Bronze age Steampunk or, Limiting the use of Iron

I’m trying to create the history for a fantasy world. The basic idea is that a human society develops a steampunk age, which is destroyed by elves because humans haven’t discovered iron (which weakens magic). For this to happen, steampunk technology would have to be developed without the use of iron. I’m not going to be following the laws of physics to the letter, but could technology realistically develop along similar lines using bronze? Or possibly using another metal available at the end of the bronze age (and which one would it be)? To clarify, technology will still advance (it won’t be stuck at the bronze age), but it will develop from the bronze age without the discovery of iron.

Alternatively, iron is discovered, but its anti-magic properties aren’t realized until after the destruction of the steampunk age. This seems less plausible to me. If iron becomes as ubiquitous as it did in our world, and I think it would have to for steampunk technology to develop, someone would have noticed that iron and magic don’t mix. Maybe it needs to be treated in some way? Although I was trying to follow folklore “canon”, and I haven’t heard about that before. I have heard about meteoric iron, but I don’t think that it is common enough to turn the tide of a war.

Alternative to the alternative (or maybe an addendum to the alternative), iron is discovered and its anti-magic properties are known. The problem with this is that I don’t think elves would be able to become a “superpower” if magic can be easily disrupted by a common material. The original reason I wanted to withhold iron is that, after the destruction of the steampunk age, man discovers iron to defend itself against a worse magical threat. I don’t think that this could happen if iron and its properties are already known about before the destruction.

Also, for whichever choice, what are some things that would be different because of that variable (and its various sub-variables)?

I originally posted this question on a thread at reddit's r/worldbuilding. Based on someone else's posts, I'm thinking of limiting the use of iron instead of outright removing iron from this world (thus the new thread name). However, I'm looking for other perspectives

edited 29th Oct '16 9:56:51 PM by Grenedle

First off, I think it needs a bit of clarifying: is it only pure iron that affects fey creatures? Or will anything made mostly of iron do so?^note As with werewolves and silver, it's not specified just how pure the silver must be. So one might conjecture that a load of old dimes fired out of a shotgun would be just as effective as the traditional silver bullet.

The carbon content of most steel alloys is between 0.002% and 2.1% by weight, which means it's still ~ 98-99% iron or better. Stainless steel contains about 10% chromium in addition to the carbon. But even a wrought iron horseshoe or a cast iron frying pan may not be 100% pure iron; there could still be trace amounts of other minerals in them, depending on how good your metallurgy is.

In folklore, "cold iron" is simply a poetic way of saying "iron," since metal is usually cold to the touch, unless it's just come out of a blacksmith's forge. Worked iron (including steel) is traditionally something that the fairy folk shy away from, and many fantasy works have embraced this — but each does so in their own way.

In many RPGs, "Cold Iron" is a special material with unique properties, but it must be crafted or prepared in such a way as to retain those properties, and an ordinary iron or steel weapon doesn't have them. (There is also a real-world forging technique called "cold forging." It just means the metal wasn't heated as much as many techniques call for, and the resulting piece has different qualities of hardness than a hot-forged piece.)

In the Dresden Files universe, the actual purity of the metal doesn't matter — the very presence of iron in any form is uncomfortable for DF fey, and bringing steel into a fey demesne is considered profane. In fact, they find it so offensive that they're very likely to attack anyone carrying so much as a steel pocket knife or a keychain. Possessing an iron weapon has major drawbacks in a fey-heavy campaign, because it makes you a target for suspicion and possibly pre-emptive elimination.

So: do your elves differentiate between pure iron and its various alloys? And what is their reaction to the presence of said material?

edited 3rd Nov '16 11:59:19 AM by pwiegle

I think that the amount of iron will have an effect, but it doesn't have to be pure. Steel would still work, but any alloy with less than 50% iron content wouldn't have as much of an affect (although I'm not sure it would be called iron/steel at that point).

Small amounts of iron (eg iron filings) would only be an irritant, with larger amounts causing greater/painful/debilitating effects. Creatures would also have varying levels of magic "saturation", which changes how they're affected. Low-magic creatures could handle more iron than High-magic creatures. I'll have to think of some specific reactions.

I also wanted magic itself to be disrupted by magic. For example, a mage throws a fireball at a guy with an iron shield. The fireball would either veer off in a random direction or fizzle out. I vaguely remember a trope page describing a story where people were able to calculate how magic would react to iron and were able to pull off crazy trick shots. I wanted to do something like that as well.

If iron deflects magic in mostly predictable ways, you could be looking at the beginnings of magitech

edited 9th Nov '16 3:22:39 PM by Belisaurius

In that case, with steel being 99% iron (give or take), a knight in full plate armor would be nigh invulnerable to magical attacks. Since you want to limit the use of iron/steel, just make iron ore scarce and/or rife with impurities.

