So what stories do I actually want then
Oct. 22nd, 2024 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI haven't been having much to say just lately
because wandering the internet looking for how even the agriculture, ecosystem, and supply chains would have to work
to make Adventurer Clothes
with all the pockets
just keeps raising questions
that I'm not sure how to make a story answer.
The thing is though, agriculture was bloody difficult, and getting enough to live on was the daily work of the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of history
and I never get a feeling that rpg adventure worlds really grok that.
(Internet tells me 60 to 90%, but is not big on citing sources today, google is giving me reddit questions and wiki pages with citation required, not help. Also google says today globally around a quarter but locally in UK or US only 1 or 2% farmers, which explains the lack of grok.)
I mean it's fine that the rules are more detailed about magic item shops than about farming, that's just where the action is from that rpg's point of view, but you also get detailed rules for Survival in the Wilderness, without much detail going in to what makes it Wilderness?
And like, in the xbox game I think there's a dialog bit where Ulbrig talks about how Sarkorians claimed their country from the wilderness, driving the giants back off the rolling empty land... and the knight commander can point out that if there were giants it was not in fact empty? And elswhere in the game there's a one card several choices moment where soldiers are accidentally made permanently big, at the cost of their mental stats. And by the time this comes up you have probably been feeding enlarge potions to your tank pretty continuously, so that's... a concern. And you have the opportunity to spend resources to restore them, but you also have the opportunity to make resources by putting them to work.
So what even were giants, originally?
And what is their population density like now? And how isolated is each population? And how long has it been since they were the builders of great civilisations, the ruins of which you find all over the place if you poke even a little?
And how the heck are they eating, when adventurers aren't around?
So so much more food to fill someone that big. Unless magic is taking care of it, the way Enlarge spells never make your fighters hungrier.
Probably.
But I just spent a while clicking wiki links for things like British Agricultural Revolution, and now I'm wondering where Golarion tech levels stand vis a vis crop rotation and how turnips would work out given the unusual hazards in on and under Golarion fields. Like, have the druids had this figured out for ages, and that's why the planet is surviveable? Are the crop yields more like modern ones than medieval ones? How much bioengineering went into the food crops already? They had a whole civilisation that got knocked down ten thousand years ago, there's an Azlanti Star Empire listed on the wiki that went offworld, they used magic for tech level equivalents to... what exactly?
Whatever makes the plot go, obviously.
What quests do you get out of all that though?
Adventurers reading about the treasure of the ancients and then struggling through overgrown ecosystems that used to be fields filled with such abundance they can survival roll to live off the lands, but getting frustrated because whatever the ancient carvings were talking about it does not appear to be gold.
(surrounded by wheat and corn, they think this, obvs)
Supply problems in WotR get abstracted out to deciding if they should nick what they need and if so who from, but zoom in on individual parts and you could be teleporting parties all over the planet to make them come back loaded with food, or cloth, or whatever else the army hasn't had time to grow locally.
Teleport is the solution to where the new recruits come from in the early game, pay a money and a wizard did it. So it could answer later.
The supply chains thing gets wild.
And or, caravan guard remains steady work at all levels, if said caravan has to cross into the worldwound.
In Kingmaker and WotR it is possible to put teleport circles in every fort and settlement. Adviseable even, given the danger levels, for running away purposes. But also inadviseable, because then you have that problem where everywhere is the front and you need to defend your teleport circles really a lot.
But if teleport circles are a routine way to connect up known settlements, that would change the logistics so so so much. And need stupendous amounts of money to go in. But gold makes travel instantaneous for potentially ten thousand years? So that seems, you know, helpful.
The metals needed to supply the army have to come from somewhere, but by the nature of the wound it is initially somewhere off the edges of the map. Later your armies defeat a few of their armies and free slaves from mines. The mines make money and resources for you after that. But how?
Like, Daeran suggests recruiting nobles and their guards by promising land grants after the war, even though Sarkoris does not belong to Daeran. ... got distracted looking up Daeran endings... But, how do you run the mines, who owns the mines, where do you get workers when actual mythic demons are out there, what incentives are going on?
