The logistics of fantasy technology
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
- We are back from vacation and Nathan wanted to discuss his time at Hancock Shaker Village because it got him thinking about how fantasy tech works. We will talk a bit about the round hay barn, the water turbine and how pre-industrial societies handled common day-to-day life. What does this teach us about the world-building of your RPG?
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I love considering how to employ pre-industrial technologies in world building at various scales.
the problem with every atempt at magitech is it's creators tend to try to scince up the magic or magic up the science instead of just making the two work together as is. Science as hard rules and defined limits and magitech can't break that but magic can do pretty much what the writer needs it to and often does even in stricter universes. Put the two together to make some fantasy technology and you have devices that don't do the impossible instead doing the things we know are possible but can't yet achieve with tech alone. You open the device up and you can see how it works at a glance and it looks like it sould work but you can't explain how. This is the one true blend of magic and technology because the magic is still fantastical and the tech is still grounded in reality.
I think the Sequel Series of Avatar (Legend of Korra and the interquel stories of Aang) did this pretty well. In one of the Aang era comics how using control of Earth, Water and fire could be used for an industrial process if i recall it was processing metal ore or mining. Earth bendors move earth into the facility, water benders wash away the dirt and fire benders smelt the remaining ore if I recall. ...but because bending is specialized innate ability not shared in all of a population somebody comes up with a parallel factory line of easily trained non benders trained to do pretty much the same thing. and in Avatar the MAGIC is fantastical but limited...it's practitioners can only manipulate Fire, Earth, Water or Air...to build a RADIO or an internal combustion engine you need physics that we would understand in our world.
You guys totally forgot about wind power. Just for fun look up the 1,000+ year old Nashtifan windmills. Now imagine something like that powering blast furnaces and drop hammers like they did in ancient China, AND Ancient Greece(at least for the drop hammers). Or you can look up the old Dutch windmills that they used to pump the water out of the marshlands to make dry land out of it. Hey, you gotta do something when most of your country is below sea level right?
Or look up the Roman Barbegal watermill complex from the 2nd century, and again imagine something like that powering everything from smelters, blast furnaces and drop hammers, to lumber mills and looms BEFORE going on to provide fresh water to a city and then eventually to irrigate the surrounding farmlands. Puts a whole new perspective on the Aqueducts. Now they seem more like ancient power lines...
One cool thing nobody ever mentions though, is transportation. Since we`re looking at fantasy worlds, look up the Last Oasis trailer here on UA-cam. Then look up the Theo Jansen Strandbeest that these are based on. Now in your fantasy setting, are ships limited to water? Why?
One thing tgat is iften forgotten is that the industrial revolution started with water power, not steam power.
The bit on period lighting is incorrect.
While this is arguably semantics, candles were not the standard for lighting in period; that was rushlights, which were dried reeds (often rushes) dipped in some kind of fat (usually tallow). Theh were far smaller and more flexible than candles and generally last somewhere from 2-10 minutes, depending on the size and quality. Candles (which use a far more processed wick, more like a rope) were far more expensive.
Candles ran a pretty sizeable range in quality. Most candles used tallow, which is smokey and produces a moderate to strong unpleasant odor and tends to gunk up the ceilings. Beeswax was far cleaner and more pleasant, though several times the cost, and thus was largely used only by gentry/aristocracy and clergy or later on, the bourgeoisie.
Torches were more expensive than either as they burned through more material faster. The reason they were sometimes used is light levels; rushlights and candles produce very little light, all things considered. The bigger and stronger the flame, generally, the bigger the light output. This gets extended to devices not often depicted in pop-culture, such as 4-5-foot, several-inch-thick cylinders of flammable material that were used for instances like nighttime feasts and balls.
I would recommend a candle lantern over and oil lamp for dungeons. Oil is much easier to compromise with lots of harsh, jostling movements as it is easily spilled, thus the fuel is easily lost and the flame easily extinguished. Carrying additional candles is far more forgiving than additional oil. And you definitely want a lantern, not a lamp, as tiny flames (more fuel-efficient) are very vulnerable to air movement.
Whether conventional lights would be abandoned is very setting-dependent. Conventional flame-based lighting would remain dominant anywhere mages or items are not common enough to cheaply replace them. While _Light_ is a cantrip in modern D&D, spellcasters with access to it are a pretty small portion of the population in most settings and magical items are usually cost-prohibitive to use them at-scale for most of the population.
You guys didn’t really talk about the topic in the title of the video