theme for a fantasy campaign

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'd want to look at the earlier phases of their navigation technology. I think that early on they would not be using wood very much, because it's scarce. I'd be looking at kayaks and umiaks and coracles and other sorts of skin boats, with the rigid parts often made from bone. They might have developed floats even earlier.

Good thought. Such timber as they are able to get from fixed dunes and coastal swamp probably won't even give them good planks, let alone a dugout. And dugouts, the archaeologists tell me, are the way to start on building wooden boats. Remember that the stranden are in a bit of an economic trap: until they develop ocean-going ships they will be poor, and until they get rich they have nothing with which to buy timber to build ships to get rich with. It's very possible that the building of wooden boats actually begins with the brocmen, who have good timber trees growing on their riverbanks, and want rafts, then canoes, then boats for mucking about in on rivers.

One other material I'd like to recommend to your attention is bark. The best bark for making bark canoes comes off forest trees such as birch, brush box, and red gum, which aren't available at the shore. But the dominant species in the coastal swamps near here is paperbark tea-tree, which grows up to a couple of metres in girth, and produces thick, pliable sheets of of impermeable bark consisting of multiple parallel and complete layers of tough papery material. The locals used to use paperbark canoes in the coastal swamps, the estuary, and short, daring trips into the ocean.

Anyway, you have to think about exceptions, of which the most prominent is coconut palm. Palm-trunk dugouts are still popular fishing boats in Indonesia, and often have their sides built up with planks cut from a palm-trunk and attached with pegs. Coconuts grow pretty much to the water's edge. Then there are environments (such as, I think, the Pacific Northwest) in which the coastal waters are highly productive but the adjacent land produces little food. I think that stranden might be numerous enough in Puget Sound and elves few enough among the conifer-forests that the standen could pinch a few trees. And then, of course, once the stranden have a coracle that can get them across the English Channel on a fair day they can go nuts among the oaks of Britain. Or similarly with (for instance) the teaks of Borneo.

These thoughts might give hints about where the seafaring culture of the stranden got started.