Yep, because it isn't about simulation of something real, but about meeting some genre and theme expectations.
Gunpowder, fantasy and you
- Thread starter Jon_Dahl
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Yep, because it isn't about simulation of something real, but about meeting some genre and theme expectations.
pawsplay
Hero
Yes, they were. Cannons predate frequent hand-gonne use by a couple of centuries. Pre-cannon castles didn't look like castles, either; they looked like stone houses surrounded by a wall and a moat. A medieval ranch-house.
pawsplay
Hero
That's actually an explicit rule in the Rules Cyclopedia, which basically says high-ranking NPCs are generally high-level. Obviously, some qualify as near-noncombatants. Most ordinary nobles are 2 to 5 HD, a compromise level making them exceptional compared to their soldiers, but not necessarily powerful enough to personally slay dragons (at least without a large operating budget).
Medievally, it would be considered a moderately inherited trait. Again, the RC follows this logic, with the ruling class being a patchwork of heritidary rulers and new rulers, who earned their fiefdoms through grant, conquest, popular acclaim, or marriage. In the RC paradigm, high-level rulers would indeed be powerful, having access to huge amounts of wealth and training.
Your typical RC-based nation is ruled by a monarch, likely a human with multiple hit dice, perhaps a mid- to high-level NPC, likely a fighter. The realm is generally administrated by nobles with several HD, sprinkled with a number of name-level (9th) NPCs, mostly fighters with some clerics. Powerful magic-users are effectively extranational, basically rulers of micro-nations that extend as far as they can see from their towers, or they move in with and bolster the might of NPC rulers.
A 5 HD king with a 10th level magic-user advisor and a couple of high level Fighter barons is a very credible political and military threat. If a dragon came along to demand the sacrifice of a princess or some other fairly valuable person, they would probably just kill the dragon.
I think folks are taking their concepts and tropes from popular myth and fiction, not real-world history. Most folks don't seem to have any problem keeping them separate without cognitive dissonance.
I hang around with loads of people who do historical re-enactment (from Roman through Renaissance, and a couple Civil War folks as well), and outright historians. More historical knowledge than you can shake a stick at, well aware of when guns came into play. Not a one of them gives a whit that the historical gun is not available alongside the semi-historical armor.
I'm a physicist. I don't have any problems when Star Trek has holes in its science. I understand that it is fiction, and doesn't need to match the real world. That's okay with me.
Yes, but not because it is history, but because those are their fantasy tropes. In their minds, their anachronistic images of Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table are far more important than the technical bits of Agincourt.
The myth of Arthur does not play out in one particular time, largely because it isn't really one myth. There's Geoffry of Monmouth's version, and Mallory's version. Then the Romantics got hold of it. Then there's T.H. White and Marion Zimmer Bradley and the movies Excalibur and First Knight, and many other versions. Some of these are entirely ambiguous about time periods. Some (like Peter David's) moves Arthur, et al. into the modern era. All of those prior versions are in major part patched together out of stuff much older - Arthur's Grail grew out of older Celtic magical cauldrons, for example.
Saint George lived in the late 200s. Not 1200s, but 200s. Do a google image search on St. George and the Dragon. Many or most of the images you get have him in armor that most certainly didn't exist in 300. That's because he became a model for the chivalry. The myth has moved far away from the history (setting aside the complete lack of dragons in history).
Myths are not models of historical accuracy - they are false stories. The popular ones are iconic, and tell us what we expect to appear in such fictions. If enough presenters show us Arthur or St. George in heavy plate with a lance, but no guns around, then the myth sits in some anachronistic version of reality. Which is fine, because these people weren't real anyway.
You want to impose your concept of technological consistency on your game, go to and have fun. You want to understand why others don't, you need to discard the idea that to do so is somehow natural.
pawsplay
Hero
Right. The question, though, is if you set aside history, what is your context? If you are working within an established genre (e.g. Romantic Arthurian mythos) then mythology takes the place of historical fact. If you are making up something entirely new, then it falls on you to carve out believable non-facts. As the saying goes, people will believe the impossible but not the improbable. Now, for any given gaming group, "no firearms" flies, and the history of D&D suggests that is not a problem for the vast majority of D&D groups. But there are many people for whom it is a bothersome trope; if you are aware of certain historical reasons for things, it is hard to ignore, not the facts, but the logic of the situation. It's not difficult to separate the rapier from the musket, as their functions do not interrelate, but it is much harder to separate alchemy from gunpowder...
Haltherrion
First Post
Early cannons were anti-personal. Once they got large enough to be used against castles, they changed fortifications:
From wikipedia on siege craft:
The introduction of gunpowder and the use of cannons brought about a new age in siege warfare. Cannons were first used in Song Dynasty China during the early 13th century, but did not become significant weapons for another 150 years or so. By the 16th century, they were an essential and regularized part of any campaigning army, or castle's defenses.
The greatest advantage of cannons over other siege weapons was the ability to fire a heavier projectile, further, faster and more often than previous weapons. They could also fire projectiles in a straight line, so that they could destroy the bases of high walls. Thus, 'old fashioned' walls - that is high and, relatively, thin - were excellent targets and, over time, easily demolished. In 1453, the great walls of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, were broken through in just six weeks by the 62 cannons of Mehmet II's army.
