cakesandfail started this great thread about how more fantasy settings should have everyday, normal stuff like the Discworld book series does. I think a lot of fantasy gets so caught up in the magical stuff that they forget about simple worldbuilding.
If you haven’t read the Discworld series yet, I highly recommend it. It is a fantasy comedy book series written by the English author Terry Pratchett. Discworld is a flat planet balanced on the backs of elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle.
Source: cakesandfail
Just look at Middle Earth. Between the first battle against Sauron and the events of LotR is about 3,000 years. There appear to have been no technological, or even cultural advances in that time at all.
And it creates some of the most interesting and memorable moments in the series. Look at Harry King, King of the golden river, the man who managed to monopolise rubbish collection in the city. Or in The Fifth Elephant the fact that his “Sonkies” have gone generic leads the inventor of the Disk’s condoms to get involved in a complex dwarfish political plot.
Whilst I agree in general I disagree with some of the examples.
Why shouldn’t fantasy settings not have pencils? They are a fairly modern invention (1564 for the earliest, 1795 for the modern form). Toilet paper was used in the 14th century but only by the Chinese imperial family. For most of history most societies have had neither. The Romans had indoor plumbing but my grandmother never had a house with an indoor toilet. (You could still buy houses with only outdoor toilets around here at the turn of the millennium. They were all been bought up, modernized and resold for nearly twice the price about 20 years ago.)
I find both the assumption of stability and the assumption that what is normal now would be normal in other societies with different histories to both jar with what I know of history. Knowledge being lost or knowledge improving are both more believable than stagnation.