Why is D&D still Medieval?

[Clistenes]

Greyhawk had an order of knights who used handguns, IIRC revolvers. I think the explosive powder was a secret of their knightly order.

I thought that Murlynd's paladins's "six shot" handguns weren't real revolvers, but magic wands shaped like revolvers (because gunpowder doesn't work on Oerth, due to a divine ban...).

As a matter of fact, in Future Greyhawk wizards made complex magical cannons by creating two portals, one which sent a projectile close to the sun, and a second which brought the projectile back to the mouth of the barrel after it accelerated to very high speed. They did that because normal cannons and rockets and bombs don't work on Oerth...

[Darth Credence]

That seems ridiculously overwrought. Magic to create multiple portals to send it back and forth to the sun to get a lot of acceleration would seem to require a lot more power than just magic to accelerate something. Featherfall is just the inverse of that, and that's a first level spell.

[Clistenes]

That seems ridiculously overwrought. Magic to create multiple portals to send it back and forth to the sun to get a lot of acceleration would seem to require a lot more power than just magic to accelerate something. Featherfall is just the inverse of that, and that's a first level spell.

But, on the other hand, once the portals have been created you can shoot an infinite amount of projectiles at no cost... and we are speaking of weapons able to bomb cities to rubble, WWII style... You could easily create a simple steam cannon using Heat Metal and Create Water spells, but if you need to shoot thousands of 100-ton cannonballs at ten times the speed of sound in order to turn a metropolis into a pile of gravel... yeah, the portal cannon is the way to go...

[LibraryOgre]

I thought that Murlynd's paladins's "six shot" handguns weren't real revolvers, but magic wands shaped like revolvers (because gunpowder doesn't work on Oerth, due to a divine ban...).

As a matter of fact, in Future Greyhawk wizards made complex magical cannons by creating two portals, one which sent a projectile close to the sun, and a second which brought the projectile back to the mouth of the barrel after it accelerated to very high speed. They did that because normal cannons and rockets and bombs don't work on Oerth...

So, in the Guardians of the Flame books by Joel Rosenberg, some modern college students wind up in their D&D game world. One of them is an engineering student, and he starts applying modern scientific principles to things, including manufacturing gunpowder. The Wizards and Slavers Guilds are aligned, and the college students are trying to kill the slave trade, so the Wizards guild comes up with "Slaver Powder", which is a complex magical process involving, basically, turning superheated steam into plasma, then turning all of that into a powder that converts back to steam when it gets wet. The result lets them make "firearms" to match the anti-slavery forces guns... even though they're incredibly expensive to manage, and have a tendency to blow up spontaneously in the rain.

[Anonymouswizard]

But, on the other hand, once the portals have been created you can shoot an infinite amount of projectiles at no cost... and we are speaking of weapons able to bomb cities to rubble, WWII style... You could easily create a simple steam cannon using Heat Metal and Create Water spells, but if you need to shoot thousands of 100-ton cannonballs at ten times the speed of sound in order to turn a metropolis into a pile of gravel... yeah, the portal cannon is the way to go...

To be fair we can do one better. Two portals, one on top of the other, stick them in a box. Throw an object into the box and shut it and it'll eventually hit terminal velocity. But what if we had a way to remove the air from the box (for simplicity's sale we'll just stick the box on an airless planetoid and custom build some really long range b Teleport Rings)? At this point open a portal into the box when you need to fire, I highly recommend standing behind the portal instead of in front of it. Depending on how long it's been ready to use ideally far behind.

Sure, the sun cannon is faster to reload, but we can eventually hit higher speeds here, potentially significant fractions of c if we've got years to wait, and we're not having to mess around with orbital mechanics when sorting out our portal placement. Nothing says 'city destruction' like flying over a city, pulling out your teleport ring, and sending an object moving at 0.1c+. On the downside, you do want to fire them off into space occasionally so the ammunition doesn't pick up too much momentum.

[Bohandas]

DUDE!!! TIL. Unreal, lifelong D&D nerd and still I learn something new on these forums. Thanks. Anybody got a source on that?

Dragon Magazine issues 71 (I think) and 306, among other sources.

I thought that Murlynd's paladins's "six shot" handguns weren't real revolvers, but magic wands shaped like revolvers (because gunpowder doesn't work on Oerth, due to a divine ban...).

