Do you mean the psionic tech level, magic tech level, lifeshaping tech level, the science tech level, or some combination thereof?
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A combination of all.
I kinda assumed magitech would not be much visible in most human settlements given their fear and hatred of wizards?
Well, I’m famously against magic in all forms, so I just thought I’d ask to be sure.
I think that the tech levels would vary on “Modern” Athas. Psi would be higher, magic would be low, except for the Government (conspiracy theories, anyone?) who obviously sponsors fear via Templars. Science would be mostly low, with the remnants of very high (ie: Lifeshaping, if you go the science route for this), and the same for lifeshaping if you don’t link it to science.
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I’ve gathered this, but I don’t understand why. Can you explain?
For me, if you’re in the city states its the merchants or nobles who have access to this. Yes psionics are common but psionic artifice is rare and equivalent to spellcaster services on other worlds.
Villages and outposts might or might not have access to psionic tech, depending on the personnel there.
Exceptions would be Saragar, where psionic tech is available to ordinary citizens in the city (albeit less as the ages wear on), Giustenal, where I can see Dregoth restricting Green Age psionic tech to his palace, templars and defilers, amd New Kurn, where I imagine psionic tech and magical improvements are quite common, but more for public good, not personal use.
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I voted for renaissance, and commoners have access to psionics.
The latter is not so controversial, but you are probably scratching your head, asking yourself how on Athas could Dark Sun be a renaissance setting. Here is how I see it.
Think about the vast slave plantations of the New World. And think about the situation on Athas. Is Athas really much lower tech than these people? It does not seem so. Rather, resource deprivation on Athas prevents implementation of technological innovation. The innovation is there, but widespread adoption among the public at large is difficult.
The people of Athas do not ride simple chariots like the people of the classical age of Earth. They have war machines, the construction of which means that they have knowledge of screws and bolts, a technology that came much later.
Sorcerer Monarchs ban literacy for all except its Templars and noble class - maybe 10% of the population. Yet, in the ancient world, literacy was only around 10% anyway. The ban is superfluous, unless of course written languages were more highly developed on Athas than in the ancient world on Earth. That means no difficult writing systems like hieroglyphs which are difficult to learn and do not convey concise meaning. My guess is that writing on Athas is similar to our modern forms of reformed written language. It must be easy enough to learn to bother banning it. This is a social technology.
Athas has other advantages such as central government, census taking, labor mobilization and infrastructure building. Athasian bureaucracy is far more advanced than that of Rome or Greece. Certain time periods of China comes close.
Athas is a renaissance setting, but you won’t see it outside the noble villas and estates, the king or queen’s gardens or palace, and the dwellings of the templars.
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My sense is that the City-States of Athas are modelled on the palace economies of the Late Bronze Age. This is more a question of social institutions than technology per se though.
For me, Dark Sun is a post-apocalyptic setting. What technology there is - even simple metal weapons - is scavenged from earlier more abundant age. Power should reside in the person - whether muscle or psionics or magic - not in their equipment. Yes you can do a lot with psionics but I think it works best as a service industry, not manufacture. A noble house might retain (or own) a psionicist. They wouldn’t possess psionically powered tools or automata.
Even in the Renaissance screws and bolts were a rarity and certainly not widely used in carpentry. Manufacturing screws by hand is incredibly laborious; you need a very precise lathe to manufacture screws in any quantity. These did not exist until the start of the Industrial Revolution.
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Psionic fabricate. Athasians must have access to screws and bolts to produce those gnarly war machines.
You still have to make a craft check. The number of folks TODAY who have the skill (not the equipment) to handcraft screws is not particularly high, i’d bet.
Psionic craftsmen shaping materials into tools and parts seems bonkers and stinks of Eberron (which i actually really like, but…)
Besides, if its a warmachine, then its big enough to use lynch pin pegs to secure it.
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The Prism Pentad has this section which is, I believe, the one time we see technology - as in a mechanism - being used in modern Athasian times.
The thirsty Tyrians stood beneath an arch of golden sandstone, taking what shelter they could from the white-hot sky. Their eyes were fixed far below, on the slowly spinning sails of a small windmill. With each rotation, the mill pumped a few gallons of cool, clear water from a deep well and dumped it into a covered cistern
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Yes. A craftsman has to handcraft screws and bolts, and it isn’t easy. Its possible, but difficult and time consuming. Psionic fabricate doesn’t take away the difficulty (the Craft check DC), but removes the time constraints.
You are missing my point, however. Sure, there are screws and bolts in warmachines, but not in the homes of freeman, who simply cannot afford the metals. Let me ask you: do you use solid gold for taps, shelves, utensils and so on in your home? No? Nor can Athasians do so with metals. However, a Sorcerer Monarch that builds warmachines can.
So when I say this or that can be done, it doesn’t mean that it is being done in a way that appears to warp the setting. The lack of resources puts a hard cap on the adoption of metal based technologies, but the technologies are there.
Yeah, i see your position, but i think it’s wrong. You’re going to get anachronisms in any move to a different world.
The key, i think, is to look at what level of technological society you want Athas to have (or think it has) and go from there.
Forcing DS to be Renaissance because of a ban on reading and having warmachines is an interesting thought experiment, but a bad path, IMO.
Most of those war machines are built into giant undead beetles or reptiles and the reading ban can easily be explained by just HOW bad for a SM other wizards or knowledge of the past are - a theoretically widespread availability of reading materials is not the simplest answer. (It is, IMO, the most mind-twistingly bonkers one though - which I love).
