Typo: vaginal delivery after caesarean

Not necessarily true for #4. There’s something called trial of scar, AKA vaginal delivery after birth

I can’t edit anymore but my treacherous brother just forgot that later in this chapter it’s casually revealed that she does in fact cultivate bacteria and mold, disregard my prior comment

I know this is five years too late but it keeps bothering me, a doctor, even if trained as a general surgeon, would surely know about as much about basic microbiology as I got from the module in a general biology bachelor

Even if they do see them, it’s on the news or at a remove, it’s not war
It’s meant to be movie

I think you are forgetting how much of a factor skills, classes, and healing potions play in circumventing technological advancement in Innworld. People will almost always take the easy way out for everything they do – it’s actually quite rare for people to truly push for advancements, when there is no real need.

C-sections of a sort have probably been done before, but healing potions create problems that could make them undesirable to do. Someone doesn’t clean their hands well enough, and the healing potion floods their body with germs and bacteria, at a time when their body is then weakened from being cut open – and cut open without any kind of anaesthesia. Losing the mother could end up being such a problem that for most of the populace, it isn’t worthwhile to attempt. Better to let the child die but the mother live, so she can try again later.

When you already have skills that let you assist with births, and those go well 99% of the time, having a midwife try and cut someone open to maybe save the child is likely to be seen as not useful. You don’t bother trying to do something super risky when what normally works is almost always good enough.

Siege weapons would have similar issues. And we’re seeing things from the perspective of our own knowledge. Laken was given a design for a basic trebuchet with no embellishments. But what if all the ones designed by the drakes aren’t so simple? What if, instead of just a simple frame, arm, sling, and weight, you instead add on a ton of useless fluff to hide all of that. A spy comes to try and steal the design, and they return to whoever paid them with an extremely convoluted creation. You don’t know what parts are necessary, and what is fluff, so you try and make it all. And fail. And fail again. And keep failing, because much of it simply doesn’t make any sense. And then you give up, because you aren’t getting anything out of it, you haven’t leveled at all or gained any classes, etc. And of course, everyone else was spying on your attempts, see they fail, and don’t bother themselves.

If the world is large enough, those tests might not work properly. Even without a curve, the atmosphere would eventually distort vision enough for things to not be seen at a far enough distance.

Given perfect conditions, you might be able to test this, but at the ranges the horizon might be on a planet the size of Innworld (assuming it was indeed spherical), you’d probabky need a really, really good telescope to be able to tell the difference. Any less than perfect conditions – a storm between you and the ship, rough seas, too much dust in the air, etc. – and it might not work.

In regards to the first thing you brought up, I think Ken is given bad info, due to most people just having no real scientific knowledge and such. The Edge of the World has been mentioned as being accessible by sailing away from a specific archipelago. It is never mentioned as being present when sailing away from other continents, or in any direction except from that one specific area.

This leads me to believe that, rather than an actual “edge” of the world, it’s more just an extremely wide, extremely deep hole in the planet (probably with lots of magical shenanigans going on, too).

If this is the case, then the planet could still be spherical. Otherwise, people should be able to arrive at the Edge of the World no matter which direction they sail in, and it shouldn’t be only a thing in one specific area of the world.

As for things regarding flight, I imagine most of the lack of technology in that area is due to monsters. Anything large and extremely slow like A hot air balloon, or even a zeppelin, would be too easy of a target for monsters.

Steam power is probably not much a thing because magic and skills can do almost everything steam can, but better and easier. There would not be much purpose to create a steam engine for people of a magical world.

Same thing with large firearms like cannons. Magic can do it better. There wouldn’t be much reason to experiment with physical explosives when you can just get a mage to do it. Plus, a simple Flame Potion like in your example probably wouldn’t provide enough explosive force to move a cannonball at anything that would produce enough damage to make it worthwhile.