Why is medieval stasis such a common thing in so many fantasy settings?

Why is medieval stasis such a common thing in so many fantasy settings?

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Because the development of technology is not what these games tend to focus on.

Because it's pretty hard to write a comprehensive history if the world changes as fast as our own. Also probably yearning.

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Because they are copying Tolkien without understanding anything about Tolkien.

The rapid technological development of the 20th/21st century is a fairly modern thing, of course Veeky Forums is filled with historically ignorant people so i'll give you a pass

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That's why in my setting there's blackpowder rifles, colonisation, and no active gods.

Because that's the aesthetic they want.

Obviously it doesn't have to be the focus of a camptaign but an expansive setting could have major changes that affect what the players deal with. That said, building a setting built solely on player agency and their decisions is not a way to always build a setting but it's something you, the gm, can take in mind if that's what you take into account for your own oc donut steel setting.

Because it's story is set in a period of medieval tech being the current standard and most settings don't span the course of over a century from when the action starts.

That is a bit misleading user. Looking at fantasy settings many of them have histories that span centuries or even millennia. If a creator is going to account for that time, there are a lot of things that change even over the course of one human lifespan. This is all before even touching technology. Add in the invention of new seige weapons, heating and treating advancements, maybe gunpowder, or any technomancy if magic is involved and you suddenly have to account for not only the technological changes by also the quality of life, agriculture, engineering and housing and then the social developments and class hierarchy restructuring and it can be overwhelming for a creator to account for all the variables.

Are you fucking kidding me? 19th century, literally dubbed the Industrial Age, saw huge developments over the 18th century, and every century after the Renaissance saw increasingly faster development thanks to new inventions that made it easier to share inventions with the world and raise the general level of technology to a much higher place, such as the printing press. Compared to the dark ages, technology started surging after 1500, slowly at first surely, but it eventually started to boom long before the 1900s.
Don't insult someone for saying something different from your dumb ass thinks is common knowledge. Fuck off.

Let's be honest, how many settings have any coherent description or even maps of what happened even 50 years back? How many of them have actual historians or a discipline in history?

I remember in a Song Ice and Fire how Sam speculates that most of the history they have is a bunch of rubbish and the little they know have been distorted by their modern ideas of feudal lords and knights.

Many fantasy settings are rooted in a historical mindset, not so much how the world actually was historically but how people saw the world through their own beliefs, myths and legends. If you look at how the Greeks understood history, it follows a trajectory a bit like a fantasy setting - an age of gods and titans gives way to an age of heroes and monsters gives way to an age of ordinary people (but ordinary people in a world still understood to contain gods, monsters and magic, just not as obvious as before). A world which goes through the modern understanding of societal progress gives a setting a different feel. I don't think the average fantasy writer today has these things in mind but someone like Tolkien would have been aware of it and it gets passed down because lots of people like fantasy written in that mindset.

FPBP

a campaign doesn't take place over 100 years

Because it's what most consumers want

>Not Chrono Triggering your campaign

I do it because usually i have a tangible story in mind, and theorizing on the nature of history will undermine it. Everyone is used to the convention so wether its right or wrong, it works in the minds of players

this. "realism" and minutia obsessed nerds fundamentally misunderstand what much of fantasy draws from. it doesn't draw from history, it draws from historical myths, stories and legends. it's the reason why writers like gaiman and tolkien are as successful in the genre as they have been they draw from stories myths and legends not from structured worldbuilding exercises and nitpicking nerds. Consequently legend and myth based fantasy makes for better stories than the alternative.

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Careful, you're bound to hurt the feelings of a bunch of sensitive history buffs

Because people like the myth of the knight and chivalry, but the period of time where those really developed was also the end of that era (in really broad historical terms) and change followed pretty quickly, some changes happened during the period we associate with the Medieval fantasy wants to be based on (guns, science, land reform, the beginnings of the loss of the power of the nobility, professional armies, etc.), Not huge steps, but the leaping off point.

So people want to be a part of the mythology of knightly heros without incorporating the changes that would end up making those stories obsolete. So they take the knightly and "medieval" things from that high medieval times period and push them back to a time when science and technology were more stagnant, which also gives the author/GM/player control over how it will develop if they want.

It's wanting you cake and eating it too and I really don't see a huge issue with it as long as everyone else is willing to play along.

