Technology Levels
One-pager. A Tech Level (TL) is shorthand for "how advanced is this?" — used to price gear, gate availability, and set the feel of a setting. It is a single number only because, on Earth, the threads of technology happened to advance together. They needn't anywhere else.
Tech is many threads, not one number
Technology isn't a single ladder. Read the table by column: each column is a thread that has its own level. For human history the threads stayed close enough together that one number is a fair summary — so a single TL is just that summary.
The Social/Legal column is not flavor: it's the substrate the others grow on. Without the joint-stock company, currency, and global trade you don't get integrated circuits or modular reactors — there's no capital, no supply chain, no fab, however sound the Physics. So the upper threads rest on Social/Legal, with one important asymmetry:
A culture can possess artifacts from above its Social/Legal level — looted, bought, or handed down by a patron — but it can't originate them. Warlords with assault rifles, yes; warlords manufacturing assault rifles, no.
For alien or fantasy civilizations, don't assume lockstep. A culture might have TL2 Physics and TL5 Biology because healing is magical; an alien race might reach the stars with no gunpowder weapons; a steampunk world runs TL4 Physics under TL6 Math. When threads diverge, give the threads that matter their own levels and ignore the summary number — but remember the Social/Legal floor: a thread can't be home-grown much higher than the institutions that would pay for and organize it.
The original 1985 scale badly underestimated information technology. Rather than pretend otherwise, this edition simply recalibrates: TL6 is defined by the computing and networks we actually got, so the threads sit back in rough lockstep for present-day Earth. The lesson survives as history — if we misjudged our own near future this much, don't assume an alien or fantasy civilization's threads line up at all.
The table
| TL | Era (≈) | Math | Physics | Biology | Social/Legal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Stone Age | Tally, counting | Fire, lever, knapped stone | Foraging, herb-lore | Band, kinship, custom |
| 1 | Antiquity | Arithmetic, geometry | Bronze & iron, wheel, sail | Agriculture, domestication | City-states, empires, written law |
| 2 | Medieval | Zero, algebra, Arabic numerals | Watermill, blast furnace, clockwork | Crop rotation, hospitals | Feudalism, guilds, canon law |
| 3 | ~1500 | Symbolic algebra, logarithms | Gunpowder arms, printing, ocean nav. | Anatomy, early botany | Nation-states, banking, charters |
| 4 | ~1900 | Calculus, statistics | Steam, electricity, telegraph, mass production | Germ theory, anaesthesia, vaccines | Representative govt, civil codes, labor law |
| 5 | ~1980 | Computability, information theory | Flight, fission, electronics, spaceflight | Antibiotics, DNA, transplants | Welfare state, human rights, world bodies |
| 6 | now | Cryptography, machine learning | Microprocessors, networks, electrification, precision weapons | Genomics, gene editing, mRNA | Global networks, data & privacy law |
| 7+ | Postulated | — | — | — | Define per setting |
Finer grain (quarter levels)
Whole numbers are usually enough, but quarter-levels are available when a setting needs to distinguish near-contemporaries:
- TL6 — present day.
- TL6.25 — modular / small nuclear reactors, thorium power, mature grid-scale storage (a Physics-thread step).
- TL6.5 — practical fusion power.
- …and onward, as you like. The scale assumes no faster-than-light travel; if your setting has FTL, it's a deliberate addition, not a rung on this ladder.
Quarter-levels can apply to a single thread — "TL6, but Physics 6.25" — without dragging the others along.
Using TL at the table
- Pricing & availability. An item from a higher TL than the local culture is exotic — expensive, hard to repair, or simply unobtainable. The 2004 campaign convention is a good default: assume the local TL is freely available, and rule higher-TL items in case by case.
- Skills & fields. Operating or repairing higher-TL gear may require a field of knowledge at that TL; lacking it is an unfamiliarity penalty.
- Setting feel. Announce the campaign TL (and any decoupled threads) during character creation, the way you announce the genre. "TL6, but medicine is TL4 because we're cut off from the core worlds" tells players everything.
Designer's Note: the original anchors stand — TL5 was about 1980, TL4 about 1900, TL3 about 1500 — but the present needed finer grain, and the future needs humility. TL6 has been recalibrated to match the information tech we actually got. I'm not presupposing FTL, fusion is a maybe, and I was badly wrong about computers once already. Threads, not ladders.