The Effect of Health

Coincidentally, I wrote something about health and then I got sick.  There was no connection.  Coming up for air, however, I feel like I can write something.  After all, it has been three days.

With my last post, and its discussion of social health and Foucault philosophy, I may have given the impression that I care the relationship between the nature of authoritarianism to restrain population.  That was not my intent.

All I want is to provide a framework for a party, and no other entity, to viscerally identify the difference between one level of health (or happiness and culture) and another, based on a scale that can be effectively applied from region to region, or even hex to hex.

Here we have the party moving through the world, exploring as they please, disembarking from a ship into a town and realizing, hm, this is perhaps not the best place to be.  Happiness is clearly at a low, health is likewise, and there's every reason to feel legitimately concerned about their welfare.  But how exactly are the players to be made aware of it?

We can say, "Okay, the level of health is minus 3, so you better watch yourselves when you drink the water" ... which would frankly be the worst way to DM anything, though we grew up with games where we were told proudly, "The culture has a tech level of 7!"

We should rather say, "When I say that the docks and waterfront alleys are filled with wharf rats, I'm not referring to rodents ..."

We can talk about the relative maintenance of the streets and buildings, the glowering faces of the locals, the multi-colored sludge floating in the water next to the quay, the insects that have to be dug out of the served ale, the dog carcass that been thrown on a heap of other garbage back of the warehouse, the number of teeth in the prostitute's mouth that just propositioned the party and so on, but that doesn't measure the problem, does it?  How do we make the party understand that one fly in one ale might be a place we can tolerate for a few days, while the ale actually tasting slightly of blood could be a reason we should leave town right now ... assuming, of course, that little things like that worry us.

I can figure out quite easily how to establish a health rating from the local development of technologies and social structure ... what I haven't figured out yet is how to match that rating with a detailed description, or game effect.

Which is the only thing about the subject that interests me.

Health and the Public Expectation

The infrastructure, trade and development system continues, but slowly.  Just now I'm contemplating the details of how health and the lack of it will fit into the structure, and finding that it is devilishly hard to find meaningful documentation on the negative factors that arise from an unhealthy culture.  Basically, I'd like to understand what metrics can be used to define an ailing, sick culture ... but no one wants to talk about that.

This is a "positivity" problem that I often encounter on the internet.  Look up "poor health effects on society" and we're met with articles on how economic and political structures sustain poverty, marginalize groups, cause poor conditions and overcrowding ... with a definite slant on "what problems need to be fixed to make this stop happening."  A practical definition of what the poor conditions are, or how they are created, or how specific degrees of overcrowding cause specific results, these things are not discussed.  The agenda is very definitely not to measure the causes ~ the only people who care about the problem are NGOs with the goal of raising money ... and that takes a positive perspective.  We will stop this horrible stuff from happening. Do not look too closely at the horrible stuff.

Now, images and anecdotal evidence can be found in abundance.  We're replete with film of poor people picking over garbage piles to find enough useful material to preserve their lives for one more day; but the metrics are lacking.  We have no numbers.  Numbers do not spawn guilt-inspired donations.

For most game purposes, a scale can be created without having to be expressly concerned with what the scale means.  Civilization simply slows a settlement's production when unhealthiness occurs, speeding it up again when general health is improved by cleaning up the land, collecting specific resources or building a market or hospital.  This makes sense.  A market brings in a wider variety of food, that improves nutrition and the people are more productive.

For my purposes, however, I need to sketch the difference it makes when this town is 1 point less healthy than that town ~ not in a way that affects overall production of the town, which would be useless for a role-playing game, but in a way that will address the players' adventuring.

Most will call out at once that health equals disease ... and that an unhealthy town will be more diseased than a healthy town, meaning that the players should hesitate before drinking the water or eating at the local inn. True enough.  But that thought does little more than imply a die roll to see if the water is bad, which is adjusted depending on the town's health.  Which, admittedly, is as far as most RPG designing goes.

But it is boring.  "Oh, we're not diseased?  Then who gives a fuck?"

We want more than the mere chance the players might get sick.  We want a feel for the environment, something that encourages dismay when it turns out the place is sour and that encourages relief and happiness when the town is described as cheerfully safe.  For that, we need to ask some questions:

Can the players actually tell if a town in unhealthy or not?  How so?  Would it be the presence of infrastructures that prove a town is healthy (granaries, barays, running water, a market) or would it be the appearance of those infrastructures (crumbling stone, fetid water in the well, filthy streets) that tips the player's hand?  How heavy handed should those appearances be?  What is the baseline for "filthy" in a dark age, medieval or early renaissance world?  On some level, wouldn't everything be, by our standards, unclean?

I'm trying to get the measure of this.  Public health is more than just a lack of disease ~ quality of life matters, from a people having to eat rice every day to the amount of solid waste piling up at the end of every alley way.  Indulgent behaviour, from drunkedness to sexual vice, has its own public cost ... as well as dangerous delusions shared by a population, such as fear of spirits and the need to burn teenage women as witches.

Mental health is an important factor ~ and a very difficult one to impose on player characters, who for one thing come from a present day where vice and mental illness are encountered daily, in both our ordinary lives and through the media.  How much harder is it to explain to a player that their character, having grown up in the woods of Norway, isn't really all that comfortable with the wantonness of 17th century dockside London. On the whole, we can't; we're not anxious to tell the players how to think, and it wouldn't work anyway.  They're just not able, with the present mindset, to "get it."

Creating a formula for health that impresses itself upon the player and not the world (which is the hardest lesson that worldbuilders must face, since it is not the world that we actually care about) needs, as ever, some focus that doesn't depend upon the players' ability to conceive or absorb the verbal/visual impression of the town's appearance.  Plans for such rules always end in failure, since they ignore the intensive subjectivity of humans ... gawd knows why that's never taken into account.  No, no, the world has to be specifically constructed, so that options are clearly dictated at a high or low level of health that are not available elsewhere.

And like with culture, where a high level of culture increases the control on the population, I'm faced with a similar distinction where it comes to health, in the form of "biopower."

I'm familiar with Michel Foucault ... rarely has a mid-20th century academician managed to get quite so far up his own ass, even for a French philosopher.  But I find I have to take the life preserver that he throws in this unpleasant sea.  From wikipedia:

"...biopower is a technology of power for managing humans in large groups; the distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It refers to the control of human bodies through an anatomo-politics of the human body and biopolitics of the population through societal Disciplinary institutions. ... Modern power, according to Foucault's analysis, becomes encoded into social practices as well as human behavior as the human subject gradually acquiesces to subtle regulations and expectations of the social order. It is an integral feature and essential to the workings of—and makes possible—the emergence of the modern nation state, capitalism, etc.[5] Biopower is literally having power over bodies ..."

Effectively, the condition that is arrives with the health-saving grace of running water is the universal expection that everyone will wash their hands and their bodies.  The condition that arrives with the market is that the quality of goods will be regulated and controlled ... and it is this social policy, and not just the presence of the improvement or technology, that imposes the improved health of the community.  As culture demands a certain attitude from the player, health demands a certain level of grooming and social responsibility ... and where that social responsibility is evidently lacking in the population, at the point where the players can be as filthy as they like without anyone particularly caring, it is time to worry.

