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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9563232" data-attributes="member: 93670">Power and stability can encourage medieval stasis to persist even though most parts of most settings don't establish any conditions for it to happen. The Edo period was pretty much cultural and technological stasis lasting for a period of about 260 years.  There were a few factors that contributed to maintaining that and it makes a good example.Firstly you had the obvious relatable group of nobility types who owned everything and had most of the money... Where that took a wildly different flavor was in the alternative residence requirements that required them to spend half the year in Edo rather than their own territory. That alternative residence resulted in the unusual situation where noble A could regularly interact with far off nobles B  &:C on addition to nobles Q X Y &Z even though they might be multiple regions apart with relatively unique territories.Next you had the warrior class... It was wild & I'll just quote google [Spoiler]During the Edo period in Japan, the warrior class (samurai) faced strict restrictions on displaying overt wealth, with their primary income often coming from a fixed rice stipend from their lord, meaning even if a merchant class became wealthy, samurai were expected to maintain a simple lifestyle to uphold their social status and not flaunt their wealth, even if they accumulated some; this was part of the rigid social hierarchy where their role was primarily military service, not economic gain. [/Spoiler]Huzzah the warrior class is kept happy and comfortable enough to avoid any serious unrest and simultaneously prevented from coming into conflict with monied interests who they very much had every reason to keep in power.The peasants had  a lot of the usual peasant restrictions like strict restrictions on weapons and such along with travel restrictions that effectively required a permit to travel outside the area where they livedForeigners were pretty much banned  and is why you see things like Ringo telling mizu "we are the same"  in Blue eyed samurai when one has no hands and the other is simply of half English descent.All of that lasted up until the English did a bunch of things to destabilize and overthrow the whole thing for economic reasons.In a lot of fantasy settings, especially ones with d&d type magic, you could add on the fact that the landed monied nobility with power were also the ones in the best position to be the walking WMD warrior class who just needed to keep the lesser landless warrior former adventurer types happy enough with the right level of pruning that avoids letting them get too uppity in ways that could destabilize things... That's where adventurers prove their usefulness by delving secret "dungeon" facilities nobody can claim being useful  & continue being so when it comes time to prune lawless unchecked bbeg types who stepped out of line.  Things get pretty dark pretty quick and show why the retired adventurer in charge of the town's security had to hire five different bands of plucky inexperienced adventures to deal with the trivial undead/goblin problem just outside of town before one succeeded.Knowing what just to the last guy who stood a bit too tall it gives those adventures every reason to travel far off where nobody cares about them & remain quiet enough or find a powerful bit of nobility to hook their own fortunes to with support.   Conveniently that also creates plenty of "fallen" civilization/ruins filled with wealth hidden out in the wilderness waiting to be found once their former adventurer turned would be Lord is eliminated  and their peasants reclaimed killed or experimented onto create monsters dangerous enough to stop some orphaned prince from reclaiming their fallen homeland.If some new bit of destabilizing magiech or tech comes aging it's easy for the upper tiers of power to limit it and knowledge of how to make it to themselves or those under thumb enough that's well placed adventurer or proper magical mind wipe could ensure that it quickly becomes a relic that was created using methods lost to time as far as anyone not in the know might think.  Worst case a noble can give a fresh band of adventures the same treatment as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire" target="_blank">black mirror against the fire</a> treatment and send them off to deal with a dangerous get of <s>roaches</s> goblins or whatever and send some red wizard types out to clean things up so the survivors remember how those awful <s>roaches</s> Goblins murdered all of those villagers they used to live with up until that raid or just set lose some monsters like yet another cemetery crypt exploding with hostile undead</blockquote>

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