Harpy/Avian Society and Technology?

[Lord Raziere]

lets see, they probably wouldn't have stairs.

when you can just fly up and down everywhere, stairs become kind of redundant. the only way I'd see them implementing stairs is for the elderly or the wing-disabled to use. they'd probably consider anyone who can't fly as kind of like people in wheelchairs or something.

problem is, unless they have big flying beasts to transport things as well, they will need land animals to cart supplies around and thus would need to be ground-bound for that.

though its more plausible for their society to travel more and have knowledge of distant places. when you can fly around above trees and such, you can explore a lot more when you have a good view from a distance, not impeded by solid terrain and so on, and they're probably great mapmakers because they can just fly up, take a look from above, memorize it and then fly back down and draw it out. I imagine that it'd be hard for them to get lost or at least harder.

also, traversing up mountains is easy- just fly up- so they probably laugh at mountain climbers and don't consider going up mountains all that big of a deal.

in warfare, bomb drop tactics probably come about much earlier. just light a torch, fly up, drop it on a building you want burned, assuming the flame doesn't go out from the air friction...maybe use a lantern?
or just wait until dynamite is invented and use that. or, most simple, just pick up rocks and drop those. rain of rocks, no long archery training or complicated crossbow engineering needed, just gravity and stone.

also, their eyes would have to be real zoomy for flying, so they'd be good archers to.

all in all, if these people were in the same fantasy world with other races that can't fly, you have the potential for these guys to become very dangerous conquerors over everyone else, flight just grants them so many advantages all by itself that it both tactically makes them superior AND gives them a social darwinistic justification to consider themselves superior.