Schizo Tech / Tabletop Games

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• BattleTech is rife with this sort of thing:
  • The mecha all run on highly compact and portable fusion engines and have guns and missiles with great range and hideous damage, but due to the rubbished industrial base apparently nobody can build decent fire control or air-conditioning systems, so most fighting takes place at close range (under 1 kilometer!) and most mechwarriors fight in what amounts to underwear. Admittedly, the short ranges are both to keep map sizes reasonable for gameplay purposes and because the designers were shooting for a classic in-your-face mecha combat aesthetic in preference to more logical but boring long-range sniping contests.
  • Similarly, while BattleMechs have essentially taken over the role of tanks — not necessarily combat vehicles in general, just the old twentieth-century style armored boxes with a gun turret — centuries ago in-universe, everybody still uses those anyway, because they're significantly cheaper and easier to produce while still being a respectable force on the battlefield.
  • Schizo tech comes up a lot when dealing with backwater colony worlds. A hunter might use a black powder pistol to kill a deer for dinner, then come home and cook it in a microwave. At least part of all of this is due to the general devastation of and Inner Sphere-wide technological backslide during the Succession Wars.
  • This has gone even farther with the rise of so called "RetroTech," a resurgence of (in-universe) primitive technology that is cheaper to make and repair but less effective, meaning a brand new variant of a longstanding design might well have cutting-edge weaponry with an engine that was considered severely outdated centuries ago.
• Crimson Skies is an Alternate Universe setting where the United States of America broke up and the successor states are plagued by air pirates. It regularly features propeller driven aircraft armed with magnetic rockets in addition to zeppelins armed with remote controlled gun turrets and rocket launchers. The Xbox adaption, High Road To Revenge, features a German fascist group called Die Spinne who have Tesla weapons and a weather control device. This series is set in the 1930's.
• As per Shadowrun, in Cyberpunk 2020 you can find along firearms and even more advanced stuff katanas "vibro-swords", bows, and crossbows.
• Dungeons & Dragons has their share. As usual.
  • Quite a few of these are very subtle ones that most people probably wouldn't notice. While much of the technology is medieval level at the latest, windows using 19th-century sheet or plate glass are described, chimneys (a 16th-century invention) are universal, and even seemingly-minor details such as the existence of "private rooms" at inns are all developments of later centuries. On the flipside, pre-Dark Age technologies such as triremes, chariots, colosseums and the notion of daily bathing also appear.
  • See also the usual weapon selection. Fantasy Gun Control aside, you will find nearly every single weapon developed before gunpowder, and even a few invented after.
  • Gary Gygax played around with this trope a lot in his original Greyhawk home games, although most of them (mostly imported from Earth or found in crashed spaceships) got left out in later releases for that campaign setting.
  • The Book of Wondrous Inventions, which was a collection of Tinker Gnome inventions based on Real Life technology.
  • 5th edition sourcebook/adventure module Icewind Dale Rime Of The Frostmaiden has one adventure involving a crashed Illithid Nautilus. This space-faring bioship was run by a friendly pair of Gnome Ceremorph mind flayers who have an arsenal of laser pistols and rifles of their own making. But what weapons were mounted on the Nautilus? A pair of ballistas which are worse than the lasers in almost every way despite being much bigger. These ballistas are actually worse than the regular ones due to gnomish over-engineering. Besides having the same stats, these ballistas can misfire on an inexperienced user and hit them harder than a greatsword slash.
  • Mystara
    • This setting also has a number of anachronisms, either as Shout Outs (Heldannic Knights' bird-of-prey flying vessels), in-jokes, or remnants of (again) a crashed spaceship.
    • The Hollow World, inside Mystara, proactively averts this trope with the Spell of Preservation, which makes people in various cultures distrust and spurn unfamiliar technologies, no matter how useful. (Of course, some of those cultures may have Schizo Tech of their own, but they won't be developing any new examples while under this spell.)
  • Technology levels in Ravenloft range from Stone Age to late Renaissance, depending on where you are, with even higher tech turning up in the local Mad Scientist Laboratory. This is because new domains are added to the Land of Mists from different worlds with their own indigenous tech-levels, rather than technology evolving in tandem within adjacent countries.
  • The Dragonlance setting has the Tinker Gnomes who power their dormant volcano home with Geothermal power and individual Gnomes have invented things like Powered suits of armor, Invisibility Spray, various Clockwork automaton, and even a nuclear bomb. The Tinker Gnomes are a race of bungling inventors, and so a lot of their technology does tend to be a bit prone to exploding.
