Overthinking

[james_davis_nicoll]

"Using Basic Roleplaying as the template, with the detail iron quenches magic, who would prevail along the border between a metal-using, non-magical society roughly on par with the Song and metal-shunning society with functioning magic?"



Results so far:

Noticing the spell list in BRP is short on useful utilitarian magic, like light a fire or preserve food.

How does a magic using society secure a source of food? Are we talking sylvaculture here?

Why the difference? Maybe just an accident of geology meant metal working paid off faster for one, whereas it remained a curiosity for the other.

How is it these two groups are only just encountering each other? Which leads to an idea about a world whose Antarctica analog is freezing over, cooling the world and opening land bridges to a continent humans have never visited before.

Comments

[mindstalk]

There were chestnut forests in the Mediterranean. Possibly forest farming in India and Africa, I dunno. And it's not like the Americas didn't use grain, like maize.

I've wondered why orchards weren't depended on more, since productivity seems high for less labor. One answer might be warfare: if your enemies burn your land, having one year to the next harvest beats having ten years. "Against the Grain" ideas about states favoring grain taxation might be another. Orchards might let you be freer -- up until a neighboring grain state conquers you, because it's a state.

[graydon]

Grain is useless without the infrastructure to convert the stored form into the edible form. (grinding and baking or malting and brewing, generally. Rice is different but not that different.)

This does three things; it concentrates storage, it concentrates power (owning a mill is part of being elevated to nobility in Anglo-Saxon law; way back in the neolithic you use up young female slaves on saddle querns... the point being that having control of the convert-to-food process is a power concentrator), and it gives you a continuous static defense problem. The continuous static defense problem -- even if the field crops are fine, if the mill burns you have a problem -- begets standing armies. Everything else in Eurasian history follows directly from standing armies. (Once you've got the standing armies, you patriarchy, god-king autocracy, field-taxes, et multi-cetera, but it starts with defending the beer and bread supply begetting standing armies.)

Indigenous food production in NorAm was diverse in ways it's difficult to emotionally understand. You would get one cultural group using layered gardening, corn-beans-squash but not as field crops as such (no plow! not plowing deeply offended settler observers), aquatic plants, and tree crops in the same area at the same time. In terms of return for energy input people keep having to roll saving throws against disbelief at the resulting numbers. These cultures were vulnerable to attacks on food storage in early winter but not vulnerable to famine to anything like the same degree Eurasian cultures (with much more concentrated agricultural production) were.

(You can still get nice chestnut flour from Italy. It's not the same stuff as the North American version, and it's never had staple-status the way ~chestnuts (there's a lot of tree specifics involved and since there was an extinction event around 1900 there's a lot of questions) did for the Creek tribes in what is now the US southeast, for example.

[(Anonymous)]

My recollection from a history of ancient Greek warfare was that they spent a lot of time trying to "ravage" their rival's farmlands as they lacked the engineering technology to defeat city walls. But it was basically impossible to efficiently destroy olive groves. Tended orchards don't have enough dried plant material on the ground to support a forest fire, plus the trees are spread out a bit for maximum production and for ease of tending. The trees themselves are nice and healthy and moist so they won't just burn if you hold a torch to one. Even building a bonfire at the base or a tree requires lots of dried wood for the bonfire, and where did they get that? The orchard might be more flammable in a severe drought, but in a year like that armies aren't in the field, as everyone is home trying to keep their families from starving. You can chop down the trees of course, but it's hard and tedious labor with your bronze or stone axe, one tree at a time, and if your raiders are split into small groups to make the chopping more efficient, then those groups are vulnerable to being destroyed by the enemy's patrols.

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Nathan H.