Fantasy Weapons, Societies, Cultures, Equipment and Mounts/Vehicles

This city would have a pretty massive population. 3/5ths of an island that size is about 550,000 square miles, and just guesstimating based on the average urban population density for 1900 (100ish people per square mile) as many as 50-60 million people might live there. That’s like double the population of the world’s current largest city and would almost certainly be unsustainable given the farmland and farming techniques available.

Well, you'd need a reason for it to be highly-urbanised, and an some economic parameters to determine its place in the wider world. Some ideas:

• It's a relatively isolated country that's largely self-sufficient with its natural resources, like New Zealand. A country like this would realistically be dominated by farmlands and unclaimed nature rather than urban sprawl, since there's limited attraction for immigrants and resource-extraction economies don't tend to scale too well with population.
• It's a major maritime trade hub that attracts more workers than its resources could naturally sustain. You'd need the island to be situated on a major trade route so that resources and immigrants could enter easily, and there's going to be a lot of cultural imports coming in, which might include some amount of magic. You could impose some Anti-Magic force on the island to prevent its domination by magical forces, and perhaps make it an important "neutral" ground for its magical neighbours.
• Second version of the above: it's a British-style colonial power that holds dominions across the known world, using local magic to extract resources it couldn't acquire domestically. These resources are then shipped home to prop up the non-magical industries, or shipped abroad in a profitable triangular trade scheme.

The closest country to your description would probably be Japan. It started out as a fairly decentralised collection of feudal fiefdoms that turned heavily urbanised from the late 19th century onwards. But historically, the power of the nobility didn't lie on the outlying islands - it lied on the most productive farmlands in the modern Kantō/Kansai region of Honshu. Before the 19th century, 90% of the planet's population were farmers, and your wealth would mostly be tied to the amount of farmlands you own. The outlying fiefdoms that got rich were mostly on strategic trade ports like Nagasaki, Kagoshima and Tsushima, not island farms. As the country industrialised, there's more demand for residential and industrial spaces, so its agriculture began to shift to the previously-unexplored Hokkaido. This was possible because steamships, railways and refrigeration allowed the food to be shipped more efficiently. But even then, a lot of farmlands remained on the other islands. And while the settlement areas tend to be urbanised, they're constricted along lowland patches and corridors, which are divided up by inhospitable mountains. The net urban area is certainly less than 3/5th of the whole country; you'll need a very good reason to build beyond that.

Could you describe how magic works in your setting? That might help figure out our country's role in its economy and geopolitics. I grew up in Australia and have been working in Singapore for a few years, so I'm most familiar with both countries' urbanisation models and might be able to work something off them. Or perhaps you could give the narrative/thematic reason why it has to be a huge city.

No one could possibly govern a metropolis of that size from a central location, so this urbanized continent is most likely going to be divided into a patchwork quilt of hundreds of semi-autonomous city states butting right up against each other. The diversity in cultural practices, architecture, sanitation and the rule of law is likely to be immense. You could spend your whole life traveling around inside it and never see it all.

You're also still using pretty weird logic that people would INTENTIONALLY build over farmland, especially since you said this island is governed by NON-MAGICAL humans. Coruscant works because it's in a setting with advanced technology, happened over thousands of years, and it's the only city-planet of its kind, so we can at least accept that it's UNUSUAL.

"Urban development" doesn't necessarily mean "REPLACING farmland to build mega-malls"—it can more often mean "filling in the gaps between urban/rural." So a farming village wouldn't necessarily be ABSORBED by a growing town nearby, but probably be "adopted" as a district/suburb and allowed to keep producing food.

In your situation of "literally BUILDING OVER farmland," I can't see even the most naive/money-hungry governments taking that decision lightly. (Again, unless this is an acknowledged oversight that gets quickly corrected when they realize people's wallets are emptying over this week's groceries.) Sure, some people would love to get out of hard labor and others would just move for a new farm, but not everyone wants to move away or to see their existing homes urbanized.

After a while, the shrinking number of farmers would need to hike up food prices to make a living AND make a point that you need them to grow your food, if they don't outright say Screw This, I'm Outta Here and leave the island to make you remember that people need food.

