Quote:
Originally Posted by vierasmarius
To bring this back to the OP, the initial question is about a nonmagical TL3 society with very little metal. Is this even feasible? If magic were available, then Essential Stone / Wood might stand in for Iron and Bronze. But lacking that, just how far can technology develop without metal tools?
Of course, the immediate example that springs to mind is the Aztecs and other tribes of pre-colonial South America, who lagged far behind in metallurgy yet still achieved impressive engineering feats. They might be considered to display TLs ranging from 1 to 3, though I suspect much of the claims of how advanced they were are exaggerations based on colonial guilt. Anyways, if there were a TL3 stone-based society I suspect it would look something like that.
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The original poster said "Mostly, I'm looking for the worldline to be forced to adopt materials like stone and obsidian for warfare, and perhaps bronze and brass for things like coinage or maybe general use materials"
Instead of buffing other materials I'd suggest nerfing metal. Spells like steelwraith combined with bronze but not steel allow for all the technological progress that metal allows while keeping it out of the battlefield. The end result is a TL 3 society with lagging warfare and a focus on using substitutes for iron wherever possible because bronze is expensive. And you keep the relative weakness of non metal weapons instead of having what is fundamentally metal for most purposes that just looks like rock.