Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr View Post
A sword is made out of steel, which rusts when exposed to the elements. Stainless steel is not really much of a thing in historical swords. A glock is made primarily from composites, and what metal it does have is vastly higher quality and is much, much more likely to survive.

I can conceive of no particular reason the sword would survive but the glock would not. And hell, we DO find even swords and books from long, long ago on occasion. Why shouldn't such things exist?
I don't want to start down this tangent and derail things again, but a recap of the argument:
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Recall that we were talking not about what technology would be usable immediately by whoever found it but what would be reverse-engineerable by whatever civilization found it. We can (and have) taken swords that are rusted, pitted, fragile, and otherwise not suitable for combat and restored them to a museum-presentable state, and a D&D-level civilization would likely do the same, but that's because (A) both we and D&D people know how swords work and (B) they don't have to actually work after restoration, they just have to look like they'd work, and it's any replicas you reverse-engineered from the sword that would have to be serviceable.

If a magic-based civilization without any knowledge of guns, advanced composites, small piece manufacturing, or similar were to pull a Glock out of wherever it had been buried and filled up with dirt and sludge, the chances that they could figure out (A) how it worked, without a working gun or ammunition to tinker with, or perhaps even what it was supposed to do if it was damaged enough, and (B) how to recreate it, parts and materials and all, without the metallurgical and composites knowledge that RL technology presupposes are fairly slim. Further, even if the knowledge of its function was there and they figured out generally how to recreate it, they wouldn't have the technology needed to make the technology needed to make the gun, and as gunsmiths throughout history have discovered, trying to fire a gun made of inferior materials probably won't turn out well. And that all assumes that, in a world where you need magic to do chemistry for whatever reason, the people who discovered the gun could make gunpowder or an equivalent in the first place.

So the overall point of that and other examples is that even if prior civilizations had full-scale D&D magic and full-scale RL technology, current magic-only civilizations like those in standard D&D settings aren't guaranteed to develop technology along the same lines as RL technology as was asserted because higher-than-Renaissance tech, particularly anything relying on digital technology or chemistry or anything else magic substitutes for in D&D, would be both difficult-to-impossible to reproduce without the existing infrastructure of a RL-technological society and difficult-to-impossible to reverse-engineer due to the completely different conceptual and scientific worldviews the societies would have.