AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

So playing a mage has been fun. Really fun. A big part of that has been educating myself on the science behind what I do with my character. However, the more I learn, the more I find that the state of the art is nebulous at best on Amia. We feature a hodgepodge of scientific concepts in various fields, some of them from wildly different time periods in our own history. Normally, I can handwave this as "It's fantasy, ignore it", but the implications of some of it and what they actually mean will have a direct bearing on future work by my character. As such, I'm starting this thread so we can discuss, if possible, where the general sciences in Amia are at. Specifically, I'd like to cover these areas:

Chemistry
Mathematics (including Physics)
Astrology
Biology
Metallurgy
Geology

Anyone with a good grasp on their history is welcome to chime in as to where they think a certain field really is.

For my part, I'd like to tackle Chemistry initially.

Chemistry is tremendously important in the modern world; every redefinition of matter to a more accurate understanding has revolutionized our way of life. The discovery of the atomic structure led us to the nuclear age and modern quantum mechanics. The discovery of elements in the first place sparked the industrial revolution. Even flawed theories like the Miasma theory still produced effective and predictive tools for experimentation and extraction of pure elements. Thus, I feel defining the current state of understanding in this field is somewhat important for determining what sort of tools and methods would be available to an aspiring scientist or budding inventor.

So, here's some things that are raising questions:

1. We have mercury. Classically, the discovery of the molten metal form of mercury was very important: it's obtained by heating mercury oxide (basically rusted mercury, looks like an orange powder) which separates the mercury and oxygen. Careful tests identified the flammability and importance for respiration of oxygen collected from this process. Even more importantly, the resulting elements could be weighed separately and as a combined oxide and weighed precisely the same, establishing the scientific principle that nothing is lost in chemistry, only changed. These discoveries were the genesis of the first versions of the modern periodic table and led to many further experiments taking advantages of iron's oxidating properties, such as the isolation and discovery of hydrogen gas. All of this was going on in Napoleonic France, a culture and period that seems too advanced for our setting. How advanced, then, is the understanding of elements, chemicals, and so on by scientists in our setting?

2. Carbon. I originally thought this was an oversight and should've been "Charcoal", but carbon as a known element is contemporary with the mercury stuff described above. Actual demonstration of carbon's importance in steel production was demonstrated even earlier than this. This would seem to imply that Amian science is sufficient to begin producing various types of carbon steel. More importantly, the above-mentioned Mercury information suggests there is a knowledge of the oxidation process, which played a crucial role in developing not only a much better understanding of modern chemistry but various industrial processes (like the Bessemer Process) that revolutionized manufacturing worldwide. My question, then, is: Does Amian science include the knowledge of the oxidation process, even in a general sense?

Additionally, several of my RP developments so far have necessitated some advanced scientific knowledge: iridium extraction is predicated on aqua regia being available. Aqua regia was first developed in the 1300s, but again it wasn't until Napoleonic France that it really began to take a role in defining chemistry and separating out elements.

I've also heard many people using semi-modern science references in their speech. Oxygen, for example. Since the earliest point where these references would mesh with the scientific knowledge is also (go figure) Napoleonic France, it also seems like the general state of scientific knowledge characters express fits that time period.

To try to answer my own questions, I feel like our level of chemistry knowledge in the module is really pretty contemporary with Antoine Lavoisier, the guy from Napoleonic France who is responsible for most of the stuff noted above (although he stole oxygen theory from an Englishman). Naturally we carve out the standard fantasy exception for gunpowder, but otherwise I feel like the state of knowledge he promulgated in his writings is about where this field should be if it's to jive with the ingame stuff and everyone's references.

The only reason Gunpowder (if I might be honest) is carved out is a DM decision, as the setting of Faerun does have both Smokepowder and Astral Powder (One still requires the processes and a hint of a connection to the Arcane thus only Magi and their ilk can craft, one is creatable by anyone using mundane chemistry. The otheris highly outlawed by any number of churches and organizations and thus it is rare to see at bet).

I know it was Gond who gave the gift of Smokepowder to the Lantanese but I am having a bitch of a time remembering if it's the one producably by mundane chemistry.

Grymia wrote:

The only reason Gunpowder (if I might be honest) is carved out is a DM decision, as the setting of Faerun does have both Smokepowder and Astral Powder (One still requires the processes and a hint of a connection to the Arcane thus only Magi and their ilk can craft, one is creatable by anyone using mundane chemistry. The otheris highly outlawed by any number of churches and organizations and thus it is rare to see at bet).