  • Spelljammer is about as close to the franchise gets to a Standard Sci Fi Setting, and the mechanics of spelljammer helms mean that anything can get into space while gunpowder weapons are considered a bad idea. Ships in the setting range from "Roman galley with a spelljammer helms strapped to it" and "armored warship with lasers," and one prominent faction equips some members with spring-loaded dart guns and others with lightning cannons.
• In keeping with the surreal New Weird nature of the setting, Electric Bastionland portrays a world where technology resembles that of the early 20th Century where electrical technology has been implemented everywhere, but if a player can imagine something from the modern world, it'll almost certainly be available somewhere in Bastion, coated in an old-fashioned veneer.
• Exalted
  • There's SchizoMagiTech. Conventional technology is mostly around middle-to-late Bronze Age/early Iron Age. But those with the needed skills can create a hyper-precision wristwatch with perpetual calendar, sunrise and sunset calculator, moon phase display, and the functional equivalent of high resolution GPS as a minor tool.
  • Even without the inventors, Creation still has a variable tech level, ranging from cities where a few guards may have firewands and there's a medieval level civic works thing going on, to cities like Chiaroscuro where the rich quarters have elevators and a functional equivalent of electricity, to the relative metropoli of the Blessed Isle.
  • Exalted also has the Lost Technology angle going for its Schizo Tech. A lot of the more powerful or complex Artifacts are remnants of First Age technology made by Solar artisans. Of course, the Solar Exalted have spent most of the last couple thousand years being dead and have only just recently returned. Enough documentation has survived that Dragon Blooded artisans can maintain most surviving First Age tech, but any technological advancement since the First Age can't compare to what Twilight Caste Solars were capable of.
• In Fading Suns most advanced technology is prohibited or restricted by the Church following the fall of the Second Republic, though it's not always enforced, particularly weapons tech. For example, a militia man on a backworld may have a laser, while his wife still cleans the shirts on the rocks by the stream.
• GURPS has the idea of Technology Levels built into the rules, by name; societies have a tecch level, as does each character (representing the highest level of technology with which they're familiar). But as a generic system, it also recognizes the idea of Schizo Tech, handling it with mechanics such as Split Tech Levels (for societies which have advanced further in some areas than in others) and the Cutting-Edge Training perk (for characters who've received technologically advanced training in one specific area). Some examples of published GURPS settings with Schizo Tech:
  • The alternate historical timeline of "Alexander Athanatos" from GURPS Bio-Tech is mainly in the Iron Age, but it is capable of producing genetic hybrids thanks to Hippocrates triggering a revolution in medical science.
  • The world of Yrth, setting of Banestorm, is a vaguely-medieval fantasy world like many others, except that people from Earth occasionally get teleported there and stranded. The Powers That Be suppress gunpowder and other obviously problematic technologies, but many minor technologies and concepts have become common, including the germ theory of disease, some experiments in vaccination, heliocentric astronomy with elliptical orbits, the modern novel, stagecoaches with suspensions, sloops and brigs, fingerprinting, and the use of perspective in art. Advanced printing has become established despite the problems it causes.
  • The random alien culture generation rules in 3rd edition GURPS Space have a small (a roll of 3 on 3d6) chance of resulting in primitive barbarians with spaceships.
  • The Discworld Roleplaying Game uses a cut-down version of the full GURPS rules, but given that the Discworld is heavy on Schizo Tech along with depictions of technological progress, this necessarily includes the relevant tech level rules.
• In Mechanical Dream, the setting is an alien world where civilization was once run by a race of super-intelligent plants before they were politically displaced by a more dynamic people that rapidly ushered in an industrial revolution. So there are helicopters, chainsaws, genetic engineering and mechs in addition to yokels in the neighboring district who are running around in leather armor and throwing spears at wildlife.
• New Horizon was colonized by humans with advanced technology... and low resources. Thus, while every town has touches of modern inventions — a few computers, a Promethean or two, the ever present Wafans — the setting as a whole generally features more frontier-level technology, like flintlocks and rifles.
• Numenera is built on this trope. A billion years in the future, eight great civilizations have risen and fallen. At least one was a stellar empire, and at least one was nonhuman. Now, in the Ninth World, every conceivable type of technology exists side by side, from swords to guns to lasers, teleporters to psionics and beyond... if you can figure out how to use it safely.