I shall, obviously, continue to think about this.  But I find it odd that each step forward seems to employ a consistent motif that when things get better, it is necessarily freedom that suffers.

A Development System

Since conceiving of a technology-based system in 2015, making that idea manifest has been a considerable trial.  At the beginning, I managed to get through the bare bones of the structure, up to tech 18, very lightly touching on many ideas and concepts with the inconsistency of an idea newly formed.  Since, I've tried twice to create a structure that would enable me to explain the system in greater depth ~ once on the wiki, and once on the blog.  On both occasions, I did not get very far.  It turns out that the idea is so damn complicated I can hardly keep it all in my head at the same time, meaning that it quickly spins out of control. I end up being uncertain of what I'm trying to describe and from there the frame collapses.

I can see what it is supposed to do, but not precisely how to design it.  That is not unusual; very often we get ideas before we have a design ideal in place.  The only thing to do it bang our heads against it until the problem is solved.  As such, I'm trying a 3rd time ~ only this time, unlike before, I'm working on the problem privately.  I'm not posting the work in process, as I prefer to do.  I want to try to get some of it in shape before I expose the work.

Not all, no.  If I tried all, I would still be at this a year from now and no feedback.  But I will try to get at least twice as far as I have in the past.  I'm shooting to complete tech-9.

In the meantime, I'm going to tackle the other bugbear.  It kept coming up with the original idea and it came up again when I wrote the "world from scratch" post.  Readers just don't understand what I mean by "tech level" ~ and this is something I'd like to work out before presenting more hard material on these lines.

Perhaps "tech" has been the wrong word from the beginning.  I used the word because of ideas I took from the game Civilization IV, but that was probably a mistake.  As I think of it, my first experience with "technology" as part of an RPG was Traveller.  Technologies were rated from primitive to super-tech ... based, I think, on television science fiction of the '60s and '70s.  When Captain Kirk ended up on the Roman planet, the people there hadn't moved past technology of the 1960s because they hadn't invented it.  So, in traveller, if a tech level described a 20th century world, that intended a world frozen at that point in time.

So people wonder, when I say "tech level," how two regions with vastly different tech levels can possibly co-exist side-by-side, having nothing more than a river or perhaps a high mountain range dividing them.  How can it be possible that Paris is tech-15 but central France, just three days carriage ride away, is tech-11?

I think the word "tech" might be the problem here.  Let me try a different word: development.  Paris is more developed than provinces in central France that are three days away.  Just as a town of 8,000 people doesn't have a philharmonic, doesn't boast a major league baseball team and doesn't have a decent restaurant serving Thai food.  It isn't that that the people of Pleasantville don't know what these things are, or that they don't know how to build a huge football stadium ... it's just that there isn't much point, because there aren't enough people in Pleasantville and the surrounding counties to make that worth while.

Now, Pleasantville might only be twenty-five miles from Omaha; and Omaha might only be 7 hours drive from Chicago, but these are very different kinds of places.  Fifty years ago, before advancements in media and information technology, those differences were even more pronounced.  A hundred and fifty years ago, before cars and good roads, twenty-five miles was a much longer distance than now.  And 350 years ago, when my world takes place, there are many people who would never travel more than 25 miles in their whole life.  And they might never, ever, speak to someone from as far away as Chicago.

Which didn't exist in 1650, but you get my point.

Imagine that you come from a part of the world that is so backward it has no arrangements for making metal axes.  This isn't out of the question.  We could point to places like this as late as 1980, and quite easily. There are some still like this ... and there were certainly a lot more like this in 1850, 1750 and 1650. Forging metal is not a guaranteed community presence any more than a movie theatre ~ which many towns in Canada and America cannot boast.  We should be able to imagine a part of the world where the making of a metal axe is just not a thing.

This doesn't mean the locals don't know about metal axes!  Sure they know about them.  But it's hard to have them, at least for very long, because metal axes don't last.  Oh, sure, we might have one for awhile, but sooner or later the blade will dull, or the 17th century metal will corrode or even fracture after hitting one too many solid trees.  And then what are we going to do?  We can't just go get another one.  We're hundreds of miles from the nearest axe shop.

Yes, we might get together a few hundred nuggets of copper out of yon river, over time, and trade for an axe ... but what are the chances that a trader, with axes, is going to turn up here just as our axe breaks?  Oh, sure, the trader was here a month ago, but the axe was fine then.  Isn't it always the way?  No trader, no axe.  Shit.

The reliable solution is to get along without metal axes.  No worries about how sharp the blade is, no wading in cold river water hoping to find a flake of copper, no problems at all except flaking a good old-fashioned, reliable flint axe when its needed.  It's not like we're working hard on an industrial lifestyle out here: we raise a few pigs, we raise a few crops ... what are we really going to use that metal axe for, anyway?

Okay, a fence or two ... and it helps us cut wands for mud-and-daub structure building, and it's not a bad thing to split open the skull of an orc raider, when that comes up.  But it's not like a good stone axe isn't also practical in such things.

Truth is, where it comes to development, if you don't actually have the means to make the technology, actually having the technology isn't that useful.  Ask yourself: if all the computer stores ceased to make parts, for whatever reason, even if you still had power, how long would your computer or your phone last? Technology is a trap.  It makes the product, sure ~ but it also demands that the product keep being made, or else it ceases to sustain itself ... or the lifestyle everyone at this tech level enjoys.

There's a certain ease that less technology produces, where that heightened technology isn't actually needed. The people in central France in the 17th century are rustic in attitude because, unlike the elite hoi polloi of Paris, they haven't got time to read papers at the coffee shops, arguing about the latest play by Moliere. There are cows to be milked come five a.m. and there's no money for candles to stay up half the night writing plays.  If we're less developed out here in the fields of Bourbon or Berry, its only because that's the practical way to live.  Anyone actually burning a candle after nightfall is probably a local baron ~ who is probably writing a letter to someone in Paris about how glad they are that they're on their way back there in a few days.

So think of it as a development system ... describing how different parts of the world move at a different pace, because it makes sense in those parts to live differently.  My goal is to describe the difference, to measure it, so that while the Duchy of Burgundy is fairly backward at dev-11, at least it isn't the awful backwardness of Stavanger, Norway, at dev-9.

Defining Culture and Other Things

Five years ago, I wrote a series of posts using the game Civilization IV to describe a methodology for creating micro-infrastructure for the game world.  I wrote posts about food, production, workers and various elements hit upon by the Civ IV makers ... and admitted that other elements, like culture and health, were "problems" that I hadn't solved.

Some problems take time.

I have occasionally struggled with connecting my trade system to other systems that I've proposed, such as the infrastructure system or the more recent tech system.  I have made three attempts on this blog since 2015 to express the tech system as clearly as I can, but it turns out I can't even clearly explain it to myself.  It is a headache of the first order, no doubt about it.  In any case, those "never-too-much-economics" posts are part and parcel of the same problem.

In a sense, with far, far less relevance to the universe than anything Einstein did, I'm struggling right now to come up with a "unified world theory" that would pull these disparate parts of my rules together into a cohesive whole.  I'd like to write a little about that, then write a little about what "culture" might mean in a D&D context.

