Pottery

At certain points in history, a technology occurs that recreates its society. Pottery was like that – though we know it only from its effect. We have no historical sources for the change, for there was no writing – but we can see, from archeological evidence, the change that occurred in the centuries that followed.

For a great period of time, for thousands and thousands of years, very little changed in human culture. Small shifts in existing technology improved upon techniques or existing tools. Pottery differed from these it that it was the transformation of a material, not merely the reshaping of it. We conjecture that peoples living in deltas where no trees or stones could provide shelter hit upon the idea of using dried clay – and that it was recognized that this clay, baked in the sun, could become as hard as stone. Better than stone, it could be shaped into a variety of shapes from which could be built more complicated structures. Dolls and totems had been made for thousands of years, but bricks were fairly new.

The inclusion of the potter’s wheel, along with a kiln made from bricks, fired the development of pottery pots, jars, oil lamps and hundreds of other implements. Development of the potter’s wheel would lead to the invention of the cog. The kiln would prove the gateway towards smelting metals. Bricks and grain storage in pottery vessels would allow the rise of villages and eventually cities. Closed pots would enable the fermentation of spirits. Since clay was soft, and could be marked upon and then later fired for permanency, marks were made on the soft clay that would become writing. Vessels for carrying goods over long distances would expand trade, particularly overseas, where far off cultures could taste foods that formerly would have soured or rotted. This created a taste of luxuries, which encouraged adventurism and – naturally – a desire to conquer lands beyond one’s immediate sphere.

Rarely is pottery considered in any D&D campaign. It is cheap and hardly considered a treasure. However, bottles for oil and for holy water would always be fashioned from pottery rather than glass – it is more durable for long journeys. Gourds are an alternative – but hardly distributed world-wide and hardly having the same benefit of breaking when desired. Hurled flasks of oil are de rigueur in any campaign.

Is there no other application to the game to be considered? Well first off, if you’re looking at the city map you’ve just finished and which you considered on a parallel with Lankhmar, have a look to see if you’ve included a street of potters – which ought to be there. If your culture is based upon the mid-east, the mediterranean or anywhere subtropical, pottery will be the central possession in most homes,far more common than wood – for plates, cups, pots and so on.

All of that is just window dressing, however. In wider terms, what pottery might elves or dwarves create? What of truly advanced races, such as faerie folk or naga? What properties might their pottery possess? Might it be unbreakable? Might it stretch?

Consider the subterranean culture I made reference to a few posts ago. If you are wondering what central purpose a clan of orcs might serve by existing at the forefront of a cave complex which continues for miles underground, consider that they are operating a kiln. Having access to clay at the bottom of various chambers, and wood gathered from the surface, plus proximity to the surface for venting, our orc clan busily makes pots and other containers for the deeper dwelling ogres and ogre magi, or even the drow or mind flayers living ten or twelve layers below. Imagine the strange looks on your party as they discover the orcs have been making a single piece of art pottery (faience), eight feet in diameter, which is meant to serve as a chamber pot for the titan that resides deep in the mountain. The titan who will not appreciate it if his commissioned piece is in any way damaged.

Could the orcs, after having been decimated, be able to explain that the party really must undertake to finish the task, or else suffer the consequences?

I digress.

Two other points I wished to make. For anyone who has seen it, the making of pottery, particularly that with walls so thin as to become translucent upon being fired, is a quasi-realistic thing. In a D&D world, the understanding that the world could be altered by hand and mind would be the beginning of technological magic – not the clumsy god-calling that would become clericalism, or druidism, but refashioning the elements themselves. A significant portion of the mage spells in the Player’s Handbook are identified as “alterations” ... these spells would all begin to be researched in and around 5,000 years ago, in prehistory. There is, therefore, a reasonable expectation that many primitive tribes dwelling deep in the heart of dungeons, jungles or deserts may have developed magic along those lines.



Too, the manufacture of totemic pottery items would have been the incorporation of magic – the first magic items, by definition. Where the gentle reader may see the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, I see a relic of untold power, created at a time when the world was new and by hands that knew no rules about what was possible. What might this magic artifact allow – what might it accomplish? Can the tremulous hands of a modern-born character master it?

Sailing

I realize the earlier pic I gave of the Civilization IV technologies is impossible to read – that is a problem with blogspot, that won’t let a decently large picture get posted in high definition. I include the following pic, a portion of the table, to give an overview.



Moving on ...

The first cultures to devise boats were those whose primary purpose was getting at the fish or waterfowl dwelling on or in rivers. Such craft were small, were propelled by poles or paddles, and were not especially seaworthy. Craft of this sort would reach its peak with the canoe of North America or the outrigger of the Pacific Islands – but until 3000 years ago, such boats were intended for hunting and not for travel.

