erik wrote:Is this something the players will care about? If not then handwaving is functionally much less boring since you get back to investigating and slaying and looting.
I don't think the players will give any fucks about the preservation process, but since the first session is going to involve the PCs' first exposure to the sun and trees, I think it's worth being able to tell them what their characters' actual context is, like whether food is Matrix-style snot-gruel that comes out of a magic spoon, or honeyed meat that comes out of big glass jars from the underchambers.
Also, since they're going to be emerging into the ruins of their pre-apocalypse civilization, it's worth figuring out what that might have been like, for looting purposes if nothing else. Determining what's necessary for the complex to have been built is a decent way to start on that.
erik wrote:
This was for an rpg campaign right? I think if you are spending more than half a paragraph on food preservation then you have already gone deep into the abyss of Logistics & Canning and way beyond boring. Is this something the players will care about? If not then handwaving is functionally much less boring since you get back to investigating and slaying and looting.
From a player perspective, knowing the specific ways that food was preserved isn't particularly important. But knowing that there is a reason other than 'a wizard did it' is helpful.
While we all know that 'fantastic elements' will change 'real world expectations', most people want to use the 'real world' as a baseline and see how the fantastic has changed those expectations. If you start with a world that already has no relationship to the real world, it's harder for characters to 'respond appropriately'.
So taking some time to figure out whether there is a 'realistic' method lets you make the world more relatable to your players. The benefits may seem minor, but I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand.
The food preservation failing also makes for a good reason to seek the surface.
virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.
FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.
angelwithanotherpin's logic is good and it's something I wish more GMs would do. Building an incoherent setting with schizo-magitech is deeply player disempowering because it means they aren't allowed to be creative with other applications of the powers or else the setting breaks. If the setting is properly thought through and consistent then it allows players to explore and invent and be creative without instantly destroying the setting and (usually) ruining the GM's fun in the process.
Based on the sheer size that the honeyed food storage method would require, I posit that the society which produced it would probably be a hydraulic empire (a state which enforces centralised rule via control of irrigation), which implies an arid or mountainous terrain and a population clustered around one or more densely farmed river valleys. The state may dominate a large hinterland in which this complex is built, but its actual population base and agricultural base will be clustered around the watercourses.
It's in the fantasy cultures thread. Nutshell version: River empires lend themselves to strong centralized authority because someone's gotta maintain all the irrigation canals, and the most efficient way by far is to have an imperial engineering corps who takes care of that on taxpayer money, then uses control of the irrigation network to maintain control over a very large number of people.
So between being a river-based empire, the monumental constructions, and the emphasis on religious ritual, we are currently looking at exactly Egypt.
What Chamomile said (I need to dig up that thread and put some more stuff into it), but here's a more thorough breakdown.
Megaprojects require three things:
1. A state in which the sovereign is not threatened by a self-interested noble elite.
In states where the monarch is the "first among equals" of the nobility, or even those which have a feudal hierarchy, the nobility historically tends to act in such a way as to keep the state perpetually short of cash and unable to invest in long term schemes. Feuding between kings and barons, even if it's carried out in terms of prestige and income rather than as open warfare, is a constant enough drain on resources that it's difficult to get the clarity of purpose in order to plan too far ahead. This isn't due to anyone's sinister schemes or any system of checks and balances: it's due to the fact that dynasties tend to be short and offices change hands relatively quickly, meaning that investment for the future is generally a poor decision because you have no guarantee that your children will be the ones to benefit from that investment. Merchant states tend to behave similarly to feudal states in this manner; Venice is a good example, with families rising and falling and therefore all investments being made either on a short-term basis or else only happening with the greatest of difficulty when consensus is finally reached.