• Pathfinder:
  • The world Golarion is deliberately all over the place. The Inner Sea Region contains every conceivable level of technology, from simple tribal cultures with axes and spears, to the standard fantasy kingdoms policed by knights on horseback, to a nation where the wreckage and technology of a fallen city-sized spaceship litters the land of savage barbarians. To top it all off, a steampunk city with black powder firearms is wedged into a magical wasteland between two nations dominated by wizards. The designers actually acknowledge the trope in one book, citing Truth in Television: not every nation develops at the same rate or obtains new technologies in the same order.
  • One adventure path, Reign of Winter, specifically enforces this as a point in artwork and theme. The adventure eventually brings you elsewhere in the universe at the modern day of the game: Earth, around 1912 C.E., where the adventurers encounter Great War-era Russians. The game states that while the sudden appearance of armored knights and robed, flying elves may be unusual, the Russians had seen far worse threats during the war as they level their machine guns toward the new threats.
• Rifts
  • Being set After After the End, the game has a lot of this. Many wilderness villages may not have running water and only a few electrical generators, but will have laser rifles capable of blowing a sedan in half with one shot. And let's not get into magic.
  • The Coalition States uses this to their advantage to peacefully assimilate human communities.^note They generally assimilate non-human communities by flattening them and claiming the smoking crater as their territory. They offer to help Low Culture, High Tech towns to perform repair and upkeep on their technology, and use that to make the town more and more dependent on the Coalition, until they quietly absorb the community into their empire.
• Rocket Age: The humans use conventional 1930s technology alongside spaceships and RAY guns and the Martians used to use a mixture of medieval and high tech technology and are currently in the desperate process of modernization. Then on Jupiter we have the use of zeppelins and compressed air dart rifles, to ensure that things don't go up in smoke.
• RuneQuest is set in the Bronze Age, but the dwarves (a.k.a Mostali) are a Higher-Tech Species and have muskets, repeating crossbows and crude bombs in a world where the composite bow is the height of technology for everyone else.
• Spirit of the Century plays with this, as it's set in the 1920s but uses pulp Science! to allow more futuristic technology, and even full on mad science inventions that we still haven't made. The book does a good job of cataloguing what inventions are just around the corner to give you some idea what the state of the art inventions you could get prototypes to, or make, are.
• Naturally, Shadowrun picks up this ball and runs with it. Even disregarding the Cyberpunk-meets-magic setting, there are weapons like katanas, claymores and "vibro-swords" to go with their assault rifles and grenades. There's even a couple of PDF sourcebooks dedicated to obsolete weapons because while there's no point in a 'Runner carrying one, there's always a chance that they could break into the home of a gun collector on a mission and it would be really embarrassing to be killed by his 19th Century revolver because you weren't familiar with its capabilities.
• Space 1889 is all about this trope, although most of the weapons described in it are either historically-accurate late 19th century weaponry or very rare Steampunk inventions. Martians are at the cavemen level and have to chuck spears at colonizers, but ages ago they once had things like heat rays which can sometimes be discovered by adventurers.
• The technology in The Splinter covers everything from early medieval weapons to impossibly advanced, essentially magical devices. The core rulebook includes repeating crossbows, monofillament razor-wire launchers, steam-punk Gatling guns, automatic shotguns, advanced underwater laser pistols, heavy insanity rays, blade-wands, disintegrator pistols, directional nukes, and about fifty types of old-fashioned medieval slaughtering tools.
• Traveller: There is a lot of space in, well, space and some stuff never gets to some planets. Also there have been a large number of disasters in the Traveller history. And even those from high tech cultures like to go retro on occasions, like using swords when they fight a Duel to the Death.
• Many civilization themed board (and electronic) games feature scientific research. Usually the trope is averted by organizing research into a "tech tree", ensuring that science progresses somewhat realistically. On the other hand, Jamey Stegmaier's Tapestry has four separate research tracks and a deck of technology cards that can be traversed independently, which can result in some extremely Schizo Tech. For example, it's possible to research interstellar travel before astronomy. Or this scenario: "What technology should I unlock this turn: gunpowder, nuclear fission, or... the nail?"
• For Unhallowed Metropolis, we will use Lightning Guns and genetic engineering in the future. We'll also be using great swords, Vickers machine guns from 1912 and rubberized plate armor as well.
