I actually think that mightve happened in Junkman. I'd have to reread it.

I've always wondered how far Hellstrommes "i'm one of a dozen people aware of the metaphysics" hat goes. Does he know Mad Scientists are crazy? He has to have SOME blind spots or he couldn't also wear the "misguided villain" hat.

I...don't understand any of that, I'm afraid. Mad Scientists aren't born Mad Scientists - if they saw they'd been helped along by a mean muse and there were better ones about, find a better one. Simples. They want to ditch the help entirely? Now they can see it, they can do it. If Mad Scientists didn't have free will they wouldn't have attracted tempters in the first place, they'd just be like that.

Likewise, magic medicine is not going to become obsolete like antibiotics as long as the Hunting Grounds are in good nick, and there's no reason native astrophysics etc. wouldn't develop just because they weren't working from a Western perspective. In fact they'd probably be more likely to, because plurality encourages intellectual vigour.

Well the issue is, they're not tempted.  They're told.  Granted they're told in a slow, methodical and sinister way.  The manitou whispers "You will make a gun that shoots railroad spikes".  You make a gun that shoots railroad spikes.  The Stray has made it pretty clear that there is no "Good" manitou that can possess you and make you not a tool of the Reckoners.

The natives would never develop astrophysics or any kind of science past a certain level because they'd never have a way to automate calculation.  This is not to mention the cost of their quality of life without industrial production and manufacturing allowing for the highly specialized labor which drives innovation; when all your geniuses spend all day hunting and gathering and the like because to not do so is to starve you just don't reap the benefits of said genius.  How are they going to build a spectrograph or a centrifuge to make discoveries?  How would they have clean cities when they cannot even fabricate something as simple as a sewage pipe?

I mean, they end up not having cities.

They're...not, though? Where are you getting this?

Sure they would: "yo, water spirit, want to power my difference engine? It's, like, super-fast canyon making and I'll give you a shiny".

They build them with spirits interested in those things. They make portals to check out the little green folks' home dreamworld, and from there work out how to reach other inhabited planets where they have funky tech.

Also, the whole "hunter gatherers live miserable savage lives" thing is Victorian Imperialist bollocks. Ever seen those beaded ceremonial shirts? Quillwork? Spruce root weaving, Haida Great Vessels, the art of the Aleutian isles? You can't eat any of that. You can't eat grand myth cycles or the advanced non-Elucidean mathematics attributed to the Mohawk. Things get invented because there's a requirement and opportunity to invent them, not because there is one lifeway that's better. This would be a huge opportunity to invent, and problems would arise that would require further invention.

I would sincerely like to drag you over to Skara Brae and stick your head down the still fully-functioning Neolithic drains, I really would. People have always done amazing shit with what they have, even if that's just rocks; give them more material to work with without the equivalent of burning all their libraries and going "no, you start from ash again until you do it our way, with a centrifuge, not a whirlwind-devil", and you will get even more awesome stuff.

Tangentally, there should be way more Classical and ancient South/Mesoamerican steampunk than there is. Clay kinetic tech and carved calculators, damn.

? Do we need cities for something?

@Tan: Belle asked how they would have cities without the ability to make sewage pipes. I said they don't end up having cities, intending to imply no sewage pipes is a non-issue without a city.

To your point, as far as I know, heavily agricultural cultures allow for cities, which are easier to defend than nomadic groups, and allow to you make easier use of local resources.

I'm neither a sociologist, an anthropologist nor a city engineer, though. I don't want to argue the necessity of cities, please.

EDIT: I'd rather fight Ravenites and outlaws and black magicians.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:37, Fri 24 Mar 2017.

I was just asking where the city thing came from, sorry if that worried you. As a warning, I am a particularly angry anarchist archaeologist at present 'cause I'm badly made and avoid taking meds as long as possible so that they still have an effect when I actually need them (migraines).

You only need cities if you have a large agrarian base and/or related teritary economic developments, yes. Or if you have a strong centralised hierarchy and want to prove your wealth by building palaces, which requires storable food from somewhere, specialised labour etc. Even then you can just have a truly fancy tent, like Temüjin.

