How come cultural and technological stasis is more acceptable for medevil high fantasy settings (thousands of years pass but everything is still kings and serfs) but not for other eras like Victorian Era/Steampunk etc etc? the only other I can think that seems to be acceptable is spacefantasy shit like Star Wars (Goon sesh?). if you tell someone that 5000 years ago King Obama rose his sword against the Edgemaxxers no one bats an eye but if I say something like, 1000 years ago Governor Blimpy shot his musket taking down 3 Man O Wars people raise thier eye brows that muskets still exist
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Because those were eras of pronounced social and technological flux, noticeable even in the short span of a human life. Star Wars and a lot of sci-fi get away with slowing down again because we don't live in a sci-fi future and have no perception of what it's "supposed" to be like, and because 'the end of technology' is a deliberately invoked thing in some science fiction.
why is she fighting naked?
What are you talking about? She's clearly wearing a shirt.
Caught undressed, but not lacking.
Have you never been getting ready for bed when assassins suddenly crash through the window, leading you to snatch a trophy sword from the wall to defend yourself? Regular occurrence round our way.
That's how they almost got Victor Steiner-Davion.
An excuse to draw some horny character, would this image work with dudes balls dangling out of his underwear? No. It’s not cool or interesting, it’s just sexy
I have seen this scene happen several times in wolverine comics actually. And yes, it was just naked wolverine, killing assassins.
gay.
The best way to do old tech way outside of its era is to set your game in the hinterlands. During the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, some of the Mujahideen used jezails. Black powder muzzle loaders with a flintlock. Very soulful, if nothing else.
technological stasis doesn't make sense for settings where an essential part of the setting is rapid, transformative change and explosive, exponential growth (eg, the victorian era)
women in the Victorian era fought duels stripped from the waist up on the understanding that bits of clothing could contaminate the wounds and cause infection. also it's easier to move around than wearing a corset. Which clearly isn't what is going on in the picture but it's worth mentioning.
yes but it is precisely the myth of cultural stasis, created during the renaissance, that makes fairly static medieval settings believable.
>yes but it is precisely the myth of cultural stasis, created during the renaissance, that makes fairly static medieval settings believable.
You can have the peasantry continue their life unchanged while the big cities are sprawling with the latest advances.
These demon worshippers get told during davening that they'll get rich if they falsify historical facts and the morons do it.
This.
Our primary goal is to understand and we need to understand that the goal of the Dark Ages myth is that they didn't live like us so we shouldn't want to emulate them. "Return" some anons say.
Speed bonus
Beyond the themes attached to the aesthetics mentioned, many of the technologies defining the aesthetics are intrinsically primitive implementations. For example, steampunk is almost universally predicated on reciprocating engines, but it takes just one obsessed autist with The Big Book Of Expansion Ratios to refactor everything by inventing the turbine. Dieselpunk is much worse because the central technology is reliant on electrical systems and calculating a great deal of proportions to get worth using, which together make stalling out virtually impossible.
Cultural and technological stasis are myths in the Medieval Era too but people have been conditioned to believe otherwise.
Which is a shame really, especially that the stasis seems to be clustered around the end of the period a lot of the time when much of the cool stuff happened earlier.
The Dark Ages myth is only that, a myth, a forced meme. They need to convince you that the only good time to be alive is now so you don't question the system.
>They
Frick off with your conspiracy theories, the myth was started by Renaissance dipshits who wanted to pretend they were hot shit and perpetrated by the Victorians whose disregard for history was only matched by their boner for Greek statues.
These 1000 years had plenty of scientific and cultural advancement and changes, as did the millenia before them. Even if you reduce them all to "breastplates and swords," the metallurgy involved in the arms race advanced significantly, and this permeated other areas of technology (much like modern military research benefits civilian tech). Not to mention the fact that we STILL use breastplates, and shields, and blades as sidearms.
