Tramways In (Dungeon) Fantasy

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Inky

Some early wagonways used grooves cut into a stone surface rather than raised rails.

The Diolkos was used to move ships across the Isthmus of Corinth for about 650 years, at a lower TL than DF. It's the most ambitious known example, but it shows what was possible.

[The Colonel]

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.

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Horse-drawn trolleys inside a city and mule-, horse-, and/or oxen-drawn wagon trains between cities can be interesting. One other option, of course, is having the tram go downhill from the mining or lumber town to the port trade city without animals, using gravity and the angle of the track to manage movement, though you'd need the animals to drag supplies the other direction.

Quite a few examples of this IRL, mines quarries and sawmills tipping down to a nearby port with recovery, as noted, by draught animals. Tended to rely on what was going up being much lighter and smaller than what was coming down.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Quite a few examples of this IRL, mines quarries and sawmills tipping down to a nearby port with recovery, as noted, by draught animals. Tended to rely on what was going up being much lighter and smaller than what was coming down.

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.

[khorboth]

Originally Posted by DaosusLeghki

Since my version of Dungeon Fantasy asks the question "is it cool?" well before it gets to "is it realistic?", I'd say Dwarven tramways are totally in.

This is extremely true. There is so much suspension of disbelief in DF already, that awesome tramways don't make a dent.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

While all steel construction is not realistic...

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.

Originally Posted by scc

So would people have problems with trams showing up in fantasy or Dungeon Fantasy games?

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.

[Inky]

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.

[Polkageist]

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.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by khorboth

This is extremely true. There is so much suspension of disbelief in DF already, that awesome tramways don't make a dent.

My first reaction to seeing this topic was, why wouldn't you see tramways in dungeon fantasy? The answer, according to this thread so far, as well as similar discussions I've seen elsewhere, is that people are assuming that dungeon fantasy is set in some specific real-world historical technological context, that the technology of a dungeon-fantasy setting must for some reason equal that of some real-world era.

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.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

Because allowing such magic also means that transmuting lead to gold is possible, and you don't want to do that.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

My first reaction to seeing this topic was, why wouldn't you see tramways in dungeon fantasy? The answer, according to this thread so far, as well as similar discussions I've seen elsewhere, is that people are assuming that dungeon fantasy is set in some specific real-world historical technological context, that the technology of a dungeon-fantasy setting must for some reason equal that of some real-world era.

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.

While the TL of Dungeon Fantasy isn't truly knowable the fact that railways and trams are only about 250 years old in the real world means that their not really possible in most peoples minds.

[Daigoro]

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.