not even touching how saying “the gods/omnipotent forces stop tech” is not a good facet for a world that is beyond Neolithic progression.
Hey, it’s clear that this is obviously a topic that’s dear to your heart, but please remember to be kind to everyone on here. It’s okay to disagree, but please don’t insult others who enjoy the hobby in a different way.
I didn’t mean to insult him (ignoring him insulting religion in a needlessly inflammatory way). In any case, I’ll continue to stand by my ideas.
I think the source material for the aforementioned rationale is a little older than medieval…
Genesis 3;22
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever.
My go-to explanation is that it’s some kind of curse and/or conspiracy from the extraplanar forces of law, especially lawful neutral and lawful evil. A multiversal curse prevents people from thinking of these ideas, and sends troubkesome coincidences to prevent those who have them anyway from being able to complete their research (can’t source the materials, their papers blow away, personal issues keep them from their research, etc.), interdicts certain magic (such as being why you can’t conjure copper and gold, both of which are important in electronics).
And if that doesn’t work they send someone to convince them with some sob story (“you can;t invent the lightbulb, think of the candlemakers who will lose their jobs”) and/or break their legs
That solution is too obviously artificial to be satisfying and too specialized to have any interesting ripple effects on other aspects of the setting. Probably better to just ignore it entirely.
The conspiracy angle provides a possible villain, as well as various possible motivations for beings ancient enough to have been around prior to it, who might be trying to undo it for example
Also, the leg breaking devils and inevitables are possible villains or combat encounters
On anti tech inevitables, I don’t even think they do much at all, otherwise there are entire areas on Golarion that shouldn’t exist (Numeria and Alkenstar come to mind).
I can think of no reason for devils to be anti advancements, the lawfulness of advancements is something they are hugely associated with (dark satanic mills).
For context on how artificial it would look, just check out Dies the Fire.
Counterpoint: Planegea
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?626529-Introducing-Planegea-a-Stone-Age-setting-for-5E
Planegea is meant to be that way. It is a specialized campaign setting. What I don’t like is for normal settings to be forever locked in medieval stasis “because the gods will it”.
By the way, this also explains why levels work the way they do. Why fighting makes you able to advance your skills whereas hard work hardly works. To actually learn you need to get tough enough to shake off the curse
Xp does not equate to energy from killing monsters. Otherwise we could set up a rat farm and grind it for xp. As has been proved in an advaenture path, xp can be study too.
I’ll generally point to the bestiary as to the reason why science and civilization seem locked in a certain period. There were advances plenty of times. It’s just that rampaging monsters/armies of goblinoids/random planar intrusions/power mad arch-casters/(super)natural disasters are just common enough that city-states and nations of insufficient size tend to get wiped off the map fairly regularly.
Further, there’s a lot less incentive to develop certain technologies when you take magic in to account. Just going by pathfinder rules, any person with at least one mental ability score of 10 or higher can cast some kind of 0-level spell. Prestidigitation, create water, and mending alone can cover so many conveniences. Conversely, deadly aim and power attack require not only a dex/str of 13 (the upper end of the npc stat array) but also a bab of +1, meaning either a lot of experience (being higher than 1st level) or dedicated martial training (being a member of a full-bab class). All for what amounts to “aim for the weak points, don’t just aim to hit them”. Heck, any acid splash or ray of frost user doesn’t even need to worry about that since those are touch attacks.
There is a big difference between game mechanics for PC convenience and the physics of the world. Your whole training thing is just game mechanics. Plus, if there are more casters you get Eberron, not middle ages.
On your point about rampaging monsters/armies of goblinoids/random planar intrusions/power mad arch-casters/(super)natural disasters, if that were the assumption, we would have the Points of Light DnD 4e default setting, not Pathfinder’s setting of HUUGE empires and clear nation states.
Frankly, the existence of nation states at all is a heavily modern assumption that is at the least dependent on stability, which would not be a thing if monsters attack were as common to cause stasis as you say.
In fact, retraining mechanics allows for commoners to be retrained to any class so long as they have an instructor. This takes only 3 days per level. Which goes a long way towards explain why the 12 int fighter whose backstory contains no wizardry training can suddenly mult into wizard… (note– personal headcanon is that there are mail in magic schools a la Harry Potter for this sort of thing)
This is something that i as maker of the setting i have addressed once or twice. The two more common explanations is that either humans can go higher than that, because of genetic manipulation to prevent them for advancing, or gods actually keeps them low tech in stealthy ways. But that are explanations of how they can’t go up, but don’t explain WHY. That is the real question and one few people does. In our setting the explanation is that gods and other beings want to prevent that humanity… something. Something what? That is one of the things i have left open to interpretation. Maybe they don’t want for humans go galactic empire, or for them to create another eternal fleet, think high tech space faring crusade against the gods, or to prevent them to go full Titan, think normal humans going full devil-tiger route. Advancing tech could lead to humanity to not being dependant of the gods, which is bad for them. The Eternal fleet is on a crusade in favor of humanity and against the gods, which don’t want to loose their job and food source. The titans are the one that will cause the Götterdämmerung, that is German for Twilight of the Gods, Ragnarok, and fight against them the Theomachy a multiverse-spanning war, which actually would be bad for all and the reason not even the Titans want to go that route. And in truth isn’t for any of that reasons at all 🙂
Still something i do to keep things interesting is to ignore the stasis part. That would imply that things don’t change at all. In our setting there are cases of worlds losing their tech and regaining it. Think of the fall of Rome and their “lost” tech. Concrete is something it could a time to reinvent. Today is a basic construction material, there was a time when it was one of the several lost techs from the ancients. So individuals worlds, regions and nations, can go up and down the tech tree. Some worlds are like ours, other have a equal but different tech leve, some are more advanced some are less 🙂
And that is leaving aside the whole magitech think one could develop. Helion Must’s animated self-driving carriage could me magic, either an artifact or spell, that could replicate a car and while some people may have problem with that others would find it fitting 😀
This is a good approach. Once again, there is no problem with STARTING a game in medieval times, but remember that magic and fantasy elements will inevitably influence it. And it is just ignorant to say that 10000 years pass and everything is the same.
Also, actually changing physics to stop tech or saying that gods stop tech is just incredibly disempowering to players.