Here is my thinking, regarding the pulling of these systems together.  The trade system designates the existence of produced goods, tied to regions.  The infrastructure system breaks down a region into smaller and smaller bites, so that we can know the amount of buildings, roads, supplies or production a specific hex has, as small as we wish to go (though I limit my production measure to 6-mile hexes, it could go deeper). The infrastructure, then, could be used as a means to determine the exact points of origin for trade goods, from fish to iron mining to the making of clothing.

The infrastructure also includes a measuring system for available food, labor ("hammers") and wealth ("coins"), stolen from Civ IV.  This measuring system might be directly affected by the trade system, so that if a town produced, according to the trade system, "cheese," then the food supply in that specific town, in a given type of infrastructure hex (remember all those "groups" posts, from 2011?), could be increased because we have a trade reference from that town.

Okay, stay with me here.  This gets complicated.

If we add in the proposed tech system, then we know that a specific level of tech produces an availability of building types: granaries, harbors, theatres, forges, etcetera.  These buildings, then, could also be fit into the infrastructure framework, so that a Type-I hex, with a settlement in it, would mean that the specific building was present, IF the tech were sufficient and IF the circumstances (near the water, say) were right. Furthermore, if we want to steal further from Civ IV, then the improvements that arise from that game could be detemined, in part, by the trade system (which indicates that wheat fields or coffee plantations, whatever) are definitely present in the region's hexes, and in part by the tech system itself, which indicates roads, monuments, city walls, waterwheels and so on.

Those improvements and buildings, indicated by the tech and the trade system, then augment the infrastructure still further, telling us how much additional labor a waterwheel adds, or how much additional food a windmill adds, or how much additional wealth a market adds ~ adjusted according to a long-standing system that has already proven itself.

Places with higher tech will have universities, customs houses and banks, while places with lower tech will not.  These things, in their own way, will affect not only the description of the region and city, but actual details regarding how the city is structured and how that affects what the players want to do.

Part of that means coming up with a meaning for culture.  It's too important to skip over, as the creation of culture by a civilization, particularly as it advances, should be there to define everything about the player's experience as they walk down a street in Paris as opposed to a street in Stavanger.  That has to be measured: and the presence of a measure for culture taken from Civ IV is too damn enticing to ignore.  We have all these marvelous figures to tell us how much culture a specific place creates, due to the presence of its buildings, products, tech and so on ... all that is needed is a meaningful description for what this "culture" actually means concretely.

Not an easy fix.  I've been climbing over Wikipedia for several days, following one link to the next, from culture to social norms to meta-ethics, looking for something that defines the difference between how people with high culture think vs. what people with low culture think.

Fundamentally, humans are ruled by a reward system, which itself is buried in the physical mesolimbic pathways in our brains, something we can't do anything about.  As a species, we are driven towards pleasure and away from fear ... so that culturally, as we've advanced, we've done our best to build systems that contain fear while providing as much pleasure as possible.

Where pleasure is provided only to a few, the system eventually collapses under violence perpetrated by the many, whereupon it is either replaced by a similar system that temporarily provides pleasure for the powerful, or a better system that provides pleasure for a larger proportion of the population.  See, the key to the balance isn't to eliminate misery, it is to reduce the number of miserable persons to a level that they can't meaningfully threaten the number of persons who are living with a tolerable level of pleasure plus those that are living with a lot of pleasure.

This is the "bread and circuses" equation, that says that if we provide nominal pleasure to the miserable, in the form of something that distracts them a little while, they will concentrate on their small amount of pleasure long enough that they won't feel the need to rise up and kill all of us who are enjoying massive amounts of pleasure all the time.

Therefore, I think I've hit upon the fundamental definition of "culture" in the measurable sense is that it establishes the amount of social control in the region.  More coliseums, more theatres, more religion, more of anything that is properly defined by the Civ IV structure, less random misery and street-chaos by the population.  We don't need to make the population happy, just complacent, rewarding them with small amounts of pleasure for obeying the law, paying their taxes, fulfilling their duty by fighting for the monarch, turning in anyone conspiring against the state and resisting any desire to change their lot in life.

Thus, the higher the amount of culture, the more viciously and coldly will come down the deadly hand of social control on the hapless player character who stupidly flaunts the law, supposing that everyone here will find it "cool" or "edgy" to speak ill of Queen Juliana the VII.  That may play out in the sticks, where people are miserable, but not here in this Type-I, Tech-13 city where we all LOVE her.  In fact, I don't think we will even give you a chance to apologize.

That doesn't give me an incremental scale, not yet ... but it does provide a framework from which I might evolve an incremental scale, given time.

Anyway, this is what I'm working on right now.  It is bound to spawn all kinds of interesting posts.

Tech Progression

As an addendum to my previous post.  Here is my latest effort to simplify the progression in cultural entities (services, features, social forms and goods) from tech-5 to tech-7 . . . to give information that can be gained somewhat at a glance:

What a Tech Level IS

For those who are tired of hearing about tech tables, I apologize.

At present, I find myself in difficulty.  I'm organizing my thoughts with outlining further characteristics of a tech-6 culture, specifically the presence of mines, minimal transport and cart-roads, the presence of artisan shops, connections with the world market, ending with governance and minimal religious authority.  The difficulty in describing these things are not in the things themselves: we can easily understand how a brewer's establishment might work and how we wouldn't expect to see something like that except in a well-built up community.

The problem lies in determining what a tech-6 culture isn't ~ because my mind, like anyone else's, will automatically seek to assign the next logical thing, be it an accessory, structure or way of doing things, because this is our experience.

Allow an example.  Let start with the head of a large village, a chieftain.  He (or she) has a close-knit association with his family and reliable associates, say eight extended families that number about fifty persons within a village of 400.  Now, where do they live?

If we're thinking a primitively agricultural community, like that of 16th century Hawaii or perhaps 8th century Vikings, we immediately think of a long-house.  This is certainly a very primitive variety of village feature: a long, narrow, single-room structure built by multiple cultures in different parts of the world, because it provided protection and, for some, status.

It is, however, a tech-7 building, not one found in tech-6.

Now how do I know that?  Well, I am founding this system on guidelines that were established by the tech system in the game Civilization: and in that game, the "dun" ~ a Celtic alternative in the game for walls ~ comes available at the level of masonry.  Masonry is not one of the techs that I mentioned as being available at tech-6 . . . it isn't available until tech-7.

I am making the association between duns and longhouses because both indicate a technical advancement in protection . . . and because I argue that protection, or defense, is itself a step forward.  At some point in human habitation we did develop agriculture and animal husbandry without also having developed the recognition that even the most primitive form of defensive housing would be necessary.  Thus, for tech-6, we have the first advancement, we don't have the later.

That is damn hard to get my head around, I will admit.  I find myself having to step back and step back again and again, trying to get a firm and distinct handle on just what exactly tech-6 is as opposed to tech-7 ~ and hell, I'm only just starting.  If the jump between these two is this difficult, how hard is it going to be to nail down the difference between tech 10 and tech 11?

And now here is the most frustrating part of my dilemma.  I'm trying to create a rational table that can be seen at a glance that will explain, in pure and simple terms, what a tech level IS.  So far, I haven't found a way to do that.