And while you say they devote "an island the size of the Black Sea" to agriculture, that's actually not as big as you'd think. Even in 2018, you need one or two ACRES of land to feed one or two people for the year, which is a mid-sized city-BLOCK. The above poster mentioned that a city of your intended size would have 50-60 million people, which means 2018 technology would need 50-120 million acres of land to feed them. At LEAST. The Black Sea is around 730x160 miles, which makes it 116,800 square miles, times 640 for 74,752,000 acres— which means it's BARELY capable of feeding 50-60 million people in modern times. And that's assuming every single inch of it is fairly level, open farmland with good soil.

Most likely about half to two-thirds of your farming-island would be arable while the rest would be bodies of water and forest/mountains/shoreline, or poor soil. So realistically, with pre-modern agriculture needing 2-4 acres per person per year, your farming island could only provide a quarter to half of the main island's food without magic—but that's still a LOT of food, so it's perfectly realistic for the main island to fight tooth and nail to protect it.

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 10:40:38 AM

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

I'll try to address by bulletin points:

- The island continent is called Marathia, and the country itself is named the Maratheon Empire.

- The government of the Maratheon Empire is ruled by an autocratic stratocracy:

The First Citizen>The Five Consuls:Dwarven Paramount>Various Governors:Dwarven Merchant Lords>Various Undergovernors and Mayors, etc. TBD

- There are regions in the central area of the island continent that have been excavated and turned into subterranean under cities by the native dwarves since the ancient times. Ever since the humans and the dwarves cemented their ages-old alliance the dwarves have been generous to build sections of their subterranean caverns into ghetto cities, which are mostly populated by the poor, the desperate, and the criminal.

- There are other oversea territories ruled by the Maratheon Empire, such as the region of Berianna located to the south on a far foreign land and the Republic Isles located to the far northwest near the Westins.

- The way that Marathia is positioned in the world is situated between three large masses of land/continents, which allows a large influx of trade, communication, and immigrants either fleeing from the dangers of arcane conflicts or hoping to experience a life free from magical interactions. While this can caused a great evolution for the culture of the eastern and northern regions of Marathia, this has also caused many issues dealing with revolutionary movements concerning discrimination/racism towards non-humans, half-humans, and mutants(humans who have been altered/altered themselves to conduct magic).

- Concerning magic, otherwise known as the arcane arts, is a programmable language that can only be wield by those species born to use the arcane, such as the Fair Folk, or humans who underwent a process to allow their physiology to be utilized as a conduit/conductor for arcane power, which are mostly known as mutants. The sorcerers of the Osmaan Hegemony and the Kingdom of Boltest are notorious with their laws that allow/encourage humans to become mutants and practice the arcane arts.

Edited by KproTM on Nov 18th 2018 at 10:57:38 AM

That's nice to hear, but how did you process the info about logistics that we just gave you?

You mentioned in this post that you wanted a diesel-punk setting set in an equivalent to the 1900s, and diesel-punk is MUCH less optimistic as a whole than its steam-punk cousin.

Combined with your mention of dwarf-crafted underground ghettos and constant influxes of refugees, I'm getting the impression that this island-city is INHERENTLY fragile and unsustainable—my first instinct is that most of the city's residents are gonna be crammed into barely-functioning slums (most likely underground), while the elites hold fancy dinners in districts full of Crystal Spires and Togas.

Edit: Also just letting you know that the city wouldn't be a TOTAL Crapsack World from the moment everything's built—it would probably be susceptible to "feast-or-famine" mentality, and split further by social class. In a good year with no/few wars and no/few trade issues, a lot of people's living standards would be decent if not fantastic. But the rich folks would be entirely cushioned from the "famine" part, unless they're unlucky or "not AS rich." Meanwhile, the poor and the farmers would be REALLY sensitive to the first signs of warfare, because if one country's ships haven't come to the docks for a while, that means they're either getting raided by pirates or they're using the extra food for warfare, and that means less food for THEM. Same for when refugees start coming and the government needs to find a place to put them all, but most rich folks would hardly want to let people into their fancy mansions—so they're stuck in the slums and probably told to fend for themselves.

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 11:24:09 AM

Hmm, you could have airships making food drops...

The airships would still be constrained by "small but frequent drops" or "big but infrequent drops." And depending on how idealistic/cynical the setting's tone is, you could have them be well-scheduled drops where guards at least TRY to distribute things fairly, or the airships could just drop the food somewhere, call it a day, and (unintentionally) send masses of people into a fight for the supplies.

Or they could be supplying a market.