Yes, here is no problem with starting a game in medieval times, or on the industrial revolution times, or antiquity or modernity and in all this cases if magic exist it will influence things. A scryphone isn’t that far from things we have got on the table. And 10000 years do is too much time for things to stay the same, that is why things change and go up or down the tech tree as i said 🙂
But who said that physics change or that gods stop tech?. Physics remain the same, unless they don’t, and that has no impact with tech. Well except on a universe where physics are so mauled they need to use reality engines just to barely keep it habitable. Otherwise physics don’t usually change and that doesn’t affect tech. And gods don’t stop tech. Other than large scale disasters they got few ways to prevent tech expansion. They instead arrange accidents and complications to prevent successful advances. Unless they are gods related to tech in which case they do advance quite a lot tech 🙂
Also, how that would be “incredibly disempowering to players”? 🙂
“But who said that physics change or that gods stop tech?.”
The big argument FOR medieval stasis on this thread boils down to “the world does not run on rational laws and therefore nothing can be evaluated scientifically and therefore technology cannot reliably progress.” or, well, the gods stop tech like they prevent certain things from working, like guns.
Which is all disempowering to players because it feels like whatever they do the Big Pantheon in the Sky/physics itself can just veto it nonsensically by having things just not work, to the point where the world just feels irrational.
For you perhaps, in our table that isn’t the case. And if it were the case it would only mean an opportunity for the rest of the group to defy the gods itself 🙂
Also to say that because gods exist tech doesn’t work ignores that gods can be gods or tech or that because magic exist techs shouldn’t work. Alchemist’s car didn’t stop working because gods or magic exist on the handbook world. It stop working for a disintegration spell 🙂
“would only mean an opportunity for the rest of the group to defy the gods itself”
Therein is my point. Medieval stasis only comes about when omnipotent forces stop tech and there is nothing you can do about it. If you can do something then you do not have medieval stasis– at least not for long.
Also, magic in DnD does not stop tech like Arcanum, otherwise I wouldn’t be arguing against medieval stasis.
It’s not well explained in most fantasy settings, which is a bit frustrating for me since technological stasis like that simply doesn’t happen over that length of time. A good explanation for how something like that might happen are things like the Desolations from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive or the enforced limits on technology from his Mistborn series. I haven’t had the limits on technology questioned in game, but something along those lines such as Earthfall from Pathfinder is probably the best explanation for the stagnation.
Golarion is a world recovering from medieval stasis, it is clearly advancing.
Something I’ve seen pointed out is that the Scientific Revolution in large part depended on people believing that the world runs on a consistent set of rules. If you believe, for example, that weather is controlled by wind spirits and is whatever they feel like making it, you aren’t going to even be able to grok the idea of meteorology. Whereas if you believe that God created rules of atmospheric pressure and fluid dynamics and whatnot, and that weather is created by the interaction of those rules, then you can consider learning those rules and predicting in advance what the weather is going to do. So in a standard fantasy setting, where half the world works according to either nonsensical magical rules or the whims of superpowered but distinctly human-in-thought deities, science and technology as we understand them would be seriously impeded.
Which kind of falls apart when you have literal deities of knowledge and technology floating around. Also, effing up physics to disallow tech feels like an asspull to me. But still it’s not like alternative physics can’t be studied.
This is a good point. The Standard Fantasy Setting IS an objectively irrational and inconsistent place. Evolution by natural selection is very clearly NOT the primary driving force of natural diversity. You have a number of fundamentally different ways to achieve similar powerful magical effects (“Okay, it makes sense that a god can lend you some of its power, but you can also heal people by… being really good at playing the lute?”). Humans and similar beings occasionally undergo a poorly-understood process by which they can survive being punched by giants and falling off 200-foot-tall cliffs without serious injury (thanks to buckets of the ill-defined “hit points”). You’ve got lycanthropes, spontaneously-forming undead, probability-manipulating witches, people who punch holes in steel with their bare hands, psychic powers, various metals, stones and other materials with unique properties that don’t fit on Earth’s periodic table, all sorts of exotic effects from getting very angry, five different explanations for how the world came to be (with affidavit-swearing witnesses to each one) and the endless supply of fey, elementals and outsiders (including some which have Chaos, and therefore constant change and resistance to categorization, as a part of their very physiology!). Trying to get any fundamental, universal laws of physics out of all of that noise (and realizing that there might be such a thing in the first place, if there even IS such a thing) would be an enormous challenge. (Actually, Chaos being a core part of the universe’s fabric might explain a lot of that – the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle on steroids, leaving you with huge piles of things that cannot truly be known for certain.)
For that matter, the academically-minded have a number of new things to distract themselves with. In addition to the obvious allure of wizardry, you have very complicated theology and philosophy (“so Good and Evil are fundamental elements of the universe…”), cataloging all of the types of devils and demons and genies and the like, and, of course, biological categorization (of both monsters and humanoids). With this much to process, I can see how technological progress as we understand it could be slowed. (Also, a not insignificant number of the world’s premier scientists/wizards become evil megalomaniacs before being killed by small gangs of greedy weirdos who then dismantle their stuff and sell it for scrap to the first vendor they can find.)
There ARE explanations for the things you propose. The bard thing is just another method of manipulating magic. The hp thing is a debate at least as old as the game and represents luckiness/extenuating effects, not meat points.
Also, why would philosophical/magical things slow down tech? If anything, wizardry would lead to MORE study and MORE advancements.
Why can’t these new rocks and minerals just be accepted into the “science” of the world? Just because things don’t conform to OUR knowledges doesn’t mean they cannot be studied.
I must have said this a lot, but saying that “physics is different so nothing advances!/the gods stop it!” is the most disempowering piece of worldbuilding you can have. Not least because it makes player effort seem ultimately worthless in the end, but also because it blocks you from making a ton of cool plots concerning high tech/industrialization.
I just don’t even bother trying to address the issue. It’s part of the setting. The reason for these things is “Those things aren’t part of the setting. Did anyone sign up to play Historically Accurate Economic and Technological Progress Simulations & Dragons’? No? Ok then, let’s move on.”
XD
You continue to be my favorite, Ramsus. Still wish I could figure out a decent setup for that “breaking the economy” comic though. One day….
Haha, glad you liked that. And don’t fret, I believe you can figure out how to do it. =D
Indeed, it seems to me that if you can accept intelligent fire-breathing flying multi-tons six-limbed vertebrates evolving in the same world as completely earthly humans and, say, horses, -and, you know, the existence of actual magic- then you can be equally tolerant of medieval stasis.
