Technologies to Be Available in Your Gameworld

Your gameworld can be characterized by any number of features. The way you treat magic in the game is one of these features, and another is how you characterize the setting. The intersection of these ideas is where you define the technologies in your world. The tech you decide to include will not only add characterization to the world, but it will also define what is and is not possible in the world. And importantly, technologies also create storytelling opportunities, as players can use these technologies to get ahead in the story. Below, I've developed a list of technologies you can deploy in your game; read on for ways that you can develop your gameworld's technologies to intensify your game by restricting or expanding the tech available. 

Before I get into the list, I want to draw attention to one of the ways that technologies have affected my games. I have seen players use new technologies to develop cutting-edge businesses, and I have seen them deploy technologies for the sake of exploring new ideas. In Listen Check, for instance, a gnomish inventor had developed a device which stored as a simple paperback book, but which could grow and take the form of various pieces of furniture. The players all invested in this inventor's device--Soren in particular poured funds into the project--and not only were they able to rebuild their home out of these transforming pieces of furniture, but they became quite rich from their investments. You can see how even one invention can change the course of a story. 

More recently, I developed several inventions for the mystery campaign. I designed the list of inventions as a letter from the inventor Lyssbetonk Cogswagon, who was offering the player characters the aid of one invention to help them in their investigations. That letter includes a total of 11 technologies, including simple ones like an automatic field plower and an automated assistant (both of which stand to shake things up in most campaigns), but also more notable devices, like anti-gravity boots, a weather controller, and something called an Undoer, which allows the wearer to travel back in time five seconds, leaving the rest of the world behind. In the context of the campaign, these technologies are world-changing to a certain extent, but the real idea here is that the inventions are part of the mystery--the player characters have to determine which inventions are involved in the conspiracy and be able to counteract them. So you see that technologies can serve purposes other than simply changing what actions are available; they can also contribute to the story you're telling. 

So let's get into some specific technologies. Deploy these in your gameworld however you see fit, recognizing that technologies change what players are capable of in your world. The players' uses of technology will surprise you. My mystery campaigners ended up asking for help with a Liquid Multiplier to turn a single healing potion into hundreds of sellable doses of healing potion--that's something I didn't anticipate. So, with the recognition that technologies can disrupt your game in the same chaotic fashion as any other ability granted to the players, let's consider some technologies for your world, moving from least to most transformative (and considering eliminating taken-for-granted technologies). 