• Warhammer, particularly in later editions, tends to have wildly different technology levels between factions in order to evoke specific aesthetics. This in a world where a powerful human kingdom still thinks knights and longbows are cutting-edge, and there's at least one major faction that's entirely Stone Age. Fan reactions have been mixed, although some earlier editions featured actual plasma guns and laser pistols, so modern players get off lightly really. The schizo tech contraptions tend to go haywire in the most spectacular ways imaginable at the moment least desired. But even then they are fun to play — if not, just for laughs.
  • While the Orcs' technology level is largely dependent on what they can steal from other people, the Savage Orcs are still deep in the Stone Age — their weapons are made of roughly carved stone, wood and bone, their society limited to primitive tribes and their armor made of crude leather and bones or just warpaint. The largest Savage Orc invasion ever was defeated by Sigmar's alliance of early medieval kingdoms 2,500 years before the setting's "present" (their secret weapon in that case being the couched lance), and by all indications, they've undergone zero change in the intervening period.
  • The Beastmen are likewise very primitive, due to a religious hatred for all trappings of civilization — they at least have ironworking, but refuse to build anything but the crudest tools, and all else they steal from their victims.
  • Bretonnia is very firmly Late Medieval — gunpowder weapons are specifically outlawed within it (aside from siege bombards and ships, because the latter aren't technically IN Bretonnia) — and for the most part restricts itself to swords, polearms, and lances. They get by mainly because they have the setting's two "good" great powers on their eastern (Empire) and western (Ulthuan) borders, shielding them from the largest threats.
  • The Wood Elves of Athel Loren (Asrai) are to their High Elven cousins as Bretonnia is to the Empire. They're barely more advanced than the Beastmen, being a semi-nomadic society (they do have some truly permanent settlements — often built into trees) whose soldiers wear little more than cloth and wield bows, iron spears, and swords. Their social advancement is similarly primitive as they're only loosely organized into hundreds of tiny chiefdoms ("kinbands") that form tribal confederations of various levels of unity. They're also part of a deeply magical forest realm that fights alongside them, giving them access to things like teleporters, magical poison, sorcerers, great eagles, and legions of Treants to supplement their forces. Despite this they still know that they're severely outmatched by most other factions (partly because of technology, partly because they're not very numerous), hence maintaining an alliance with the much larger Bretonnia to use it as a meat shield and emphasizing irregular warfare. The less magical Wood Elves of Laurelorn Forest (Eonir) aren't as severe an example, being halfway between the Asrai and High Elves: they have relatively advanced metalworking (enough to make plate armor), marble architecture, a feudalist monarchy, a high literacy rate, and a significant city.
  • The Empire is at a 16th to 17th century level with a Steampunk bent, fielding reliable if somewhat primitive handguns (matchlocks and wheellocks being standard with flintlocks also semi-common), large unwieldy cannons,^note On par with 15th-16th century designs, and inferior to more portable and accurate 18th-19th century ones. volley guns,^note Around since the 15th century in our world, but found to be Awesome, yet Impractical compared to grapeshot to the point they dropped out of widespread use by the end of the 16th century. and inaccurate and unreliable (but powerful) rocket batteries, mixed with pike and halberd infantry and lance cavalry. These mundane early modern forces are complemented with a handful of steam-powered tanks and "clockwork" horses. Their civilian technology mostly averages out to around the 16th-17th centuries as well, but the Altdorf-Nuln corridor is a notable exception, possessing tech more on par with the late 18th century such as primitive steam engines, air compressors, and power looms. Also, despite having had gunpowder for hundreds of years, even simple guns are unusually rare in the Empire's army — it's noted in the RPG sourcebooks (such as 2e's "Armoury of the Old World") that a strong majority of Empire troops still don't use gunpowder weapons, while in our history, 50% of Western European troops were using firearms by the end of the 16th century, and near-100% were by the end of the 17th.
  • The Dwarfs have more advanced technology than the Empire, including better guns and cannons (the average gun seems to be a flintlock, with some caplocks also in use), as well as organ guns, flamethrowers, trains, ironclads, helicopters armed with steam cannons, larger helicopters armed with bombs, and battle-capable air balloons. Yet, the bulk of their troops wouldn't look out of place in the High Middle Ages, still wearing mail armor or full plate and armed with axes, war picks, or crossbows. They even still use ballistae and trebuchets alongside their cannons. This is explained in-universe as the Dwarfs being particularly resistant to change, with most of their soldiery swearing by old methods in spite of their obvious inefficiencies. Those helicopters have to get into arrow-range to attack, though, so they're not too much of an advantage if the enemy happens to have guns or lots of magical projectiles of similar effectiveness to them.