These usual fantasy conceits aren’t realistic and aren’t meant to be (in fact, the fact that they aren’t is part of the appeal); explanations are only necessary as far as the players involved have individual difficulty with their willing suspension of disbelief, which I guess is related to how much they’ve internalised whatever real-world education they pursued in relevant topics such as physic, biology or anthropology. The explanations aren’t sought for their actual validity, but for their superficial believability for those present : they only have to be good enough not to take anyone at the table out of the game. Players may differ in the strength of justification they require, so some groups may prefer detailed alternate timelines rather than dealing with medieval stasis (or other pet peeve) in any shape or form, others may not bat an eye at it and thus require no explanation at all, the rest is somewhere in the middle, with post-hoc rationalizations that are more or less technically wonky but serviceable in context. If a pretence allows everyone to have fun, I see little purpose in poking holes in it, in the same way that playing with or utterly breaking these clichés is fine -encouraged, even- if everyone’s into it. I guess what I’m getting at is: standards vary, be careful not to impose yours on others.
I wonder how to deal with varying degrees of pseudo-realistic exigence inside the same group, if some players cannot have fun if they don’t get how the world works and others get bored by what feels to them like gratuitously throwing away a sense of epic and mystery. Is finding the appropriate balance mostly a matter of world-building, of session-zero social contract, of appropriate methods of exposing or hinting at Truths of Things on the go (see “Quest support”)? Is this particular group just doomed in the long run? I guess it must depends on the specifics of the situation.
“then you can be equally tolerant of medieval stasis.”
Conversely, why does accepting these things mean you cannot accept progress in the world?
spot-on
An important question. And frankly a more interesting one to me than explaining away medieval stasis.
A potential solution might lie in delegating. If you have that one guy at the table that really wants a thought-out explanation for your fictional history, then put them in charge of the timeline.
“Here are the important events from history. Figure out a world in which they all could plausibly happen. I’ll review your suggestions and decide whether they gibe with my vision for the setting.”
I think of it like downtime. Some people (e.g. my illustrator) are excited to track all the minutia. Others view it as deadly dull. If you can find space for the enthusiastic player to do their thing, and then incorporate that into the game world, everyone can be happy.
I can only restate what I have already said. The problem is not with setting a game in a medieval setting, the problem is forcing it to stay that way forever basically. In this light, the real problem is actual Medieval Stasis, where some fundamental physcial laws/omnipotent beings stop tech.
I do not consider a post apocalyptic world or even a cyclical apocalypses world to be medieval stasis, since they are things the PCs can possibly counter. I consider basically omnipotent forces stopping tech to be Medieval Stasis and therefore bad because not only does it feel handwavy, it also locks the GM out of making any cool plots in that area.
To put it in a nutshell: if neither the players nor the GM at a given table have problems playing in medieval stasis, then who is having the problem you speak of?
Perhaps you’ve been under the impression I’ve been shilling for medieval stasis; I’m not. My own personal preference is indeed not to aim for it in world-building, and I’d be quite agitated by the suggestion that locking a fantasy world in a so-called Middle Ages equivalent automatically makes it better. But I also understand wanting the allure of history without its complications, or simply not caring about the whole thing.
I think the point of discordance is that you are taking some playing needs to be universal while they are not, and perhaps seeing the notion of medieval stasis as stricter than it is used in practice (why should the cyclical apocalypse you mention be necessarily easier to fix than stagnancy??).
Not all players want to be able to counter the way the worlds runs; if no one is interested in revolutionizing society or industry, then they don’t feel constrained if they are not explicitly offered the opportunity to do so.
Not all players are against hand-waving in principle: if no one wants to deal with something (like spell components or, in this case, history), then abstracting or getting rid of it feels better than getting mired in its complexities.
Not all players care about the absolute coherence of the setting, or its realism, or its adherence to “canon”: if a dubious “explanation” (or absence thereof!) allows for more fun, then it’s useful for gaming purposes, and if it ends up getting in the way, a more or less dubious explanation for its end can be devised, as the GM giveth and the GM taketh away. A ruling dynasty as old as history can be a cool set-piece, as absurd as it is; ending it can be cooler, but this plot is only possible if the suspiciously-long-lived family was introduced in the first place. The question “why did no NPCs did it?” is acutely valid from a purely logical, simulationist perspective, but irrelevant from a ludo-narrative viewpoint, from which the actual answer is simply “because in interactive media, the most interesting stuff happens by and/or for the PCs”; one can care more about the in-game situation as it develops than about what it implies about the past.
You -and, presumably, your group(s)- are clearly heavily into ultimate player agency combined with simulationism, which by itself is completely fair, but your heavy-handedness in criticizing a concept no one is taking seriously in the first place (which is how we got a comic about it…) can come across as a “stop-having-fun-you’re-doing-it-wrong” stance toward those who are able to make peace with it in order to focus on the fun parts of settings that happen to be eternally medieval. You are correct in your assessment of the problems of medieval stasis for your style of play, but these problems are of less urgent relevance for those of us who simply don’t prioritize the same aspects of the game.
OK then. I am simply restating the opinions of many others on the worldbuilding/writing subreddits who would see people saying “the gods stop tech and there is nothing you can do about it” (the last part is the critical part) as being an incredibly lazy handwave.
And it IS! But laziness is its own reward and sometime that’s enough, especially if there are bigger fish to fry. You don’t have to have a good world to have a good game, etc.; as weird as it may sound, I do think the lazy, cheap and dirty option can be the correct one, depending on the context.
K then. But I would like to remind you that while that could work for the home campaigns, I would expect more work to be put into something that is intended to be published professionally (cough Forgotten Realms* cough)
Also, I can only really retread the fact that saying “omnipotent forces stop tech” is genuinely disempowering to PCs.
But I guess if you don’t want to focus on the fact that permanently medieval tech would mean PCs are rolling to save vs disease every 6 seconds then that is an ok solution.
Yeaaaaaaah, it’s a shame about professionnal works, which deserve being held at a higher standard.
… Being contrarian, I’m immediately trying to think of what kind of niche case could justify deliberately working stasis into a setting… Perhaps something akin to Dark Souls III: alongside its omnipresent undead, its curses and its oath-prisoned knights, stasis meshes with its theme of a neurotic world unable to willingly let go of its glory past despite the evidence of the damage it’s causing (lot of god-adjacent slaying ensues); there’s an artistic meaning here, in the absence of a logical explanation. This is, of course, a very specific situation.
