Because the last part of the Economics in RPGs Series ran to three parts, I’ve decided to throw in an extra non-series article before continuing with it next week. Fortunately, I had an idea on tap.

The Holistic NPC

“Holistic” essentially means ‘complete’. The term derives from Holism, which is a philosophic notion that focusing on specific aspects of something doesn’t convey a complete understanding of the whole, no matter how perfect the understanding of those aspects – the interconnections between them mean that the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts.

Medically, the term refers to the treatment of a person as a whole, regarding the interplay of conditions, rather than just the symptoms of an illness, specifically incorporating mental and social factors.

So a Holistic NPC is one that is more complete, more rounded, more comprehensive than is normal. Today’s article provides and describes a process for the development of such an NPC.

Clearly this is not something that should be utilized routinely. It promises to be a lot more work and to require a considerably greater effort than most NPCs, and should only be used when that is warranted. My go-to for most NPCs remains the Partial NPC (see Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep).

The good news is that you can feed the results of just about any other NPC-generation process into the Holistic procedure as a starting point.

1. Central Focus

The process starts by defining the central focus of the NPC. This might be a particular ability or professional skillset that is defined by their intended role in an adventure, or within a campaign. It might be a particular personality trait. It might be a particular professional role, or even a specific weakness of personality.

This is the most important element of the character from the point of view of the campaign. It will serve as a focal point around which everything else will revolve. It’s critically important to get it right, and not to choose the first thing that jumps into your head.

I have often found that a singular adjective and a single, specific noun, work best, but that’s not always the case. It’s usually a good starting point, however.

2. Inevitabilities

With almost every central focus, there are traits, skills, and characteristics that come as baggage; these are essential to match the NPC with the assigned role. Sometimes, these are more obvious than at others.

Nuance can be incredibly important in defining something as an inevitable corollary of the central focus. Foe example, if we’re discussing a Priest, “Pious” and “Religious” are not the same thing – one describes a personal philosophy or central belief in a faith, the other refers to the practice of behaviors that are commonly associated with such belief. That practice can be the result of such beliefs, or it can be a cloak, superficial trappings.

3. Manifestations & Consequences

The third step is to take the entirety of the world around the character and contemplate the interactions between that world and that character in three broad areas. The goal is (1) to define the ways in which the focus and the inevitabilities will manifest, and (2) to define the consequences for the character.

Note that so far, what we’re producing is essentially a cardboard cutout of the character defined by the Central Focus. The fact that such variety of focus is possible creates somewhat greater variety of 2-dimensional characters than would otherwise be the case, but be under no illusions – the real effort is still in front of us.

That said, let’s look at those three broad areas.

Background

Background refers to the current status of everything except the character and his family. Everything in the game universe – whether that’s practical and objective, or conceptual, abstract, or subjective.

A “cop” means vastly different things in a street-level superhero campaign, a cosmic thriller, and a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

Before you can place the character, you need to know what these surroundings are, and what they represent within the campaign. What part do they play, and how does this character’s role intersect with them? If there’s anything for which you can honestly say, “It doesn’t”, then that’s an irrelevancy that defines that part of the background as something to ignore so far as this character is concerned. Only relevant background applies, in other words.

Culture

A Culture is not the same thing as a society. Rather, it’s the context within which a society exists. For most characters, there will be a broader culture, and frequently, a number of sub-cultures that are applicable.

What are the expectations of behavior, the general perceptions of such characters, that apply to characters of this particular focus?

Society

Society defines the rules of interaction between individuals – everything from marriage to criminal acts and their punishment.

Again, ignore anything that’s not directly relevant, but annotate this section with anything that does pertain to the character.

Once you have the three broad areas populated with the relevant constituent elements, it’s time to focus on how the character will manifest, and what the consequences will be for the character, for each item listed within each of the three areas.

These are signposts to the character, sometimes useful in and of themselves for defining traits or circumstances, but more important when treated as facets of the whole. The goal is to generate a brief description of that ‘whole’.

An example to get the mental wheels turning over: contemplate an ‘honest cop’ within a society in which the police are generally viewed as lazy and corrupt.

4. History, Family, & Shaping Events

Personality traits don’t emerge from nowhere, career decisions are rarely made flippantly, and it exceptionally rare for someone’s first job to be the same as their current job – even if they still have the same job title.

The goal in this stage of the process is to take every trait, characteristic, and fact determined thus far and trace them back to a causative trigger. There may be a number of steps in between the ultimate cause and the current situation; don’t be satisfied with simple answers. These should be classified into one of three broad phases of life – Childhood & Family; Youth & Education; and Vocation & Career To Date (which includes any vocational training)..

Childhood & Family

Childhood friends, parental figures, other relatives, and family friends, they all normally have some impact on the life of the NPC as a child. Sometimes this impact is a positive one, sometimes it’s negative, and sometimes it’s a mixture of both.

There are two major reactions possible to each: either a guiding force or principle, or rebellion. The greater the negative impacts of alcoholism by a parent, for example, the more powerful a driving force sobriety becomes, for example – that may not mean complete abstinence, it could simply mean a determination to retain self-control.

Youth & Education

Beyond the early formative years, there are the years in which some responsibility are conferred on an individual but they are nevertheless not free to make decisions for themselves in many parts of their life. Western societies tend to label this period as adolescence, and it generally coincides with external role models and life experiences with educators when universal education is a part of the society surrounding the character in their early years.

Fantasy games tend to be set in a more medieval society, in which characters serve as footmen or apprentices. There is frequently an assumption that apprenticing to a trade locks a character into pursuing that trade, or some offshoot of it, and any deviation from that course is traumatic, disruptive, and a personal milestone event.

One of the great takeaways from Magician by Raymond E. Feist was the concept of a pre-apprenticeship, in which youths get shared around as general laborers amongst the different trades so that aptitudes and attitudes can be assessed; those with an affinity for a particular ‘trade’ are then taken on as apprentices within that trade. Each year, any given trade only has so many vacancies to fill, so the naturally gifted tend to get chosen first while the mediocre sweat it out. I’m not suggesting that this system is, or should be, universal; but the need for this (or some equivalent) is so obvious that it should be a central element of the society.

Vocation & Career To Date

What led the character to the profession he or she now holds? What experiences did they have along the way that have shaped their capabilities, attitudes, and reputation? What training did the NPC have, and who delivered it, and how did what the NPC learned shape him or her into the future? What natural gifts did he or she possess that have aided them in this vocation, and what gifts or traits were possessed that occasionally lead them to contemplate some other path in life? Finally, what traits had to be overcome in order to succeed, and how did they learn to do that (if they did).

Once a catalog of formative influences and critical events has been compiled, this step is completed by projecting the character’s life story forward from the critical moment to the present day and the character’s current circumstances.

Some influences play a part in the character’s development and are then superseded by a differing influence, as the character grows as a ‘person’. These mark distinct phases of life for the character, and these are critical in delineating the character’s personal story and their personality. Very few of us do not experience some such moment of transition; some of us are unlucky enough to experience several. The transitions are always moments of great personal growth, and critical to defining the character as they are now.

This approach has the virtue of ensuring consistency within the character’s life story even if the end result appears to be a mass of contradictions.

An Abstract Representation



It can sometimes be helpful to view this stage of the process through a more abstract perspective, so I thought I would offer one as a tool.

The triptych above represents the process as something similar to a spiderweb of straight lines.

Panel 1

The first panel starts with the ‘now’ of the hollow circle (the central focus) at the bottom and traces it back through the character’s past to a critical incident that shaped the character’s decision or destiny to become the central focus. Every time that critical incident caused the character to make a decision, it is represented by a change in direction and a marker that indicates an intermediate stage of development, a personal history milestone.

Panel 2

The second panel starts back at that formative event, and traces other impacts of that and the other secondary milestones. In the process, two personal crisis moments (shown in yellow) are identified, moments when two or more of the character’s values came into conflict.

These are interconnected insofar as the second is a conflict between the consequences of the first and another key aspect of the character’s primary focus. If the character’s path had changed direction at either of these incidents, that’s an example of a “slippery slope” in which an avalanche of past decisions begins to accumulate and will eventually threaten to overwhelm the character.

Note that such an avalanche is not necessarily a negative – it might be a crisis of conscience in which a villain reforms, at least partially. The first crisis might be an act that the NPC was required to perform and that he came to regret; the second is a moment when he second-guessed his duty or task because of the regret. Again, he did whatever it was that he was being paid to do (no change in life-course) but this only compounded the regrets and – no doubt – doubts would begin to emerge as a consequence.

These can be considered secondary elements, subordinate only to the primary focus.

Panel 3

Panel three examines each of the critical moments and whether or not there is a direct consequence of that decision that is unaccounted for. These are often fringe issues to the central focus, and can be considered tertiary to the other manifestations and influences generated in preceding panels.

For the first time, this takes the character beyond the simple cardboard cut-out, exploring the penumbra of the formative decisions of the character’s past and the ramifications of those past decisions on the character’s present.

5. Personal Consequences

Step four defined other aspects of the character’s personality by way of past decisions and formative events. These should all have consequences in one or more areas: Relationships, Financial Status, or Social Status.

What’s more, each of these consequences should also manifest in one or more of the areas of initial development – background, culture, or society.

One of the formative personal events may have led to the character entering an unhappy marriage, for example (a relationship impact) – that could have ramifications on the character’s role within the general campaign background, though that’s relatively unusual; but it is far more likely to have an impact on the character’s role within his culture and society, in the form of obligations and expectations.

Relationships

Relationships include spouses, children, employers, employees, personal contacts, friends, allies, and enemies. Despite the breadth, only those relationships that can be deemed essential to understanding the NPC should be listed, or those which signpost an aspect of the character’s personality or ethos.

These are important because in any investigation of the NPC, these are the indicators that reveal – at least in part – what sort of person the NPC is. Such an investigation might never connect with the events that shaped the character’s thought processes; why they did what they chose to do is not especially relevant, what matters is any impact on future decisions.

Financial

Many decisions will have financial repercussions.

Continuing the unhappy marriage example, it might be that this was necessitated to gain access to a business opportunity. That means that it had a positive effect on the character’s finances as well as the negative effect of sharing any prosperity while the character is married.

Should the marriage strike rocky ground, the financial consequences could be dire economically, or it might be that the character needs to undergo a (presumably bitter) divorce and make a fresh start in order to take advantage of future opportunities. It wouldn’t be the first time that an opportunity steered someone into a personal or professional cull-de-sac.

Social

Many decisions compromise a character’s social engagements, and this is often a factor that is not taken into account when assessing the costs and benefits of a decision. I know one person who got married and was forced to give up RPGs as a result – the wife did not understand them, or what the player got out of them, and made it a choice: her or the games. After a while, she relented to the extent of permitting him to play board games with other people who played RPGs, but he never got back into the hobby, even after they were divorced.

You can never go back again to exactly where you were after events like this, as the example demonstrates. The more traumatic the events, the greater the loss; other social activities tend to expand to fill the resulting free time, and the person undergoes a personal evolution as a result.