... do you just heal up the former slaves? I mean, that could work, it just... seems bad...
There are so many stories in every corner, but they're somehow not the exciting main character stories?
The game states possible by late game, where teleportation is a routine way to get around the entire kingdom, seem like they would build very different worlds than the worldguides or the kingdoms when you found them. But maybe they're just key to how challenge ratings change so steeply. Like how it's easier to travel stargate to stargate than it is to go over a days walk of terrain, so it kind of makes sense to end up with very distributed interstellar civilisations with a village on every stargate, before they'd bother with anywhere else. Evacuation being a factor there too. But teleport circles can be built, by locals with the knowledge, anywhere. So you just pick one economically productive bit after another to link together, and leave the in between places and ruins for the adventurers.
I was reading a thing on tumblr about GRRM's worldbuilding or lack thereof, and how that seasonal cycle doesn't make that ecosystem, or indeed that human race.
A kitchen sink fantasy world where every fantasy race and beastie in the bestiary has a place is just... really wild as an ecosystem.
Golarion has rumours of vaults in the Darklands and you can read it as somewhere the life got moved to rather than having to evolve there. Just layered up ecosystems that have one part that makes sense on earth and another that... really doesn't.
... but also few people seem to be good at making different ecosystems truly different from the one they see out of their window. there's a lot of handwaving involved.
It so often boils down to: what is there for any of this to eat?
... answers often seem to be: what is trying to eat you?
... some of it will be ambulatory or potentially sentient plant life so you also get novel ethical problems in the food chain, where veganism isn't remotely adequate as an answer.
fun!
If we take a science fiction approach then there's story upon story after each individual change to the way the world works. Stack them up like these fantasy worlds do and things get incredibly far out.
But it's all a backdrop to seeing how hard the fighter can hit things, which is a tad bit weird, really.
So: I want to figure out where the interesting stories are by treating the sort of damage spells do as the plainly least interesting bit of the setting.
But after a while if the interesting bits are teleportation and bioengineering and the possibility the neighbours are diversified post humans, you're doing science fiction with very retro fashions on.
Shall ponder more.
because wandering the internet looking for how even the agriculture, ecosystem, and supply chains would have to work
to make Adventurer Clothes
with all the pockets
just keeps raising questions
that I'm not sure how to make a story answer.
The thing is though, agriculture was bloody difficult, and getting enough to live on was the daily work of the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of history
and I never get a feeling that rpg adventure worlds really grok that.
(Internet tells me 60 to 90%, but is not big on citing sources today, google is giving me reddit questions and wiki pages with citation required, not help. Also google says today globally around a quarter but locally in UK or US only 1 or 2% farmers, which explains the lack of grok.)
I mean it's fine that the rules are more detailed about magic item shops than about farming, that's just where the action is from that rpg's point of view, but you also get detailed rules for Survival in the Wilderness, without much detail going in to what makes it Wilderness?
And like, in the xbox game I think there's a dialog bit where Ulbrig talks about how Sarkorians claimed their country from the wilderness, driving the giants back off the rolling empty land... and the knight commander can point out that if there were giants it was not in fact empty? And elswhere in the game there's a one card several choices moment where soldiers are accidentally made permanently big, at the cost of their mental stats. And by the time this comes up you have probably been feeding enlarge potions to your tank pretty continuously, so that's... a concern. And you have the opportunity to spend resources to restore them, but you also have the opportunity to make resources by putting them to work.
So what even were giants, originally?
And what is their population density like now? And how isolated is each population? And how long has it been since they were the builders of great civilisations, the ruins of which you find all over the place if you poke even a little?
And how the heck are they eating, when adventurers aren't around?
So so much more food to fill someone that big. Unless magic is taking care of it, the way Enlarge spells never make your fighters hungrier.
Probably.
But I just spent a while clicking wiki links for things like British Agricultural Revolution, and now I'm wondering where Golarion tech levels stand vis a vis crop rotation and how turnips would work out given the unusual hazards in on and under Golarion fields. Like, have the druids had this figured out for ages, and that's why the planet is surviveable? Are the crop yields more like modern ones than medieval ones? How much bioengineering went into the food crops already? They had a whole civilisation that got knocked down ten thousand years ago, there's an Azlanti Star Empire listed on the wiki that went offworld, they used magic for tech level equivalents to... what exactly?