Speaking of the Forgotten Realms, funnily enough (well, to me at least), the Player’s Guide to Faerun (third edition) mentions a unique magical shield, Captain Aerad’s shield (named after some dwarven hero or whatever) that “Legends say […] could shatter any weapon that struck it, but in fact it is merely a +3 heavy steel shield. Its legendary weapon-breaking prowess was a function of the crude bronze weapons that Aerad’s foes wielded against him, not of powerful magic.”
I have forgotten everything about the damn book but this odd passage suggesting (perhaps accidentally, I can’t be bothered to cross-check the lore in search of a Faerunian Bronze Age) an item forged at the cutting edge of before-stasis technology, accumulating myths, then being reduced to irrelevance by then-extant technological progress; this here is a single glimpse into an alternate Faerun in which the march of history does grind down the past.
That being said, this kind of stuff raises questions on what one expects, as an individual player, from the relevance of history in play: is the obsolescence of mythical items, evocative of stuff like the Lance of Longinus or Mjölnir or Excalibur, an unwelcome let-down, an obvious outcome unworthy of being commented upon, a joke, a potential dramatic reveal? Do I prefer adventurers pillaging ancient ruins to only be bothering the likes of archaeologists, sanctuary guardians and nostalgics (if PCs even bother with the past instead of burgling secret research labs), or should such expeditions be potential national security breaches as the old superweapons and curses they may unearth still have teeth in the modern age?
Clearly post-apocalyptic settings, by presuming past generations more advanced than recent ones, allow one to have their mythical yet still surprisingly edible ancient cake and eat it too, but now that I’m on this train of thoughts I seriously wonder what approach I’d prefer in other circumstances…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurren_Lagann
“this here is a single glimpse into an alternate Faerun in which the march of history does grind down the past.”
A single glimpse that was unfortunately too single, as FR immediately devolves into Medieval Stasis in the particularly odious form of “omnipotent forces stop tech”.
Once again, I have no problem with starting a medieval campaign, or doing something like Numenera where the post apocalyptic is more obvious, but if the situation is set up so that nothing the PCs do could EVER influence the situation if a group like mine tried to run a campaign set there, then I think I can say it is not a good setting because of how it has objectively minimized gaming opportunities.
I think what I find interesting about Golarion as a setting is that it’s very much a world leaving medieval stasis. guns were exotic, super rare items in pf1e, but are now simply martial weapons in pf2e. Even Fighters are proficient in them, provided they’re from a part of the world that’s managed to get functional firearms. Different parts of Golarion are advancing in different ways, though- Absolom is going heavy on steampunk and clockwork, while other places are going mroe into gunpowder and firearms. The interesting thing about this is how it’s affecting NPCs- Bonefist, leader of the pirate nation of The Shackles, outright banned firearms from being brought into the nation because he doesn’t want anyone to level the playing field against him (he managed to get his hands on a Speed Revolver, and doesn’t want to chance anyone getting a leg up in the arms race)
Meanwhile in the Mana Wastes, people have embraced technological advancements because a long-ago war utterly destabilized magic in the region. The people there HAVE to turn to technology to survive, because magic, even the most basic magic, is unpredictable at best and downright unusable at worst.
Nowhere is this more evident than Numeria, though, thanks to the crashed interplanetary starship rising from the desert like a solid steel mountain. What was once Conan-The-Barbarian land is now Conan-Meets-Mad-Max-Meets-Star-Trek land.
Even in other nations though, Golarion’s clearly invented some interesting things. There’s an insane asylum in the early parts of Strange Aeons that has a functional, heated, plumbed shower! (it does 1d4 nonlethal fire damage to you over the course of half an hour, and gives you a bonus on fort saves vs disease)
It’s worth considering that if you think about it science and technology ought to actually advance faster in a D&D style setting because you can just do divinations instead of futzing around with expensive cyclotrons and bubble chambers and large hadron colliders
Exactly. Magic is ANTI-SCIENCE is a dumb concept unless you make magic a demonstrably chaotic (and anti tech) force like in Arcanum. Magic in 3.X is orderly enough to the point where you have major academies studying them. Magic is science in DnD.
oh boy, you are a preachy one.
are you trying to convince your own DM by way of internet forum?
No, I am trying to explain in greater detail why actual, real Medieval Stasis (not just being in a medieval campaign) is bad. The creators of this comic are even making fun of it.
Incidentally, my DM ALSO hates medieval stasis.
Believe I’ve mentioned this before but in my hombrew, a civilization’s level of technology depends on how magical they are. Elves or whats left of them rely heavily on magic so have dark age barbarian tech while dwarves have little to no magic and civil war – ww1 level tech. Humans and goblinoids r mid level magic and Renaissance level tech
Magic being antithetical to advancements is a pretty disheartening aesop though. It proposes the weird notion that magic is inferior to tech somehow.
Which is WHY an explanation is required
Exactly. And once again, the “explanation that is not an explanation” like “gods eff up tech/physics negate tech” is, well, not so much an explanation (at all) as a (lazy) handwave.
My last group didn’t have much tech, but we did have several warforge characters. Mostly NPCs, but one that was a PC.
My current group definitely has tech. We lived on a city sitting on top of a massive airship and one player crafts hover-planes. I’m hoping to figure out a way to get my gun chemist a motorcycle that he can use in battle as a mount.
Look, while I think there is no problem setting a game in a medieval setting (accounting for things like “advanced dwarven metallurgy, arcane energy sources, and the friggin’ fabricate spell”), actual Medieval Stasis where the Fundamental Physics of the Universe or the gods themselves preclude advancements is, once again, about the most lazy and disempowering piece of worldbuilding you can make.
In KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) the tech evolution is more or less backed into the setting. As the campaign starts, with Uther, in about 450 CE, the tech is indeed Dark Age europe. Then, when Arthur comes along, you get into the Enchantment of Britian. And with every seven years or so, the tech, and fashions and stuff, will advance a whole Middle Ages century. That means that just before the end of the whole campaign we are in about 1500 CE, with crude guns and cannon, and full plate Gothic armour and horse barding. And then, when Arthur and the flower of knighthood get killed at Camlann, the whole “Enchantment” fades out, and “normal” history reasserts itself. This is a little game conceit to provide for all flavours of knightly combat, romance and ideas about the genre. But it usually works out quite well.