1. Purified Water: In medieval times, water was not reliably clean, and most folks just drank ale, which was easier to reliably safely produce. In your world, you can develop the technology of purified water to allow people to safely and reliably drink pure water if you so choose. But you can just as easily rule that purified water is outside the realm of possibility, and portray people as drinking ale as a safer alternative. Clean water also has a huge impact on agriculture, and you might play in a world where people preserve water for crops and drink other things to ensure a good harvest. If you include pure water in your game, consider only the most upscale establishments the holders of pure water. 
2. Agricultural Harvesters: In medieval times, harvesting crops was an arduous process, but today, complex devices make the process much easier. Your world can share this development: inventors eager to reduce labor in the field can create rolling machines which pluck any crop from the ground and store it. You might have one all-in-one device handle all crops, or a specialized machine for each crop; the device could be cheap enough to be revolutionizing agriculture, and it may be expensive enough that most farmers must save carefully to afford one. Whatever you choose, these harvesters will be game-changers which will multiply the free time of farmers who have it. 
3. The Printing Press: This is not a wild invention in the way that many TRPG inventions are wild--this technology simply determines the spread of information in your world. It's worth considering how popular the printing press is in your world so that you understand how many books there are and thereby what the average person knows about a given topic. I've decided that the printing press is relatively new in my world, but gaining considerable traction, so that printed books have only just become popular and widely available. You might also run a world with no printing press in order to keep written records rare. Printing press availability also affects libraries and newspapers, so make this choice carefully. 
4. Clocks and Watches: Clocks are one of civilization's earliest inventions, but early clocks were unwieldy and large. You might rule that only such large clocks exist in your world, but you can push the line of technology in either direction: you might rule that clocks generally do not exist at all, meaning that player characters must approximate time by the sun's position, or you might rule that clocks are so useful that the technology of timekeeping has rushed to meet demand, and there are even small watches which can reliably keep time. Determining the commonness of timekeeping can help to characterize your world and put pressure on time-related activities. 
5. Musical Instruments: Instruments in a traditional D&D world include period instruments like lutes, lyres, and harps, but these instruments don't have to be the full range of musical possibilities. In the mystery campaign, Montana plays a guitar even though the instrument wouldn't be invented until the very end of the medieval period. But musical expression in the game is more about self-expression than historical reenactment, so you can have in-game characters develop modern instruments. In my world, halflings are renowned as experimenters in the world of music, so I could easily determine that halflings invented the guitar and other instruments to satisfy my players. 
6. Plumbing: Traditional medieval worlds have only the most basic hygienic inventions; science had not yet shown us that disease thrives in unhealthy conditions, and so people did not have things like plumbing yet. But I like to think that magic increases the capabilities of engineers, and that the kind of wealth disparity that exists in my world would lead to the development of technologies that only help the rich. So why not include basic plumbing? The wealthy have the ability to fill a bathtub without carrying water, they can use more sophisticated technology than an outhouse, and they have running water to wash their hands. This opens a narrative possibility of a disease that affects mostly the poor, but the rich have immunity because of their plumbing. 
7. Photography: The ingredients required for early photography were all commonly available to people in medieval settings; the daguerreotype, the earliest publicly available photography method, required silver, iodine, and mercury. In a world with plentiful apothecaries, each of these substances would be relatively easy to find. So why not include photography in your world? These early photographs take time and resources to create, so using it would still require a person to work hard for the fruits of their labor. This would introduce changes into the way that persons of interest are tracked, as perfect reproductions would be available to the public.
8. Use of Existing Magic as Technology: This is one of my favorite ways to make my gameworld more interesting. Consider the magic that exists in the world and how those spells would supplement other aims. In my homebrew setting, powerful wizards are employed by a courier service to teleport couriers all across the continent. Thus, from this spell, there is a whole business that keeps the world informed and connected. The above example of Listen Check uses this format too: the furniture inventor was using a shrink/enlarge spell paired with engineering for his devices. If you have an idea for how a spell might affect the world, keep imagining the details until you know how it affects the world. From there, you'll soon have a unique way for magic to express your world's details. 
9. Flying Machines: As far back as Leonardo da Vinci, there are designs for flying machines. You might introduce a variety of flying machine in your world, and you have lots of options. You could go with the single-person design that da Vinci developed, an early biplane which could hold a passenger or two, or something else entirely. I include this idea because flight is at the heart of the human imagination going back as far as we can remember, and it seems only natural that people in the gameworld would strive to fly as well. With limited flight, travel changes drastically, and all manner of new complications arise--consider how dramatic a skill check to keep the device in the air would be. 
10. Social Programs: I'm writing from the United States, where social programs have long taken a backseat to "economical freedom," but that doesn't mean that your gameworld can't have them. In my homebrew setting, gnomes have a very socialistic government, so they use magic and extensive recordkeeping to provide everyone in their society with the resources they need. Technology gets used in this system: every gnome has a personal artifact, like a ring or a card-shaped metal plate, which can be scanned by a government official before providing aid in order to track social programs. Gnomes' roles as inventors also mean that these social programs take advantage of some of the highest-profile devices in the known world. 
11. Fortune Tellers and Mediums: In the real world, fortune tellers and mediums are people who we can't really be sure have any contact with the supernatural. But in D&D, with the existence of spells like "Weal or Woe," fortune telling is a pretty exact science. Because spellcasters and other mediums have access to very real magic and information that lies outside of everyday life, people in the gameworld would come to rely on them for accurate information about what lies ahead. Where fortune tellers in our world are a "special occasion" type of visit for most of us, fortune tellers in D&D might be a regular visit for all manner of people. These figures can provide your game with dramatic tension, storytelling opportunities, and memorable predictions. 
12. Communication Devices: One of the greatest factors that makes our modern world different from a medieval setting is the speed of communication. Today, we can send a text message almost instantaneously to someone on the opposite side of the world, but a D&D setting usually requires you to travel to the location of who you want to speak with. I like to imagine that people within the gameworld sense that communication could be sped up and use magic with technology to change that. Perhaps your communication device is like an early telephone, with a whole structure that must be wired to its connection, and perhaps your communication device is simply an earpiece that allows the wearer to speak with whoever has the matched earpiece. Whatever you decide, speeding up communication and removing proximity from the equation will change the pace of your adventure and intensify the relationship of whoever your characters speak to. 
13. Magic Identifier: In a world where magic runs rampant and people afflicted with spells may not know how to counter them, it makes sense that someone would develop a mechanical device which can identify magic. This device, which I imagine as a scanner similar to a tv remote control, can confirm that magic has been cast on a person and can potentially diagnose the exact spell used. In conjunction with the treatment of a professional, this device could free the person from any manner of magical effects and curses; additionally, it frees up a range of identifying spells for the professional to use to help people. The Magic Identifier is likely a one-off invention by an enterprising individual, but you could also have it somewhat mass-produced if your gameworld considers magic to be as much a liability as a benefit. 
14. Gunpowder: The ingredients of gunpowder were freely available to people in medieval times--saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur all occur pretty regularly in the world, especially from miners. I'm not suggesting that you give your D&D players full-on firearms--that would be quite a different game altogether. Rather, gunpowder can be used in small explosive charges, allowing your player characters to build bombs. Of course, just because the ingredients of gunpowder are available doesn't mean that they're easily available, and you can ration how much your players have access to in order to keep them from overwhelming all their enemies with explosives. 
15. Resurrection: There are a number of spells directly dedicated to raising fallen characters. These spells are designed so that the players don't have to lose their characters if they die, but the spells create story complications that can be difficult to deal with. Years ago, I had a party split in which one half of my players decided to kill a king and the other half decided to defend the king. One of the assassins succeeded in regicide, and the cleric on the defending party wanted to resurrect him. How could I decide between the split parties? I had to invalidate one side or another. I decided that "Resurrection" as a spell could only raise the king for one week, at which point he would permanently die--a sort of compromise. I mention this because "Resurrection" has unintended consequences when applied to NPCs. If "Resurrection" is widely available in your world, it should exist in a way that reflects the societal impact of death being escapable. If it's widely available, there should be spellcasters who specialize in casting the spell almost exclusively. If you reduce the power of the spell like I did, remember that it needs to be consistent across your gameworld. 

That's 15 ideas for ways that technology (especially paired with magic) can be a part of your gameworld. You can and should consider the ways that other elements of the game would affect society and other technology, and if you do so, you can turn any idea into a working technology in your world. Remember to have your world reflect the change made by the technology, as this is often the most important and interesting way it will show up in your game. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: an argument against min-maxing, an age calculator for D&D races, and a one-shot based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Until next time, happy gaming!

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