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gadren
2016-03-13, 02:01 PM
I'm designing a fantasy campaign setting for a D&D game right now. Most of the world is at about a 900 AD technology level, but I wanted there to be a few civilizations with more advanced war tech: One kingdom knows how to build crossbows more appropriate to the 1300's, another knows how to forge rapiers, another knows how to create full plate armor, etc.
How feasible is it for kingdoms on the same continent to have this level of disparity without breaking suspension of disbelief. What are some of the best explanations you can think of for why this situation would exist?

PS: Yes I know D&D already has a pretty anachronistic mishmash of tech as it is.

Incanur
2016-03-13, 02:08 PM
It's completely reasonable, at least as long elites everywhere have access to everything. Relative isolation, different geography,and different economic systems are the most likely explanations. If elites don't have access to everything, it gets somewhat more complicated.

Keltest
2016-03-13, 02:15 PM
Access to various resources will also be a factor. You aren't going to develop the crossbow quickly (or at all) if you don't have ready access to good wood for making them. You wont have as good lumber harvesting technology if you live in the mountains, you wont be a good miner in the middle of the planes, etc...

ace rooster
2016-03-13, 02:50 PM
Wide ranges of resource quantity and quality, together with necessity can do this. Say one region has very little iron ore, but it is very high quality for making swords. Anyone working with the stuff would be very well trained, and taking their time, resulting in very good swords. On the flip side, iron is generally too expensive to make armour out of, and the high quality swords would cut through it anyway.
Another region has loads of iron ore, but it is not great. The swords made with it frequently break when hitting armour made of the same material, making armour much more viable in this region. Once it is viable, lots of work goes into making it comfortable and flexible.
The third region has gold mines far inland, but the arid plains between the mines and the coast cannot support good agriculture. The orcs that live on these plains and in the mountains constanly try to raid the gold caravans, and engaging an orc in melee is suicide, no matter what your gear is. Their solution is to outrange the orcs, and they have developed their crossbows to a fine art. The wood that grows in the forests of the mountains is particularly good for bows, which is a coincidence that simply pushes the tech further, because they cannot outrange the orcs (who use the same wood for their bows, and are stronger) by importing better materials.

Notable is that the tech is tied to the locations by more than just experties. Imported craftsmen would not get the same results as they would at home, so they would not bother.

Spiryt
2016-03-13, 03:09 PM
Well, you have pretty much described Baltic States around ~1300 AD, to be honest.

Still Pagan, very much tribal, constructing wooden/earth fortifications hidden among the swamps, an-alphabetic, etc.

Receiving most of it's 'higher' culture trough the Rus lands, which Lithuanians were conquering, at the same time.

Although 'The West' was obviously also penetrating further and further, mostly via German element lead by Knight Orders of Brothers of a German House of St Mary in Jerusalem and Livonian Brothers of Sword.

While places like Northen Italy, Rhineland, Alpes, France, Southern Germany were raising gigantic cathedrals and castles, cranes, gears, trebuchets, crossbows, some early plate armor, as well as banks, loans etc.


So it's completely feasible, just have some 'older' region which accumulated fair amount of technology and cultural feats coming in contact with more 'primal' societies.

Necroticplague
2016-03-13, 04:53 PM
I'd like the point out that spear-hunting-living-in-huts societies still exist in the present day. Typically, they're avoided because their xenophobic/lack interest in expansion, geographically isolated, and their land doesn't contain much of interest to those with the means and motive to take it. So if real life can have some societies harvesting the atom, and looking into antimatter, while others don't even know that they're related to the monkeys they eat (albiet, distantly), I don't see why such disparities can't exist in a fantasy world.

awa
2016-03-13, 04:54 PM
look at Africa as well you have a very wide range of technological ability there.

Slipperychicken
2016-03-13, 05:48 PM
How feasible is it for kingdoms on the same continent to have this level of disparity without breaking suspension of disbelief. What are some of the best explanations you can think of for why this situation would exist?

It's pretty feasible. Just don't try to pretend like you're playing in such a perfectly realistic world. Also have some fun with it; don't take it all so seriously all the time.

Kami2awa
2016-03-13, 06:43 PM
Yes, I see no reason why not. There are still Stone Age cultures in the world now, and groups whose lifestyle has not changed very much since the Middle Ages - and that's in a world with easy travel and global trade. Once it becomes harder to travel the world and share ideas, technological disparity is even more likely.

For example, the Roman empire was more advanced in its military technology than many of the tribes they conquered. Over the 8th-13th centuries the technology of the Middle East was far more advanced than that of Western Europe, particularly in medicine, astronomy and chemistry. The advanced technology of Europeans later allowed them to dominate cultures such as the Aztecs. Technological advancement is not universal at all.

As to why, there are many possible reasons. Resistance to change may mean people are slow to adopt new technology. Lack of resources may mean they can't make the technology themselves, or cannot become wealthy enough to trade for it. They may be too far away from the centres of technological development to import it, or even be aware of it.

How to make new technology might be kept secret by the cultures that have it so that they maintain an advantage. The new technology might create too many social problems (as with the enormous loss of livelihood created by mechanisation in the Industrial Revolution) to be useful.

Communities might object to the tech on religious grounds, calling it heretical or ungodly. Nature-loving cultures (such as elves) might despise some technology for the pollution and damage it causes. Places that lack strong government or other management might not be able to get organised enough to build or maintain it.

Finally, the new tech might have disadvantages of its own. Early cannon could be devastating to the enemy, but were about as likely to blow up their crew instead - as happened to James II of Scotland while he was inspecting one.