The more quickly the reversal takes place, the closer to ‘the way things were’ the character can get. Married in Vegas as the highlight of a drunken weekend? Divorced on the Monday, when you came to your senses? Relatively little impact – unless the new partner makes trouble, of course. Married thirty years earlier? The entanglements ensure that a divorce will be traumatic and expensive.

6. Causes & Contradictions

Step six is to identify and catalog the things that the character believes in, and any contradictions within his persona.

Note that the layout of the graphic emphasizes that these are more removed from the Core Focus of the character concept.

As usual, there are three general subdivisions.

Passions, Addictions, & Interests

What is the character passionate about? What does he do habitually – whether he needs to, or not? What subjects and activities interest him?

These need not have any relationship whatsoever with the central focus of the character. Quite often, the less they relate to that focus, the more noteworthy they are.

I once knew an English major who liked to solve differential equations as a way of ‘loosening up his mind’, distracting himself from the world around him and whatever his personal circumstances were so that he could achieve maximum creativity. He had me write a random equation generator app for his laptop when we were both at University.

My sister loves “True Crime” stories, for no particular reason. They have nothing to do with her career or family. My niece’s favorite color is Purple. No identifiable reason, but it’s a defining characteristic of who she is. My brother and I are both interested in Formula 1, but for very different experiences – I like the tactics and engineering, he likes the excitement and drama. He enjoys going to F1 races as a consequence, while I prefer to watch on television.

Prejudices

Everyone has prejudices, even if they are nothing more than opinions formulated on an encounter with one individual that has been generalized.

Sometimes, these prejudices take the form of a receptiveness, a greater willingness to take a chance that interactions with an individual won’t be a waste of time – My twitter feed shows clear evidence that anyone involved in TTRPGs, Sci-Fi / Fantasy, or Photography / Art is very likely to get a ‘follow’ from me without further inspection; accounts that do not fall into this category are subjected to far more stringent examination.

Another manifestation is a dislike of certain kinds of behavior that the individual considers socially or personally unacceptable – berating a partner in public, for example.

But everyone has prejudices.

Weaknesses & Mistakes

There can be, at first glance, considerable overlap between this section and the other two. ‘Weaknesses’ generally refer to behaviors rather than to “Kryptonites”, if you get what I mean. Someone who can never resist the last slice of cake, or the last little leftover bit of dessert. It’s not an addiction, it’s not something the character obtains deliberately – it’s something that outside circumstances regularly offer them.

‘Mistakes’ also come with a caveat – these don’t include any of the formative events listed in stage 4 of the process, but they do have to be influential on the character or their circumstances. You would have to be a saint not to have made mistakes in the past, whether acknowledged or not.

The other content to be incorporated in this section is anything that stands as an unresolved contradiction to the general nature of the NPC as already described. Someone who is extremely safety-conscious, but loves to drive fast. Someone who is financially fastidious (even miserly) who indulges in collecting something (regardless of cost or monetary worth).

Some people are a bundle of conflicts and contradictions; most are more consistent. But we all have exceptions, hot buttons that override our normal behavior.

7. Ramifications<, Manifestations & Consequences

Of course, everything that got listed in Stage 6 is rooted in the character’s past. So the next logical step is to explore the impact that they have on the character’s present-day personality and circumstances.

The subheadings in this phase map directly onto those from stage 3 – in fact, you can simply expand that section if you want, though I find it more useful to keep them separate, so that stage 3 represents the direct consequences of the Core Focus. If there is ever a contradiction or conflict between two aspects of the character – one in this section and the other in the manifestations / consequences of the core – it’s usually the core that holds sway, perhaps modified slightly.

Just to remind you, those three sub-fields are:

• Background
• Culture
• Society

Their definitions haven’t changed since Stage 3, so I’ll forego repeating them.

8. Correlations: The Origins Of Beliefs

Stage 8 of the process is to take all the entries in the “Causes & Contradictions” category and use them to further populate the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category. What this means will differ depending on the type of content in the “Causes” subcategories.

For “passions” (and “interests”), where did the character first come into contact with the subject? And how did it impact on, and interact with, their other formative events?

A passion for art might have started as a mild interest in drawing, but harsh dictates by a parent who saw it as ‘wasting time’ restricted its expression. What might have been a passing phase or minor sideline grew, through lack of satisfaction, into a more obsessive interest – probably manifesting in a complete different manner to the original, such as being a collector of artworks.

Addictions deal with when the character was first exposed to the substance or practice.

One can argue that Weaknesses were always a part of the character’s makeup, but they have a strong potential to interact with critical decisions, often to the character’s detriment.

Mistakes generally translate into specific incidents in the characters’ past. It’s often not the event of the mistake itself that is significant, however, but the awareness that the character has made a mistake that is important. Nevertheless, it can be useful to incorporate both, with a link connecting the two. Even that impact can be delayed, if the character was not in a phase of life that encouraged or permitted introspection, so there can even be a third step in the causal chain before the original mistake becomes important to the character’s development.

Contradictions can require a deeper consideration – when did they start, when have they contradicted something in the primary makeup, and how was that contradiction resolved without eliminating the contradiction and without it being a formative event critical to the core focus? Sometimes, these answers are easy; sometimes, you will need to look deep into the character’s psychology, and perhaps even conclude that on this subject, they are deluding themselves.

9. Correlations II: Consequences

Of course, once you have new entries in the “History, Family & Shaping Events” category, you need to process these into consequences, in the same way that you did in Stage 4. Since the process is exactly the same, I’ll forego additional details.

10. Interpolations

The interpolations stage is two-fold:

1. Take everything that’s listed in the Personal Consequences space and interpolate connected entries in the Manifestations & Consequences space, and,
2. Take everything that’s listed in either of the Manifestations & Consequences spaces that is not already connected to Personal Consequences and interpolate additional entries in the personal consequences space.

It is these connections that are ultimately the difference between this process and other NPC generation methods. Throughout this procedure, the emphasis has been on how two discrete elements of the emerging character concept interact and relate to each other. Put that together with all the elements of the character, and ensure that the impact on the character is front-and-center, and the end result is a more holistic definition of the character.

In particular, emphasizing the connections ensures that the character is internally consistent, even those elements that are contradictory.

11. Concluding Stage

Of course, it’s not entirely in user-friendly format at this point. You have perhaps a page of conceptual elements, classified and categorized in various subcategories. You’ve ensured that everything correlates and interconnects as it would if you were describing a real person, and documented those correlations and connections in two or three additional pages, also within the same categories and subcategories.

The final step is to take each of these lists and combine them into a brief narrative description. In particular, you want to generate a thumbnail perspective of the character’s past history, of the primary focus and inevitabilities, of the way everything manifests outwardly, and what the personal consequences are for the character.

The result is purely conceptual in nature. It is a road-map to the expression of the character in game mechanics, and – as a general rule of thumb – should override any such mechanics that don’t fit. If the concept demands a character who is a skilled negotiator, with a particular approach to such negotiations that breaks through entrenched positions to get results, and there are no game mechanics for such negotiations, either let the approach always play out in roleplaying terms, or introduce such game mechanics (since it’s clearly a hole in the system).

NEVER let the mechanics restrict or interfere with the character concept that you have so clearly crafted; unless you have been completely myopic and created a Saint or a Devil, your creation will have inbuilt checks and balances, flaws and the potential for misjudgments and errors, and that’s all you need in terms of restriction.

It’s a different story for PCs, where there may need to be game mechanics restrictions as well as conceptual ones; if this process is used for the creation of PCs, the “always play it out” option is off the table, simply because there will always be a gap between the player’s skills and abilities and those of the character that they control.

Postscript: Full-sized Graphic

To fit everything in, this had to be a large graphic (1807 × 1723), and almost 4Mb in size. This in turn made getting everything to be legible when compressed to Campaign Mastery’s display footprint a challenge.

Because the final graphic incorporates everything from all ten stages, I thought it best to overcome the latter problem (as usual) by providing a full-sized version.

to open it in a new tab, from which it can be downloaded – complete with spelling error!

Today I’m going to tell readers about something I’ve been working on a lot over the last few months, because it highlights an important principle – you can usually do a lot more with basic tools and utilities than you think.

A Recurring Pattern

Every now and then we seem to get waves of tools and utilities emerging, as though in support of the premise, “One Task, One Tool for that Task”. It happens in real life, it happens in the world of computer software, and it happens in RPGs.

What usually happens is that someone decides that they need to perform a particular task and either none of their existing tools and utilities will do the job, or none of them will do it in the way that the person wants the job done. So they write a Utility to do that job for them, and then make it available to others.

Eventually, that functionality gets incorporated into a larger application, and the Utility gets abandoned and fades away – if the incorporation is successful. Sometimes, the developer of the larger application can’t do the work cost-effectively or without hitting legal trouble, and they will buy the rights to the Utility from the original developer – creating an incentive for that developer (and others like them) to go write another one.

I wrote about the Office Suite that I use in The Braiding Of Plot Threads, more-or-less in passing. For some reason, it’s not a subject that I’ve written about = maybe because what I use might not help others, or because I have a fairly eclectic selection that’s built up over the years.

I might have to do something to correct that deficit in the near future…

RPG Equivalent

The RPG equivalent is writing a standalone mini-supplement to solve a particular creative need, and offering it either as a free download from somewhere or through someplace like RPGNow. These succeed because they plug a hole in one or more game systems. When a new version of those game systems gets written, the best of these solutions get incorporated into the revised mechanics, or the authors put in place an ‘official fix’ for the hole – either way, the standalone product goes away.

The reality is that people often already have all the tools that they need, they just don’t want to – or have time to – do the work, or they don’t know exactly what their existing tools can do.

The back-story

The players in my superhero campaign have chosen, as their new base of operations, a Mansion in Royal, Arkansas. The process of making this their Home-away-from-home and a functional base of operations is now underway.

Meanwhile, I have been working on implementing their decision into the campaign in various ways, effectively converting the reality of Arkansas as it now is (because that’s what the internet gives me access to) into the fictional post-Ragnarok 1986-era version of Arkansas that exists in the campaign.

I want to admit up-front that there is absolutely nothing stopping me from inventing things ad-hoc as needed – except that spur-of-the-moment creativity is rarely as effective as putting a little time and effort into things in advance.

Purposes

One of the things that I wanted to do is create a sortable, searchable, database of businesses and interesting localities within ‘adventuring range’. The latter is defined by the parameters of this phase of the campaign, and can grow and change in time.

Originally, my intent was simply a list of townships, but it quickly grew from that basic concept. If the PCs needed a set of four different banks in their local vicinity, for example – a need that I both anticipated and that has now materialized within the campaign – having a list of the ‘real’ banks in their local area would save me a lot of work. If they find that they need a particular type of consultant, or a particular chemical, or whatever, I wanted to know where they might look for that resource.

And, I wanted a spur to my creativity in coming up with adventures.

