Anachronistic Settings with Multiple Tech Levels

[Harshax]

I've been collecting a lot of material for my setting in progress and wanted to get the den to ask me some world building questions in regards to some of the elements I'm choosing to blend together.

This setting will take place in Chicago, that geographically includes elements from the 1880s through the 1920s.

This setting is urban fantasy/horror.

Setting elements are heavily influenced by both Diamond Age and Howl's Moving Castle.

There are quite varied tech levels all operating simultaneously. The availability of these innovations depends equally on an organizations resources and the scale of their operations.

Using GURPS tech-levels as a guideline, let me describe a couple concepts:

transportation.
3 -
4 - Horses and Air sailing ships are the most prevalent methods of travel, used primarily by the segment of the population with the lowest resources or by entities that have large fleets, such as standing armies.
5 - Locomotives exist. While extensive, their capabilities are obviously limited to predefined routes between major cities. Dirigibles exist for luxury aircraft and elite military units. Steamships and early automobiles exist, mostly reserved for specialized military or the wealthy eccentric.
6 - early 20th center Automobiles, Airships, Submarines exist buy are truly limited to the extremely wealthy individuals, ancient cabals or black-ops Luminary units.

communication/data
3 - pony express, letters, semaphores, smoke cignals
4 - difference engines, punch cards
5 - telegraph, lan lines
6 - computer/network, cell phone

I've decided that anachronistically, Tesla was able to commoditize transmitable energy before Edison was able to market his own methods. The internet exists, but there are few users. Network communication protocols are, fundamentally, the transmission of energy between devices using agreed upon handshakes, headers, formats and error handling. I might be able to leverage tech levels to determine the difficulty class of various activities.

Weapons, Medicine and other aspects about the world will fit into formats described above.

This is is like Diamond Age in that there's a economic and social strata that allows for varying types and descriptions of problems and enemies. It also allows me to scope out different types of enemies such that a ancient Chantry of cultists might represent a small group of individuals with advanced resources or rival gangs in Back of the Yards still settling things with cutlasses and the occasional wheel lock pistol. It also allows there to exist both low-tech widely spread existential threats that are also in conflict with other dangers that, while having more resources, simply do not have the reach to dominate their enemies with superior technology.

Is it to early to Request Comments are there societal considerations that I should be considering now?

[Thaluikhain]

Well, even in WW2, the German Army was using loads of horses, (they used elephants from a zoo to shift cargo around in WW1), cavalry sabres were used in WW1 (and the Japanese, of course, had swords in WW2, but more as a status symbol or thing to murder civilians with). Flintlocks were used in the American Civil War. Even today, you get some really primitive home-made firearms, though often made from things that were made in modern factories. So there's precedent.

I am curious as to how you can get it to work that a flintlock is a serious weapon when someone else has an SMG.

[OgreBattle]

Don't US troops find a mixed bag of weapons in middle eastern raids?

The supply chain to upkeep a modern automatic is like magic power levels in fantasy

[Thaluikhain]

Don't US troops find a mixed bag of weapons in middle eastern raids?

In Afghanistan, definitely (and Afghanistan domestically makes lots of weird guns to sell to foreign troops as souvenirs), in Iraq they are mostly early cold war or later. Which is still a mixed bag, though, but you'd likely mostly categorise them as "modern".

[Harshax]

I am curious as to how you can get it to work that a flintlock is a serious weapon when someone else has an SMG.

Maybe I'm overly simplifying, but this scenario sounds no different than a mid-level fighter with a +2 sword facing a squad of mooks surrounding a mid-level boss.

[Sigil]

You see interesting discrepancies in firearm technology sometimes, even relatively modern examples. Generally in the context of a group with many more resources invading or occupying a territory that they're technologically superior to, or from individuals and small organizations home crafting weapons illegally to avoid laws.

Historically you have things like Afghan jezails sometimes using the matchlock mechanism from captured weapons because of the difficulty of manufacturing them, but the rest of the jezail being entirely purpose built. Or you have the Liberator pistols (and though never actually distributed as far as I know the Liberator shotguns), which was a single shot pistol mass produced to be extremely cheap and distributed in quantity to various rebels and other groups that the CIA wanted to support, originally conceptualized to be distributed to French resistance fighters in WWII.

You also have people even in the present day united states (probably mostly small criminal organizations and libertarians) that just make their own guns. 'Ghost' AR15's, weird one offs, weirdly repaired handguns, etc.

The Killdozer also comes to mind as an example of "I kind of built a tank but not really".

[Harshax]

Anyhoo ... I think these responses are a little over focused on weaponry. We know helicopters got shot down with bows in arrows in South East Asia and the Amazon. As long as I don't fetishize weapons, I should be ok.

But I'm thinking about varied technology levels compressed into a surface area of about 1200 miles.

I'm imagining a city where downtown Chicago is dominated by cargo trains. The stock yards are still open. There is a vibrant mercantile and commodities exchange. The areas that comprise most of the features of the Columbia Expedition is the campus for the Luminaries. The Winnebago tribe still has a caravan stop south east of the Calumet and there is still some fortified inn somewhere along route 57 to St. Louis, which Ifailed to save a map for and can't remember the name of.

Is it worth it to have some kind of social class feature that might affect difficulties? eg: Having a character with the Operations skill, who is a gang boss in the train yards might still be literate enough to woodpecker a keyboard, but the challenge of pulling up data might be a degree more difficult.

And ... can it all make sense? No one argues that cave dwelling, club-wielding subhumans can not only coexist but terrorize organized technologically advanced civilizations in oh-yawn-fantasy. But in the world I imagine, gangs of thugs with truncheons are still a threat near and around the Paris Brothel, whether you have a tommy gun or an assault rifle.

[Thaluikhain]

But in the world I imagine, gangs of thugs with truncheons are still a threat near and around the Paris Brothel, whether you have a tommy gun or an assault rifle.

A threat to people with tommy guns, or a threat to the general populace/people that walk down the wrong alley? The latter makes perfect sense.

Just under a hundred years ago Razor gangs were a menace in Sydney because of the tough laws on firearms, for example.

[Harshax]

There are only six bullets in that gun. There are nine of us.

Thus at least three will surviveto throw those switches.

K. But who's going to win the lottery...
...and who's going to lose?