As for defense, it depends what you're defending against - if it's raiding nomads, you just need a big house or a wall per village to hide behind until they go away. When they get the large polities and will to besiege, then you do better with your food and producers stored mostly in one large place. I...I'll stop rambling now, but suffice to say that my undergrad dissertation was on the fortified churches of the Languedoc: I know a lot about the interaction of religion, conquest and building things (like murder churches. Murder churches rock).
This message was last edited by the player at 22:04, Fri 24 Mar 2017.

In reply to The Stray (msg # 469):

'k, I skimmed that message first over because I was distracted by the "if no formal academia, how tech?" over there, but aside from the mental image of a TechnoShaman being a shaman constantly dressed for a rave (which I'm not sure how to feel about) that is Awesome.

I would not be 100% surprised if Goes and Jacob had wound up on the moon once, either. Probably whilst attempting to do something else. So much love for those guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlg2sYN0yY

Also this, on Incan waste removal in Cusco:



You were saying?
This message was last edited by the player at 00:08, Sat 25 Mar 2017.

In reply to Tan Xiaohan (msg # 482):

I'm open to changing the name, if you've got a better, more flavorful suggestion. That said, *rave rave rave*

Oh geez, yeah, I can see that. It was Lee Goes claimed to be related to, wasn't it?
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 00:17, Sat 25 Mar 2017.

Brass Dancer? Gosh, that translates badly...um. Ghostwright? Ironmaker? Medicineer? A non-African word for the objects would be good, too...how 'bout a Making?

Not that I remember, but then he's claimed to be related to eagles, fictional 13th-century Irish monks, and Maharajah Uthram Thirunal before, so...probably? That one's at least theoretically possible. I'd love to see what would happen with Art and Goes in a room, but I fear it'd end up with someone being throttled.

Okay, the point I was making was completely missed.

Neolithic drains and Macchu Picchu levels of technology are primitive and do not support modern or even 19th century level civilization.  Macchu Picchu I seem to recall at its height had only a few thousand occupants.  Impressive for the time, surely, but again impressive for the time.

Whatever the ancients accomplished is not to be sneezed at or discounted (the Roman aqueducts confounded the best minds to come after Rome was no more for centuries if not millenia), without it we'd never have innovated further.  However the most delicate craftsmanship just can't compare to later era's ability to mass produce and build things people from prior centuries couldn't even conceive of (not because they were dumb either, just because there was no way they could have known).

You don't have an advanced civilization which advances scientifically with any kind of speed without cities.  There's no example in history of an advanced society that didn't have larger, more dense population centers than those considered less advanced. Cities are the economic engine, and more importantly are a conduit to ideas and information from other places.  Granted we have somewhat gotten away from that in the information age as the infrastructure expands to the point you can literally send messages to rural Uganda from Chicago and vice versa, but we haven't solved the problem of how to not have economic specialization without urbanization.

The cultural traits of people and their relative levels of contentment have nothing to do with what they can accomplish.  Technology and science are the same regardless of context and they develop in similar patterns no matter what era or people you're discussing.  A people without vacuum tubes will never go to the moon just for instance.  These are a people doomed to not have pacemakers, X Ray machines, or insulin shots.  This is a people who will forever lack now simple but all important discoveries like the Haber-Bosch process for transforming natural gas into ammonia.  (Seriously bat poop used to be worth a bloody fortune.)

It has noting to do with the merit of the people or their culture, any such point has nothing to do with this discussion.  It has to do with the realistic economic impacts of not having technology advance past a certain point.

You're missing the point entirely in that we're talking specifically about a universe where there's an entire subset of metaphysics. This isn't just "bam, everyone back in the Stone Age forever," it's "bam, you're now a hunter-gatherer nation with very functional magic to compensate for the drawbacks of that economic model and a great impetus for development."

You don't need mass production or vaccum tubes if you can tie a lawn chair to a Thunderbird, ask her to land on the moon, and listen when she suggests you cast Environmental Protection first. You don't need cities if every citizen can make spirit pacts on their own with enough desire and effort. Imagine the Songlines of Australia laced through with new research as well as enviromental mnemonic information, teller to teller: we know it's possible to move news and huga amounts of coded information across landmasses, even up to the size of Siberia. Give the same people horses, wheels, portal tech, access to immortal cosmic intelligences without disrupting those songlines, and you have progress reaching beyond anything that's easily imagined.

There are already specialised scientists in hunter-gatherer groups: that you don't accept shamanisim as a scientific dicipline* is down to your single-route bias. Furthermore, 'similar' is fundamentally not 'identical': maths is universal. A hammer is universal. Hypotheses are not.

