10-25-2021, 07:18 AM | #11 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
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10-25-2021, 09:18 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
With a bit of engineering you could probably run them on a drag chain - might not be able to stop them mind you, unless there was a hook on hook of thing going on, but you could set up a sort of set of paternosters ... only going along instead of up and down. Like cable-cars on the deck...
Power requirement would be dreadful - some vast watermill might do the trick though. Quote:
Last edited by The Colonel; 10-25-2021 at 09:22 AM. |
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10-25-2021, 03:28 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
Grain and wine does tend to be lighter per volume than lumber or ore. This could also work with the counterweight options recommended above, too.
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10-25-2021, 04:22 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
This is extremely true. There is so much suspension of disbelief in DF already, that awesome tramways don't make a dent.
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10-26-2021, 02:21 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
In Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series, a lot of magic-enhanced craftsmanship consists of making an item out of wood or clay, then transmuting it into steel. How doable is something like that with standard magic? I think there's a spell that will turn stone into metal - can than count fired clay as stone or does it actually need to be stone? Failing that, I know there's a spell that will turn flesh to stone, but what about turning wood to stone? It might be possible to make a wheel out of wood, turn the wood to stone, and then turn the stone to metal (maybe even go all the way to essential metal, for orichalcum wheels). It probably wouldn't be cheap, but might be more readily doable than actually forging/casting a steel wheel at that TL.
For the former, it would depend on if it seemed like the rest of the setting was compatible. For the latter, DF is frequently an "Anything Goes" kind of setting, so unless using the DF rules as an aid to something more like serious fantasy (and the more serious setting is one in which trams don't really "fit"), I'd have no issues whatsoever.
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10-28-2021, 06:43 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
Basic Set has an "Earth to Stone" spell, so you could definitely turn a clay wheel to stone if just firing it wasn't enough to make Stone to Metal work on it. As Varyon says, it'd probably be rather expensive, what with the work of making clay wheels to as precise a tolerance as possible and what with using two or three spells to turn them into metal (can you use those spells on a batch of items, or would you have to cast it separately for each one?), but if a rich ruler really wanted to build such a system it could be done. I was thinking the same might work for rails/grooves for them to run on.
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10-28-2021, 08:27 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
I think there's also a volume issue?
I haven't looked it up, I want to say that the Earth->stone->metal chain also reduces the amount of material but I may be wrong. In any case, yes I would definitely put a biiiig price on that kind of stuff, or alternatively give the world a strong magitech vibe with transmutation built machine components here and there. Other neat mechanical elements to add are cranes. From the early greek A-frame winch cranes to the shadouf for loading and unloading ships to big complex treadwheel cranes in the medieval period, there's a lot of engineering that went on with just wood, rope, and muscle power. |
10-28-2021, 09:11 AM | #18 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
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Why? It's not only fantasy, it's outrageously over-the-top fantasy. Since the early days of D&D, it's been a tradition to throw together technologies of vastly different eras with no justification other than wanting to reproduce things the authors have seen in books. One of the earliest D&D campaigns had a McDonald's in the middle of the dungeon. One of the early published D&D modules has robots and spaceships. The genre is fairly indiscriminate in this way, and was especially so in the early days before people started getting snooty about realism in their fantasy. A tramway? You bet. No problem at all. In fact, a gnomish-designed, steam-powered car running on it and driven automatically by a magical iron golem is also not impossible, if it suits your dungeon. |
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10-28-2021, 08:13 PM | #19 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
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10-28-2021, 09:00 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy
Part of it is probably that trams are a symbol of the Industrial Age, even if the component techs are theoretically doable at a lower level. Maybe one-off, unique trams here and there would be more palatable, but having a fully fledged city-wide commuter system would be overly anachronistic. So there could be the Royal Tram which allows the royal personage to transit in style from their castle on the hill down to the Royal Barge at dock, but not tram stops on every corner of town.
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dungen fantasy, railroad |
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