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ON THE AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY
We can certainly hope that most mushers have a fair grasp of what "Medieval European technology" usually means in an imaginary setting (no gunpowder, no steam engines, no electricity, no printing press, few effective medicines and no antibiotics - gosh, those were the good old days!), but inevitably, some of your new arrivals won't quite get the point unless you spell it out for them. So it behooves us to lay out some guidelines on how far the local technology has progressed. And going in the other direction, if your technology is futuristic, you have a certain obligation to let your Players know exactly what the "modern conveniences" are that they can roleplay taking advantage of.
Let's break it down into several subcategories, and then I'll list examples of each:
MEDICINE
Medieval or earlier: a good practical understanding of what we call "first aid" may have been developed. For example, setting a broken bone is usually considered a good idea. Ditto covering a bloody wound with a bandage so the patient doesn't bleed to death. Midwives get a lot of practice and understand what to do when a woman is having a baby, although they may not be familiar with the Caesarean procedure for tricky cases. On the other hand, any "advanced" treatment may do more harm than good. Do the physicians have ANY idea how disease is usually contracted? Correct answers would include rats, fleas, handling sewage and so forth with your bare hands and not washing them afterwards, failure to bathe regularly, etc. . . In Europe's Medieval period, none of this was even SUSPECTED to be a problem. Result : Plagues. Also, certain standard treatments included these:
For fevers, bleeding the patient was often considered a good idea. If a man showed signs of mental disease, one approach was to beat with him sticks to drive the devils out.
Many writers of "medieval fantasies" prefer to assume a more "sanitary" society, where people believe baths are good instead of dangerous, dispose of their sewage in a safe fashion, find ways to keep the rat population down to a minimum, don't bleed the patient, etc. If you want to assume that your "medieval" citizens have that much sense, it's your mush.
Nineteenth Century: Microscopes are being used to identify nasty little germs which are often found in the bloodstreams of people with nasty diseases, but rarely in the blood of healthy people. Could there be a connection? Certain methods of vaccination are finally developed and tested in response to this idea. Cleaning your hands and sterilizing your scalpels before you slice open the patient in the operating room is slowly becoming a socially acceptable idea.
Early twentieth century (1901-1950): Blood transfusions are experimented with. It is learned, one way or another, that some people's blood is very BAD for some other people, and several different blood types are identified, with charts being drawn up to show which types can NOT receive transfusions from which other types. X-rays are developed. Somebody finally discovers the first antibiotic - penicillin? Work proceeds in the lab with vaccinations and immunizations for additional diseases as they learn more about germs, bacteria, viruses.
Late twentieth century (1951-2000): Antibiotics, sleeping pills, antihistamines, etc., become available in any drugstore. Neurosurgery. Heart transplants, kidney transplants, lung transplants, bone marrow transplants, etc. CAT scans. DNA tests to once and for all nail down such questions as, "Is he REALLY my long-lost son?". Laser surgery on eyeballs. It is now possible to take a blood sample and learn dozens of interesting things from it (antibodies, genetic diseases, leukemia, low blood sugar, etc.) that a few decades ago would have been impossible to identify. Genetic diseases are being identified faster and faster as the experts get the hang of it. Artificial insemination is experimented with. Cloning of animals occurs in the labs.
Futuristic developments (2001 and up). Many possible things could be done, we still don't KNOW what breakthroughs will occur in what order, but interesting possibilities include:
LAND
Primitive: "How long will it take to walk from here to there?"
Early Equestrian: "Let's train these horses to let us ride them!"
Late Equestrian: "Let's have the horses pull heavy cargo in wagons, or passengers in carriages!"
Industrial: Steam-engine-powered railroads.
Twentieth century: Gasoline-burning automobiles (granted, there are other things they could burn).
SEA
Very Primitive: "I just invented swimming!"
Primitive: The canoe or small rowboat - only power sources are A) humans pulling on oars, and B) any current that the local body of water may have (if it's a small lake, that won't be very much. Good-sized rivers and seas would have noticeably more). The wind is admittedly a factor, but not nearly as important as it could be, especially when it's a slow, lazy wind.
Early Sailing: The small sailboat. Wind is finally being made to earn its keep by being the principle source of propulsion as it pushes against the broad surface area of the sail.
Advanced Sailing: Real "ships", capable of carrying many tons of cargo, generally using sails to travel, but often having lots of rowers down below (Roman galley, Renaissance Galleon, etc.). NOTE: Actually, MANY significant improvements in the construction, maneuvering, and navigation of sailing ships were made during the millennia between, say, the galleys of the early Romans and the coming of the clipper ship in the early nineteenth century - such as the bright fellow, whoever he was, who first connected the ship's rudder to a wheel on the quarterdeck to make the steering easier - but I'm no engineer and not really qualified to discuss these details of each stage of the evolution of ship design without doing a LOT more research than I feel like at the moment. On the bright side, most of your Players probably have even less interest in the details of ship construction than I do. If you tell them it's a sailing ship - as opposed to a ship with engines - they'll probably figure that's all they need to know as they pursue their roleplaying on and around it :)
Industrial Age: The fuel-burning ship. Probably using a steam engine at first (principally burning coal for its high energy yield, in other words, though wood and various other combustibles are acceptable in a pinch); later they may get ships with engines designed to burn special types of fuel, such as petroleum derivatives (diesel, etc.).