One of my headcanons is actually that the Company of Seven got where they are partially by figuring out how to flout divine bans

[snowblizz]

That seems ridiculously overwrought.

This is how it looks when authors who have no idea of anything fixates on One Specific Thing as if that was the only thing capable of toppling their imagiworld never mind that their precious magic will make it all go Tippyverse if they thought about it like at all.

[Darth Credence]

But, on the other hand, once the portals have been created you can shoot an infinite amount of projectiles at no cost... and we are speaking of weapons able to bomb cities to rubble, WWII style... You could easily create a simple steam cannon using Heat Metal and Create Water spells, but if you need to shoot thousands of 100-ton cannonballs at ten times the speed of sound in order to turn a metropolis into a pile of gravel... yeah, the portal cannon is the way to go...

If there are portals open to space near the sun, they would be continually sucking the air from Oerth and dumping it in the vacuum of space. So I assumed that the portals would only be created in order to shoot the cannon, since they didn't want to end all life in the process. I'm sure one could come up with some convoluted justification for how this would be circumvented, but that just goes back to ridiculously overwrought.
I would also think that anyone who could figure out gravity and vacuum and how this would work would also be able to come up with gunpowder. If the answer to that is that the gods banned gunpowder from working there, then for this to work the gods would have to be able to prevent a chemical reaction from working, but be unable to stop a workaround from achieving the same results, or they didn't care about the results of gunpowder working, they just didn't like the aesthetics of gunpowder for some reason. Seems really, really silly to me, but your mileage may vary.
I'm with snowblizz on this.

[Clistenes]

If there are portals open to space near the sun, they would be continually sucking the air from Oerth and dumping it in the vacuum of space. So I assumed that the portals would only be created in order to shoot the cannon, since they didn't want to end all life in the process. I'm sure one could come up with some convoluted justification for how this would be circumvented, but that just goes back to ridiculously overwrought.

They could prevent air being sucked using latches to cover the portals when not in use...?

I would also think that anyone who could figure out gravity and vacuum and how this would work would also be able to come up with gunpowder. If the answer to that is that the gods banned gunpowder from working there, then for this to work the gods would have to be able to prevent a chemical reaction from working, but be unable to stop a workaround from achieving the same results, or they didn't care about the results of gunpowder working, they just didn't like the aesthetics of gunpowder for some reason. Seems really, really silly to me, but your mileage may vary.
I'm with snowblizz on this.

I think the premise is that magic is gradually, very slowly weakening in Oerth. A few centuries after the end of the Greyhawk Wars it has reached a point high level spellcasters aren't as powerful anymore (high level magic is hard to cast...), but mortals have developed some sort of standarized industrial magic to compensate for it (think of Eberron's dragonshards), so a lot of artificers can pool their resources to create powerful magical machines to create the same effects as a single high level wizard...

As for gods, either there isn't enough magic left in Oerth for them to alter the basic laws of physics and thaumaturgy anymore (so they can't, say, ban portals) or they have lost interest in Oerth and are preparing to migrate to other worlds (since they know a few centuries or millennia in the future magic will stop working altogether, and they won't be able to keep control of mortals through their clerics...).

EDIT: The setting starts with the news that a country has nuked Iuz's Empire, killing him and destroying his capital Dorakaa. "So you are a Demigod? Well, we have magical nukes!".

[FireJustice]

magic in d&d allows easy ways to create perpetual motion machines.

Also, you have no idea how sciente works. How many joules in a fireball or a lightning bolt spell if you want to harness the energy in any other way?
do a flaming sword flames are hot enough and can be used to generate some watts?

undeads or constructs or any other drone that doen't break down nor sleep (even now we can´t have drones that do that)

control weather is downplayed in how you can affect plant growth with magic. indoors farming

go outside of the core.
At will spells or powers, like the warlock, (or all classes if you fancy 4th edition, there's even at will healing!).
you can create light, electricity, fire, from air. without limit.


the only explanation i can think off is that the enviorment is so hostile, with monsters, wars, disasters and global extinction level events that there's no time or opportunity to come up with those morden ideas without the sun blowing up for the 4th time, half of the plane getting ruined yet again while a new daemon lord awakes again and is almost destroying the rest.
Also, the cellar is on fire.

