Golarion fibrecrafts
Nov. 23rd, 2019 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I am wondering if Pathfinder's preferred campaign setting has knitting.
If their history of tech remotely resembles ours then they ought to. Wiki reckons the oldest known knit object is from 11th century CE but knitting might be from as far back as 3rd century , though it do depend where you draw the line between different techniques, and fibrecrafts leave less evidence.
Pathfinder's main setting has fun with tech levels, and if you want anything from adventures with nomadic mammoths in the ice age through to adventures in a crashed starship, you can manage it on the same continent. But it sort of averages out at vaguely medieval ish.
Starship stuff is covered using magic rules, on the grounds that there are a lot of magic rules and sufficiently advanced tech etc. And doylistically thst gives you all the answers you need, but watsonian it raises far more questions than answers. I mean if spellcraft can analyse nanotechnology then is your standard Cure spell only possible because the environment is saturated with nanogenes? Should we go full Virtual Adept with all this and start positing a games machine gone awry? Not if your players want to stomp around an actual planet, obviously, but still.
My point was meant to be, the level of understanding can't make nanotech, but I think under the rules it's more like, they might understand it as magic but it's entirely possible magic can make whatever advanced materials we could ever think of.
So that's a shiny.
But they do not have industrialised production in any of the cou tries I've read so far. Gunpowder isn't around neither. So that puts it back in imaginary vaguely medievalish times.
And usually fashion is very much shaped by technology. What fibres are available and what people can do with them are key. Boning with actual bones has different constraints to plastic. ... and would be way more goth in aesthetic, but not very vegan. But sustainable?
ANYway
Generally there's aspects of clothing that depend on technology
but on the Pathfinder planet, you can find every kind of tech if you just wander around a bit
and the distinctive Pathfinder aesthetic doesnlt seem to worry about any of it.
Like, you can be sure from the pictures that they can make armour in many, many kinds. Leather and metal and chain and plate and splint and... so many sorts.
Because players are going to care. A lot. This aesthetic can save their lives.
But also the armour design is... distinctive. Not overly concerned with freedom of movement. Actually game mechanically committed to the idea you can't move freely in the most protective armour, even though you can find videos of people doing dances and acrobatics in full plate. Because game balance, I guess. And keeping classes distinct.
Anyway. You end up with a lot of big shoulders and the general feeling they either can't turn their head or would clunk themselves in the face a lot.
It's an aesthetic that works very well on stylised miniatures with the primary purpose of being notable on a crowded battlefield, but I can't always see how it's even constructed, if it's not glued together and still.
... there are female pathfinder characters who appear to be holding the back of their 'skirt' on with their butt cheeks. It's not dignified.
The boov window problem is pervasive, but the butt window and tendency to show off upper thighs is also an issue.
You can tell from the illustrations that the locals can do really interesting things with leather. Ones that look more party than adventure party if you ask me, but there's all kinds of fun in the world, so fair enough.
There's also lots of big rectangular panels of fabric, like cloaks or big coats.
But then there's the painted on effect? And that's a bit difficult to get with modern fibres with stretch. I don't know how they're meant to be managing it.
... obviously magic, but, if they are spending that much magic on keeping their clothes on, you've got to wonder about priorities.
But what I haven't seen in the illustrations thus far is a good chunky knit. Even in places that look plenty cold. It's fur or nothing. ... usually nothing, obviously, and that's fair when you've got magic around to cast endure elements or whatever
but what is everyone else wearing?
I can see that thigh high boots are In, but are stockings being knit or what?
Would turning up being able to do a fiddly cable knit look Sufficiently Advanced?
How would importing pattern books do you? I can't read them but there's whole websites that'll tell you how to knit in standardised code. Super fancy patterns too. Would you bring those to a new world and find everyone wow or everyone bored?
I realise a game optimised for fighting monsters isn't really going to go into details on this one
but sometimes it bothers me.
And the answers might be in my books somewhere, I have a whole bunch more to read, so that's fun.
The Craft skill has many specialties but the suggested relevant ones are
clothing, cloth, leather, shoes.
Like, a point in cloth will get you the ability to craft every kind of fibrecraft??