I'll explain briefly how I'm building up notes.  I start by going through the Civilization (Beyond the Sword) effects, buildings and units to collect details on what comes available with what technology.  I then list these in terms of physical changes that will be made to the environment and culture: structures, institutions and production.  I assign whether these are connected to coins, food or hammers, then how much of each of those is needed to mean that in that hex, that structure, et al, is present.  Finally, I try to create a list of those things that would be associated with the structure, institution and production that helps define the technology number that we're at.  Here are my notes for tech-7:

All of these things are available at tech-7 but not at tech-6.  And while the table is easily read and considered in a minute or so, it isn't immediately comprehensible what this all means.  That, I have found, is disturbingly difficult to establish with simplicity.

I have made a number of attempts now to write out a given tech level in terms of what it means and what sort of culture/experience it would represent for the players ~ and it always winds up being an exhausting description of detail that ends up being wholly useless for game purposes, as I can't sit and read four thousand words and compress it effectively enough to enable proper game play.  I find myself forgetting things and wandering into the wrong tech without thinking about it, because habit tells me that if there is a primitive society it ought to have a long-house.  Except that for about 8000 years of human history, primitive agricultural societies didn't have them.

So, I'm stumped.  The "world from scratch" posts were intended to get a handle on this ~ and I'm going to continue to try to get a handle on it, and I'm going to write those posts.  But I can see this is wrestling a mental tiger; so far, I feel more like the problem is mauling me than I am getting it chained up and domesticated.

P.S.

The "super-high" column in the table above is a reference to deciding if a hex has a great lighthouse or an aqueduct based not just on the coins or hammers of a given hex, but that hex + those hexes surrounding that hex.  I am still playing with different ways to make the 6-mile production hexes pay off.

A Separate Mindset

"The first prehistoric farmers of central Europe, the so-called Linearbandkeramik culture that arose slightly before 5000 B.C., were initially confined to soils light enough to be tilled by means of hand-held digging sticks.  Only over a thousand years later, with the introduction of the ox-drawn plow, were those farmers able to extend their cultivation to a much wider range of heavy soils and tough sods.  Similarly, Native American farmers of the North American Great Plains grew crops in the river valleys, but farming of the tough sods on the extensive uplands had to await 19th century Europeans and their animal-drawn plows."

- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies

If the reader has spent any time reading material regarding the rise of civilization and the development of human technology and culture, the above quote will not stick out.  The sentiments expressed by Diamond are those that can be read in hundreds upon hundreds of other sources.  They are not wrong.  That is precisely the change that increased the food supplies of both Europe and North America, as well as many other familiar cultures that can be found around the world.

The paragraph jumped out at me last week, however, in light of the continuing controversy I seem to be having about the explanation of my tech level proposal.  If I may express the argument some have made, it would seem obvious that, once the technique could be intellectually shared, the food supply of every region would be increased as the ox-drawn plough was introduced.  Why would anyone continue to plough with hand-digging sticks once the ox had been domesticated?

Diamond is making an assumption in the above; he knows he's making the assumption and it is no problem for him, because the argument he makes is not challenged by the assumption.  That assumption is that heavy soils and tough sods exist in the area where ox-drawn ploughs are introduced.

That is by no means a guarantee.  There are many places around the world where such soils don't exist, where hand-digging sticks are sufficient.  It is true that oxen will till much more soil than hand-digging sticks, but many places in the world do not have enough tillable soil to make the introduction of oxen an efficient addition.  Oxen eat.  Some parts of the world can't produce enough food for both the humans in the region and oxen, so if cows exist at all they are not the sort that are made into working animals.  A working cow gives less milk and far less meat, and because it must be fed in and around the place where it works, it must be fed with food that is produced on the local soils.  On the other hand, cows that are not used as working animals can be taken far afield, to eat natural grass on lands that cannot be tilled at all, since they are composed of too much stone.

If the habit of using a cow to till isn't pursued, then the region will possess no residents who know how to employ a cow as a working animal.  Do you know? You don't, because you don't need to know.  An impoverished, agriculturally-stunted environment doesn't have that knowledge either, not because it doesn't exist, or because it isn't known about, but because it isn't needed.  There are no parents to teach the technology to their children, so for all intents and purposes, the region continues to exist in a technologically backward state.  It is irrelevant what technology exists elsewhere.

Far too often, we presume that different parts of the world advanced at different rates because the knowledge was lacking.  To some degree, this works for parts of the New World prior to the 16th century . . . but how does it explain the continued backward cultures of Persia, North Africa, even Lapland and Pictish Scotland up until the 1400s?  People elsewhere in the world knew how to read ~ why didn't a typical Icelandic herdsman?

Well, what good would it have done him?  It required all of his daily labor, in those hours when light was available, to accomplish the tasks that would keep him and his community alive.  When he was done, it was dark.  He could not afford candles ~ what a waste that would have been.  It requires a tremendously intricate commercial and civilized culture to enable a very small number of persons to possess the capital to waste on candles for no other purpose than to read or otherwise occupy themselves at night.  The typical resident of Iceland did not have access to that culture until the early 20th century.  No resident of Iceland possessed it in the 15th.  That is why Iceland had an oral storytelling tradition.

This notion that knowledge overwrites everything about an existing culture's technology and status is a 20th century one.  We cannot free ourselves consciously from it because it represents so much of our personal identity and cognitive experience.  We see something new and we have adapted to immediately embrace it ~ because everything that we see can be embraced, implemented into our lives and made useful.  This has not been true through the majority of human history; something demonstrably true from the accounts written by hundreds of travellers into foreign places: Conti, Przhevalsky, Leo Africanus, Marco Polo, even Lewis & Clark, if an American example is needed.  In a world without mass communication or easy travel, a distance of a hundred miles must be, for most people, as far as a trip to the moon.  Most people did not possess enough food at any given time in their lives that would enable them to walk that far and back again.

That is hard to get our heads around, when we get on a flight in the morning to attend a funeral 500 miles away, then to get on another flight afterwards to be home in time for dinner.  To us, every farmer's field is the same, every collection of livestock is the same, every weapon is the same ~ and if there isn't iron to be mined in the area where swords might be made, obviously it would be imported, right?

But am I right?  What would Ooredoo, my most recent tech-6 contribution, do with a lot of swords?  To be used against who?  Invaders who would come to seize . . . what, exactly?  And if the invaders took over, and demanded taxes from the residents, how would that actually change anything?  They pay taxes already.  If they spend their hard-earned food on swords, the swords would just be sitting in rooms, where they could not be eaten.  What good would that be?

We simply can't imagine a world without nationalism, without identifying ourselves according to our traditional belief systems, without getting angry because an outside country has done something inside our country.  But no one from before the 15th century would have cared about that. Nationalism is a very late cultural development.

I urge the reader to try to think as a medieval or renaissance individual would have felt, when faced with technologies that did not substantially improve their lives, or were impractical for reasons such as available resources or social interest.  Things were not always the way they are today.

WfS ~ Ooredoo and Tech-6

At last, I'm ready to start forward again.  I'm going to be introducing a new region, Pangaran, that is tech-6. The first step is to identify Pangaran's relationship with Jawanda, as we want our world to fit together. Therefore, we start with this map:

Depicted: 18-mile hexes

I have reduced the scale of the above map to 18 miles per hex, in order to create a 90-mile separation between Ooredoo, an island at the edge of Pangaran, and Jawanda.  Thus the island is marginally close enough for a dangerous journey in a fishing boat, which we presume our party of fighters will try to accomplish, bringing them to this new place.

