What is the technological timeline in your world?

[aDwarfNamedUrist]

In our own world, technology began with using found tools, then we and a few other species made tools, then metal was discovered, until today we have computers, rockets, and other technologies. How has this technological progression gone in your own world?

 

[gia]

Well that is a fascinating question! In my book, which takes place in 2055, it starts out with no technology after the great pole shift of 2012 (hence the year is known as 43 a.t. or after technology). In my world, there's a jump into a different type of technology...the one of human energy. Which I"d never stated in that way before so thanks for the opportunity to get clear on that!

 

[ThinkerX]

Apart from Earth, my worlds were initially near lifeless rocks terraformed by 'ancient aliens.' So, lots of high tech toys, much of it bizarre, 'just appeared.' These aliens imported races and lifeforms from other worlds as servants and experimental subjects, including humans and goblins. They then modified members of these races, genetically and otherwise, spawning elves, cat-like rachasa, a brutal, muscular hobgoblins. About three thousand years ago, after tens of thousands of years of dominance, the alien civilizations imploded in a spectacular manner.

Bits of mostly nonfunctional alien tech litter the landscape. The more useful pieces are sought after by the descendants of their former servitors (humans and goblins) who have managed crude copies of some pieces, like solar forges - one of the few means of smelting metal on a world without coal. The other means is via a 'natural' creation of the aliens, fast growing, hot burning 'fumar trees.'

Outside of a few distant realms, the original ancient alien tech is seen as suspect. It tends to get impounded or destroyed by governments or clergy.

Most of the nations rely on 'people power' (aka 'slaves') rather than technology. This is built into society; slaves are a measure of wealth, and anything that threatens that wealth - like labor saving technology - is a threat. However, local technology did make great strides in a few out of the way corners - like the province of Equitant in the Solarian Empire.

At first Equitant managed this because they were mostly ignored (frontier province away from the real centers of power.) Then a eccentric emperor took note of some of their creations, and implemented them nationwide (semaphore signal towers, printing presses, and improved ships being the biggies) while attempting to restrict the rest. For a couple hundred years this worked, sort of. Then came the Traag War.

Traag, a nation sponsored by demons and ruled by ruthless sorcerers, was Solaria's most dangerous foe. Solaria's leaders needed every advantage they could get - so Equitant's artisans were encouraged to bring forth the goodies they'd been sitting on - black powder bombs hurled via catapults, gasbags (hot air balloons), crude hang gliders, simple submarines comparable to those used in late 18th-early 19th century earth, and especially bicycles. Those two wheeled contraptions - simple single speed devices with hard tires - tripled the distance Solaria's troops could travel in a day - and Equitant churned out over a million of them.

Solaria won a near pyrrhic victory over Traag. The imperial treasury was empty, so veterans were paid with land and citizenship and vacant shops. EVERYBODY knew about bicycles, and lots of imitations sprang up. And Equitant's merchant rulers extracted concessions from the imperium as part of a debt relief scheme that resulted in even more of their devices being spread throughout the Empire - greatly improved farm equipment (fewer laborers), the beginnings of what will eventually be a railway system (still a hundred years off), photography, food preservation.

The old line 'labor based' lords detest these innovations. But, they're also going broke.

 

[elemtilas]

A very complex question indeed, as far as The World is concerned. *Here*, in the primary world, we see a fairly stepwise, linear progression. Once Homo sapiens knocked off its competition, and with dolphins safely in the ocean, it was pretty much Man against the universe and things progress as you lay out.

But in The World, Men (a pretty close human analogue) are relative late comers to the technology (and thaumology) games. There are other, older races living in the same world, some of them participating in an antagonistic relationship with Men and others have hardly any relationship at all.

Also, the planet itself is quite different from Earth. While iron is far from non-existent, manu crispatu, it is relatively rare at the surface. Magic is also a thing in this universe, a natural force generated by the deep telluric interactions of rotating core and concentrations of interesting substances and beings down that deep.

The lack of iron affects everybody. You won't find huge skyscrapers full of steel girders. You won't find great iron battleships or rumbling land ironclads in the armed forces of any country. Heck, you won't even find an iron sword or mace! Iron is just too valuable a resource to waste on weapons. (There is an iron substitute, a kind of silver-steel perhaps not unakin to mithril, but this requires considerable dwimcraft in order to work and things made with it are thus generally small and rare. Or terribly magical in nature.)