>my very possibly wrong thoughts
cause its easier to start and think about revolutions from stasis.
from stasis its easier to say "the world is this way; change it how you will" making it better for making a narrative


that was pleasantly informative and very relevant.

the narrator needs to get a little distance form that monotone though.

to be fair, that very special kind of fun is the purview of the GMs
I like thinking about the ramifications of tech-advances if they get swapped around.

I'm about to run something that put the earliest combine harvesters and automatic seed drills BEFORE the advent of firearms(but not gunpowder)

it frees up people that WOULD have been farmers to do lots of things like taking trades which would then be either more advanced or more dependent on the now very available extra man-power, etc. etc.

that, and giving primitive cultures one or two tech advancements over higher tech Civilizations.(usually rooted in locally available resource plants or animals)

the rate of change in our world is significantly greater now than it was

"the faster you go, the faster can go"

playing it straight earth settling?
or you got a different world for that?
either way, sounds good.
any neat quirks of advancement?

AGREED
though there is something to be said for jacking about with the established formula a little.

looks like he already did...

So you can have different stories with a similar style in the same setting. If you have the story of the guy who saves the world but later want a sequel writers will generally set the sequel after the previous protagonist has died or become irrelevant but keeping technology the same so they can keep the same aesthetic and core ideas. So story one could be set in year zero, story two in year 90, and story three in year 250, yet there is little to no technological advancement so they can keep the themes of knights in full plate armour, kings, dukes, dragons, etc.

>though there is something to be said for jacking about with the established formula a little.

oh sure! The genre has come a long way, and we don't wanna limit ourselves, but i do think that realism nerds tend to rob fantasy stories oif some of their best elements in pursuit of a purist goal thats never attainable or even if it is usually ends up being incredibly boring and bad stories.

Why not have the guy be old by the time of the sequel, or move the story to another country?

How do you top saving the world anyway? It's done, there's nothing else to save!

Who hurt you user?

Let's be honest. How many fantasy settings actually do that? Most of them are shallow pastiches copying the early works. I doubt there are many GM out of there who have any knowledge of legend or myths anyway.

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Save the world from another world ending threat generally.

>Why not have the guy be old by the time of the sequel
Generally you don't want him to overshadow the new protagonist. Also in cases like video games it helps allow for ambiguous canonicity of the former protagonist is dead and buried, after all if you played your character like an asshole who fucked things up for everyone in game 1, but when you bump into him in game 2 he is a cool old guy that everyone loves it would piss off some people.

>move the story to another country?
Depending on the scale that may not help. If there is some world ending threat and the new protagonist is just dealing with a civil war while this epic struggle is going on in the next country over the story loses some of its impact.

Not saying that this is a good thing, simply that this is often a reason for medieval stasis, more stories in the same setting without needing to advance technology and thus change the core themes. Honestly this seems far more common in video games than literature and more common in literature than RPGs.

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Because he just tried shutting an user's opinion down and calling it irrelevant when he himself is wrong on the subject. He's actively attempting to kill discussion by discouraging people from talking on these subjects, and because he's wrong, it's certainly not because he thinks only knowledgable people should be talking about it. Fuck him and people like him.

Because modern fantasy grew up in a time of Romanticism

Because it’s not real.

Who are you trying to fool though. We both know that what you want isn't a removal of medieval stasis, you just want to set the medieval stasis at the exact period you want with the tech you thinks looks best because you're tired of the "generic" fantasy setting style.
Oh and FYI none of the armors in your pic have massive pauldrons so they're complete garbage by default.

Because people like swords and armor and they are bored of guns.

Because Late Medieval Romances drastically skewed people's ideas of the aesthetics early to mid Middle Ages.

Blame Walter Scott and Ivanhoe, and fiction of that sort.

Because every time civilization reaches a certain point the immortal dragon returns and lays everything to ruin until a hero defeats it.

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1525 is pure sex. Where have you been all my life pre Renaissance knight.

My nigger.

>gun bait threads start getting deleted/ignored
>better change them ever so slightly so you can still trigger the same people but avoid the mods

could 1100s beat 1610?

What exactly were you trying to accomplish with this post?

In close combat? Sure, look at those unprotected arms and groin.

Because lots of settings like a lot of mysterious and/or epic histories in their settings and it's lame as fuck if it's all about cavemen.

