Temperature and Air

[TarlimanJoppos]

Okay, so I found this great site () that has the periodic table sorted by melting point. Given the constraint of 10 degrees x talent rank, and allowing Elementalists to "stack" this Talent, you'd need three Elementalists with a rank of 15 in this Talent to get liquid nitrogen or oxygen. I can't see going much past that with the materials available in the Earthdawn world. Ceramics will do for a containment vessel to a point, but at the temperature of LOX, you're going to have problems with containment failure due to brittleness induced by extreme cold. The kind of ceramics and other materials that can handle LOX and colder liquids are most likely out of reach of Earthdawn's technology. So with a Mages' Collegium in the city of Fortetsa Hebo, originally set up as part of the war effort and now doing various sorts of research in peacetime, we can probably scrape up enough Elementalists to get LOX. The equipment and the time / energy of powerful Elementalists is going to preclude mass production, but we can certainly get enough to experiment with. From there, hilarity ensues.

Now I have to go back and think about whether anyone's done the equivalent of Joseph Priestley's work, or that of several of his predecessors, as Priestley gets the credit for oxygen's discovery, but he was building on the results of a number of other scientists. And then there's other non-elemental gases to think about, like acetylene, which is easily extracted from coal tar, which you have in great abundance once you discover the trick of cooking down coal into coke. And Marac has prided themselves on being a hotbed of this new thing they call "science". Ha! We'll show them!

[TarlimanJoppos]

Okay, after this I need to stop posting here and let people catch up, but I got excited. The Promised Land has the Bessemer Process for steel production, which requires a good deal of dolomitic earth for lining the crucibles. In the process of mining dolomite, you're likely to find (as co-occurring mineral deposits) marcasite, pyrite, opal, quartz, chalcedony, and cinnabar. The semi-precious stones are nice to have for trade, but the cinnabar is vital to a lot of metalworking. Roast it in a rotary furnace to release the sulfur, attach a condensing column, and you have mercury, which you need for gilding and silvering, making amalgams, and doing all sorts of other things. Now, you're going to need to clean the condensing column every so often, which gives you aqueous mercury. Dump in a bit of a strong alkali and you get mercuric oxide as a precipitate. The smiths of course would want to recover this mercury, and so putting the mercuric oxide under a strong lens in bright sunlight would result in a pool of mercury and a plume of oxygen - which is the method by which Priestley isolated what he called "dephlogistinated air". (We'll leave out Scheele and Lavoisier for purposes of clarity, although they deserve a lot of credit.) So the smiths would at some point realize that the plume of released gas will make fires burn hotter, and would dispose of it by running it into their forges. Waste not, want not. Coordinate a bit between the Mages' Collegium and the Great Forge in Fortetsa Hebo, and they're going to realize that they're working with the same stuff, just in different forms - one as a cold liquid and the other as a gas released in the process of recovering mercury from the cleaning solution.

I really need to stop thinking about this now and get this all written into my campaign... before I have any more clever ideas...

[The_Gun_Nut]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't know that this technology (for example, rotary furnaces and what not) wasn't exactly available back in the day. They didn't have the knowledge of folding metals, and many weapons would have been made of bronze, with the very nice/expensive ones being iron.

Now, this isn't really touched upon in the ED fluff or rules, primarily because it is unimportant to playing the game. I do, however, urge you to NOT put any of this into the game, as it makes very little sense, technologically speaking.

For example, the great hallmark of the great Roman Empire was not their weaponry. It was their indoor plumbing. Not kidding. This was extraordinarily advanced for the time period, and one of the hallmarks of their great civilization. As was concrete. And roads. And architecture. The list goes on, and very little of it has to do with advanced molecular chemistry and metallurgy.

As a final note, Mr. Priestly was an 18th century chemist, and NOT a classical Greek philosopher. I mention this to point out the difference in time periods and the level of technology both present AND needed to conduct his experiments. The saying is that Hindsight is 20/20 is inaccurate. Meat Loaf said it better when he sang "Objects in the rear view mirror appear closer than they are."