All that said, I guess you could say Gea's technological timeline is kind of more like the contents of a family's toy box by the time the fourth or fifth child comes along. The first child born's toy box is pretty pristine. It's full of soft toys, Bible for Baby, and those nice Fisher Price stacking blocks. But as time progresses, the fifth child to come along has access to all the hand-me-downs, plus a few newer toys, plus the Duplo & Legos, Star Wars figures, Raggedy Anne dolls, a whole kitchen play set complete with aluminum pots and pans, tricycles, old Game Boys and Lord knows what all else. When he's a year old, he doesn't know what to do with any of that high tech stuff, so he just ends up indiscriminately banging molecule models and wooden blocks on the floor.

The Teyor came first (well, for all practical purposes), and they went through the timeline so long ago that it's almost useless to compare the later races. Also, they are the most perfect of all the peoples of Gea (perhaps something like Elves), and their alignment has always been much more with thaumology than technology. Daine came along much later and learnt much from the Teyor. They're lesser beings, not as perfect, but neither are they among the Fallen. They strike more of a balance between magic and craft.

They both had to come up with early basics like fire and weaving and pottery making and the working of magic so forth on their own, but early involvement with higher beings (that Men would later call "gods") gave the former an early leg up. Daine being naturally adept pupils naturally gave them a leg up later on. By the time Men arrive on the scene, having migrated up from who knows how far away, their crude stone tool culture met a flourishing bronze-o-lithic culture already well settled, literate and thaumically adept.

They learned quickly, however, and mimicked the rest. Forty thousand years ago is considered to be the era of Man's First Flowering. Daine took it upon themselves to teach the Newcomers in the same way the Teyor had taught them in ages gone by. Through observation, they picked up on agriculture and a settled way of life. Within a span of about twenty thousand years, their numbers increased considerably and they began moving into lands inhabited solely by Daine; they learned how to work metal, better agriculture and how magic works.

Within the next ten thousand years, Men will be building their first great empires to rival those of the elder races. The halcyon days of yore are long gone as Men do not have the social and spiritual maturity of the Daine. They quickly forget who their benefactors are and how to respect them as fellow beings. Life becomes much more violent as wars break out and martial technology comes to the fore. Men seem to be hell bent on conquering the world for themselves, though it is not yet a fully formed idea in their consciousness. I guess a back-shadowing of some of the darkness we see *here* with eugenics and racial purity ideas. Ironically, like their first angelic teacher, they can not brook competition from Others and will seek ultimately to destroy anyone they think is in their way.

About 6500 years ago, the world of Men pretty much blows up in their faces, and those wonderful empires turn to dust. We see the rise of new kingdoms upon the ruins of the old empires. One thing Men are great at is forgetting what they knew before, so things like writing and mathematics, geometry, metal working, stonecraft --- those are all things had to learn again on their own. Magic and theology, too. This time around, they seem to have quite forgotten the Daine (having killed most of the neighbouring folks off in their incessant wars) and for their part, Daine developped a deep and abiding mistrust for Men. They came to realise the error of teaching so much to a people unready to learn.

So, this is largely the technological situation we're in now for the last ten thousand years or so. Teyor are so far and above everyone else intellectually, spiritually and socially that they are pretty much ready to transcend. Their advancements in the areas of technology and thaumology have been passed on to the Daine who continue to tinker and improve. Men have a long way to go but in their own fashion are catching up.

 

[Orc Knight]

It starts fairly straight forward, going the usual route. Though once it goes beyond the Iron Age, things start getting a little confusing. The Elves and Trolls along with their off shoots are long lived, so it takes a while to get to each age. Despite the near constant state of warfare, magic also kept things from moving very quickly. Even with Men finally coming on to the scene (same time as salamanders started to become dragons), they were kept low by being enslaved and as menials and some tech experimentation went on.

Though in time, men, delver dwarves and goblins would become the most technologically adept, though all with similar technology. Golems, constructs and weapons to level the fighting against the other races and experimenting to make their magic more powerful. At one point in time the main human nation had vast golem armies patrolling and a colossus for the current Arch-Mage, made for and by said mage. Dwarves and goblins often had mecha and constructs and in the Sun Lands, air ships of magitek abounded. Elf and troll kin stayed the course and just got more powerful naturally and magically and were just as capable of putting the new tech in it's place as needed. If they noticed it at all.

