How do I justify a world where civilization has remained at the early modern/gunpowder era for far longee rather than...

Have the invention of gunpowder come close to upsetting the balance of power on a societal level, but the nobility successfully clamps down and engages harsh restrictions to keep their piece of the pie.

Like, gunpowder soon after its invention ends up being used in a serf revolt that only really fails because they run out of ammo. The nobility sees this, panics, and becomes very very scared of the advancement of technology flipping the table on them and enacting a series of laws that eventually grow into a self-perpetuating social taboo against new tools and technology.

The nobility maintains stockpiles of guns for war, but uses the destructive power of guns as an example to the peasants as to the dangers of technology. They occasionally leak guns to the rebels that are designed to explode when used that further reinforce that this is something dangerous they don't understand while also killing off the more rebellious members of the population in the process.

>How do I justify a world where civilization has remained at the early modern/gunpowder era for far longee rather than our own world did?
strangely enough this is onr of those things that seems like a big issue that really isn't. In reality this stagnation of technology is only a problem if you draw attention to it. Your typical player, or reader, or whatever will usually just accept long stretches of technological stagnation in a fantasy setting as part of the usual suspension of disblief without giving it a second thought, unless, of course, you yourself draw attention to the fact that it's weird that technology stagnated for so long.

So, for the tl;dr crowd, the best way justify it is to not acknowledge it.

I don't have a full answer, but pic related is from Gregory Clark's book _A Farewell to Alms_, which discusses the subject in detail of why and how the Industrial Revolution happened. I suggest you grab a copy and skim it for interesting ideas and relevant factors to twiddle when considering how society advances or not around that time.

The problem with this is guns aren't all that mysterious. It's relatively easy to figure out why a gun exploded. Plus, the advantage that guns have over other weapons is their ease of use, making poorly trained peasant-conscripts much more effective combatants; an elite noble class wouldn't have much use for guns unless they can co-opt the masses into using them on their behalf.

Or this. Tolkien got away with it because it's not talked about at all.

Look at Japan, their feudal system didn't fall because of Samurai adopting guns as their weapons of war.

There's no gunpowder, there's a substitute which functions LIKE gunpowder but CANNOT be used for the more advanced post-1800 functions.

And the same for whatever other materials are relevant.

This could be pretty easy by making metals so weak that they can't sustain creation of more powerful and automatic guns. That used to be a problem with early smokeless powder.

How typical is fantasy in relation to power level of soldiers?

Cause if soldiers use magic/ki/etc, to power up than bows strengthen with magic or just done from some exotic materials can push crossbows and guns somewhat back until more advances are made. And if they are effective these advances may take longer with less incentive to make them.

Basically if your veteran soldier can pierce plate armor from his magical bow and fires at least half as fast as Legolas in the movies guns will be put on a backburner for a long time. Training more such soldiers will be more effective.

I love muskets, something about a single-fire long rifle just tickles me.

But muskets are by definition not rifled. That's kinda the point what makes them muskets and not rifles.

Easiest answer is magic. People developed technology to overcome obstacles.
What do you need penicillin for if you can just pray the disease away.
what do you need ICBMs for when you have a wizard riding a fucking dragon?
You can say the proliferation of early firearms occured as means of trying to give the average soldier some way of dealing with battle wizards.
The average wizard could melt the sword in your hand, or create a barrier capable of deflecting an arrow or two. But a volley of musket fire?

Coal and oil do not exist for some reason.

Either an ancient advanced civilisaiton that was around 200,000 years ago has already burned through all of it, or the world is too young for coal and oil to have formed, or a wizard did it.

The Gods cause anyone and their immediate family and friends who takes an interest in the scientific method to spontaneously combust, along with a booming voice in the sky saying "BY OUR DECREE YOU MAY NOT ADVANCE."

>Old wise men furthering science thus stay in place, looking smug, and work from that spot, never moving again.
>Hordes of lab assistants roam the country, participating in experiments they only half understand, lest they be cursed the same.

no brass?
Cartridges cannot exit in a rudimentary form without some kind of soft, pliable metal with exceptional durability to house gunpowder and shot. This would have prevented any kind of technological advancement in loading procedure.