2. The ability to extract vast amounts of money and labour from the population.
Most feudal states are perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy, and are unable to levy large amounts of labour for exceptional circumstances. Their ruling class is a military thing, designed to raise part-time levies of professional warriors. Merchant states may be able to raise the cash but do not have access to huge numbers of peasants which can be forced into labour on a whim. They might be able to invest in slave labour, but that limits the size of their megaprojects to the availability of mass short-term slave labour, which is always less easy to get than conscripted peasant labour simply because fewer slaves are available on the market than peasants exist in any country.
3. A professional bureaucracy and class of professional infrastructure engineers.
The physical labour of building a megaproject is not only difficult and expensive, but requires specialist engineering skills. Peasant miners may be expert at working on their local mine, but all they have is rules of thumb that hold true for their particular case. You need professionals who have theoretical skills, and that means you need a tradition of engineering and a centre of study. Likewise, the coordination of such a project - the labour involved, the engineering, the logistics - requires professional bureaucrats and organisers. Things like this can't simply be done by learning on the job; they imply the existence of a tradition of professionals who have developed these skills over generations. Church states are often good places to look for such professional bureaucracies, especially those with monastic traditions.
All three of these things are provided by a hydraulic empire.
The river monarchies of the Fertile Crescent, and later under Persian and Seleucid rule, were absolute. All land belonged to the king, and he ruled via a professional civil service as opposed to via a feudal hierarchy. Dynastic Egypt is another good example of this, as are some regions and periods of Chinese rule, and the precolumbian Mexican and Peruvian civilisations. The control of water sources is a natural way to centralise power, and makes it difficult for warlords and local elites to build their own power structures and patronage networks. In cases where irrigation occurs from rivers rather than from qanats or lakes, it also means that trade and transport occurs via the river and hence is also easy for a central government to monitor. As such, hydraulic empires are good places for centralised authority, which helps with megaprojects.
Hydraulic empires are also easy to tax - the bureaucrats can see how much water you're receiving and thus can tax you appropriately. It's impossible to hide income from tax inspectors or develop your own separate sources in the same way that you can in regions where all the land is innately arable. Similarly, it's easy to carry out censuses and so have a system of conscription for military purposes or for labour. Because the hinterland is much less fertile than the irrigated zone, people cluster around the water sources and thus it becomes both easier to count them and much harder for them to move from place to place to escape registration. This means that when you need to conscript tens of thousands of labourers to work on your megaproject, the infrastructure for that is already in place.
Lastly, because of the regular flooding of rivers or other water sources and the vast amount of engineering required to keep an irrigation system going, bureaucracies and engineering traditions will grow up. Usefully this sort of thing tends to be done in a centralised fashion, since large-scale irrigation and flood prevention isn't something each farmer can do on their own land. As such, people develop engineering knowledge and teach it to one another until after several generations it becomes a full-time profession with large bodies of theoretical knowledge. Similarly, the sciences of organisation, logistics and administration become things which people learn and which professionalism develops around. Perhaps even more usefully, people get used to the existence of professional engineers and get used to obeying professional organisers, which means that the construction of megaprojects is possible without causing widespread social disruption.
If you have a society which is thoroughly familiar with the large-scale organisation and engineering involved in something like the Nile flood or the Aztec farming on Lake Texcoco, which involves many thousands of conscripted labourers working under the guidance of professional engineers and supported by professional organisers and logisticians, with the whole thing paid for by centrally-raised taxes and guided by the long-term planning of a state which isn't fractured by feuding noble power bases, then it's actually not that much of a leap towards being able to build megaprojects. Instead of being something brand new, it's simply a larger-scale implementation of something they know how to do well.
Derinkuyu, along with the other Cappadocian underground cities, were built by the Medians whose irrigation system relied upon qanats, making them a good example of a non-river-based hydraulic empire.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:Now, canned food seems like it can also potentially last for at least a century - because it has. And the actual can isn't necessary, issues of transportation aside, glass with a wax seal seems like it would do fine. Sterilize with heat, maybe pour in some honey as insurance. Plausible enough, and no particularly advanced paradigm required.