But again, it's generally assumed that you'll care more about the arms and armour rules
and the rules are equally chunky there
Craft armour will get you armour of every sort.
It's just never going to mess a game up because the relevant bits will be the hitting things rules.
... see one thing I like about GURPS is it can handle the desire to get really fiddly *and* the urge to ignore whole swathes of distinctions and get on with rolling dice. It's right there in the rules. It's just Pathfinder is a lot closer to Wildcard ! skills than not, so leaves many questions about its setting unanswered as a roleplay detail.
... I dont actually play these games though, just read the rules and daydream, so I will swiftly dream iff the edge of the detail map.
I mean if everyone on the planet is going around killing monsters and acquiring really interesting hides to tan then I can jnderstand leatherwork becoming dominant. Farming for fibres a bit difficult when dragon. But. I just wonder.
Are the barbarians sitting around knitting
or would they wonder how you even did that?
Of course knitting plus regular possibility of slashing damage is just sad
but so it goes.
... I continue to ponder what wiuld be really useful to import in a portal fqntasy
and continue to come up
improved yield agricultural biotech (with a great deal of care)
refined techniques on small scale crafts
and
textbooks.
they might take a while to implement most of the textbooks
but they can have fun with pattern books pretty much right away.
And the new technologies of power could have great fun
though if you combine a decanter of endless water with a water wheel you already have power covered from the waterwheel about equivalent to a perpetual motion machine.
I mean I imagine it's summoning water from the relevant elemental plane
but that don't really answer all questions there.
The economy of magic is a whole big deal
like with gods
do they actually help
or do they just use the river of souls
to power what they want
but harnessing all their worshippers afterlives?
where does the power actually come from
and does it grow
or just go round and round?
because what course of action is Good very much depends on the answers
like in some versions gods are basically billionaires
drawing on the many
and in others they're genuinely wealth creators
because power flows from them that wouldnt otherwise exist
and sometimes they're sort of neutral
because they're tapping energy
their followers could also learn.
... obviously you make up the answers and have fun with that, but figuring out what the rules default assumptions are gets fiddly sometimes.
okay, this is not massively productive.
If their history of tech remotely resembles ours then they ought to. Wiki reckons the oldest known knit object is from 11th century CE but knitting might be from as far back as 3rd century , though it do depend where you draw the line between different techniques, and fibrecrafts leave less evidence.
Pathfinder's main setting has fun with tech levels, and if you want anything from adventures with nomadic mammoths in the ice age through to adventures in a crashed starship, you can manage it on the same continent. But it sort of averages out at vaguely medieval ish.
Starship stuff is covered using magic rules, on the grounds that there are a lot of magic rules and sufficiently advanced tech etc. And doylistically thst gives you all the answers you need, but watsonian it raises far more questions than answers. I mean if spellcraft can analyse nanotechnology then is your standard Cure spell only possible because the environment is saturated with nanogenes? Should we go full Virtual Adept with all this and start positing a games machine gone awry? Not if your players want to stomp around an actual planet, obviously, but still.
My point was meant to be, the level of understanding can't make nanotech, but I think under the rules it's more like, they might understand it as magic but it's entirely possible magic can make whatever advanced materials we could ever think of.
So that's a shiny.
But they do not have industrialised production in any of the cou tries I've read so far. Gunpowder isn't around neither. So that puts it back in imaginary vaguely medievalish times.
And usually fashion is very much shaped by technology. What fibres are available and what people can do with them are key. Boning with actual bones has different constraints to plastic. ... and would be way more goth in aesthetic, but not very vegan. But sustainable?
ANYway
Generally there's aspects of clothing that depend on technology
but on the Pathfinder planet, you can find every kind of tech if you just wander around a bit
and the distinctive Pathfinder aesthetic doesnlt seem to worry about any of it.
Like, you can be sure from the pictures that they can make armour in many, many kinds. Leather and metal and chain and plate and splint and... so many sorts.
Because players are going to care. A lot. This aesthetic can save their lives.