[Darth Credence]

They could prevent air being sucked using latches to cover the portals when not in use...?

Ever try to open a cover on something where there is high vacuum on the other side? You're trying to lift the atmosphere. With strength enhancements or a small enough opening it can probably be done, but it isn't going to be easy. And you would have to do it on both sides, and the cannonball would have to overcome the wind that would be sucked into the portal where it comes out which would slow it substantially, if not prevent it from working all together. A better hand wave here would be that the magic of the portal is such that the only things that can pass through are the specific makeup of the cannonballs. But still, ridiculously overwrought.

I don't know enough about Oerth to comment on anything about the setting, so I'll take your word for it that the gods are giving up on the world or magic is dying or whatever. Although I don't know why they would still be able to enforce the ban on gunpowder if that's the case. And they somehow had nukes? I assume not real nukes, because real nukes would also require conventional explosives, which would mean they can make gunpowder or some equivalent that could power guns.

This must make more sense in context, and since I don't have that context, I'll accept that it works for the setting. Although if you have somewhere I could learn more about the magic nukes, that would be cool to read about.

[MoiMagnus]

If there are portals open to space near the sun, they would be continually sucking the air from Oerth and dumping it in the vacuum of space.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that "everything goes through" a portal.

Even for an earthly use, if air (that isn't contain in an organism/receptacle) can go through the portal, then you should get some massive wind each time you open a portal between different regions, due to the different in atmospheric pressure and temperature. And I can't imaging the climatic mess that a permanent portal would cause.

Though if one want to go all-in in "everything goes through a portal", I think sucking up air would be one of the minor concerns here. Since we're assuming that physics follows laws similar to our world, gravity is transmitted through gravitons, and if those can travel through the portal, then that mean that gravity goes through, so if you open a portal to nearby the sun,
(1) everything, not just air, would be attracted and sucked in by gravity and
(2) you would cause some massive chaos in the trajectories of planets, as earth has now a significantly higher gravitational pull.
(3) in particular, as for short term consequences, the moon is gonna crash on the earth. A bigger nerd than me could compute how quickly the moon would crash on earth depending on the distance of the portal from the Sun.

[Clistenes]

Ever try to open a cover on something where there is high vacuum on the other side? You're trying to lift the atmosphere. With strength enhancements or a small enough opening it can probably be done, but it isn't going to be easy. And you would have to do it on both sides, and the cannonball would have to overcome the wind that would be sucked into the portal where it comes out which would slow it substantially, if not prevent it from working all together. A better hand wave here would be that the magic of the portal is such that the only things that can pass through are the specific makeup of the cannonballs. But still, ridiculously overwrought.

I don't know enough about Oerth to comment on anything about the setting, so I'll take your word for it that the gods are giving up on the world or magic is dying or whatever. Although I don't know why they would still be able to enforce the ban on gunpowder if that's the case. And they somehow had nukes? I assume not real nukes, because real nukes would also require conventional explosives, which would mean they can make gunpowder or some equivalent that could power guns.

This must make more sense in context, and since I don't have that context, I'll accept that it works for the setting. Although if you have somewhere I could learn more about the magic nukes, that would be cool to read about.

They easiest way to open a latch connecting to outer space would be to have the portal inside a chamber from which you can pump all the air out, creating vacuum inside. Sorta like latches in real-life space capsules. Then you release the ball pressing a switch, and it falls to space.

The return portal would be easier... the ball is moving at ridiculously high supersonic speed, so it punches through atmosphere.

But anyways, I don't think the developers thought too much about it, and I don't think there are rules for the magic nukes... that was just an article from Dragon Magazine or Dungeon Magazine, offering inspiration about how to create an adventure in steampunk magitech Oerth...

But even if you forget about the magitech in Future Oerth, the point is, in the mainstream, canon, vanilla Greyhawk setting the gods have banned some key technologies so the world remains at a tech level they are comfortable with. The real reason, of course, is that Gary Gygax didn't want firearms in his setting...

About Murlynd's guns: "According to Robert Kuntz, Murlynd did not get his trademark "six-shooters" in actual play, but they were given to the character in tribute to Don Kaye's love of the Western genre. Although Gygax did not allow the use of gunpowder in his Greyhawk setting, he made a loophole for Don Kaye by ruling that Murlynd actually carried two magical wands that made loud noises and delivered small but deadly missiles."

magic in d&d allows easy ways to create perpetual motion machines.