Data Acquisition

Before you can create a database, you need the information with which to populate it. Of course, you need a preliminary design so that you know what information to look for, too!

In this case, what I wanted was a list of targets.

Basic Parameters

Operations of the PCs meant that road distance and driving time were all that would be relevant for the most local business operations – Royal and the nearby Hot Springs, basically. Outside of that, I would also need straight-line distances.

Anything and everything within about 100 miles of their base of operations was fair game.

I decided fairly quickly to exclude churches, temples, and the like, because none of the PCs is especially religious and most of the adventures involving such were becoming stale. But businesses and retail operations and landmarks were fair game. Later, I revised those parameters to specifically include graveyards, because I had a specific idea regarding them. I also excluded hotels and wedding venues and the like; the key intention was to list the suppliers that the PCs might want to buy from, and the services that they might want to employ.

Scope

Arkansas is a little like medieval France – some bigger places (but none as big as you would expect) and a huge number of much smaller places. In fact, if you count suburbs as ‘towns’, you can get the sense that the average gap between such is 1 every 10 miles or so. If each location has between 3 and 50 businesses, how many does the zone of interest run to? How big a list are we talking about?

What I’ve essentially defined is a circle 100 miles in radius, with an excluded zone in the middle of 10-16 miles radius, and what I want to know is how many more 10-mile radius circles I can fit into it. Multiplying the answer by 3-to-50 gives some indication of how many entries to expect.



100 miles radius = 100 × 100 × π = roughly 31,416 square miles.

10 miles radius = 10 × 10 × π = roughly 314.2 square miles.

16 miles radius = 16 × 16 × π = roughly 804.3 square miles.

Difference = 30611.7 to 31101.8 square miles.

Divide by 314.2 = 97.4 to 98.987 localities. Call it 100 for convenience.

Multiply that by the estimate of 3-50 data points per locality, and you get 300-5,000 entries.

But this is very sensitive to the initial inputs, especially the gap between localities and the number of entries per locality. If the true gap is, say, 8.5 miles, then I get 30611.7 to 31101.8 divided by 226.98 square miles = 135 to 137 localities. Call it 136. If the number of data points per locality is more like 10-100, that’s 1,360-to-13,600 entries.

Realistically, I expected 1000-2000 entries.

Approach

The basic approach to acquiring those entries was simple: Call up Google maps, locate the position selected for the Mansion, measure out a straight-line distance of 141 miles (a right-angle triangle with sides 100 miles long gives a hypotenuse of 141) at a 45-degree angle to get the corners of a box that’s 200×200 and centered on the zero point. Then start listing localities.

Once I have that list, I can zoom in on each and create a list of the entries of interest.

Map

As always, shrinking a full-screen capture down to fit the available visible space at Campaign Mastery remains a challenge, especially if legibility is to be retained. The top part of the image shows the whole window, resized to fit; the bottom is an extract from the source at something close to actual size.

Creating the list is just a matter of being organized and systematic.

List

I ended up with 343 localities, and that’s without treating suburbs independently. That’s very bad news because it means that the average gap is nowhere near 10 miles. Doing the reverse calculation – square root of (31101.8 / 343 / π), I get 5.372 miles between localities.

But that’s okay – if the number of localities is 2-3 times as many as expected, I can simply list only 1/2 to 1/3 of the entries for each location. A little more selectivity and a little more ruthlessness would keep the job to manageable proportions, or so I thought to myself.

Here’s a sample of what the resulting list looks like:

Chappell Armory (Army Reservist Training Center)
Camp Joseph T. Robinson aka Camp Robinson (Army Reservist Military Base)
Arkansas Storage Centers (Self-Storage Facility)
Smackies Grill (Discount Restaurant)
S&V Renovations LLC (Remodeller)
Family Dollar, 5613 MacArthur Dr (Discount Store)
Levy Concrete, 5613 MacArthur Dr, Crystal Hill (Discount Shop)
Dollar General, 6700 MacArthur Dr, Crystal Springs (Discount Shop)
Two Men and A Truck, 4125 Crystal Hill Rd Ste A, Crystal Hill (Removalist)
Smith Campers (Campervan and Caravan Dealer)
Nicky Houses Cleaning (Janitorial Services)
Ed’s Corvette Body Repair (Auto Body Shop)
Hatchet Jacks Sport Shop (Fishing Store)
Taco Mexicano (Fast Food – Mexican)
Skyline Automotive (Car Repairs & Maintenance Service)
Laffert Equipment Manufacturing (Automated Systems Manufacturer)

After each entry, using copy-and-paste, I then added a line for the data to be gathered:

    x miles, x min, x km (x miles) straight line

I ended up with about 1200 entries to process. Sounds good, right? Well within estimates.

You may also observe that I added a description of what the business was or did. In a lot of cases, these were obvious; in others, I was greatly assisted by the fact that if you hover your pointer over an entry, a pop-up appears within the map that contains additional information about the place – sometimes an address, sometimes a photo, sometimes a description. I soon came to the conclusion that most of these were provided by the business themselves. I have an illustration of that, but I’ll save it for a few minutes.

Map Scale

I was, in fact, close to completing the task when I had my graveyard brainwave and decided to add them to the list. After all, how many could there be?

If those sound like famous last words…. The reality was that I had to zoom in closer than the 1km-per-inch that I had been using in order to see most of the cemeteries on the map.

And when you do that, you discover that there’s a lot of businesses that simply aren’t shown until you get in close enough. Important businesses, ones that should be included.

Long-story-short: The list of entries now has 2837 items. I keep finding more to add. About 300 of the additions are cemeteries, and about 1500 are places that I overlooked on my initial sweep, by using too small a scale. Ultimately, I went to a scale of about 200 ft per inch outside of urban areas, and 100 ft per inch within urban areas. This still won’t show everything – most shopping centers are represented by only one or two entries out of maybe 50 stores – but it’s good enough.

Data Processing

But that lay awaiting discover in my future as work got underway.

Basic Tools

I want to make it clear how basic the tools were – pencil and paper to start with, then a text editor (the same one that I use to write adventures and Campaign Mastery articles), and my web browser.

Windows Arrangement

The screen capture above shows the basic layout that I employed: text editor on one side, at a fairly narrow width, and browser window with map and navigation panel on the other. I had no control over how much screen real estate Google Maps used for it’s navigation panel (visible on the left-hand-side of the browser), I needed a reasonable amount of space for the map itself, and whatever was left was used by the text editor.

I quickly discovered that if I chose a text-editor-window that left the last “x” – the one in (x miles straight line) – at the end of a line, I could simply use the “end” key to get there, and repetition made even the smallest time saving worth the effort.

I had three additional factors to contemplate as I went.

Correcting for 1986

Back in ’86, there were nowhere near as many foreign-car dealerships. There were a few, but nothing like there are now. There were genetic testing labs, and medical imaging was far more primitive – and less common. Instead, we had video rentals, and record stores, and so on. Every time I found a business that looked like it didn’t fit the 1986 era, I would replace it with something era-appropriate that wasn’t around in modern times. Even so, stores like Blockbuster are probably under-represented.

Correcting for Campaign

I also had a few business operations that never existed in real life but that either had been, or should be, established within the campaign. Entirely fictitious creations, but I actively looked for ways to insert the Campaign Continuity into the database.

I added things like a Kzin spaceport / launch & landing facility, for example, and thought about crew needs and human proclivities – that’s why one fast food joint of a type that seemed over-represented became “Cardinal Landing”, offering Americanized Kzin cuisine for the curious and the real thing for the benefit of the crews, and a real pet grooming establishment became “Kitty Pride Fur & Grooming”, a Kzin Grooming and Clan-marking establishment, and a generic gift store became “Kzin Imports” – no prizes for guessing what they sell, both wholesale and retail!

Rebuilding after Ragnarok would have created considerably more builders, electricians, plumbers, etc, so I deliberately over-represented them on my list. But most of these would now be starting to struggle – most of the rebuilding has now been done, and the world is starting to return to whatever passes for “normal” in a world in which Ragnarok happens – and is stopped by superheros.

Sparks Of Inspiration

The third and final factor to be taken into account are outright inspirations. A business that didn’t exist in the fictional 1986 could become something far stranger – sometimes with a name change, sometimes not – simply because it offered opportunities for adventures. A “Geo-chemical & Genetics Research Lab,” for example. An “Exotic Meat Butchery”. A “Genetic Engineering Company”. And so on.

For example, when I went to screen-capture one of Google Maps’ popup descriptions – I wanted one that was as complete as possible – I came across this:

“Omega Technical Violator Center”, described as a Prison. It’s NOT on my list of entries (yet).

I can well imaging that in real life this is a location for low-risk short-term prisoners (unpaid parking tickets, anyone?) – I didn’t bother to look it up. Because the name itself, and the descriptor as a “Prison” is suggestive of something completely different, in a superhero world. This is now a high-tech super-max prison for supervillains, a very different interpretation of the term “Technical”!

Doing The Research

So I took the whole-of-screen capture presented earlier and added some graphics to highlight the process of completing the data capture.

Don’t worry, I’ll be zooming in and going into specifics – this is just to give you an idea of the overall workflow, showing it to be a six-step process.

I’ve divided the work up into full-page blocks that take between 60 and 90 minutes to complete. If you look closely at the Text Editor, just after the blank space, you might just be able to make out a “25” – that tells me that I have 25 full-screen lists to go.

And if you look at the Greeked-text whole-of-document panel on the right-hand-side of the editor, you can get a sense of just how big that 25 pages is, compares to the work already done (perhaps that should be, “how much has already been done, compared to that 25 pages”).

Acquisition, Step 1

Step one only has to be done at the start of a session.

I highlight the address of the mansion in the text editor, copy it, and paste it into the Map Search.

Acquisition, Step 2



For the first item, I then add ” to ” and then the name of the business to be located to the search. Google maps will then present me with one or more alternative interpretations; I pick the right one.

The search box splits into two, one for the start point and one for the chosen destination, both already filled in for you.

On subsequent searches, the two separate search panels already exist, so I just have to click in the box and over-type what’s there with the next name.

Sometimes, you have to specify the street number and name (if they are known) or the locality (if known) in order to find the business. I didn’t know that at first, but once I discovered the fact, I started noting the (incomplete) address when I could get it from the hover-over described above – that’s why some of the unprocessed entries already have the location listed.

Acquisition, Step 3

Google also (usually) adds the address, which I then type after the name in the text editor.

Google is not always very good at getting the locality right – it defaults to the nearest big settlement, not the actual location. The same is true of suburbs of larger cities. I list the locality both ways, putting the real locality in brackets after the “map search” answer.

Acquisition, Step 4

To measure the straight-line distance for the first time, you have to right-click on the start location, and then somewhere near the end location. I zoom in to the 50′ scale (which is probably more accuracy than needed) in order to do so, then zoom back out to place the destination marker.



Zooming in to the destination point indicated by Google’s trip calculator, I can then click-and-drag the straight line destination marker to that it coincides – moving (3) to (4) on the captured image above.