[as an aside, I have made the decision not to attach intelligence to tech levels after all.  I know this is something I discussed back with the first implementation of the system, but after all this is a learning experience.  I know some will miss this note, it was meant to be included in the last post, but I'm remembering to add it now]

I've made only a rough drawing of Ooredoo above.  I have a more detailed version in 6-mile hexes to present; I could have updated the map above with the map below, but I felt at this point it was a detail that wasn't really necessary.  The important point here is the distance between the two places.

Here is a 6-mile hex map of Ooredoo:

Depicted: 6-mile hexes

My goal here is to depict familiar hex-types as they manifest around tech-6.  The deserts have become dry, unproductive rifts and sinks, which still offer the potential of meeting monsters in the hills and back country, but which have little influence on the island's infrastructure apart from inconvenience.

I have also divided the island into two terrains.  On the west, a flat watered plain, with a base supply of 2 food.  Should I start describing that as '11' food? To emphasize I'm referring to the number of 1s in the expression and NOT the number of food?  This seems to be really confusing some people.

On the east, we have a dry hill-plain, hardly better than the best lands in the previous desert culture, with 1 food and 1 hammer per hex.  The type-7 hex around Sayur has precisely the same productivity that Ai had in Jawanda (our starting hex).

But does it?  Unlike Ai, Sayur produces cereals, vegetables and at least one type of livestock: goats, sheep or swine.  Reindeer is pretty much out, as this is still close to the tropics.  See the link for where I'm getting this from.  We can further identify these things, if we want, by defining cereals as maize, vegetables as sweet potatoes and even a specific kind of goat, sheep or swine ~ but the point is that the small amount of food production in Sayur comes from these things and NOT from hunting and gathering.

How is this different?  Well, archery is now a skill set that the locals have, so the population is likely to defend itself with bows rather than spears.  If attacked, an inhabitant of Sayur will likely run away, then return later with bow and try to chop the party down one by one from a distance.  This is a new mind-set.

As well, Pangaran in general has no religion.  They've abandoned mysticism, so they are largely a pragmatic sort, much like one would expect of frontier settlers.  These are hardened, rugged individualists, living more in families than in clans, as there is less need to depend on others in order to eat.  We defend better and our food supply is more secure and diversified, so we can afford to be in it for our personal gain.

Moving on to the type-6 hex surrounding Qimo and Raya Pos, we have again the same relationship as Bodo and Cai in Jawanda . . . except that now the increase in food supply creates the existence of fruit trees, which will be scattered along the heights above the sea, where they can catch the morning dew.  Both the cereals in Sayur and the fruit in Qimo enables fermentation, so drinking now becomes a thing to do.  Drinking brings the option of intoxication as well as other social problems.  Qimo does remain a transshipment point, like Eom and Guba before it, but now it has more interesting things to ship.

Turning to the other end of the island, the type-6 and better hexes produce a great deal of food: 111 food, so that instead of merely a large settlement, we have made villages of Tangarang, Umar and Vekasi.  The latter two of these, however, lack hammers altogether.  Obviously, this means the table I posted earlier today and which I have already linked with this post will need an adjustment (learning process), as these can't be "nomadic hunting and gathering" cultures.  I will adjust "subsistence farming" from 1 hammer to 0 hammers, fixing that hole.

The lack of hammers would indicate no animals, but we still have plenty of cereals, vegetables and fruits to supply a food source.  The population of Umar and Vekasi, both of which produce coins, is at least able to exchange food for bare necessities, such as the most simple of weapons, skins and the occasional maintenance of objects they have to pay to replace.  Life for these people is very primitive, but in a very different way that Jawanda: there are lots of people surrounding these two villages, 400-1000.  That's more than probably the whole region of Jawanda.

Tangarang is a little better off.  It has one hammer, gained from becoming type-5: but there is a lot of pressure put on that single hammer, so we can assume that a lot of extra goods must be brought in from outside to support the needs of all of West Ooredoo.  Still, none of these people are starving.  They are just living very simple lives.

For the time being, I think that covers it.  I'll make some rolls and determine that we have 1,301 persons in Ooredoo, in an area of about 12.3 hexes: about 105 persons per 6-mile hex.  This is much higher than the maximum should be for tech-6, which is around 49 per hex.  But Ooredoo is just a part of a larger region, so we can offset the density by adding additional hexes elsewhere.

I'll be taking a break from this for a bit, not producing another post tomorrow.  I have a general idea what to do next, but I want to contemplate that a bit, and see how this one plays.

Further Notes to Tech-5 and Some for Tech-6

I had meant to start on tech-6 today, but I have yet a small issue to manage first, to keep the reader in line with my thinking.  The gentle reader must please remember that I am creating this as I am going along ~ this felt like the best way to both work out the various elements of the tech-system and the world-building experience at the same time.  This way, the reader can progress with my interpretation, I can identify problems as they arise and are questioned, while at the same time a world can take shape slowly and steadily, showing that worlds can be made from the ground up in a fully rational manner.

In creating a table for tech-6 that would reflect the table I created for tech-5 in the last post, I found that it was clumsy and unworkable.  As such, I've rebuilt the tech-5 table so that it can match what I mean to do with tech-6.  And just so the reader doesn't feel that nothing has been added with this, I'll put up the tech-6 table also . . . and then begin on a map and design for the tech-6 region I plan to lay out.

Here is tech-5 again:

Instead of basing the indications for civilization based on the type of hex, I've instead chosen to base it on the amount of food, hammers and coins.  This is more logical, since different base terrains can radically change how much food and so on there is compared with the type of hex.  Readers who are ambitious can compare a type-7 hex on various parts of the recent Stavanger map with those on the recent Crimean map, where the base hexes are very different.

Now let's have a look at tech-6:

I won't go far into this: the reader can see at once that there are a great many more things to be found and used with a tech-6 culture.  As a reminder, I will point out that tech-6 adds agriculture, animal husbandry, archery, mining and the wheel to the mix.  I will probably need to update this table a bit in the future (I see I've forgotten roads), but I will post it again once I've gone through the process of outlaying the tech-6 region that goes with this.

Finally, I've left out a table indicating bonuses for hex-type.  Here it is:

This doesn't mention the +1 bonus coin for coasts or rivers (intermittent included), though not both. That is really a footnote, but an important one.

Good, that's fixed.  Let's get started.

Techs Living Side by Side

Each time that I make noises about regional tech-levels, I find myself facing the same bugbear: that the existence of a higher tech level will force a confrontation between one region and the next, for no other reason than the disparity between tech levels.  If we have swords, then we must attack the next region over that has only spears.  If we have the benefit of courthouses, organized religion and the alphabet, then we must immediately attack those regions that do not have these things.  This is an imperative . . . and there are many readers who find themselves asking, over and over, why wouldn't this happen?

What keeps the tech areas from bleeding into one another?  How do two different tech areas exist alongside each other, or trade with each other?  How does that work?

I'm quite sure that the reason this is a mystery is based upon the more dramatic instances of historical emigration.  Europeans encountered primitive peoples living in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and began a conquest that was greatly enabled by a superior technology.  So it is assumed that if we have a superior technology, we will certainly rush in and take land away from those who have an inferior technology, yes?

