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Old 10-10-2016, 03:36 PM   #25
Frost
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
Default Re: Tech Level for a Fantasy Setting

Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
It's not that simple. The official starting point of TL4 is 1450. People stopped building castles, as such, toward the end of the 1500s. And only because the threat became armies with increasingly heavy gunpowder artillery. Castles would be perfectly practical defenses against, say, zombie legions, or giant monsters,
Its even more complicated than that, large fortresses of one sort or another where built and upgraded until well into the nineteenth century. The design changed over that time to compensate for gunpowder but certainly on a strategic level they remain the same beast, a combination of refuge and forward base.

The big change is cultural, these forts stopped being residences (often considered the defigining feature of a castle) and eventually stopped being treated as the private property of garrison comanders. This is why we have the idea that castles somehow stop at TL4.

Like many technologies it is better described as being current over a range of TLs (in this case 3-5) rather than a single TL.

Last edited by Frost; 10-11-2016 at 12:38 AM.
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