Where are the Big Dumb Objects in your campaign?

[dmjalund]

His name is Mog Axeblur

 

he's a half-giant barbarian

 

 

 

 

 

(that's what you mean isn't it?)

[GhostDancer]

Not fantasy, but massive in size and inspired by a legendary story- the design of Beihai (North Sea) Park, in central Beijing. Rising above the East Sea, the story goes, were the three fairyland mountains of Penlai, Yingzhou and Fangzhang. There the immortals lived and a miraculous potion for longevity could be found. Both the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (reigned 211-210 B.C.) and Emperor Wu Di or the Han Dynasty (reigned 140-87 B.C.) sent people over the sea to the mountains in quest of the potion, but all of them failed to find it. Longing for immortality, several emperors built several parks modeled after this fairyland. Beihai covers 71.4 hectares (176.5 acres), half of which are taken up by water. It borders on Zhongnanhai (Central and South Seas Lake) in the south, Shichahai (Ten Temples Lake) in the north and the wooded Jingshan (Coal Hill) in the east. The majestic former Imperial Palace lies to the southeast. Qiongdao (Jade Islet), Tuancheng (Round City) and Xishan (Rhinoceros Hill) Terrace in Beihai were shaped to resemble the three fairyland mountains, and all the towers, pavilions, odd-shaped rocks and caves, as well as the dew collector held by a bronze immortal located on Qiongdao and much more were created out of imaginations fired by the legendary story.

Beihai remained an imperial pleasure ground for more than 800 years, but is now open to the public. Sight tour- http://www.beihaipark.com.cn/en/attract.html

[tkdguy]

Big Dumb Objects? I know where they are, but my players don't appreciate being called names.

[Jkeown]

In Caleon, we have an arch that purifies water, a floating castle or three, some spell-focusing bells for which I've never really decided a function.  Various magcal prisons that cage deities.  That sort of thing.  

[Chris Goodwin]

The Discworld could be considered a BDO, as could maybe the Mines of Moria and maybe Ethshar.

[Christopher]

The game Septerra Core is placed on a Planet-sized-????.
youtu.be/b3mpgldV8c
 
It sure is an artificial Cosntruct. And just when you think that was it, you realise that wasn't the wierdest production of "the creator" (I seem to be unable to use Spoiler tags right now. so I set the font color to white):

At the end of the game planets seperate layer shards realign and all move up to the top layer froming a (even if hollow) normalish planet. Then the whole planet phases/decloaks/teleports into the vicinity of three other inhabited planets. Presumably each of them having a similar wierd construction and a similar history behind them. And those were only the once that made it into this stage "so far".

The sheer amount of stories are mindboggling.

[Chris Goodwin]

It occurs to me that fantasy doesn't have BDOs as much as it has MOOs (Mysterious, Old Objects), such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall, the Nazca Lines. A thousand years post-apocalypse, the Mountain of Four Men will be one of those.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Part of fantasy is that some things in it are utterly baffling. Take "a city carved out of a mountain". It would have to have been planned obsessively. Where do people live in such a city? Where do ordinary people go about their daily business? What happens when a young adult wants to move out of the house if you can't build more houses because all the space on the mountain is taken? How can you manage to keep the city sanitary enough that people aren't dropping dead right and left from preventable disease?

[Markdoc]

And yet, people did exactly that.

If you google "Underground cities turkey" you'll get many images of what such a city could look like.

 

The largest of these cities (there are at least 200 known, across the middle east and caspian region) could have housed well in excess of 12,000 people, and has 13 levels, each with defensive works.

And actually ancient people - by and large - were not big on obsessive planning. The structure seems to have grown organically, like many cities, with extra parts being added on as required. Need more space? Dig sideways or dig down. Hit an existing street in the process? Build an arch, add a door and switch direction. 

If you visit some of these places, the bizarre switchbacking, variations in size, and ups and downs that passages and rooms follow make it very plain that they were not working to a plan.

 

cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

What I want to know is, what did people in those cities do when the electricity went out? 