Thereafter, when you change the destination (in Step 2), the straight-line-destination marker stays where it is, and it has to be shifted again, while the start-position marker remains unchanged. So this part of the process gets quicker for subsequent searches.

Acquisition, Step 5



From the information panel on the left of the map, I locate the distance and travel time, and enter these as the first two ’empty’ x items on the blank in the text editor.

That sometimes entails changing the route offered by Google, it doesn’t always make the best choice.

It also requires converting the hours-and-minutes time that often results into just minutes by adding 60 or 120 or whatever.

Acquisition, Step 6

The last step is to look at the “measure distance” box at the bottom of the map and extract the Total distance.

Because I’m in Australia, where km are the default, the distance is shown in km with the miles in brackets afterwards; I would presume that if I lived in the US, it would only show miles, or it might show miles and put kilometers in brackets afterwards.



This is shown to far greater precision than I need; I round off to the nearest 0.5 km / 0.5 miles. This means that I can get a little quick and sloppy in position the start and end points of the straight-line measuring tool, greater speeding up the whole process.

Why do I need the straight line distance at all?

The PCs are going to get to “superhero emergencies” by flying.

Flight speed in the hero system is given in inches per second, and there are 2m in every Hero-inch. And, of course, you fly in a straight line, instead of following the sometimes convoluted road routes.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the distance in miles at all – but it will provide a convenient reliability check on the quality of data once it gets entered into the database.

Problems & Solutions

Google Maps is sometimes very broad in its interpretations of the name you’ve searched for, but there are times when the slightest error in punctuation or capitalization means that your search won’t be found.

So I’ve taken extra care to match what I’ve listed in the text editor to the exact spelling shown on the map. But minuscule errors, like leaving (or adding) a full stop after “Inc” or a comma between business name and “LLC” can make all the difference in the world.

SOLUTION #1
Sometimes, though, all of the above is not enough. When that happens, I’ll try a sensible best-guess for the locality, on the presumption that I’m more likely to list two things that are close to each other, sequentially. That’s best-guess #1.

Best Guess #2 is the actual locality of the previous destination, (because Google is inconsistent). Best Guess #3 is always Hot Springs because I went over the local area with a finer comb. Best Guess #4 is Little Rock because it’s biggest.

SOLUTION #2
If that doesn’t work, I’ll cautiously try some obvious variations on the spelling, as described above.

SOLUTION #3
If I’m still coming up dry, it’s time for desperate measures. Option #1 is to get rid of the measure distance box and clear the destination field; doing that lets me click on a business name on the map and Google will decide that’s where I want to go, and fill in the destination search box appropriately. But for that to work, I need to find it on the map, and that’s sometimes easier said and done. I won’t spend too much time searching, because….

SOLUTION #4
Google maps is incredibly efficient at removing businesses if they go out of business, or at processing changes of name. And a gap of one-to-eight weeks between my listing it as an entry to search is more than enough for this to happen. So my last resort is to open a new tab with a regular Google search, because other sites – like Facebook – are slower to take down old information. Once I have the street address, I can enter that into the search panel, ignoring the business name, and the problem is solved.

SOLUTION #5
My absolute last resort is to treat the location as “lost” – set it aside and just keep an eye open for it as I continue on.

Frequency Of Problems
It’s near-certain that any given page will have at least one or two cases where I have to resort to ‘stronger measures’ than the quick-and-easy Google Maps search. These techniques are in the sequence presented because I’ve found which ones are the least work for the maximum likelihood of getting a result.

End-Of-Page

Google Maps appears to chew up a huge amount of disk cache. By the time I’ve done about a page-and-a-half, Chrome will start throwing up “Not Responding” messages that will grow progressively worse; by the time I’ve done two pages, the browser is essentially frozen.

The only solution to this problem (aside from more memory) is to close the browser and then start again. So that’s exactly what I do. But first – just in case something goes wrong – I’ll save the updated text file!

And before I do that, I’ll cut and paste the page that’s been done to the end of the list of completed work, so that the line with the mansion address is near the head of the next page to be processed.

The List After

After about an hour’s work, I’ll have a page of completed results. For the sake of being complete, here’s the most recently-completed set of results.

Burger King, 4227 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Fast Food)
    71.9 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Bowman), #A1, 1011 S Bowman Road, Little Rock (Brodie Creek) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    63.5 miles, 63 min, 80.5 km (50 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila, 2000 S University Ave, Little Rock (Boyle Park) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    66.5 miles, 64 min, 85.5 km (53 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Cantrell), 14524 Cantrell Rd, Little Rock (Woodland Heights) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    68.7 miles, 67 min, 80.5 km (50 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Sherwood), 8605 AR-107, Sherwood (Apple Valley) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    74.7 miles, 75 min, 99 km (61.5 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila (Maumelle), 9847 Maumelle Blvd, North Little Rock (Maumelle) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    69.7 miles, 66 min, 86.5 km (54 miles) straight line
Senor Tequila, 4304 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Restaurant & Bar – Mexican)
    71.8 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
McDonalds, 4422 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historical District) (Fast Food)
    72.0 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, 4704 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historical District) (Restaurant – Chicken / Cajun)
    72.0 miles, 70 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Kroger, 4401 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Grocery Store)
    72.0 miles, 70 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Edwards Cash Saver, 3801 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Grocery Store)
    72.1 miles, 69 min, 93.5 km (58 miles) straight line
El Paisano, 406 W 47th St, North Little Rock (Grocery Store)
    72.2 miles, 69 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Arvest Bank, 4724 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Park Hill Historic District) (Bank)
    72.3 miles, 70 min, 94.5 km (58.5 miles) straight line
Hogg’s Meat Market, 3901 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Butcher Shop)
    71.1 miles, 68 min, 94.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Bargain Brothers NLR, 4135 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Discount Store)
    71.4 miles, 69 min, 94.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Hobby Lobby, 4701 John F. Kennedy Blvd, North Little Rock (Lakewood) (Craft Store)
    71.8 miles, 69 min, 95.5 km (59 miles) straight line
Camp Robinson Mountain Biking, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Sports Venue)
    76.7 miles, 78 min, 92.5 km (57.5 miles) straight line
Pi Roofing and Construction, 6109 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Roofing Contractor)
    73.2 miles, 71 min, 95 km (59 miles) straight line
Bungalow Bills, 22 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Novelty Store)
    73.5 miles, 72 min, 95 km (59 miles) straight line
B.E.E. Promotional Products, 7000 Remount Rd, North Little Rock (Indian Hills) (Gimmick Manufacturer)
    73.8 miles, 72 min, 95.5 km (59.3 miles) straight line
US Army Reserve Center, 8000 Camp Robinson Rd, North Little Rock (Crystal Hill) (Government Office)
    74.3 miles, 74 min, 94 km (58.5 miles) straight line

Data Entry

For obvious reasons, I haven’t seriously started on the data entry stage. But I have started work on the database that I’ll be using.

The Database

This takes the form of a spreadsheet, because the easiest way of actually using the results is to sort the table contents by different columns, and the results can be used directly and immediately – and updated instantly.

There are 21 fields and sub-fields in the design.

Entry Number

Entry Variation – see note 1 below.

Name
Address – doesn’t include locality.
Google Locality – see note 2 below.
Actual Locality
Type – see note 3 below
Dist to near outskirts by Road (miles) – see note 4 below
Driving Time w/out stops (min)
Est. breaks (min) – Calculated automatically – see note 5 below
Time Zone Adjust (hrs) – see note 6 below
Net travel time by Car

(min) – Calculated automatically by adding breaks and driving time.
(hrs, min) – Calculated automatically by dividing the travel time by 60 and using a different number format.

Direct distance to same point

(km)
(miles)

Flight Time with Time Zone adjust – see note 7 below

(ST B s-sonic, min)
(ST B s-sonic stealth, min)
(ST B noncom, min)
(ST B noncom stealth, min)
(ST B evasive) (min)
(ST B evasive stealth) (min)

Notes – see note 8 below

Notes

[1]

Sometimes there are two or more alternative routes of significance. Most of the time, I’ll just measure the fastest/most direct, but where there’s a variation, a number will be put into this field.

[2]

Only present to permit the address to be located again using Google Maps.

[3]

I’ve tried hard to be consistent, but already know that I’ve failed spectacularly in this respect. But by sorting on this field, and using down copy, I can perform mass-entry editing to fix that. I was originally going to put this information into the Notes – and skip it when it was obvious, eg “Lanais Funeral Home” – anyone want to guess what the service they provide is?.

[4]

I want to briefly comment on the “Near Outskirts” specification. Some communities are tiny, some are huge. I deliberately targeted the nearest ‘city limits’ rather than the Google Maps default (somewhere in the middle).

It will be renamed for the business / specific sub-table.

[5]

Standard practice of the PCs is to stop for 5 minutes every full hour – except when they reach their destination.

[6]

I’ve also done a list of other significant cities in the US, which will be extended as more become relevant, and a very selective list of international locations which might become relevant if the PCs do something they aren’t supposed to. These will be put in a separate sub-table with the appropriate adjustments for time zone noted in this field.

[7]

The character providing ‘transport’ for the group, St Barbara (operating under the name ‘Nightshade’ in this sub-campaign) has several flying modes. This set of fields automatically calculates the travel time in these different modes.

The modes are

– Supersonic (100 km in 1.62 min = 3704 kph)
– Supersonic Stealth (100 km in 6.48 min = 926 kph)
– Non-combat (100 km in 16.67 min = 360 kph)
– Non-combat Stealth (100 km in 50 min = 120 kph)
– Evasive (100 km in 100 min = 60 kph)
– Evasive, Stealth (100 km in 200 min = 30 kph)

Date becomes Information

The whole point of this exercise is to generate information that can be used by players and GM alike. They may be at DeBarrie and decide they need sacks of cement – where’s the nearest place to get some?

The data entered into the table becomes information when it has meaning attached to it. Often, that meaning is relative to other related entries. “Where’s the nearest Demolitions expert? The nearest Doctor?” – and so on.

This meaning is conferred by sorting the information in the table. Sometimes, a sort can be ad-hoc, but I actually think that duplicating the tables and doing semi-permanent sorts is the best way to go. Or maybe I’ll do a sort and save the results as a PDF.

Already, I have 8 Useful ways to sort the information.

1. Locality, Type of business, Distance, Name, Address

What’s at a location. All the businesses in a given locality, grouped by type, in sequence of distance i.e. flying time. If there are multiple examples eg Fast Food restaurants all the same distance away, they are listed alphabetically.

2. Locality, Name, Type, Distance, Address

What’s at a location, 2. This is a basic business directory.

3. Distance, Type, Locality, Name, Address

‘What’s nearby?” Note that really local businesses will have no Straight-line Distance information because the PCs aren’t supposed to fly to them.

Process Flaw

In theory, since the group will be driving to a nearby secret location and flying from there to avoid risking their secret identities I should have been measuring distance from that departure point. Except that they will only be doing so in daylight, and will forego it if the emergency is serious enough.