The West still has no idea what chi functionally is and can't replicate the peculiar physical feats of Buddhist monks, for instance, or why accupuncture works, or why some mental patients don't respond to drugs but dramatically lose their psychosis when a culturally appropriate healer goes through a treatment or excorsism that's nonsensical to Western medicine. There must be an explanation, but because we in the West've created a cultural Science/social split and now (arrogantly) believe that's a fundamental truth/base of progress, we're not going to find it for decades because anything we can't talk about in Western terms goes in the "kooky New Age shit" box.

It wasn't anyone else who came up with the 'quality of life' thing, and you're still ignoring the universe under discussion.


*which I'd define as 'observe consistent results in world, formulate hypotheses as to causes, experiment in manipulation'.

Okay let's talk about that.

The magic of the Deadlands universe is too limited to substitute for non-supernatural technology.  It never replaces highly specialized mundane skills (like a surgeon) fully, it never operates on the scale it would need to to create a more fantastic universe, and more importantly most of the population is completely incapable of using magical powers at all.

Using spirits to whisper messages isn't a stand in for a telephone when 99 of 100 people cannot summon, see, speak to, or otherwise even perceive that spirit.  No electricity spirit ever summoned by the most Legendary Junker could recreate the power produced by a hydroelectric dam.  Psykers never replace the need for mundane infantry.  The Clockwork men from the Smith and Robard's catalog aren't deployed here en masse because they're just no substitute for mining the mundane way.

It's a question of scale, the magic is not what I'd call small scale, but it never really gets to the point where there's enough of it to completely substitute for actual technology.  Even the bombs that end the world are mostly based on real nuclear technology.

The world is familiar and assumed to be otherwise realistic except for the cases where it is not.  I know that sounds like a tautology, but this is still a world where water freezes at 0 C and makes sparing use of A Wizard Did It (A Wizard Did It is used, but it's for something big and unique, like opening the time portal).

*pokes head in*  Remember the Old Ones/Good Spirits are still abiding by their pacts or are being suppressed by constant warfare in The Hunting Grounds, so what the world sees is a limited/watered down version of the true powers possible, often corrupted by the Manitou, who want to give just enough of a glimpse to tempt mortals without relinquishing any True Power.

The Reckoners still have their hands tied in this setting... in the world view the proposed, the Manitou would be weakened, the Spirits released from their old bonds and a new beginning would occur.

In your comparisons to 'real world' cities, not everyone can wire telephones and support the technologies, but an abundant number of specialists can provide the services for countless.  If the ritual ways of bargaining with Spirits were taught in schools instead of 'physics', then in a reality where these Metaphysics apply, the results could be similar to smaller communities achieving the same levels of development that we consider high standards of living today.

But that's my point.  The magic in the world of Deadlands never reaches this quantum state, at least not until the actual Reckoners show up.

Now if the proposal was perhaps "Well this happens after the events of Hell on Earth are all reserved and the apocalypse is sort of perma-stalled/reversed and we're left with an Earth where the spirits good or evil no longer give a damn, a completely different world results", I could actually accept that.



The economics of the situation proposed will just never produce this kind of human capital.  Magic in this universe does not lend itself to widespread automation and the freeing of human capital.  To put it differently, in the world of Deadlands, magicians summoning water elementals will never replace artificial reservoirs, water towers, pumping stations, chlorination, and computer control thereof.

I think this is what the Native American Ghost Dancers are thinking would be the case - DL:Noir/DL:HoE are the 'bad ending' timelines for the Reckoners being delayed/stopped , but not driven off.  The concession would be 'if this drives off the Reckoners/bad Manitou and returns the good...' then all the other is subsequently avoided.  At least that's the impression I got.

But at the same time, creating the "technology dead zone" over the Sioux nations via the Summoning ultimately advances the apocalypse, because there's now one less source of ghost rock...

Surgery isn't a tech skill; so you couls have surgeons and surgeons using Wonders; development. Also, the population can use/benefit from their local shaman without shamanising, just as they did beforehand. If you ask an earth spirit to landscape a watermill for you, that's not going to benefit just the shaman.