(of course this is all horseshit armchair historianism but it'll pass if you want to convince PCs)

Something could have happened to prevent the creation of factories. This would mean that smaller workshops are still the backbone of production which would mean there wouldn't be an excess of goods. This includes guns, they would be built in workshops or in the homes. Lack of goods would mean the population wouldn't be able to converge in cities, so education would advance at a slower rate.

"Enlightened Nations" were never able to build the military power to colonize the rest of the world as a result, so nations reside in relative isolation.

Maybe the equivalent of the French Revolution just kept cycling for a while, so no one really was able to solidify power in order to organize.

Doesn't matter, can't hide. The Gods just KNOW where you are instantly and omnipotently. Nothing you can do because you GM Fiat explode. The only reason life goes on in a pantomime of normalcy is because the Gods allow it.

And don't even bother conceptualizing action against them or established dogma, because that's asplodin'.

your idea is cool though

The size of the Japanese islands is another factor

Maybe the resources for making gunpowder are so scarce that people never bothered pursuing technologies that would lead to higher volumes of fire.

Or maybe the world has little or no flint, so firearms never evolved beyond matchlocks.

The next major advance after the wheellock and flintlock was chemical rather than mechanical: the percussion cap. A technology that's not so obvious because it's directly dependent on scientific understanding. If scientific progress has been lacking, you don't get this advancement. Or as other anons have suggested, chemistry doesn't have to work the same way as in real life because it's fantasy.

Why do you have to justify this? The Chinese were still using matchlocks into the late 19th century, and muzzleloaders through 1945.

Just find BS reasons why guncotton never came about.

Most published settings for D&D are like this.

Hell, just look at Spelljammer.

Does it have to be stuck for a long time though? Remember, most campaigns take place over the span of a handful of years at the very best, but usually a few months. It's not as if someone's going to accidentally industrial revolution during the duration of your campaign.

This means you have a comfy 100-300 years of so of guns but no industrialism where people ran around in full plate, guns and melee weapons without there being any strain on believably.

>What if the moon is actually a giant mirror
But it kinda is?

The power of their artillery advanced, and how they waged war changed extremely from Musket to Late Musket.

And thats sorta the problem with Musket Romance: You forget what it actually involves, beside the shitty sidearm and occasional infantry volley

Level 10 veteran enters the field
Picks up a rock
Throws it it a throw as mighty as a hurricane
It cleaves the entire frontline of all but the stronger veterans
He looks at them, as he is outside of their counter distance
He then unsheats his sling, picks up another rock
He cleaves apart the rest of the army with the extra power and precision, with the shrapnel from skulls and armor decimating the rest of the army

religion

This here, lack of coal and oil will prevent any real industrialization beyond very localized power bases making limited runs of high quality goods.

Lack of 'power tools' locked down mechanical aplications significantly in the pre-industrial age (people weren't dummies, they realized you could do fun stuff like revolvers way back in the 1500s and before, Dionysius of Alexandria is credited with a repeating arbalist that functions very much like a painfully slow chaingun in 300BC )

However, the limiting factor of these 'ideas' is primarily the standardization of tooling made possible by factory power and the ability to refine metals to the reliability required. Without that standardization in a facotry your going to need some combination of steelsmiths, watchmakers, jewelers and probably even a dentist just to get your gun tuned up.

>religion

Maybe if the gods themselves intervene (in a unanimous decision note.)

Meanwhile I fairly sure even crossbows were banned by the Pope (against Christians), so you're going to need a much stronger authority than the Catholic Church in 1139.

Catholic Church with a bunch of Powerful Dieties that will literally rain down salt on the earth?
I think its more powerful than the RL version.

Its also a far more powerful state because the deities are still head of state, with the Pope only being a level 22+ faggot who keeps the shit from not falling apart.

