Dragaera

Two words about two letters etc.

Wed Jan 8 12:02:53 PST 2003

On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Andrew Lias wrote:

> Now, the real question, in my mind, is why the Easterners have been stuck at
> a fairly primitive level for that amount of time.  What's been keeping
> *them* in stasis?

Constant fighting with dragaerians and a general lack of sorcery? Some
sort of fiddling by the Jenoine back in the day? It's aparant that some
human tech has survived their time on the planet (marxist writings in
Teckla), but do we really know what sort of tech they have in the east?

> Now, we might well wonder why the islanders (AFB and can't remember the
> proper spelling of the damned place) haven't developed their own mundane
> technologies.  I can only assume that, lacking the big advantage of
> something equivilent to the Orb, their technologies have been developing at
> an ordinary rate, proportionate to their lifespans, which would put them
> somewhere about 3,000 BCE, by my estimates.

I think I'm inclined to agree with this. I've concidered the islanders to
be equivalent to aboriginals in level of tech as well as, to some extent,
lifestyle. Maybe feudal would be more accurate though.

> Again, I think that the real mystery is the situation with the Easterners.
> They are basically unmodified human stock.  In 50,000 years we went from
> paleolithic hunter/gatherers to the Space Age. In more than four times that
> duration, the Easterners are still living in castles and fighting with
> swords.  This suggests to me that the hypothesis that the universe is
> fundamentally different is plausible.  Perhaps our sort of technology
> *can't* exist on Dragaera, which means that the Easterner's have had to make
> due with their own magical development which, lacking the Orb, doesn't have
> nearly the pragmatic utility that Dragaeran sorcery has.  However, this
> leads to another question: why haven't any humans developed skill in the
> practice of Elder Sorcery?  Is there a genetic limitation in play?

I've seen other stories where humans 'devolve' or 'primitive-ize' after a
colonization mission to the stars goes wrong for whatever reason, and just
assumed this was the root cause of the tech level (or lack thereof)
amongst easterners.

--Brother Ike