Also, about magic vs. technology: It all depends on how effective, stable and common magic is. If magic is very rare, and also not very stable or effective, people will find other ways to do things, usually via something that can be called mechanics, or biology (better and more plentiful crops and animals). If magic is everywhere, and effective and stable, why would you use mechanical things to better your lot, if that involves more work than casting a spell? What I think you probably would see, is that, depending on the “tech” (in this case magic) level of the setting, there would be specialization. In early medieval society you would only have a few specialists, as there was no “market” for more. When society evolves, you get more need, hence demand, for more specialized roles. So for instance eventually you will get some magic-user who is only capable of making foundations, but he will incorporate all your wishes, and provide for spellhooks for the magic user that will provide you with the walls for your castle, using those spellhooks to connect them with the foundations, including anti-magic shields to protect against combat\siege magic-users that can demolish said walls. Or it might evolve completely different, and this is just a transposition of our technical society to a magical society.
I like this. The average magic level of the average DnD world is easily enough to do some serious magitech stuff. Eberron is the industrialization, Starfinder is the future.
Also, on your “specialization” thing, in my world, magic items became cheaper and easier to make the more “associated” the spell is with the item. So instant portrait is better than silent image for a camera scanner type item. And you also get spells like “alter velocity area 3” or “shift nanocarbon tube” that are super-tailored to specific items.
I’ve had a number of thoughts about this issue in my various settings.
One of my two Pathfinder campaigns has a major but somewhat under-the-radar technological revolution going on. A faction discovered in some ruins the substance ‘argentum’, a form of magically-created-and-control nanites created by ancient dwarves. (The original creation was declared heretical for potentially ending the need for dwarves to work at the forges and it was violently suppressed shortly before the entire civilization collapsed and dwarves became extinct on that continent.) Combining argentum with modern magical knowledge, the renamed Argent Order has discovered in about 20 years a number of useful applications, including nanite swarms controlled by someone’s mind, more efficient production and material sciences, advanced construct creation and the ability to induce magical ability in someone who lacks it (by giving them the Nanite Sorcerer bloodline). There is even a powerful flesh-eating nanite type called winterbone that can tear apart even the highest-CR monsters, potentially giving mortalkind a major leg up in the multiverse. The Order has focused on refining the technology before spreading it publicly (to maintain a monopoly and avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention), but they have also used it to refine and mass-produce good-quality firearms. Combined with firearms-specific training, the Order’s basic guards are regarded as the most powerful military force in their area. The extent to which this technology spreads across the world will depend partly on how aggressively the PCs attempt to tear the Argent Order down out of personal grudges, and if they manage to get the city destroyed in the process. (The PCs are pretty destructive.)
In my ancient aliens campaign, the elves got an infusion of electronics from a spacefaring civilization thousands of years ago, but abandoned much of it after it was discovered that the aliens were controlled by a dangerous, assimilating species. After the elves drove the aliens off-world and the gods put down a big magic bubble to protect the solar system (Golarion is on a planar nexus that makes planar travel, divine action and general magic much easier there than it is elsewhere, which is why the aliens had no magic), they feared the technology would cause them to be corrupted, like it did the drow. A secret elven faction, however, maintained stores of technology while suppressing knowledge of the aliens and sabotaging other species to maintain their technical dominance. The alien technology has evolved since then and actually diverged a bit, with the Elfluminati’s tech and that possessed by the few drow who have some of their own having noticeably different features.
In my own original medieval fantasy setting, Shadowfire, I don’t think the world is actually that old (maybe 1,000-1,500 years old), and it hasn’t stayed at the same tech level that whole time. In the present, it is undergoing substantial social evolution, which is leading to some technical change and industrialization. The elves perhaps could have been at the forefront of this, but their nature magic allows them to live comfortably in a low-tech society, so they don’t bother. The drow split off out of a desire to develop more types of powerful magic, but their low population and long enemies list have impeded their progress beyond the academic level. The Nexessan Domains are a theocracy whose god is devoted to essentially creating a modern industrialized nation-state out of a feudal region, and it somewhat succeeded, making it the dominant power for about a century (until the Mongol-like orcs devastated them). The Eutrophan Confederation, its main rival, is a series of city-states joining together out of fear of Nexessan strength, forcing them to centralize power as well. The Holy-Roman-Empire-like Kingdom of Rosdren has lasted for centuries in part because it was a relatively weak feudal state with a divinely mandated form of elected monarchy (dukes squabble but none are strong enough to rule all the others), but it has been in steep decline in recent years and some factions are considering major overhauls to compete with the post-feudal states. The biggest social shift is with the orcs, who, because of events, got moved from Comanche/Mongol-like nomadic tribes to an almost 100% urbanized population in a generation, and it has been ROUGH on them. But their labor has formed the backbone of a water-powered early industrial economy (as their city desperately needs exportable goods so it can pay for food imports), which will likely only expand in time. In my not-very-well-defined ideas about a several-decades-in-the-future story, an entirely new continent was found and settled thanks to the development of a new type of sail, which was invented by the previously-landlocked orcs.
Lastly (and this IS the last one, I swear), I once made a “modern Earth, secret magic society” setting (Harry Potter, basically), where magic worked primarily through enchanted items rather than direct casting (though there is some of that). Historically, magic items were made by skilled artisans and monks, with certain immensely powerful items being created over decades or even centuries of craft and refinement. In the Industrial Revolution, however, ideas trickled into the secret magic world (as they often do) and people began making magic items to help them make magic items, eventually forming the basis of some mass production. However, things really jumped forwards after the invention (and theft of) of the computer, which could be used to make far more powerful magic items much more quickly. This was then turned on its head when they used magic to create better computers, eventually arriving at rare, expensive quantum computers capable of mass-producing items more powerful than have ever existed. Needless to say, this breakneck pace of progression has kind of broken everything and the magic government is in a constant, desperate struggle to keep on top of the ongoing arms race. Smart mages also adopt nonmagical technology and upgrade it. While firearms were once considered quant (since you can make a bullet-blocking force field easily), someone eventually had the idea to enchant bullets so they could go through those shields and things went nuts from there. A few hundred years ago, a mage commando team might look like your average D&D party. These days, the best ones have invisibility cloaks that prevent all falling damage, totally silent automatic rifles, night-vision sunglasses that detect low-level invisibility and short-ranged teleporters. It’s a wacky world.
See one of my default tests of a magic item creation system in an rpg, well white room tests, is, assuming a cooperative GM, can I use this to make trains, steam or otherwise. you can do it in DnD 5e, though it’s not a system where I would attempt to actually do it in play
My setting is an early-modern era one with very heavy worldbuilding in which the central antagonistic concept is essentially the arcano-technological cubic singularity, progressive and regressive as well as destructive and preservative alignments replace (partly) the traditional spectrum, and the follow-up campaign will almost certainly be the world’s answer to either the 1910s or a nuclear wasteland. You can probably guess what I think of medieval stasis.
