Ep 55: Steampunkery

Indeed.

Certianly agree, even just elements of Steampunk can add a lot of character to your games, without taking it from the folds of fantasy. Additionally, may I add, your campaign gave me a new idea to use for my own. Thanks!

Briefly, in a word: Tolkien. He's the granddaddy of fantasy, and his setting is stagnated in the early middle ages. Almost from the moment of creation there are swords and chainmail and sailing ships, but not crossbows or plate armor anywhere to be seen. It's because he was drawing from his beloved Anglo Saxon and Norse sources for his mythos, basically and those are early medieval.

Added to that, moving the standard ahead a few hundred years, were the Arthurian romances, and the (anacrhonistic) idea of knights in shining armor. From this we get paladins and so on. A lot of this part was drawn from Renaissance and later artwork depicting the knights in plate armor that was not really developed until the Renaissance. This is where our image of knighthood comes from - the full suit of articulated plate became feasible, and fashionable, just as it was being made obsolete by early firearms.

Now, we have the "standard" fantasy setting, stagnated in the late-ish medieval era. Authors and designers have definitely experimented with adding gunpowder, but it makes things difficult in a lot of ways. If I have fire bolt as a cantrip, and you have a keg of gunpowder, I will ruin your life every time. Without the magic, guns of any kind still put holes in your knights and their shining armor. So you get settings with 10,000 years of recorded history that is all late middle-ages Europe.

I'm having fun with my medieval South/East Asian inspired setting because gunpowder is already there, as well as other weird things (the first automated factory was built in China in like 900 CE and it was water-powered). There are also settings like Krynn (Dragonlance) that add tinker gnomes and their zany inventions, or World of Warcraft that does the same. But you don't have to go that far - there were clockwork devices in ancient Greece. And even in Middle-Earth, Saruman and Sauron both develop some limited technologies, like the blasting device that blew a hole in Helm's Deep, and what seem almost like semi-modern factories in the Shire under "Sharkey." 

Ultimately I'd say it's laziness and habit that keeps us with the "standard" fantasy settings being the most popular.

So far as Tolkien goes, he was such a luddite that much of the theme of his books was "progress bad, good old times good". The antagonists of Middle-Earth are the ones employing advancements in technology and Tolkien always focuses on how those advancements are destroying the things that should be valued (nature, culture, etc). For all the value of his works, which is considerable, it's sometimes worth remembering that Tolkien was a stodgy old Oxford professor with a set of values that directly reflected the English academic setting of 1950.

The fantasy genre is colloquially tied to the medieval setting in the same way that scifi is colloquially tied to space. If you're defining the genre by the setting or level of technology (as is often colloquially done) then those conventions hold up. But if you look at the narrative fundamentals of the genre then you'll find quite a few fantasy stories in space (Star Wars) and sci-fi stories in modern or medieval times (District 9, Outlander).

So far as technology goes in actual history, it's a smorgasbord across the planet. The Chinese had loads of technology that nobody else had for centuries (like fireworks). The Native Americans had some innovations that the Europeans never figured out. The Vikings had metal work that you had to go all the way to India to match (probably because they picked it up in India). But I think it would be a mistake to consider these technologies well understood, especially to a layperson of the era. The Middle Ages (which is an anachronistic category itself) spans a helluva long time and hundreds of different cultures, people, and places. I find narratives are considerably improved when they keep that diversity in mind rather than assuming that everyone was always at the same level of technology in every area all the time.

Yeah, sorry, steampunk. Right.

In a way, steampunk is Middle-Earth in reverse. The person with a 'mind of wheels and no respect for growing things' is an industrialist or inventor, celebrated by society and presented as heroic. That's the steam. The punk bit is that this optimism about technology and the future is in contrast, even resistance, to the traditional forces in society. In Middle-Earth, the orcs and goblins, led by Saruman, would be the steampunk heroes, and they would be fighting against the traditionalists in Minas Tirith who want to drag everyone back to the age of kings.