Why do so many fantasy settings have a medieval stasis permanently stagnating the world when humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
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Because these stories and settings are taking place in a romanticized view of a particular period, moron.
Then have the games take place in a certain time period instead of making all time periods the same.
Pretty much.
People don't actually read A Yankee at Arthur's Court, which makes sense because it's a terrible SJW political novel that put politics into places where they have no business mucking about.
Really, just look at the Japanese - their Isekai reliably support the peculiar institution and hold fast to the truth that the gods create some men to be superior to the rest, reflecting the basic truths we believe in.
List 10
Okay, uh
>Lamposts
>pizza
>Toothpaste
>Jackie Cha
>gunpowder
>better guns
>better armour
>printing press
>clocks
>lighter than air flight
>steam power
>machining
>sanitation
>survey equipment
I'm exhausted and this is my first 10 off the top of my head.
Magic can do more damage
guns
Just put magic on the guns we have
armour
Magic walls and magi shields exist, why bother
press
Magic can comunicate with people on the other side of the world instantaneously
Magic can rewind time
than air flight
Just magically tame a dragon
power
MagicL beasts can be tamed and cost cheaper
Alchemy can duplicate items
Just use a healing spe
equipment
Magic detection
The only technology that is acceptable is giant robots moved using magic so can tame giant beats whiout hurting them
depends on the setting or till your run out of mana or spell bawds
What the frick is magic?
Y'know how a bunch of people believe in a god and think a god just created the universe and people and animals and stuff out of nothing? Magic's kind of like that.
It's not so much a "thing" as it is an "excuse".
>Y'know how a bunch of people believe in a god and think a god just created the universe and people and animals and stuff out of nothing? Magic's kind of like that.
Kind of like what? That answered nothing.
>It's not so much a "thing" as it is an "excuse".
An excuse for what? I'm asking how it works.
that's what i'm trying to tell you: it works by magic. Magic works because of magic.
There is no answer, there is only the excuse.
Why not stop using it as an excuse and give it some grounding in the world then?
I'd love to. I think magic is shitty. it's a crap plot device. it's bullshit.
Nobody i know wants to play anything but 5e though. they all just want magic and blue-and-yellow tieflings with glittery hair.
I hate it.
So much.
>An excuse for what?
Given that both God and magic are fiction, you can make them say or do anything you want.
>Why are you abusing your children?
God told me to
>Why are you killing your neighbour?
The Bible told me to.
>Why do you hate women?
Because I believe in Jesus
>Given that both God and magic are fiction, you can make them say or do anything you want.
I get the feeling you really want me to believe God is fictional.
>Why are you
None of these make sense.
why would you believe a god is real? That's magic.
I also get the feeling you're really itching for a strawman-filled argument about theism. Boy, it'd be really frustrating if I were to deny you that, wouldn't it?
Doesn't the Artificer class exist to deal with that?
What's to strawman? The god makes animals out of dirt and breath, and then makes a human out of dirt, forgets how he made female animals and pulls a rib out of dirt man to make women...
.... that's magic, bruh.
That's sandniger bullshit. That's primitive morons making up magic stories to explain shit they didn't have answers for. An excuse.
>What's to strawman? The god makes animals out of dirt and breath, and then makes a human out of dirt, forgets how he made female animals and pulls a rib out of dirt man to make women...
I haven't even engaged you and you're already confusing yourself. Thankfully, I'm a monergist, and so I'm capable of wasting this perfectly fine opportunity to waste time and words.
I mean to stabilize magic concepts.
It doesn't work.
The artificer just gets magic powers and the magical ability to make magical weapons and ironman suits.
It's just more magic.
I'm so sad.
>Doesn't the Artificer class exist to deal with that?
No. Artificer class alone can't kill all of the tieflings. I checked. I was disappointed.
>really want me to believe
I don't want you to believe anything.
The question was "10 settings with medieval stasis" you stupid mong
The aqueduct
The stories intended to take place in a game setting usually don't span a long enough period for those kind of changes.
this
may as well ask why a story is set in any particular time period instead of the most advanced possible thing imaginable at time of writing
you see a small span of time in these settings without the ability to see any real change. Only recently has humanity hit a point where change happens relatively quickly as opposed to the past where due to the slow spread of tech and information caused any change from the norm to be slow
People don't seem to realize how remarkably fast technology has gotten and how slow it has been. In 1912 the Wright Brothers took flight. In 1969 the US landed on the moon. That is an absolutely astounding rate of technological growth. Now look at the 600BC to 200AD period and you can't really find anything of that substantial speed.
Harpers
>BUT MUH TESTS OF STRENGTH MUH ROMANTICISM!!!!!!!!!!!!
Time moves on, the orcs will be crushed by the might of innovation, the dragons will be driven to extinction as they're shot out of the sky. And mages will answer for their oppression of non-magic users by the might of gunpowder.
After writing one of my thesis' in college I always love how the spread of gunpowder basically was the main driving factor for the death of the nobility. Who cares if you've trained from birth to be an expert swordsman when some peasant is handed a musket and kill you instantly
>the spread of gunpowder basically was the main driving factor for the death of the nobility
It was not. Aristocrats continued to be present on both the wet and dry battlefield well into the 19th century. That Lord Uxbridge got his leg blown off by a cannonball at Waterloo doesn't mean he wasn't there.
The rise of professional armies, which coincided with the proliferation of gunpowder weapons, led to the nobility being a smaller percentage of the men on the battlefield than were there previously. But ultimately "the nobility" never died.
Yeah, the aristocracy really didn't die until WW1, and that was largely an engineered policy by the victors.
>The rise of professional armies,
This is pretty much what killed off warrior castes like Knights and Samurai. When you could raise and equip 100 professional soldiers in a few months for the same or lower cost than it would take to raise and equip 1 knight over the course of decades you go with the more cost effective method.
