On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 Jon_Lincicum at stream.com wrote: > And why the Easterners we've seen all seem to be late medieval/early > renaissance level of tech--and never seem to have advanced any further. > > Since it seems likely to me that what happened was that the Easterners had > high-tech, then got smacked down. Whether this was by the gods, the > Jenoine, the Empire, or "other". (Davdi just did a great speculative > write-up on this line of thinking on the wikicity. > http://dragaera.wikicities.com/wiki/Speculation:Easterner) There was a long long discussion of this on the list, considering everything from the Cycle to the gods to recurrent Imperial intervention to the effect of demonstrable magic on would-be physicists and engineers. (Note the similar issue for the Islands and for the Empire itself). None of these explanations (except for the Cycle) was entirely satisfactory to me, given the timespan, but another (I think) discussed at the time can't be argued with: SKZB likes it that way so deal.