Whatever makes the plot go, obviously.
What quests do you get out of all that though?
Adventurers reading about the treasure of the ancients and then struggling through overgrown ecosystems that used to be fields filled with such abundance they can survival roll to live off the lands, but getting frustrated because whatever the ancient carvings were talking about it does not appear to be gold.
(surrounded by wheat and corn, they think this, obvs)
Supply problems in WotR get abstracted out to deciding if they should nick what they need and if so who from, but zoom in on individual parts and you could be teleporting parties all over the planet to make them come back loaded with food, or cloth, or whatever else the army hasn't had time to grow locally.
Teleport is the solution to where the new recruits come from in the early game, pay a money and a wizard did it. So it could answer later.
The supply chains thing gets wild.
And or, caravan guard remains steady work at all levels, if said caravan has to cross into the worldwound.
In Kingmaker and WotR it is possible to put teleport circles in every fort and settlement. Adviseable even, given the danger levels, for running away purposes. But also inadviseable, because then you have that problem where everywhere is the front and you need to defend your teleport circles really a lot.
But if teleport circles are a routine way to connect up known settlements, that would change the logistics so so so much. And need stupendous amounts of money to go in. But gold makes travel instantaneous for potentially ten thousand years? So that seems, you know, helpful.
The metals needed to supply the army have to come from somewhere, but by the nature of the wound it is initially somewhere off the edges of the map. Later your armies defeat a few of their armies and free slaves from mines. The mines make money and resources for you after that. But how?
Like, Daeran suggests recruiting nobles and their guards by promising land grants after the war, even though Sarkoris does not belong to Daeran. ... got distracted looking up Daeran endings... But, how do you run the mines, who owns the mines, where do you get workers when actual mythic demons are out there, what incentives are going on?
... do you just heal up the former slaves? I mean, that could work, it just... seems bad...
There are so many stories in every corner, but they're somehow not the exciting main character stories?
The game states possible by late game, where teleportation is a routine way to get around the entire kingdom, seem like they would build very different worlds than the worldguides or the kingdoms when you found them. But maybe they're just key to how challenge ratings change so steeply. Like how it's easier to travel stargate to stargate than it is to go over a days walk of terrain, so it kind of makes sense to end up with very distributed interstellar civilisations with a village on every stargate, before they'd bother with anywhere else. Evacuation being a factor there too. But teleport circles can be built, by locals with the knowledge, anywhere. So you just pick one economically productive bit after another to link together, and leave the in between places and ruins for the adventurers.
I was reading a thing on tumblr about GRRM's worldbuilding or lack thereof, and how that seasonal cycle doesn't make that ecosystem, or indeed that human race.
A kitchen sink fantasy world where every fantasy race and beastie in the bestiary has a place is just... really wild as an ecosystem.
Golarion has rumours of vaults in the Darklands and you can read it as somewhere the life got moved to rather than having to evolve there. Just layered up ecosystems that have one part that makes sense on earth and another that... really doesn't.
... but also few people seem to be good at making different ecosystems truly different from the one they see out of their window. there's a lot of handwaving involved.
It so often boils down to: what is there for any of this to eat?
... answers often seem to be: what is trying to eat you?
... some of it will be ambulatory or potentially sentient plant life so you also get novel ethical problems in the food chain, where veganism isn't remotely adequate as an answer.
fun!
If we take a science fiction approach then there's story upon story after each individual change to the way the world works. Stack them up like these fantasy worlds do and things get incredibly far out.
But it's all a backdrop to seeing how hard the fighter can hit things, which is a tad bit weird, really.
So: I want to figure out where the interesting stories are by treating the sort of damage spells do as the plainly least interesting bit of the setting.
But after a while if the interesting bits are teleportation and bioengineering and the possibility the neighbours are diversified post humans, you're doing science fiction with very retro fashions on.
Shall ponder more.