Ah, but that's where you're wrong. Ancient people didn't realize that 'sterilization' was even possible. They didn't have germ theory, nor did they have sufficiently advanced storage techniques to permit them to boil and hermetically seal foodstuffs to discover it by accident.
This is why canning was only developed in the late 18th - early 19th century. Fermentation could be discovered by accident, salting and drying and picking could be discovered by accident and a bit of basic experimentation, but it requires advanced techniques to can.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:Now, canned food seems like it can also potentially last for at least a century - because it has. And the actual can isn't necessary, issues of transportation aside, glass with a wax seal seems like it would do fine. Sterilize with heat, maybe pour in some honey as insurance. Plausible enough, and no particularly advanced paradigm required.
Ah, but that's where you're wrong. Ancient people didn't realize that 'sterilization' was even possible. They didn't have germ theory, nor did they have sufficiently advanced storage techniques to permit them to boil and hermetically seal foodstuffs to discover it by accident.
This is why canning was only developed in the late 18th - early 19th century. Fermentation could be discovered by accident, salting and drying and picking could be discovered by accident and a bit of basic experimentation, but it requires advanced techniques to can.
Amusingly, there are actually written records of medieval scholars carrying out proper lab studies using this as their experimental setup in order to conclusively demonstrate that mice and bees spontaneously generate. The results were normally "see, I got insects inside my sealed jar of fruit, spontaneous generation is totally a thing." Since spontaneous generation is not in fact a thing, this can only mean that medieval wax seals suck at keeping insects and mice out.
I assume that Occluded Sun is as aggressively wrong about this as he is about most everything else. Chiefly because he refers to 'advanced techniques' without specifying any actual processes. For the record, I have personally canned things, no 'advanced techniques' were involved.
Wax seals are used for hermetic sealing today, so wax totally can hold an airtight seal. Indeed, Sir Francis Bacon recorded keeping an apple fresh for a month under a coating of wax.
You don't need germ theory to discover that food goes bad under some circumstances and not in others. I know this because germ theory wasn't proven when Nicolas Appert was developing his airtight preservation methods. I don't see any reason that a low-tech society could not stumble onto the same method that Appert stumbled onto.
Canning was invented with the help of a development grant by the Revolutionary Army of France in 1810. I don't know if the germ theory of disease is strictly necessary for the creation of canning (Pasteur proved that bacteria can be killed with heat sixty years after the first canning factory went online), but it is factually true that in our world the viewing of microorganisms with a microscope predated the invention of the can by a bit over one hundred years.
Sure, there was knowledge *of* microorganisms, but I'm not sold on any particular link between that and trial-and-error tests to see if heating things makes them spoil more slowly.
You must both heat things sufficiently - depending on where you are on the planet, the boiling point isn't always enough - and then keep the heated substance away from contamination, which is actually quite difficult.
We take things like airtight seals for granted, but the mass production of jars and lids capable of forming such a seal is a strictly modern development. And even then, they fail regularly, which is why people who home-can are supposed to inspect the jars regularly for signs of bacterial growth, and why people are justifiably wary of cans with dents.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
angelfromanotherpin wrote:I assume that Occluded Sun is as aggressively wrong about this as he is about most everything else.
Yes, I am as aggressively wrong about this as I am about everything else. Precisely as wrong.
You should be aware that your track record here includes blatant factual errors, such as "the equal-time rule hasn't been in effect since 1934." I know that you are not the sort of person to let being proven conclusively wrong give you any pause whatsoever, but if you're really going to try and claim a pristine record I am going to point out that it stopped being pristine one of the many times we pissed all over it. On this topic specifically...
Pasteur is the one who finally proved that microorganisms were responsible for food spoilage, and he did so half a century after some French chef realized that you could preserve food by boiling it in glass jars sealed with wax. I can't tell you why Nicholas Appert thought it would work, but canning predates a scientific understanding of the spoilage it prevents and its discovery may as well have been an accident. If Appert had understood the ramifications of his own discovery we'd be calling him the father of germ theory, because that is exactly what Pasteur did: looked at canning and realized it could be used to prove the germ theory of disease, then did so. Also: Appert sealed things using a cork and wax. Nothing high tech about that at all.
