[ravenfish]

Personally, I've always been rather skeptical of the early start to TL5. I feel like adventuring-relevant gear even as late as the 1770s (a musket or muzzle-loading rifle to fight with, a sailing ship for long distance travel, communication limited to the speed a messanger can travel) is a lot more like that of the 1500s or 1600s (with inevitable improvements, of course) than it is like that of the the mid nineteenth century (multi-shot firearms to fight with, steamships and railway trains, the ability to send messages across continents instantly by telegraph). That a Kentucky rifle made in 1740 uses a different tech-level skill than a seventeenth century hunting rifle and the same one as a civil-war repeating rifle strikes me as grotesque, and similar comparisons could be made regarding ships. I am aware that the industrial revolution was well underway by the mid eighteenth century, but I'm not persuaded that it made a fundamental difference to equipment "in the field" until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century (to the extent a particular cutoff is needed, I might go with 1815 and Fulton's steamboat- steam engines turning looms or pumping water out of mines are a mere setting detail; steam engines that let you travel swiftly against the current mean that the technology has reached adventuring relevance).