In the real world iron made useful metal both cheap and widely distributed. You could repurpose iron in your backyard with very little effort compared to the previous artisan period of the bronze age. Sure it would be cheap and nasty stuff but that was the point. If it breaks you can refashion it or make somthing else. Iron was truely revolutionary.
The whole iron sword / burial issue is really an illusion. It is a cultural phenomenon with its routes in the bronze age idea of metal weapons being special and imbued with status. It's a cultural idea not a technological one.
Sure a really good iron sword is going to be very impressive and effective and thereby imbue status, but 100 quickly made iron swords knocked up from your old scrap and a few ploughs have a pretty impressive impact on your neigbours when needed, and then the archeological evidence will dissipate when they get turned back into agricultural tools. Hence in early iron age Britain we have lots of evidence of warfare using slashing weapons but not as many swords as you might imagine.
A viking experimental archeologist I met once, made a pretty good case for a small bit of mail being useful as a kitchen scourer. Seems unlikely given the man hours but somtimes cooking is more important than killing people.
Plus iron is an ever growing resource as more and more iron ore is turned into iron through increasingly efficient methods. Everyone in England (and probably across Europe) will be familliar with the sight of ghost railings where iron has been sawn off just above the ground for use in warfare. Once it's in metal form it's very easy to turn into anything you need, and it's not easily destroyed.
So now look at Glorantha, it doesn't look like the Iron Age. Even the big empires don't see iron as a cheap and transformable metal. It's rare and used for very specific things. It looks like a super bronze age. With specialist artisans fashioning weapons from unusual metals.
Other technologies vary also of course, but I believe the existence of magic to be a bit of a red herring, that's analogous to RW magic at the small scale, and on a large scale it is too conservative to act like technology. It is it's own thing, and again defies real world analogy. And when large scale magic does try and get innovative bad stuff happens again and again.
Jamie
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