For example, Japanese swordsmiths developed their elaborate forging techniques out of necessity. Native deposits of iron in Japan were few and far between, and contained numerous impurities which had to be worked out before it could be made into a decent kitchen knife, let alone the blade of a katana. By contrast, Europe had vast deposits of homogenous iron, allowing European blacksmiths to turn out good-quality tools and weapons in large numbers, easily and cheaply. Japanese building construction used wooden pegs and sliding door panels where Westerners would use nails and hinges.

I wouldn't call medieval European iron homogenous by any stretch. Medieval steel and wrought iron was rife with impurities.

Give iron the same treatment as Bronze. That is as Pwiegle said not common enough to be worth the effort to dig it up for mass use. Instead have other metals be so plentiful that they are what is used because there is simply enough of it to exploit. Iron's big draw was there was a lot of it just about everywhere and it was cheap.

One other thing about Bronze vs Iron or steel is that iron can oxidize or rust while bronze simply doesn't rust like iron does. Iron objects left in water without protection will rust away and potentially break down completly while there are 3,000 year old bronze blades can be dug up, polished to remove the green bit of oxidization on the surface, and be totally usable.

Also, bronze and copper are not magnetic, while iron is.

If the setting includes things like say... Dungeons and Dragons rust monsters that the fey have trained to sniff out and destroy iron, then there could be a totally justifiable reason why iron objects aren't commonly used.

Actually, that would be totally reasonable to expect. If the fey are a whole race with magical powers and iron is basically their kryptonite, it would be reasonable to expect that they would take steps to protect themselves against it. They could, for example, find some magical beast that eats iron or makes it instantly rust or tarnish, and they start breeding or raising them like guard animals. Or, they develop a spell or chemical that can damage or disrupt it.

Like say... they found some special type of salt which when mixed with water makes an ideal rusting agent that can instantly rust or tarnish iron or steel. Or some enterprising elf discovered magnetism or electricity and how to manipulate them with magic (without the net result being pure magic). So, if someone puts on a set of iron plate armor and attacks an elf wizard, the wizards magic can't hurt them... but they can do something like shoot lightning bolts at them, or have a special staff or rod that can be charged with electricity in such a way that it shoots non-magical lightning bolts. Or the elf uses powerful magnetic forces to move their opponent around.

So, it could be that iron is dangerous to fey, but the fey have developed so many ways to counter it that it's seen as kind of a restricted material. Bronze tools and weapons could be commonplace because they last for ages and are immune to magnetism (if there are spells that can generate the magnetic fields that detect or throw around iron). Iron however is dangerous to fey... but many fey soldiers and wizards have set up ways to detect and counter it so it's really hard to move it around in places where the fey have a good power base.

It might also be that many of the fey's anti-iron techniques can themselves be countered... like making rust resistant steel. The fey might have developed many ways to disintegrate or rust away iron weapons and for centuries they've been able to discourage it's distribution. However, someone just found a way to make rust-resistant iron or steel that resists these methods and their other fancy tricks like targeting their foe with lightning or magnets isn't something that the average elf (or spoiled elf noble) would be able to pull off.

I wonder if you raised the oxygen content in the air enough and applied heat if you could make an iron rod burst into flame. Kind of like the steel wool+9 volt battery trick.

That would require oxygen concentrations at outright toxic levels, not to mention carbon-based things bursting into flame spontaneously.

I'm not sure how well the physical properties of bronze compare to Bessemer steel. It's harder to work, that I know.

In AD&D 2E, there was a spell from one of the supplement books: Rusting Grasp.

Basically, spell + touch attack = opponent's weapon/armor instantly crumbles away to nothing.

x6 I had considered making iron scarce. Someone in my reddit thread suggested that meteorites could be a source of more iron. I was thinking that, since my world is going to have multiple moons, I could blow up one of them to have a mass influx of iron whenever I thought it would be appropriate.

x5/2 I've been trying to find a metal that could replace iron as the "common metal". According to someone else on my reddit thread, the strongest bronzes are only equal to the weakest steels. Any machines made from bronze would wear out quickly, and need replacement parts (and maybe full replacement) often. Not sure what effects this would have when technology advances into (what would be our) Iron Age. Are there any other metals that could be used in a similar manner to iron?

x4 I hadn't even considered that the elves would develop their own defenses against iron! It seems obvious in hindsight. There could be this whole arms race of iron destroyers and iron protectors. If iron isn't used for weaponry, would/could it still be used for construction? The elves aren't going to be antagonistic right away, so society could develop using (at least some) iron in this case.

How magic interacts with iron would dictate how/if this spell works. I haven't decided on whether I want iron's effect to be entirely "magic doesn't work" or "magic shoots off 'randomly'". I think the most interesting would be to have a mix of both, but then I would need to decide how/when either option happens.

Here's a video on bronze swords vs iron or steel ones. It's mostly what made me think of using bronze instead of iron.