Speaking of that, why didn't anyone invent anything for like 3000 years on Tolkien's works? I mean I get that the third age is post-apocalyptic but 3000 years is plenty of time to pick up the pieces and get your shit together.

In-setting excuses? The fantasy elements themselves keep the tech and social levels down. Magic takes the place of some technological solutions but usually resists mass implementation for some reason. A land full of magical man-eating monsters will aggressively resist being tamed. Competition and differences between humanoid species prevent social cohesion even more than irl divisions of humanity. The gods themselves and their followers defend the status quo of power, and any disagreements between them only distract further from having new ideas.

Just not having certain opportunities from the real world might be enough though, you're never going to get to factories and cars if you don't have fossil fuels.

That is nearly mid renaissance, my man. But it is a cool looking suit.

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Medieval fantasy is baby's first worldbuild.

This. It's a misconception that nothing new was invented in the middle ages but shit was pretty slow until the Renaissance and even after that still relatively slow until the mid industrial period. Think of it as exponential growth and that's close enough - so if your setting is in the low part of the curve not much will be going on development wise. Or rather, not much the players care about unless you're playing Farmer: The Game

You're a retard. I'm not going to take the time out of my day to explain to a retard why he's stupid, but just please know that you are, and if you said this to any medieval history professor you would be laughed out of the room.

The elves had already achieved the pinnacle of craftsmanship, and they had no interest in mass production of consumer goods - if an elf wanted something, he was encouraged to become good at making it. They are a society of immortal post-scarcity individualists in Valinor. Every elf is competent or has all the time in the world to become it.

And the developmental history of men resembles what we've seen in history - a few thousand years of moderate peaks and valleys, of rises and falls of achievement born out of circumstance and competition. The absence of an industrial revolution before the Fourth Age isn't really shocking. Things started accelerating when elves started leaving, and their moderating influence with them. People stopped having them as role models to be imitated, and opened their minds to the pragmatic approach shown by Sauron and Morgoth.

I don't think that medieval stasis is really that common. What happens is that most fantasy settings are set precisely in the period before gunpowder and whatnot.

Also, I personally like to make it so that firearms coexist with swords and magic. Why are they not more efficient, you ask?
Because it's set in a fantasy world, and in this world physics just say that "guns are only slightly more lethal than crossbows and easier to reload, in exchange for being way more expensive".
If you thought that physics worked in the exact same way they do irl, then you weren't paying attention to the 30 foot tall lizard flying with a wingspan that's only slightly more than his length from head to tail.

I wasn't talking about an industrial revolution. More about anything from societial progress, changes in art (songs are more or less the same 4000 years later?), architecture etc. Land cultivation. Hell, just growing the population a little - I know about the great plague, but that was over a thousand years before the events of LotR, and shouldn't really matter anymore. Technology is just a small part of it.
And elves had a moderating influence? By the time of LotR, again, they had been cooped up in a small number of places, being extremely xenophobic and I don't really see how they could exert such influence over the entire continent.

Because the Harpers confiscate all technology and kill anyone who threatens to change the setting in any meaningful way.

Romanticism.

Basically this. Japanese fantasy is good example of fantasy without much Tolkien influence (they're more influenced by D&D) and there is less of a medieval statis.

Any Eastern culture is going to be influenced more by their own folklore and pop-culture Western stuff. Similar things are seen in Slav-made stuff.
GRORIOUS NIPPON is not uniquely superior, weebshit.

1. people are just trying to have good dumb fun and not spend ten thousand hours researching history before they crack open a beer and play games with their friends

2. people are often lazy and uncreative and game producers are marketing their shit to as many people as possible, not to niche neckbeards like OP

3. magic and dragons and ghosts and shit are real in this setting and god only knows how that would affect the advancement of technology - if you have a wand that lets you fly, what's the push to invent airplanes? just speculation without an assortment of actual timelines to study, but whatevs

4. why do you even fucking care how other people play their games you goddamned autist

he said good example you deepshit.

It isn't. Most fantasy takes place in antiquity with some renaissance characteristics.