I think it was more the merchant class drained so much wealth from the aristocrats that most aristocrats could no longer maintain their position of power.
>I think it was more the merchant class drained so much wealth from the aristocrats that most aristocrats could no longer maintain their position of power.
The states position of the Anglo-American victors was that the monarchies ought to go, or at least be made into figureheads.
Professional soldiery existed well before the decimation of the noble warrior class. In fact, much of the leadership of professional soldiery until as late as WW1 were nobility. People like to think that nobility retired from the battlefield well before Napoleon but in actuality it was right after WW2 when British/German/Japanese aristocracies finally collapsed to pressures from inside (anti monarchical movements) and outside (soviet and American policy shaping) that left to downfall of the “warrior noble”.
Nobility as it own unit mostly collapsed in WW1 as cuirassiers and hussars (even then they just switched to being plane pilots) and what have you were finally done in by TACTICAL advancements (trench warfare, the proliferation of extended urban warfare, warfare that ended in policy change as opposed to territorial chamge), not just technological improvements as most think.
Yeah, in World War 1. The nobility was doing fine until August 1914. The survivors are actually still doing fine, they all have made up email jobs at investment firms or charities.
Elf-haters confirmed for literal, unironic communists.
Outbreak Company was less memey than Gate but a lot more interesting in terms of using soft power instead of hard power.
This is why its such a poor match to typical fantasy stuff. It's usually portrayed as something that just trivializes everything causing every wondrous or powerful thing to be diminished and defeated by the mundane.
>He said, while also being mudcore fetishist
What’s wrong with being a mudcore fetishist? I have both guns and swords in whfrp.
>It's usually portrayed as something that just trivializes everything
I mean, it did IRL. just go back to some of the first real battles between armies of elite knights vs peasants with early guns. There's absolutely a reason why feudalism and armies of nobility died out
>peasants
These guys were typically professionals. Levee en masse wasn't really a thing until, as the name suggests, the French revolution. And even then, European aristocracy continued to dominate the world for another century.
>There's absolutely a reason why feudalism and armies of nobility died out
That is so dumb it physically hurts.
Nobility was superceded by the merchant class as economics became the primary method of power distribution
cry about it homosexual, i'm still going to execute homosexual little knife-ears and there's nothing you can do about it
You're not brave or interesting for it. Heck, japan already made a dumb manga about that shit and guess what? Lots of people hate it for being so transparently wanking off modern military to the point where it never feels like there are ever any stakes and you always know who will win.
>Y-you are not brave or interesting unlike muh tolkienerinooooooooooooooooooooooo
>mentions asiatics out of the blue
back to Ganker with you.
I bet you're a HFYtard who always somehow fails to understand why people don't find your self-fellating zero stakes fics interesting.
Gate is the cosmological counterbalance to shit like Samurai Jack you all mentally wanked to, it's one of the finest trollings ever done in the industry, right there with Endless 8 and Death Note S2.
A world where mundane power is killing the fantastical sounds pretty interesting.
Like, you could even feature some Napoleon type guy using canons to fell a dragon, which usually takes a mighty wizard or a knight if legend with a magic sword to slay, gaining power because of it & becoming an Emperor. This event sets a precedent for fae folk & supernatural beings being on decline. We no longer need our histories filled with epic men with epic desinties. We still have a few, but not as many. Now the stories tell of crude men using brutality, cunning, & more importantly explosives to kill things.
Felling a dragon isn't even impressive anymore given their jobber status in most media. Having the dragon actually stomp everything humans throw at it would be interesting these days.
GATE was fun for about 5 episodes til it had no stakes. It could have been fantasy anime Japan SG1 but then they fricked it up
taking away their magic and intelligence does that.
my dragons would've cast a wall of force just in front of one of those jets.
>A world where mundane power is killing the fantastical sounds pretty interesting.
Not to me it doesn't. I've seen enough involving guns already before I ever picked up MTL to rape my brain of all my english literacy. To you it might be interesting but to me its just Buffy the vampire Slayer, Stargate, that one show whose name I keep forgetting, etc. Pretty much anything with Bruce Campbell with my B Movie phase.
>Enchant armor with a bullet proof spell
>Wear it
How can mundane shit trivialize something that's only limited by imagination?
I cast Antimagic Sphere on my cannonball
Okay, so you used magic to make your mundane shit effective. You didn't trivialize shit
Because alternatives rely on the idea that humanity would be the first to employ and mass produce gunpowder weapons (and not any of the "tinker" races like gnomes or dwarfs) or that early gunpowder weaponry could develop and compete with archmages/liches/demigods warping reality.
Unless we are talking about low-magic settings where a well-placed arrow can slay a god.
>age old archwizard scries yet another fool accidentally inventing gunpowder for the nth time in history
>scries the future to see how it will turn out this time - bad news for spellcasters, again
>summons some devils to have the poor fricker, his research, friends and family dragged down to Hell, and has their names scrubbed from all records
>also has his business contacts and any correspondence hunted down, just in case
>no noteworthy spellcaster intervenes on behalf of the inventor, because they too have scried the invention upending their world order and decide that they don't want to get mobbed by gun-toting peasants a hundred years from now
What now, muggle?
>summons some devils to have the poor fricker, his research, friends and family dragged down to Hell, and has their names scrubbed from all records
Then one day devils armed with guns that they learned how to make by going through all the stolen research invade and it is up to the player characters to send them and their weapons back to maintain the status quo or allow guns into the world and let it change. Sounds like a cool hook for a story.
very cringe, imagine the type of person who types this shit out
yah, this image totally doesnt screams I have crippling and unwarranted self hatred and am a gay.
I have played many games and watched several shows where people are using swords to fight dudes with machineguns. Anything goes in fiction, so long as you're willing to amp up them power levels.