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However, as i think about it, i would say the Green Age was pretty advanced. The SM’s would still have acess to knowledge from whatever level of tech was common in those days.
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Mere examples. I could have pointed out how similar Agis’ plantation is to the plantations of the Antebellum South
Again, I am not saying there are widespread reading materials, but rather that the social technology of language, including writing, is concise and relatively easy to understand. If you want to know why certain isolated tribes remained backwards for millennia, it is for this reason. You can’t properly think about concepts that you cannot express by language. If Athas was really at the bronze age tech level, for example, the writing systems would be beyond the ability of freemen to learn, much less slaves. It would be difficult to learn, time consuming, and not even very good at conveying information.
Its literally the same societies, albeit smaller scale. The difference is that in the Green Age there were apparently plentiful resources to go around, while in this age of Athas, they cannot properly implement a renaissance society even if they wanted to due to lack of resources. Let me give you an example. You got a tin of food, but no can opener. You can’t eat the contents because you can’t open it. That’s Athas. Knowledge of technology is the tin of food. The can opener is the resources.
Yeah, I disagree with how you draw such a conclusion. The base problem withbsuchba conversation is that IRL, such categories aren’t actually technological levels, they’re time periods and so they’ll NEVER fit another world/set of circumstances.
If you want to say the Green Age reached a level of tech generally consistent with the Renaissance, sure maybe.
But Athas seems to have been knocked back to the technology of the Stone Age. Words fail when you try to describe a post Renaissance-esque Dark Age.
Better to say what they have and do not have.
Also, this whole conversation is pretty Euro-centric (which I’m generally fine with) but the Asians/Chinese were doing “wacky” technological things that make this conversation even more useless, with paper, rockets, etc
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My friend - I disagree with your parsimonious definition of technology. Even if the same era (even today!), levels of social technology differ between countries and regions. A starting point here.
They sure were. Their oriental bureaucracies also better represent the templars than Western tropes as well. In fact, in my work on Ravenloft Kalidnay, I made most of the dominant philosophies those of the east - elementalism (similar to the middle way), legalism (ripped off whole from Qin dynasty China), and virtus (of the Roman sort). Elementalism seeks to avoid extreme actions and thoughts, popular among freemen. Legalism posits that sapients have a propensity to wickedness in the absence of law, therefore the strict application of law is a necessity. Popular among templars. Virtus is the philosophy of the nobility, and the pursuit of virtue, whether martial or otherwise fends off decadence and degeneracy.
So you are right. China cannot be placed nearly into European modalities because it was never in the European modality in the first place. As for Athas, the city states could easily manage a Chinese style examination system bureaucrats. Where it fits on the Eurocentric view or what era, I don’t know.
Anyway, have a read of that article linked and if you are inclined, go down the rabbit hole of social technology. Technology is not only nuts and bolts.
One of the fun things about thinking about the Green and Blue Ages for the Dead Lands Project has been trying to imagine how the world was adapted to “psitech” and before that lifeshaping. Peter Nutall and Will Kendrick had some excellent worldbuilding in the early 2000s for Athas.org 3E fan content that we’ve been largely working off, and expanding on that, we envisioned the Green Age world being vaguely “bronze age” in that metallic weaponry was still somewhat expensive and rare even at the height of Green Age plenty -for example, plate mail was not really a thing.
Overall imagine the Green Age world as a place of decentralized polities, no real empires or “nations” but localized in an intricate network of kinships, alliances, city-states, clans, ethnic enclaves ect with strong centralized local bureaucracies, usually derived from councils or hereditary chiefdoms led by powerful psions. Much like the Blue Age, a dependence on Guardians eventually led to the proliferation of highly socially stratified, technology-dependent city-states where the haves lived in borderline modern luxury (automated households, transportation, ect) but much of the poor and outcast lived in more archaic standards. The automation of farming and other infrastructure probably made things incredibly dire, as there wasn’t even a place for subsistence farmers- many of the humans in the Dead Lands and other southern areas are the “dregs” of humanity who eked out nomadic lifestyles not far removed from the Rebirth 14,000 years before.
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Regarding the Blue Age I very much Peter’s and others’ re-contextualization of it, by having a lot of the problems of the Rhul-Thaun in the modern world extent back to the Blue Age, the Nature Masters as the cause of much of the problem.
Rather than as they (depict themselves) as an enlightened naturalistic utopia, the 3E fandom Blue Age is an eco-dystopian hellhole where dependence on lifeshaping lead the Nature Masters to hold a stranglehold over society under their socially chauvinist ideology, with emphasis on the “purity of the halfling form” and “natural roles” creating a severely stagnant society, and the Nature Benders becoming monsters fighting the Nature Masters rather than just being “evil lifeshapers.” Throw in persecuted early psions, “evil” elemental clerics and other threats to the established order and you have a world that’s a powderkeg.
The Blue Age, going by the canon sources like Mysteries of the Ancients, Psionic Artifacts of Athas, ect is by far the most “high technology” period of Athas- though organic in nature, the Rhulisti have stuff ranging the equivalent of modern military gear and scientific equipment (night vision goggles, gieger counters) to straight up Ridley Scott’s Prometheus style biotechnology, from organic holograms and supercomputers to copyright-safe xenomorph eggs.
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