Because this is literally the second half of the article I posted last week, I’ll forego all the usual introductory bits and pieces and dive straight in from where I left off.

Industrial Economics III: War & Depression

Many of the economic influences that defined the era came together in the First World War, and the consequences of that conflict combined with the rest to create the Great Depression. Even in hindsight, it is hard to see how the Depression could have been avoided, though it was far deeper and more severe than it had to be. And, in between, there were the roaring twenties and prohibition.

The links that bind these events together are both tenuous and inescapable, and we met almost all of them in the previous part of this article.

Internationalism

There is one major exception to that statement which needs mention before proceeding. Even though the Empires of the 19th century had experienced ripple effects from local or national events or trends, as a general rule the problems of one location were largely compartmentalized.

It was only really with the advent of the 20th century that international relations became so entangled and intertwined that local or regional issues could become multinational and international in scope, spreading beyond those directly involved.

Because these links were seen as heightening prosperity for all during the good times, the downsides were not fully recognized until it was too late to avoid them; and even had that not been the case, the fact that the overall trend was positive probably made the trade-off too attractive to resist.

There was also the widespread belief that intermingling made serious wars less likely, by attacking directly the perceived root causes of wider conflict. The transition from British Empire to British Commonwealth, and from a colonial mindset to one in which it was entirely acceptable for mature ‘colonies’ like Australia to transition to independence within a broader political union added to, and accentuated, the perception that the world had found solutions to problems that would have previously only been resolved with wars of independence.

In truth, despite the numerous wars since, this belief persists as an undercurrent attitude even into modern times. This is demonstrated by the widespread criticism of Russia over the current invasion of Ukraine; there is an element of shock at the barbarity of an invasion, so at odds with the spirit of Glasnost that was embraced in the 1980s. This has fueled much of the outrage over the invasion.

Pre-War

The first 13 years of the 20th century did little to dispel the optimism described above. The biggest conflict of the first decade of the century was the Russo-Japanese war, and it had little impact outside of the participants. The other great Empires were competitive, especially in terms of the scramble for Africa; again, while there were numerous local conflicts as a result of these imperial ambitions, for those in less remote parts of the Empires, they were little more than news headlines in terms of their impact on personal lives.

In modern times, it was the 1905 Russian Revolution that would come to be viewed as the most significant conflict of the era, but disasters – both natural and man-made – would have the greater impact on ordinary lives, and even those would be overshadowed by more positive effects from the spread of new technologies and the rise of mass literature.

When the 1910s began, there was no real indication that this decade would not be ‘more of the same’ from start to finish.

World War I

The First World War is widely regarded as starting with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there had been a period of rising tension prior to that triggering event. The assassination was carried out in pursuit of Serbian independence, which was a cause that the Archduke was known to favor; it is entirely possible that, had he survived to assume the Imperial Throne, he would have overseen a transition to a Commonwealth-style political umbrella that granted independence to many of the nations within the Empire, but that’s just empty speculation.

Forgotten Nobility

In many nations, Nobility had long been extracted from the day-to-day political decisions, and there were conversations from time to time as to whether they were even necessary in the ‘modern day’. The usual consensus reached by such discussions was that they provided a valuable continuity of institution from one government to another, functioned as a brake against over-ambitious national authorities, and were still valuable in diplomatic terms.

It was widely held that the nobility had little day-to-day impact on the lives of the citizens of their empires, at least in comparison to the Kings and Rulers of past eras. Even Napoleon Bonaparte had greater direct impact on his citizens, his reign introducing legal precepts that are still widely accepted.

To most citizens, Nobility was like a natural feature of the landscape, like a mountain, or like the weather – just there, but of little relevance beyond the occasional inconvenience. To those who saw deeper, the Nobility was an abstract vessel into which people poured their trust and ideals, which they then expected to see reflected back on a grander scale; touchstones of national or Imperial unity of huge symbolic import, but forgotten except when the Nobility failed this test in some way.

This truth was laid more bare than ever before when treaties and alliances flowed through diplomatic channels following the Archduke’s assassination like dominoes. Russia was drawn into the conflict almost immediately, followed by Germany, France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, and only grew from there.

And yet, ironically, the ultimate trigger belied this attitude; it was the assassination of a member of this ruling social class, deemed so irrelevant to daily life, that would so profoundly reshape the lives of so many people around the world.

Revolutionary Science

War is widely regarded as a hotbed for technological advancement, a perception that started in the First World War and was driven home by the Second.

And, in a way, this is justified – but my personal impression is that the biggest impact of war on technological progress is that money is directed into R&D at a furious rate, a ‘cold-war-within-a-war’ that drives this advance.

At every point, in such conflicts, it is sought to nullify an enemies’ advantages while taking maximum benefit of their vulnerabilities. Where those advantages are technological in nature, so must the response be (or so it was deemed at the time); and that only made it natural to look for technological answers to the other questions, too.

It was also perceived that tactical problems were susceptible to technological solution that could not be resolved in any other way. The stalemate of the Western Front and its trenches gave rise to Tanks and Poison Gas, for example.

The biggest impact of technology is not on the battlefield, in my opinion; it is in the economic infrastructure that supports the warring parties, both as technologies are developed that will manifest in other forms within the economy, and in the logistics of their deployment, and indirectly by growing that economy to include the research, design, manufacture, and distribution of the new technology. In particular, there is the impact post-war of examining the newly developed technologies and searching for ‘peacetime applications’ (assuming that such were not inherently obvious to begin with).

Mass-produced Soldiers

Although early deployments, especially of conscripts, can be characterized as amateur and even shambolic, one of the most significant technological impacts that transpired during the course of the war is often unheralded – the application of mass-production techniques to the training of soldiers.

Initially, training was just as shambolic; I can never forget the naive enthusiasm with which the early British soldiers embarked, believing that the war would be over in just a few months, and the contrast this makes with the gruesome realities of trench warfare in an age of machine guns, landmines, and artillery.

Harsh realities and brutal lessons soon began to bite, and practicalities became the driver of innovations in training content and processes. The US, when it entered the war, started with a more theoretical approach, disregarding many of those harsh lessons in the arrogant light of assumed American superiority. They, too, had to be schooled by the practical realities when they got to the front lines – but, to their credit, I think they learned those lessons better and faster than the other participants, perhaps because distance imparted a greater objectivity, perhaps because the weight of tradition did not bear down on them quite so heavily.

Post-war, the training methods concerned would be used to revolutionize education and skills training. Sometimes, this infiltration and assimilation would be rapid, sometimes it would be slow, but the general principles would become universal by the time of the Second world war.

Wartime Finances

I spent quite a bit of time examining the consequences, advantages, and liabilities of a Gold Standard in Part 4 of this series, but that was written from a peace-time perspective, focusing on supply-side economic consequences.

Everything in an economy – both strengths and weaknesses – gets amplified by a war, even without direct and indirect war effects on the economy.

A gold standard means that a government has a fixed amount that it can spend without changing monetary policy – raising taxes, or issuing debt instruments. The latter are only useful if someone both wants to buy them and can afford to do so.

It’s not entirely inaccurate to describe WWI as a holding action fought until the economic investment by one side exceeded that of the enemy by enough to resolve the conflict.

The entry of the US into the war didn’t just deliver a mass of new men to the Western front; it added the mammoth US Economy and its manufacturing capability to the resources being marshaled by the Allies. There was nothing close to equivalent that the Central Powers could deploy as a counterbalance; barring stupid mistakes and sheer bad luck on a protracted scale, victory became eventually inevitable from that moment onward.

Personally, I think this perception is an oversimplified, but nevertheless captures an often-overlooked aspect of the story of the war. As soon as the US entered the war, the conduct of that war became about negotiating positions in the eventual peace talks, and what the ultimate price of victory – or loss – would be.

War Reparations

The fact that the participants all had to go into debt – to near ruinous levels – in order to finance the Great War is often overlooked as a factor in the scale and timetable of War Reparations demanded by the Allies in the Treaty Of Versailles.

Another factor was an assumption that the economies of the world – even those of the defeated enemies – could return to a peacetime prosperity without experiencing any consequences of note. And, if that had been the case, the reparations demanded might even have been affordable.

The role played by these reparations as the seeds of the next great conflict is well-known; not enough attention is paid to the reasons for the harshness of the demands.

Note that these reasons don’t have to have been correct; those participating in the peace treaty negotiations believed them, and that is enough.

In a nutshell, the allies wanted to be fully reimbursed for the expenses incurred in fighting the war, and were less concerned with bleeding the losers white than in restoring their own economic foundations. As a short-term position, this is hard to argue with; in the longer term, the attitude was short-sighted at best.

The Roaring Twenties

The post-war attitude was so optimistic that it made the pre-war enthusiasm seem quite lukewarm in comparison. America, in particular, thought itself saviors of the world, infallible and wise. The war outcome showed that there was at least some merit to this attitude, but not as much as was thought at the time.

And, in their hubris and pie-eyed optimism, they enacted the largest social reform intervention the world had ever seen – Prohibition.

The pages on Organized Crime linked to in the first part of this article tell the story of the consequences. America’s government may have been ready to embrace sobriety; America’s populace were not, with the exception of a handful of optimists.

Smuggling and distribution of illegal alcohol became insanely profitable, and money creates power. Rivalries exploded.

It’s a truism that people with power change; their tolerance for slights and offenses, real or perceived, thins, and their reflex responses to such affronts are amplified by their power. If you’ve been carefully educated in the effects of power and the reality of consequences, these problems can be overcome; but the latest band of Nouveau Riche not only had all the elements of the trope down pat, they punctuated them with automatic weapons.

By the time the Prohibition experiment wound down, Organized Crime had established itself in many nooks and corners of the American economy, from which they would be extremely difficult to dislodge. The smartest mob bosses took their wealth and turned (mostly) legitimate; others fled to Cuba, from where they could not be extradited; and, one by one, Federal authorities or gang violence got the rest.

The Seeds of Depression

If World War I brought many preconceptions crashing down, the Great Depression was no less traumatic.

The first thing that you have to learn about the Depression is that it was felt almost everywhere; the second is that the depth, duration, and dates of those effects vary from one country to another.

The actual downturn in the United States was only three or four years in duration, but the consequences and resulting pain was experienced until 1939, a full decade.

Causes

There are two classic explanations and several alternative theories that attempt to describe the causes of the Great Depression.

The current consensus of the Keynesian (demand-driven) hypothesis is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden reduction in consumption and investment spending. This theory suggests that the stock market crash of X was more of a symptom than a cause.

Monetarist theories agree, up to a point, but hold that the Depression started as an ordinary Recession, but the shrinking money supply deepened the short-term emergency into a deeper crisis. In other words, they see it as a banking crisis which caused a general reduction of available credit and a string of bankruptcies.

My Take

I’m not wedded to any one theory. I think they are all simplifications of a crisis that had many stages and knock-on effects.

In my view, it starts prior to the infamous stock market crash with stock instability over several months following a small crash on March 25th, 1929. This was made worse by the sale of shares to small investors over the preceding decade, and the issuing of loans to fund these purchases. Credit laws, fueled by boundless optimism and greed, meant that borrowed money was easier to come by than it had ever been, and the steady growth of the stock market made it seem like anyone who didn’t borrow to invest had economic rocks in their heads.

In mid-October, nervous investors began to liquidate their assets, driving the stock market lower; this convinced them that they were doing the right thing, and the demands to sell entered a state of positive feedback. Finally, on Friday, October 4th, the market crashed 11% at the opening bell.

The opportunity to restore confidence over the weekend was lost as more people became convinced that sticking it out might be the right thing to do in theory, but they couldn’t afford to do so. On Monday, there was another 12% drop and on Tuesday, another 11% fall.

Thousands of investors were ruined, and billions of dollars had been lost; many stocks could not be sold at any price.

The market recovered 12% on Wednesday, but the damage had been done.

— Wikipedia, The Great Depression

There was a period of recovery from mid-November 1929 until April 17 of 1930, but then a fresh decline began.

Thousands of businesses would close over the next few months even if they had survived the initial disruption, throwing millions out of work. This made the banks nervous, and so they began tightening up on credit practices, and pursuing those who who already owed them money – who, of course, no longer had the money to repay their debts.

Smoot-Hawley

But that took time to have an impact. In the meantime, the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in June, 1930.

Ostensibly aimed at protecting the American economy as the Depression began to take root, it backfired enormously.

— Wikipedia, same source page

Some even think that the Depression was caused by this backfire. Two thirds of economists in 1995 agreed that at the very least, it made matters worse. It caused a sharp decline in international trade and retaliatory tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls.

Normally, International trade would have shielded participating economies from the worst effects of a local downturn by giving investors something about which they could be confident – the result might have been stock market turbulence, but some stocks would have gone up, helping to stabilize the system.

Instead, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act exported the pain of the depression to other countries around the world, and took away the last prop holding up the US economy.

Bank Failures

In December, 1930, the crisis hit a new panic point as a run began on the Bank of United States (a private operation that had no connection to the US Government). A run happens when depositors grow concerned that the bank doesn’t, or will not, have the money to pay them if they withdraw their money.

This causes many of them to withdraw their money, and the resulting loss of liquidity takes a bank that may have been financially sound and puts it under dire threat of collapse.

The rising number of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and unrepayed loans resulting from people losing both incomes and ‘nest eggs’ were the obvious cause of the belief in this particular case.

Unable to pay out to all its creditors, the bank failed. It wasn’t the only one; over the last two months of 1930, no less than 608 banks closed. But it was the largest; one third of the $550 million in deposits were lost, deepening the financial crisis.

The Gold Standard

The Gold Standard only made things worse, as Gold Prices in directly-affected countries caused Gold holdings to be moved to countries that were not directly affected.

This caused the value of their currencies to crash, inflicting the Depression upon their economies via a different mechanism – but the end result was the same.

The only way to prevent this was to inflict your own damage to your economy, in effect masking a healthy underlying economy with an overlay of confidence-sapping monetary policy.

But the worst effects were felt in the US. From April 17, 1930, until July 8, 1932, the market lost 89% of its value. By 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%.

(Further details are far too complicated to fit within the scope of this article).

In Germany & Britain

The depression was especially harsh in Germany, where entire industries began to close down, triggering bank failures despite propping up from international sources.

Part of the problem were the ongoing reparations, which some other countries (notably France) were relying on to boost their own economies out of trouble.

The crisis spread from Germany to Romania and Hungary even as it worsened domestically.

The world financial crisis next began to overwhelm Britain as investors from around the world began to withdraw their gold from London at a rate of 2.5 million pounds sterling worth per day. Credits from the Bank of France and Federal Reserve Bank of New York slowed but didn’t arrest the decay.

A political crisis arose as a result, one which almost brought down the MacDonald government. MacDonald himself wanted to resign, but King George V insisted that he remain and head up a new all-party coalition government. Most of the opposition parties signed up for the coalition, along with a handful of the elected government, but the majority of MacDonald’s party denounced him as a traitor for his involvement. The coalition took Britain off the Gold Standard, and consequently, Britain suffered less than the other major countries from the effects of the Depression.

You can read more about these events at this Wikipedia link.

Recovery

In most countries, recovery from the Great Depression started in 1933, but in many, it was a slow process. Unemployment in the US was still 15% in 1940, for example.

There is no consensus as to the cause of the recovery, and in particular, the role played by the New Deal. As with the cause of the crisis, I suspect that analysis are seeking a simple, “pure” explanation, when the reality is more nuanced.

The New Deal

The New Deal was basically the US government spending a lot of money on infrastructure, creating jobs in the process, and acting to support people in the meantime. Some of the jobs were undoubtedly mere placeholders, but many were more substantial.

At the same time, temporary policies were established to reinflate the economy, and reforms instituted to protect from the vulnerability in the banking sector that had made everything so much worse. Those temporary policies caused a small recession in their own right when they were wound up, and so did the Banking Act of 1935 which forced the banks to retain greater reserves.

There were a lot of measures in the New Deal, but some general principles stand out.

In Service Of The People

The government was firmly established as being in the service of the people as a whole. Republicans and Business lobbyists have been attempting to undo this, ever since; they have succeeded in some areas, but have failed in others. In particular, attempts to wind back Social Security have been doomed to failure. It’s also worth noting that systematic dilution of the credit protections put in place by the New Deal are considered responsible for the GFC, because what took place in that financial crisis was exactly what the policies weakened were supposed to protect against.