[Telarus_KSC]

[The_Gun_Nut]

Magical tomfoolery, I have no issue with. Adepts of all stripes experiment with the what and the whys of "magitech" all the time. It's the reason the Theran empire is so potent. I have no issue with this.

The issue I have is, as I said, the "20/20" hindsight people seem to insist should happen in any old world/historical style of game. Just because we know how to make steam engines or rockets or firearms in the modern age shouldn't translate into technological superiority in a fantasy or old world game. A Hero of Alexandria steam engine? Sure, no problem. A steam locomotive or zepplin? This isn't a steampunk, cyberpunk, Renaissance, or industrial revolution period game setting, it is a high fantasy setting. The airships and t'skrang riverboats are perfect examples of the technology available to the people, AND the direction the thinkers and inventors of the setting would move in.

I also have an issue with gunpowder in the setting. Aside from it being invented in Cathay as an alchemical experiment to produce an immortality potion (dead serious, that's real world stuff there), and given how much magic has permeated the public consciousness in the setting, it is unlikely that it would be used as the weapon of war that we know it today. Especially on any time scale less than a century following its discovery (which is extraordinarily rapid for both the setting and the real world of antiquity).

I've had this discussion with folks on the Iron Kingdoms forums before. If someone is dead set on using technology completely inappropriate to the setting, then no one will stop you. The game will not, however, be Earthdawn, but something homebrewed using the Step system from Earthdawn. Which is just fine for your game and your group, but it isn't something I want to play.

[Telarus_KSC]

(I used to run Mage the Ascension, so I can get a bit jargony. "If you're not hot for metaphysics, best to just skip it" -the Principia Discorida)

I definitely agree that you'd be drifting it away from the standard Earthdawn model, it's definitely a "houserule"-style campaign. I'd still call it Earthdawn ("in house" so to speak).

I'd also play much more fast-and-loose with these concepts in a home campaign than if I were designing something to be submitted and published by RedBrick. You'd have to stick much closer to the level of the examples in the book when expanding the magitech components for a product that effects the whole Game Line. If I saw Dragon-Powder in an official book, I'd want to see it as an optional rule with some good advice on how to, as you say, weave it back into the history of the world a few hudnred years so it doesn't feel dropped in, and advice on where to be careful in applying it.

So cranking the magitech dail up to 11 seems worth exploring in a non-formal game...

I don't mean to hijack this into a fire-arms discussion, but as an example I wanted to mention that I see things that can be used to bring back the Fantasy Swords & Sorcery shtick to applications of modern tech, like: sympathetic magic (dragon powder being a drug equivalent to fire elementals), modern kevlar equivalents made from magic silks, keeping effects like "smokeless powder" and "barrel rifling" the sole realm of Legendary Named Treasure (required Thread Weaving to use), and the fact that Death is "sleeping" & accompanying healing magic (a gunshot in ED is much much less threatening that even in the pre-modern era).

If we can apply that to Tarliman's ideas on Temperature and the Element of Air, what can we get? Let's keep in mind that we are working from the magic metaphysics outlined int he books.

Well, if the Elemtalists learn that Air is a Fluid comprised of multiple gasses.. this shakes up some of the foundations of the current Elementalist Paradigm. What does this mean for Kernels of "True" Air. What does this mean for other "True" Elemental Kernels. It might strengthen other theories of magic: "Sympathetic magic in Air-ships might work from the fact that both Air and Water share the Fluid descriptor, which comes with the Pressure, etc, etc properties. High levels of Mana allow one Fluid to behave 'as-if' it where another while in the presence of an Enchantment designed to that effect."

This might lead dwarf Weaponsmiths to try to fireproof some True Wood, and then soak some liquified steel into it like wax into a candle wick (you'd need the knowledge of capillary action...)... or other neat things.