You sound fat (and ugly)
Nothing is stopping a dragon that can maneuver far more agilly than any helicopter from strapping some cannons more powerful than it's breath weapons to it's side
Because i signed up for medieval fantasy. Medieval fantasy is why i got in, medieval fantasy is what i want. So if i go and medieval fantasy is not what im getting, im going to frick off and look for something that can give me medieval fantasy. I wanted steampunk, pike and shot or industrial revolution, i would have picked a setting where i get exactly that.
>Two Minas Tirith tier fortresses that close together
It looks cool. Also, there is a big canyon. Probably is a border between two provinces or kingdoms. Local rulers might have stared a pissing contest, trying to make their city on their side of the canyon the biggest and bestest. That is, until the land (or the provinces) got united. So now they build a bridge, but the old city rivalry is still going strong. Its like two sports teams.
>Probably is a border between two provinces or kingdoms. Local rulers might have stared a pissing contest,
Actually, if you look closer on the way the fortification is divided, it's pretty obvious the gorge formed very recently, and literally split the streets and walls in half.
It doubles the protection.
Why even have humans in fantasy if our main advantage is going to be disregarded? At that point you might as well have a world without humans.
Because i like humans in my setting and i dont care what you think our main advantage is. Its not part of the appeal.
Because it doesn't actually matter. Humans are there to be self-inserts/the designated protagonist race and they usually win and survive anyways because the writers want them too.
your fundamental conceit is garbage on its face. the main advantage of humans is thinking. the exact same trait possessed by every other intelligent sapient race in the fantasy setting. and frankly, more often than not, other races are portrayed as being far superior to humans in their application of this miraculous ability, gnomes, kobolds, dwarfs, elves (already did that eons ago), and goblins (in some settings).
What if we changed that to not be the case?
you mean there are only humans. sure we do that irl already, so we know how that plays out.
what if you asked a reasonably well thought out question, instead of being a moron?
>play fantasy game for the fantasy shit
>”UMM ACTUALLY LE BASED MUSKETMEN WOULD TOTALLY BTFO OF WIZARDS AND THE FREAKSHITS TO MAKE WAY FOR BASED AND HUMANPILLED MCDONALD’S XXDDDDDDDDD
I fricking hate you gays
Humans won't get to enjoy existing at all if they don't utilize their innovation to survive the hordes of non-humans.
Survival is pretty easy when you have allies, and choose them well instead of pissing everyone else off by being mindlessly hostile.
Humanity has no allies, all non-humans are treacherous and seek our destruction.
You actually have the same belief system as your average evil jobber empire, fricking kek
Humans are always the good guys and the protagonists of the setting. The Evil Overlord is always either an Orc, a Demon, or an Elf. Humans are the most important species of any setting.
Not exactly. Just as humans are often the protagonists, the biggest evil villains are also human and it's up to the good humans to take them down.
Nah, the biggest evil villains are invariably dragons, demons, and drow who exist to be jobbers to human fighters.
Wrong again. Those supernatural threats are almost always sidelined for the human villain who has a deeper connection to the plot and characters and allow for a more grounded 1 v 1.
>Humans are always the good guys and the protagonists of the setting. The Evil Overlord is always either an Orc, a Demon, or an Elf. Humans are the most important species of any setting.
>What is Eragon?
>What is Eragon?
I don't know what this guy is but he sure ain't human.
Congratulations on not knowing anything and posting something from the extremely terribly adapted movies. Which, even if you'd watched those, you would know that the thing you posted is just a servant of the Evil Overlord, who is unmistakably human.
Where do they find people as addicted to being wrong as you? Where do you even get off thinking "humans are always the good guys?" You can say "I only like settings where humans are the good guys" if you like, but "humans are always the good guys" is an unfathomably autistic and moronic statement.
I guess we’re going to the trope of humanity joining with a bunch of other races to fight the evil empire
That's Altmer pisstalk, I bet you support the White-Gold Concordat.
Literally the words of a typical dark lord who created his own misfortune making his prophesized doom a reality by trying to stop it in the most evil way possible.
depends on the setting.
I like that piece of art, but I refuse to believe that they finished portions in the middle before the origin points. It just makes no sense. It would be finished in sequence from each side.
I thought the same at first, but there's a huge gulf/canyon between them, so they could have been established to be on each side of that.
The real question is why they need a multiple-tiered sky-bridge between the two of them, instead of just a road and a couple of normal bridges. With like half the material they could probably bridge that gap significantly wider if they didn't build it so high up.
If you've already built two dumb fortresses you might as well build a big dumb bridge too to complete the set.
It looks to me like that canyon is a fissure and a recent-ish development, and the bridge between these two fortresses is being built after the fact.
Could be that one of them wasn't even a fortress until recently-ish, too.
Talk to your DM if you want something different b***h
Because the rate of magical advancement outpaces technological advancement (inasmuch as the two can be considerate separate in most fantasy, and in particular D&D settings)
These. I figured someone would have already made this point. Magic, being fundamentally irrational is anathema to real world style "progress" and however parallel the author wants it to be is invariably related to how "rational" the practical application of magic is.
Why did we stick so long to stone tools? Why did it take so long to get started with agriculture? For most of human history technological advancement has been slow. Also what and
said. If humanity's best and brightest spend their time and energy learning how to summon demons and control the elements instead of thinking about engineeting or medicine or such, this will obviously have an impact on technological development.
Because if fantasy settings were realistic, white human male fighter and his metallic dragon wife along with their distant relative chromatic dragon dude + horsie horsie horsie goth nazi sorc girl wife would have outbred the other races within a few years to the point that pesticide isn't even needed.
Nah, realistically humans would have been outcompeted before they even properly reached the point where they can be considered human.