In Service Of Business

The government also established itself as being in the business of regulating business, but beyond protecting the populace from side effects of business, and regulating the labor market, staying out of the way as much as possible.

Bread & Circuses

FDR’s fireside chats were a key component of the New Deal, the means by which he buoyed spirits and restored confidence. But they also used new Technology (radio) to bypass the Newspapers and speak directly to the American people.

This also acknowledged the rise of the media as a new industry, one that would be hugely influential in the decades to come, though that is unlikely to have formed part of his motivation.

The New Demographic II: The Black Vote

The 15th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibited denying a black male citizen the right to vote based on ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’ in 1870. In theory, this was extended to Black Women in 1920, but effectively were blocked from exercising this right until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The new voters had an immediate impact in many jurisdictions, especially in the South, where black voters turned out in numbers to elect non-whites to positions in state legislatures. Records show that these new representatives made positive contributions, and several economic and social indicators began to improve.

As a direct response, various forms of voting restriction were gradually implemented at a state level over the next several decades. Within a generation, usually a decade or less, these progressive elements had been effectively barred by restricting the Black Vote, and the progress that had been made was regressing.

In United States v. Reese (1876), the Court upheld voting requirements, such as literacy tests, which do not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race. Jim Crow laws enforcing legal racial segregation at the state and local level in the Southern United States were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by Black people during the Reconstruction Era.

— Wikipedia, Black Suffrage in the United States

Civil Rights movements started in 1905 with the formation of the Niagara Movement by a group of Black Activists. Other such groups followed, but the Civil Rights movement would not come to full effect until the 1950s.

In the meantime, a series of small victories, defeats, and legal skirmishes were fought.

In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court struck down a grandfather clause that functionally exempted only white people from literacy tests.

The Court ruled against white primaries in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932), upheld [them]in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), and finally banned them with Smith v. Allwright (1944) and Terry v. Adams (1953).

In Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), the Court upheld the constitutionality of a poll tax requirement for voting.

— Wikipedia, same source page

The resulting laws would remain on the books until the 24th Amendment banned poll tax requirements for Federal elections, and the Supreme Court ruled against state Poll Tax requirements at the State level in Harper v Virginia State Board Of Elections (1966)..

A plan to redraw the political boundary lines of Tuskegee, Alabama was struck down by the Supreme Court in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960).

The struggle for electoral rights would be ongoing through the rest of this era, culminating many years later, as the above landmarks show. This, of course, is another representation of the principle of individual powers overriding those of the Government, a theme throughout the era.

In-Game Economics: Pulp (continued)

The Great Depression had several repercussions, among them the forfeiture of prestige by the Entrepreneurs and descendants of Robber Barons.

This doesn’t really fit with the ethos and atmosphere of a Pulp campaign, so one of the critical historical changes made in setting the Adventurer’s Club in the 1930s was to weaken the impact of the Depression significantly, while not throwing away the entirety of what had taken place.

But history is not this isolated narrative thread and that; we are continually confronted by questions of the domino effects of that change.

For example, in our history, labor unions get started in 1935; without the stimulus to business necessitated by the Depression, would that have been delayed or would the stronger sense of optimism have accelerated the process?

We had already established the presence of a very strong Teamster’s Union in New York City, with implied connections to Organized Crime (but nothing proven). So that argues in favor of answer #2, but it might have been just a local phenomenon, so it didn’t answer the question definitively.

As usual, we obfuscated and deferred the question until an adventure made the answer clear through the needs of a pulp plot. We are currently working on a plotline that will probably commence later in the year that contains a definitive answer.

The Needs Of Adventure

That’s an important principle to note – don’t decide on consequences until you need them, and then choose the answer that best fits your adventure needs.

Another example, because I can: The Depression was instrumental in the Nazi Party coming to power in Germany. We wanted the Nazis to be around because they make such dandy Villains in a Pulp campaign. So we needed the Depression in Germany to be (almost) as bad as in our world despite its causation being reduced in intensity.

So we made the French more upset over their losses during WWI, demanding reparations be maintained as much for spite as for economic need; and we decided that because the Depression was not as severe, a shortsighted USA might not offer the assistance noted above.