Also, you have no idea how sciente works. How many joules in a fireball or a lightning bolt spell if you want to harness the energy in any other way?
do a flaming sword flames are hot enough and can be used to generate some watts?

undeads or constructs or any other drone that doen't break down nor sleep (even now we can´t have drones that do that)

control weather is downplayed in how you can affect plant growth with magic. indoors farming

go outside of the core.
At will spells or powers, like the warlock, (or all classes if you fancy 4th edition, there's even at will healing!).
you can create light, electricity, fire, from air. without limit.

Well, I know how science works, and it's pretty much incompatible with D&D. If you try to combine D&D rules and real world science you end with stuff like the infamous Commoner Rail Cannon...

[Bohandas]

As a matter of fact, in Future Greyhawk wizards made complex magical cannons by creating two portals, one which sent a projectile close to the sun, and a second which brought the projectile back to the mouth of the barrel after it accelerated to very high speed. They did that because normal cannons and rockets and bombs don't work on Oerth...

Which book is that from?

[Clistenes]

Which book is that from?

It was a Dragon Magazine or Dungeon Magazine article... I would have to search it...

They proposed a future steampunk-like future for Oerth, and gave some pointers about how to play it, nothing too deep.

I only mentioned it because of the whole "regular explosives don't work in Oerth" thing...

[Bohandas]

It was a Dragon Magazine or Dungeon Magazine article... I would have to search it...

They proposed a future steampunk-like future for Oerth, and gave some pointers about how to play it, nothing too deep.

I only mentioned it because of the whole "regular explosives don't work in Oerth" thing...

I think I read that article, but I thought it mentioned an atomic war with Iuz's empire, which woukd c9ntradict the no explosives thing

[Clistenes]

I think I read that article, but I thought it mentioned an atomic war with Iuz's empire, which woukd c9ntradict the no explosives thing

I'm pretty sure these were magic nukes... but I think you could have "normal" nukes without mundane explosives... you need explosives to compress the plutonium or uranium and start the fission reaction, but you could replace them with a powerful enough magical explosion...

EDIT: I pushed the wrong key and wrote "fussion" instead of "fission"

Any way, a fusion bomb still needs a small fission bomb inside it, so that would still technically correct: You need explosives to compress the uranium or plutonium to detonate the small fission bomb that starts the euterium/tritium/lithium deuteride fusion reaction.

[Willie the Duck]

I'm pretty sure these were magic nukes... but I think you could have "normal" nukes without mundane explosives... you need explosives to compress the plutonium or uranium and start the fussion reaction, but you could replace them with a powerful enough magical explosion...

Or cast Implosion on a uranium golem.

[Beleriphon]

Nothing says 'city destruction' like flying over a city, pulling out your teleport ring, and sending an object moving at 0.1c+. On the downside, you do want to fire them off into space occasionally so the ammunition doesn't pick up too much momentum.

If we're doing this I recommend reading the XKCD blog about the relativistic baseball or the relativistic diamond asteroid. Suffice to say the asteroid turns planets into subatomic particles, and the baseball doesn't have a safe firing range since it more less turns air instant into atomic weapons. That said the baseball probably counts as being hit by the pitch and the batter gets to advance to first base.

[Max_Killjoy]

If we're doing this I recommend reading the XKCD blog about the relativistic baseball or the relativistic diamond asteroid. Suffice to say the asteroid turns planets into subatomic particles, and the baseball doesn't have a safe firing range since it more less turns air instant into atomic weapons. That said the baseball probably counts as being hit by the pitch and the batter gets to advance to first base.

Relativistic baseball -- https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

[Anonymouswizard]

If we're doing this I recommend reading the XKCD blog about the relativistic baseball or the relativistic diamond asteroid. Suffice to say the asteroid turns planets into subatomic particles, and the baseball doesn't have a safe firing range since it more less turns air instant into atomic weapons. That said the baseball probably counts as being hit by the pitch and the batter gets to advance to first base.

Yeah, I read it. Suffice to say,, while I don't actually know what a safe speed is, I intentionally stated something nowhere near elativistic.More likely we want a bigger object moving at a lower velocity (say a solid steel sphere about the size of a bowling ball).

