See, I thought you might be saying that, but then I don't understand why you think Lambda's population isn't similarly driven by needs. Also yes, it doesn't matter much. It makes no sense so I am perfectly fine with totally ignoring it. How do I put this nicely? This series, while oddly entertaining sometimes, does not give me the impression that it has a high standard to live up to, if you get what I mean. I enjoy it for what it is, which is a power fantasy that relies on not looking too hard at the little details. So that being said, I'm fine with calling it quits here.
just ignore that Trash. He's just calling people idiots and dismissing arguments on mostly the basis he's right and they are wrong. Either way they aren't adding to the discussion so just ignore them The real Troll is him and responding to their crap is just giving him what he wants. If anything report him to the mods for going too far and then block them. The rest of us can have an actual reasonable discussion where it's not important who'd right or wrong it's just about discussing and debating ideas and interpretations. It's not that it's not driven by any needs but their situation makes those needs significantly different. First of all is Alda who is again limiting a lot of innovation in the major countries with the smaller Vida villages lacking the resources to do it themselves. Also keep in mind Alda damn near had a panic attack when he found out vvan was developing gunpoweder. Meaning even trying to develop forbidden technology sin't jsut taboo, it puts a target on you where Alda will do everything in his power to wipe you out of existence. The extremists are hated by society but really they are the most faithful to Alda's true will, the only issue is when they go after stuff without him actually telling them to. So most people are probably scared to invent anything to get them targeted. That has far more of an effect that a simple ban. The other issue is magic satisfies a lot of basic needs and with those satisfied people have less needs that would lead to large scale innovation. People are much more prone to just accepting the world as it is than trying to create a world changing invention. That mostly occures either becuase of a desperate need or a wealthy eccentric. But the latter may or may not occure much if ever in a place like Lambda especially with Alda extremists ready to murder someone like an eccentric wealthy inventor. Again lets change focus for a bit and freshen up the discsion with a new perspective with a bit of a "what if" scenario. What I mean is we've already discussed at length possible reasons why inventions don't exist. But instead lets talk about what inventions could possible exist in 10K years. Especially those that would have revolutionized society? Remember most of Van's inventions rely on death attribute so basically everything he's done isn't an option unless there is a non death attribute option people could reasonably achieve.
Honestly their best hope for actual development would e going through a hydro power development path. The problem is that I can’t think of a good reason for them to pursue that kind of development path other than needing a non polluting power source. If they started burning lots of coal and oil or such Alda and his gods would absolutely jump in. Magic is another path, but we know that in Lambda huge use of magic can contribute to devil nest growth.
Sterling Engines could be made to be somewhat viable to produce pollution free power in a magic heavy environment. just need a big enough cold source, which I assume could be made. ability to make a decent piston like device so pressure changes can occur, and the engineering knowledge to make one.
Because the loss of a city is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and is apparently a rare occurance. If it did matter no medium or larger cities would exist. Besides, why would a constant threat cause stagnation? Intelligent people tend to do something about in whatever way possible. Innovation tends to help a little with that. The system is also not a cure all and in no way does it impede upon innovation. That entire thing is a non-sequitur. The fact that I even have to spell it out ffs...
Plus the issue with hydro electric power is kind of putting the cart before the horse. Basically what would they use electric power for? The way our society developed was we first found easy ways to produce electricity, found uses for it, and then found other ways to get that electricity. But with most of the simple ways to produce large amounts of electricity blocked by Alda the few clean options are just too hard to develop given no one in this world has a practical use for the stuff. Like why spend millions developing a hydro electric engine when you have nothing to use that engine for? Sure I guess they could just use water wheels and go from there but again it's questionable if anyone could have a practical reason to push water power to the point of hydro electric power. Not a bad idea but how possible is it to develop an engine like that in a society not even allowed to develop a basic combustion engine? The more I think about it the more I realize that if you outlaw a lot of inventions that harm the enviroment and ones that can lead to dangerous weapons ... you aren't left with a whole lot left. Most inventions I can think of that Alda might allow are still reliant on harmful inventions comming first to pave the way. I mean if anyone has ideas I'd love to hear them. But right now nothing is really comming to mind.
Why would the ruling party wants the common people have that? That would be just a seed of rebellion if you asked me.