Late Twentieth Century: The nuclear-powered ship.
Beyond this - who knows what will be sailing the oceans in, say, the 25th century? Improved nuclear power, less dangerous?
AIR
None: "Air travel? What air travel?"
First successes: Hot air balloons, which will lead to dirigibles in due time (dirigibles actually can have engines on them, when those are invented). Hang gliders.
Twentieth Century: Fixed-wing powered aircraft, at first with propellers (the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel in World War I. The Spitfire in World War II), later with jet engines (the 747 and other passenger planes today. The F-14 Falcon). Also, rotary-wing powered aircraft (the helicopter). These (at least in our own timeline) have developed in parallel, neither the fixed-wing nor the rotary-wing ever really replacing the other, because while the fixed-wing can go much faster and can be made much bigger, the rotary-wing has the great advantage of being able to get in and out of tight places by going STRAIGHT up and down, instead of requiring a nice long runway. Likewise, it can hover over something for awhile to let you take pictures of it (or do other things that require a stationary platform), instead of needing to be continually moving "forward."
Future: Some other power source? Antigravity sleds?
SPACE TRAVEL
Prior to late twentieth-century-level technology : NONE, unless you determine that local "magic" can perform the equivalent of what Apollo 11 did, or even better. Or unless your cosmology is REALLY strange . . . for instance, Robert Shaw wrote a trilogy of SF novels in which two worlds were orbitally locked on each other, only a few thousands of miles apart (I THINK that's right) and the "path" along the line between their centers of gravity was filled with breathable air - kind of thin and cold at the midpoint, but breathable. iInterplanetary flight became a bit simpler when you didn't have to worry about being airtight. In fact, they used hot-air balloons! :)
Once the technological base exists, the following stages seem likely to occur (more or less in this order - and I am assuming, for lack of better data, that your world has is one of several planets orbiting a sun, and that you have a moon approximately 240,000 miles away):
1) Something that can put an artificial satellite into space (Sputnik launched by rockets).
2) Something that can put a man into orbit and get him back down, still alive (the Space Shuttle, and earlier rockets).
3) Something that can take men to the moon (about 240,000 miles away) and back again, still alive and kicking (Apollo 11).
4) Something that can send robot probes to land on, or pass very close to, other planets. (Mariner, Voyager).
5) Something that can take men to other planets in the same solar system - and bring them back again, one hopes (probably tens of MILLIONS of miles each way, unless you change the rules): Doesn't exist yet in RL, but they say they're working on it. In the meantime, read some of Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile novels from the 40s and 50s and you'll get a fair idea of what he thought it would be like.
6) Something that can take men to other solar systems at slower-than light speeds, but they'll still be alive (or their descendants will, depending on relativity effects, suspended animation technology, etc.) when they get there.
7) Something that can take men to other solar systems at lightspeed (relativity theory says the journey will be instantaneous to them - or at least, the part of it they spend at lightspeed will be. Acceleration and deacceleration might eat up a lot of time?).
8) Something that can take men to other solar systems at FTL (Faster than Light) speeds - SIGNIFICANTLY faster than light, it should be, i.e. making a 10 light year trip in a mere 9 years of travel would technically be "faster than light," but not fast enough to make it very appealing to somebody in a hurry :) (Star Trek and Star Wars universes, with their "hyperdrives" and "warp engines" and so forth, such that you can get from one inhabited star system to another within days, if not hours).
COMMUNICATIONS
This is one of those things where many different methods can be popular simultaneously. For instance, one of the earliest methods of interpersonal communication involved conversing face-to-face with the other person, and it's never really gone out of style, even though lots of cost-effective substitutes have been developed that don't require you travel to where the other guy is. So pick out which ones are common in your culture.
1) Communication requires that the other person hear and/or see you personally (talking, sign language).
2) Smoke signals (only good for a matter of miles, not hundreds of miles, obviously).
3) Writing is invented. If paper, or even papyrus, is discovered as well, you can now send written messages to anyone in the known world (in theory, if nothing happens to the messenger). Combine this with the use of horses (if you have any), and you get the potential for a "Pony Express." See also item 4.
4) Carrier pigeons (good for hundreds of miles, but takes a little time). Can carry a small written message.
5) Heliograph is invented. Lines of communication can be set up across hundreds of miles, or even thousands, in theory, each person flashing a message with a mirror to the next station in line-of-sight (using Morse Code or the local equivalent).