Of course, if we can do this we can probably just drop a city-sized rock on top of the city. But that has less style.

On an unrelatedc note, I should never be allowed to have characters with the capacity to accelerate stuff to near-c without a lot of asterisks (the one GM who theoretically okayed it only did so because, under comic book physics, it essentially just sent objects really far away from me with no other side effects, which took so much fun out of it I never took the device).

[Clistenes]

Or cast Implosion on a uranium golem.

Taking into account that you can create any amount of uranium or plutonium using Polymorph Any Object, and that you can make it move and attack using Animate Object... That would be a very, very, very evil thing to do to a 3.5 party with a high level Cleric (and to everybody in a radius of several hundred miles around them...).

Send the giant radioactive "golem" against the party... the thing is poisonous to everything around it, and it has a lot of hp... so of course the party will attack it using their best "save or die" spells..

The Cleric tries Implosion (mostly because the thing is immune to most other "save or die" stuff a Cleric can cast, being a Construct...) and BAM! INSTANT TZAR BOMB IN YOUR FACE!

Another reason it is an awful idea to mix Science and Magic in D&D...

[Bohandas]

\Or if you have the shrink item spell in addition to a means of flying you can just fly up and drop your compliant golden-banded tungsten telephone pole on them

[Clistenes]

\Or if you have the shrink item spell in addition to a means of flying you can just fly up and drop your compliant golden-banded tungsten telephone pole on them

Shrink Item would work too... Shrink a ball of plutonium. Place it inside a bigger ball of plutonium, inside a thick steel case. Make it so you can command the shrunk ball of plutonium to return to its real size from far away (maybe using a custom Message spell...?).

The shrunk plutonium ball would expand, crushing the other plutonium ball with the force of an explosion, starting the fission chain reaction...

I am glad magic doesn't exist.. this forum alone would destroy all reality in a span of hours since its discovery...

[snowblizz]

Shrink Item would work too... Shrink a ball of plutonium. Place it inside a bigger ball of plutonium, inside a thick steel case. Make it so you can command the shrunk ball of plutonium to return to its real size from far away (maybe using a custom Message spell...?).

The shrunk plutonium ball would expand, crushing the other plutonium ball with the force of an explosion, starting the fission chain reaction...

I am glad magic doesn't exist.. this forum alone would destroy all reality in a span of hours since its discovery...

Hours? Sounds a bit generous.


Expanding a shrunk item would only shunt the outside material away though. There's a reason the explosive material is wrapped all around the core of an atomic bomb, and shaped so the explosion faces inwards.

[Max_Killjoy]

Hours? Sounds a bit generous.


Expanding a shrunk item would only shunt the outside material away though. There's a reason the explosive material is wrapped all around the core of an atomic bomb, and shaped so the explosion faces inwards.

Depends on the speed of the expansion of the inner material.

At a certain velocity, the outer material doesn't have time to move away before the density goes supercritical.

[Telok]

Re: Future Greyhawk & sun-portal-guns.
As I recall... (may still have the zine somewhere in storage) the guns were all pistol & rifle scale, no cannons. Also a fireball spell was something like a 300mb file. Which I suppose is possible if you encode all 3 written pages as uncompressed, super high-res, 1024 bit color, bitmaps.

[Clistenes]

Hours? Sounds a bit generous.


Expanding a shrunk item would only shunt the outside material away though. There's a reason the explosive material is wrapped all around the core of an atomic bomb, and shaped so the explosion faces inwards.

As I described, the shrunk plutonium ball would be inside another plutonium ball inside a thick steel casing, so there would be plutonium both pressing outwards and being pressed inwards.

And, as another posted said, if the ball is big enough and it expands fast enough, it kinda is an explosion...

[HouseRules]

Another reason it is an awful idea to mix Science and Magic in D&D...

Anytime you mix Science and Magic, God kills a kitten, usually in the form of a catgirl.

RAW says that all standard laws of physics always applies to the game unless an exception is defined.

Explosion faces inward: do we usually call this implosion?

[Witty Username]

Anytime you mix Science and Magic, God kills a kitten, usually in the form of a catgirl.

RAW says that all standard laws of physics always applies to the game unless an exception is defined.

Explosion faces inward: do we usually call this implosion?

Now Fill This Man With Some Science, SWEET MAGICAL SCIENCE!