Your mistake is ranking firearms on a line of progression while reducing swords to a single consistent static technology. A Greek Kopis is not the same thing as a French rapier.
>Your mistake is ranking firearms on a line of progression while reducing swords to a single consistent static technology.
Feel free to explain which portable firearms technology predates the fire lance.
>Frick off with your conspiracy theories
Take your mental meds you frickin news watcher.
>Frick off with your conspiracy theories, the myth was started by Renaissance dipshits who wanted to pretend they were hot shit and perpetrated by the Victorians whose disregard for history was only matched by their boner for Greek statues.
But surely our rulers today are so benevolent that they'd never do anything similar, thinking otherwise would be wrong because that would be a conspiracy theory and conspiracy theories are always wrong because if they weren't that would be scary.
Occam's razor dipshit. Even if ~~*they*~~ were intent on that the fact is that Petrarch and co have been forcing the meme since well before your globohomosexual terrors. Build a better strawman next time.
>These 1000 years had plenty of scientific and cultural advancement and changes,
But they aren't known for being a period of rapid change. The average person can point to plenty of technological innovations in the last 400 years. They're going to have a harder time pointing out things like the steady evolution of armor or higher poundages of crossbows or siege weaponry.
>Even if you reduce them all to "breastplates and swords," the metallurgy involved in the arms race advanced significantly
I explicitly stated that they wouldn't be the same kinds of breastplates and swords. A knight from the 1500s who found a 5000 year-old sword is probably going to view it as closer to a bronze knife, and any armor he found would likewise seem lacking in terms of how well it fit and what it covered.
But if somebody is telling you a legend about somebody using a sword, both of those are still swords.
If somebody tells you a legend about somebody using a musket, a musket is a very particular type of gun. If it was a legend about somebody using a firearm instead, then that fits a similar timeframe to the vagueness of 'sword'. Much like the progression of Kopis to Rapier, you've got a progression from early hand-cannons to modern rifles.
In the context of tabletop RPGs, this is further exacerbated by the fact that there will often be a smaller difference in stats between a bronze shortsword and a steel rapier than it will between an arquebus and a modern hunting rifle.
There are all sorts of reasons for why it's seen as more acceptable. The reasons tend to be built upon the fact that the average RPG player has a pretty poor understanding of history, but these reasons are there.
You can either work around them or just deal with the fact that you'll need to explain your autism to your players.
>But they aren't known for being a period of rapid change.
This has no bearing on reality. Reputation is not fact.
The average person can point to plenty of technological innovations in the last 400 years. They're going to have a harder time pointing out things like the steady evolution of armor or higher poundages of crossbows or siege weaponry.
The average person is not a medieval scholar. The middle ages saw advancements in metallurgy, construction, science, and medicine.
>In the context of tabletop RPGs, this is further exacerbated by the fact that there will often be a smaller difference in stats between a bronze shortsword and a steel rapier than it will between an arquebus and a modern hunting rifle.
Sure. Again, the problem is modern misconceptions, not historical stasis.
>It is totally implausible that you'd have muskets in use for 5000 years. It is not implausible at all that you'd have spears in use for 10,000 years.
You're doing the same thing the other comments did, lumping all "spears" together while arbitrarily separating different types of firearms.
Is a pilum the same weapon as a pike? Of course not.
kek
This Anon gets it
Why would they keep the myth alive with millions and billions of dollar in the entertainment industry?
PS: documentaries are entertainment.
The myth is perpetuated today, which you can tell by ignorant homosexual know-nothings continuing to propagate it today.
Frick you the height of the Roman Republic was the only time it was good to be alive or perhaps Sparta under Lycurgus. Those were the days of SOVL!
SPQR! SPQR! SPQR!
(I would absolutely lead a legion or be a spartiate not a slavet or helot)
>They
Can you cowards just say israelites, everyone on this site knows what you mean.
They cannot, because racism is technically against the board's rules and the jannies might hurt their feelings by removing their post.
But also they're cowards.
While the "Dark Ages" in the sense of the utterly cartoonish strawman this "atheist" respondent created is certainly fictional, it is also true that very little technological change occurred from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance, and really nothing /substantially/ (as in, created a large disparity in health, wealth and military power as compared with iron age civilizations) changed until around the time of the English Revolution. What we might consider scientific inquiry was esoteric practice for the majority of human history, what changed things was the adoption of universal literacy and state organized research institutions, coupled with harsh eugenic purges of criminals via execution. Things were quite the same from the earliest times until very recently and we are already well past the apex of our technological civilization.
>it is also true that very little technological change occurred from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance, and really nothing /substantially/ (as in, created a large disparity in health, wealth and military power as compared with iron age civilizations) changed until around the time of the English Revolution.
That's just not true. Advancements in medicine and agriculture were happening, the stirrups were invented, the printing press was technically invented in the middle ages, the mechanical clock, the hourglass, the proliferation of gunpowder weapons (a very medieval technology despite medieval fantasy misconceptions), alcohol distillation, massive advancements in construction, better ships, reading glasses...
Most actual historians don't even agree that the Renaissance actually represents any major shift. To the extent that it does, it piggybacks off if centuries of medical technology.
>we are already well past the apex of our technological civilization.
I now wonder if I'm being trolled
Gutenberg's printing press was built in 1440, you're being very disingenuous. The rest of the inventions you mention did not substantially change anything, they did not create any large disparities in wealth, health, or military power. 14th century France fielding an army against 4th century Rome is not even a sure thing for the French, indeed even the pike and shot conquistador armies were quite evenly matched with the more or less stone age mesoamericans in combat. Things only began to really change and accelerate with universal literacy and state formation coupled with state research institutions. And again, the eugenic culling of violent criminals for many successive decades was essentially a prerequisite to modern state formation and the gradual adoption of industrial production and the commercial economy.
The 30 Years War, Glorious Revolution, and even the Reformation that sparked them are the most obvious breakpoints from the iron age, as all of these vast socioreligious movements came about through mass politics as a result of literacy.
>Gutenberg's printing press was built in 1440, you're being very disingenuous.
Singling one item in a list and ignoring the fact that the others are much more solid counterexamples is more disingenuous than including an item created decades before an arbitrary dateline.
>the eugenic culling of violent criminals for many successive decades
That is not how biology works.
>The 30 Years War, Glorious Revolution, and even the Reformation that sparked them are the most obvious breakpoints from the iron age
The Iron Age ended with the beginning of recorded history.
>vast socioreligious movements came about through mass politics as a result of literacy.
So you're going to ignore vast socioreligious movements like the formation of the Holy Roman Empire or the Christianization of Scandinavia and Britain?
when you invent magic you don't need to progress
Nonsense. You should see the development of magic throughout the centuries. There's no reason everyone would immediately master it, and "lo and behold here art the 610 spell canon, which doth popped into existence the moment magic was discovered and has been the beginning and end of all magical progress."
You'd have a period where the rudimentary principles were worked out, and more and better spells would be developed over time, and not all of them would be kept secret.
Especially with the paradigms of them being expensive to research and being widely accessible in mages guilds for a fee (unless deemed too dangerous to make public) a la 2e or 3e. The magic should develop over time just like real world science did.
It *does* pose a pretty harsh barrier to more broadly applicable developments if it's at a skew or entirely divorced from the physical laws of day-to-day life, as it then sinks academic work into an exact fit for aristocracy.
Could be mildly amusing to have the Mudcore Peasant stagnation of "general lifestyle" end with a wizard turning himself into a clockwork factory to pound out large volumes of increasingly capable yet LESS magical tools just to prove a point to the local version of Koschei.
Sure. The research would be conducted by what would quickly become a whole social class of mages, divorced from the daily drudgery peasants face, and there would be a great deal of research into things that the peasants wouldn't see value in.