[tkdguy]

What I want to know is, what did people in those cities do when the electricity went out? 

 

We can't answer that here. This board is rated PG.

[Michael Hopcroft]

And yet, people did exactly that.

If you google "Underground cities turkey" you'll get many images of what such a city could look like.

 

 

he largest of these cities (there are at least 200 known, across the middle east and caspian region) could have housed well in excess of 12,000 people, and has 13 levels, each with defensive works.

And actually ancient people - by and large - were not big on obsessive planning. The structure seems to have grown organically, like many cities, with extra parts being added on as required. Need more space? Dig sideways or dig down. Hit an existing street in the process? Build an arch, add a door and switch direction. 

If you visit some of these places, the bizarre switchbacking, variations in size, and ups and downs that passages and rooms follow make it very plain that they were not working to a plan.

 

I still wonder how the inhabitants handled sanitation and personal hygiene. Disease must have been a problem.

[L. Marcus]

As in all pre-modern cities. I heard somewhere that it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that city populations had positive growth ...

[Markdoc]

 

I still wonder how the inhabitants handled sanitation and personal hygiene. Disease must have been a problem.

 

Sanitation? I imagine it was handled the same way as in large above-ground cities: either dump it in a pot and carry it away, or pour it down a hole to where a stream could carry it away. In practical terms, I don't see a huge difference between living 3 stories down in a hole to living three stories up in a tenement. It's the same number of flights of stairs either way and if you lived in the middle of a tenement, ventilation would not have been a great deal better ...

 

Levity aside, I'm thinking that lighting and air quality would probably have been a problem - it'd get pretty funky with lots of candles or oil lamps going, not to mention plenty of people. On the other hand, the relatively constant underground temperature would have reduced your need to burn fuel just to stay warm.

 

And disease ... well disease was always a problem, any time you had plenty of people gathered together.

 

As in all pre-modern cities. I heard somewhere that it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that city populations had positive growth ...

 

 

I haven't seen any numbers on that, but I kind of doubt it. Babylon more than trebled in size (near as we can tell) over the space of a couple of hundred years and Rome (for which the figures are much better) went from around 100-200,000 to about a million in 2 centuries or so. A lot of that was immigration, but given the rise in the number of roman-born citizens over the same period, there was clearly a lot of population growth as well. In fact, the Romans had a continual problem in the early imperial period with overgrowth of their cities, trying (and failing) to keep the population below fixed limits to prevent overcrowding. Berlin stayed tiny for about 400 years but then it started to grow, and just kept growing for the next 400 years - same with Copenhagen.

 

Ancient and Medieval cities could go up and down dramatically in population: Siena went from 60-70,000 in 1340, to around 12,000 in 1370, through a combination of the plague and Florence  Rome went from over a million to about 50,000, albeit more slowly. Looking at the numbers, it seems around the end of the Renaissance (1500-1600) that cities started to grow consistently in Europe and that tracks with a growth in the total European population over the same period.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

I meant that cities were dependent on people moving in to maintain the population. The filth and squalor would make disease so rife that, without country folk moving in, the cities would soon be nothing but ruins.

[Markdoc]

I meant that cities were dependent on people moving in to maintain the population. The filth and squalor would make disease so rife that, without country folk moving in, the cities would soon be nothing but ruins.

 

Yeah, I got that, but it doesn't square with the math. People moving to the cities was certainly a major factor (it still is today!), but in many cases (not all), the growth appears to be too much and too prolonged for immigration to account for it all. In some cases (Rome is an example) local born citizens had different rights and obligations to immigrants - even if those immigrants were citizens - so we know from the records that there was significant growth even among those who lived there. In the case of Copenhagen, by the 17th century it dominated the surrounding countryside in terms of population, so there literally were not enough people around it to supply enough new babies to drive its growth: it had to be internal as well.