As for bronze being likely to corrode or break down... bronze does have a lower melting point than iron or steel, so even if a part is broken it can be more easily melted down to be reforged as a new part. Plus... magic exists in this setting. The Dn D spellbook contains such gems as Mending (lets you basically weld or glue to broken bits back together seamlessly or repair cut cloth) and Make Whole which just plain repairs the whole object. There might also be spells that magically strengthen materials, along with the ability of expert blacksmiths and metalworkers to make the strongest materials they can with mundane ingredients.

Imagine a society of elves for whom bronze is a very popular metal. It may not be the strongest metal in existance, iron and steel clearly have it beat. But it is stronger than wood (unless you have iron wood or something) and probably one of the strongest metals you can get if you're not using iron or steel and don't have access to things like titanium and stuff

Also, regarding wooden weapons:

Remember, these elves have access to magic and since iron interferes with magic, things like bronze, wood, stone, glass, and maybe some rare exotic metals like titanium or aluminum (or outright anachronistic materials like plastics or fiberglass) these materials would be the things you make magic weapons out of.

If anyone is going to be making a magic sword that shoots lighting, they're probably making it out of bronze. They could make it out of wood... but I doubt wooden swords would really compare to a bronze one if both swords can be equally enchanted.

So yeah, the elves might be stuck with bronze... but in this universe bronze would be about the strongest metal aside from titanium or mithril or whatever that can be enchanted. If they use bronze in their machinery... sure, it's not as strong as iron, but any broken bits can be melted down and reforged or they can use magic to enchant or repair their machines. Also, any bronze object that isn't experiencing constant wear and tear (like say... a candlestick enchanted to always have a lit candle, a milk pail enchanted to always be cold, or a bronze frame bed that heals an injured person laying in it) any object like that simply would never rust in a thousand years (unless it gets hit with bronze disease, ie getting exposed to chlorides).

On the flip side... this means that iron and steel metals that humans might get ahold of would really be outright stronger than the stuff the fey use, not only because it's simply stronger and more durable than bronze but also because it can disrupt all the magic they no doubt include in their weapons and devices.

Good quality bronze is actually better than wrought or pure iron. However, keep in mind that tin was typically at a premium so bronze was always expensive.

I know that OTL, much of the Industrial Revolution was made possible by cheap, plentiful steel. Besides being lighter and stronger than iron, steel is also fairly easy to mass-produce once you know the secrets of the blast furnace and eventually the Bessemer process. That's what most people think of when they think "steampunk".

Bronze is more expensive and more difficult to work, but various alloys thereof might be able to substitute (to some effect). For instance, it was a fairly popular material for cannon, though cast iron beat it out in terms of manufacturing cost.

Iron and Steel actually have nearly the same density at 7.9 grams per cubic centimeter. Given basic steel is nothing more then iron with some carbon mixed into it kind of hard to drastically alter the materials weight. What allowed lighter construction was they could use less material to do the same job.

The problem with trying to use copper based alloys like bronze over iron based steels is that by the time the Industrial Era arrived Bronze had largely been supplanted for several centuries because steel wound up being the superior metal in the end.

The best option I can think of is to make iron rare on that world for whatever reason like noted a post or two above. If you want iron to still be rare in the world reverse tin and iron availability like here on Earth. See this map here. Notice how few sources of tin there is globally in ancient times. Make that the trend with your world only instead of tin it is the iron that is uncommon.

x4 Wooden and bronze weapons will definitely be important when iron is rare (and afterward for the elves). I hadn't considered that (even with iron) bronze would still be valuable as an "enchanting metal", or that iron would be so much more effective.

x2 Are steel and steampunk directly connected (besides iron technology)? Also, what is OTL?

What effects will making tin more common have to the world, besides increasing the supply of bronze? Basic research tells me that trade between cultures will be affected. Would iron replace tin as the object of trade, or would it be horded?

@Steel and steam: Iron is important in steam machine building because it's cheap, strong enough to basically smile smugly on abuse from water steam pressure, burning charcoal, and rather drastic change required on working steam machine (abrupt change in pressure, volume, temperature. Boyle's law.).

@Tin in trade: Depends on situation. We are not really sure how things like gold can be currency in old times (besides "shiny" and "hard to miss/ corrode"), but if something has value/ perceived value, it could be used as currency. Like salt.

Also, polity with standing military forces will tend to hoard anything that can be used militarily. US has biggest hoard of titanium until post-Cold War.

Spells like Glassteel and Ironwood — magic that can make a relatively fragile material as hard and tough and strong as iron or steel.

edited 17th Nov '16 5:52:51 AM by pwiegle

Steel was crucial in the continued development of the Industrial Revolution because its high strength for its relatively low weight enabled things like steam engines to function. Power-to-weight is the name of the game; the less weight, the more things you're able to do.