User blog comment:MyOpinion:/Redwall's future/@comment-1421927-20100516025552

You are very true with the British Isle is approx. Redwall-ish culture, but, to create Gun powder, you must use the exact quantities of the ingredients, or you just have a bunch of random stuff that won't do anything. Not only tht, but the Chinese made gunpowder trying to make the fountain-pf-youth-pill, if you wil; they weren't thinking, "Hey, you know, I'd really like to create a weapon that uses combustion to fire a projectile at high speeds in order to pierce the enemy's flesh and cause him to die of shrapnel or blood loss. Hmm..." They were thinking, "I wanna life FOREVER!!! WEEEHEHEE!"

And, if Redwallers/Salamandastronites aren't trying to come up with a magical way to kill all of the vermin, they won't think about getting sulfur and whatever else you need; they'd be more likely to be thinking about what looks good with a green habit or if strawberries and October Ale would taste funny. It would be like asking why the Redwallers haven't yet created the Atomic Bomb; the thought has never crossed their mind that if you split an atom (Like they even know what an atom is...), you can cause mass destruction and probably kill basically all their enemies from the actual bomb or the cancers the radiation cause; because nobody has thought of the need for such a weapon as that (I mean, they wouldn't need a Weapon of Mass Destruction, seeing as since the vermin don't seem to practice good hygiene, if they weren't all killed in battles, they probably would die of Redwall equivalent of Bubonic Plague, Pox, or simply the Rhino Virus, common cold.), they would never think to invent it. As the saying goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention."