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Fantasy economies


Alytha

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It was relatively easy to knock down sections of a wall (compared to scaling and assaulting it), but the problem was that whenever you knock down a piece of a wall, the defenders immediately build a bulwark, a second semi-circular wall, to cover the breach. So, breaches needed to be many and large to make storming fortifications any easier.

That said, there is also a considerable psychological impact with siege weaponry.

Finally, consider the siege of Constantinople, 1453 - the Turks had access to literally the largest cannon in the world, among other artillery, and a fleet of ships specifically designed to scale the seaward walls of the city. They also vastly outnumbered the defenders (according to Wikipedia, the Turks had anywhere from 80-300k to the defenders' 7000). Despite the odds and their siege weaponry, the Turks were able to enter the city only when they found an unlocked gate.

Also, the Siege of Antioch in the First Crusade - again, despite a heavy numerical superiority, the Crusaders only took the city by treachery.

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You know, judging by the film, Helms Deep was a terribly designed fortress.

It's OK because judging by the film Company D of the 1st Elvish airborne were always on hand to remember the ancient alliance between elves and men and swoop into the rescue.

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It's just in the line with the film's presentation of Rohirrim (and the Ents) as imbecilles to pimp up Gandalf's awesome shishkebab attack. No, you don't charge a insanely steep slope into a spear wall, morons, I don't care how awesome it was supposed to look when Gandalf flashed the Orcs into submission. Of course they had to come up with something since the book's +5 cause terror Horn of Helm Hammerhand would have been equally cheesy to someone not familiar with the books... which was 96% of the moviegoers... but still. Come on. Would it have been too costly to hire someone who knew how fortresses were built and how horses behave in battle?

Fuck you with a rusty zombie-virus bearing lawn mover, Peter Jackson.

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I figured they had to end it that way, since the actual way it ended (the Orcs break ranks and run right into the Huorns, who have enclosed the other end of the valley) would probably make the Entish attack on Isengard not look quite so cool.

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On the most basic level economics in any world boil down to "where does the food come from?", after that it's just dressing, which of course can itself be questionable - if these wizards can zap stuff across the continent, why aren't they selling transport services? Why aren't there any apprentices making some spending money on IM'ing for merchants?

Pretty much everyone has a concept of how the world works today. Most haven't even tried to think about how the world worked a thousand or five hundred years ago, much less personally tried to experience it, even in such a small way as growing some of their own food. Problems arise when people transport their grasp of the world - "food comes from the shop, right? o yea, and hunting sometimes!" - to a pre-industrial one.

The root of bad economics is that most writers get their education on actual medieval/pre-medieval cultures from other fantasy sources. Worlds are built from the top, not from the bottom, which often leads to just superficial changes to what the author thinks is "medieval" society. Because writing something set in, say, Yuan dynasty China, industrializing Britain or bronze age Baltia would actually require research on the part of a western author and thus maybe not suck mule balls. But everyone knows what medieval Europe was like, there's countless of movies set there. <_< (I won't even go to the problem of getting even history educated people's misconceptions about medieval era, because boy would that rant be long. Just don't trust half the things museum guide at Turku castle tells you if you ever go there.)

If you've never thought about where the food comes from, it's unlikely you're going to write very economically feasible fantasy book. I take my hat off to Martin for adressing the subject. Other than that, there's LeGuin. And probably some other authors I can't remember right now. Tolkien isn't in that crowd, that's for certain...

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Guest Other-in-Law

(I won't even go to the problem of getting even history educated people's misconceptions about medieval era, because boy would that rant be long. Just don't trust half the things museum guide at Turku castle tells you if you ever go there.)

OK, I'll bite. What is the litany of Turku castle guides' transgressions? Feel free to post elsethread, if you don't wish to derail.

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I figured they had to end it that way, since the actual way it ended (the Orcs break ranks and run right into the Huorns, who have enclosed the other end of the valley) would probably make the Entish attack on Isengard not look quite so cool.

Bah. Some Orcs running into a forest that starts waving and trashing* would not have made the awesome wrecking of Isengard any less awesome, but it would have made sense in "where did the 10000 orc bodies go" way.

And I'll never forgive Jackson for changing the original plot and making the Ents ignorant of what was happening in their own damn forest. I mean, what the fuck was up with that decision? It's the biggest deviation and one that makes no sense at all.

* And wasn't that on the EE, or am I mislead by hopeful imagining?