The larger sailing craft has its beginnings in deltas – specifically the Nile and lower Mesopotamia. It is logical, is it not? A watery environment requires shipping as part of the transportation/haulage of an agricultural community – hunting communities have less reason to haul goods. Add to that the yearly flooding of deltas, where travel by water is the only means possible. The flooding current demands that larger cargo vessels be somehow outfitted with superior motive power in order to keep from being washed out to sea.

The river provides a natural trade route – as does immediate access to the sea. The rule has often been that the combination focuses culture. Larger, seaworthy ships are developed, enabling them to stand up against storms – though generally the ships were built with shallow keels, allowing them to be beached when weather threatened. The galley is the high point of development for a thousand years ... up until the 3rd century CE.

Ships in D&D are usually depicted being at sea for days at a time, whereas in ancient Greece ships were almost always pulled up on the beach at the end of each day. Oarsmen were never slaves, not even in the Roman era. This was a Hollywood fiction. Oarsmen eat, and are stronger when fed well – in combat, slaves chained to oars are rather useless when the ship is boarded – whereas free, paid oarsmen fight very well. Why would you spend money to support men who could not defend the ship – nor have a reason to – when the ship is attacked?

In most galleys the oarsmen sat open to the sky – the sort of galley typically portrayed in the 1950s in Hercules epics. Hollywood movies of a later date (beginning with Ben Hur) will usually show the ‘cataphract’ variety, where a deck has been built above the rowers. Such ships were phenomenally expensive, could not be easily beached, and were thus strictly the province of the military, to be used only in battle and only with the expectation that the weather be damned. They were not used for trade or ordinary sea travel, since in a storm they were virtually certain to sink.

I have always had a soft spot for seagoing campaigns. By and large my players over the years have been less than interested. The ships are too expensive, the battles too long and clumsy. If ever there was an argument that plunder was not the soul of the game, its the lack of interest I’ve had in the art of pirating. Part of that, it has been explained to me, is the near certainty of death once the ship goes down. That tends to turn players off.

This also explains why no useful rules have ever been written regarding waterborne combat, travel or ship design. If I had a party bent on it, I would take a few months expanding the basic rules from Trireme and Wooden Ships and Iron Men, build into it some kind of damage system based on the principles of Starfleet Battles.

For this post, I’ll simply point out that every highly developed technological culture had sailing as its most powerful military arm. The Phoenicians, the Athenians, the Byzantines, the Venetians and Genoans, the Dutch, the British and finally the Americans.

Any culture on your world that does not have a strong navy will inevitably be inward looking, in its art, in its politics and in its suspicion of strangers. Waterfronts have the habit of being very open to foreigners – inland, not so much. You can measure the hatred for wandering adventures in direct proportion to how far they wander from sea and river ports.

First Cultures

I threw the above map together in about twenty minutes, just to give a sense of how one might begin to design an ordinary world based upon these early technologies. Deltas and lower systems begin to develop agriculture, while fishing succeeds along islands and peninsulas. Hunting suits the high country or any well-watered plateau. Obviously subterranean cultures begin to develop in high mountain ranges. Minor subterranean cultures might also develop in isolated hills or in deserts, though that isn’t marked on the map.

Meanwhile, some cultures will be isolated by deserts (the yellow area on the map), mountains or hills. Such cultures will develop slowly, as land routes have not been established.

Consider the fishing – hunting – agriculture group at the top of the map. Hunting tribes along the top of the river would find travel across the desert difficult, while mountains along the coast separate the fishing villages from the hunting grounds. We might imagine that the west side of the mountains experiences the rainfall, while the lee of the mountains on the east is dry. Only the snow covering the mountains at the center supports the river that feeds the delta at the upper right. Thus, the flat lands west of those hills containing game are thick forests – again isolating those fishing communities.

Now consider the group at the bottom. Fishing, agriculture and hunting are all unified by the single river basin containing a large lake at its center. The lake too, of course, would likely have fishing villages. Hunting tribes trade skins for agricultural goods, which in turn make their way to the coast. The reverse is equally true, as fishbone and oil are brought up along the river to the hunting tribes. The agricultural culture in the center accomplishes most of this trading, increasing their success and access to any technological innovations that may follow.

The south will clearly grow quickly, and eventually dominate the lower half of the continent. The agricultural delta at the top may eventually become successful in its own right, particularly since they should develop sailing earliest – but that is the next subject, so I will begin that with the next post.