Meanwhile the God of Darkness, Tight Leather Pants and Goblins hears of it and decides 'Fuck yes that sounds metal, time for pyrotechnics tell my Champions that glam hair is IN!"

When you open up the door to divine meddling and a pantheon of participants you're always going to get 'That Deity.'

Magic.

While technology would continue to advance, the progression of industry and iterative design would suffer when placed next to a robust, magical society.

There's no point in developing technology when magic can do the same thing technology does easier, cheaper, and with less hassle and maintenance than the scientific version.

If any bumblefuck wizard can throw out believable illusions, instantly converse with people dozens of miles away, or do any of dozens of other things you need more infrastructure, money, and technology to do, why would technology advance at all?

In a world where a sufficiently powerful cleric can literally raise the dead without consequence or a mage can reshape reality at a whim, why would technology be treated as anything but a dead-end of intellectual advancement?

Neat, you made a nonmagical device which takes mastercraft-level workmanship in order to clumsily fire a Magic Missile at someone. Meanwhile my twelve-year-old prodigy of a child can do the same thing with a good night's rest and a look through his spellbook. And it doesn't require detonating explosive powder inches from his face while trying to aim four feet of wood towards the target.

And some times you get the Greek Pantheon, where all but 2-3 Gods is literally that guy.

That's quite a departure from the original Vancian fluff, where masters and post-doc level mathematics were considered elegant and simple next to learning spells, and study times were so long eternal youth was almost a prerequisite for being an archmage.

Original Vancian spells basically started at 5th level.

Just don't talk about it.

What about biomass? Wood, charcoal, holzgas can be used instead of coal. I realize that production of energy might be relatively slow, but, apparently, modern day Sweden gets ~20% of its energy from forests. And biomass is far more than that - you can use, for example, agricultural byproducts.

>I realize that production of energy might be relatively slow
You mean slow as in have to grow trees slow? Or something else?

Rifled muskets are a thing though.

And they are explicitly NOT muskets. That is what the "rifled" part of "rifled musket" is for.

The defining aspect of a musket is the firing mechanism used i.e flinttock, matchlock or wheellock, not the smothbore, rifled muskets are still a type of musket, hence why they are called rifled muskets and not something else.

Musket is just a type of small arm, it can be smoothbore or rifled. Just the smoothbore is widly more common.

A series of hilarious but still horrific unfortunate events happen to each inventor of the gun.

Either they get attacked by owlbears or it just happens that its rival, a very angry wizard, decided to throw a fireball into its workshop.

One day they might, but until now its really just been unbelievable bad luck.

you dont need machines to make gunpowder.
Just have the industrial revolution not happen. Maybe your world doesn't have sufficient quantities of coal to fuel the industrial revolution. Maybe they just couldnt figure out pressure systems. The advance of technology isnt unstoppable.

This, most likely will the guy who finds mold on his sandwich not investigate it any further than "Oh hey this is neat" cause as it stands its like trying to reinvent the wheel.

If replacing part of a object makes it a different object, it is no longer the original object.

Replacing the smooth-bore barrel of a musket with a rifled barrel is what makes a "rifled musket," as apposed to a musket or a rifle. If once a musket is a rifled musket, it can no longer be a musket.

No industrial revolution, everything is still made with the hand methods.

You may be familiar with the hand methods for swords, but the hand methods for gunpowder arms in the early days goes something like this, as a modern day mechanic who got a look at historical tools.

>Barrel is made out of iron heated until its soft being hammered around a rod of iron which was cast with a higher softening point. Barrels are either hexagonal or round. On a rifled gun (far more common early on in gunpowder than most will make it sound) the rifling was cut with a very sharp die hand driven and twisted down the barrel. The touch hole is hammered into the soft steel by hand as it cools.

The lock is assembled on a plate, which his then screwed onto the stock and covered on other sides by plates, with only the hammer, or the hammer and a latch remaining external. Trigger was a simple lever working on the latch with no trigger-spring. Pan is worked into an extension of the guns side plate on that side.

Wood is carved from local hardwood, most fittings and often lock parts that didn't have to be forged were cast.

