Thus Spake Zargrabowski/RealmTechnologicalLevels

>>>Advanced road systems<<<<

Yes, and a multi-tiered post system including heliographic chains and magical communication to go along with the lines of communication. I imagine most of the Realm's roads are military roads by design, to take advantage of the interior lines of the Blessed Isle.

>>>The Realm seems to have a very advanced economy. They have paper money and writs of note, a bank, and a whole complicated standerd based on inflating the value of a material. While its sorta breaking down now, this shows that some things like taking a bank loan or something are not too out there.<<<

There is not a lot of penetration of sophisticated financial instruments into the general populace. The scrip system is a built-in method of economic discrimation. You have patricians bonding cargo in jade, but peasants are paying their rents as villages and mostly doing business in effectively worthless money.

>>>Ship riggings in the world of Exalted as a whole are more advanced then they woul of been in Imperial China or Roman times.<<<

Yes, and oriented around single masts as well, because sail and mast material strengths were not an issue in the First Age.

>>>I can see some other Roman things coming about in architectural feats.<<<

I imagine their architecture is as advanced as ours, and mostly just materials-limited. One of the central Immaculate holy figures was a builder, there are lots of pre-Contagion structures around for study, and the building of complex archtecture is of central interest to the Exalted, because they need to use it to maintain Manses.

>>>Aquaducts and fountains,a nd running water atleast in some form might exist to a point.<<<

In places with built-up infrastructures, yes.

>>>There seems to be a limited industry a bouts. While there are still private smiths and the liek, there are probably small textile factories and the lot.<<<

The 'private smith' as the sole guy is sort of an illusionary figure. Those guys did a lot of simple fabrication, but there was a pretty sophisticated manufacturing economy upstream of them in our own world. There are "workshops" with hundreds of employees and operating foundries. All those village guys had to get their rod and bar stock from someplace. There were water-driven triphammers in Europe in the 14th century.

>>>Clocks are probably advanced in the world as a whole to be hoenst. I can see time keeping devices atleast getting to the nineteenth century level in our world<<<

I would imagine there are Essence-driven timing devices of incredible precision for use by savant-engineers and sorcerers, and mechanical devices for people like astrologers, and very little else. What do the common people need of clocks and time? They know when it is time to rise and sleep, time to sew and reap, and they have the priests there to tell them of the festival times. The less they know, the happier they are.

>>>Medical technology is still going to be primative<<<

Interesting question. I think Exalted's world lends itself to a fairly high quality if general well-being. There are some very good books on natural health floating around, and there are many lucky charms and efficacious prayers and magic tubers and whatnot. You can be really screwed if you suffer major physical trauma, because their surgery is mediocre (the have anasthetic and some equivalent to germ theory but not much else) but opportunistic ailments, parasites and so on are probably rather uncommon outside of crushing urban population densities and other environments of pervasive poverty.

>>>There is apprently advanced metelurgy in the world too. They can create steel of good quality, something that you don't see until modern times.<<<

See above, this is not exactly so. The steel is of pretty good quality, but not even the Nexus foundries can match the quality of the automated mills or whatever they used in the shogunate era.

>>>Other things about might include telescopes, glasses, complicated locks, glass windows, affordable reading material, and advanced use of things like paper or extra lanes for Imperial businesses.

Telscopes, glasses and glass, yes, especially near Chiaroscuro. There probably isn't enough skill left to get glass that good, but there's someone's wrecked 50 million person glass arcology to dig around in. The extra lanes is covered above. I don’t think they would have an extra lane just because everyone is using the whole thing at their sufference. If the Princes of the Earth need to get through, they’ll just clear a path. The kind of super-urgent missives that in our world need put on a courier who cannot possibly be delayed would never reach mortal ears, in all likelihood, but would instead get infallible messengered.

>>>Standerds of weight and measure are most likely going to be odd and non-metric though<<<

Metric? No. Specially optimized for the tasks the way metric measures are optimized for science? Yes. Consider that anyone educated is going a constant pressure to engage in geomancy and architecture. That’s a lot of surveying, and a commercial incentive to do it well. Consider also that they’re inheritors of the First Age. Was some Solar bored enough to invent 0? I know what I’d bet on.

>>>They are going to be either five-based, which is a habit I've noticed a lot in the world, or they are going to be just plain odd, like the money system.<<<

I would bet more on the latter. I imagine there may be several modes of measure, as there's little need for standardization. Even in the advanced and relatively populated Realm, “scientific inquiry” (really more like curiosity about the First Age) is coming from a couple hundred savant-engineers and sorcerers, who are all geniuses. Again, it’s worth thinking about them as inheritors of the First Age. They treated their peasants the same way too. It’s entirely possible there’s some sort of Exalt-devised peasant measurement system that’s specially designed for rural living. You could build food portion control, healthy driving distances for animals and good agriculture right into the system of measurement, the way metric makes force and energy calculations easy.