Mining

In considering prehistoric mining, one must remember that without the development of metal tools, mining is limited almost entirely to what can be found, as opposed to what can be broken from existing rock. Early mining examples are few in number – mostly for placer deposits such as gold and silver, or for hard stones found in soft material (flint found in chalk, such as at Grimes Graves in England. Gems found at Mogok in Burma or in Ceylon, hematite at Zimbabwe, outcroppings of lapis found in Badakhshan, or diamonds found in kimberlitic deposits (in many places) are other examples.

While Egyptians did extract malachite and turquoise in the ancient world, in terms of time scales this is considerably late for any discussion about the development of early mining as a technology. Grand scale mining arose as the result of bronze and iron tools – while we are not yet considering those advancements.

If this were an anthropology essay, this overview would be virtually done – I might go into a few specific examples, discuss some archaeological digs. Instead, since this is about D&D, I must tackle a different course, discussing instead the rise of mining culture among those who would have sought to advance it some 20,000 years ago ... had they existed. I am speaking of the non-humanoid races.

Long prior to the development of technology, there must have been an adaptation to living beneath the earth’s surface. Forgive me if I advance a evolutionary theory based upon my world – I mean this only as a suggestion. Still, since my world is based on Earth, this allows any examples I might present to be more easily fit into an understandable framework – which the gentle reader might later adapt for their own world with little trouble.

Some 2 million years ago, as part of the diaspora of homo erectus from Africa into the wider old world, there must have been sub-species who developed alongside humans. Some of these developed characteristics which enabled them to subsist entirely upon creatures that existed below ground. Without discussing in depth the entire fossil history of every monster found in D&D, let’s simply accept that both flora and fauna had already developed – along with geological structures - creating vast underground regions capable of supporting humanoid life. For thousands of generations, proto-orcs, proto-dwarves and other related creatures each developed along independent, sometimes parallel evolutionary tracks.

Certain underground cultures would have developed along the same lines already discussed: subterranean fishing cultures, where pools or underground rivers provided a steady source of protein; agricultural societies, founded upon either evolved mushrooms or soil crops supported by non-solar light sources; hunting cultures founded upon extensive herds of underground creatures supplying meat; even cultures based upon non-food sources, somehow sustained by the power of the earth itself, in a manner suggested by the context of my last post.

Life below ground would have been harsher – population pressure might have forced some clans back onto the surface, but most deep clans would have been compelled, given finite space, towards cannibalism or other methods of systematically killing their own kind: ageism, culling, specism.

The technology of mining would have been a godsend. Any increase in cubic would have allowed greater area for farming in particular, where this was developed. Some creatures might have developed claws hard enough for digging in soft stone, and probably an ear for detecting hollow spaces in the rock. Mining, as it might have developed some 20,000 years ago, by means of harder rocks pounding against softer rocks, would have made tremendous impact on these cultures.

Usually the manner in which subterranean lairs are laid out presumes living arrangements which might have been established within the last year. Any long term settlement is rarely supposed, particularly a settlement that might extend back for generations – complete with processing chambers, livestock chambers, holy chambers and sub-chambers, places where members of the culture might seek solace or privacy, recreational areas (slides, swimming pools – complete with diving platforms), burial chambers and so on.

As further technologies are added, I will try from time to time to discuss how each of these things might affect a subterranean culture, as well as how they did affect those above ground.

Mysticism

UPDATE:  This post has been expanded under the title 'Wild Magic' and included in the recently released book, How to Play a Character & Other Essays, available for purchase from the Lulu marketplace.

”In the beginning was nature.”

- Camille Paglia

Last night I went head to head with a chicken bone. It damn near killed me. Got stuck in my throat, about an inch below my tonsils, and hung there for about three hours. Tried to push it down with food, tried to vomit it up. No good. In the end, probably because enough acid washed over it, the thing made its way down.

Try to comprehend this when you have no references: no understanding of human biology, no comprehension of how the throat is construction, nor any conception of why a chicken bone would attack you. Particularly since you have eaten chicken many times and this has never happened before. And what about your family? Ugh and Chu and Pag and Gurt ate the same chicken as you and it didn’t attack any of them.

Primitive humans, as they begin to grasp with their developing minds the world around them, would soon discover many things which their senses could not explain. The world is a huge, dangerous place, ready to destroy without reason or warning every living thing that dwells in it.

Camille Paglia at the fore of her book, Sexual Personae, argues thus: early male hominids lived in a constant state of terror for the world around them. In order to rationalize that world, it became necessary to adapt, emotionally and intellectually ... and thus homo erectus developed a delusion which remains with us to this day. The delusion is that the world is not violent or destructive, that it is beautiful.