Hope this helps with describing a traditional gunsmith in your games or making a sensible description of the shop, process, and tools needed.

Square marshmallows are neither squares nor marshmallows, as we all know.

They are SquareMarshmallows. Their own, distinct entity.

>this pedantism to save face on a mongolian throat singing board

You need "machines" to make guns. Making a rod of metal solid enough to withstand an explosion requires some fairly complicated metallurgical processes. Putting a long, uniform hole into that rod requires a long, uniform drill. Assuming you're not creating a simple culverin, creating a trigger mechanism requires vises, clamps, files, casts, et cetera. All of these things are co-requisite ideas for a printing press, so it stands to reason if you can make one you have the general know-how to make the other.

Yeah, about 300 years of it in history. 500 if you include the whole world (East Asia had about a 100 extra years of gunpowder and a hundred more of no industrialization).

OP here, I like the "no fossil fuels" idea so I'm going with that.

If there are steam engines they're very primitive and powered by charcoal, which is probably a bit more limited than coal and oil in its uses.

Honestly OP, most of the early industrial revolution was powered by charcoal. "Shaft" mining of the sort most people imagine (tunnels supported by wooden beams deep in the earth) was not possible without machinery and explosives that didn't become available until the 1800s. Without fossil fuels, industry would probably rely on wood instead.

Is this what a Dynasty Warriors character with a sling would be like?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifled_musket

"A rifled musket or rifle musket is a type of firearm made in the mid-19th century. Originally the term referred only to muskets that had been produced as a smoothbore weapon and later had their barrels replaced with rifled barrels. The term was later extended to include rifles that directly replaced, and were of the same design overall as, a particular model of smoothbore musket."

The fuck do you want? That is what they are. It is not my fault some words have stricter definitions than "whatever the fuck you feel like them meaning."

No, trees simply aren't energy dense enough and grow too slowly. Even using them as fuel requires a slow process of growing, drying them out, and then burning them at an incredibly low energy density - and you would cut them into extinction in a hurry if you did rely on those. All the technologies that make it viable without fossil fuels depended on fossil fuels previously in order to come into existence.

Here's a terrifying thought: if there was a nuclear holocaust and mankind was reduced to 1500s technology again, we could not crawl our way back to modernity at all. There simply isn't enough accessible coal, metals and other necessary resources at a depth we can reach with 1500s technology to reproduce the industrial revolution again. We used them up.

If a planet came into creation without deposits of coal, oil, and other fossil fuels, it's possible that no matter how intelligent the life forms were that evolved on that planet, they might plateau at a certain level of technology and never surpass it. Or else it would take them a much, much longer period of time.

>burning them at an incredibly low energy density
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal

Might not be wrong on the other points since humans have never really bothered looking at large scale, long term wood-for-fuel systems since we have cheap coal.

>If a planet came into creation without deposits of coal, oil, and other fossil fuels
Pretty sure earth came that way. Took dinosaurs and shit, but it worked out.

1. Materials for saltpeter/gunpowder is very rare or just doesn't exist (if that guy questions chemical compounds, it doesn't matter. Its fucking magic.)

2. Gods are more malevolent and actually have kept the world less technologically advanced than usual. (last time they let a world get to the industrial age they started losing faith and said shit like "gods aren't real")

3. Powerful organizations and governments keep tech at a standstill to keep their power over the people.

I use all 3 in mine.

You can go the annoying faggot route and just say "because I said so" but that never really makes for nice lore, now does it? I'd like to believe a world like that would be forced into it as a social experiment ayys made or something with a "master controller".

Magic is able to make those guns function plenty well, and they have to be made by master craftsmen, just like swords did. They basically become the replacement for the nobleman's sidesword. Most non-noble troops are stuck with shoddy versions.

It takes a lot of training to use a musket and bayonet in combat. Especially if you're learning to shoot on horseback. Sure, the kid down the road may have learned to shoot a bottle off a fencepost, but he didn't learn how to fight with it and can't do well in combat.