However, new fortifications, designed to withstand gunpowder weapons, were soon constructed throughout Europe. During the Renaissance and the Early Modern period, siege warfare continued to dominate the conduct of the European wars.
and a little farther down on the same page:
The castles that in earlier years had been formidable obstacles were easily breached by the new weapons. For example, in Spain, the newly equipped army of Ferdinand and Isabella was able to conquer Moorish strongholds in Granada in 1482–92 that had held out for centuries before the invention of cannons.
In the early 15th century, Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a treatise entitled De Re aedificatoria which theorized methods of building fortifications capable of withstanding the new guns. He proposed that walls be "built in uneven lines, like the teeth of a saw." He proposed star-shaped fortresses with low thick walls.
However, few rulers paid any attention to his theories. A few towns in Italy began building in the new style late in the 1480s, but it was only with the French invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494–95 that the new fortifications were built on a large scale. Charles VIII invaded Italy with an army of 18,000 men and a horse-drawn siege-train. As a result he could defeat virtually any city or state, no matter how well defended. In a panic, military strategy was completely rethought throughout the Italian states of the time, with a strong emphasis on the new fortifications that could withstand a modern siege.
The linkage between effect siege cannon and changes in fortifications is pretty clear cut. If you don't think it is, please give some concrete counter examples.
As pre-cannon castles, how about:
The Edwardian castles in the 1280s.
Krak des chevaliers 1030-1250s
Chateau Gaillard 1198
These don't seem to fit your amusing characterization.
As for a date of siege-effective cannon in Europe, it seems to be around 1350 at the very earliest but more like the fall of constantinople in 1453 that they were really used as wall smashers and the impact on fortification design gained momentum from that time.
From wikiepedia:
The first metal cannon was the pot-de-fer. Loaded with an arrow-like bolt that was probably wrapped in leather to allow greater thrusting power, it was set off through a touch hole with a heated wire. This weapon, and others similar, were used by both the French and English during the Hundred Years' War, when cannon saw their first real use on the European battlefield.[34] While still a relatively rarely used weapon, cannon were employed in increasing numbers during the war. "Ribaldis", which shot large arrows and simplistic grapeshot, were first mentioned in the English Privy Wardrobe accounts during preparations for the Battle of Crécy, between 1345 and 1346.[36] The Florentine Giovanni Villani recounts their destructiveness, indicating that by the end of the battle, "the whole plain was covered by men struck down by arrows and cannon balls."[36] Similar cannon were also used at the Siege of Calais, in the same year, although it was not until the 1380s that the "ribaudekin" clearly became mounted on wheels.[36]
I don't see how your statement holds.
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JoeGKushner
Adventurer
And much like comic books, if you look at the actual settings being weighed down by the genre, they don't make a lick of sense.
Reed Richards, Doctor Doom, and others should have revolutionized the Marvel Earth into something completely unrecognizeable by now but haven't because that would push against the genre/boundires of the story.
As long as you're just trying to game and not get into anything deeper, things probably work okay.
Hussar
Legend
Couple of hundred pages might be true for Greyhawk (if we only accept official sources) but what about Forgotten Realms? Between fiction and game books you've got tens of thousands of pages of Realmslore. Surely they could have had a bronze age in there.
Then you have Dragonlance, where they actually time travel back a few hundred years, and there isn't any apparent technogical differences. I mean, it would be pretty hard on Earth to go back three hundred years and not notice much difference at any point after the fall of Rome.
pawsplay
Hero
I don't know how to refute you, since I would just be quoting the same passages back at you, which describe the transition from mid-14th centurty to the 16th century, during which time cannons became increasingly effective against castle walls. But long-barreled cannons are definitely 16th century and on. That's more than two hundred years of bombards, grapeshot, wall cannons, and hand cannons in action, all of which coincided with feudalism, and castles.
Selectively coloring text in Wikipedia doesn't make you right, I'm sorry. You're cherrypicking quotes from a very general overview, written by a team of amateurs and edited by no one, and you're still not making your point, anyway.
Could have, sure. It was entirely possible,. nothing much stopping them. But while I can see it as something a few folks would find nice to see, it doesn't seem to me to be anything anyone's been clamoring for.
So, they had means and opportunity, but motive seems a little thin.
Yes, but you also ought to note that that time travel was immediately before the fall of a major culture and the departure of godlike beings who had been providing major support to the cultures all over the planet - they called it the Cataclysm for a reason. Those few hundred years were spent in recovery, rather than advancement. Go figure.
I suppose if you're doing deep sociological stuff through your RPG, there's an issue. But for the vast majority of personal stories about action-adventure heroes? You can go pretty darned deep there.
....
So, here is a question for you - just because things advanced in a particular way in Earth history, does that make an alternate path unbelievable? There's only one way for technological advancement to go? All things proceed inevitably as we did them? Even when we clearly have different laws of physics implied by the existence of magic in the setting?
That sounds less reasonable to me than missing gunpowder in a pseudo-Medieval setting, honestly. YMMV.
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