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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 4920125" data-attributes="member: 19675">Some other thoughts.Depending on your campaign so far, guns could have a wide variety of shapes and styles.  For instance, S.M. Stirling's sword & planet novel, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, the Martians are masters of biotechnology, having had no interruptions in their culture in tens of thousands of years, but also having no access to fossil fuels or nuclear materials.Their biotech extends to all kinds of things we use for tech, like living engines...and even guns.  The martian gun-creatures fire needle-like projectiles by using exploding methane as the propellant.  Yes, they need to be fed; yes, they can only fire as fast as they can refill their gas chambers; yes, shooting them results in a burning fart smell.(BTW, I'm yoinking this for the martians in my Supers 1912 campaign.)I bring that all up because...you can have Druids doing the same doggone thing.  A little Druidic magic, alchemy and animal/plant lore, combined with...lets say...Craft Wand?...and your mundane Wand of Magic Missiles becomes a living Druidic poison dart flinger.  OK...you wouldn't let that have the autohit...This is very much like how it was handled in the Shanarra books- they had crystals that absorbed light and provided lift.Other options:The RPG Space: 1889 handles flying airships with Liftwood, a rare-ish tree that has an anti-gravity effect, the force of lift based on how panels of it are angled vs gravity.This was based on HG Wells' cavorite (a metallic alloy), from his novel, The First Men in the Moon.  If you keep it as an alloy, this metal could- paradoxically- be a secret of the Dwarves.The telescope could be the outgrowth of humans re-purposing dwarven tech.  There are certain minerals, like high-grade quartz or corundum, that can be found in optically clear forms, and can be used to make lenses- in fact, both of those are currently used as watch crystals.  While Dwarves may fashion lenses out of them to make magnifying lenses to improve their ability to do fine metalwork, humans playing around with the same lenses could accidentally discover the stars.Dwarves may also have the tech to grow certain crystals, like quartz or corundum.FWIW, those minerals also come in colored forms- some still optically clean.*  Because of that, certain people have made sunglasses out of them.  Those minerals, being harder and clearer than glass would be the first sunglasses on record- Nero, for one, apparently had emerald-lensed sunglasses...and those would be pretty cloudy (emeralds are almost always full of inclusions).  So were the Chinese quartz glasses of the 12th century.These could be a boon to light sensitive races like Orcs or Drow.  Hmmmm...sunglass-wearing drow swordsmen.  How cool is that?* Besides being perfectly clear, quartz also comes in purple (amethyst), yellow (citrine), rosy or smoky-brown colors, and corundum can be yellow, orange, purple, blue, green, pink (all of which are called sapphires) or red (ruby).</blockquote>

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