Since Depressions are as much a psychological phenomena as they are economic, we decided that this would be enough.

But this gives rise to a serious follow-up question: would the timeline of World War II be slowed or accelerated by these changes?

After some serious discussion, we decided that it was probably going to be delayed a little, because there would be less urgency. Weakening the Depression impacts in Germany as much as possible while still bringing the Nazis to power results in a more powerful German industrialist group, who would need to be won over – and who could supply us with the occasional non-Nazi German villain (or hero) in the meantime. We’ve never done anything with that concept yet, but it’s just waiting for the right adventure idea to present itself.

The Room To Adventure

If there’s no immediate plot need to dictate terms, and you can’t defer the question (perhaps because it will impact on the background of a PC or important NPC), we let ourselves make the choice that provides the maximum scope for adventure going forward.

Dark Spots

Finally, blanket statements like “The Depression was not as severe, and so the concept of ‘the Person with enough wealth and resources to go adventuring’ is more viable” are all well and good, but we always try to reserve the right to have ‘dark spots’ and ‘spot fires’ where circumstances were worse – possibly even worse than our history relates, if that is more useful.

General Principles

The above examples also reveal a couple of other broad principles.

• As a general rule, you can’t make things much better without impacting on the backgrounds of PCs, and you can’t make things too much worse, either.
• A general guide is to make things just bad enough to create the environment you need for adventurousness to be optimized, and no worse.
• A number of circumstances can swing either way, so if there’s something that particularly offends you, you can do something about it. For example, we decided that the Supreme Court had been a lot more proactive in striking down Black suffrage restrictions, significantly weakening discrimination in the American South – but pushing the KKK into more ‘Pulp Villainous’ responses. Don’t make knee-jerk assumptions, consider both alternatives carefully.
• Finally, look very hard at the underlying assumptions of your game world. If Weird Tech works, contemplate the economic and social impacts, and what you might need to put in place to restrict those impacts to manageable scales.

In-Game Economics: Sci-Fi

Some people date Sci-Fi to Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. My preference is an earlier story that some may have heard of by the unprepossessing Mary Shelley.

None of those early SF archetypes work well as Sci-Fi in an RPG-campaign sense. Frankenstein can work in a horror-genre campaign, and they can all work in a Pulp campaign

But this era saw the rise of Space Opera, back when there were no limitations to what was technologically possible in the imagination. Later eras would have more accurate information to work with, but would also be constrained by the technology that had been proven to work.

Such campaigns aren’t for every player or GM – they demand a certain level of freewheeling but controlled imagination. But if the mixture is right, such campaigns can be a wonderland.

A handful of general principles to keep in mind:

Laws are made to be broken

Forget what physics says is possible or not possible. Forget what established engineering practice tells you is required in order to achieve something.

That does not mean that there will not be restrictions or consequences; there will be, and they should be logical, given the assumptions your technology is making.

Go re-read the Lensman series, or the Skylark Of Space series, or just about any E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, for that matter. Watch Star Wars again.

The Wikipedia page on Space Opera may be helpful, but I disagree with elements of it (especially parts of their list of representative examples), so take the contents with a grain of salt, and use your own imagination. Keep your internal ‘game physics’ self-consistent, and above all, have fun.

This sort of game should be about the problems and opportunities of the era, writ impossibly large, not about the solutions to those problems and the consequences of taking the opportunities that we know.

Money Is Infinite

No-one ever runs out of money in a Space Opera. They will run out of Rhodium or Tantalum first.

But that doesn’t mean that it grows on trees, or that it can buy you anything you want; generally, it’s so freely available because it can’t solve every problem or satisfy every need.

There is an exception to the above principles – money is freely available for one of everything, but extremely hard to come by for two.

Resources are plentiful

Another truism is that there’s plenty of everything out there somewhere, you just have to go out and find it. Bigger and Better are only ever limited by your imagination.

In fact, “Bigger” and “Better” are almost always synonymous. “Bigger” may not be “Better” necessarily, but “Better” is almost always “Bigger”.

There are plenty of people, there’s plenty of money, and there are plenty of resources out there for the taking/earning. The decisive limitation is skill and the ability to use it – not everyone should or will have what it takes, while some (on both sides) have a surfeit.

