Anachronism Stew World

I'm developing a world for a Roleplaying Game I'm going to be running (and most likely will write a book based on the world itself at some stage) and would like input from people about some of the ideas I've got regarding plausibility or things I've missed.

The concept is this:

Random people vanish from Earth and arrive in some other realm that is (admittedly implausibly) Earthlike - right down to the perceived lengths of the day and year.

They generally arrive with whatever they happen to be carrying at the time they vanished from Earth and bring whatever skills they know.

In this realm, however, time passes at a different rate: six years of the local time corresponding to the passage of an entire century on Earth.

The setting is an area originally settled by people from 5th Century Europe - mostly Britain/UK - the Low Middle Ages.

Due to the continuous influx of people from later times, however, this has led to knowledge and technology from later times being introduced.

At the time of the game, the area has been settled for 96 local years (bringing the Earth up to early 21st Century).

The oldest surviving "immigrants" date back to around the early 12th Century but there are many from more recent eras.

Some form of Modern English is the most common language in the setting, though there are those who still speak older versions and others who speak or know other European languages (I'm having it that people from other parts of the world arrived elsewhere in that realm in places that correspond to their own geographical location on Earth and are therefore physically remote from this particular setting).

Since it's been less than 100 years, the layout of the place hasn't changed much from Medieval style - a large city, a few towns and a lot of villages scattered out amongst the farming regions, with urban centres typically near navigable waterways.

Technology is a major Anachronism Stew due toitems carried in from later times and skills brought by later people. It's also "patchy" and ad hoc due to the randomness of what skills people have and what skills are lacking to make things happen.

The technology is also limited to what can be produced by reasonably-skilled artisans from local materials.

So, no televisions or electrical refrigerators despite the presence of people who know how to use them or know the principles behind them or may even know how to service them or once worked in a factory that built them.

However they do have the ability to build electric motors and generators, steam engines, simple combustion engines, telegraph and telephone - though none of these things are very widespread (the Age of Steam only started about 20 years ago, after all) especially since they have so far found no fossil fuels (not even coal) and rely mainly on wood and charcoal for heating - though vegetable oils and distilled alcohol can be used to run combustion engines.

I'm thinking in terms of a fairly widespread public telegraph network between towns and the larger villages and the main towns and cities also having a telephone system that links their administrative centres.

Roads are still mostly dirt with gravel or concrete paving on the major roads, plans are made for a rail network to link the towns but that's quite a way away yet.

The towns and cities have electrical street lighting in some areas but it's not common in a lot of houses, which are still most frequently lit by candles or lamps.

Some houses make up for this by having their own personal generators to produce enough electricity for their household needs.

Travel is usually by foot or by horse, ox-cart, boat (ox-drawn boats being a common means of transporting goods), with a very few Earth vehicles that have come through and a small number of locally produced vehicles (most of which are steam powered).

Weapons also vary. Everything from swords, pikes and bows up to modern semiautomatic weapons have wound up in that realm and skilled artisans could replicate pretty much any of them.

Enough knowledge has been "imported" that they can make gunpowder, nitrocellulose and even some explosives.

And well they might, because the history of the place has been rather bloody in the past with cultural clashes occuring between some later arrivals and the earlier arrivals or between rival camps of arrivals in the region.

The wars have pretty much settled down now but a state of armed readiness persists.

Any thoughts on it? Things that don't make sense? Things I've missed?

Thanks.

Another thought I've had about the realm is a sort of Fridge Horror at what some of the history would have been like.

From the viewpoint of the setting - and presumably other areas of the realm populated by people from the rest of Europe - from about 27 years ago, new arrivals would have been bringing with them the strifes of the Religious Wars - between each other and between them and the established population.

The Reformation and its resultant bloody wars would be within living memory of all but more recent arrivals.

If there's any contact at all between this, chiefly UK, area and other European arrivals, this would mean that the strifes of the numerous Anglo-French Wars and the First and Second World Wars would also extend into this realm.

This would mean that many still-living inhabitants would be mindful that crap could spill through from our world without warning and cause strife and this knowledge would dictate what laws and procedures they have in place to ensure survival.