The rest of that is just mechanics in the spiritually-crippled HoE scenario; things have to be that way or they'd have to start thinking hard about the world and it'd shoot off out of genre. Here, post Great Summoning? Should you truly need a message sent faster than a runner relay could take it, grab a shaman or a spirit-powered portal device, go yourself. Send a bird spirit. Visit their dreams Classic-style.

Again, that's because you're tying yourself to a Western idea of what civilisation must be: you're imagining a Flintstones version of the world, where every present advance is replicated 1:1 in the same order and the same way with different and absurd materials, not an Über version, where a bit of truly weird advancement sends everything spinning off over there and causing more research to catch up with the discovery (this still happens even without a war, witness any great breakthrough).

The Great Summoning pretty much bans the Reckoners from the immediate area, but yeah, that's part of the point of the power increase alongside the (manitou)tech ban.

It's still there, just not accessible (to anyone who isn't Kang, providing he doesn't start playing silly buggers). Though if the Nations're around long enough to stand up, recover from colonial pressure and take a damn breath to organise, they can start finding other ways to fight it.

Digging about in my browser history for something I saw months ago...the Discworld is actually low-magic in terms of everyday use, which is what's under discussion, but skim down to the bit about Exhalted and maybe you'll see what I'm talking about in terms of it not taking that much spark to start a chain of invention: https://aenramsden.tumblr.com/...ing-that-gets-me-the

It's entirely possible that I might just move in a more magitech direction overall, depending on how things go in this game.

Okay we're arguing past each other.

Again the different cultural traditions of different people doesn't matter here.  Let's consider a non controvertible example:  clean water.  Every society needs to figure out a way to deliver clean water en masse.

A shaman with the Elemental Manipulation power and 20 PP (so an experienced Shaman) can purify 18 pints of water, or 8.5 liters.  We could say the Shaman calls the spirits to make it rain or whatever you want to call it.  Now perhaps in a day if she rests and recovers some PP, we can get a little more, so let's be generous and call it 10 liters.  Let's further assume Shamanism develops a great deal and this society gets to be amazing at it, and so let's even assume an uber-shaman who can produce 1000 liters of water a day, 100x what the rules imply they can do.

I did a quick Google and found this statement on a pdf on a local government website:

The North Water Treatment Plant can treat up to 75 million gallons of water per day using a conventional filtration system.

And this is for Lubbock, Texas, which has a population ~250,000 or so.

75 million gallons = 283,905,884 liters

That is 283,906 shamans just to recreate one facility.  I don't know how many people work at that treatment facility and can't find it quickly, but I feel safe saying it's less than 10% of that number and it's probably less than 1%.

Speculating a bit, if one in ten people here is a shaman, that's a population of 2.8 million people who only have enough clean water to supply 250,000 people.  Granted their population may be a different number but just scale it, it's the same problem.

Right now they're no worse off than most people in the world in 1880, but by 1980 these poor people will live in heartbreakingly substandard conditions.  The magic of the Deadlands universe just does not have the horsepower to make this work even if we grossly overestimate what magic can do.

Silly Scientist… Shamans could use Earth Spirits to make gentle grade aqueducts from high altitude water sources and for shaping natural basins in heavier rainfall areas.  A gentle downslope over moss-filtered irrigation and infrastructure style pipes can accomplish the same thing without mass requirements for extended magic.

Artesian wells and springs, as well as natural geysers could be put to the same purpose.  The main thing to overcome would be man's inherent greed for more, something that gets substantially curbed in societies where commercialism isn't as rampant.

The best part is, these already exist!  They're called rivers.  And yes they could feasibly just drink out of the river the rest of their existence, but they would... live like people who drink out of a river for the rest of their existence.



Won't produce the volume of water needed.  They could also use sand, loam, etc.  But the problem even then is they're limited to what they can do with wooden, stone and bone tools, and all the gathering is by hand.



Which they can't fabricate.  Even a clay pipe requires a large kiln.



If they exist in sufficient quantity.  And again, you're missing the point, it's not just this one process is not going to measure up, it's every process they have is not going to compare to modern standards of living.  In this universe, even if these people are so much more superior to other cultures as is being suggested here, there's just not a substitute for these things that follows this universe's rules.  Even blowing the scale of what magic can do in this universe up by a factor of 100 and assuming there's way more shamans than there are, etc. it just doesn't work.



I'm at a complete loss what that has to do with anything.