Consider: I bring you to a place overlooking a spectacular vista, a wild place, where the craggy mountains rise above the valley floor and the forests clothe the lower slopes of the mountain. A crystal blue lake rests in the bottom land, and a small river snakes from the lake, through a meadow marked with shining white boulders – left behind from some ancient glacier, now long gone. “Is it not beautiful?” I ask. I feel almost compelled to ask the question. No doubt you would have to admit the sight was impressive and – if you were not emo – that it was, in fact, beautiful.

But if I were to ask you to spend a week, naked, in that place, you would certainly decline. You would certainly not see it as beautiful if you were stranded there – even less so if the place were so far from civilization that there was no chance you would be found.

Soon the lake and river would reveal themselves as icy dangers. The forests would be filled with deadfall, predators and insects. There would be no place warm. There would be little food. What you think of as beautiful is, in reality, an awful, dangerous place. You would likely not survive it.

So why is it beautiful? Why is it when the leaves are dying, we do not see dying leaves, we see beautiful fall colors? Why do we not huddle in terror at the thought of leaving our safe cities, even though hundreds die every year from avalanche, exposure or accident? Why do we build houses on fault lines or near volcanoes, when we know what it will mean, eventually?

We do it because we live in denial. We must live in denial. To be too conscious of the dangerous world around us is to become impotent.

The shift from animal to human, in recreating the world in our own conception (not a horror, but an opportunity), occurred, it is supposed, about 40,000 years ago. It is about that time that humans began to aesthetically redesign their tools, smoothing off edges or polishing their appearance – even though this made no difference to the usefulness of the tool. The argument Paglia makes is that this was done with the same sense of mind in which humans retooled their perception of the world – as a place of beauty. This made one significant difference. By not being afraid, we were able to take risks, to experiment, and thus further adapt to our environment.

I have come all this way around the barn because most persons now do not have a firm conception of mysticism, as they might hunting or fishing. Early man, at some point during an attack from a chicken bone, or from being alone amidst the great wide wilderness, began to conceive that there was a greater influence on the universe than what he could detect from the use of his senses. Something that determined where the game would be found, or who would die, or what events would come together to make rain. He could only perceive this force as something which must be nurturing, for otherwise he could do nothing as a species but give up and die. Later on this nurturing quality of the Earth would be personified – but that is a further interpretation. Mysticism alone, unadorned as yet by the later developments of meditation or polytheism, remains only a sense that there is power, and that this power permeates all that exists, in a manner which cannot be seen nor even understood.

At last we can come to D&D. Once we accept that it is a world with magic that is being described, mysticism is not merely an interpretation, but a comprehension of a magic that is beyond the mind’s reach. Think of it as an old magic, abiding within the fabric of the existential plane itself, greater than any god or being that might seek to manipulate it. It is the magic which is not explained in the Vancian methods of the mage, in any mere item or in the conjuring of demons or gods. It is the very power that makes gods – it is the influence whereby mortals become immortal. It is the great power by which the stars move, by which things come into being.

It is the power of birth itself, never explained and certainly not understood by humans throughout their history – arguably, not even now. It is the soul that resides, the ghost in the machine, the atman, the means by which breathing powers the body. It is the magic that makes crops grow and seas rise, that topples mountains and cracks open the earth.

In comparison to this power, an ordinary mage is a charlatan with a bottle of water, wetting a spot in the sand – while mystic forces prepare to flood the desert and wash it into the sea. To tap into this power, even for a heartbeat, is to hold the universe hostage.

It may be the oldest magic, but it is also the least understood. In countless generations, this power has never been fully harnessed. The early druids who were the first mystics tried to harness it. They gained enough knowledge to manipulate to some degree the world around them ... but every druid would know that there was great magic, old magic, which was yet to be found in rock and rill, in every cloud and in the ways of animals. So they watch, and follow, and struggle to comprehend one more clue that will reveal the dragon, as it was called. Explain to your druids that they have not yet begun to plumb the depths of nature, then give them something to find.

As a DM, you are free to define this magic however you like –for the record, it should terrify. How often do we hear that nature is sweet and light, that we think of druids as tree huggers? Nature is a cold blooded murderer, as were the druids themselves.

That the world nurtures its humanoids is only the defence mechanism ... it is not the reality. A meteor strikes the earth and cares nought for what is killed or what might survive. In the world of D&D, meteors are not random – they do not occur because the wheels and turns of the universe produce likelihoods. This sort of thing can only happen because you, the DM, wills it to happen. Admittedly, you’re more likely to do the opposite, and have nothing happen:



If you have ever felt restrained by the rules of magic, by what you think the gods can manage or what spells exist, you have not opened your mind to the source of every kind of power. There are no rules to that source except those which derive from the limitations on you, a living creature living in this world, subject to the mysticism that rules you now as you read this.