>>>--Printing presses seem to not be present. Things are handwritten by hundreds of scribes and the lot.<<<

They have reversed image carved block printing. I do not know if they have semi-movable type blocks, I vary on it.

>>>I would see the Realm as a government to surpress such an invention anyhow. Peasants are peasants and they shouldn't be allwoed to rise up. It distrupts the order of society and causes chaos and all that.<<<

This is largely why they don't have more efficient mass communications, yes, but I'll bet you they print the Immaculate Texts. I think that you take a little more cynical a tone than the average Dragon-Blooded would. Consider that you can go outside and see the ruins of multiple destroyed high-tech civilizations. Would it be hard to keep a straight face when pushing a society based on idealized peasant farming?

>>>Its amanner of magical substitutes preventing the implementation of scientific progress.<<<

Society also has a different focus too. The self-envisioned idyll of the world of Exalted is, I think, very much like the funeral scene at the end of Kurosawa's "Dreams". A few Exalted trouble themselves so that the masses might live in peaceable ignorance.

>>>I've wondered about the mathmatics of the setting as well, to be honest. There is so far as I can tell one reference to the number zero, and that intrigues me.<<<

They definitely have the zero, trig and calc -- their engineering is too good for them not to, and the Empress' economic policies pretty much require someone to be doing calculus equations to run her economic models. I don't know what the base of their system is. I'd suspect ten rather than five because ten is even, but I have never really thought about it.

>>>There seems to be no pencils int he world, just to note. They are a very brush-orientated culture in the Realm. Theif alphabet is a basterdization of Old Realm language, go figure. They oculdn't do all the detail of the block worlds, so they just turned it into brush stroke sand made them fertical. Go figure.<<<

They didn't have the time. The Old Realm alphabet was made by people who lived 3000 years and could write an epic in an eyeblink. When the simplified system came into service has never been explored.

>>>I also doubt that, atleast in the Scarlet Dynasty, artwork hasn't evolved too well. This is due to the culture's iconoclistic culture.<<<

I think you have some cultural bias here. It certainly doesn't have sophisticated depictive art. That doesn't mean their aesthetic is weak or unsophisticated, and their appreciation of other art forms is likely highly developed, only because a primary audience is going to be immensely sophisticated.

>>>With a widely-read reading material and th elot, Low and High Realms probably are very advanced in their grammer strucutre.<<<

Tentatively, High Realm is a formal court dialect (these are common in places without a formalized language) and Low Realm is mastery of various vulgar dialects, which are often liguistically drifted into incomprehensibility. I think of High Realm as like diplomatic French and Rivertongue as more like Swahili or English.

>>>The number of literate peasantry is still a debatable thing though.<<<

It's not sinful to learn to read, but you might be subjected to social pressure if you started to become a secular scholar. Savantdom is for the Exalted and the patrician classes.

Hope this provides some helpful answers. You guys that collect this material can add this to the collection, but I don't think I'd count it as exactly canon, as some things, like the language of the Realm, are actually being messed with now.

Geoffrey C. Grabowski Exalted Developer, WWGS

Comments

I think tech level is mostly a matter of what you feel is thematically appropriate. Consider that A)The Romans were a hop skip and a jump away from the Industrial revolution, even without Intelligence 8 and B) There were a whole lot of bored Solars around for a really long time. Maybe some of that tech survived, or was rediscovered? I'd say its possible to justify almost any level of tech you care to put it in the game. If you wanted to, you could certainly put in essence driven helicopters, supercomputers dedicated to calculating the physics involved in The Death of Obsidian Butterflies, and so forth.-MeiRen

I definately get a steampunk vibe from a lot of the tech of the Realm; supercomputers I would doubt, because the whole thing seems very organic- unless Autochthonia has something, high-level computing is probably done more by beuracratic spirits than essence manipulation (Whoa, although I just had the coolest idea of an Essence clock like a bizzare water-clock). The cardinal rule of steampunk is: Technology exists at the level at which it has been challenged to exist. Since Essence is a basically unlimited, omnipresent power source (like water), it follows that as long as you have someone who can map the circuitry and integrate the gears, whatever you need is plausible.

Which contrasts sharply with mortal technology, which seems to be more or less on par with ancient China. In a lot of ways, there are two or three cultures of drastically dis-similar levels that interact in the setting. Mortal, Terrestrial (which includes ghosts, lesser earthly spirits and the like) and Celestial (also Abyssals et al). The Terrestrials and mortals are pretty close in a lot of ways, their cultures inter-weave. If you can't channel Essence, you're out of the 'technological' elite right away. $.02 &Arafelis