>We both know that what you want isn't a removal of medieval stasis
No, I like settings with a reasonable advancement of technology. It doesn't need to be middle ages straight to guns, but when people were running around in full steel plate armour 1500 years ago and they still are in the present of the setting it makes the setting feel empty and pointless.
This is fine
2000 years ago people were running around in bronze corsets
1500 years ago people were running around in chainmail
1000 years ago longswords started to appear
500 years ago stirrups appeared
200 years ago knights started to wear partial plate armour
Now knights wear full suits of plate armour

This comes across as lazy and makes the setting feel pointless
2000 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
1500 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
1000 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
500 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
200 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
Now knights still wear full suits of plate armour and ride horses with stirrups

I can't wait until the nerd rapture happens and I won't only be able to store every piece of historical relevance in my mind, but also automatically calculate every variable to a .00002% margin of error to creat super realistic settings. I guess until then my settings will always consist of static snapshot points in history. Feelsbadman

although maybe I could just gm from vr and we'd all shape the game with mere thought since sci-fi is filled with dumb impractical thoughts like hoverboards

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Even if you're extremely well educated on the evolution of arms and armour through antiquity or the Middle Ages, you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the amount of detail and variation that real life history has, especially to a realistic standard.

On top of that, how many games are you to have in which arms and armour will evolve, or even play any kind of part in the game? In the Middle Ages it often took decades for things to change, and in antiquity it could take centuries.

A Song of Ice and Fire averts this by casting doubt on the in-world historical records. Although Westerosi history seems to suggest medieval stasis at first glance, it appears more likely that this is a combination of legendary history and Westerosi historians projecting their own culture onto historical figures (by casting historical persons as medieval knights and lords, when they were likely nothing of the sort). This is shown most explicitly in a Sam chapter early in A Feast for Crows, where he complains that the historical records are full of kings who reigned for hundreds of years and "knights riding around a thousand years before there were knights". Although, why Sam knows better than other historians in this regard is never explained.

>Even if you're extremely well educated on the evolution of arms and armour through antiquity or the Middle Ages, you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the amount of detail and variation that real life history has, especially to a realistic standard.
But you don't really need to. You simply need to illustrate that technology advances, that people thousands of years ago didn't have full plate armour, two handed greatswords, and stirrups.

Do you NEED to though? How often are arms and armour from centuries earlier brought up in the present setting?

Because bronze age stasis doesn't allow for elaborate enough societies.

Because ina world of magic, why bother inventing things like guns and indoor plumbing when I can get a scroll of fireball or cast a spell to teleport my literal shit into the sun?

The need to overcome rivals drives innovation. And innovation can go a very different waybif all you need to do is change what your write/say

I think OP is talking about tech level that is typically late medieval (without guns and some renaissance tech added)

Though these days many settings add the guns (usually renaissance tier), but often rest of setting stays same making the guns look ridiculously advanced.

Because history has been a downward spiral.

Quite frequently in games like Elder scrolls when some games are set decades or centuries before others.

>medieval stasis

Bitch my campaign takes place over a few months at best.

Kind of ironic example given that in TES arms, armor and technology in general used to be more advanced in past.

i don't do that, every campaign i do is in the same setting, just a few dacades later or a few centuries before, i change technology and society accordingly, now we've reached a point where guns are becoming fairly common and living standards are increasing

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That would make sense if standard fantasy settings were more like magocracies with magitech revolutions, but since they aren't it makes the stasis seem even worse.

Can we not have thIs post every.God.damn.day?

Taking Oblivion and Skyrim as an example, the Empire degraded over the two centuries between the two games, which explains the lower quality equipment and soldiers in Skyrim. This is exactly what happened during the later centuries of the Western Roman Empire. Loss of territory, prolific corruption, degrading economies, etc all impact military strength, including being forced to implement more cost effective equipment and training.

And then on a larger scale you have the clear military difference between the Roman Empire throughout its life, and armies of the Middle Ages. Rome could afford to issue equipment and enforce a strict, regimented, professional military, whereas armies for a thousand years afterwards had no way of doing anything that even compares, thanks to feudalism. It's not a question of just being older vs newer, you have to take government, money, culture, etc into account. Hence why I explained that it's extremely difficult to recreate a realistic evolution of arms and armour in a fantasy setting, because there's so much that goes into it.

>The rapid technological development of the 20th/21st century is a fairly modern thing

I think you do not know much of the 19th century nor its literature from the latter half it.

Pic is of the HMS Minotaur, a ship commissioned just under 50 years from the end of the Napoleonic wars. It makes every thing that came before it look like a bad joke, even the HMS Warrior that came out a few years before it. It could of won a major battle of the Napoleonic era by its self.