A Silly Monster Redeemed

I’ve just had such a good idea about gas spores that I feel I must post it.

I’ve always hated this creature, primarily because once a party knows that it isn’t dangerous if you don’t hit it, it is a useless balloon floating around dungeons. And what player doesn’t already get the joke – yes, we know its not a beholder.

I’ve always felt, however, that a gas spore could be some kind of monster in its own right.

Consider the cattail. Once the flower is ready to germinate, the hard brown shell splits, allowing the downy material within to fluff out; the wind then catches the fluff, which supports the seed, scattering the plant throughout the marsh.

Now, suppose the gas spore is made of the same hard fibrous material on the outside (let’s give it more hit points, as well). The entire creature doesn’t split at once – only compartmentalized pockets, which have matured. Effectively, there is always some part of the creature which is in gestation mode.

Allow the gas spore to emit the down it produces; this down supports a seed just like a cactus, but the seed retains its parent’s floating capacity ... so that the seed and its downy surrounding, no wider than a few centimeters across, can float its way along. Stone and dead wood it ignores, but once it attaches to living tissue, the seed at once begins to affect the skin as a disease – which must be saved against or cured.

Nasty, but quite practical.

Yahoo

Had a great conversation today with KenHR on Yahoo; developed a yahoo nick for the purpose, so I thought I'd include it here in case anyone wanted to find me there. Your best chance is before 11AM EST. The nick is tao_alexis

Hunting

This is a huge subject where it relates to D&D, since so much of the game relates to tactics, exploration or killing. Do not bad mouth the game for this – historically, the elimination of vermin and the acquisition of food was more a part of human existence than any other set of skills. Hunting is the first technology, the impetus for the creation of tools in order to kill meat and cut meat; the embracing of fire to cook meat; and finally the exploration of mysticism in order to express or explain the existence of meat and its intrinsicality to us, the eater.

There is a recently proposed argument (last forty years) that the larger portion of mankind’s food supply consisted of foraging and gathering; a small portion of anthropologists accept the theory that this foraging was done by women, while men time wasted ... thus supporting a feminist argument that women were once the breadwinner. Whatever that may be, the argument is founded on the premise – near as I can tell – that game meat is hard to find and hard to kill. This is the sort of developed argument that can only come out of a culture which has no experience with an abundant natural food supply – I doubt an anthropologist from the 19th century would accept this argument.

Early hunting cultures consisted of few people and an unfathomable access to game. The steppes of Africa and those of Central Asia once teemed with life, when humans were few and had not yet made their presence known. Your D&D world should reflect herds consisting of tens of thousands of animals, such as the buffalo of America, the wildebeest of Africa, the wild pigs of China and the wild sheep of the Persian-Anatolian highlands. Caribou, another hunted species supporting another hunting culture – the Inuit – still exist in these numbers. The largest herd of any sizable mammal in the world is in Canada’s Northwest Territories, consisting of two hundred thousand animals or more. It is only the largest because it is the most remote – it does not compare with what the herd was 500 years ago.

Also, consider that many huge animals in America and in Australia were hunted to existence only in the last 10-15 thousand years. It is estimated that the last mammoth in North America was killed just 3,900 years ago, in Michigan. In other words, such animals did not die out due to climate or lack of forage – but because they were systematically massacred.

Weapons developed by hunting cultures include the spear, naturally, as well as the axe and javelin – most throwing weapons, in fact. The bow was developed about 18,000 years ago, and therefore should be sophisticated for the most primitive of peoples in your world. There ought to be less emphasis on hand held weapons, since the practice of killing is something which is intended at long range. Thus, any group of hunters in your world should not close with the party in melee. The effort should be to attack by guerrilla tactics, approach to within 8 to 12 hexes, hurl axes and spears, then retreat to a cache of weapons kept nearby. Bowman should harass the party, blending into their environment. Even if this only annoys a strong party and does little damage, the hunters would be more likely to give up the attack than to ever close for hand-to-hand combat.

If they can drive the party in a direction, pits, snares and so on would be used whenever possible. Snares can be fashioned within a few minutes with a sufficient number of men. Pits need not be large; a pit small enough for a foot, fitted with spikes, proved very effective in Vietnam – easy to conceal and just as able to immobilize the victim.