7/11 of the main TTRPs with notable non-human origin species have humans via divine creation or as alien invasion to the planet, not as IRL/via evolution. Seeing as humans are also the first planetary predator to evolve in the universe and thus THE progenitor race (that even uplifted members that what would have devolved into subspecies), its fair to say no realistic approach to any setting that doesnt start off with cyber-dinosaurs or mecha-fish inevitably has humans outbreeding and eradicating all other species.
That's just to sidestep the exact thing I described and to ensure they are special snowflakes that somehow nobody considers special snowflakes.
This, we are most likely the first race in real life.
There are no aliens.
We are the ancient forerunner race they will talk about billions of years from now.
Because feudalism, theocracies, and capitalism stifle innovation.
idk, I feel like there was more innovations in the theocratic, feudal, and protocapitalist high medieval ages then in the migration era tbh tbh senpai.
Jesus, why do Marxists always say the most liberal shit. The advancement of the west was so much faster than the rest of the planet. So how can one say that it was "stifled"? Compared to what?
>something just split the entire continent
>yeah lets just.. like.. build a fragile bridge that will topple down if it happens again..
>Hey, an earthquake might topple the castle or house so let's just not build them
>The mines might collapse so let's just not use metal
>Famine might destroy the crops so let's never plant them
>Here's soft marshy land which has a really hard time holding up buildings
>Let's build New Orleans, Venice, Calcutta, London
Humans do nonsensical shit all the time.
Two of those aren't build on marshland, but your American education is insufficient to grasp that, so here we are
Elves.
Magic slows innovation. Why work on better methods of long range communication when you can use a crystal ball or teleport.
>Why work on better methods of long range communication when you can use a crystal ball
I like how Tolkien had this with the Palantir where any communication could be monitored by a third party if they had one, themselves
>Medieval Fantasy.
>There are no knights.
>There are no serfs.
>The heroes are usually vagrant murderhobbos.
>There is no Catholic church.
>Polytheism everywhere.
>No feudalism.
>The heroes rarely have a liege or answer to anybody.
>Gold is the main form of currency and you can buy anything with just gold.
>It is overly focused on cities.
>Nobody follows codes of chivalry or anything.
>Nobody fights in the name of Lord or God.
>No themes from medieval literature or history.
>Heroes usually travel and fight on foot and rarely involve themselves in mounted combat.
>Giant dungeons everywhere with no explanation behind them.
Why is it called "Medieval" fantasy again?
>All those projections
Which setting, anon?
To mock your no-game ass, obviously
Name 5(five) settings that do this.
Sounds more like Bronze Age to be honest.
to spite (You) personally, you gigantic homosexual, you dicksucking c**t
because we hate you op everyone hates you and so much that it distracts them from figuring out how a society with magic would progress into their equivalent of modernity and what that would look like, how you could do it without just ripping off history. the hatred for you in particular is so intense that such a thing can't really be done, everyone is so busy hating you that there is neither time nor energy for making the best campaigns and rping them well, your awful presence infects the minds of others and so you ought to walk into the sea and die
In my setting guns are just situational (and with quite the poor reputation weapons).
You see, enchanting ammo is expensive as frick (since you're consistently consuming it), and there's a complexity limit to what kind of weapons you can enchant (the upper limit being the crossbow, and crossbows are already harder than usual to enchant)
So, there's both late 19th-early 20th century guns and early guns, but the former cannot be enchanted at all while the latter can. This means the former are basically reserved as assassin's weapons (who can afford to buy enchanted ammo) or for bandits who want to go and terrorize villagers, because there's plenty of magic that stops non-magical ammo from hurting you.
Hence, modern guns have a so shit rep that even the ancient gun models aren't in good taste (also because magic bows effectively outdo them at the high end of shit).
Similarly, because of magic, massed gun formations are extremely risky to deploy, if the enemy has a half-competent wizard you might as well have dumped all that gold into the ocean.
>Setting where a bunch of gods built their world as a sort of game
>Not competitively, but the rules are there to prevent one of them from accidentally fricking over the others
>Predictably to us but not to them, one of them cheats
>It's the god of humans, giving them intuitive intellect, curiosity, boredom, etc
>As well as some sneaky imperialism and supremacy language in his holy text
>Humanity soon enslaves all the other eight races
>If the situation is left alone, the other eight gods and goddesses will die
>God of humanity is so full of himself he thinks he can handle taking over their duties
>Spoilers: he cant
And so the main conflict of the game is gunpowder-level humanity tech vs the magic of the various other races, like a crazy inverted No Game No Life. Unfortunately I have no idea what system to play it in and even in freeform RP I can't find players for it.
Because the setting is medieval (or otherwise ancient, dark ages, etc) adventure. Not a fricking 2000 year game of Civilization.
Are you merely pretending to be moroning?
Imagine complaining that a WW2 setting is "in statis".
>when humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
Things take time.
Even more on the biological seeing how the graph is from the fricking ages debunked ROoA idea when we have genetic charts of all the insane interbreeding that happened across the world in the 200000 years between the end of homosexual erectus and actual early homosexual sapiens (and another 50000~60000 years of it with early homosexual sapiens).
Doesnt however address the point of OP since Europe has in the last 1400~600 years developed more tools every century than in the entire history of humanity including the prior century and by estimates the civilized world has managed to 3 years ago reach the point of having to eradicated more pests (viruses, bacteria, fungi, species of parasite, etc) than all extinction events up to the end-Triassic managed to deleted life.
>doesn't address OP
>Primary strength
>600 years vs 60000 years
Does. OP's question is badly framed.
Something like
>why stasis fantasy rpgs when dynamic and anachronistic adventure
or similar but that would involve changing their shitpost script.