Sort of.  It is interesting to note that these indigent peoples who were eventually conquered were discovered three hundred years before most of the actual conquests took place.  For a hundred years, the Dutch, English and Portuguese existed as nothing more than outposts in Africa, India and the Far East, even though they had vastly superior weapons and social organization.  What they did not have were numbers.  Therefore, until the industrial revolution made mass production possible, it was more practical to trade with backward regions than to attempt conquest.  Most of the actual conquest of Africa and Asia did not begin until the early 19th century, post the Napoleonic wars.

There are exceptions, of course.  India was greatly occupied by Britain in the mid-18th century, but only with the aid and benefit of the local Rajahs, who saw their own way to power by supporting the British.  More than half the subcontinent was still under strict native control in the year 1800.  South America is a better example, as the Spanish began smashing apart the native regions almost at once ~ but then, these regions were greatly under-populated compared to Africa and Asia.  More to the point, South America had vast, unexploited resources, untapped by the natives, which served as an encouragement to conquest.  Most of the resources in Africa and Asia were already exploited.

The same can be said of the United States, which had a motivation to take away the lands of lower tech societies because those lands were of great, unexploited value.  Australia's conquest of the interior was quite different, given that most of the interior was uninhabitable and undesirable.  Thus, while the American natives were exterminated or pushed out as soon as the higher tech Europeans arrived, the Australian natives experienced a longer period of co-existence because they did not have anything the Australians were inclined to take ~ whatever the disparity in tech levels.

Those parts of the world that did not have meaningful resources of any kind were left virtually untouched until the 20th century.  Even though the British had gunboats, rifles and pistols, they did did not set out to exterminate the native Inuit in the 19th century because there was no reason to.  In fact, there are no examples of acquisition or massacres by Europeans of Inuit in northern Canada and Greenland, as there are in southern Canada.  Because the resources just aren't there.

As far as persons of different tech levels living side-by-side, I'm surprised that readers can't see the more obvious examples, those staring them right in the face.  The depressed regions of West Virginia and Kentucky have existed right alongside Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia for two hundred years . . . yet the disparity between services in Maryland and southeastern Pennsylvania and West Virginia are still pronounced.  Even the present day existence of computers and other technological innovations are sadly lacking in places like Tucker or Randolph counties, in the mountainous part of the state.  How is it that the "invasion" of tech industry and social progressiveness hasn't caused these places to universally adopt ideas like free abortion, embraced homosexuality or social liberalism?  Why are the hospitals of depressed areas not of a quality of hospitals in New York or San Francisco?  How is it that these places of greatly different tech-level co-exist side by side without one bleeding into another?

If we remove the communication of instruments like the internet, television, radio and the telephone, taking us back to the 1870s, how much more backward is West Virginia compared with Washington?  How is it that most people living in Washington city can read but most in Huntington West Virginia cannot?  How can universities exist in Boston and New York but there are no great Universities in Morgantown or Charleston?  And if we go back another century, to the time before the revolutionary war, how is it that there are Europeans living in Bucks County in Pennsylvania but there are none living in the Appalachians?  How is it that these Europeans exist side-by-side with the vastly inferior tech people of the interior?

With the last post, I was asked about foreigners arriving in the fictional Jawanda interested in trading for slaves.  I would ask in response, why would they go there?  I've described the total population of the represented Jawanda being about 700 persons, scattered over an area the size of Rhode Island (about a fifth of Wales).  How rational is that?  It costs money to build boats and fund soldiers to go get slaves.  Would it not make more sense to bypass Jawanda and go to another place with more food production and more people?  There are no accounts of Europeans landing on Greenland's shores and seizing Inuit to be slaves on plantations in America.  Certainly, it would have been easy to conquer the Inuit.  Why did they not do so?

There are also parts of Africa ~ the depressed coastlines of Mauritania and Rio de Oro ~ that waited until the 19th century to be "conquered" by Europeans.  Actually, the Europeans just showed up, pointed guns and were allowed to do whatever they wanted.  But it took four centuries after the discovery of these lands for outsiders to bother.  Until then, Rio de Oro was nominally under the authority of Morocco.  And how did they interact with their overlords?  They paid tribute in the shape of salt, skins and gums, in exchange for food.  Just as I've described.  And they did so for centuries, without the higher tech Morocco culture bleeding into Rio de Oro and Mauritania to any extent at all.

Because there were no meaningful resources!  This is what readers just cannot understand.  You cannot propose a motivation to conquest if there is nothing of value to take from the conquered region.  Do you imagine that Europeans want to live the hard, unforgiving life I've described as the existence of Ai, Bodo or Cai, in the interior of Jawanda?  Have we not already learned that white people in America do not want to take the jobs that illegal Mexicans are willing to perform?

Even if we handed Jawanda over to a higher tech region, lock, stock and barrel (though none of these things exist in Jawanda), the region would be abandoned within a year and the natives would move right back in.  The higher tech skills of Europeans did not enable Jamestown, Port Royal or any of the other failed first colonial attempts on the American seaboard to survive ~ because Europeans just weren't strong enough or willing enough to survive in that kind of harsh, untouched wilderness.  It took time and effort to remake even a golden land like America into a comfortable place to live: this still hasn't been done with the parts of the world that I am describing as tech-5.

This is what readers just won't get.  These tech levels do not exist arbitrarily.  They exist because the region itself, without the modern measure of information exchange, won't support a better tech level.  Even if a better tech level is right next door.

Non-Fighter Training and More

The following is an answer to Vlad Malkav's three questions in the previous post.  Starting with the training of non-fighter characters.

I'll be addressing the matter from the original starting-age tables in the DMG, back from 1977.  I don't know what other age tables exist or what numbers they give, but I have always felt the original numbers were well designed and rational, for the classes they were supposed to represent, at least as far as humans are concerned.  I treat every races' lifespan as the same as humans, as this makes sense for history in my game. I don't need any elves around talking about their personal friendship with Julius Caesar.

A fighter starts with a minimum age of 16 (15+1d4).  This suggests that there is little mental prowess that is necessary, which fits with our conception of history.  Boys have always entered armies as young as 12; just look at juvenile combatants in Syria, Zaire and Afghanistan right now.  The principle requirement for a medieval-concept fighter is a weapon, some experience in using it and comprehension of the battlefield through observation.  A 16-year-old fighter is believable.

However, the paladin begins 1st level at a minimum of 18 years while a cleric or druid starts at 19.  Again, there is a 4 year window (the paladin is 17+1d4), but the key point here is the 2-year difference between paladin and fighter.  What is that two years spent doing?  What slows the cleric or druid down three years?

The latter seems plain.  They have to learn spells, gain an understanding of either the secular or non-secular world and in general obtain a certain clarity where it comes to their professions.  With the paladin, the question is one of faith.  The paladin needs to become more mature in order to comprehend how the world works (and how the paladin fits in it).  This can't be gained by just more fighting.  We can imagine the paladin becoming a fighter first, but then the character needs to "drop out" of the daily grind of living and acquire insight through prayer, contemplation, study, ordinary labor (to gain perspective and humility) and in all likelihood a great deal of time spent alone.