I know it was Gond who gave the gift of Smokepowder to the Lantanese but I am having a bitch of a time remembering if it's the one producably by mundane chemistry.

Gunpowder is literally the smallest concern I have here. While I appreciate the input, if people could please avoid focusing on it at all it'd be much more productive for purposes of this thread. I am not asking and never will ask for gunpowder or think it should be allowed.

I am not very familiar with any of the fields mentioned, but my general perspective is this: observations and predictions can be very advanced and accurate, but the paradigm is different. I think a theory should always have a strong mystical element, not because it's less advanced but because it's a fantasy world inspired by medieval, especially Renaissance, thought and actually filled with mystical things. Health is affected by the balance of the four humors, which are linked to the elements, blah blah. The more connections you can draw, the heavier and richer you can make your system of explanation, the better the outcome. Because culturally, science is a kind of esoteric art and it should play that part proudly.

We also need to be careful not to assume sciences would progress toward the same conclusions as in the real world - there are dozens of viable models, and ours is just one, historically contingent strand of development. Moreover, the laws of nature are not the same in the Realms. Fire is not "the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion" (as per Wikipedia), at least not primarily; it is a manifestation of the Element of Fire, and it does not behave in all ways like the fire we know. It may be that most things behave more or less like in the real world, but we can't assume that until actual research is done.

A neat thing I would do, if I knew enough about the field in question, would be to think what instruments my PC has available, experiment with them, and then see if I can infer a coherent, valid theory based on the results that is nonetheless entirely different from what was historically suggested. Observation, manipulation and prediction can work regardless of the abstract theory constructed around them, after all.

Astronomy, not Astrology.

Quote:

A neat thing I would do, if I knew enough about the field in question, would be to think what instruments my PC has available, experiment with them, and then see if I can infer a coherent, valid theory based on the results that is nonetheless entirely different from what was historically suggested. Observation, manipulation and prediction can work regardless of the abstract theory constructed around them, after all.

Quoted for emphasis. I love to see see players coming up with creative interpretations of the world around them. The challenge that I face when I try it, however, is that other characters can tend to be demeaning in a matter-of-fact way. It's difficult to know what has been proven, what is merely speculation or theory, and how much of that our characters know.

Best thing I could do would be to encourage players to actually go through the roleplay of learning these things, and to let their characters be wrong at times. (Hell, embrace it-- it gets fun!)

I think Iron's post reflect most of my thoughts as well. With my own character's work in metallurgy, I've run into the same challenges you've mentioned in the OP. I try to separate my own RL knowledge of science and metals (or what I can dig out of the internet) and try to project a very alien fantasy world dwarf's view of the way things work. It is not always successful because of a) I as a player do not know what materials exist in the setting we play on and b) I am not a dwarf. Yes and there is the fact that other players sometimes fail to play along with my imagined dwarfish theories and project their RL science into the exchange.

Carbon is a tricky one. As per the job system you turn logs into 'carbon'. For me I do not like the idea of carbon being common knowledge, I'd rather the job system item was called charcoal. Since carbon is an atomic element and one I feel a too modern and RL concept for the setting. My PC likes to think of charcoal or coal as an Element of Earth which divinely strengthens (through a lot of skill of the refiner) iron to make steel instead of thinking about the molecular bonding of elements. I don't think knowledge that it was actually carbon, which was key to the steelmaking process, was discovered until the RL 1700s. Before that I am sure it was just a process of trial and error that you add charcoal or coal and it makes stronger iron.

I have similar issues when dealing with healing in the D&D context.

When I first created my healer <Abbey> I found that just about everyone's IC and OOC approach to healing was to cast a cure or heal spell and that was that, simple and banal.
But I remember reading years ago (and can't for the life of me think of the publication it was in) about magical healing and what it could heal and what it could not, I'm not saying it was cannon it may have simply been an article in Dragon magazine but it got me thinking that magical healing should have some restrictions and not be an easy fix to all things.
Where it that simply then life in the D&D world would be all but eternal with every injury, wound and ailment removed instantly for a few gold at the local temple, and given that all clerics by default get access to all healing spells I could never understand the need for deities who had a focus in healing if all it took was a simple casting.

