Technological stagnation is as common a fantasy trope as elves and goblins, whether it be the Warhammer World, Middle Earth, or Faerûn. Such settings are usually stuck with technology roughly equivalent to that of the Late Middle Ages (c. 1200-c. 1500): knights, castles, perhaps early gunpowder. Sometimes, this conservatism belongs only to particular species, such as long-lived elves, or culturally conservative dwarfs, with humans presented as uniquely innovative, the only ones to actively seek new advancements, technological or social.
In the world of Warhammer Fantasy, resurrected in 2024 as Warhammer: The Old World, there are only small technological advances, the odd new weapon or machine. Novels and in-world sourcebooks depict the foundation of the Empire of Man (1 IC) as akin to Iron Age Germania. A thousand years later, the Empire had advanced to a Late Middle Ages technology and discovered gunpowder (1152 IC), but with no further transformative change over the following millennia leading up to the game’s ‘present day’ (2276 IC). It seems a classic case of fantasy technological stagnation, an ahistorical scenario in a setting whose creators had backgrounds in history and archaeology and were heavily inspired by real world history.
Yet, unlike many other settings, this stasis may be narratively explicable. Cities are destroyed on a far greater scale and frequency than in Middle Earth or Faerûn. Beastmen in the forests and Orcs in the mountains hamper the exploitation of resources, Norscan raiders strangle sea trade, and fear of Chaos stifles political, social, and cultural innovations. Using the Empire of Man as a case study, and drawing upon historical comparisons such as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the breakup of the Western Roman Empire, and medieval frontier societies, I shall show just how plausible this limited technological development is in the Warhammer World.
Author bio
Rory MacLellan holds a PhD in Medieval History from the University of St Andrews. He has published on the Crusades, late medieval Britain, and political uses of the Middle Ages. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Royal Holloway University of London working on inclusive medieval histories.