I think another fridge logic issue is going to be the massive social and technological changes that have occurred in the last few centuries. Up until recently life has been fairly recognisable but now we have technology which looks like magic to anyone pre electricity and we tolerate view points which would be seen as downright appalling to someone from the 10th century. People might not create modern level tech in this pocket world but they would talk about and that would be enough to scare a lot of the older inhabitants.

Also disease would be a massive thing, no one would have immunity to diseases from outside their time period. Modern people would be at massive disadvantage as the modern health care we rely on is gone.

Thanks for that. I hadn't thought of the disease issue.

The viewpoints would certainly cause violent clashes, against which rules would have to be made and enforced.

There would also be racial concerns as the demographics of the UK has changed over the years - there's no reason to assume that arrivals are all going to be "European" folk given the ethnic diversity of the UK in more-recent centuries.

Some modern-level tech - mainly portable stuff in people's personal effects - would come through and some people would be able to advance the technology somewhat - I would expect steam power, basic electrical generators, electric motors, primary (chemical) batteries, electroplating, fairly advanced lathes.

edited 25th Jun '14 4:45:25 PM by Wolf1066

Most of us don't know much about the tech we use so recreating it is almost impossible for most of us.

The disease would probably go both ways with us introducing new, unstoppable illnesses while we frailly fall for things that they are immune to.

I don't think this world is going to be a very happy place.

Not knowing much about more advanced technology would prevent a lot of things being developed, certainly, but other things are pretty basic - knowing how to work metal, especially for some of the earlier arrivals from earlier centuries (there's bound to be a few smiths of various types amongst them) and some things are quite simple to make if you know the principles and have someone skilled enough to work the raw materials - electromagnets, simple dynamos, telegraph, even basic telephones (I could build all of those, myself, given wire, wood, metal and glue).

There are, and have been over the years, hobbyists that could make steam engines, stirling engines, even basic internal combustion engines (the first ones were built by individuals in workshops after all).

The first phonographs were purely mechanical. Lathes are very old inventions, a modern person with modern ideas could revolutionise (no pun intended) them to the point they'd be very effective even there. Drawing metal is an old skill, as is die-making - so given modern cartridge ammunition to make a pattern off, a skilled artisan could replicate every part of it (and anyone with decent knowledge of chemistry could make fulminates, gun powder and nitrocellulose).

I remember reading how craftsmen in Afghanistan were hand-making very good, accurate replicas of firearms they'd gotten hold of, even improving on design faults and hand-fitting the components.

In a CAVE, with a box of SCRAPS.

A decently set-up armourer should be able to do the same, an intelligent one could start designing their own based on imported articles.

Basic capacitors and resistors are possible to manufacture, possibly even "whisker diodes" - but not microminiaturised components.

Chemical primary batteries are so basic that anyone with a couple of lemons and two different sorts of metal can power a light bulb.

Electric lights are so basic that even Thomas Edison could steal the idea.

Other innovations are also simple - indoor plumbing, flushing toilets etc.

As arrivals get closer to the mid-late 20th century and early 21st century, the ability to replicate things does become more difficult and there's a lot that they won't be able to make.

So, while a person may well know how to fix/maintain a TV or computer, they won't have the components to do so nor the infrastructure to build those components.

So technology would be a weird mix of stuff up to around mid 20th Century, depending on how far it's been able to spread.

EDIT: Some things would have to be developed from what they know but other knowledge can come in from Earth, accelerating the pace of progress (in local time it's only a few years from the introduction of gunpowder and matchlocks to the introduction of modern breechloaders with cartridges filled with "smokeless powder").

—end edit—

And, yes, it'd be a terrible world in a lot of ways, disease being one only of them.

There's also crime and punishment (the Blood Code and its 220 hanging offences would be very recent history), attitudes towards race, class, sex and sexuality would vary - and be heavily weighted towards negative attitudes by 21st Century standards (but, of course, "only right and proper" by the standards of yesteryear).

Stocks/pillory, whipping, hard labour, hanging... and the cops make Gene Hunt look like a push-over.

I've started running the game and one of the "delightful" moments was arriving at the city to see carrion crows tearing the flesh off a corpse in a gibbet (Stress roll: two D6 and pray...)

edited 7th Aug '14 3:40:27 PM by Wolf1066