Towards the end of the last war, nearly one hundred years ago, the one that saw the fall of the Hoxha regime and the dissolution of the Kalhom empire, there was a technological flourishing. Mixa, the empire of their elven enemies had already invented basic firearms, black and white silent movies, radio and the first cars. However, towards the end of the war, Hoxha regime began to improve all of these things, they made guns more powerful, they added sound to the movies, they pressed records for the new gramophones, they created faster cars and added some inventions of their own, including some miraculously solid and flexible bullet proof vests and growing giant vegetables. Even these sudden advances were not enough to change the direction of the war, coming too late and being to hard to mass produce quickly. After the fall of the empire, the scientists responsible were either executed or taken prisoner by the victorious Mixa Empire and taken back to their homeland in chains. As a result since the end of the war the rate of technological advances has slowed dramatically and in some cases has gone into reverse. For example, the giant vegetables are still growing in one of the universities labs but no one there knows how these plants were created.
One technology notably absent from this world is the telephone. They do not exist and as a result the streets are full of messenger boys running or cycling from one end of the city to the other carry the communications of merchants, politicians and lovers.