But at the same time, I'm sure you'd get research into things that keep the peasantry happy and productive, like magic and magic items that help with stabilising the food supply. If you didn't, well I've read the Netheril trilogy. And that sort of peasant revolt seems plausible. Really, that whole trilogy shows what happens if the mages ignore the peasant suffering, but also actually covers a good bit of out of touch and out of sanity mages researching magic without care for the good of the people. Good trilogy.
But, more *sane* mages would see that it's in their interest to keep the peasants from starving to death until there are constant revolts needing suppression. The people in charge, would benefit from putting mages in charge of solving societal problems rather than ignoring them.
But in either case, the magic of a thousand years ago should be generally less sophisticated and varied in application than the magic of today.
Ive actually done something luke this in my setting, its more iron age than medieval so ive banned a lot of spells as ive deemed that they don't yet exist.
Recently the party managed to gain access to one of the evil lich's towers and found his research notes on a flight spell that he discovered by performing experiments on captured faeries.
Once you get going with the industrial age (enormous energy abundance, standardized units), things kind of speed up.
even shortstack latinas with 32ddd breasts?
Wut
It is probably because things like the industrial revolution are known for being periods of relatively rapid change.
The middle ages lasted for around 1000 years, and while 5000 is obviously an exaggeration on that, even before then you still had several thousand years of bronze age where people were still using breastplates and swords, just not the same kinds.
>First sword 3300 BC
>Last time swords were deployed in war 1945 AD
>5425 years
>First "gun" 1000 AD (fire lance)
>Current year, the gun period 2024 AD
>1024 years
Seems to make sense to me. There's a good chance that if you said "1000 years ago King Obama wielded a sword." and you'd be right, you could only say "1000 years ago King Obama wielded a primitive firearm." starting the same year U2's "Beautiful Day" came out. For you to say "1000 years ago King Obama wielded a Colt Model 1848 Percussion Army Revolver." you'd have to wait until the year of 2848, and for context:
>Star Trek The Next Generation starts in the year 2364
>In Battletech, The Star League dissolves in 2780
>In Fallout New Vegas the battle of Hoover Dam takes place in 2281
>Subnautica the futuristic underwater exploration game takes place in the 22nd century
Strewth.
BUT IT GETS WORSE!
Since 1980, U2 has released 15 albums. That means that until you could guesstimate whether Obama had a Colt 1848 or not, at bare minimum you'd have to wait for another 2934 U2 albums. But if you wanted an equal chance for this then as you'd do for a sword now, you'd have to wait until the year 7273 when U2 releases their 21350th album: "Still Kicking It".
Coal is a non-renewable resource. any Victorian-era society which actually tried to create steampunk technology would soon find itself in stark trouble. Barring magical intervention, the power requirements necessary to make real-world versions of steampunk devices (or at least Victorian-era versions of 20th century technology) would be enormous, and would soon exhaust all available supplies of coal and wood. A real steampunk society would have to either immediately transform into a fully modern society (with oil, gas, and nuclear power driving devices made of modern, lighter materials) or would quickly become, in all probability, a technological dead end. With this said, the recent development of a number of designs of rocket stoves beginning in the 1980s, have demonstrated that a highly fuel efficient steam boiler may in fact not be quite so impractical after all, at least on a small scale. On this point, it is also worth mentioning that the average contemporary power station still runs primarily on large coal-fired steam turbines, and that nuclear power still actually involves running a steam turbine as well, but simply uses the heat from (ideally) contained nuclear reactions to generate steam, rather than a wood or coal-fed fire.
>Coal is a non-renewable resource
Not strictly true (and the same goes for oil, natural gas, and peat), but it requires specific environmental conditions and geologic timescales. So unlike biomass (including wood for stoves) it simply wouldn't renew fast enough to meet the needs of society.