Well I wasn’t talking about electric power generated by water. I meant using water to provide power to industry, there are a lot of ways to do that with water wheels being the most basic variety.
We do see innovation in the background, human tech is like around the 1600s minus the sort of things that were outlawed. It's like, tech exists but it's always niche and never widespread. Murakami was able to buy a spyglass to get around Van's Abyss skill. I think the 4 dead captains had one too? The mages are the human scientists, explicitly setting up hypotheses and testing them. Developing things like prosthetic limbs that rival ours, turning demon fragments into safe weapons, magic items that store information or using magic stones as fuel for spell effects. I guess something that has always made me scratch my head was the guild cards. Farmaun seemingly invented them 100k years ago, and the information has carried through to the present. A metal-like card made from alchemy that you can store information on with magic tools. I'm sure it has a limit of some sort on how much it can store, but that's never been expanded on? Is the way to make that stuff that heavily restricted to prevent counterfeiters? On the human's side, their civilizations seem to be perpetually collapsing. We see things like Birkyne setting up a base in a ruined city that no one remembers somehow? Fitun earned his fame winning a massive war to set up a country as the top dog, and no one remembers that country's name. Alda is in the middle of setting up the Amid empire to burn up its own civilization in a holy war, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's done that more in the past. The humans often feel like they would do better if the gods would get the fuck out of the way, and maybe if there were fewer dungeons spitting out village destroying monsters. The monster's side, it sometimes feels like the civilian humans should have spawned some inventors in all that time. Lot's of societal pressure to keep away from the fighting, encouragement to go for the mental pursuits like magecraft, maybe some records from the old craftsman? Though it seems like the crafting heroes didn't leave any uplift ideas in their diaries, and Zakkart's stuff is either in Gufadgarn's dungeon or Vida's divine realm. Most of the Vida races don't seem to want the creature comforts I associate with tech advancement. The folks from Zanalpadna even go so far as to say they prefer their meat raw. A bunch of the races also seem to devote almost all of their manpower into learning how to fight and managing the dungeons. It often feels like the dungeons are keeping people from focusing resources on non-combat, but everyone likes the materials you get from them so they build their societies around maintaining them instead of destroying them. Heavier than air flying machines. Frankly the girl with the personal storage cheat ability should be working toward that out in the Laberta Archipelago (I think?). It was established in a super early appendix that personal flight can be achieved with beginner level non-elemental magic, though it would be magically expensive to do anything fancy with it, and that would also raise the skill ceiling. Replace the engine with a magic tool that does the telekinesis spell for you, powered by magic stones, mages, or a mix. This shouldn't even take fifty years, one guy invented a magic item that tracks where a god's teleporting dungeon will go. I guess there could be flying monsters that will knock you out of the sky or something.
Hmmm .... I guess the question is then is it possible to make a magic tool that just does telekenesis like that for you? Magic in the world isn't all powerful it does have various limits in what it can and can't do. I can't deny your idea but I don't think it can be confirmed either. Good thought though. However the major limiting factor might be the magic stones and mages. While possible it might make it too expensive to comecialize something like that. Also large scale aviation MAY OR MAY NOT be on Alda's taboo list. This isn't confirmed as far as I know though so Just take this as speculation. The reason I think this is aviation proved to be a MASSIVE turning point in warfare that revolutionized how battles were fought. Alda might not like that and with people able to tame flying monsters or learn flying magic they aren't helpless when going against things like flying monsters making the need for a flying machine less. I do think you're right though and it's entirely possible flight technology of some form could have been developed. I'm just offering a counter point as to why it might not have taken form in this world.
Instant transmission of goods and information is invaluable for research and economy. Probably even more valuable than it is as a weapon.
Weren't there some deadly dragons in the sky when Van flew? Fairly sure they would slaughter anybody who flies too high without being strong enough, though maybe I'm misremembering since it's been too long. Maybe they could also fly lower, but they would still have to be worried about possible monsters with ranged attacks in devil nests below them if they go too low. Either way, it would be a lot riskier until the aircraft got advanced enough, and that would make it a lot less appealing to anybody trying to invent it, and non-attribute magic is already extremely mana-inefficient. The sheer amount of mana stones or whatever fuel it uses would be absurdly expensive. Would probably take a country-wide effort over a very long period of time before significant results showed up, and that's assuming any country would be willing to with all the anti-technology Alda stuff.
