Real World Knowledge Applied to Crafting Skills

[Boogerbear]

I've played a lot of merchants, but it occured to me that I had never read about, for instance, the history of tanning, despite having crafted a genocide's worth of chalton hides.

Mind blown.

I mean, because of heavy exposure to Native American artifacts where I live, I grew interested in the process of how cryptocrystalline stones like chert and flint are knapped to form tools. Unfortunately, aside from watching my dad make custom (and intricately double-buckled) leather belts, that's some of my only firsthand experience with actual crafting, aside from mundane stuff like cooking/chopping wood.

So, I'm curious, for players who like to craft a lot and maybe have explored real life information about crafting, what are some interesting things you've learned, whether firsthand or via research?

[Heade]

I've played a lot of merchants, but it occured to me that I had never read about, for instance, the history of tanning, despite having crafted a genocide's worth of chalton hides.

Mind blown.

I mean, because of heavy exposure to Native American artifacts where I live, I grew interested in the process of how cryptocrystalline stones like chert and flint are knapped to form tools. Unfortunately, aside from watching my dad make custom (and intricately double-buckled) leather belts, that's some of my only firsthand experience with actual crafting, aside from mundane stuff like cooking/chopping wood.

So, I'm curious, for players who like to craft a lot and maybe have explored real life information about crafting, what are some interesting things you've learned, whether firsthand or via research?

I learned a lot about animal glue, among many other things! Various methods of making materials harder or more pliable/workable. Different ways of tanning leather, like vegetable tanning.

Typically, when I submit a custom craft of some sort, I try to make the ingredients and process of crafting the item make sense. So I've generally done real life research into various methods of working materials/tanning when I've submitted my custom crafts.

[Dar]

Tanners in rome would place a giant amphora outside their shop onto the street, so people could piss in it when they're walking by. Then they would use the piss as tanning acid for their leathers.

[Cind]

The doc that describes in part of it about gem crafting alludes to the fact that real-world gems have fewer facets the further back you go, because the tools used to make them were less advanced. The number of facets in gems increases past the time period Zalanthas is set in, and in the game Kadius should probably be able to make a couple more facets per gem than everyone else, while the rest of us are stuck with probably only enough to make triangular and square shapes. I mean, you know, we're stuck in the latter Stone Age for the most part.

A dwarf could probably make a focus based on improving gem cutting technology, but they would need to work on tools first, and then technique.

[Heade]

I mean, you know, we're stuck in the latter Stone Age for the most part.

Umm...I don't think this is exactly accurate. Tools absolutely influence a society, so the materials they have available really -are- important. However, technology levels of Zalanthas aren't at stone-age for a variety of reasons. First, they've technologically advanced and ARE able to work metal. There simply isn't a lot of it to work. A lack of metal tools has certainly held them back, technologically, however, other things have pushed them forward. For instance, the IG existence of extremely durable biological products that don't exist IRL. Mekilot bone, Silt Horror Shell, etc.

Furthermore, they have magic. And magic is a suitable replacement for metal tools, I'd imagine. Who needs a metal pickaxe when one can simply tell the stone to shape itself to your specifications?

If you compare the actual IG world, what it looks like and feels like, to the architecture, look, and imagined feel of various era's of history, I'd say Zalanthas is technologically closer to being Iron-Age in the city states, just without much Iron.

[Cind]

That's true. Its been a long time since I've been near magick.

Paths are open to Zalanthan scientific improvement that aren't available to us, although one can argue that the cost of defiling after the Dragon brought it (or the knowledge of it) into the Known might outweigh the benefits it would bring.

And you can't actually argue, hey, everyone who knows sorcery is marked out for execution. Because templars gain spells from their respective sorcerer-king, and you can't sit there and expect the establishment not to be messing with it in some secret officiated laboratory, looking for ways to improve life for nobility.


Component crafting has always been mysterious to me. The echoes you receive from making components are usually either extremely mundane or extremely magickal at first glance, and maybe it was just when I was playing witches, but there don't seem to be that many people who know much more about them than they need to. In the pc world, anyway.


I'm willing to suspend disbelief that a Zalanthan man can skin a salt worm's hide off its body like a deer, although the mdesc of a salt worm hide indicates that it has about the same thickness as a wooden door.