That said, knights and swords are still cool, hence the choice of early modern setting for this game. Thanks to a massive dividing line in the terrain and the advantages of magical equipment, one side of the continent where the campaign takes place can be comfortably Hussar-esque whilst the other is somewhere between Carolean and arcanopunk. I’ve further justified why technology takes a bit longer to develop – following the catastrophic cyclical war which ends each age of the world, people have been blown, rather than conquered, back into a dark age. This isn’t post-roman Europe, where ideas of what came before remain fresh, books and art can still be found at first and social structures often survive in some form – the war forces everything to break down. Furthermore, in the tribal and then proto-feudal societies that succeed the period, magic renders technological development less necessary than it was in the real world – or rather, both magic and technology are both extremely limited, and the slight presence of both reduces the need for development of the other. As such, any advancement is very slow. It takes around two-thirds of a millennium before most learnable magic begins to be sufficiently powerful to achieve anything of note again, thanks to re-opening of trade routes, discovery of new component resources and simple increased study, but even then the small population serves as a limiting factor. Development now moves at only a slightly slower pace than the real world, and by the year 1800 after the war (equivalent technologically to the late 12th century) the rates of advancement are fairly level. At this point, magic and technology begin a feedback loop in places, where the advancement of one feeds the advancement of the other. By 2100 they’re moving noticeably faster than real-world development, and technologically around 1480. By 2207, the present in-game time, the rate is accelerating dramatically, with the tech-level broadly covering the 17th century, although some areas missed out on these feedback loops and as such are far less advanced, their non-conquest coming down to other aspects of world lore.
Anyway, that was a very complex way of saying “I don’t do the thing you’re talking about.”
This is the sort of setting where “medievalism” works. The PCs can actively change things. What does not work is enforcing medieval stasis by altering physics to stop tech.
Also, it seems to me that magic would have a huge impact on advancements, such as increasing technology faster than only the 17th century, which IRL was not much different from the 1500s, but the fact that everything is reset might have something to do with it.
Exactly that. I should be clear that the present-day has elements of 17th-century with some things that’re closer to 20th-century in terms of tech. It’s just that the 17th-century level economics and international connections currently limits that… but if the world survives the forthcoming technological singularity without crashing and burning in another war, the successor game will be closer to a variant on the Tippyverse.
On the other hand, if the whole thing goes to hell then the next campaign might be incredibly low-magic, with metal rare, smithing impossible and no magic above level 3 spells, and then depending on how they do there things might begin to advance again, which’d lead to another campaign, and so forth until I die or run out of willing players.
“variant on the Tippyverse.”
Like the Tippyverse but more focused on doing custom things a la this: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?182780-Magitech-in-DnD-3-5e-(PEACH) instead of “traps everywhere lol”?
Also, I think your method is best for handling “medieval stasis”, since it allows aspects of medievalness along with aspects of high magic/tech. Sort of like Numenera. Instead of just flat saying “no omnipotent forces you couldn’t possibly challenge negate all tech.”
Yes, variant in terms of similar levels of power, similar world set-up, but definitely a lot more technology alongside the magic.
And thank you! I like my method, although it doesn’t really so much “handle” medieval stasis as just not use it and happen to set the game in a particular period. If the characters time-travelled back two hundred years for some reason, they’d find a world very different from that in which they now exist. If they travelled back a thousand five hundred, they’d barely understand the place where they put down.
My quick explanation is that things are progressing but they take time. Cool you made the car now make a car that suits a harpy or a centaur or a large sized race. It takes time to facilitate everyone, because what’s the point of living in the future if everyone doesn’t come along.
I went back and checked – this is the first comic with Wizard in it since the wedding. Did they lose the ring already? (I can sympathize – I was worried about it for years with my own)
Good eye!
Honestly though, who wears a big chunky ring on a day-to-day basis? Wizard does the sensible thing and goes Frodo:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/p__/images/b/b4/FRODO.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/298?cb=20120124180422&path-prefix=protagonist
Holy moley – this comic got a LOT of comments in. Is this gonna be the most commented one at this point?
The wedding was 140, and I haven’t responded to half of these. So… probably?
Oh, I basically ignore this in games I run. Either the world is simply not-yet industrialized, and has the standard amount of history of the world behind it (consider, during the Dark Ages, there were people using stone tools living in the literal shadows of Roman aqueducts) or sometimes I set things during a time of industrial revolution, with cities becoming more advanced, but the ‘trickle down’ time of it spreading to more rural areas taking a lot longer.
“but the ‘trickle down’ time of it spreading to more rural areas taking a lot longer.”
Remember, some places TODAY still don’t have net connection. It was even worse in the 1890s-1920s. Even in Star Wars they spent a ton of time on super desolate places far from civilization. Medieval stasis isn’t necessary if you want the PCs to be in a low tech area.
When it comes to maintaining a technology stasis, I’m personally a fan of “it’s a vast government conspiracy” tactic. There are powerful but shadowy mage organizations who DO study, research, and track down technology, and these organizations of course belong to different nations or focus on certain innovations. They’re basically the ones who tell the PC’s “the world is not ready for this yet” before teleporting away with like, vaccines and standardized calendar systems.
The fact that I also use these people as an obvious tool to control the level of development, progress, and power over the peasants is an intentional design. Generally speaking everyone can accept that learning and gaining magic is generally something that takes time and effort: sure there are a few reports of kids gaining first level sorcerer or warlock abilities, but not only are these rare but usually it’s implied that they still needed to take time to learn how to control that power. So regardless at people needed to get training from SOMEONE associated with a mage guild, temple, or simply a cult.
That’s intended, for the simple reason that education is a good way to indoctrinate people. These shadow organizations want those with large ocular magical and mental talents to already be influenced by their own facilities, as oppose to potentially rising beyond their station and creating a competing school of thought. Or more importantly, rapidly expand the power of the people beyond the shadow organizations control. Sending in a few wizards to disrupt an adventuring party from learning industrial blast furnaces is easy, but trying to do that with ever wannabe artificer making their own adamantine melting stove from rocks and cement is harder to track down and stop.
And generally speaking the players will never learn about this until one of them tries to be too clever by a half and incorporate modern tech into the game. These characters of course being fairly intelligent already, and with a magical background, so their progress is already known and monitored. Only once have my players ever felt the need to address this conspiracy and I managed to get them off that trail with a simple “cult kidnapped someone” mission.