How many times are you going to invent the wheel? how many times are you going to improve the wheel? how many times are you going to expend vast amounts of resources to do something that can already be done for much less. humans invent guns and gunpowder, but why when they already have magic missiles and fireballs. technological invention comes about from a need to do a thing. the phrase necessity is the mother of invention" applies literally in this case. you don't invent a gun to do a piss poor job of recreating a magic missile or even a firebolt. you don't invent grenades and cannons to do a piss poor job of recreating a fireball. and then there is the fact that reality warping power exists and reality warping entities with their own agendas exist, and may in fact prefer the world to stay the way it is, the way they made it to be.
a better question to ask, since this one has been asked and answered a million times already, is why are you such a fricking moron OP?
You do when you realize you can train Joe schmoe to do it with his five buddies. You pay 15 peasants to fire three canons and it takes two days of training to replace them compared to a mage who takes years of training.
Again, exactly why it doesn't tend to fly in fantasy. Fantasy is about romanticization and glorification of individual powers that "earned" their place in the world. There's no place for random grunts killing legendary heroes and dragons as old as time like nothing.
>There's no place for random grunts killing legendary heroes and dragons as old as time like nothing.
Except there absolutely is? Fantasy and Pulp and literature is crammed full of what amount to human fighters taking out wizards with reality warping powers or great and terrible dragons or lord evil with an entire pantheon of evil power's blessings using nothing but his sword, his wits, and his determination.
What's more fantastical than that? It shows up everywhere from Bilbo & Smaug, to the scoundrels of the Dying Earth, to whatever YA schlop gets pushed out every day today.
Not at all the same thing. Imagine, if some legendary figure like say...King Arthur showed up for a duel wielding Excalibur and then Excalibur is shot to pieces and he goes down to a random no-name peasant like that sword guy that Indiana Jones shoots without even fighting him. Maybe it's realistic, but its anticlimactic as hell and doesn't make for a fun or good story. It just sucks.
A bit like Smaug, the great and terrible, who destroyed the dwarves' civilisation and tyrannised the lands around the lonely mountain for centuries with his completely unassailable might, getting shot out the air by some butthole called bard with a bow? Imagine being a dwarf.
Smaug unfortunately had a little flaw - one of his super duper mega scales fell off, so bard shot him in his soft squishy dragon belly
If smaug had all his scales, he'd was still alive I guess
Reminds of Geralt in the books, actually. Until the games, his fate officially ended with Ciri's plot unresolved, Yennefer's plot unresolved, and Geralt getting gutted by a peasant with a pitchfork.
It was great ending
I disagree. This is a good story hook for an entire separate campaign. It's an RPG, not a novel. It can be a great story with humor and in modernish style, how the peasants discovered their nobility despite lack of origin, abilities, intelligence and health. Or we can move to the future where the team is trying to find fragments in a different campaign. So many options
The witcher is often deliberately subversive of common fantasy tropes though. I dare say Geralt dying to some literal who he let his guard down around was intentionally done as an anticlimax.
>it's surprising that the literal subversion book ends with him getting pitchforked
no, actually
>Fantasy and Pulp and literature is crammed full of what amount to HEROES...
ftfy
You cannot train a skilled cannon crew in 2 days lmao. Artillerists were some of the most professional soldiers in medieval and renaissance Europe. They were highly trained specialists who often got extra hazard pay due to the risks of cannons bursting on them.
I know the thread is about humans, but a goblin landsknecht seemed appropriate given the discussion of historical realities of 1400-1500 warfare.
You know, that's fair, but how long is the boot camp for an artillerist compared to a level 10 wizard in a 3.5 or derivative system? My point remains the same. Just as guns killed the nobility, they'd kill magic nobility all the same.
"random grunt" is not Bilbo Baggins. He's got this magical thing called "being the protagonist". I get what you're trying to say, but it's in fact proving his point. It's the fact that these "normal" human fighters are a bit cleverer, a bit stronger, a bit more determined that makes them not "random grunts".
I mean, that's kind of what evolutionarily sets us apart.
>You know, that's fair, but how long is the boot camp for an artillerist compared to a level 10 wizard in a 3.5 or derivative system? My point remains the same. Just as guns killed the nobility, they'd kill magic nobility all the same.
There is a component of unskilled labor, but these were usually professional soldiers. The guy in charge of actually laying the guns often had the medieval equivalent of a math degree.
Even with the unskilled component. 2 days is not enough to get people to walk in formation.
And if we're talking prevalence, the clergy was ~5% of the medieval european population. If we considerate that group of literate, pious people to be a proxy for potential magic users - it would be fairly ubiquitous - although I doubt, in D&D terms, there would be a whole lot beyond 5th of 6th level.
>You know, that's fair, but how long is the boot camp for an artillerist compared to a level 10 wizard in a 3.5 or derivative system?
How effective is a cannon vs a level 10 wizard?
>Just as guns killed the nobility, they'd kill magic nobility all the same.
So, you mean they wouldn't? I don't know if you're forgetting this but when the big anti-nobility revolution (with guns and artillery!) happened in France it eventually got crushed by the old aristocracies of Europe. The nobility won. And they remained powerful and wealthy in industrialized societies like Britain and the German Empire in particular, with the Junkers deriving most of their power from guns and the fact that they were in charge of the army.
What eventually did in the nobility in Europe was that while they were having a massive war among each other, a unified and extremely anti-nobility continent (USA) stepped in and supported the side that was more bourgeois-aligned. Guns aren't some sort of "ends the nobility" thing.
as long as you want to consider logistical issues, wizards in training etc. a wizard only needs to hit 5th to cast fireball. and every day he isn't lobbing a fireball at the enemy, is a day he is inscribing a scroll of fireball for the next engagement. a reasonable assumption for wizard artillery is that is is well prepared beyond its apparent ability. professional soldier wizards would be stocking up for go day, the same way professional fighter soldiers trin and prep their gear, only timmy has 57 scrolls of fireball and 23 scrolls of lightning bolt. and none of them might blow up in his face, or require several other marginally trained peasant soldiers to follow orders to make it happen.
see, you are replacing magic works great today, with technological progress 200 years in the making, when there was no 200 years of in the making prior. you are also interjecting the assumption that magic is hard or rare or both, and that technology development and manufacture are easy or cheap or both. your arguments are at best ignorant, and at worst disingenuous bad faith.