Pedantry aside, with a little handwaving a steampunk society could theoretically do things like Space: 1889-style expeditions to Mars, to search for coal. And since nuclear reactors produce steam, it's neither impossible nor thematically inappropriate for there to be uranium-powered steampunk (which becomes more amusing if they don't discover electricity but do discover nuclear-powered steam turbines, and thus invent a kind of jet engine).
Thing is... innovation breeds innovation. Look at Moore's Law, which is now obsolete - but the principle of the increasing rate of change is true. When you look at all of human history, it took until 1903 to invent the aeroplane. 27 years later, Frank Whittle invented the jet engine. 39 years after that, man set foot on the moon.
tl;dr - the typical fantasy RPG is modelled on an era which wasn't truly stagnant, it just changed less quickly - and if you didn't have the breakthroughs to move beyond that era, or share knowledge with your global neighbours, then it would probably look stagnant from the outside. Also, the minute you point out that there were historic guns, it starts arguments on /tg/
It's for the same reason we define the difference between Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern when periodising history.
The medieval period was far more stagnant in technological advancement than the Early Modern (a period best defined by "discovery" and "transition/rebirth/reformation" across science and religion) and the Modern.
The late Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era is a point in history where the "when I was a boy" attitude truly takes root in the sense that the world was one was born into was a markedly different place than the one they died in (in terms of technology AND culture, as opposed to there being a vague chance at a cultural shift like in previous centuries).
For a long time the Industrial Revolution was characterised by historians as a watershed moment whereby modernity becomes an inevitable, inexorable thing. This only left popularity in the 60s/70s, but that's LONG after this idea was effectively enshrined in popular culture. Any changes in academic history's opinion is normally never heeded because its far less interesting than the anachronism we all know and love.
Think about the changes from 1000 - 1500 vs the changes from 1500-2000. The Medieval period was still a vibrant place, it was a place where culture could thrive in many ways, but it was undeniably a more technologically and culturally unshifting time than early modernity.
>/tg/ - Traditional Games
Name five situations where this issue came out in your game.
Name five games (without DnD and WH) where this issue exists at all
Name 5 games without stagnant or decreasing technology.
Name 5 games which disagree with societal expectations about the past or the future.
The modern era is defined by rapid change brought on by an inability to cope with rapid change. It is totally implausible that you'd have muskets in use for 5000 years. It is not implausible at all that you'd have spears in use for 10,000 years.
>The modern era is defined by rapid change brought on by an inability to cope with rapid change
Sounds like a bad case of future shock.
It's called technoshock, choom, and the only solution is to become a punk and also a career criminal.
Only once. Turned out to be a burgler though, not an assassin. He escaped out the window and then I got to sit up all night waiting for the cops.
Writegay reporting in. History is hard. Years of worldbuilding for a high fantasy hard scifi hybrid, 20k years of major geopolitical events outlined, but I still have big ugly blanks spanning hundreds of years each that would be loaded with incremental political and technological upheaval. Its hard to push myself to flesh things out that might never be relevant to the main text of my story. But that's the hole I've dug myself. If I'm lucky I'll have enough worldbuilding to publish a single novel before I die of old age.
If a 200% autistic homosexual like myself can't fill enough history to make things plausible without question, what chance do the normies have?
Normies who believe in a God who'll reward them for a good job and punish them for being homosexuals try their best to be truthful.
Because the people looking for fantasy are generally looking for a specific feeling of fantasy. They aren't looking for any sort of historical parallel.
If you take two fantasy themed characters straight out of something like d&d. One of them is wearing a suit of chainmail, has an axe and a shield, there's some frivolous details like a tabard and a nice helmet. The other is a figure clad in gleaming, intricately detailed plate armor and has a polearm
The average fantasy seeking person isn't going to care that these two are technically like 300 years apart in a real world historical context. They're just looking at two fantasy dudes adventuring
Medieval fantasy is a setting (a generic one), not a real world time period.
Just like how it'd be strange to assume you can bring Johny Rico into a star wars game it'd be strange to assume you can bring a rifleman to a generic medieval fantasy setting