Drow and humans compete with alchemy, the drow more for fun and humans as it is one of the few ways to turn the world their way. Though both have been able to create entire new monsters with it if need be. Though the ability to create the likes of the Seelee and UnSeelee courts has been lost to time and the two alchemical races will hunt down anyone trying to create versions of them. But with the use of magic and creative sorts, it's not unusual for any place to have fairly modern seeming magical conveniences or to find things that seem quite anachronistic.

Though, short of the human city state of Zukal and their territories in the Sun Lands, most the world is actually in a post apocalyptic setting due to the Lich Wars. And even they've taken such losses that the current Arch-Mage is going to spend another life time just trying to repair the damage on her colossus. Things are still fairly decent, but no dwarf and goblin mecha show all that much, fully automatic crossbows and the like are relics and there are many armor types that can no longer be made or if it can, it is in the hands of the undead. Or gone completely due to the purges of simply trying to wipe them out.

There is also portal technology, such as it is. And confined to either the drow, who often deal in interplanary or other universal threats. Something they had to do because adventurers kept ending up in the wrong place to take on Lolth. It does become more well known and used across the world, though the power it takes a lot of power to use. There is also the Sylvan Gates, which isn't so much technology as walking through another world to move faster on the actual one. But those too have been mostly lost and the Sylvan are no longer open the gates for just anyone.

Architecture and building technology hasn't suffered however, if only in thanks to a single person keeping it in business. In fact, it has made for some very lasting buildings and fortress'. And in time, air ships and even magical versions of computers will show up. And it takes an actual leap when they get invaded by aliens and 'subdue' said aliens. Mostly kill them, take their magiteck and learn how their ships work and jump into Spelljammer, more or less. Though that's several hundred years down the line and another story then the current setting.

 

[Horus]

Technology in Ynol is... complicated as the plane has gone thru several upheavals that have resulted in "dark age" periods. The first sentient beings, the Old Gods, were "perfect" creatures beyond most mortal comprehension. They were capable of rearranging the physical world as casually as a person might walk thru a door. They had no use for tools, but their children did.

The Ancients were a collection of 5 races who were all inherently magical and possessed no natural lifespan. As such, any tools they used (beyond the rudimentary) were magical in nature, but they slowly learned to quantify their world via advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, and various other sciences.

With no reason for War, their tools were mostly focused on making life easier. Reliquaries were made to house the collective knowledge of groups, races, or valued individuals, while the Solvia allowed travel over great distances, or the creation of "pocket realities". Their structures were built by automated semi-intelligent constructs and mages wielding telekinetic magic, but were still designed around not being dependent on magic to stay standing. The only exceptions are their three luminaries, as these objects were designed to be weapons against the Old Gods. During this age, most of their tools were refined via magic and their civilizations magitech would make them capable of things equivalent to what a Class 1 civilization on the Kardeshev scale.

After the war with the Old Gods, the systems of magic that made it possible for mortals to create and wield magic on this scale, deteriorated. The Ancients slowly recovered, later advancing to a near industrial period of technology with magic driven engines capable of manipulating gravity. These made floating cities and airships possible. At around this point, the Ancients developed methods to create non-construct life via "Life Weaving", a process of forcible altering smaller organisms. During this period, the Age of Wonder, the Ancients altered the "lesser" creations of the Old Gods. These races, not being magically inclined, progressed up into a late medieval period with the help of the Ancients.

12 B.C (Before Cataclysm), the other races begin perfecting the art of war while competing against the Ancients. The Blast Furnace, Steel armor/weapons, advanced mining tools, wind mills/water wheels, and black powder become available. The most important advancement is in agriculture, allowing all "lesser races" to be independent from the Ancients. 0 A.C (After Cataclysm), due to horrendous environmental damage and the loss of over 70% of the male population in some countries, the Age of Anarchy begins. Blast Furnaces, artisan techniques, and most scientific knowledge is lost. Nations rise and fall while fighting over natural resources too quickly for any significant advances to be made/distributed. Technology returns to an Iron Age level for most races, except the Dwarves, who maintain a large technological advantage.

350 A.C, the Ecclysian Empire, Forel, Orus, and Solari Imperium return to late medieval technology. Scientific advances and trade in Ancient technology gives rise to an academic age with the signing of the Treaty of Wyvern's Tooth, which prohibits destruction of academic and religious artifacts as a wartime measure. 690 A.C, alchemist make the first air guns and black powder cannons/ firearms become possible. 1001 A.C, Alchemist create the first new airships and long distance communication devices usable by all. Technology is now in a Renaissance period, but some areas lag behind or spike ahead.