  • The Skaven, infamously, feature "fantasy" versions of a sniper rifle, a ratling gun, a flamethrower, a laser cannon, a hamster wheel of death, chemical warfare and what what appears to be three separate types of nuclear bombs — including a Davy Crockett Personal Nuclear Missile Launcher (all of which may fail with destructively hilarious results). Yet these rarely show up and 90% of Skaven troops have little more than rags and rusty blades, with another 9% having decent 16th-17th century equipment similar to what the Empire uses. Those armed with high-tech Steampunk gear comprise less than 1% of their forces, and the rarity of their deployment is handwaved by the fact that their weapons are as likely to kill them as the enemy due to the Skavens' notorious lack of quality control.
  • The Lizardmen are the last remaining servants of incredibly advanced Ancient Astronauts who vanished millennia ago, and have been steadily declining and dwindling away since. Many of the wondrous artifacts left behind by their creators are still around, and the Lizardmen can operate them, but the knowledge of how these things actually work is long since lost. The Lizardmen can use and maintain them, usually through instructions remembered in the form of magical or religious rituals, but cannot make more and have lost most of their ancient infrastructure as well. As a result, a typical Lizardman army consists of ranks of warriors wielding stone and bronze weapons (and usually nearly naked, since their warrior castes were designed to have scales thick enough to serve as natural armor) around a core of spellcasters and of incredibly powerful space age weapons and devices carried around by dinosaurs.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar:
  • It's most noticeable with the Cities of Sigmar, due to the Sigmarite empire having descendants of all the human, elf, and dwarf factions living together with very similar aesthetics and equipment to their ancestors in the old world. The bulk of the Sigmarite troops, especially the Freeguilds, are armed with spears, axes, swords, bows, crossbows, and black powder firearms and cannons roughly on par with 16th century designs (the standard handgun of the Freeguild Handgunner regiments is explicitly stated to be a smoothbore wheellock). Yet, thanks to most of the Free Cities having at least one Ironweld Arsenal guild, they also possess the same helicopters, steam tanks, trains, and more advanced firearms (percussion caps, repeater handguns, organ guns, etc.) in much greater numbers than the old world factions ever did. There are magitek walking fortresses as well, capable of disseminating prefabricated buildings. And they produce all these things in assembly line factories◊ rather than by hand. The aforementioned helicopters and tanks are still weak and rare enough to not overturn the melee-centric formation fighting that makes up the bread and butter of the setting's combat, but it's not clear why the Free Cities haven't used their demonstrated mass production to arm all their troops with rifled caplocks by now.
  • This is just one faction, albeit probably the most diverse one. Comparing between factions makes the difference even starker. For example, the Kharadron Overlords are an entire faction of dwarf Sky Pirates whose aesthetic and tech mostly resembles the early Victorian era with a steampunk bent (their standard Arkanauts being equipped with axes/cutlasses and caplock pistols) but who, via Magic-Powered Pseudoscience, also have things like power armor, robots, jetpacks, and airships.
  • The Skaven have doubled down on their Fantasy tech and expanded it, so you have armies brought to the front by interdimensional teleporters and staying in touch with their home bases via wireless communication devices that still 90%+ consisting of troops wearing rags and armed with little more than rusty knives and spears.
  • All of the above coexists with huge hordes of Orruks and Beastmen being major threats, despite still being at an Iron Age level like they were in Fantasy, and with Aelf (elf) civilizations firmly in the spears, swords, magic and monsters style of high fantasy warfare.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Due to a bit of "lost tech" going on, the Imperium's technology is controlled by a religious cult/autonomous government called the Adeptus Mechanicus that doesn't believe in researching new technology or trying to understand the technology they currently have out of paranoia regarding daemonic corruption. Instead, they worship whatever old technology they can find from before the Age of Strife. Some planets have degraded to iron age or stone age levels of technology. This is due to a combination of a catastrophic AI rebellion bringing the old human government to its knees and immediately after that FTL travel collapsing for almost five thousand years for any appreciably long distance in the Age of Strife. Although the Great Crusade reunited a large amount of surviving lost colonies, the Horus Heresy and, in its aftermath, ten thousand years of near constant war to survive caused further technological loss.
  • The Imperium of Man has floating bio-mechanical skulls called servo-skulls, basically a cybernetic computer that can hover. They put candles on them when they need some extra light. Likewise, the miles-long spaceships of the Imperial Navy still use hordes of gang-pressed workers to manually load their weapons.
