Firestarters are
Low Tech page 35. You can use any appropriate container (pp. 33-34?) to hold a few coals and avoid having to roll to start a fire ... I think a Pyramid article discussed it briefly. Anything from birch-bark to baked clay can work, with some ashes for insulation and to control the flow of air so that the coals don't go out or burn up.
Deformed births also tend to be omens, and a community with lots of stock and no scientific vets or synthetic medicines will have a lot of those.
Many cultures had hearth gods or goddesses like Vesta. If they are offended/driven away/killed by the squid-things from another dimension, problems with the fire should be an early sign.
Quote:
Originally Posted by starslayer
While the base concept, all fire in an entire town goes out at once, is interesting enough. I find the basic premise a bit flabbergasting. Starting a fire from nothing, while not the most fun thing in the world, and far more miserable in poor conditions is not hard.
The stick and bow technique is very old, and somewhat reliable. If you can wait to morning glass exists, so sun focusing spheres cab exist. With that said 'borrow a light', or 'carry the embers' were probably great time savers, but the basic premise that most people in the midevil era could not light a fire seems suspect.
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Burning glasses famously show up in a joke by Aristophanes in the 5th century BCE.
On the other hand, in agrarian societies you can list everything that most people own on one side of a piece of paper, and changes to buy a broad range of goods are infrequent. So if you pawned your firesteel to pay for your wedding, and never learned to make a firebow and stocked some good tinder to dry in the rafters, you may be out of luck as far as tools go.
And remember that the FP cost of friction-based methods are calories in a world where most people don't have enough to eat and you have already lost FP to cold or hunger.