What’s more, if their destination is in the right direction, this error will have comparably little effect on the total. It is most significant when they drive one way and then fly back the way they came.

With all that in mind, and remembering that the drive time to the secret location is only about 10 minutes (less if they speed), the resulting error seemed relatively negligible, and not worth the effort of taking into account. But it is a flaw in the process, and one that I might eventually be able to use against the PCs!

4. Drive Time, Locality, Type, Name, Address

A variation on “What’s Nearby” that takes into account road quality and focuses on communities as a whole – “where’s the nearest town with a dentist?”. I will probably stratify this into time bands – <3 min, 3-10 min, 10-20 min, 20-30 min, 30-45 min, 45-60 min, 60-90 min, >90 min.

5. Drive Time, Type, Locality, Name, Address

A variation on “What’s Nearby” that focuses on type of business. Stratified as above.

7. Type Of Business, Locality, Name, Address

List every builder in the state, in order of where they are – that’s achieved by loading this sort and scrolling through to “builder”.It relies on consistency of nomenclature in classifying businesses to work, though.

8. Name, Locality, Type

Finally, when you’re looking for somewhere specific, this is the list of value.

There may be others, or refinements to these. They are so easy to produce that if something proves useful, I can generate it ad-hoc and keep it forever. And if one of these proves less useful, it can be replaced or simply deleted.

The key point is that I don’t want to have to enter new entries multiple times. One master file that gets resorted is a lot less upkeep!

The Lesson To Learn

This entire process uses only basic tools – a browser, google maps, a text editor, a table, table sort functions, and maybe PDF export function.

In other words, a browser, text editor, and office suite.

I could search Google for weeks and not find what I’m looking for simply because that relies on other people doing the hard work for me.

What we get out of it

For the next few weeks, game time, the plan is for the PCs to head for a randomly chosen location and do superheroic things as opportunity presents – and just get to know the place until it knocks.

As a planning tool, the right type of sorted list will be invaluable. And, if there’s no inspiration in sight, the entire outing can be hand-waved. So they get more adventure, and I get less ongoing work, and sources of inspiration.

Generalizing

As I wrote at the start of this article, the general principle applies in all sorts of ways.

Let’s take a D&D example, just for some variety.

You could buy a supplement – “99 Swamp Encounters”, a simple table listing things that you might encounter. The results are likely to be fairly generic and you might well commit to something only to draw a blank on the specifics, or have the players not be interested.

Or you could have a list of the various monsters and an entry for each terrain in which they are common, and then sort it. You could add in other monster supplements from other publishers – that requires adding a field that lists the source, and – to be truly convenient, the page number.

You can modify and home-brew the official data to fit your campaign world.

And that’s only a direct replication of the core concept.

Further Generalizing

So let’s look beyond it. I can’t present the chart below in legible form without ruining a forthcoming adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign.

Fortunately, I have a version without labels and other tell-tales. It took me about 4½ hours to create AND fully populate – using the draw function in my Office Suite, a part of the package that I had never used before.

Once I had the structure, I added some blocks of color and a temporary background – and that’s included in that 4½ hours, too.

That’s a ferocious learning curve!

In the past, I’ve looked for an online diagram generator, or even downloaded and installed software just for the purpose. But everything needed was already there.

What else can my Office Suite do? I use a fraction (about 1/2) of its modules – Writer, Spreadsheet, now Draw. What else is in there? What functions are hidden from view in menus and sub-menus?

What else can your basic utilities do for you? Maybe a sortable list of every NPC ever to appear in your campaign, for example?

I’ve clearly decided to push on and get this trilogy of posts out of the way before interrupting the series for another break.

As usual, because this is a direct continuation of what’s already been posted, I’m going to skip the usual preamble, so make sure that you have read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 first.

But before I dive headlong into it, there are a couple of Kickstarters that are worth mentioning.

First up, and closing early next week, is The Geologist’s Primer by Anna Urbanek, with additional content by Jakub Wisz.

A massive 360-page “illustrated guide to Magical gems, rocks and metals – Gem Folklore, Magic & Occult Magic Item Recipes, Game Master’s Tools” – and more.

Click the image to visit the Kickstarter Page.

System-agnostic, the list of content inclusions is quite comprehensive; “Each entry in the Geologist’s Primer provides basic geological information, notes on where to find and how to extract these materials, along with their industrial, decorative, magical, and sometimes even culinary properties. Each entry also includes a short, handy description. So if you’re just browsing for information, you won’t have to read through pages of text!”

Click the image to open the Kickstarter page.

The example pages look fantastic, and the utility of this as a reference work amply justifies backing it. Note that most of the stretch goals that have been unlocked so far have created Add-ons which have to be added to your order when you back the project.

This project was fully-funded within 5 minutes of launch and has currently raised more than $430,000 toward it’s $10K initial goal, so it’s as sure of delivering as any Kickstarter ever can be. Time is running out, with 2/3 of the funding window already closed, so if you are interested, the time to dive in is now.

The PDF-only option is a relatively-affordable $20, but I put my money down on the hardcover, costing $50 (I briefly considered the US$80 deluxe edition, but my budget wouldn’t stretch that far).

The scale of the public response shows quite clearly that there is a significant level of demand for this product, so I’m quite sure that it will interest some of you out there!

One down! Here’s the second serve:

I snuck this photo out of the campaign preview I was sent. But I won’t tell if you don’t! Click it to visit the Kickstarter Page (once it’s live).

Next, and launching (if all goes according to plan) later this week, there’s some newly-designed dungeon tiles and 3D printed accessories that are sure to interest some of my regular readers.

Mad Wizard’s Hall provides “Pre-painted wooden tiles, doors, columns, and traps for any fantasy tabletop RPG and miniatures games”.

These look great, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There’s a free print-for-yourself sampler, and 341 people have subscribed to be notified on launch already, so it’s very likely to get up.

These are the first major outing for an indy designer hailing from Kipeda, Lithuania.

Yes, Lithuania – talk about gaming having a global reach! So to welcome Ilya into the pro gaming fold, you should at least consider backing his project!

Okay, with the decks cleared, lets get back to business!

The Space Race

It’s fair to say that the Space Race was the single most transformative economic event series within the twentieth century – and in a period that includes two world wars and the Great Depression, that’s saying something.

Entirely separate from the outcome and spin-offs, and the space industry itself (addressed separately below), there’s the direct investment – Project Mercury was $2.57 billion in 2021 money; Project Gemini, $8.2 billion in inflation-corrected currency; and Apollo $178 billion in 2022 money.

That adds up to (roughly) 189 billion (corrected) dollars in direct investment in the research, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities of the US. Even had the project failed, it’s hard to see that not having a massive economic payoff in the long run.

Nationalism Vs Progress

The roots of the Space Race run deep, and branch off into unexpected sociological domains. One of the strangest is the complete 180°-reversal in public perceptions that followed.

When the trilogy of space programs began, supporting them was very jingoistic; there was a sense of direct confrontation with the advance elements of the Enemy, and failure to support the space program was viewed as ‘unpatriotic’.

As soon as the Apollo program succeeded with Apollo 11, that began to change, and quite rapidly. Space exploration was immediately and increasingly subject to harsh budgetary constraints and the catch-cry (paraphrased) was ‘there are more important priorities here on earth’.

Poor Salesmanship

To be fair, NASA did a very poor job of selling the economic value of their achievements, and still do. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, so it’s entirely possible that the decline in American manufacturing capabilities mirrors the retreat from investment in space technologies entirely by coincidence.

But the list of sciences and technologies that got a big boost out of the Space Race reads like a comprehensive list of human technological and social achievements. And that’s without the spin-offs and indirect benefits. We’re talking everything from computer technology to materials science and all points in between.

Softer subjects also benefited – there was so much written about the space program that literature itself had to evolve. There were so many creative artists in other fields that drew inspiration from the projects that whole new fields and styles began to manifest. And manufacturers were quick to learn that if you slapped “Astro-” onto the name of a product, or established some connection with the space program (however tenuous), sales went through the roof.

Social Antagonism

The post-Apollo shift defined a new social antagonism between the interests of Nationalism and those of Research. Suddenly, research grant applications had to justify their funding requests in terms of concrete benefits, and you can’t run research efficiently along such lines; the only guaranteed outcome of research is that you’ll have the chance to learn something. What that something might be, and how it might translate into economic and social benefits, is completely unpredictable.

From a modern perspective, it’s easy to cast this as an opening skirmish in the political wars between progressives and conservatives, but that’s an oversimplification, in my view; NASA simply failed to plan for Apollo’s success, taking their funding for granted, as I have explained in earlier sections of this article.

That failure is what opened the door for those forces of economic management that wanted to re-prioritize and cut expenditure. These were politicians who saw only the immediate / short-term goal of “Beat The Russians” and not the longer-term benefits to society, and NASA failed to educate them about the longer-term gains. I’m quite sure that they tried, but on this mission, they failed.

The demand for practical research outcomes to justify investment became a characteristic of the remainder of the 20th century and still lingers today to a large extent. It became part of the economic and social infrastructure of the western world, a fundamental assumption of society, thereafter.

Progress Vs Service

Increased funding for social programs was often used as a justification for winding back investment in the space program, and that had the flow-on effect of painting those two elements of society into an antagonistic relationship.

Increasingly, they were seen as competing for shrinking slices of the available resources.

The attitudes engendered were pernicious, and spread into a perception that funding of research stole money from the delivery of services as politicians employed divide-and-conquer approaches to enable a growth in their personal power.

There is a key sequence in The Distinguished Gentleman, the political comedy starring Eddie Murphy in one of the best-written roles of his career (link is to a Double-feature DVD set with Trading Places, his other great role in this sphere. I get a small commission if you buy).

Murphy’s character is meeting lobbyist Olaf Anderson who sounds him out on the choices that he has on various policy perspectives so that he can know which lobby groups he can direct funding from into Murphy’s reelection campaign. Olaf doesn’t care which position Murphy takes; if he chooses a position in favor of a policy, group “A” will give him money, if he opposes it, group “B” will do so. And, either way, Olaf remains the Kingmaker and gets his slice of the pie from both sides.

While a cynical exaggeration, this explanation for why nothing ever gets done in government save for politicians feathering their own nests still resonates. Systemic corruption by lobbyists continues to handicap the political system of many nations; only the form varies.

The key point in this context is that artificially created competitions for funding set different lobby groups into antagonistic positions which can let the orchestrators play one off against the other, to the benefit of the orchestrator.

Service Vs Profit

The increasing emphasis on environmental regulation and protection was always described in terms of the public benefit that would (and did) result. That this regulation ate into the ability of a given operation to generate the maximum possible profits created another of these antagonisms, in which the corporate sector increasingly focused on the short-term over the long term and the immediate benefit over the short-term.

There is little doubt that the same forces which antagonized research from service delivery also encouraged this perspective, but it was all an outgrowth of the more general government vs business disharmony that had existed since the end of the Second World War.