Dogs and other domesticated animals (birds of prey, ferrets, various D&D creatures) were also an intrinsic part of hunting – being in the wild, it was possible to feed these animals scraps that could not be preserved, winning their friendship and willingness to aid in the hunt. Most hunting groups will have at least one type of animal in support, as is described for several humanoids in the Monster Manual.

The cultures themselves would be small, and would be very mobile. Tents or methods to build mud or snow housing on sight are mandatory. Thus, the ‘lair’ will always be present. These simple societies will have few valuables, if any the party can respect.

Virtually every member of the culture will have skill at hunting or weapons, including women and children (even as young as six). Newborn children will be quite rare – a woman would normally give birth in a hunting culture no oftener than once in 4 years. Moreover, death in infancy was common and infant mortality rates can be as high as 25%. In a group of 30 adult hunters, therefore, half being women and only two thirds of those being of childbearing years, there might only be 7-12 children younger than thirteen (taking into account pregnancy deaths and additional high death rates for each year of life). At thirteen, most children would be considered full adults in a hunting society.

I could probably continue, but I must confess I don’t find the topic terribly exciting. It is fairly straightforward for anyone willing to do research into the practice, how hunting can relate to natives in a given setting.

Agriculture

Agriculture is without question the fundamental technology in the creation of civilization. Like fishing, it greatly increases the food supply, the success of which is lent aid by the storage of food, the management of food and the expansion of food producing areas. Grains lead to the consolidation of population, technological discovery and empire building.

Thankfully, I don’t have to talk about all of that now. Much of what is above falls under later technologies, created as the result of agriculture, and thus can wait for another post. All I need talk about presently is the recognition that the biosphere can be manipulated.

To quote Jared Diamond from Guns, Germs and Steel, p.88,

”Most species are useless to us as food, for one or more of the following reasons: they are indigestible (like bark), poisonous (monarch butterflies and death-cap mushrooms), low in nutritional value (jellyfish), tedious to prepare (very small nuts), difficult to gather (larvae of most insects) or dangerous to hunt (rhinoceroses). Most biomass (living biological matter) on land is in the form of wood and leaves, most of which we cannot digest.

“By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers ... than hunter gatherers.”

Agriculture also increases the strength and health of a population, but to a greater degree than an abundant fish supply – primarily because of the variety of food produced and the benefits of a non-meat diet, but also because the effort required to harvest grain is much less than that needed to harvest fish. What physical prowess that is lost in the cultivation of non-resistant plants (fish requiring more effort), is more than made up for with free time to think or train towards other goals. Yes, it is true, harvesting grain is a tremendous effort – but it is an effort that is accomplished over a much shorter time, to give a year’s supply of food or more. Fishing requires constant year round effort, as fish cannot be preserved (the preservation of fish with salt is a later technology than what we’ve discussed here).

One last bit of background: the earliest agricultural development would be the recognition that grains produced their own seed, and that this seed was spread naturally, producing more plants. Once this was observed for what it was, cultures could affect a more widespread distribution of the seed through personal intervention – thus increasing the natural food supply. That is the understanding that resulted in what we call ‘agriculture.’ The earliest development did not include irrigation or straight plowing.



Very well, what does all this mean for D&D? First of all, agricultural societies should greatly outnumber non-agricultural societies. In cases where we are talking about food production without food storage (covered by Civ IV under ‘pottery’), a three-fold or four-fold increase is reasonable. Ten fold increases should be for reserved for more advanced societies. There are numerous reasons for this – more food, increased birthrate among a population which can afford to remain in one place year round and so on.

Thus, if you perceive a primitive tribe made up of norkers (Fiend Folio, a creature I’ve always seen as a sort of caveman-goblin), the number stumbled upon in the river valleys and deltas should be four times the number encountered in the hills. Thus, instead of 3-30 appearing (hunter/gatherers), the number should be closer to 12-120 – existing as a loosely held together culture in scattered but grouped huts, living off the domesticated plants in the area.

Whereas a group of hunters would lack social cohesion, the loose settlement would have a designated ‘leader’, who would have to power to coordinate attack. Time spent training to defend the home would allow diverse combat groups: a group throwing spears or stones, another group trained to rush in with clubs, a third group sent to circle around the enemy and attack from behind. Free time would mean the development of tactics, which as DM you should apply.

(Acknowledged that hunter/gatherers would devise different but equally effective tactics in hunting prey – but those would be offensive, while the tactics for an agricultural community would be defensive).