Why wouldn't other races learn tech as well? Why aren't tribal and highly aggressive societies like orcs eradicated by more powerful civilizations? Why is OP nogames?
Only gods may know.
Op wants ars in princess mononoke
>join a medieval fantasy game
>wtf why are there no guns, flying cars, or mechs?
The majority of threads wouldn't be made if OP just put the slightest thought into his question
Because it's fun, and your idea is boring.
/thread
For most of human history people lived generally the same. It wasn’t until a few centuries ago that rapid progress really happened.
Why, with so many more influences and such different ones, would you expect a given fantasy world to develop along the same lines as our own mundane one? There are a lot more viewpoints in a fantasy world, between the subtly to blatantly alien from the human baseline, which will have their own ideas of what "progress" looks like and will compete to see their vision unfold.
You don't play games.
I made a setting with 3 different evolutions, but overall the trchnological developement in human and non-human society depends greately on how much magic is present on the given territory.
As magic makes innovation futile beyond personal interest, as a flick of a finger can grant you the required phoenomena or "thing" one may require (calling a storm over your home during Summer, literaly curing any non-magical disease, provide tonics and build homes in one day), High-Magic regions tend to be technologicaly underdeveloped, despite adopting some foreign weapons, armors or innovations of basic and easy replication and incantation, while in low-magic regions is the opposite.
One of the regions of a setting of mine is Late 17th/Early 18th Century for technology (with some fantastical elements but mostly grounded), while the high-Magic region of all present a late 15th century aesthetic.
However, the "2nd edition" of this world is almost devoided of magic after a big apocalyptic event that quite loteraly "killed magic", amd where the few remaining wizards requires special instruments to not waste what little "Mana" acxumulated over the generations, so essentialy Wizards require Technology to amplify meager spells or sacrifice their precious mana charge.
Pic related: one of those techno-wizards (that I commissioned to a dear friend)
Also cover for it, as I'm trying to develope a system to use for it.
>humanity, around for aprox 200000 years so far
>roughly 199500 of that time spent poking each other with sharp objects on the end of handles
Gee I wonder, maybe because thats basically what happened?
thats a slightly moronic point anon seeing how most fantasy settings tend to be roughly medieval, which is roughly where much of the exponential growth of that stuff is.
of course op is moronic to and cant see that the simple fact that people like the setting of the roughly medieval so it stays that way.
Actually, things really didn't pick up until the late renaissance and the subsequent age of enlightenment. We're actually quite prone to stasis, and there's no reason why a premodern fantasy society wouldn't be stuck in medieval stasis.
eh, idk about that. the high medieval had a lot of advancements in metalergy (higher quality and quantity of steels) and finances (early banks especially for crusading topics) and philosophy (Scholasticism) and engineering (cathedrals and the like) as well as other fields in the 1000-1300s as well. much more exponentially than between 500-1000. hell, in a lot of instances there was more progress in the high medieval then in the late roman republic of 300-500 ish.
Yes, but there wasn't any guarantee any of that was sticking around. There's always been changes and innovation and inventions, but it wasn't until the late renaissance it actually started taking off and accrue at an accelerating pace.
>Yes, but there wasn't any guarantee any of that was sticking around.
idk about that. that is something I found particularly interesting about the high middle ages. at that point, pretty much all the surrounding lands was controlled by a well developed sedentary culture all the way to russia. if any one polity collapsed, it would, and did, just get absorbed by another major polity rather than it falling to barbarian hordes rome style. the only semi "barbarians" of any numbers were the mongols, and they were rather civilized in internal conduct and tended to stay as rulers of civilized areas if they won, or vassalized them. Hell, that general principle of lasting civilization pretty much extended from ireland to japan at that point. if piedmont fell, genoa would probably just extend over that area, etc.
>humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
I mean you're technically correct because tool use define us visavi other forms of life we know of, but it's not necessarily true in a fantasy setting. It's easy to try to extrapolate on the last couple of millennia of European/Indo-Aryan progress, but the truth is that outside of specific periods in specific regions, the human default has been relative stasis.
We were hunter-gatherers for thousands of years. The bronze age was over 2000 years long, without significant widespread leaps in technology. The iron age in its entirety also lasted ~2000 years. And so on.
>us
1. Stop projecting yourself into the game worlds.
2. The game is going to be whatever tech level the designers want. Obviously. You can design a setting with multiple tech levels to choose from (almost every game does this, even if its just "club + hide" vs "knight armor + sword") of course.
Firearms were around in a crude form for ages and weren't really well developed as a technology until there was a very very weird niche for them in Europe in their crude form because a line of cheaply made inaccurate muskets worked to counter what was previously the trend for warfare there, which itself was countering another trend.
Then because of this they were developed further until they became more practical in a general sense, but even in places that had their soldiers use them by default there were still people with swords, and those rifles had bayonets up to WW1.
The modern idea of guns being this stage in development that was inevitable is off, they were a fluke. They might have started to develop as the industrial age kicked off regardless, but them being widespread before the industrial revolution is just random chance.
Technology doesn't develop on a single line. It's all over the place and goes up and down in different areas for different things.
Part of it has to do with European fortifications. Castles with tall, relatively thin stone walls are vulnerable to cannonballs in a way that stone-clad earthenworks like the Great Wall of China were not.