6) The Printing Press is invented. By rights, any world that invents the printing press ought to have the entire world population take a few weeks off to celebrate the opening of a bright new era, but it probably won't happen that way. Note that the Printing Press is much more useful to people whose writing system utilizes a phonetic alphabet, one with a few dozen, rather than several thousand, characters to worry about reproducing - i.e., the Chinese who first invented the idea of "woodcuttings" which could dipped in ink and thus the image be transferred to paper were also burdened with a written language comprised of thousands of different characters, so that trying to create bins of type for each character, and eventually a typewriter keyboard including each character, would have been impractical. This is probably why Europeans, with their phonetic alphabets, were the first to construct a true printing press and to use it for mass production, thus gaining a HUGE advantage in the dissemination of acquired knowledge, and thus the Renaissance was able to move into third gear and lay the groundwork for the Industrial Age, etc.
7) Electricity is invented! More or less in this order (based on our own experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), you get:
A) Telegraph lines.
B) Telephones.
C) Radios.
D) Cable television.
E) Broadcast television.
F) Photocopies.
G) Fax machines.
H) E-mail (and related functions of a computerized information network, once they get a decent modem invented).
Any means of communication based on electricity is, of course, limited to the speed of light, but for a population stuck on or near a single planet, that's perfectly satisfactory. If you go beyond that, i.e. on the Star Wars/Star Trek scale, you need to establish the existence of either
A) Courier services - give an electronic copy of your message to the next hyperdrive ship headed for Tatooine, and it will transmit it to your friend there once it arrives. The speed of interstellar communications, therefore, is whatever time it takes a typical starship to go from Planet A to Planet B.
or
B) Truly instantaneous "telephones" based on something other than the conventional applications of the electromagnetic spectrum. Is it possible to dial a number on your "phone" and carry on a fast-paced conversation with a friend 10 light years away? How much does it cost? (If only a few "dollars" per minute, or even less, then it will happen millions of times a day, probably. If it costs a few thousand "dollars" per minute, it will pretty much be restricted to use by government, big corporations, etc., and the common man will be dependant upon courier services as mentioned above).
METALLURGY
Stone age.
Bronze Age.
Iron Age.
Steel Age.
[NOTE: I feel the first four names are fairly self-explanatory - the state-of-the-art, toughest available material for toolmaking is the item mentioned in the name.]
Steel was improved significantly during the Nineteenth Century, I think, but I'm not sure how and I'm not going to go look it up in the Encyclopedia Brittanica right now. I'll get back to this one.
Further improvements - 20th century. With the aid of mass production techniques, electrical power, computers, etc., society has hit the point where virtually ANY metal which exists in significant quantities in the planet's crust can be found, refined, turned into alloys, bought in large quantities for industrial purposes, etc., IF there is a real demand for it in some walk of life. Aluminum, for instance, has in the 20th century rapidly become very popular for such things as lightweight aircraft design (planes in World War II, for instance), and flexible foil to cover food while heating it over a fire or inside an oven, and cheap disposable cans to contain soft drinks, and many other functions. As recently as 200 years ago, nobody had ever isolated a sample of "pure" aluminum in their laboratory - and even after they did (early Nineteenth Century) it was given little attention for several decades because nobody saw much use for it - but changing circumstances have created a massive demand for it, and once the demand existed, the development of an industry to locate, mine, refine, and shape it was a fairly straightforward engineering matter - given modern tools and techniques. The demand for uranium is even more recent, and probably grew even faster once it got started.
POWER
1) Wood is burned for heat.
2) Coal is burned for heat.
3) Fish oil, etc., is burned for illumination (you CAN burn it to heat a room or a whole building, but that idea has never really caught on at the grass-roots level. Wood is easier to obtain in large quantities for that purpose, usually, if you need to heat a whole building at once).
4) Windmills and watermills are developed.
5) The development of the steam engine (sure, it still burns coal or wood - coal by choice - but now you get more use out of the combustion, to move factory machinery, railroads, steamships, etc., etc.)
6) The discovery of some of the wonderful things you can do with petroleum and its derivatives (gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, etc).
7) The harnessing of natural gas to the problem.
8) The discovery of the electrical generator.
9) The development of nuclear power.
10) Whatever comes next - cold fusion? A system of absorbing and storing solar power with such efficiency that coal, gas, etc., no longer are necessary? Antimatter? Something else?
NOTE: I segregated these various aspects of Technology because there's no hard-and-fast rule that says your culture must
have exactly whatever England (as an example) had at a certain point in its development, and nothing but. For instance, I
can imagine a culture that had invented the steam engine and installed it on a ship, without ever developing a printing press
along the way. On the other hand, I have trouble believing in a culture that could have the printing press for 3000 years or
more before it went on to the discoveries of steam engines, OR germ theory, OR hot air balloons . . . but Robert Jordan,
noted fantasy author, has created just such a world, and evidently HE believes it could happen. Or else that was just the type
of world he preferred to tell stories about, for some reason - they do call it FANTASY, after all. Anyway, my point is that
you are free to mix-and-match from these various lists of different stages of development, as long as you think you can get
away with it.