Oh, I thought you meant for emergencies/warfare. Yeah, air-trade would work pretty well, but depending on how "easy" the Easy Logistics are, it would still have drawbacks regarding cost or practicality. I mean, the whole point of the Cheap/fast/good triangle is that you can only have TWO of them—if the product is cheap and good, it'll be a very slow-and-steady process, but since airships are automatically FAST, the trade-offs would either "cheap but basic goods" (so they'd be supplying the masses and seen as a lower-class business) or "stellar but expensive ones" (so only the elite would have access to them).

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 2:56:10 AM

Sounds "Urban Dystopia" to me!

Yep, Marathia has stumbled along the way before becoming a superpower. Since their only territorial agriculture consists of the eastern regions of Marathia, the eastern fertile island of Allas, the southern island of Camaica, and the oversea land of Berianna, the Maratheon Empire is notorious in the international realm for taking large quantities of imports/exports from their foreign proxy states/associates. The has caused an external/foreign perception of Marathia as being an imperialistic nation of tyrannical, xenophobic humans.

Though none proficient in arcane knowledge, the Maratheon Empire is the most technological advanced nation in the world, with the country of Calimany following second with their advancements from Steampunk to Dieselpunk. The reason for the Maratheon Empire's exclusion from magic is because the island continent had been isolated from contact and communication from the known world during the ancient times, thus while the rest of the world had been progressing with arcane development, the people of Marathia developed their civilization in an isolated environment away from the interactions of the arcane.

In the present, the Maratheon Empire is the only superpower that has ironclad ships, zeppelin airships, and early designed tanks. After connecting with the international realm and learning about the arcane arts, though the practice is banned in Marathia the nationa itself has secretly dabbled in the research of the arcane which has led to the invention of steam-powered exosuits, fusion powerplants, and even the creation of arcmages(automaton-droids powered by a fusion of Maratheon technology and the arcane arts)

I refreshed the page while I was tweaking my food calculations because I forgot about the main island's agriculture, so here they are:

-The city's potential population is 50-60 million people, according to 1900s demographics.

-The main island has 40% non-urban land, so with half to two-thirds of that land being realistically arable, there's 20-26% of the population's food needs met at ~5-15 million. But the farmers ALSO prefer to eat, so you'd have to cut the SOLD food in half to ~2-8 million urban people / 10-13%.

-Gigantic farming island has 74,752,000 acres total, so with 50-66% of that being realistically arable, you've got ~37.37-49.33 million acres of farmland. Pre-modern societies would need 2-4 acres of land per person per year, so you can feed ~9.3-24.6 million people; but again, since you need to feed the farmers, cut that number in half to ~5-12.3 million urban people.

This would mean out of ~50-60 million people in Marathia proper, their native resources can only feed ~7-20 million city-folk (average 13-15 million). While there's probably enough food for 5-10 million more in the rest of the archipelago's minor farm regions, this still means at LEAST half the city's food is going to be imported.

—
Of course, with the Marathean Empire vastly outstripping most other territories in land and population, their dependent states probably roll their eyes when Marathia proper goes "half the city is gonna starve!!!1123" for the umpteenth time, and I'm betting even Marathia's allies view the city as Awesome, but Impractical—really impressive to entire COUNTRIES whose territories/populations could fit into that one city, and useful for trade and technology, but expensive as shit, especially since they don't publicly accept magic.

Hell, I'm betting there's been a LOT of discussion regarding the Fridge Logic with "Have you tried downsizing the city so you don't have to import so much food?" or "Have you tried using magic to boost your crop-yields so you don't have to import so much food?"

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 6:26:33 AM

So the UK post-Industrial Revolution, basically.

What about possible additional food sources such as fishing?

Or how about vertical farming? Maybe instead of tearing up the old farmlands wholesale, you could convert them into agricultural high-rises to save up space. Our current tech isn't nearly efficient enough to make it worthwhile for anything other than vegetables (which IRL accounts for <10% of the world's agricultural output), but you could make the society advanced enough to farm their staple crops vertically using some form of fantasy aeroponics, or something like that. Marathia's engineers could work off whatever system the dwarves are using to feed their subterranean cities, for starters.

dwarven weed lab, ho

Fishing would probably boost the eating rates near the coasts and bodies of water, but since this country is explicitly NON-magical, fresh fish would be a climate/tech-dependent trade good. If it's not eaten on the day of catching, it's probably going to be salted/dried and cheap, or frozen/specially-shipped (and therefore expensive).

