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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5813757" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's why I mentioned comparing ships from different eras.   While it's true that a SOL is as anachronistic in your typical D&D pseudo-medieval setting as a jacquard loom or steam engine, in some settings all three items would be acceptable in some form or the other.   Many settings, even 'default' ones, implicitly featuring mechanical objects every bit as complicated as any of my examples in the form of traps, and even have these things made of stone sitting in three thousand year old tombs.   I think it is a mistake to make too many assumptions about what people are playing.   Some people may be inspired by galley warfare and the ram, based on watching something like Ben Hur (forgetting the historical inaccurcies in that for a moment) or from reading about the Peloponnesian War.   Others may be going for Harn World like heavy medievalism, and period accuracy right down to the Viking longships.   Still others may prefer more accessible and more modern periods inspired by the great age of pirates, Errol Flynn movies, or the great age of sail.  In my case, the lengthy campaign I played in was Great Age of Sail inspired on the grounds that this was the most interesting period in Naval Warfare and the one most often romanticized in story.  So, while SOL were anachronism in a sense, in a very real sense its impossible to say what is an anchronism in a fantasy world with a culture, history, cosmology and even science far different than are own.   While in this world SOL's weren't invented until the 18th century, with the exception of firearms, lots of things in D&D that are accepted without question didn't show up until much latter than the 14th century in the forms they are described or imagined in.  Based on the costuming, most of the Walt Disney princess films occur in the 19th century.  The average campaign is filled with anachronisms of every sort, and its probably not possible for the average person to imagine a D&D world without filling it with anachronisms.</blockquote>

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