There's been considerably less warfare than we had in the West during the ages when guns really picked up steam. It basically jumped from Napoleon to WWI in around a hundred years because people didn't fucking stop fighting. Tons of small wars in various colonies, the American Civil War, etc. All of that happened repeatedly until it exploded into a war where technology had far outstripped our previous ability to murder people.

I did it with the powder creating a stronger explosion cuz its infused with magic so not many materials outside of mythrial and adamantite can be used for the rifling.

Only problem is that gunpowder is usually confirmed to work like it does in RL in D&D settings.

What if you need an artifact to be an ancient-ass gun used to flew a dragon from an eon ago?

You don't have to justify it at all. This idea that history has to follow a neat and tidy progressive development is really misplaced. That you HAVE to discover steampower, you HAVE to discover gunpowder, you HAVE to discover electricity. No you don't. There is nothing preordained about that and really only the most basic and obvious kinds of technological revolutions - say, agriculture or basic metalurgy, are bound to be inevitable.

Here's how you get a world without gunpowder - nobody farts around trying to invent an elixir of life or whatever which preceeds the development of gunpowder. Nobody puts two and two together about saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur. That's it. That's all.
They were farting around with embryonic steam experiments back with Hero of Alexandria yet nothing came about for almost 1800 years. Why? It just didn't. No Europe and steampower might be discovered tens of decades later, centuries later, millennia later, or never before mankind is extinct.

They had a familiarity with fossil fuels since naptha and the BCs yet didn't put two and two together to develop combustion engines for more than two thousand years.

If you're saying they were stuck at early gunpowder then there's no reason you still can't justify the stagnation. No inevitability of progress - the Chinese and Arabs had gunpowder but without European industrial revolution developments would have remained at their level probably 'forever' short of the unique circumstances of geography, economy, culture and sheer luck of having bright minds.

Is it, though? EU uses 1 606 million tonnes of oil equivalent of energy and produces 425 million m3 of roundwood, and that's an equivalent ~100 million tonnes of oil when converted to holzgas which has high energy density.
It's just one order of magnitude less, when we don't really care about wood production that much - and our forests are steadily growing.

I also think his claims are kind of bold. The world uses 1.2 billion tons of coal per year and cuts down 15 billion trees a tear.

You get 1/10th the energy from it, so if you assume each tree we log weighs at least a ton, we already produce roughly equal amounts of potential energy from logging.

I also find his claims of a nuclear holocaust resulting in a shortage of metal kind of strange too since it's not like all the metal currently in existence would be going anywhere.

The only thing I can think is that it takes a lot of processing to get metals out of the ores that are left. If the nuclear holocaust knocked out infrastructure, then it'd be a shortage by the inability to get it.

Britain bfore Roman invasion is a perfect example.

Isolated on an island where little migration occurred , caused them to become a stagnant and primitive shit hole.

>All of these things are co-requisite ideas for a printing press
I can't fucking see how. We made complex machinesway more complex than a fucking culverin for two milenea without printing press nor industrial machinery

desu we made way better and more powerfull cannons 170 years before fucking printing press.

Meanwhile on the mainland, celts invented chain mail and the barrel and were properly civilized.

It's not really a "just didn't." Hero worked in a time where slavery was an integral part of society, removing the need for initially expensive automation. Additionally, steelworking wasn't nearly advanced enough to be able to put an internal combustion engine to good use. The Bessemer process gets short shrift in history classes, given how incredibly important it was.

I'm not talking about mining. Presently most of america's yearly steel production is made from... recycled steel.

Come up with something else?
If you feel you NEED an object that breaks or over complicates your world building, consider why you feel you NEED this object to exist.