Also, as populations expand, they overwhelm the capacity of the immediate environment – as a result, ‘colonies’ are created of a set portion of the core population, which go out to find other, similar places in which to settle. Thus, our group of norkers would only be partially isolated. Ten or twenty miles downriver would be another similar-sized grouping, many of whom would be known to the locals encountered by the party. There might be dozens of communities strung throughout the region, which might in turn gather at certain times of year to exchange information and genetic partners (marrying outside the tribe was common). These norkers may know a great deal more about the surrounding hundred miles than may be counted upon. Thus they may be a source for information, or potentially a greater danger to a passing player character led army than might be dreamed of.

These articles are meant to be an overview, so I think I’ll leave it at that. What more there is to be said depends on the development of later technologies, so I will save it for then. But I do want to take this opportunity to talk about food.

There is very little suggestion as to what foods non-human races consume ... particularly in terms of dungeons. I suppose that dungeon edibles consist of the creatures themselves, the upper levels being prey for the lower levels, until all is eventually consumed by vast, awful creatures picking the lowest levels for every scrap imaginable.

But still, plant life is essential to a successful food chain, and I’d like the gentle reader to consider Diamond’s words. Orcs, fire newts, goblins or kobalds are not limited to human-acceptable foods. A mass migration of monarch butterflies may be a marvellous, rich time for a colony of kenku (birdmen), while a yearly infestation of death’s head mushrooms may be the singular reason the area is full to the gills with troglodytes. Ettin may grow trees in order to harvest bushels of leaves and small branches for direct consumption – who says they don’t have bellies designed to digest such matter? Very small nuts may prove as good as grain for trolls, who need not remove the shells and who might therefore have something to combine with their meat diets.

That biomass which humans and demi-humans cannot consume may sustain various other races – who in turn might intentionally destroy all the biomass consumable by humans in order to ensure a good crop of tent caterpillars (cultivated on an entire landscape of nothing but small hemlock trees) or who knows what else. Plus, those same races may despise humans for destroying hemlocks and caterpillars in order to plant inedible grain and fruit orchards. Plum trees may be poisonous to ettin.

There are many possibilities.

The Wheel

The wheel may be second on the list, but it certainly does not precede agriculture, hunting or mysticism. Though developed in southwest Asia sometime before 5000 bce, its widespread use developed as a result of transporting agricultural goods between cultures.

Not every culture developed the wheel. Inca and Olmec cultures did not, nor is there coherent evidence that the Zimbabwe culture of South Africa did. Therefore, in determining the development of a nation peoples in your world, consider that Incas were highly developed and civilized, with no wheel. Note also that the absence of the wheel would limit the development of pottery, mathematics and so on ... but would not necessarily deny the presence of these things. Natural gourds and other storage methods might replace pottery in those cultures – something to be considered.

The presence of the wheel in your devised culture is cut into two stages: the first being the solid wheel, limited in strength and in shock resistance. This wheel was the first developed, but was later replaced by the spoked wheel – coming into existence around 2000 bce and having the benefit of distributing the weight more easily upon the rim and axle (the solid wheel, made of slatted wood, did not). The use of the wheel in war, for the chariot, required that it be spoked.

If your culture has developed the solid wheel, there should exist a seasonal, bartering trade with other nearby cultures; where wide plains exist, and roads easily fashioned, such cultures may be more widespread, such as in the Middle East or in parts of Europe. The distribution of cultures (some being of different type) may allow for a wider range of weapons and treasure. It is up to you to decide, given that you will determine what the nearby trading partners might be.

Therefore, a plains culture with some agriculture may trade with a coastal culture, obtaining spears, coral and pearls, and even crushed shell as a fertilizer. A singular cult of the plains culture might include training in the trident, for purely military purpose.

Given that I mean to describe the wheel as the only advancement of the culture, extensive roads would not exist. Cart tracks, tailored to some degree with local stones, would be the height of the roads the party could expect – in overgrown areas or areas of hard packed earth and grass, the roads may disappear entirely, to be found two or three miles beyond. Locals would expect this – a travelling party might easily become lost.

The introduction of the spoked wheel, following the domestication of horses (animal husbandry), allows for the presence of the chariot. I want to make a small point here about the absence of practical, useful rules in D&D to manage combat by horseback. Clearly the creators expected players to ride up and dismount before fighting. However, the chariot was the true terror weapon of the 2nd millennia bce precisely because the riders did not dismount. At some point I mean to take all the various thoughts I’ve had on horses and chariots and produce a group of written rules – at present my offline party and I work according to agreed upon principles which remain fluid.

Since the wheel is so intrinsic to other technologies there is little to say about it beyond roads and chariots. However, note that the inclined plane, the wedge, the pulley and the lever are also basic weapons which come into existence along with the wheel, and which themselves highly influence a culture’s construction (monolithic construction in particular). The presence of these five basic tools in your culture means that the defences surrounding a tooled habitat should be stronger and more elaborate than a mere wall of boulders. A raised platform upon which cultural centers are built, split logs as well as finely cut and shaped stone, collapsing or lever-designed traps should all be present. It may not be as easy to seize a primitive village as the players think.