Fresh fish probably would be limited to a few HOURS' travel from where it was caught, or it would be for the rich folks who can either outright make their own fishpond, or fly a crate over via airship and store it in a cold-box. There's a reason traditional fish-markets are next to their respective bodies of water, after all.

Of course, there's probably a black-market dealing in magical food boosts, but that necessarily means it only helps the folks who are a) desperate, and b) keeping that food-boost secret.

Edit: OP mentioned that there's basically a sci-fi equivalent of The Fair Folk, and half of all real-life fairy-tales involve fairies giving mortals boundless food. There are all sorts of story ideas for how this seemingly unsustainable and allegedly magic-hating empire doesn't starve every other year.

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 9:07:41 AM

While Maratheon law technically forbids the use of magic within its borders, it doesn't say anything about having state agents and contractors sail overseas and trick unsuspecting natives into eating fairy food, binding them into slavery and giving the empire a steady stream of disposable workers that they don't need to feed.

Which is exactly the type of rules-lawyering that The Fair Folk are known for. Diesel-punk human-trafficking, bitches.

Edit: As for human-trafficking, Dubai is pretty notorious for tricking overseas workers by luring them over with employment and then making sure their new hires can't LEAVE. It's actually an Open Secret that "Dubai is magical, but you need to be careful if you're South Asian."

Edit edit: Apparently the secret of "Dubai is run on slave-labor" is so open that it needs a WHOLE NEW PAGE to explain it all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 19th 2018 at 10:51:18 AM

Oh wow, I never thought about bringing in that kind of ideas about trafficking.

The Maratheon Empire used to have a slave system as part of its economy, but after the immigration of of nonhumans, half-humans, and foreign humans into the outer rims of the continent several laws were implemented by progressive historical rulers to accommodate the new citizens of the empire. These minority citizens have protested the injustice of work labor and civil rights not granted to them that regular, normal humans receive in the society of Marathia. Foreign humans share a similar discrimination with not being native born on the land of Marathia. In the present-day, the Maratheon Empire substitutes the outlawed practice of slavery with a legal form called indentured servitutde, put upon those of prisoners of war, those who owe debts to the government, and criminals of the law.

Just a note: the Fair Folk, or the faey as they are called, are a race of arcane beings from another realm that rule a collection of other native nonhumans called the Seelie and rule over the domain of human kingdoms on the mainland known as the Fair Kingdoms, which include the kingdoms of: Avalon, Victorria, Annwvn, Ossiana, Brokovia, Roncaster, and Reynes. Across this dominion, the fair folk reign differently between each kingdom, yet they all uphold the rule over humanity and that the nature of humans is to be subservient to the needs of the fair folk. Because of this mindset, humans are generally put into slavery by the fair folk. The Maratheon Empire and the Fair Kingdoms are locked in a cold-waresque conflict.

Edited by KproTM on Nov 20th 2018 at 5:34:06 AM

We brainstormed the idea of human-trafficking for Marathia because with the expense of feeding a gigantic city in a magic-banning and newly-industrialized society, the ONLY way it survives if the unlucky half of the city is treated like shit, or if they've got a black-market of secret magic-dealers to bulk up the food supply.

Let's face it, if too many of the empire's dependent states rebel, or if their allies can't spare any food due to famine or warfare, it's inevitable that a) someone's gonna cut costs and whoever can't pay an arm and leg for imports is stuck fighting over famine-rations, or b) the city DOES get fed properly... through some shady, hypocritical magic-slavery that they keep hush-hush.

Using Dubai again, it's the PERFECT example of "gigantic, beautiful, and... who built everything? How are they feeding eight million people in a desert?" The answers are 1) they use foreign workers (usually from South/Southeast Asia), and 2) they're not feeding the foreign workers.

It's a very Open Secret that Dubai's labour-force laws are barely enforced. They basically have modern-day slavery where foreign workers are lured to the city with promises of working in beautiful, cutting-edge Dubai, but when they get there, they're paid rock-bottom (if at all) and crammed into slums, barely get help from the laughingstock of law-enforcement, and they have a difficult if not impossible time LEAVING thanks to the first two problems. Dubai's residents make SHITTONS of excuses for how this isn't actually slavery because "they weren't SOLD or KIDNAPPED, they went willingly and their employers just lied to them! And That's Terrible!" or "they're still better off here in Dubai than being poor in their own countries."