The cannon arms race that it set off, producing star forts and the trace italienne, and concluded with British gunners firing timed shells that burst over Chinese earthenworks that would have been virtually impervious to round shot in the Opium Wars really couldn't happened anywhere but Europe.
I think it's just interesting to imagine how if certain warfare trends had gone a little bit in a different direction, or at a key time gunpowder or the right kinds of canons weren't cost effective, how different would warfare have been for the next few hundred years or however long it would then end up taking for industrialization to come about with the changes that would have politically.
But with the way people think about technological progression they think of guns as something that fits a specific period but that was mostly a fluke. Having complicated to make weapons that had to be crafted by hand and required more maintenance and than a whetstone, which couldn't aim straight, and putting them in the hands of a lot of peasants, and then relying on it being a lot of them lined up just to be effective because they couldn't be relied on to be accurate? Instead of just giving them all long sticks with a bit of metal on the end? You need a convoluted precedent in military strategy to end up there.
I'm not convinced that it was so much that Europe's castles were the catalyst as much as the disunity. In China, there were no regional powers that could even hope to contend with its sheer size. The Temujin overran it, yes, but that was significant precisely because it was the exception. China, for the most part, started to stagnate and simply had no one to push them to innovate through conflict and competition. Meanwhile, Europe had more than its fair share of it.
On the theoretical side, it could certainly be interesting, but I think it's more that things just wouldn't have sped up. We like to look at the 20th century and comment on the exponential rate of technological growth, but the gun allowed infantry to become cheaper, which shifted away from cavalry, which centralized power to monarchies, which lead to the growth of state apparatuses.
I don't think it's that they're trying to be obnoxious. I think it's that people just don't really comprehend the improvements firearms saw across centuries. An "old" gun is a Smith and Wesson, which would've blown the breasts off of any military thinker in the 1500's. If you tell them to think of "a musket" they're thinking of the 1700's, which is still a full 300 years after guns started arriving on battlefields in Europe. How do you sufficiently explain that "no, it's okay that guns suck, that's just the point on the technology tree you're at."?
My problem with this sort of thing is not only the bad writing but also how lop-sided the technological advances are or that the mono-cultures are all in lock-step on rejecting the advances and not using them to their advantage.
Hell, even the fricking Native Americans were all about guns when they could get them, same with Samurai. Why wouldn't my wood elves reluctantly learn how to use muskets and revolutionize hit and run tactics with them and still be able to use bow and arrows where needed?
The native americans such the Allegheny and the Iroquois and Mohawk had the capabilities of producing every part of a firearm with the sole exception of powder. Something they couldnt make as saltpeter was rare in NE of the US, and something the colonists struggled to make until the french began to provide them.
Wood Elves and races would have to be the same way, they lack the cultural/scientifics advancements to male things. Ive never heard of a wood elf mine so that would be a limit on them as a whole.
Inherently fantasy races really only work in their microcosms unless you make your own setting and what essentially is a new race to explain it.
People are allergic to guns in fantasy settings for some reason and I have no idea why. Cannons were a part of mid to late medieval warfare, and late medieval period saw the rise of guns. You never see people complaining about crossbows or halberds or full plate armor. It took nearly half a century for gun-focused warfare to be 100% adopted, and even then there were still bayonet charges which slowly got phased out over the course of a century.
Then there's always the possibility of having guns be normal in one part of the world but a rarity in the other, think of the Boshin War irl. You'd have literal samurai with bows and tanegashimas and katanas in armor on horseback going up against dudes with muskets and gatling guns in military uniform. One part of the country would be like stepping back to 15th century Japan, while one part had trains, modern-ish cities, etc. You'd have regular samurai in their kimonos and shit, then you'd have other samurai in fricking suits carrying a katana and a revolver. It's fricking cool.
A big part is that people just go "guns great", but don't realize there was a four-hundred year period to shift from the discovery of gunpowder to regular use of guns. Gunpowder, in the west, was learned from the east in roughly the later half of the 13th century. It wouldn't be until the 1600's that we'd finally see guns take a dominant position on the battlefield. Mixed unit tactics of having a line of gunmen behind a traditional line of spearmen don't easily translate to a fantastical game. Players don't want their character to spend three rounds reloading. So they stack a feat, a magic item, and special ammunition in order to shoot once per turn and be like the archer. By having all these mechanics to speed up reload, games like Pathfinder remove the differences that give an adventurer, who's inherently going to be a high skilled character in this world, any reason to pick between them. Sure, a bow may have a greater ability to puncture for cheaper use, but an adventurer has no interest in this economy of scale.
In summary of my disjointed thoughts; DM's are unaware of the hundreds of years of incremental progress and just assume guns were always more powerful than melee. Players don't want to play a character that attacks once every three turns and are not forced to, making the gun a no-brainer compared to a bow.
Agreed. It's why I carefully regulate guns in my games. They're either a relic from a bygone age, the result of alien interference, or cutting edge technology that, the player being a person of exceptional status, is able to get ahold of and use better than a common peasant, despite its technological newness.
I was just pointing out that it's not so simple as counter asking "Why use X when Magic?" when the answer is "because X is 1000 times cheaper".
>You never see people complaining about crossbows or halberds or full plate armor.
cuz gungays always argue their weapons should be the bestest ever... not unlike OP is fixated on humans being the bestest ever and always pure
Because legolas can't reload a gun as fast as he can shoot like 10 arrows, so who gives a living frick
That's why I always had a soft spot for ff7, magic is a byproduct of industry
High fantasy makes sense to be stagnate technology wise. Necessity is the mother of adventure and magic all over the place address those needs enough to not require practical innovation.
>humanity's primary strength
Exactly, all those other gutter trash races are bringing us down.
>humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
This is a fairly recent phenomenon
I love gunpowder in medieval fantasy settings.
