Yrth technology

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by CraigM

And printing did not come through alone; other technologies came with it. Enough, IMO, to plausibly motivate a mage somewhere to run a Divination on "what's going to happen to us if we keep allowing this technology to develop?".

The downside to that is that if there are divinations capable of that, there are all sorts of other things that you can ask them about. Somebody will after all ask "who is going to rebel against the crown", or "who are the worst criminals of the next generation" or "which heresies most threaten the true faith". OK we've got the list of babies to kill. Or "if we start a war, are we certain to win". No? Then we don't.

Most of the problem with an enforced tech ban is that if you can pull it off, you should control everything else in the world too, and the nigh omnipotent Illuminati are plot killers. There's a reason stories that have one are mostly about how they fail and fall, which is much of the reason I've always thought the whole thing was a terrible approach - I don't *want* the central story of my fantasy campaigns to be circumvent the tech ban conspiracy, and just having one in the setting book tends to encourage that - witness how much of the discussion of Yrth on the forums is about it.