NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5376304" data-attributes="member: 4937">If that was what I'd primarily learned from EnWorld, I'd not participate.  And presumably, you are excluding yourself from this summary judgment...But, anyway, it's not what I've learned about EnWorld.  What I've learned about EnWorld is basically what I would have expected to learn, namely, that its filled with the usual collection of history geeks and reinactors who revel in and argue about historical minutea almost endlessly.  I suppose that you could say that is my bias though, since I discovered only what I expected to discover.  If I had a different bias, maybe I'd have confirmed that expectation as well.In any event, my decision to not have firearms is based on history.  A firearm in my setting would be an anachronism.   But, it wouldn't be an anachronism in the way you think, because - as I've emphasized - the relationship of real history to my campaign setting is only tangental.  A firearm might not have been anachronistic in 14th century Europe, but it certainly would be anachronism in the 937th year since the fall of the Fourth Empire on the world of Sartha.   Not, I might note, because it would be the appearance of something that hasn't been invented yet, but because this is not an era in which magic is sufficiently advanced to have the appearance of technology nor is technology sufficiently advanced to have magical qualities.  Of course, on Sartha, they wouldn't make that distinguishment.  Magic to them is technology, and conversely technology is magic.  Therefore, objects which seem technological are anachronistic - because they belong to the past of the world (and not necessarily, though possibly, its future).  Someone might have, indeed someone somewhere will certainly have, a wand that shoots bullets or fiery explosions, but 'magic' as accessible and ordinary as something that is or emulates a firearm isn't current to the world's era.Now of course, in a sense, a wand that shoots bullets is 'high tech' to an observer from the 21st century of our world.  Or at least, its 'arcane', which is roughly the same thing.  But the important point is that the 21st century observer doesn't tend to think of it that way, whereas they do tend to think that guns are 'high tech' but not 'arcane' (but rather 'mundane').   This is that tangental relationship that I talked about.  I'm not concerned about whether the players think of the campaign world as being 'in the past', because that's a meaningless distinction considering Sartha is not Earth and isn't even in the same universe.  I'm concerned with conveying to them the sense that magic is not so prevelant at the current time to be considered by the inhabitants of Sartha to be fully mundane and understandable, and is not employed by them (or leveraged by them) in a way that is industrial, mechanized, and scientific.  Magic is at the present time (on Sartha) still a bit more of an art than it is a craft, much less that it is the basis of or element of the practice of every craft (the way technology and science are at present on Earth).  The time when magic was equivalent to every craft and every craft was equivalent to magic was long ago.  In such an age, something like a firearm wouldn't be anachronistic.   But as I said, the Age of the Art Mages was very long ago.</blockquote>

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