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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2096716" data-attributes="member: 6533">First of all, let me say that this has been a simply amazing thread to read.  I certainly have very little to add to the technical discussion.In terms of genre, however, I think this position can be modified.The reason why ancient artifacts are presumed to be better, true even in Indiana Jones BTW, is that it makes the actions of the adventurers positive in a very huge sense.  That is that the recovery of such artifacts is directly contributing to the culture at hand.  It is the most progress oriented depiction of technology within an adventure genre.  It's not simply a Dark Ages approach it's true of almost every heavily progressing period.  When Victorian and Pulp era adventurers go out they always find something better than what they brought with them.  Where it isn't straight up tech it's the tech of the earth itself, strange minerals and herbs and such, or, in the case of Indiana, God tech.When you portray the adventurer's technology as best, then the genre inevitably slips toward the decline.  If it isn't of the civilization then it's of the adventurers in question.  Thus the distinctly cyberpunkish ideal of most sci-fi military fiction and most military fiction in general.  At the least you have a Clancy style situation where the emphasis shifts away from the men on the edge to the people at the hub of the education base.There are sub-genre exceptions to this dynamic: super-heroic ones where the heroes are the personal and individual source of the tech and the star-trekish fleet style of adventuring where you make the tech on board.  Both have their problems in terms of simulating the adventurer dynamic in that they are extremes of individualism and ego in the super-heroic and corporatism and super-ego on the other.I'm not saying you can't bend genre, but that there is more at stake in the depiction of technology in the genre than simply an idea of history.  It's part and parcel of the ideal of heroism and action being depicted.Either way, it's certainly appropriate to give the dwarves a weird technology.  Fits all of the above genres perfectly.</blockquote>

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