Hellcow said:
So I'm afraid that in this case, Eberron simply may not be the world for you. Sorry!
Well. While that was written in reply to you of sorts. It was not written TO you, or with the idea you'd see it. I was e-mailed your response to someone who'd had expressed similar questions I'd had. And I replied to that person who'd emailed me.
But what the hell right?
Obviously, I haven't done very well explaining my point. And other forums members thoughts on my "limited understanding of history aside", I'll give it another shot, this time free from examples. (Which only seem to cause the conversation to diverge.)
Essentially my question/critisism is this: What are the limitations that keep the world in check?
In Lord of The Rings, at least as far as the Hobbit, and The Lord of The Rings are concerned, Gandalf and Orcs had "gunpowder". Rider's of the Mark didn't have a written language, so they had no ability to pass such information on but from one person to another. The Hobbits didn't care, and frowned on such pursuits if not results. The men of Gondor didn't even know what they did know, having fought in a long crippeling war that stretched beyond living memory and suffered the dark designes of Sauron. The Orcs had something pretty similar, obviously, but were wholly bound to their masters will. The elves were unchanging, and little was known about what the dwarves new. And even if the other races did know, they wouldn't share it freely. Significant limitations. Tolkien explains, and explains well, why such things had not come to pass. Particularly when it comes to the appendexies and the fate that befell the men of the West. This is not, "lazy." It is quite thorough. Your world should have similar devices to explain why what is is, and why what might have been isn't.
I for my part, wondered, but planned to wait and see, given responses in other forums, and understanding the limitiations of NDA's in light of future releases such as issues of Dragon. The Dinosaurs, the Lightning Rail, and the abscense of useful "technology" in an economically powerful, once united, empire, populated with assumably clever people, that hasn't suffered a major catastrophy that took much of the know how out of the world lead one to certain inevitable questions. The friend I was conversing with actually came up with a very inventive explaination that would satisfy me. I would be inclined to assume (and we know what that means) he posted my reply in an effort to test this hypothesis.
But you might be right. If your most immediate answer to "Why and why not?" is "Because that's not what I wrote." Eberron probably isn't for me. Odd that another poster mentions Miyazaki, since that's inline with what I would hope for.
As an addendum to s/LaSH et al:
The Chinese are KNOWN to have invented gunpowder by the 8th century, and at the latest 13th centuries for handguns and shrapnel filled rockets. Hardly, A) a 1000 year gap, or B) precludes the inventions of either elsewhere and even many times but not "catching on." Europeans adopted rifling by the 16th century IIRC to collect the soot that fouled the cannon (the frequent need to reduce fortifications made these sorts of endevours frequent). By a quirk of serendipity it was discovered that the right kind of rifling induced a stabilizing amount of spin. Exploding artillary loaded with shot appeared not long after rifling. There is a reason the events happen in the sequence they did, it's not a coincidence. And there is a reason the chinese are credited with the invention of gun powder as well as most of it's first military uses. And there is a reason why these inventions were so improved by the europeans who didn't invent them and not so refined in the nation of their birth. There are consequences to having a rich powerful nation like china, or the US, some of them are good, like pure science and scholarship, some are bad like the inertia of a huge infrastructure. Eberron, being made up of people will have similar inevitable consequences. HAND.