At the moment, the Elementalist Paradigm in ED seems based in the Alchemical/Mystic Elements-as-Base-Units-of-Reality (Things are comprised of a mix of the True Elements)... with True Elemental Kernals serving as mana batteries and concentrated power that "resonates" with certain abstract ideals.... but if they discover that Air is comprised of a chaotic mix of stuff, it would be a similar revelation to the discovery of the Quantum Mechanics scale in particle physics... in that what was once thought to be the "basic building blocks of reality" (atoms) turned out to actually be "A useful map for investigating one aspect or scale of reality".

I think the True Elements are the perspective from which Mana is worth investigating ("Reality behaves differently when Mana is involved," being one of the primary postulates), so the 5-True-Elements models shouldn't go away, imo. But if you wanted to play a magic-theory/metaphysics heavy game, it's worth considering how ED's "Legends from our world's mythic forgotten past" will play out when we humans bring what we've learned about our world back to the fantasy narrative.

[ragbasti]

I've had a little thought:

If you really want to force advances in technology, you can always come up with a plot involving artificier.
As mentioned before I am currently about to introduce the early steam engine into my campaign and I've been trying to find ways to make it fit into the ED setting.
Basically my Idea now is, that the person who devised that engine is marked by artificier, who is trying to get his physical form back into this plane.
As the magic level is too low, artificier is using individuals that have been marked through his traps to do the job for him, feeding them with technological inspiration slowly leading to new advances.
The culmination of the whole plot will take years but at the end of that period, I plan to have arificier worshipped by little machine cults, granting him more and more power.
If I will use him to wreak havoc onto the world, I'm not sure yet. He might even become an "anti-passion", ruining the plans of Upandal and therefore settling with feeding off the rage of a passion. It is not all very well developed yet as most of the stuff is merely scribbles but maybe it gives some inspiration.

[The_Gun_Nut]

OK, I can see that working.

Pure technological innovation sans magical interference that took millenia happening in 6 months or so? Not so much.

[TarlimanJoppos]

[TarlimanJoppos]

To tie together Tansiarda and this thread:

The dwarfs decide they really ought to have a look at the footings - after all, they've got some good engineers, and any engineer worth his salt is going to insist on an inspection of the towers before building atop them. To do this, the dwarfs have to send someone down into the river. Now, magic is the easy way to do this, casting Gills or Air Bubble or what have you on the divers, but why pass up a perfectly good opportunity to field test this helmet and hose thingie that the engineers at the mines have been working on, a way of keeping a dwarf alive as he goes into a tunnel full of poisonous gases to plug the leak. So our unfortunate guinea pig gets sent down into the freezing waters of the Serpent with a diving helmet, and a couple of his compatriots working the pump up on the shore. A bellows just won't do, you've got to have some serious leverage to keep the air pressure in the helmet greater than the water pressure outside, which means a piston pump to move air down the hose. Sadly, our guinea pig expires when one of the pipes attached to the piston cylinder splits a seam, and the pressure in the hose drops. However, this causes a rather startling discovery: When the pressure falls so quickly so fast, the pump cylinder gets cold enough that condensation forms, making the temperature drop readily visible. Further experimentation back in Throal (oh yes, there's probably a few words said at the riverbank for the guinea pig, whose body is no doubt far downstream by now) proves that if you pressurize air, then drop the pressure off abruptly, it gets cold. Repeat a few times, and it gets so cold you can pour it. Hey presto, the dwarfs of Throal have liquid air that doesn't require an Elementalist to produce it. And they can take the temperature down further, providing their equipment holds. Sadly, a few lab assistants and a researcher are lost when their equipment proves brittle at such low temperatures, as do they after being sprayed with the product of their labor, but progress marches on. Imagine how much easier it'll be in the mines when you can spray the rock face with liquid air, then just give it a few good whacks and the whole thing collapses.

Oh, and I'm going to have to do something with the steel-soaked wood idea... thanks for that one.