Three Rivalries

These three rivalries, manifestations of deeper political philosophies and personal greed and altruism, became increasingly strident as the Pre-Digital era neared its end.

There are those who would argue that they did not reach their most extreme levels of conflict until the 1980s, but I think of these trends as more of a parabolic arc; the impetus pushing these agendas begins to tail off at the end of this era but momentum pushes the conflicts to greater extremes before the social perspectives responsible begin changing course.

Any campaign set in this time period needs to keep the three rivalries in mind, and GMs should remember that there will be forces on all sides who will resent and resist any efforts to change the status quo – sometimes from the best of intentions, sometimes for more venal reasons, and sometimes out of pure self-interest.

Alliances are short-term, extremely focused, and unreliable. There are too many social and political forces pulling these “special interest groups” apart for them to last very long.

Very Strange Fruit

Getting back to the Space Race, the legacies of the Apollo program and its predecessors were more significant indirectly than they ever were directly. In order to make Apollo work, industries needed to learn to do new things, and they often found those lessons applicable in other areas and new products.

For example, the adhesives industry was revolutionized by the space program; it wasn’t so much the adhesives needed for space applications as it was taking the failed experiments along the way to those products and turning them into something useful (and profitable).

Computers and Communications and Satellite weather maps often get the headline billing when discussing Space Race spin-offs, but the technological ramifications and confluences run much deeper, and include artificial limbs, scratch-resistant lenses, insulin pumps, firefighting equipment, automation, water filters, sports shoes, long-life tires, freeze-dried food, ear thermometers, vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, LEDs, pens, medical imaging and diagnostic technology, and (of course) Velcro!

Every new product creates new employment and new manufacturing needs, new marketing requirements, new or augmented distribution channels, new demands on income, and new prosperity.

Despite the high price, the economic benefits were an ongoing contributor to the global economy that far outweighed the costs.

Tech Briefing: Miniaturization

One of the biggest forms of technological progress to result from the space race was miniaturization of electronic components. While no more than half of this takes place in the pre-digital era, it’s worth looking at the totality, at least briefly, because the beginnings of this process set the foundations for the era to follow as well as impacting the available technology throughout the part of the era that follows WWII.

Beginnings

Vacuum tubes were developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The simplest and most common examples were the humble light globe.

Vacuum Tubes of greater sophistication are delicate, expensive, and fragile. Glass-sealed, air slowly leaks into the vacuum sealed within and destroys their effectiveness. Some could last for many years, and some could die a very quick death, depending on the quality of manufacture and the complexity (amongst many other factors) – but quality always costs.

They are large, and heavy, and power-hungry.

Worse still, they are horribly inefficient, wasting a lot of the energy fed into them as light and heat. Light could be lived with, but heat distorts glass and can render the technology stone dead.

Early computers needed significant cooling in order to function, and this could easily double the cost of an installation.

Vacuum Tubes to Transistors

Vacuum Tubes made digital computers possible, but not practical. So many of them were required that the director of IBM, in the 1950s, famously predicted a total global market of five or six computers.

The first transistor was invented in 1947. Discrete components mounted individually on a circuit board, they were soon 1/100th the size of a Vacuum Tube equivalent, consumed 1/100th the power (or less), and wasted 1/20th as much of that power (or less). TV sets went from being a large and bulky cabinet to being portable devices, despite still relying on a vacuum tube for the television display.

They were more reliable, more robust, less expensive, less expensive to operate, and much more compact.

The improved electrical requirements also meant that power supplies could be made smaller and more reliable.

All this meant that more circuits could be squeezed into a given space, and that gave rise to greater capabilities. The earliest remote controls could arguably have been achieved using transistors, but development was proceeding at a breakneck pace.

In 1954 the worlds first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1 used four Texas Instruments npn transistors and cost $49.95, equivalent [to] $507 in 2021 [dollars]. Today, a 512GB SD card can contain over a trillion transistors and costs about $30.

— Curious-Droid.com, MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century

Transistors to ICs

In 1958-59, a way was devised to mount many transistors and a number of auxiliary components onto a single piece of silicon, shrinking the transistors at the same time, and increasing all those other benefits of transistorization at the same time. This was the beginning of the Integrated Circuit.

The 1962 prototype contained 16 transistors. In 1964, the first commercial MOS integrated circuit was released, containing 120 transistors. These were roughly 1/50th of a millimeter (0.787 thousandths of an inch) across. 120 discrete transistors would have taken up an area of about 3 inches x 4 inches – assuming no electrical components were required in between, but they almost always were. This could easily double or triple the area required, so call it the equivalent of about 7½ x 10 inches.

ICs to Chips

By the late 1960s, Integrated Circuits had grown so large and complex that a new term was in use: LSI, or Large-Scale Integration. Early in the 1970s, this gave way to VLSI (“Very Large Scale Integration”).

The first digital microprocessor is generally considered the Intel 4004, a four-bit CPU whose descendants lead all the way to the Pentium and beyond. It had 2300 transistors on a ‘chip’ of silicon about 3.15×4.46 mm (1/8th of an inch x 2.1 eighths of an inch) – plus case.

Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law postulated that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years for an unforeseeable period of time, but certainly, for the immediate future.



A logarithmic graph showing the timeline of how transistor counts in microchips are almost doubling every two years from 1970 to 2020 (Moore’s Law) by Max Roser & Hannah Ritchie, from Our World In Data via Wikipedia (image page) and licensed under CC Attributions 4.0 International license.

While it’s been refined and revisited a number of times, as a rough-and-ready guesstimate, it’s proven remarkably resilient. On several occasions, doom-and-gloom forecasts have prophesied the end of Moore’s Law, only for new technological developments to make the formerly impossible, possible.

History shows that Moore’s law is a useful generalization. If it were perfectly valid, the graph above would be a perfectly straight line; clearly, it’s not.

There are corollaries, which state that power requirements are a function of the physical size of chips (and hence power requirements per transistor will continue to fall), and that R&R and manufacturing costs also increase exponentially in proportion to Moore’s Law – which means that the cost per transistor would remain constant, but actually continually falls with economies of scale, which are driven by demand. Those have also proven useful rules of thumb, but less accurate than Moore’s original law.

Chips to Multi-cores

Modern computer chips have transistors that are as little as 35 silicon atoms wide. There can be billions of trillions of transistors in each. We passed the threshold whereby quantum effects had to be taken into account a long time ago – around the time of the Pentium IV or V, if memory serves.

These days, a single CPU can’t pump electrons through its circuits fast enough; problems and tasks are distributed amongst several CPUs on the one chip, a multi-core, designed to utilize parallel-processing methods such as multi-threading.

Supercomputers can hold as many as 20,000 processors (not necessarily all on one chip). The technicalities don’t matter much – the operative factors from an economic perspective are that computers get cheaper in (real terms) and more powerful every year or two from the moment of first creation in 1970 through to now (though there have been the occasional brief reversal of this trend).

Ubiquity

Despite the dire prediction of that IBM executive, that essentially means that computers have been getting cheaper and more powerful over that period of time. It’s well known that the onboard computers that ran the Apollo spacecraft were less powerful, in computational terms, than those of a 1990s engine management computer in a typical family car.

A lot of that reduction in price is due to economies of scale – essentially, the more you make of something, the less per unit they cost. And the only way you get economies of scale is through increased usage. Almost everything has an onboard computer of some kind, these days – right down to extension cords and power sockets.

This has been a steady progression that started in the 1970s and has continued ever since. It was in its infancy at the end of the pre-digital era, but had progressed far enough that bureaucracies and large corporations were increasingly using computers by this point in time.

Behemoths Of Blind Logic

Which means that public perceptions of computers had also begun to take shape. These would also evolve with increasing ubiquity, but – outside of specialist areas – the headline of this section denotes the general attitude that I remember.

Many people could see, at the time, that this would not always be the case; the promise of computer technology was well-known and widely appreciated – and frequently mis-characterized or misunderstood by CEOs.

These failures would exist right through to the 2000s – in particular, the belief that computers would streamline workflows and permit a reduction in labor costs, making a business cheaper to run. That never happens, in my experience. What computers facilitate is greater control, and better management of internal processes – but they were and remain unforgiving.

GIGO is an abbreviation for “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, a phrase that was coined all the way back in 1957. Back then, computer professionals used it in reference to sloppy programming practices, but sometime in the 1970s it began to be used to refer to operator errors and corrupt data, and when PCs began infiltrating office spaces, the term almost exclusively referred to these problems.

Operator Error

When computers were new, operators needed – and received – special training in how to use them. This training was not cheap, and often extended for weeks or months.

In part, that was because many operations that take place automatically in modern times needed to be carried out manually.

Computer Errors come in four basic varieties:

Logic Errors

Computers are – currently – stupid devices, the current crop of “AI” functions notwithstanding. They will do whatever they are told to do, whether that is the right thing to do or not. Errors in the underlying logic that the computer is to implement are the most fundamental mistakes, and some of the hardest to diagnose and correct.

Hardware & Software Bugs

If the intended instructions to the computer are correct, they can be mistranslated into computer instructions (a software bug) or misunderstood because of a flaw in the hardware itself. These days, the latter are so rare that there is an almost-automatic assumption of the former. That’s what made the floating-point computational error of the early Pentium chips (now known as the FDIV bug) so shocking to the IT community in the mid-1990s.

User Errors

By far the biggest cause of computer errors is an operator typing in something they shouldn’t. Some estimate that 90% of computer code is directly purposed at spotting and handling such incorrect inputs, but I think this exaggerated – a little.

A real-world but trivial example is of an operator entering numeric values for invoices with a dollar sign at the start – “$123.45” instead of just “123.45”. If the software isn’t told how to handle this – something that could take several lines of code – it won’t add up the invoice line entries to produce a correct total.

There are all sorts of derogatory terms used by computer professionals to describe this sort of error, most of which will go completely over the heads of laymen, but these are becoming more rare in the modern world because of user-friendly interface design expectations, which hold that operator errors are the fault of the system programmer who should have anticipated that possibility.

Interpretational Errors

The fourth type is perhaps the most pernicious, though slowly becoming less frequent; it occurs when the computer does everything right, and so does the operator, but the human who receives the information misinterprets what the results are telling them.

This used to be a lot more common when computerized functions were newly-introduced to a business, and the wealth of data outputs first became available to management. I once knew a manager who was quite happy spending 12 hours a day restructuring his reports to view information in new contexts, for example.

Like everyone else who has trouble with data saturation, he eventually figured out what reports were actually useful and what were simply noise, or worse yet, misleading.

Nevertheless, this remains a valid interpretation of GIGO that casts the expression into a more human context.

No matter how highly trained, computer operators were human and capable of making a mistake. Depending on the specifics of those mistakes, the results could be catastrophic in terms of the purpose of the information being processed, and decisions deriving from it.

PCs

With the advent of the business-purpose personal computer, there was a significant reduction in the training that operators received, and a natural increase in the number of errors that would typically occur.