This can't be bought or taught, except in the most cursory of terms.  The paladin must be the sort of person able to "see" the way clear to being a paladin.  Thus the necessary wisdom and intelligence as well as strength and constitution.  The high charisma is then gained because, through humility and comprehension, the paladin has gained a greater understanding of what people need and what they want to hear.  The paladin is empathic.

When we roll up a character, we're seeing the result of this training, the accumulation of the stats that we're setting down.  The matter is settled at the beginning of the game.  We roll a 17 and slot it in under charisma without a thought for how that charisma is acquired.  It simply is ~ and the tendency is to think it is a natural, born-in-the-womb trait.  Actually, it is an indication that this character spent those extra years profitably.  An ordinary fighter with a 14 charisma, not so much.

So to "train" a paladin would be to make a fighter the way I described in the previous post, then let go.  After a few years (if we sent off a 16-year-old to be a paladin, could take as long as 5 years before the reunion occurred), we'd get the revised fighter back or we'd get a fighter that failed.  It wouldn't be up to us.

Similarly, the cleric or druid would probably interrupt the fighter track before becoming a 1st level fighter (less proficiencies, a THAC0 that upgrades more slowly, very little interest in fighter-based knowledge), just enough to gain the requisite combat abilities for the class, before ditching anything more to spend years either in a seminary or in the wild.  Again, both would be a matter of time, not expense.  The seminary might cost a stipend, but that wouldn't make the time go by faster.  The same follows for the druid, who would likely follow a teacher but the skills gained have little or nothing to do with combat.

The thief also begins at 19 (18+1d4).  The thief's combat abilities are different, less trained and more streetwise in technique.  But we can still assume that a greater thief could train a would-be ordinary person to obtain their first level, like Fagin in Oliver Twist.  The thief track could work almost exactly like the fighter, except that a non-fighter would be the instructor.  Thus I created the sage skill disciplinarianship - about which I've written nothing, until now.  That's because, like the fighter, I had absolutely no idea how it would work until 1:30 AM in the morning last night.

The assassin starts with a minimum age of 21 (20+1d4).  There is no disciplinarianship for assassins because I don't see an assassins' school as a concept.  Murder, or killing as we like to say, is taught in the army; and with my recent change of seeing the assassin as a fighter and not a thief, we need to see the principle combat training/sage ability knowledge for that assassin coming out of the fighter instruction that we've postulated.  However, like the paladin, the assassin is someone who drops out.  Not to become more pious, but more likely because they don't get along with others.  With a higher strength, intelligence and dexterity than ordinary fighters (again, the ability stat prerequisites), they learn more quickly, get bored, leave before they gain their necessary 1,200 experience and begin living a misanthropic lifestyle.  They do mercenary jobs, pick up knowledge from thieves on the streets and gain a natural aptitude for killing more effectively and coldly.  We can argue that the assassin takes less experience to get to second than a fighter does because it takes perhaps 1,700 x.p. for the assassin to gain their 1st level.  I'm don't know for sure.  All of this postulation needs the creation of firm guidelines for what each 100 x.p. gained produces.  I don't need to do that at this time, so it can wait.

The ranger also starts with a minimum age of 21, like the assassin.  The high intelligence, wisdom, strength and constitution all assume this time was spent hardening the ranger to the wilderness.  Less interested in how nature works and more interested in how to survive it, we can presume rangers also manage their fighter training handily before departing from the urban environment for the wilderness, where they are happy as individuals.  There they accumulate another 500 x.p. surviving, getting to know specific environments, acquiring ranger sage abilities (most of which are exactly like a fighter's) until reaching an age where they accumulate the skills, hit points and hardiness to be a first level ranger.

The monk begins at age 22 (21+1d4).  Like the paladin, the monk has meditated.  Unlike the paladin, the combat training is wholly unique and intrinsically different from that as a fighter.  More of the combat training is managed through precision and repetition, so that is must be gained like a cleric learning spells in a seminary.  It can't be gained through casual combat as a non-leveled individual.  It is rigorous and requires total commitment.  The monk begins somewhere in their early teens and doesn't appear at all in the real world until they have become a 1st level.  Therefore, one doesn't encounter a non-level monk anywhere but a dojo or a monastery ~ where, we might suppose, there are many students with partial monk abilities that could be a formidable challenge for even a high level party (a hundred "part-monks," with the skills I've recently proposed, would be strangely dangerous, even if they had few hit points).  Naturally, all the monks in any particular school would be following a specific "path" in the "way" of the school's design.  This school would be full of "claw"-trained monks while that school would all be "tranquility"-trained monks.

This leaves the mage and the illusionist.  The mage's minimum age is 26 (24+2d8).  Because a bell-curve results from the two dice used to determine age, however, only a very few mages would be that young. Most mages would start as 1st levels between 32 to 34.  The illusionist's minimum age is 31 (30+1d6).  A slightly worse average.

This suggests the training to accumulate cantrips and spells is exhaustive and time-consuming.  In a typical campaign, therefore, training an ordinary NPC from scratch to become a mage would be impractical.  Considering the response I received from the post I wrote about jumping time ahead, I don't think this plan will interest most players.  Who wants to wait around for a 15-year-old to enter a magic academy to reach the unlucky age of 40 before hitting 1st level as a mage?

Okay, let's put that down for now.

Part 2

Vlad asks about my civilization technology concept from 2015.  In brief, for those not familiar, this is the idea that more densely populated parts of the world would have a higher tech level than parts less urbanized.  The tech level measure is based on D&D equivalents to the video game Civilization by Sid Meier.

The explanation for why more people would be leveled in a higher tech region is simple: there are more teachers.  A given teacher should be able to teach more than one protege: most of the time training and learning is spent in repetition and practice, meaning that a single teacher is only needed for 10-15% of a student's actual learning window.  One teacher, then, can manage up to 8 students, rotating between them, getting rid of students who require too much time when the full complement is being educated.  A teacher with less students can manage more time for hard-to-teach individuals.

In a dense culture, teachers are everywhere and there are plenty of would-be students.  This enables the creation of mass-production schools that would be impractical in largely rural cultures (where there aren't the teachers and fewer students).  This allows for the greater number of leveled persons, as the experience gained would be fruitful and not lost to an x.p. ceiling, as I proposed in the previous post.

Vlad's second question regarding tech cultures is about where does the experience come from?  I rush to point out that the 30 Years' War post describes a war taking place in the highest tech areas possible for my world.  Virtually everything in the heart of Europe has a tech between 15 and 18.  Remember, the tech is based on population density alone.  All those city states are very densely populated ~ and all of those city states (Ulm, Mulhouse, Pisa, Milan, Augsburg, Florence, Padua, Nuremberg) were rife with war, uprisings, rebellions, religious clashes in the streets and ~ like the modern era ~ excessive crime.  By no means does an educated population indicate a calm, peaceful population.  Given our humanity's propensity for fighting over ideas, an education actually gives us a lot more to fight about.

Therefore, a technology-rich region might shield themselves from harm on the outside, but everyone inside already has all the available tech and are more than willing to use it.  As well, population density tends to fit the agricultural richness of a river valley, so if our country is well off and educated, the chances are the other country across the river will be also.  Finally, we know that greater technology massively increases the potential for devastation and destruction, rather than decreasing it.  The evidence of the 30 Years' War indicates this was as true in the 17th century as it is now.

