Sir Emeth Mimetes wrote:
Humans have built a powerful infrastructure of technology based off of the way our world works. If our world worked in a slightly different way, that technology would have been developed in a commensurate fashion.
So if you have a dramatic difference in your world's natural systems, taking the time to consider the impact it would have on its technology will go a long way in making it realistic and believable, not to say awesome.
But trying to simulate the industrious inventions of thousands of geniuses building upon each other across the span of an entire world and epochs of time is really an impossible challenge.
...
So, how do you integrate technology into your cobha developments?
I don't have any "dramatic" differences---I don't think, anyway---and I don't have "epochs of time" (as my story begins only a few years after the world's creation and has only gone a couple of centuries so far---though I plan to revise the timeline again Real Soon Now), but I do have one feature that has had some impact on technology. I call it "applied metaphysics"; it's a general-purpose power that some people have. (To summarize too briefly.) But I've limited its effect on technology to a few areas by making a guideline that using applied metaphysics to do something is almost always "cheap, easy, or effective---choose at most one." Because of this, mages usually get involved only in cases where you'd spare no expense anyway (medical diagnostics and crime investigation, for example) or where there's no alternative.
I did a blog post a few weeks back about this limitation, but I haven't thought much about how applied metaphysics (or any of the other "cobha" (like the existence of fairies, dragons, elves, and the like, or the fact that that universe's Fall had less intrusive effects and was more recent, or the world being flat, or ...) could be worked into technological development. Hmm. Need to think about this.