So, in short, variation in technology in a world is not just feasible, it's very likely indeed.

Ikitavi
2016-03-14, 05:08 AM
One of the themes of AD&D is finding buried or lost magic items or weapons that are more powerful than currently widely available. Technological change is often static for a long period of time.

But that isn't the only paradigm. One of the things I really enjoyed about the Terry Pratchett DiskWorld setting was there was technological or technomagical change and societal change along with it. If you have disparate technology, then you have a campaign story about slowly percolating technological and possibly magical change. This can be fun, because instead of trying to come up with ways to prevent the PCs from breaking the magic system for fun and profit you can make the campaign about how the PC exploit changed the world and the culture. They can SEE the effects, both positive and negative, of the change that they created, for selfish and/or noble reasons.

So a thing to consider: If the rapier was developed recently by one nation, and you have a player from that nation that specializes in the rapier, they should not expect to find a magical anything rapier in a 100-year old tomb.

A campaign where you have technological change, you may see an expectation that players will rely on getting lots of treasure with which to hire the making of magical items, rather than hoping to find top of the line magical items.

You might even deal with a decline of the Great Adventuring Age, as modern crafted weapons and magic items finally start to exceed the quality of the ones retrieved from monsters' hoards.

Ikitavi
2016-03-14, 05:11 AM
Of course, even if you have one localized area that is finally producing items that rival the quality found in long buried dungeons, you can play a Renaissance type campaign, as suddenly that region jumps by leaps and bounds in power. You could have old rival countries racing to improve their gear, maintaining parity with each other, but greatly outpacing distant cultures overseas.

Ravens_cry
2016-03-14, 11:24 AM
Of course, even if you have one localized area that is finally producing items that rival the quality found in long buried dungeons, you can play a Renaissance type campaign, as suddenly that region jumps by leaps and bounds in power. You could have old rival countries racing to improve their gear, maintaining parity with each other, but greatly outpacing distant cultures overseas.
And it came to pass that Uesessar, the Empire of the East and Ewe'essai, the Empire of the West, didst forge in secret weapons of a most terrible power, to turn the sky to fire and the land to glass and to rain down death wherever the wind didst send the plague that came hereafter. But, in their fear of each others' secret might, a kind of peace was kept.
And so Pax Terribilis was kept for over 50 years. . .

Knaight
2016-03-14, 12:12 PM
As has been stated already, the real world has plenty of technological disparity, this is generally believable. With that said, it is worth observing that you'd probably also get some weird mismatches because how "high tech" something is and how difficult the infrastructure to support it is is often surprisingly unrelated. There's a lot of areas today which get cell phone reception, have some amount of cell phones around, and use well water for everything because plumbing is actually really expensive as infrastructure goes. There are plenty of places that have access to pretty sophisticated medicine for treatment, because a lot of that is done elsewhere, but where diagnostics are hopelessly archaic because diagnostics usually requires a lab, and refrigeration, and other local infrastructure that just isn't there - though there is work being done both on making diagnostics which can handle things like being room temperature, and improving refrigeration access.

This still applies with older technology. If the limitation to doing something is knowledge, and that knowledge has spread, it could easily disseminate pretty far. If the limitation is expensive infrastructure, less so.

Coidzor
2016-03-17, 02:43 PM
That situation is untenable in the long run.

Others will reverse engineer captured or purchased examples of the crossbows and plate armor eventually, even if the trained craftspeople are controlled and prevented from leaving to take jobs in other places and taking their knowledge with them.

How long it takes until *eventually* runs out, though, depends on the variables in play.

Rapiers aren't so high tech compared to an arming sword or saber that a swordsmith couldn't figure out how to make one if it was desired.

Kami2awa
2016-03-18, 03:18 AM
That situation is untenable in the long run.

Others will reverse engineer captured or purchased examples of the crossbows and plate armor eventually, even if the trained craftspeople are controlled and prevented from leaving to take jobs in other places and taking their knowledge with them.

How long it takes until *eventually* runs out, though, depends on the variables in play.

Rapiers aren't so high tech compared to an armin sword or saber that a swordsmith couldn't figure out how to make one if it was desired.

I'm not sure about this. We are all used to a rate of technological development that means a new device is obsolete practically before we've got out of the shop, but that's very unusual in human history. Technological development in the past was much slower.

Furthermore, even in an age where trade and information-sharing has progressed so that I can buy goods from Australia without getting out of my chair in the UK, and read about a scientific discovery in Japan a few minutes after it is made, there are still people in parts of the world living without electricity, or running water, or modern medicine.

Eventually, technologies will spread, but in a world of local trade, limited education and slow communication, it's going to take a while, probably longer than the campaign you are running.

Coidzor
2016-03-18, 04:19 AM
Furthermore, even in an age where trade and information-sharing has progressed so that I can buy goods from Australia without getting out of my chair in the UK, and read about a scientific discovery in Japan a few minutes after it is made, there are still people in parts of the world living without electricity, or running water, or modern medicine.

Think less isolated tribes in the Amazon and more France and Germany and Italy. Despite varying levels of interaction and differing political relationships, there's been some level of awareness of one another amongst those regions since, well, civilization proper.

If they might as well not be on the same continent due to physical barriers, well, then they might as well not be on the same continent.


Eventually, technologies will spread, but in a world of local trade, limited education and slow communication, it's going to take a while, probably longer than the campaign you are running.

So you're violently agreeing, then?

My main point had more to do with how holding a world in stasis like that for millennia would require quite the explanation and less to do with anything the PCs would do to alter the tech levels.