But also the armour design is... distinctive. Not overly concerned with freedom of movement. Actually game mechanically committed to the idea you can't move freely in the most protective armour, even though you can find videos of people doing dances and acrobatics in full plate. Because game balance, I guess. And keeping classes distinct.
Anyway. You end up with a lot of big shoulders and the general feeling they either can't turn their head or would clunk themselves in the face a lot.
It's an aesthetic that works very well on stylised miniatures with the primary purpose of being notable on a crowded battlefield, but I can't always see how it's even constructed, if it's not glued together and still.
... there are female pathfinder characters who appear to be holding the back of their 'skirt' on with their butt cheeks. It's not dignified.
The boov window problem is pervasive, but the butt window and tendency to show off upper thighs is also an issue.
You can tell from the illustrations that the locals can do really interesting things with leather. Ones that look more party than adventure party if you ask me, but there's all kinds of fun in the world, so fair enough.
There's also lots of big rectangular panels of fabric, like cloaks or big coats.
But then there's the painted on effect? And that's a bit difficult to get with modern fibres with stretch. I don't know how they're meant to be managing it.
... obviously magic, but, if they are spending that much magic on keeping their clothes on, you've got to wonder about priorities.
But what I haven't seen in the illustrations thus far is a good chunky knit. Even in places that look plenty cold. It's fur or nothing. ... usually nothing, obviously, and that's fair when you've got magic around to cast endure elements or whatever
but what is everyone else wearing?
I can see that thigh high boots are In, but are stockings being knit or what?
Would turning up being able to do a fiddly cable knit look Sufficiently Advanced?
How would importing pattern books do you? I can't read them but there's whole websites that'll tell you how to knit in standardised code. Super fancy patterns too. Would you bring those to a new world and find everyone wow or everyone bored?
I realise a game optimised for fighting monsters isn't really going to go into details on this one
but sometimes it bothers me.
And the answers might be in my books somewhere, I have a whole bunch more to read, so that's fun.
The Craft skill has many specialties but the suggested relevant ones are
clothing, cloth, leather, shoes.
Like, a point in cloth will get you the ability to craft every kind of fibrecraft??
But again, it's generally assumed that you'll care more about the arms and armour rules
and the rules are equally chunky there
Craft armour will get you armour of every sort.
It's just never going to mess a game up because the relevant bits will be the hitting things rules.
... see one thing I like about GURPS is it can handle the desire to get really fiddly *and* the urge to ignore whole swathes of distinctions and get on with rolling dice. It's right there in the rules. It's just Pathfinder is a lot closer to Wildcard ! skills than not, so leaves many questions about its setting unanswered as a roleplay detail.
... I dont actually play these games though, just read the rules and daydream, so I will swiftly dream iff the edge of the detail map.
I mean if everyone on the planet is going around killing monsters and acquiring really interesting hides to tan then I can jnderstand leatherwork becoming dominant. Farming for fibres a bit difficult when dragon. But. I just wonder.
Are the barbarians sitting around knitting
or would they wonder how you even did that?
Of course knitting plus regular possibility of slashing damage is just sad
but so it goes.
... I continue to ponder what wiuld be really useful to import in a portal fqntasy
and continue to come up
improved yield agricultural biotech (with a great deal of care)
refined techniques on small scale crafts
and
textbooks.
they might take a while to implement most of the textbooks
but they can have fun with pattern books pretty much right away.
And the new technologies of power could have great fun
though if you combine a decanter of endless water with a water wheel you already have power covered from the waterwheel about equivalent to a perpetual motion machine.
I mean I imagine it's summoning water from the relevant elemental plane
but that don't really answer all questions there.
The economy of magic is a whole big deal
like with gods
do they actually help
or do they just use the river of souls
to power what they want
but harnessing all their worshippers afterlives?
where does the power actually come from
and does it grow
or just go round and round?
because what course of action is Good very much depends on the answers
like in some versions gods are basically billionaires
drawing on the many
and in others they're genuinely wealth creators
because power flows from them that wouldnt otherwise exist
and sometimes they're sort of neutral
because they're tapping energy
their followers could also learn.
... obviously you make up the answers and have fun with that, but figuring out what the rules default assumptions are gets fiddly sometimes.
okay, this is not massively productive.