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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8553737" data-attributes="member: 19857">I take issue with the idea that the last 2000 years are the metric to use.  If you look at the 2000 years from 500BC to 1500AD you see slower technological development, and before that you had civilizations like Egypt that were stable for thousands of years.  It's really in the "early modern" era - around 1500AD - that you start to see rapid development of technology. So I think the premise is flawed - measuring fantasy worlds by the standards of our era mistakes the interests and pursuits of our modern era for what people in that world would care about.  Also there's no guarantee that magic would scale to industrial levels - even in Eberron where the most "magic as technology" aspects are around the big industrial magics require major magics like the Creation Forges to pull off and in a world where advances are not shared at the patent office but rather horded by guilds your advancement is going to slow a bit.Beyond that, most D&D settings presume civilization-destroying apocalypses in the past that keep setting unbalanced and often make people skeptical of magic for centuries afterward.  You've got Greyhawk's Rain of Colorless Fire, the Realms have the destruction of Netheril, Krynn has the Cataclysm just a few hundred years before the timeline starts, Athas of course is the result of a civilization destroying apocalypse, Mystara has the destruction of Blackmoor, etc.  And finally from an industrialization perspective - most fantasy worlds don't seem to presume a prehistoric die-off of plants and animals to bury a whole bunch of hydrocarbons in the ground.  Without that, we don't get the Industrial Revolution on our world either - you needed the free access to coal, oil, natural gas, etc. to fuel our big industrialization push and without something equivalent on a fantasy world you're not going to get it.  Also there's no reason to believe that fantasy worlds are as iron rich as our world either - another element that factors into our industrialization push of the last 500 years.On top of all that - once you mix in gods, demons, immortal wizards, archfey, and others who have a vested interest in keeping the world as is for their own purposes, the fact that fantasy worlds have even advanced to the level of Middle Ages Europe is perhaps the more astounding question. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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