> The one technology that strikes me as problematic to these theories is that > of gunpowder. Gunpower is so obviously and manifestly useful to the > military that I have trouble believing that it could be supressed.. the > Dragon's, if no one else, would not relinquish the technology lightly. I > think that there is another solution to that problem though, that I would > propose. We know, from Issola, that the Dragons have been engaged in > sorcerous arms races for a good long time and that the nature of battle > shifts back and forth, sometimes being dominated by sorcery and sometimes > being dominated by arms. I can imagin that there *was* an era where > firearms where introduced into the field and, perhaps, even dominated the > field until such time as some sorcerer developed a set of spells that > negated their utility, after which they became merely another footnote in > the long history of the Empire. Consider Spell-sticks (as described in Orca, p. 224). They went out of fashion as soon as a sorcerer discovered a way to make all of the enemy's spell-sticks spontaneously detonate. It's easy to suppose that a similar spell could be developed for gunpowder. (And remember that early guns in our own world were already likely to spontaneously blow up in the user's hand...) Alexx Alexx Kay Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employers alexx at world.std.com http://world.std.com/~alexx "Hello, I'd like to join the French Foreign Legion." "Fine. We'll need your name, Social Security number, and the name of the girl you're trying to forget. That is, if you're up to it. If you're not going to start crying or anything. I know it's painful." -- Cowboy Wally's Sands of Blood