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OK, I'll bite. What is the litany of Turku castle guides' transgressions? Feel free to post elsethread, if you don't wish to derail.

To give the background, some of our fellow living history hobbyists work at Turku castle as living props, to give some life to the museum, and they overhear a lot of silliness. Most of the "argh" comes from them, but not the forks one.

On forks: they got introduced to Finland pretty late, as we were the backwater of Sweden (ugh) at that time. And as Turku was the capital of the backwater, hence the castle, it was the first place where forks were used. According to the guide, this lead to several deaths as diners poked at their palate with the tines and got gangrene. Because, you know, nobody had the fine muscle coordination required for such dangerous items, unlike every five year old.

Also, there were no plates or utensils in the medieval era. They were forgotten for some hundreds of years.

On horses: Horses notedly aren't very keen to attack spear wall, and they were quite useless against them unless they could make the spear wall break down. According to the guide, the horses' funny looking eyes in a tapestry that depicts them with helmets with eye protectors is because the horses' eyes were poked out to make them blind and willing to attack a spear wall.

On beds: While standing in front of a 1,7m by 2m sleeping alcove it was presented as a fact that the place was too short for a normal lenght bed, and people slept sitting upright because they were afraid of their soul escaping if they slept laying down. While this WAS a fad for hypochondric old ladies for a while, that was much later than the medieval era.* Because you have to lie parallel to the wall and not perpendicularly. And even then, a room called young lord's chamber might not possibly mean that the place was meant for children.

On bathing: this one happened when the friend in question was a paying customer in a tour and could ask for sources. The guide gave the standard "everyone smelled really bad because they bathed once a year and just used perfumes", and note, this in Finland that gave the world the word sauna. The friend asked for sources and got none, so he took it to the museum's intendent who stately ignored the evidence that there were like 30 public bath houses in Turku in the medieval period, and that there was an ordnance telling people to wash before going to church (which is why Saturday is still the traditional sauna day), and only got vague "we're telling things according to the best information we have" or the sort of response. Public bath houses were really common in whole Europe and only fell out of use during renessaince or so if I remember it right.

This sort and many other instances of the museum guides can be explained by them just telling what they're told to tell, and it would be very impolite to start arguing with them if you're also there as a worker, so the friends usually just roll their eyes at each other and let it go, but when the person who's responsible for the content of the tours gives the answer of "state archeologist told it this way" when the said authority died thirty years ago, a little updating of the information might be in order. It's mostly the denial that they're telling something that's so wrong as it could be that bugs me. It's just too hard to admit that what they've been telling is outdated, so it keeps on getting more and more outdated every year.

So if you go to Turku castle, just take everything that sounds odd and against common sense with a fairly large grain of salt.

* Although sleeping in a halfway sitting position does help with breathing if you've got a serious cold, so it's not so far out.

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I'm actually rather dubious about the entire "horses can't be made to charge a spear-wall" thing (my sister managed to get her horse to charge straight into an actual wall...) It would be a monumentally stupid thing to do, but it's hardly impossible.

Public bath houses were really common in whole Europe and only fell out of use during renessaince or so if I remember it right.

This is true, but if I remember correctly it was a fairly brief thing: Basically it started in the 13th century and started falling out of favour in the 15th. Which admittedly covers most of the "historical" middle-ages in Scandinavia.

And of course, public bath-houses would be restricted to urban dwellers: About 1-2% of the population...

Which isn't to say that people didn't wash more ofte than once a year: They almost cerainly did. (if nothing else, there seems to have been a relatively steady production of soap going on)

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The issue with cavalry in medieval times isn't so much that knights couldn't force their horses to charge into a shield wall as it is that they had no desire to do so.

1. Knights were interested in fighting and killing/taking other knights, because that was honorable. There was nothing honorable, generally speaking, about killing stupid peasants with sticks.

2. Horses were expensive weapons of war, and knights took care to preserve them, as they would perforce have to replace them at their own expense were they to die.

3. While there is significant shock and awe value in charging into a mass of infantry, once the momentum of the charge is gone, a knight in a body of even poorly armed infantry is a giant sitting target who cannot possible defend himself (or his horse) from all angles, and thus, is very likely to die despite his armor and training.

It certainly happened, of course, but typically mounted medieval cavalry tended to fight against other cavalry first and infantry second. Even then, the traditional cavalry charge was not all that common--at least, not into the front of a shieldwall. Flanks, random bodies of disorganized troops, sure! But rarely spears.

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