  • The Imperial Guard can sometimes be a good source of this. Example: the Leman Russ Executioner battle tank. It looks boxy and crude, the engine's designed to run on anything you can burn up to coal and wood, and the heavy stubber on top is a World War II-era M2 Browning in all but name, but it packs a huge tank-melting plasma cannon for the main gun. An Imperial Guard force is probably the only place where you'll find motorcycle troops and horse cavalry fighting alongside Sentinels and Warhound Titans.
  • Despite popular belief, the Astra Militarum has no "official" loadout enforced across all regiments; individual regiments are largely responsible for providing their own equipment and training. The image of Guardsmen all wearing green, angular armour comes from many regiments copying the famed Cadians. Since planets in the Imperial Guard vary wildly in technology levels, you get a lot of this when regiments are folded into each other or co-operate: you may get professional troopers from a Forge World equipped with plasma weapons and utilising cameleoline cloaking and cybernetic augmentations, fighting alongside Feral World primitives who like draping themselves with noxious body paint and the bones of dead comrades, and prefer tomahawks and longbows over their lasguns. It sounds crazy but this is a necessity for an interstellar empire that is so profoundly large, ancient and thinly-spread that it doesn't even really know how many planets it controls. To stop Guardsmen from a planet with technology level around the 16th century from using their muskets over the far more effective lasgun, the latter was modified to make a "bang" sound when fired.
  • Also very noticeable in spaceships which make extensive use of manual labor. So you have a multi-kilometer long spaceship powered by an advanced plasma reactor where the multi-story tall shells for the guns are loaded by hand using ropes and pulleys (and whips).
  • The Mechanicus and its love of cybernetics is an exercise in this all on its own. One example given in the first Skitari rulebook is that a common soldier could easily have upgraded lungs that filter out all toxins and let him operate in any environment, while the guy next to him got "upgraded" lungs that are literally just a set of leather bellows (and still work somehow).
  • Most races actually manage to avoid this trope fairly well, with Eldar, Necrons, Tau and Tyranids having reasonably consistent technology levels (the Eldar and Dark Eldar mostly have a problem of being unable to use present psychic technology too much for fear of losing their souls to the Dark God a vast majority of their race created in their fall, incidentally causing the Age of Strife, the Necrons are only just waking up after their 60 million year long stasis following the War in Heaven, the Tau only became prominent within the last few thousand years and haven't faced the true horros of the galaxy yet and the Tyranids are a hive mind of intergalactic Horde of Alien Locusts who have biological technology). Orks, on the other hand, really don't. Primitive axes, clubs and boar-riding cavalry are regularly seen alongside laser guns and Humongous Mecha. Individual vehicles also exhibit this, as the Orks freely adorn their contraptions with whatever they're able to steal or build that they think will make them work better or go faster; consequently, it's entirely possible to find a trukk propelled by jet engines scavenged from a fighter plane and giant squig-powered hamster wheels. The in-universe explanation is that their technology works by the Rule of Cool — if Orks believe something they've built will work, it will (in combination with the fact that they are the devolved descendants of a Living Weapon species used during the aforementioned War in Heaven and have technological knowledge imprinted in their genes and backed by their gestalt psychic field).
  • Exodite Eldar intentionally invoke this. Their Dragon Knight warriors ride dinosaur-like creatures, and they have laser lances (much like the Shining Spears aspect warriors but more primitive) and laser carbines (much like Imperial lasguns except they don't suck). Exodites limit their technology in such a way to give themselves hard lives to stop their culture from falling into decadence and depravity; otherwise, they have almost exactly the same technology as their Craftworld or Dark cousins. The Craftworlders use rigid lifestyles and soulstones to prevent losing themselves to hedonism and the Dark Eldar torture and sacrifice others to stave off the claim on their souls by the aforementioned Dark God.
  • While the Tau avoid this trope like the plague, their Kroot allies do this intentionally. They keep tech for the most part very simple (they can absorb the DNA from other species), but still have space travel and their otherwise primitive guns fire incredibly advanced munitions given to them by the Tau.
  • The Tau Farsight Enclaves' tech is somewhat dated compared to the Tau Empire's tech. They do occasionally get some shiny new toys thanks to spycraft, theft, and/or sympathizers within the Empire. Farsight himself still uses the same old battlesuit he wore when he first left the Empire.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: The world is full of this, possibly because nobody's ever bothered to explain any of it. We are talking about a world where a medieval knight can do battle with a low-orbit ion cannon and win. That same ion cannon also greatly fears duct tape.

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