Late Middle Ages. Firearms, although rare, expensive and unreliable, are merciless in combat and are a sign of the dawn of a new times.
In addition, the action is located on a borderlands, in the province, in the demarcation area, colony, no man's land where social changes are taking place even faster. I love that vibes. New technology, new currents of thinking, new social classes, war between old and new, religious wars. Improvement of the conditions of the poorest and the emancipation of discriminated social groups, but at the cost of the disintegration of society and the search for a new social consensus. The emergence and disappearance of national consciousness. Guns are just symbol of it. Small detail. And all that should be only background but this kind of things are better than extensive lore, new calendars, some weird cosmology, calendarium etc. Nobody care. It's not a book but even good novel don't need more lore than consistent vibe. Also I love Hussite Wars and I would like to implement a greater influence of the terrain on the course of the fight in my OSRish campaigns. Or I just get back to wfrp 2ed and play "historical" settings
God, I love Lady Eboshi.
Frick men and frick samurai.
how do you make a town out of outcasts?
Why do Miyazaki fans resent masculine traits unless it's found within superficially female protags that are actually just men in disguise?
I didn't know being based was a male exclusive trait, you degenerative trog
Easier to run
Because guns are a coward's weapon.
I can also say the same for anything having an advantage againts your opponent so stfu
European medieval fantasy is fundamentally an aryan genre while gunpowder is an invention by weak cowardly chinamen to overthrow their superior aristocratic masters (as your gif proves).
>when humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
That's moronic. Humanity's strengths lies as much in its irrational qualities.
Muskets and rifles were actually invented by Europeans
Let me guess, you think the Chinese just used their gunpowder for firecrackers, right?
They sure as hell didn’t use them for muskets or rifles until the Europeans brought that invention to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#China
Make sure to backpedal with an obligatory "But not REAL gun!!!"
They fricked about with gunpowder like that anon said, but they didn't make muskets or rifles (i.e. anything actually useful). Nobody said Europeans made the first gunpowder proto-guns or weapons, but they made the actual useful inventions and conquered most of the world because of it.
cos guns are lame.
>Why do so many fantasy settings have a medieval stasis permanently stagnating the world when humanity's primary strength is our ability to innovate new tools and technologies to benefit us?
Because you are failing to read the entirely of a setting.
Thank you. I'll go ahead and thread myself.
/thread
Humanity's primary strength is their silly little hands perfect for holding swords and casting magic
Because IRL humanity was very technologically stagnant for several thousand years even after having discovered metalworking. It's basically just a combination of lucky factors that we started to progress rapidly. In no particular order:
- Christianity spreads in the Europe, reduces practice of slavery (which undermines mechanization).
- Black Death arrives in Europe, kills off a ton of peasants, increasing the value of their labour and creating a wealthier working class who have more free time to tinker and invent, and whose more expensive labour makes mechanization more profitable.
- Islam preserves a lot of Greek knowledge preventing a Bronze Age Collapse style backwards slide when Rome falls.
- Western Europe establishes patents / IP law which encourages innovation by enabling people to profit from their ideas instead of just having them taken by people with existing capital.
- Western Europe goes along with the abolition of serfdom instead of keeping it the way the east did.
- All of this happens in Europe specifically where there is a high IQ population and the geography has a lot of readily accessible coal and iron, both of which are important for an industrial revolution.
- Temujin fails to reform the Mongol inheritance system leading to the eventual fracture of his empire, preventing the eventual arrival of a unified Mongol Empire which could have ended up with Europe getting trashed and collapsing.
Imagine none of these things happen, or only half of them happen, we might just as easily be at an essentially medieval tech level today.
The first guns were imprecise, took too long to reload, and didnt do as much damage a lvl 1 fireball could do
There is absolutely nothing it has better magic
This might be a stupid question to you all, but would you said Thundercats, He-Man, The Herculoids, and Thundarr are low fantasy or high fantasy?
Thundarr the Barbarian is post-apoc sword-and-sorcery.
Because Toliken did it and people get pissy when you stray to far from what he did.
Because the fantasy genre is full of weird primitivist and monarchist writers who think the two worst things to ever happen to society were Industrialisation and Democracy.
pretty much lol
without industrialisation they wondnt even been able to publish their shirty works
Really, like who?, I think
's explanation is more likely than yours.
Because swords are cool. That's literally the only reason.
Because they included humans. Take the humans out, everything makes sense.
Idk sounds like you are playing the wrong settings. Mine is firmly rooted with tech available up to the 13th century. There are no guns, and the best thing available is the coat of plates and bascinet. Why would I add full plate and zweihanders and rapiers and then not guns?
My problem has never been with things like gunpowder breaking the stasis, But if you don't think about how magic and other things evolved to keep up, or basically say it replaces all magic, it's just wanking off the power of industry (which yes it's a driving force since it's inception but these are pretend elf games). Magic can break physics, why are industrialists and mages not figuring out creative new ways to outdo each other or working together to build things greater than the sum of their parts? My beef is with uncreative types who go 'gunpowder and the might of mundane man will make the world completely orderly and crush anything fantastical ever because I just read guns germs and steel and my dick is fricking hard'. Like frick, if you want to jerk off to industry just don't have magic at all and play a historical setting, or make it a world different from our own with whatever tech level you desire. I'm just tired of wank for wank's sake with setting elements.
I want to know what would happen if mages all over the world knew how to magic their way into Paixhans guns back in 1000 AD.
Like, what would happen if the only ships you could make were wooden, but everyone had exploding cannonballs?
Gunpowder is magical too, like the Forgotten Realms. Problem solved.
Because settings are places to tell stories, not stories themselves and every time a company tries to advance the timeline they just make everything worse, less consistent, and convoluted. You're not smart or distinguished for wanting this, you're just a moron that doesn't understand basic convention.