 

I think the real difference is that in pre-modern cities, the mortality rate and financial constraints were high enough that they significantly blunted growth - but were not enough to stop it entirely (in most cases). If you look at most existing European cities (I don't really know enough about non-european cities to say) they exhibit a pattern of slow growth where they tripled in size every 100-150 years (as a really rough rule of thumb). But in the 19th century they exploded. It took London about 2000 years to grow to a million people, around 1800. It then added another million in 40 years, then another in 20 years and another in 10 years ... a lot of that was migration, but it was also driven (increasingly) by internal growth. Those big numbers caught people's eye, but if you look at it, that growth started in the 14th century, at which point the population shifted from very slow increase to exponential growth (numbers here, graph here).

 

cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

I meant that cities were dependent on people moving in to maintain the population.

 

This makes medieval cities sound kind of like roach motels.  I wonder if that is not an apt description. 

[Chris Goodwin]

Medieval cities were all full of effete namby-pambies who will all die in the next barbarian invasion.

[Markdoc]

This makes medieval cities sound kind of like roach motels.  I wonder if that is not an apt description. 

 

Actually it's a very apt description.

 

Cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

The poor, oppressed peasants who weren't part of an Anarko-Syndicalist Commune wanted to escape to the city to find a new life and earn money.

 

Uh ... Sounds like the US ...

[Lord Liaden]

Regarding ancient city populations, to be fair, expert estimations can vary widely. Just look at this list of largest cities throughout history comparing estimates by different authorities.

[Markdoc]

Regarding ancient city populations, to be fair, expert estimations can vary widely. Just look at this list of largest cities throughout history comparing estimates by different authorities.

 

Yeah, I know: that's why I stuck to examples like Rome or Babylon, where there's been a lot more work done and the numbers are pretty consistent, for ancient cities, or to modern European capitals for the medieval stuff, where there has been a lot more research and where there's more documentation. Even there, precise numbers are impossible to get, but the estimates tend to vary by less than 20%. Move outside well-known sites and variations become much more extreme.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

I'd add that the whole "cities were population sinks" thing always overlooked the existence of rural slums. Just because there weren't as many people in the shire as there were in London doesn't meant that your little hamlet isn't letting its sewage seep into the drinking water. 

 

On the other hand, there's cases like ancient Rome, where the reconstructed population densities are incredible and we know that most people (aqueducts aside) got their drinking water from wells. This is enough to make me suspect that the population statistics, reconstructed from the corn dole, are perhaps reflecting fraud on the dole side. (Hence my crazy "the Roman Empire [or, hell, ancient empires more generally) are all about cattle drives."

[Markdoc]

I'd add that the whole "cities were population sinks" thing always overlooked the existence of rural slums. Just because there weren't as many people in the shire as there were in London doesn't meant that your little hamlet isn't letting its sewage seep into the drinking water. 

 

On the other hand, there's cases like ancient Rome, where the reconstructed population densities are incredible and we know that most people (aqueducts aside) got their drinking water from wells. This is enough to make me suspect that the population statistics, reconstructed from the corn dole, are perhaps reflecting fraud on the dole side. (Hence my crazy "the Roman Empire [or, hell, ancient empires more generally) are all about cattle drives."

 

Well rural areas in the developing world can be pretty crummy - lord knows, I've worked in some pretty awful places. But I think the definition of a slum is concentrated awfulness.

It's not necessarily worse as a place to live than awful rural places - after all, the worst big city slums are usually kept well-topped up with recent imports from the country. But concentrated poverty has a frenetic desperation all of its own - if only because you take all of the desperation, violence and deprivation from two dozen villages and compress them into a quarter of a city block. Per person, it might not be worse - but misery per square meter is definitely higher.

 

As for the purported population densities of ancient cities, as a student living back in New Zealand, I thought they simply had to be inflated. Having worked in urban slums that are positively medieval in squalor, I can easily accept that they are not. I have no problem accepting Roman population densities having seen thousands of people in a modern city slum dependant on one faucet for water. People would stand in line for hours to fill some buckets of water.

 

cheers, Mark

[LordGhee]

Oh I just wacthed this, very good.  Just no not eat while wacthing.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC0mKHoHvYY