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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4351130" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not sure that this is true.  The general trope of fantasy fiction is that past civilizations were much more advanced than the current one.  This fits in with the Medieval/Renaisance European setting.  This is true of my own setting, where the greatest technological progress was during the Second Imperial Age when the Art Mages (Artificers) had elevated ordinary crafts to the point that everything that was made was magical.Since that time, technology and magic have been static or mostly in decline by mandate of the Gods, who feared the power weilded by the Art Mages both to themselves and to the world (they nearly destroyed it in an Apocalytic war, can you say, 'Power Word: Thermo-nuclear Explosion').  Anyone who gets too close to being like an Art Mage gets splatted by the gods.  One of the never fully explored plotlines I've wanted to develop concerns the fact that several of the main nations are rabidly approaching a golden age where significant technological expansion is possible.  At what point do the gods step in and start wrecking things to prevent the widespread reintroduction of magic and/or technology?It is certainly conceivable.  It is not however a necessity.  Dwarves are a secretive people, and little inclined to share thier secrets.  In my campaign, Dwarves basically have a survivalist mentality, and are more or less continually digging in for the next Armeggedon.  It's certainly possible that there are surface dwelling stone age peoples who are functional serfs of dwarven communities with a higher technology level.Without firearms the technology gap between stone age and latter technology levels is much more managable.  This is especially true if the stone age peoples have effective native magic users - druids, shamans, sorcerers, whatever - to counteract whatever magical/technical prowess the would be conquerers have.  Unless the gods step in, no one really has the capacity to conquer really wide stretches of anything over a short period.More importantly, what happens if there are no fossils?  Most fantasy worlds are only a few thousand years old (again, a Medieval view).  As such, there is no particular reason why coal or oil or would exist in any great quantities.Given that the default D&D universe has only four elements - and one of them is 'heat' - even though at a superficial level the physics of the world resemble ours, the D&D world has in detail very different chemical and physical properties than our own.  Lighter things might really fall slower than heavy ones.  Heat might not simply be energy converted to molecular motion, but a fluid available in limited quantities.  The sum of the ashes of a combusted material might have less mass rather than more, and perhaps the energy of an object is proportional to the velocity rather than the square of the velocity.In short, why would you necessarily expect gunpowder to exist at all?In my own campaign, firearms have never been invented (despite many attempts) because no one has ever developed a stable explosive with sufficient energy.  Either the explosive doesn't produce enough energy to be terribly effective (imagine if each cartridge was the size of your fist just to get a modest muzzle velocity) or else the explosive was too unstable to be of practical use (imagine bullets with liquid nitrogylcerine as the propellent).  The hurdles in getting 'gonnes' to be effective enough to challenge a good longbowmen or a wizard are just too great to justify the economic expenditure.And, I personally doubt that D&D demihumans would be any more vicious and brutal than humanity has generally been to itself.  Although it might not be readily apparant, the modern age is probably the least warlike in human history.  Most of human history, everyone is fighting with everyone else pretty much all the time.</blockquote>

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