Let me be clear – it takes time to master ANY software. The best software for any purpose is often the software that lets you dive straight in and start being productive right away; that doesn’t reduce the learning curve, it just lets you do something useful in the meantime.

For example, I’ve tried more than a dozen varieties of different music composition software, but one of them clicked with me immediately (sadly, it’s no longer available). Others who tried the software on my recommendation found that it was not so user-friendly for them – in particular, if they knew (musical) keyboards and used one to ‘play’ music into the software (I did everything by mouse). Other packages were ‘best’ for them.

The immediacy of productivity didn’t mean that I had mastered it; I was still learning new tricks right up to the day that a forced operating system upgrade meant that it stopped working.

But the Pre-digital era falls at the very beginning of that story, at a time when many of these dangers went unrecognized, at least by management; there was a sense that computers were infallible amongst those who had championed their use by a corporation, and there was little capacity for human judgment to leaven harsh and sometimes incorrect decisions.

The popular zeitgeist at the time was that computers would be responsible for all manner of simple mistakes that common sense would prevent immediately, like issuing invoices for 1 cent, often due to a rounding error, or for 99.999 dollars.

Of course, mainframe computers were both huge and hugely expensive. So: Behemoths of blind logic.

Whatever fun mistakes you can have an overly-literal computer make, I guarantee that a worse mistake really happened.

The Promise Of Atomics

Sci-fi of the 1930s had a rose-colored myopia with respect to the future of atomics. The writers of the time had enough understanding of the fundamental research that had been published that they could (and in at least one case, did) predict atomic weapons.

But, to be honest, it was frequently a catch-phrase meant to “sci-fi” an object up. ‘Destroyer – sounds too naval. I know, we’ll call it an Atomic Destroyer!’ Or an Atomic Car. An Atomic Dredge. An Atomic Mole.

Atomics promised power supplies that were smaller, lighter, and more powerful than anything then available – and that was the serious stuff. Every city block would have its own atomic generator that would last a decade, or maybe a century. Self-powered factories, automated refineries…

More frivolous and less-grounded but still somewhat-plausible applications that were predicted included transmutation, atomic-powered rockets, force-fields, and atomic rays.

Setting aside the ridiculous stuff, concepts like Atomic Automobiles that never needed refueling were not only seriously contemplated but expected.

All that was the promise of Atomics.

So, what happened?

Stumbling Block 1: Cold-War Paranoia

Klaus Fuchs arrest in 1950, and the Rosenburgs in 1953. These three names were sensationalized following their arrests and trials (and in the latter case, executions).

On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first successful weapon test. On September 23, President Truman revealed that the Soviets had developed their own version of the super-weapon that many felt had ended the War.

These developments did not ignite the Cold War, which had already been underway since 1945, following a string of broken agreements regarding the post-Nazi-defeat in Europe and Iran. But they did signal an increased level of (justifiable) paranoia toward secrecy regarding key aspects of nuclear and other cutting-edge technology.

While military applications – better and newer bomb designs, delivery systems, nuclear-powered vessels, and attempts to create defenses – were well-funded, there was a slowing effect on civilian applications of nuclear power.

Stumbling Block 2: Government Protectiveness

The growing environmental awareness of the 1960s and 70s also had a massive impact. Suspicion that nuclear power was not the key to unlimited energy had been growing for a while, as the dangers emerged onto the public consciousness.

In response, safety standards for nuclear power plants were set at an almost impossibly-high level. The granite of Grand Central Station, like all granite, was slightly radioactive, and in fact exceeded the permitted emission standards applied to US nuclear reactors.

The accidental escape of radioactive gas at Three Mile Island turned nervousness into outright panic for some. Fact: the radioactivity released was less than that received in a dental x-ray, or a single trans-continental flight..

The shielding and safety mechanisms that were required – rightly or wrongly – made atomic installations huge and expensive. Both factors signaled the death of the Promise of Atomics.

Stumbling Block 3: Fear & Atomic Nightmares

B-movies frequently used Atomic-based monsters as villains. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had a fictional type of dinosaur awakened from frozen ice in the arctic circle by an Atomic weapons test. Them (1954) and Godzilla (1954) cemented an exaggerated concept of what nuclear power could do.

There were more serious movies as well, ranging from The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961), in which atomic tests displace the Earth from it’s normal orbit through to movies like The China Syndrome (1979), On The Beach (1959) and Silkwood (1983).

All of these, and many more, created a distorted awareness of nuclear power that resisted the directly the atomic dreams of the more optimistic visions of nuclear power. I don’t know that it ever reached the point where support for the nuclear industry was enough, on its own, to cost someone victory in an election, but it was often a drag on political support.

Chernobyl & other nuclear disasters

That’s not to pretend for one minute that Nuclear Power is not dangerous if mismanaged. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 is proof of that.

Nor can nuclear power ever be made 100% secure against natural disaster, as demonstrated by the 2011 Fukushima accident.

And, one can never entirely dismiss inimical acts by others, such as the ongoing Russian invasions of Ukraine.

The Russian 22nd Army Corps approached the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on 26 February 2022 and besieged Enerhodar in order to assume control. A fire began, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that essential equipment was undamaged. Despite the fires, the plant recorded no radiation leaks.

— Wikipedia, Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Southern Front

That, of course, did not end the danger; in fact, the Russians attempted to use the power plant as a pawn in their invasion as the offensive bogged down (see Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Zaporizhzhia Front).

The plant continued to be a strategic target in the months that followed.

On 3 September 2022, an IAEA delegation visited the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia and on 6 September a report was published documenting damage and threats to the plant security caused by external shelling and the presence of occupying troops in the plant.

[Eight Days Later] at 3:14 a.m., the sixth and final reactor was disconnected from the grid, “completely stopping” the plant. The statement from Energoatom said that “Preparations are underway for its cooling and transfer to a cold state”.

— Wikipedia, Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Zaporizhzhia Front

Ukraine, of course, remains subject to threat and the invasion is ongoing. Until that changes, the danger posed remains, however it has been mitigated.

Other uses of Atomics

Nuclear materials, of course, have a number of other applications, which many people overlook. Medical uses are obvious (see Wikipedia, Nuclear Medicine). There are other industrial and commercial applications, too such as Industrial Radiography – used for

….the testing and grading of welds on piping, pressure vessels, high-capacity storage containers, pipelines, and some structural welds. Other tested materials include concrete (locating rebar or conduit), welder’s test coupons, machined parts, plate metal, or pipewall (locating anomalies due to corrosion or mechanical damage).

— Wikipedia, Industrial Radiography – Inspection of products

Whenever I think of this subject, though, an odd source springs to mind – a secondary plot thread in Arthur Hailey’s Wheels, in which an auto worker accidentally spreads radioactive contaminants.

Alternate Reality, Alternate Physics

So there are lots of good reasons why the envisaged ‘golden atomic age’ didn’t, and was never going to, happen.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m a GM; I’d never let something so trivial get in the way if I really needed a campaign element like ubiquitous atomics. All that’s needed is some simple plot devicium to eliminate the dangers and the need for heavy shielding.

A thin material that uses something similar to the photoelectric effect to transform one type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma) into electricity would do it – and would simultaniously get rid of the bulky (and heavy) plumbing, permitting the direct conversion of radiation into energy. One triple layer later and the “Pocket reactor” (perhaps one cubic meter, perhaps half that) is ready to go.

A Default Economy

Time is starting to get away from me – I really wanted to reach this point in the article three or four hours ago. But, press on…

One of the biggest changes over the last 50-70 years of economics has been the relative importance of wages as a component cost of manufacturing. Wages have, in the western world, skyrocketed (in relative terms); this, more than any other factor, has resulted in the exodus of manufacturing to regions where the wages bill will be smaller.

This effect may have been less noticeable in the early 1970s but it was nevertheless present; the increasing pressure on the US auto industry was an early manifestation, and while it will take the Oil Crisis of 1973 to bring matters to a head, this only accelerated greatly a transition that was already ongoing to some extent.

Prior to the Oil Crisis, the dominant cost factor to the manufacturing sector was industrial in nature – machinery, tooling and resources (materials). Environmental concerns were a growing area of expense for many industries, but still secondary; and wages and training were a remote third (Administrative costs were fourth on the list, which will become significant in the next era).

Many of the classic entrants into different genres of RPG were written by people whose experience in economics was rooted in the society and attitudes of the era, and hence a low-scarcity high-manpower foundation became the default economy of those games.

Incorrect Economics in Fantasy

Most fantasy GMs knew enough to recognize that assembly-line techniques were inappropriate to the genre, but that was often as far as they went. Very few investigated the economics of steel production, especially the impact on forests. To be fair, the resources to do so were not as readily available.

But let’s think about this a moment: anything in scarce supply goes up and up in price – that’s the law of supply and demand. And labor was in very short supply – which means that the basic model of the economics was wrong.

Some GMs tried to correct this problem by increasing labor efficiency and effectiveness – healing magic to make the population healthier, more capable of hard work, and greater crop production through Druidic intervention (not only makes the populace healthier, but frees more of them up to work elsewhere.

Nothing wrong with that as a foundation for fantasy economics – but many of the secondary impacts of these changes were ignored, or not spelled out properly (at the very least), and the changes themselves were inserted as explanation after the fact. No impact on the prices and availability of various goods was taken into account, for example.

Now that this has been pointed out to you, you have three choices:

• Make the explanation official and correct the game mechanics to devalue skilled labor costs and introduce other relevant knock-on effects, including social consequences;
• Remove the incorrectly applied assumptions and their consequences to produce a more realistic medieval economy and society;
• Find some other explanation for the incorrect modeling, one that (perhaps) requires less change to other areas of the mechanics – and implement the consequences and knock-on effects without fear or favor, having first adjusted for the incorrect assumptions already present.

Anything magical or mechanical in nature .should either get a little cheaper or a lot more expensive. Anything that requires extremely high skill, likewise. Anything in common demand will be more easily available, and this may act as a depressant to the price.

Similarly, apprentice numbers for blacksmiths and wizards and what-have-you will either go down considerably, or go way up.

These changes aren’t rocket science; they are fairly straightforward and simple, actually. But there’s a lot of them.

Once those are complete, you can start thinking about economic flows and who has money – and who doesn’t, but wants it – because the generic fantasy society that I have often seen at play is no more realistic.

To be clear – you can choose not to change a thing, especially if this level of realism is not considered desirable by your players; but this should be an intentional choice, and those who make it should at least give passing consideration to the consequences.

Sci-Fi Optimism: A Simpler Age

But, befitting an age of technology, there’s a lot more to talk about on the Sci-Fi front.

Modern sci-fi is far more dystopian in tone, far more cynical and pessimistic. Sci-fi that’s rooted in the era can go one of two ways:

• It can be faithful to the era, with a far more positive outlook; read classic Heinlein and Asimov and EE ‘Doc’ Smith for tonal cues. And, in general, think a little more ‘Victorian’.
• Or, you can adapt to service a modern audience, with cautious injections of pessimism and cynicism – but these changes won’t come out of nowhere and will have knock-on effects, and your campaign setting will need to incorporate and reflect those. Start with the three axes of conflict described at the start of this post, amp them up to 11, and throw in modern levels of political corruption; then incorporate some form of massive betrayal of the people to create that tonal quality within society. Go full pre-Cyberpunk, in other words.