To add to the sci-fi dystopia feel, it's not even hard to poke through Dubai's glamour—South and Southeast Asians (especially Indians and Filipinos) are well aware that if you get a job offer from Dubai and it sounds too good to be true, they're lying about it to get you on the plane. And while everyone talks up a storm about how badly foreign workers are treated and we need to get them help, the problem is that you can't talk about it IN DUBAI without getting arrested or shanked.

Marathia could easily be KNOWN to have all sorts of rules about "treating minorities fairly" and "not using magic," but nobody actually cares if you keep it quiet.

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 20th 2018 at 3:14:13 AM

If you want to pad your urban blocks' density, you could also throw in unregulated industrial blocks around Marathia's historical farmlands. Have the industrialists build shoddy high-rises where indentured servants sew clothes and assemble gadgets in unregistered sweatshops with minimum safety measures, which burst into flames and burn down the whole building once in a while. Or have a bunch of tower blocks acting as personal airship perches right next to elite residential areas and green spaces.

<.<

>.>

Kiiind of a shameless plug but I just started a new thread on my fantasy setting. I'll hopefully follow up with overview posts on the nation-states throughout the coming week, and in-depth looks at the core cultures after that.

An idea for high density urban especially poor regions would be the Favelas in Brazil. They are loaded with illicit business from every source, have all sorts of mini-economies, all sorts of organized criminal groups, and just a wide variety of conditions and things that could be interesting.

If you are looking for a dingy tower like settings Bangkok's Ghost Towers, Venzuela's 'Tower of David', Johannesburg has Ponte tower. Also, dig around Eastern European remnants from the Soviet Union days with the full-bore Brutalist Architecture theme hanging heavily on the structures.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Nov 28th 2018 at 5:57:39 AM

You want abandoned settings? We have them all over the place.

Edited by DeMarquis on Nov 28th 2018 at 10:47:57 AM

Anyone asked for half-arsed WIP art? No? TOO BAD.◊

So I've been giving my setting a pretty thorough rework for the past few months (long weekly hospital trips means having time to reflect on the silly bits of your writing, who woulda guessed). This one's from... -checks file- back in February, and is supposed to illustrate a bifurcated lance thing developed by a nomadic grassland culture that my protagonist hails from. Some design features:

• The long end is about 2.5 metres long and is mainly used as a standalone hunting weapon, with a pair of lugs just behind the spearhead to prevent the target from sliding up the shaft.
  • The shaft itself is around 3.2 cm thick and carved out of ash, making it closer to early modern pikes and military lances than real-life hunting spears. There are many dangerous things on the Ashen Plains, and you don't want your weapon to break too easily.
• The spearhead is traditionally pattern-welded, as the nomads relied on temporary metalworking facilities and lacked the means to consistently forge quality steel (not that it's necessary for most prey animals).
  • As the Empire encroached on the plains and vassalised one tribe after another, settlers from the Eastern Domains began to set up shop along the traditional hunting and mining grounds, where they built large smithies with proper blast furnaces. Newer spearheads are differentially hardened along the cutting edges, though cheaper ones might be forged out of wrought iron and mildly case-hardened instead.
  • I'm kinda unhappy with the spearhead at the moment: it's too thick, lacks the wide blades it needs to seriously wound a large prey, and the socket doesn't taper at all. The whole thing looks like a dumb fantasy weapon with its centre of gravity too far from the user, and I'll be redesigning it in future illustrations.
• There's a wool sling attached via two loops on the shaft. This allows the user to carry the weapon on their back while using a bow, axe or musket.
• The rear end has a flared wooden counterweight with a threaded iron socket inside. This is where you screw on the short end for extra reach - when the fully-joined lance is couched underarm, this part serves as a crude vamplate to help transfer the force of the charge onto the point.
• I still have no idea what you could use the short end for on its own - maybe a fishing spear? It's definitely heavier than something you'd use for that purpose.
• Lastly, I based the overall dimensions on a Qing-era cavalry lance◊ illustrated in the 1766 military manual Huangchao Liqi Tushi (皇朝禮器圖式). The real thing had a longer, heftier shaft, but it didn't have the rear spike and other metal bits to increase its weight, so it kinda balances out.

Anyway, this piece is mostly me trying to figure out an art style and general aesthetic for the setting via a limited exploration of the material culture. I want it to come off as a normal, functional tool for everyday use and not, like, an extension of the user's body or anything creepy like that. Will try to come up with more substantive pieces once I'm less sick/busy.