I'm a little suspicious of the almost conspiratorial rationale of slavery being why it didn't get traction. At least when it's phrased in a kind of ancient version of "big ebil oil killed the electric car" with big ebil slaveholders it sounds ridiculous. I can buy the notion that the cheap and abundant presence of physical labor mitigated the need....yet that argument suffers when numerous innovations of improved productivity and greater use of pre-industrial machines (windmills, improved watermills, ect) came about while if not slavery then serfdom was prevalent and labor was not a problem. And it's not as if when labor was short (post Black death when it was a seller's market for the laborer, to the point that those who needed laborers had to try and bullshit up edicts to freeze wages at pre-BD levels) all of a sudden you automatically got major innovations. Likewise the cotton gin came about while we were still using abundant slave labor.

I'm sure it played a part, as did the lack of copyrighting and other things, but while slave-dealers might bristle at something to cut into their deals you offer someone running a mine or a farm or a fabrica the ability to improve production and if it means them getting greater profits only an idiot would say no.

That being said the steelworking point is undeniably important and pivotal. But you understand my point - besides a fantasy world not having to follow our exact chronology there's also no reason that higher grade technologies are inevitable. And long as I bitch on this subject, that applies to fucking full plate too. I'm assuming the Ottomans and Mughals developed metallugy on par with 15th century Europe even if a few decades or centuries later (or earlier, even) but they didn't inevitably end up going full plate.

I'm actually working on a world similar to this. Magic being in decline (Cliched I know) caused a surge of technological advances, but that was stopped when a meteor landed in the ocean and caused an impact winter. I'm no good at all the science, so it's slow work to make it all make sense, but that's my reason for ye olde rifles being around for so long.

Serfdom wasn't as prevalent as you might think. In France, for example, serfdom was very rare throught most of the history. Really, serfdom in Europe is mostly a thing of XVII - XVIII century.
And yes, post black death saw quite rapid technological advancement.
It's not that abundance of cheap labor kills all creativity, but it certainly lessens the incentive for it. It's all about capital-labour substitution.

>the God of Darkness, Tight Leather Pants and Goblins
You remind me of the man...

....What man?

Books are still hard to make even though printers exist. That's because paper isn't as easily manufactured and neither is ink.

I think that might have to do with the exact nature of japanese firearms. If memory serves they adopted arquebusses and small arms swiftly, but they couldn't manufacture proper canons. Sure, you could give a dozen jackasses arquebusses and they would do ok, but compared to a bunch of trained soldiers they wouldn't be nearly as effective. Give the scrubs siege guns and they'll do much better.

What you've gotta remember is that early handheld firearms could be compared to really stupidly long-hafted pikes in terms of use.

>How do I justify a world where civilization has remained at the early modern/gunpowder era for far longee rather than our own world did?

>a rifled musket isn't a musket
Nigga you dumb.
>a red car isn't a car

Wood?

>unironically citing Wikipedia
>unironically using "it's not my fault" to defend pedantry
You're a textbook autist.

they got cut off from trade routes.
Just take europe, remove the steppe highway and bam. progress grinds to a halt.

I don't think the vague equivalence of slavery to serfdom is accurate economically. When you're talking about windmills and serfs, you're discussing very isolated communities. There were far fewer serfs in most areas than there were slaves on the Roman latifundia, so it's not too hard to see why there would be a drive to establish infrastructure that benefits a community and reduces labor. Also, keep in mind that Whitney was a northerner working during the Industrial Revolution. I don't much like comparing the economics of late antiquity and the medieval period; comparing either of those to the early modern era gives me hives.

In any event, Hero predated even the latifundia, which were the only sort of communities in the ancient world that I think could economically support the development of something like an internal combustion engine, metallurgy aside.

>>a red car isn't a car
Not an accurate analogy. Something like "Was a factory, but having the machines taken out and replaced with boxes of stuff for storage is now a warehouse" would be closer.

>You're a textbook autist.
Though I am still right about muskets (or musket pattern weapons,) having been retrofitted with rifled barrels, being rifled muskets and not muskets.

Noe enough. Industrialization need a specific blend of societal customs AND resources. Lack coal near the proper civ, and we're in pre-industrial times forever, despite complexity.

Think about the Chinamen.

Simpilest answer is that physics/chemistry dont work the way they work on earth so modern guns arent really a thing