What I am confused about is WHY you feel technological stasis is so necessary that you have to have these huge secret organizations dedicated to stopping it. I mean, couldn’t your cabal of evil wizards do much better with allowing industrialization and keeping the populace controlled with cybernetic implants or something?
If you just want the setting to be medieval, why don’t you just set all your adventures within a decade or less of each other?
*causing it
To add onto a few things you raised, things like “vaccines and standardized calendar systems” are presumably already present in the vast majority of fantasy settings, given that basically all of them have a standardized calendar and people can use the Heal skill to treat disease and heal wounds without, you know, killing the patient or causing them to get additional diseases in the form of infections.
I remember this one game wherein advancing the local tech over the course of months (it may have been a few years) was part of the plot. But then, this was Exalted, wherein doing godly deeds is the default campaign.
As others have mentioned, usually campaigns are too short for tech to advance even with heroic dedicated inventor PCs. A single gadgeteer PC will generally not be able to widely share their battle-proven-during-campaign inventions until the campaign epilogue. Any one gamechanging invention the PC has is major plot, which has to be approved by the GM before it can come up.
If nothing else, “you don’t have the facilities/money/knowledge to do this right now” can deter attempts to casually break the world during a day’s downtime before the next quest. If the PC really really wants to do it, just researching to find out what will be needed can give a GM time to come up with plot to accommodate the request. It is best if the resulting quest requires help from the other PCs, so the other players have to buy in to this new quest. (“You want us to spend weeks so you can get +1 on your AC? Nah, bro, if we spend those weeks leveling up we’ll get better results.” versus “You want our help getting parts so we can have a sweet airship? I’m in!”)
Also: if you don’t want to play medieval stasis, don’t play medieval stasis. Specific technologies that don’t break the plot can be there. Someone wants plumbing? There are few adventures that would break. Gunpowder? Primitive guns with the same damage per round as good bows – see the DMG. Smartphones? Most players know that would break the game (if there’s even a network to connect to, otherwise they’re just handheld computers, which can be impactful enough).
A special note on gunpowder: it can be limited to a Gunpowder Guild, where any member (potentially including a level 1 PC) knows how to make the stuff but is sworn never to reveal the secret to non-guild members. So, a PC with the right ingredients can set up the process at night when camping (so long as it is not raining) and wake up with the ingredients having become another keg of gunpowder, similar to how an archer with the right equipment and ingredients can make more arrows. By limiting it to guildies, gunpowder’s impact on the campaign world can be minimized.
Naw man. You’ve just told your players to plan a “rob the gunpowder guild” heist. 😛
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
Well, sure, the PCs can rob a gunpowder depository. But that’s not going to free up all the nations of the world to start producing gunpowder on industrial scales, to start using them for everyday mining and the kind of mass experimentation needed to invent good rifles. (How many handcannons with autoloading or higher muzzle velocities will explode, before they realize they need better grades of steel, which is best made with electricity, which requires a mass electrification campaign, which requires figuring out how to make a large number of power generation plants without sorely limited resources like non-cantrip spells, and add a few more layers?
This complete set is more than most PC parties are capable of, even at maximum level.)
It would take the PCs obtaining, understanding, and widely distributing the recipe – and if they’re coordinated and determined enough to pull that off, then I say let them break their world’s stasis that way. Rare is the campaign long enough to see them do more than start down that path.
The power issue is singlehandedly solved by an animated object. Or a decanter of endless water.
The problem overall with tech in general is that ignoring certain tech (like plumbing) means that everyone will be needing to save vs disease every round. It is a dichotomy where you need to both preserve the most basic player expectations like sanitation and deal with things like guns.
Personally, I choose to use liberal applications of magitech.
I’ve been lucky; most of my players Really Like Swords.
You introduce tech that obsoletes swords, they feel like they can’t play with their swords any more, they get sad because RPGs mean Playing With Swords, so we’ve got a nice consensus that tech advances are just fine up until they obsolete swords.
The minute I get a player who likes steampunk more than swords, we’re probably going to have to split the group, because steampunk era tech will very very swiftly leave swords behind.
Also I’ll need a whole new bookcase of three ring binders to start up a new campaign setting, so I’m kind of glad it hasn’t happened yet.
Watch as someone brings it up next session.
I really hope this comic doesn’t jinx us.
Guns =/= obsolete melee. In Starfinder, melee is perfectly good with guns because a. armor blocks bullets just as well as swords and b. guns don’t do tremendous amounts of damage, iirc it is only like 1d6 at first and it scales but hp scales faster in SF.
As an aside, I’d like to point out that the idea that powerful groups work to supress technological change that would reduce their power, most notable in Gurps Fantasy and Forgotten Realms, would require that said powerful group be able to predict what changes would come from a small innoculous seeming discovery or device and that no faction wouldn’t give a new invention a wink in order to get advantage over another group.
Also, the fist generation of new technology is always going to be disappointing. With impure ingredients, no corning and poor mixing, the first gunpowder would be a major disaopintment to PCs who expect it to be a game changer.
Oh no, I’m late to one of my favourite discussions! personally, I don’t like medieval stasis, but I am primarily a story writer and world builder, and even if I don’t explain it all in games, I like a healthy degree of versimilitude even in my fantasy worlds, and strivr for imternal consistemcy.
the eternal late iron age (I used to call it the “Eddings condition”, after the fun but athropoligcally outgrageous world of the Belgariad) hasits obvious reasons and roots in “fantasy as nostaligc and idealised recall of white european history”. And as many people posting here have alredy identified, it’s really a worldbuilding issue and not a campaign issue, because even if your late iron age lasts only a few centuries, that still enough time to fit in more campaigns to one setting than your players can complete in weekly 4-hour sessions!
I don’t really understand why this is so popular – if you want to reference events in the distant past, why not situate them against an early metallurgical (or even pre metallurgical) culture? Heck, the world must have been so extraordinarily fantastical to humans in those periods of our own history! And if you really want, you could do -just as medieval europeans did – and depict the ancient cultures reimagined as carbon copies of their own society, whilst not actually making it fact. Think the case of King Arthur, a high medieval French knight riding around in late antiquity!
But still. It’s personal taste.