True, they were using muskets and gunpowder.  But they didn't have magic, and a high tech culture would have much more magic than a low-tech culture.  The paradigm holds.

Thank you again, Vlad, for such good questions.  For the general reader, Vlad lives in that part of the world that was knee-deep in the 30 Years' War.  Without giving the exact location, he's well-acquainted with the city-states of Alsace, those of Wurttemberg and the upper valley of the Rhine.  He's close enough to walk to places that I would give my i-teeth to visit.

Lucky bastard.

The Genius of Peat and Gilkask

Let me start by apologizing.  My head space remains, for the time being, with the issue of tech levels and the changes that are growing in my head regarding the overall system.  Although I've finished an overview of those levels, I don't feel I'm done yet.  I hope the reader will indulge me a little while longer and let me go on talking about this.

After three weeks, let's come back around to the problem I presented with Gilkask, the city in the far north of Russia that I presented as a stumbling block.

I keep getting suggestions on what to do with it (some not publishable), most of them running like what Mujadaddy recently posted:

"The Brass King, a hobgoblin chief from a mining-tech-level area, has a fortified outpost, Gilkask, hidden deep in the tundra where his primitive cousins toil in open pits for the 'black fire'."

I don't want to deliberately pick on Mujadaddy here.  The description above would work as an adventure.  I wouldn't use the descriptive 'black fire' - all the creatures in my world are intelligent enough to know what coal is: a rock that burns.  Fire is orange and yellow in every part of my world, it doesn't burn black; even the coal itself is not black when it's hot, so on the whole the description doesn't make sense.  It's exactly the sort of 'rule of cool' faux-fantasy cheeze-speak that every DM feels defines the emotional feel of their world . . . but I think it is horrible, awful schlock that only cheapens a campaign into the realm of kiddie fare.  I'm quite happy to call it coal and to have the creatures who dig it out of the ground call it coal, too - because the tension and depth of my world does not rely upon giving coal a descriptive fantasy face-lift.

I'm building up to a post on self-discipline: that I am bound by the rules I assign to my world and that the world gets better because I have to stretch myself to obey those rules.  In the case of Gilkask, I've posited that the tech level ought to be 5.  This means that the settlement must obey the precepts established by a tech 5 culture - that all cultural associations are nomadic in form, that settlements are impermanent (and cannot, therefore, be 'fortified'), that higher tech practices such as agriculture and founding cannot exist, etcetera.  And because of previous rules I've set up that I am also bound to follow, Gilkask also has a population of 6,500 and it also produces coal - not because I say it does but because the city it is based upon, Norilsk, actually produces coal.

I realize it is very difficult to make many understand why this is important.  Part of the fun for me in building my world this way is that I learn - on an intrinsic, ground level - how the world works.  Prior to my discussing this part of the world (see the map), I'm prepared to believe that none of my readers had the least idea of the existence of Norilsk, its coal deposits or its geographical situation.  How, may we suppose, do I know these things?  I know because I began at one point in the world and I steadily made my way outwards until I set myself to learn everything there was to know about all the places in Krasnoyarsk Krai, where Norilsk is.  Once I learned, I adapted the territory into my world and mapped it, drawing out all the lakes shown in the map - lakes where right now people live, fishing there and watching their children skip rocks.  I didn't choose which hexes would be civilized and which would not - the rules I designed for building my world based on more research did this for me.  All I did was follow those rules to make the lay out shown on the map above, a map that revealed itself to me as I made the map, having no idea ahead of time what that revelation would be.

This is why I love to map-make so much.  Because the process is an investigation and a revelation, step by step, hex by hex, conglomeration by conglomeration.  I live in continuous fascination and awe of the profound circumstance of the world as it presents itself to me, as each new part of the world comes into being.  I'm not inventing my game world as much as I am channelling it - and in the process, letting it change me and my preconceptions again and again.

Norilsk doesn't come from my imagination.  It's a real place.  I feel that if I'm going to apply my imagination in changing its existence to one populated by nomadic hobgoblins, I should try with all my might to retain the flavour of the original.

Let me put that another way.  Rather than fabricating yet another cheesy cliche of a fortified mine, I'm using the whole world as a crutch for my imagination - forcing my imagination to adapt to the world rather than making it adapt to my imagination.  I want Norilsk, Gilkask, to live up to something really different and interesting, something more than just another humanoid king on another pile of rocks in another part of my world.  Gilkask has to be more special than that.

This is why the peat-for-coal suggestion works so well.

On the Stumbling Blocks post, kimbo made the suggestion of replacing the coal mined at Gilkask with peat.  I like this for a number of reasons - first of all because the Tunguska region, where Gilkask is, does produce peat.  It is indigenous to the area.  Peat and coal are both fuels so there is a continuity there.  And peat is easily dug up by nomadic tribes, who do use it for fuel because it is convenient and practical - particularly in areas where wood fuel doesn't exist or where wood is often too frozen to burn (seen pictures of the taiga in winter?).

So imagine Gilkask as a sort of drifting settlement of tents that does not exist in exactly the same spot from month to month, but does orbit a large peat moss lowland, usually near the large lake (Pyasin).  Each year, two hundred clans or so follow herds down the Yenisey river valley until they reach Garka.  Shown by the route drawn, these clans travel east from Garka along the shore of the lake (Vodokhran) to where they can cross over a stone plain to the next lake (Keta) . . . then down river to Gilkask.  It is a difficult route, 160 miles, but it is well-traveled and the huge fields of peat are worth the trip.

Why not simply continue down the Yenisey and come at Gilkask from the north?  Because past that grey line at the top of the map there are gnolls, the Samoyads - and travelling through their lands is dangerous for hobgoblins.  So they travel the route their forefathers took.

Once in Gilkask, they dig up several years supply of fuel, enough for their family; all around them are thousands of tents from other clans, all doing the same.  There are fights, blood feuds, exchanges of brides and tales of far away lands.  There are high clans, low clans, outcasts, clans of impressive age and size - and of course many single families.

Some will arrive in the spring and make their way out in the autumn, with just enough time to get out of the hills so they can winter on the Yenisey in Garka.  Others will be moving into the valley in autumn with the intention of wintering there, until they can get their supply ready in spring.  On the road, there will be clans moving in both directions.

I wonder if the reader can see how this makes a far more interesting adventure for the players.  Rather than one static location - Gilkask - there's a whole process of finding their way up from Garka to the peat fields.  If they don't want to be killed by thousands of hobgoblins, they must find a way to disguise themselves and maintain the disguise; or they must somehow justify being there.  Their reason for going to the fields could be a number of things.  They need the peat as an ingredient for a magic item.  They wish to start a war between the hobgoblins and the gnolls, urging one or the other side to attack across the border.  They are seeking a specific hobgoblin who happens to be journeying along the route because this is the year he goes there with his clan.

Most of all, this makes Gilkask unique.  There are no other huge hobgoblin marches; no other arctic tent cities of this magnitude; no other 'peat fields' of extraordinary activity; no comparable places where the presence of thousands of passive hobgoblins might yet worry the few gnolls who watch that frontier (offering another interesting backstory).  By obeying the restrictions of the tech 5 design, I have a far more interesting framework for running a profound adventure than just another mining outpost like so many outposts in so many sci fi/fantasy stories.