So I have tried go deeper into healing characters than simply casting spells and tried to make it a more co-operative bit of RP utilizing descriptive emotes and dialogue intended to elicit a response from the patient on how the treatment is effecting them, but at the same time as Luckbringer mentioned I have to try to separate my modern knowledge from that of the character whilst at the same time allowing the character to figure new things out.

To that end I have raided the internet many times to try and find references to medicine and healing practices from ye olde days from ancient Egyptian uses of sugar and honey to Roman Army procedures for dealing with battlefield casualties with a little dip into the maniacs of the Tudor era bleeding their patients with knives, leeches and special little mechanical devices containing many blades placed against the skin in a soft tissue area like inside thigh and when a level is depressed the blades scythe through the flesh creating horrendous looking but shallow wounds which bleed copiously and often became infected!

I can only hope that these efforts have made the RP more entertaining and believable in the D&D context.

I'd have thought one of your big problems would be that magic is real, so the physics of Amia are going to have to be hugely different from ours. To use your example of oxygen, yeah, it'd be way too advanced for the fingerwagglers to start talking about proton gradients across the cell membrane, and mitochondria doing their thang with ATP, but if you did, you'd also have to come up with the physics that explained why that still happened underwater when you're wearing that ugly Crab hat from Wiltun.

The Amia laws of thermodynamics are going to be a riot. Even clean-living gravitational potential energy has a lot of fast talking to do to explain how you can go from the peak of the Spire to the Underdark's lowest node and not suddenly be going at a few hundred metres a second.

Thennnnn...you have the world's d20 origins to contend with. I'm imagining a gnome researcher spending hours at the Arena watching and recording every spell cast and blade swung and noticing that no matter what skill and power they have, their strikes miss and their spells get resisted or dodged no less than 5% of the time, and hit true no less than 5% of the time as well. And as the sample time gets longer and longer and everything smoothes out over time it's exactly 5% that it tends towards, to a scary number of sig figs.

Uberuce wrote:

Thennnnn...you have the world's d20 origins to contend with. I'm imagining a gnome researcher spending hours at the Arena watching and recording every spell cast and blade swung and noticing that no matter what skill and power they have, their strikes miss and their spells get resisted or dodged no less than 5% of the time, and hit true no less than 5% of the time as well. And as the sample time gets longer and longer and everything smoothes out over time it's exactly 5% that it tends towards, to a scary number of sig figs.

This would be a horrifying revelation for any scientist. "IS THIS ALL SOME KIND OF GAME!?"

Uberuce wrote:

Thennnnn...you have the world's d20 origins to contend with. I'm imagining a gnome researcher spending hours at the Arena watching and recording every spell cast and blade swung...

I always found that funny in d20. If you had 20 people in a room and set off a small nuclear charge, on average, 1 of them would be standing after it like "lol, what's wrong with you guys?". There's some suspension of belief there, that people inside the world can only extrapolate so far the mechanics of that world. It's counter-intuitive, because so much of our own world is based solely off of measurable and repeatable observation. The way I most often see science hand-waved is simply introducing it as necessary. Could a 25+ INT PC derive the formulas for laminar vs turbulent fluid flows? Without a doubt. Does he automatically understand them upon dipping his finger into the water? Roll d20 and let's see how fast he figures it out.

Then comes the question of publishing the information. 99% of the population could not even understand the findings. 99.9% of the population would have no use for it, even if they understood it. So does someone in the Forgotten Realms universe understand that a flying machine could fly with cylindrical wings, if the wings spun fast enough? Probably. Did he bother to spread this information around? Probably not.

How advanced is "Science" in our setting? I would say however advanced the smartest PC in the current party is and has put in the time for. As I've explained, any outside source doesn't really matter, because they wouldn't have bothered to share. It is also important to remember that PC's are ideally the DaVinci's and Poison's of their world. They're the game-changers. They make the discoveries. It's a bit harder to handle in a multi-player game than it is in tabletop, but the goal is the same. You don't have a player walk into a bar and ask to see Stephen Hawking. You have the player walk into a bar and NPC's go "Look, there's Sir Stephen of Hawk" and ask him to roll initiative.