The Trend To Tomorrow

Don’t take your eyes off the bigger picture. Read anything you can get your hands on regarding how people from the era (through to the 1960s/70s) saw the future – not the science fiction, but the serious speculation.

When I was in high school, I had a book, “The Next 10,000 Years” by Adrian Berry (it’s fairly hard to come by now). I don’t know what happened to my copy, it vanished at some point, probably lent to someone, but it massively fired my imagination at the time. Would it still have the same impact?
I don’t know, I haven’t read it in more than 40 years – but I think it says something that I still remember it!

In-Game Economics: Steampunk

You may be wondering what Steampunk is doing here. After all, the previous age was “The Age Of Steam”.

Well, I was thinking about it when outlining this section and it occurred to me that in most Steampunk settings that I have heard about, the steam-based technology was already well-developed and ubiquitous- In fact, it’s everywhere.

And that doesn’t describe the Age of Steam – it described the period just after it, the early days of electrification – and that’s this era.

Besides that point, I have a couple of tips that I think worth offering for the genre.

The Ubiquity of Steam

The first one leads directly from the point already made – look around at the technology of the 1920s-30s, and try to think of a way to emulate it using “steam”-tech. Early Heinlein, where spaceships are controlled by mechanical cams (described in detail in Rocketship Galileo, for example) will help.

Look at anything you can find on the limitations of steam technology – why the internal combustion engine is more suited to motor vehicles, for example – and then ‘invent’ a way to overcome the critical limitations.

Non-humans for Humans

Something that I used when the PCs in my superhero campaign were in “Steampunk Mexico” a while back – replace people in ordinary roles with a blend of non-humans and steampunk-tech-enhanced humans. Find ways to turn the resulting advantages (natural or artificial) into achieving a better performance at their job, whatever it might be.

Inventors are Unstable Geniuses

There should also be a small infusion from Cyberpunk – the people who develop the Tech will have the latest and greatest. And they will be driven to make it better, if not downright obsessive.

Furthermore, there’s usually a reason for them being so driven. The inventor that I featured in “Steampunk Mexico” had survived a skiing accident in which she almost died, and had been maimed. She found the ‘replacement parts’ available to be inadequate, so she studied and experimented and started to design better. Along the way, she realized that some of her discarded ideas could be useful for others, and a new career was born.

Strange Tech

Weirdness should also be commonplace, usually attached to some myth or legend. The people in a Steampunk environment should think outside the box at every opportunity, and that should lead to weird solutions to commonplace problems.

The End Of An Era: The rise of fascism

As I said at the very outset, there are so many possible endpoints for this era that it’s almost impossible to pick one that is absolutely, definitively, correct.

After trying (and being unsatisfied) with a couple of possibilities, I decided that it was best to have this era and the next overlap to a certain extent.

That being the case, the chosen end-point of this era doesn’t especially matter – the transition to the next will be gradual, but eventually complete.

So the next era deals with World War 2 and the rise and fall of Fascism. But first, I’ll take some time to write something different next week.

Join me then!

In part 1:

1. Introduction
2. General Concepts and A Model Economy
3. The Economics of an Absolute Monarchy (The Early Medieval)

In part 2:

4. The Economics of Limited Monarchies (The Later Medieval & Renaissance)
5. In-Game Economics: Fantasy Games

In Part 3:

6. The Renaissance, revisited
7. Pre-Industrial Economics I: The Age of Exploration
8. Pre-Industrial Economics II: The Age of Sail

In Part 4

9. Industrial Economies I: The Age Of Steam
10. In-game Economics: Gaslight-era

In this part:

11. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Electrification (last week)
12. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
13. In-Game Economics: Pulp
14. In-Game Economics: Sci-fi
15. In-Game Economics: Steampunk

Planned for parts 6-7:

16. Tech Economics I: The Gold Standard
17. Tech Economics II: Resources & Regulation
18. Tech Economics III: Inflation & Hyper-inflation
19. Tech Economics IV: Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed

Planned for parts 8-10:

21. Digital Economics
22. Post-Pandemic Economics
23. In-Game Economics: Modern
24. Future Economics I: Dystopian
25. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
26. Future Economics I: Utopian
27. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
28. In-Game Economics: Space Opera