The real obstacle to the feasibility of canning is the container itself. Appert used glass bottles, which are difficult to make and difficult to transport. Durand introduced the tin can, which requires some level of industrialization to create. You really want something cheaper and more durable than glass but more primitive than soldered metal, but you could probably get away with glass. It's not prohibitively expensive.
It's a pleasant change for DSMatticus to be merely wrong, as opposed to actively making up lies and trying to make them stick.
To successfully can, you need to:
1) Sterilize the food
2) Sterilize the container
3) Keep both the food and inside of the container sterile
These aren't all that easy even when you know precisely how to manage the task and why. It also requires containers with certain properties - at the very minimum, stoneware with a glaze.
It's very notable that the Egyptian preserved foods were in Egypt - an extremely dry country once you're away from the river and the sea. Which is a large part of why they developed mummification in the first place, although even some societies in relatively humid climates attempted it.
It's difficult to imagine a medieval society, or even a Renaissance one, managing to stockpile and preserve enough food to keep a viable population fed for a hundred years, or even a single generation (say, twenty years or so).
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
At a guess, he wanted to preserve something against oxidation, or against picking up other flavors.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Occluded Sun wrote:To successfully can, you need to:
1) Sterilize the food
2) Sterilize the container
3) Keep both the food and inside of the container sterile
I wonder how you could go about accomplishing all three of those things. Maybe you could put the food in a container, seal the container, and then boil the sealed container for an extended period of time. Why yes, yes you could.
I wonder what Nicholas Appert did when he successfully invented canning (you know, that guy I mentioned in my post). I wonder if he put food in a container, sealed the container, and then boiled the sealed container for an extended period of time. Why yes, yes he did.
Occluded Sun wrote:These aren't all that easy even when you know precisely how to manage the task and why. It also requires containers with certain properties - at the very minimum, stoneware with a glaze.
They are exactly that easy. A chef with no special training accomplished the task using ordinary glass bottles, a cork, wax, and boiling water.
Occluded Sun wrote: It also requires containers with certain properties - at the very minimum, stoneware with a glaze.
Or glass. Or probably even sufficiently nonporous stoneware. All of which are thousands of years old, and in no way an obstacle to the development of canning.
Occluded Sun wrote:It's difficult to imagine a medieval society, or even a Renaissance one, managing to stockpile and preserve enough food to keep a viable population fed for a hundred years, or even a single generation (say, twenty years or so).
That is an exceptionally difficult thing to say. Even before the massive industrialization of canning (when it was still an incredibly labor intensive process), we still canned things. The biggest consumers were governments with active militaries, who correctly identified the logistical value of transportable preserved foods. The process is not prohibitively labor expensive, it's just the regular kind of labor expensive. It almost certainly would not require industrialization for a sufficiently large premodern society to produce a bunch of canned food for their doomsday shelter community. But it probably would require a level of organization that historically the medieval period is not known for. You'd probably need a society that looked more like Rome or Egypt - capable of pooling its resources (including abundant slave labor) in order to get shit done. You'd also really want a compact energy source for all that boiling you're doing; wood probably isn't going to cut it.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
My guess as to why Appert tried heat was that simply cooking food helps to preserve it, and he was trying to see if kinda cooking it would help. And Bacon had shown that keeping things away from air helped. It's a fairly logical progression.
Glass is mostly terrible to transport because it's heavy and fragile. But if they made it more or less on the site, that stops being much of an issue. This suggests that the empire had a pretty large glassmaking skill base to begin with. What does it imply about a civilization that it has a lot of glassmakers and beekeepers?
Would it be economical to use charcoal-burning to get better fuel out of trees, or are they going to need a coal mine or something?
virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.
FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.