…
Sociological plausibility is one of the many elements I’ve been scratching my head over the last years’ work designing my “final, best” DnD campaign setting. I have a 10,000 year period roughly mapped out that progresses vaguely like our own from “neolithic” to “early modern”, allowing plenty of different settings (of which, I am sure, medieval amd early modern will be easily the most used!).
But, I also have examples of stasis – my elven people, for example, are heavily inspired by Pinian elves, and psychologically different to the point that they will never develop writing, or cereal agriculture, or metallurgy, living instead in magically-assisted stone age stasis. This, I am OK with, because I want to demomstrate how fundamentally different they are from human – not just humans with big eyes and pointy ears.
It’s all a matter of taste though. I massively overthink everything in a fantasy story setting, culture, society… geology, botany, climate… what effect it will have to have my continent centred on the polar cap instead of somewhere in the 60-30 latitudes… and that is why my setting is years in the making.
But I still happily endorse, for those that enjoy it, the Eddings approach of throwing realism to the winds and having 3,000 year dynasties of medieval chivalry. It’s implausible, and that should be acknowledged, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
Serious question: What is the point of this level of detail? Is it the satisfaction of a problem solved? An engineer’s pleasure at building a working simulation? Do your players appreciate the massive overthinking, or is this more something that’s for you as the designer?
I read this is an acknowledgment that medeieval stasis has an aesthetic effect beyond “it’s lazy worldbuilding.” It trades on the nostalgia-for-a-mythic-past trope. And it seems to me that this effect may be worth the price of admission. Obviously, some people disagree.
I guess the question becomes, “When is the tradeoff worth it?” People still like the Belgariad after all. Would removing the implausible timeline improve it somehow?
Thanknyou for prompting some self-analysis! I think youu are very much on the marki. Whilst it is irrelevant detail – my players rarely delve into the logic of things except when it directly effects gameplay – I take enjoymemt from the thought that, fantastical elements aside, the elements of my world could be explained if anyone ever cared to examine them.
Absolutely, medieval stasis is not just lazy world building. Well, I suppose it can result from that, but a lot of people like it, and a lot of people couldn’t give a fig about whether the setting is “plausible”. I don’t think Eddings even wondered if a society could go unchanged for thousands of years; he wanted a great gap of time to give scale to his story. I personally enjoy the Belgariad for its humour and often snappy writing, rather than its worldbuilding; and I might enjoy it more if it were more sociologically believable; but I’m sure many people don’t even notice, and fewer care. And there’s no right or wrong to it.
I also apologise for the typos. One day I’ll learn to only respond when at a computer with an actual keyboard!
Personally, I do not like Medieval Stasis.
Because objectively, the life of the commoner was 1000% times worse in medieval times than now. Check out Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for some context.
In any case, my favorite setting is settings like Golarion/Eberron where advancements are noticeably happening in lore so the PCs can be creative in this.
Thinking back on this, I have thought of an interesting… not justification, exactly, but point of consideration. As I understand it, people in medieval and Renaissance times thought of their world not as a vast engine of progress, but as a somewhat stasis-like continuation. Mostly, this was because they were projecting their world back onto history (as we do ourselves – see all the settings with better sanitation and freer gender politics than history would dictate). Medieval/Renaissance art of ancient, classical or biblical events and people depicts them wearing medieval/Renaissance clothes and with those sorts of tools and weapons. Shakespeare has some plays allegedly set in Venice or Athens, but other than names they always function exactly like 1600s England. I think it could be argued that a medieval stasis world where ancient times were basically like the current medieval ones in society and technology is actually accurate to the way that medieval people thought of the world and of history. In the same way that most fantasy settings seem to have had an intentional, direct creation by an intelligent deity (rather than stardust coalescing via gravity, followed by Darwinian evolution) and ancient legendary heroes who slay monsters and found empires are real, the medieval stasis world could be seen as a pre-Enlightenment worldview made manifest. Not how the medieval world actually was, but how they UNDERSTOOD the world to be. (Similar to how you could make a flat planet fantasy setting – it wouldn’t make sense as we understand physics, but that’s not the point, and criticizing it for that would be silly.)
Yes, but those deities could also set into motion laws of physics/fluid motion/etc etc.
Which would naturally be studied.
In fact the existence of wizards and clerics of deities who have portfolios literally centered around advancing civilization and tech would be a major moving point.
Both good and evil deities, if not promote, at least allow advancement since no matter what it benefits their intentions (for good deities, the advancement of tech/magic allows people to live longer and have better lives, and evil deities, especially LE ones would love the idea of huge factories).
In any case, stagnation has rarely occurred in human history, with even regressions due to societal upheaval not leading to stagnation long term (the dark ages is a misnomer, as while cultural aspects were lost and some tech did regress, other tech continued to advance.) The industrial revolution is not a fluke, but the natural progression of the tech historically present; it actually would have likely happened sooner if Mercantalism did not occur, as most production tech was kept as state secrets. Stagnation only has occurred when there is a a lack of means (not enough resources to advance), there is no pressure (no conflicts and resources are so plentiful that there is nothing needing a solution), or active suppression (which usually cannot persist indefinitely.) plus, humans are pretty curious, and do like to “do this and see what happens.”
Kinda late to the party.
Not tabletop, but I recall an OLD (I mean 2 decades old) game Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Obscura has explanation that magic and technology can’t coexist, they literally interfered with each other (an example, magical healing potions were useless to tech inclined characters)
I don’t recall details, since it’s been an age since I played it.
Second part was an OC of mine, from time when I dreamt of being writer.
I had a setting where I wanted high tech stuff like computers,. but also reasonable explanation for using swords and the like, so I came up with explanation that dragons, who rarely communicated with humans were all “purging with my kin” anytime someone made progress in gunpowder research (I did not say I was good at this, that setting had more plotholes than Michael bay movie)
“I want computers but also swords” remind me of an amazingly dumb setting a friend and I came up with. It was a Star Wars-like spacefaring setting in which no one had ever figured out that ranged weapons could be a thing. Lightsabers and pikes and stuff were common simply because they were the main way people knew how to fight. And how would space combat work? Simple. Spaceships were built like big wedges and rammed into each other like ancient Greek triremes.
The explanation we developed for how you get orbital mechanics without ballistic weaponry was that these people did not actually invent any of their technology. They instead learned all they know via shamans who commune with the cosmos and gain blueprints in their mind. And for whatever reason the cosmos doesn’t feel like sharing bows along with antigravity and FTL.
Weird… but to each their own!
I personally prefer Dragonstar/Starfinder “magic powered quantum destabilization guns” myself.