Inside 11 years the HMS Devastation made the
HMS Minotaur into a bad joke itself.

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Tolkien was a christian white supremacist. What's there to get?

>Wearing armour when firearms are a thing

Oh, sweety, no...

what's your fucking point tumblr?

people wore armor up until WWI smartass

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^

The 19th century is where technological progression really began to snowball. The 20th century obviously doesn't compare, but that's only because of how snowballing works. Large scale warfare and new developing technologies go together like a house on fire.

Whether or not you should be wearing any kind of armour depends entirely on what kind of soldier is wearing it, and what kind of weapons they're going up against. Now while arquebuses were in use, there was a long time when they only supplemented pikemen in formation, in which case it's perfectly fine for a soldier to be wearing armour, even full plate, because that was a thing historically.

However if this is supposed to be in a setting where guns are in equal number to pikes, or even more common than them, then yeah, no you shouldn't have full plate. Just a very well made cuirass and helmet would suffice.

Regardless that picture is cool as fuck.

His comment is misguided, but you're just as incorrect. Pretty much only French cuirassiers wore armour up to WWI, and that's only because they always had wore them. They dumped them as soon as the wore started.

You could say the same thing about the HMS Dreadnaught.

as an italian i am deeply offended
mamma mia

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Different user, but Tolkien was a fudd who believed technology was evil after witnessing the industrial warfare of WW1.

Saruman was the only leader in LOTR to advance down the path of industrialization, and he's the bad guy who gets his comeuppance when nature strikes back.

How many examples are there of the latter, really?

Excuse me?

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Elder Scrolls
ASOIAF
LOTR
Forgotten realms

ASOIAF is not the case. It's more of a case of imperfect records and misconceptions about their own past.

LOTR is the reverse. They are losing tech and magic. Everything is broken and forgotten by the time of LOTR.

Elder Scrolls is also not relevant, since during the 1st era, Reman's empire had space ships,internet and planetary colonisation. The Dwemer of course had their tech, Septims empire had space stations, but lost them over the years, so technology devolves, not stagnate. And technology DOES progress by the 9th era, with super computers, advanced robots,time travel and math weapons.

>LOTR
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this is the case. In FoTR at least, during the opening battle everyone is seen wearing pretty high standard plate, and 3000 years later during the war of the ring, Gondorians are still wearing pretty much the same full plate that you would see on a wealthy nobleman of the late middle ages. Nothing looks like it changes at all over those 3000 years, which is a major problem with having a fantasy world in which such a huge length of time is basically nothing.

I admit I don't really know anything about the non-movie lore though.

Medieval stasis is a function of economics. As the Roman Empire declined, trade and travel declined as well. Loss of trade means loss of comparative cost advantages, so everything becomes more expensive. The Empire is debasing its currency which in turn pushes people back into barter economies, banditry is on the rise and patrols are becoming more and more expensive, and the exchange of ideas (i.e. technology) diminishes.

The Medieval era is essentially a restructuring of governance which halts technological progress. Leadership is realigning from a centralized empire to decentralized fiefdoms - Feudalism, where kings could draw upon their retainers for promised troops for periods of time instead of maintaining standing armies they didn't have the money to afford. Once control is reestablished and trade begins to grow, industry is able to develop and medieval stasis ends.

If your setting is never able to develop trade to a significant degree (and perhaps it is not, there's usually a pirate ship or bandit camp on every voyage) then it is plausible that technology has struggled to advance beyond a medieval equivalent.

The empire in Warhammer fantasy is under such constant siege from every angle that the fact that it managed to *stay* at renaissance technology for a thousand years is a testament to their resiliency

>2000 years ago knights riding on horses with stirrups wearing full plate armour were a thing
That's true, though

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Don't respond to bait.

>ASOIAF is not the case. It's more of a case of imperfect records and misconceptions about their own past.

Which is kind of based in history a bit. Medieval depictions of people from the Ancient world usually have them in contemporary armor and dress. Most medieval stasis settings could be chalked up to the same thing, just people misunderstanding their own history.

This was more or less going to be my answer as well. People in the Middle Ages did not have our historical awareness, and they intended to envision the past much as they did the present. Why would things have been very different, after all? They didn't see a lot of change around them. Hence you see medieval depictions of Biblical scenes where people are shown as medieval knights and dressed in the latest fashions.