Magic could be seen at first to complicate things, but I honestly tend to look at them as the same field. As Thor said "your ancestors call it magic. You call it science. I come from a place where they are one and the same." Once you look at it like that, the current state of the world makes a lot more sense. "Why hasn't anyone invented the telephone." Because the people smart enough to devise one were usually smart enough to learn Whisper or Sending, and that technology was already available to them. "Why don't we have guns if we have smokepowder?" You could, but most of the people who had the time, knowledge, and resources to make one were wise enough to learn Fireball and called it a day. Technology is more often evolution than genesis; innovations are often a building upon or culmination of previous discoveries. In a world where you could either invent a T.V. from a pile of rocks and metal or make an improved version of a spell that lets you send dreams into people's minds, of course most would choose the path of least resistance.

CouncilofAutumn wrote:

This would be a horrifying revelation for any scientist. "IS THIS ALL SOME KIND OF GAME!?"

But don't you think e=mc^2 is just a leeeeetle too neat?

Uberuce wrote:

CouncilofAutumn wrote:

This would be a horrifying revelation for any scientist. "IS THIS ALL SOME KIND OF GAME!?"

But don't you think e=mc^2 is just a leeeeetle too neat?

It's neat because the formula says c^2 instead of 89,875,517,873,681,800 m^2/s^2.

No, that messiness is the entirely excusable fault of the metric guys and dolls for basing their system on water rather than fundamental particles and constants, almost none of which were known at the time.

Face it. You're just an NPC.

The way I see it, if magic can do it better, quicker, and cheaper anyway IC.... if someone wants to fudge around a bit science wise and comes up with a logical workable plan its better then just saying "I magiced it and it works"

Also I believe something that would play a large factor is the location, Amia island is magical happy land, Ruathym (Wiltun/Caraigh...ect) is not, so I believe that Ruathym in fact would be more advanced science wise in some cases then places where magic is a option to solve problems.

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Magic could be seen at first to complicate things, but I honestly tend to look at them as the same field. As Thor said "your ancestors call it magic. You call it science. I come from a place where they are one and the same." Once you look at it like that, the current state of the world makes a lot more sense. "Why hasn't anyone invented the telephone." Because the people smart enough to devise one were usually smart enough to learn Whisper or Sending, and that technology was already available to them. "Why don't we have guns if we have smokepowder?" You could, but most of the people who had the time, knowledge, and resources to make one were wise enough to learn Fireball and called it a day. Technology is more often evolution than genesis; innovations are often a building upon or culmination of previous discoveries. In a world where you could either invent a T.V. from a pile of rocks and metal or make an improved version of a spell that lets you send dreams into people's minds, of course most would choose the path of least resistance.

While the looking on magic and science as the same part is a neat concept, I don't buy why magicians wouldn't make gunpowders or TV's if they could. Let's say you're a wizard to some court or the leader of a warband, of course you would like to make your minions more powerful than your enemies, and most of the time it should be easier to make the science available to everyone than training everyone to become wizards.

When it comes to chemistry and nuclear physics in DnD I don't think the atom is discovered yet, as it was discovered as we know it by Bohr which didn't happen before the beginning of the 20th century. The thought about the atom however is old, and was first thought of in the ancient Greece . To claim though that we can base a lot on napoleonic france may not be too wrong, but I think some things there are still advanced though (like the discovery of emulsifiers). I am not sure if hydrogen was discovered in Napoleonic France, as far as I have heard they actually discovered it by accident when they look at the sun with a absorption specter. I think the limit for chemistry is properties discovered by trying them, if you can't make the assumption out of a scientific experiment, think twice before consider using said assumption. Robert Boyle is one of the "fathers" of modern chemistry, but he never discovered more than 4-5 elements, but concluded there should be more.

When it comes to mathematics and physics
I don't consider electricity discovered in FR, or at least it isn't developed enough to use it as it is used today. If we look at the Sherlock movie some years back (the oldest one) I think we can use that as a line for what is acceptable to do with electricity. Mathwise I think we can use trigonometry and pretty advanced algebra and stuff like that.

Astronomy
This one is a bit linked with physics. Can we use Newton as the standard? alright but then we know that celestial objects are moving and not standing still as they thought up to Galileo, they also know the earth isn't center of the sun system and so on. When it comes to the earth being flat, this is a myth and you have to go far back for people considered it a truth, navigation proves this. This is up to the DM's in the end, but I don't think many of the things Earalenia (She's a master scout, they make grenades) makes could actually be useful without the knowledge Newton came up with.

The State of Amian Science

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