Next: agriculture.

Fishing

Beginning with the premise that a completely uncivilized race or culture would have minimal possibilities for levelled members, only clubs for weapons, no armor and perhaps no clothing at all beyond skins (many might not find skins necessary), how do the technologies from Civ IV expand the possibilities for defence, attack or ‘lair’? Specifically, how does fishing in particular modify Palaeolithic culture?

To begin with, fish provides a steady source of food, more reliable than vegetable gathering or random foraging or hunting (‘hunting’, further down the list, refers to systematic practices, which I’ll deal with in time). Early civilizations were at the mercy of the environment – a consistent, plentiful supply of food meant stronger, healthier societies. In D&D terms, this means a higher average hit points per die (increased constitution bonuses) and greater strength. Furthermore, the use of tools in order to fish increases dexterity for the whole population, as generation after generation learns from infancy the practice of hurling a barbed spear to obtain food. The barbed spear itself is an improvement over the club, as it is a superior short range missile weapon.

There are several methods of fishing; early societies would develop the above mentioned spearing, or the gathering of seafood by hand – clams, crab, oysters and so on. Hand gathering of abalone or lobsters would imply diving beneath the water, as well as the gathering of pearls for wealth. Hunting for oysters can include the practice of diving to depths up to 30 meters. The members of the culture would thus be very comfortable in water, and would possibly seek to combat land-conscious enemies in that environment.

While hunter/gatherers must move to seek food, fishing cultures may establish permanent settlements. The tendency is to build habitats near or onto the water, making food gathering more efficient and increasing defence. Homes might include rock dwellings on small islands offshore, dwellings built upon pilings above open water (lakes) or tidal flats (seacoasts).

A moderately greater increase in technology would mean the creation of traps, permanent or semi-permanent structures placed within a river or on a tidal area to gather fish moving past. Elaborate traps may catch unusual species, such as stone fish or eels, increasing the variety of food and possibly the toleration of the inhabitants to poison, say a +1 save against. Fish traps would also teach the method of creating elaborate traps to catch or kill humans, making such cultures more dangerous to approach.


Netting would allow for the use of nets as combat tools and a greatly increased supply of food (and thus a greater number of members in the community). The first villages, incidentally, were not dependent on pottery as suggested by Civ IV, but in fact occurred around freshwater or tidal sources where food was plentiful and good gathering technologies available.

The development of a boat by a culture allows for greater range of movement, a wider knowledge of the region and more contact with other groups, who may be themselves fishing cultures or may only have access to the water, or potentially obscure cultures living under the sea. This greater knowledge would increase the willingness of the fishing culture to accept visitors, be less fearful of strangers and be more able to identify local places the party may be seeking.

Pure fishing cultures began as early as 40,000 years ago. Unusual features include the occurrence of shell middens (piles of discarded seafood shells, particularly clam/oyster) and fishbone piles.

Greater comprehension of fish migration patterns would encourage exploration. Fish oil aids in food preservation and in the creation of a light source at night. Cultures around reefs would include corals as wealth.

That is a brief overview. I hope it gets the ball rolling.

Technologies

Having finished the fourth draft of my novel today (I wrote more than 100 pages this last two weeks, all re-writing), I’m in the mood to stretch myself out a bit. Recently I’ve had an idea for an ambitious series of articles on culture and D&D, using as a template a marvellous and familiar source: the Civilization IV tech tree.



My idea would be to consider how technological advances affect cultures and how this might be addressed within the rules and format of D&D, including suggestions for adventure, world design, potential obstacles to players and naturally arising conflicts. Obviously I would begin with the most primitive of cultures, starting from the assumption that low level players would be put up against simplistic societies with only one or a few technologies. As technologies were then considered, additional combinations could be applied to create radically different species characteristics.

Naturally, having the tech tree in front of you should itself suggest ideas, particularly when you consider that civilization builds into its tech structure buildings and units that can be introduced. I hope to add to whatever ideas that you, o gentle reader, might have, always encouraging of course comments expanding out my ideas and adding your own.

I won’t quibble about where to start: I will begin with the top of the first column, work my way to the bottom and then move on one column at a time. I don’t think I’ll worry much about the order in which Civilization IV allows technologies to be acquired. I would rather consider the whole as a list and nothing more.

I’ll begin tomorrow, I think. The first topic would be ‘fishing.’