Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
Start with brick-making and brick-laying. The higher TL versions of these will be conceptually comprehensible to TL2-3 craftsmen, although they'll take a while to get used to the higher standards of quality being demanded. Stone-masonry has also not changed a great deal, although higher TL tools make it easier.
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In a world before or more likely
without Hellenes or Romans and if we concentrate on what we might call Greater Central Europe and environs, where would the ASNs be able to find large numbers of brick-makers and masons?
None of the ASN gates appear to lead to parts of the world of
Germania Hyperborea south of the Danube analogue or north of the 50th parallel north (no gate I've proposed yet is north of the Owl Mountains in modern Poland, I
think). The most westerly gates they use are near their original settlement in Westphalia, nothing, I believe, west of the Rhine. There are gates as far east as the west shore of the Black Sea and in several locations on the Danube, but those are very much frontier areas and unsettled for the first decades of ASN settlement unless there are tremendously important resources there justifying a town that far away. Early ASNs did not settle east of the one great settlement that they founded in the analogue to
Glatzer Land / Kłodzko Land in Lower Silesia in modern Poland, on the Czech border.
When begin planning settlement in 1943-1945, the ASNs only had three gates that led to
Germania Hyperborea, i.e. the Wewelsburg one, the Der Riese one and a more convoluted path through the World Tree that led to an area where modern Romania would be, on the Black Sea shore, where they raid for slaves, but decided not to settle. They also had gates to Jötunheim and to a small demiplane containing a mystical analogue of Wewelsburg, though until they settled, the mystical realm around
Wahr Wewelsburg existed more in potentia than reality.
At settlement in their multi-world
Neue Reich, the ASNs added the
Externsteine analogue on
Germania Hyperborea as a major access point to the World Tree and perhaps their major 'highway' through the multiverse. Any gate
can lead there, with sufficient knowledge of the World Tree and the magical lore of the
Irminsulen. Some pathways, however, are long and arduous enough for anyone but masters of the occult ways to be better served to avoid them and rely instead on established routes that link two worlds or, more rarely, two points on the same world (this exists, but the travel is often longer and more challenging than a route from
Germania Hyperborea to another world entirely)
The ASNs have added
many small Irminsul pathways between their magical demiplane and the first settlement around where Paderborn would be, and discovered many other ways through the World Tree that lead through gates at various legendary locations. The ASN gates are still heavily concentrated in historical 'Germany' and not even all of Germany, at least not yet, although quests are ongoing for gates that might exist at analogues to various legendary places from Germanic mythology.
The first ASN settlements were heavily concentrated in Westphalia (mostly around where the Wewelsburg, Paderborn and the
Externsteine are in our world) and the Owl Mountains of Kłodzko Land, in Lower Silesia by the Czech border. Lesser concentrations of ASNs later emerge around other gates or in vital geographic areas linking resources with gates, leading to settlement of the Middle to Lower Rhine and in the Black Forest, several outposts and towns in Saxony, and, even later still and with new gate discoveries, perhaps settlement of gate-towns on the Danube.
There is a gate which the ASNs have known about from 1944 that leads to the mouth of the Danube, but travel there was moderately difficult for anyone but healthy and courageous soldiers, at least for the initial trips, and the lack of local resources and distance from the other ASN areas meant that it was just used as a military outpost and staging area for slave raids, not a civilian settlement. Even when travel to it through the World Tree was simplified with new discoveries by ASN occultists in the first years of settlement, that just meant easier transport of slaves and perhaps the odd horse for research and breeding purposes (moving horses through would have been extremely bothersome on any scale, for that gate, at least), unless there are some vital resources at the Danube Delta I haven't thought about.
Anyway, given those geographic constraints, where might ASNs be finding good sources of skilled slaves in various trades they need and just generally people with cultures that make learning to function in an industrializing society easier?
Vast swathes of Central Europe are dominated by a bewildering variety of Hallstatt-esque and La Tené like societies, many of whom speak some form of not always mutually intelligable pseudo-Celtic languages, but by no means all of them. Such societies also extend into Iberia (existing alongside a confusing array of culturally distinct tribes and polities that speak many languages that befuddle ASN philologists), some places in Southern Europe and even further afield in all directions except north.
In general, the north gets progressively less civilized and there are peoples in the far north that don't rate TL2-3, but rather TL1 and even TL0. It may well be that the Germanic tribes on the lands of the ASNs were poor in material culture because they live far away from the active trade routes and more rapid cultural exchange around the analogue Mediterranean, not because of any active anti-German prejudice that crept into the sorcerous shaping of this world, if indeed it is not a natural world.
As the history doesn't match up with Earth, despite similarities, any real-world culture existing before 0 CE in a geographic location accessible from the areas analogues to those the ASNs control,
might exist on
Germania Hyperborea. I don't pretend to have decided on the exact demographics and ethno-cultural makeup of the entire world.
My PCs have, in a past campaign, never even actually visited this world and only met exactly one group of slaves-to-be from what the ASN dub
Germania Hyperborea, whom they rescued from the Antarctic Space Nazis, and those people were from certain alternate cultures (the group came from the same general area, but not the same exact settlements), from which I have extrapolated those parts of the world mentioned so far, but places I haven't mentioned might have received only minimal thought, or never even occurred to me.
So, by all means, anyone reading, please suggest cultures or polities that the ASNs have strong practical reasons to interact with after they start settling, whether or not those particular natives fit into any of the Nazi racial political narratives.