Not very likely, they are big and need something like an industrial revolution to justify making. But they do not pollute in themselves so could be made if someone thought of it and server as a power source for something like a windmill, or water pump. The problem is Lambda is to besieged by monsters for anyone outside the strongholds of Alda's faith to have the spare time to invest in anything other then the Skill/Class/Race system, as due to how and why it was created it is to good will always outshine any other directed development path Electricity came after the industrial revolution, and steam power was developed for the industrial revolution. There are airborne devils nests, so yes.
How many people do you even think live in that world? Many compare it to earth, but from what we know I would estimate the continent where the story mainly takes place to be about the size of Australia, If not even smaller with a population of not even 10million. On earth there were many cultures who basically did not progress a lot over the course of 10.000 years. There was always progress in some part of the world, which then spread to the rest until in europe the industrialisation kicked in and it was spread everywhere. But elsewhere was nothing of that sort. So I wouldn´t call it unlikely for that continent to have developed only that far in 100.000 years. Especially when progress in some directions is completely blocked by the gods and you are killed when you accidently invent something resembling something bellwood described, it takes a lot of innovative spirit away. Aside from that, isn´t Lamda a relatively new world? Do coal, mineral oil and natural gas even exist in that world?
Lambda has a population of around 100m human races and something like a million Vida races combined, iirc. The continent the main story takes place on is apparently smaller than US. I have no idea how many other continents have humans actually living on them because the two large continents that have come up so far sure don't seem to have any. I think fire mages could pretty easily take the place of fossil fuels and earth mages would make it pretty easy to acquire rare resources. As far as Lambda's future with technology goes, I sure hope they develop spaceflight in the next thousand years or so or even with dungeons they're probably going to have serious population pressure issues. The population is pretty long lived, have lots of kids and when they die they stick around and continue consuming resources even though they technically don't need them.
My mind wanders to Africa when you talk about cultures that did not progress at all as well as the Middle East. The way I see it, Lambda follows a different set of physics that Earth and Origin run off of. So things won't work out exactly as they are to work as like how they worked on Earth. Since Origin is basically Earth but with magic, things that happen on Earth are more likely to happen on Origin due to a lot of similarities. The only thing that I can think of that can be the same on all worlds are a god's divine protection and blessings as well as magic and their attributes. Even on a magicless planet like Earth. The situation on Lambda is dire, you could almost correlate landmasses there to here, where we have two and Lambda seems to have two, Lambda seems to have lost the larger landmass in the war due to mana pollution and devil nests. The funny thing is I imagine this whole setting where all the kingdoms reside is in a combination of 10 states in the U.S. I'm sure Lambda does have coal, mineral oil and natural gas but they operate very differently than on here, on Earth, or even on Origin. Shoot for all we know coal, mineral oil, and natural gas on Lambda could be in totally different forms or even states of matter.
Information and economy are a great weapon that can even be used against their homeland. A country is only stable as long as its ruling party are stronger than a group of individuals. This is also the reason why a country provide a noble status towards strong adventurers. So that it can be used as a deterrent for both outside and inside the country.
Cultures tend to not progress when they are still stuck in the stone age, not when they are already as advanced as what Lambda is. With writing and currency two of the most important pillars are already in place and advancement is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Especially when we are talking about timespans in the thousands of years. Magic can replace fossil fuels and monster materials can be used to skip material sciences. Well, not all of it, but its something. Creating plastic would suck tho. Would need several extra steps after all. Almost every country would have access to magic of that type. Its too useful to ignore. Not using it to advance your society just makes it even worse. All in all deathmage has a poorly constructed setting. Even a relatively small set of changes would do a lot for it.
I don't think that's going to be too much of an issue, considering that Vandalieu can create and reshape dungeons at will. As it turns out, the only limitation is going to be on where he can place all of the dungeon entrances over the eons; his lifespan and power-cap are functionally infinite considering that he's literally a god, making him flat-out immortal, and directly increasing his abilities with the number of his worshippers, which will increase explosively over the years and generations.