Inspirational articles about pre modern world building

[tmsbrg]

Hey all,

I'm new here. I think Daggerfall has some great potential to be filled in by mods that add content to the large and somewhat empty world. I'm already really enjoying the mods I've seen so far.

I thought I'd share some pre modern world building related articles, mostly from the great acoup.blog since they've been inspirational to my thinking about the past and the myths we have about them. Maybe for some of the modders it could contain some inspiration for stuff to add to Daggerfall. If you want you can also share some articles and we can build up a bit of collection of world building information.

Alright time for some links, hope this wont get me seen as a spam bot.

Lonely cities - Main takeaway is a model of how pre modern cities worked: and mainly the amount and types of country side that surround it. Look for the series of circles picture in the article, I thought it's quite eye opening.

Pratical polytheism - Provides a framework about how old polytheistic religions work and the difference with modern religion. Main takeway: They're way less about morality and belief, and more about practicality and knowledge.

Logistics - Provides detailed information about how armies move and what they need, especially regarding population amounts. Main takeaway: There's a hard limit to the size of pre modern armies based on the amount of food they consume and the fact that they have to "forage" this from the local population. Maximum army size is strongly dependent on population size and time of year.

Notes on Medieval Population Geography - A critique of Medieval Demographics Made Easy which contains a lot of information about realistic medieval populations, what kind of cities and towns would exist at what population densities, and also army compositions and issues, etc. -- Makes me wonder what is the population density of the various provinces of Daggerfall and what that means for their relative power.

That's what I wanted to share. Hope you find something interesting.

[jayhova]

This brings up a lot of issues I see in Daggerfall and DFU. It also shows some of the issues surrounding to changes to Daggerfall in DFU. It also reveals some of the things left out of Daggerfall in order to get it out the door. TES Arena had farmland surrounding the cities. Unfortunately, those cities were not connected to anything. When Daggerfall was made the farmland surrounding the cities was left out.

DFU exacerbated the problem by creating terrain that was much more pronounced than in the original release game. This created issues where cities were halfway up a large hill or mountain. As the referred to article points out food costs rise the harder it is to get said food to market. If you must climb a hill to get to the market, those costs go up dramatically. Almost all cities, therefore, exist in a river valley or other low-lying area that is easily accessible.

A thing I found surprising is the lack of coverage about the single most important thing for a city to exist, access to clean drinking water. This is again another major reason major cities are in low-lying zones. Mining towns can exist in areas with poor access to water but only due to the fact that they have money from mined goods to afford food and water to be trucked in. When the mine runs out you have a ghost town.

[tmsbrg]

A thing I found surprising is the lack of coverage about the single most important thing for a city to exist, access to clean drinking water. This is again another major reason major cities are in low-lying zones.

True, the articles don't really discuss drinking water. The Notes on Medieval Population Geography does mention city locations relative to rivers though, specifically:

So as you design your imaginary world, don’t put your huge cities right on river deltas, or deep in the mountains. Put them at heads of navigation, with their size proportional to accessible farmland, concentrations of political power, the absence of disease and presence of favorable climate, the relative structure of nearby military threats, etc.

It would be nice to see better use of the non city areas in the game. Farmland around the cities, grazing land with sheep and shepherds, rivers, etc.

[jayhova]

There was quite a bit discussed about how roads come into being. I discussed several of those ideas here:

In the construction of roads, it is often a better idea to go around a hill than up and down it. ...
in my research on the subject, I found this book https://books.google.com/books?id=f9DNAAAAMAAJ

The treatise discusses the fact that a moderately shorter road that dips and climbs make take longer to traverse than a road that is level because animal traffic will slow down on inclines and declines. If fact a horse will go slower on an equivalent decline than the same incline.
...

I also discuss the more in-depth aspects of road creation procedures here

Generally, you don't want to make a road with a rise of more than 1' for every 30' (1.9°) and less than that if you can manage it. ...

In short, roads have two primary functions: to allow the movement of commerce AKA traffic and the movement of armies and other governmental bodies. Roads will never traverse steep inclines over any sizable distance because this makes the road impassible to draft animals pulling loads. That is to say a horse path and a road are not the same thing as a horse path cannot bring goods to market.