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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9714528" data-attributes="member: 6790260">We had the ability to traverse the Silk Road from ca. 200 BC to ca. 1400 AD. Nearly two thousand years of traversing a road.During most of that time, things not even a quarter of the way along the Silk Road were shrouded in myth and legend, despite us having incontrovertible genetic proof that there was small but measurable genetic intermixing between these populations (likely "merchant A marries into family B, has kids, those kids stick around and thus create a group of descendants related to A's distant homeland").Magic certainly helps, but remember, these are worlds where medieval stasis is in full swing. If we're saying China should've been a well-known, well-reached area for over a thousand years, gunpowder weapons emphatically should not be a rarity. They should be commonplace. Since that is almost always not true of these fantasy worlds, and indeed enormous other swathes of technology move even more slowly than they did in our actual world? Magic seems to make it harder to see beyond the horizon, not easier!There have been "curious adventurers wanting to explore everywhere even if only to loot it" in our own world for literally five thousand years. Why do you think Tutankhamen's tomb was the first one we'd ever found that wasn't burgled? Its location was quickly lost and he was relatively poor as far as pharaohs went, so there was less (not zero, just less) interest from grave-robbers.If literal thousands of years of "adventurers" IRL didn't make India a well-known, well-understood place to ancient Greece, why would their presence in D&D-alike worlds make a dramatically different impact?Our own real world shows that local problems and local concerns are far more immediate for the vast majority of people, and even with magic, it's an established fact that much knowledge gets lost or forgotten in the stereotypical medieval-stasis worlds so many GMs (and very particularly old-school D&D GMs) tend to favor.</blockquote>

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