Sci-Fi Pessimism: Monster-bashes

Monster movies should be treated as documentary references. This week, the Triffids; next week, Them; and so on.

Take Myths, Legends, and Cryptids, and add a sci-fi twist. The Headless Horseman from Mars? The Radioactive Ghost? Swamp Men from Venus?

Why not?

Sci-Fi: Optimism Depth & Richness

Both pessimistic and optimistic genres are morally-simplified in some ways. Identify the ones that pertain to your particular genre and run with them.

In particular, though, the pessimistic route involves more universally-down attitude; greater variation and richness is possible in a more optimistic campaign, even if it’s a single persistent thread through the darkness.

Sci-Fi Pessimism: Apocalyptic Visions

There is no such thing as the doomsday clock in an optimistic vision of the sci-fi world; in a pessimistic sci-fi campaign, it should represent an ever-present existential threat.

A perfect comparison is possible: watch both the original 1960s version of The Thing and the John Carpentier remake. Then watch a whole bunch of other sci-fi and categorize each into either ‘B&W Thing’ or “Carpentier Thing’ compartments, tonally. Alien? – Carpentier. Aliens? B&W. The Blob (the original with Steve McQueen? B&W – the good guys win in the end, and the threat is ended. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers? More ambiguous, and there’s always a suspicion that a pod has survived, somewhere – so that equals paranoia, and that’s Carpentier in classification.

And so on.

Sci-Fi Optimism: The Scale of Ginormous

More than anything else, this section tips a hat toward EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and towards the original Star Wars (the revised Death Star in Return Of The Jedi may have been bigger, but it didn’t feel bigger. Just the opposite, in fact).

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Spacecraft 5 miles long? Go for it! Spacecraft 15 feet long? Get ye to the Dark Side – except in comparison to the scale of the enemy, of course!

That’s the only reason for the X-Wings to be so small – to make them more insignificant relative to the Star Destroyers and Death Star of the Empire.

This applies to more than just the physical infrastructure. Contemplate for a moment the economics of building something on the scale of a death star. Here, this site should help: John M Jennings – Economics of the Death Star.

Superheroics & Idealism

Okay, let’s take a sideways step in Genre. It’s clearly just a short step from the positive sci-fi sub-genre to the idealism inherent in a superhero campaign.

Once again, though, contemplate the economic impact of what your PCs and their enemies are up to. If there’s one crisis a month, resulting in significant damage to one or more metro areas, that’s a downward damage bill that’s going to total up into the billions – of 1970s dollars. Possibly more.

Either the national economy of your setting is going into a lasting depression, with public confidence in the toilet and going under for the third time, or there is some factor that’s giving everyone an unlikely positivity.

Two obvious factors can (should?) play into that confidence: the good guys always win (in the end), and/or there’s a steady growth in technological prowess that shows up as a more vibrant economic outlook.

Let’s start by thinking about the rebuilding costs – unemployment goes down, and scarcity of good workers drives wages up. That money has to come from somewhere, and the easiest source is a more rapid technological progression, which boosts corporate profits. And it all plays into greater tax revenues. But, since 90% of the economy gets those positive effects without experiencing the downside, the result is an economic boom.

So far, so good. Sure, the government will have some additional expenses – a more potent space industry? A holding facility to contain supervillains? And so on – check and check. Rebuilding that damaged infrastructure is just another of those items.

Let’s say that half of the extra tax revenues gets eaten up – ten per cent per item, plus one or two not listed. The government can bank 20% of what’s left, and still give everyone a 30% tax reduction.

Next, contemplate the industrial benefits of regularly replacing aging industrial resources. Tokyo and West Germany, it has been argued, benefited massively from such replenishment post World War 2 – but don’t take my word for it, do your own research on the subject.

That’s easily another 10% kick along for the economy – because additional government spending always comes back three-fold, if you wait long enough, provided that the spending isn’t going straight into the pockets of some corrupt corporation or politician.

Okay, that’s all just a starting point; you can take it as far as you think you need to. But there’s a lot of good reasons for optimism in that lot, don’t you think?

Modern Pulp

Modern pulp – the Clive Cussler model, for example – takes superheros out of the picture and relies on extraordinary examples of ordinary people rising to the occasion. In general, this straddles both positive and negative tones, and so the surrounding world is not going to be all that different from our own.

What follows, in my opinion, is a more dynamic roller-coaster in terms of the economy – more significant and prominent ups and downs. But instability of this type makes investors more nervous, and is (in itself) a negative impact on the economy.

Once again, then, we need some positive counterbalance – just to sustain the status quo, in this case. What might that be?

It could take any of several forms – a series of medical breakthroughs, for example, or the discovery of friendly aliens (even if they are standoffish, with some version of the Starfleet Non-Interference Directive, the mere fact that there are solutions to problems if we want them badly enough could be enough).

We don’t need an impact on the same scale as superheros provide – a mere 10% should be enough to cover the shortfall, or even less.

Into this environment, we can then add the benefits of altruistic big business – and all the social changes that flow as a consequence – and we find ourselves firmly in the positive frame, in which all problems have solutions, and the good guys and girls always win in the end. Both of these are part of the infrastructure of such campaigns, a necessary assumption – but one that isn’t often enough factored into the broader society.

War Games

Back in the two-genres mold, we find military-based campaigns. These range from WW2 (positive) to Korea (positive but just barely) to Vietnam (negative, and not much fun). But alternate histories provide a more flexible foundation that can occupy any particular space on the map.

For example: at the height of the Korean war, the USSR invades Canada, intending to plant a soviet super-state right on the American doorstep. Already stretched by the Asian conflict, the US (and its allies) can’t spare a huge manpower commitment – so it puts together an elite force – and suddenly we’re back in ‘Modern Pulp’ territory.

Spies & Spy Games

The final genre to be considered is one that goes hand-in-hand with Cold War settings: the solo super-spy or elite counterintelligence force. Variations take place in WW2 settings.

There’s good reason for what many consider ‘the definitive James Bond’ to derive from this era, and that’s where your economic cues should be drawn from – in essence, whatever it takes (within reasonable limits) is available at need; but you always have to look for a less expensive alternative than simply throwing money at a problem.

Go read (or re-read) the original Ian Fleming novels. There’s always enough money to spend on supervillain lairs or fancy gadgets. There’s a limited amount that can be spent on establishing a cover if necessary. Villains make fortunes by being villainous – but that only makes them a target that will eventually become the focus of attention.

They really are the economics of the 60s and 70s, amplified.

Whew – got there at last! It’s been a marathon, but the finish line for this three-part article has now been crossed – and, in the porcess, the series grows to almost 80,000 words!

Next week: something completely different (and, since this part ran for an extra chapter, maybe the week after, as well).

Until then, have fun!

This is literally the second part of the article I posted last week, so I’ll forego all the usual preamble bits and pieces, just as I did the last time this happened, diving straight in from where I left off – well, almost.

Writing like this sometimes has strange confluences and coincidences, and in this case, it means that I need to insert a footnote that should have been part of the previous post, but could not possibly have been included.

Explaining that statement, and giving context to the actual footnote itself, requires a little real-life background. I’ll keep it as brief as I can.

One of the free-to-air TV channels here in Australia is SBS, or the “Special Broadcasting Service”. This channel specializes in multicultural content, sourcing programs from all over the world, often in multiple languages; where these are not subtitled, the channel has its own small-scale translation-and-subtitling operation. This is the channel that has broadcast everything from the original (Japanese) Iron Chef, South Park, Who Do You Think You Are? (British & Australian varieties, and sometimes the US franchise as well), amongst many others (some of them quite odd-ball).

They have also broadcast numerous science documentaries, championed Soccer and Cycling, taking them from virtually non-existent in terms of TV coverage to national prominence, and the channel broadcasts news services from many different countries, from Vietnam to Germany to the US.

I’ve referenced their programming in a number of posts here at Campaign Mastery – from

• A Hint Of Tomorrow: The Future Evolution Of Homo Sapiens
• The Thrill Of The Chase
• The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 3
• Thinking Alien Thoughts: Roleplaying First Contacts
• The Olympian Perspective: Personal Opinions, Fake News, and the GM
• An Amazing Ancestry
• Growing The Perfect Family Tree part 1 and Part 2
• The Miracle Of Wood
• The Inevitability of Extraordinary Characters
• Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool
• Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time
• The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV
• And, last but not least, Flavors Of Victory: Why do good GMs fail?
• Plus, of course, a number of the documentaries were referenced in the Pulp Reference Library series (notably shelves 3 and 6).

They also do a lot of history doccos, and somehow the 5-30PM-6:30PM time-slots on Saturday & Sunday have become reserved as a “World War 2” spotlight. They’ve tried other programming then, but this is the subject that they return to, time after time – presumably because that’s what rates best!

So that’s the background, now to the footnote itself:

Blood Money: Inside The Nazi Economy

Over the weekend just past, in the 5:30-6:30 “World War 2” time-slot, SBS broadcast a two-part French documentary, “Blood Money: Inside The Nazi Economy” (link is to the IMDB page for the series). While this is not available (yet!) on DVD, Amazon has it for streaming, free, and the two parts can be found on YouTube (as of this writing: Part 1: A World War on Credit, Part 2: An Economy Of Death).

Had this broadcast taken place a week earlier, I would have referenced it in last week’s post; but at the time I didn’t even know that it existed. So I have to insert it as a post-scripted footnote, instead, because I think it’s worth pointing to (even though I have not yet had time to watch it, myself).

With that piece of old business out of the way, I can get back to business.

Government For The People

It’s a canonical element of the US Declaration Of Independence – “A government of the people, for the people”. From a modern perspective, it seems that the term “people” wasn’t treated anywhere close to universally until the post-war period, and the eventually successful Civil Rights movement – a success that some seem intent on undoing at the moment, but I’ll leave that alone.

The changes wrought by the Civil Rights movement had their roots in the more egalitarian treatment of minorities during World War 2, which paralleled those of Women in World War 1. This treatment was far from demonstrated equality, but it was the thin end of a wedge, paving the way for a gradual process of integration.

Rather than focus on that, which is very well-trodden ground, I’d like to draw reader’s attention to the other end of the relationship, and the effect on the government of accepting this philosophy of equality.

Governing for the people was generally held to mean protecting the populace from threats where the inequalities of power and wealth left them at a disadvantage; it didn’t matter whether or not that disadvantage was systemic or a function of the differences between theory and practical reality. The job of the government – well, one of them – was to stand up for the little guy in the face of corporate greed and excess.

Liberty Vs Social Responsibility

You can’t do that without restraining the liberty of those corporate entities that would or could put profits ahead of the welfare of the people around them.

I’ve read a lot of very bad fiction in which corporate ‘bad guys’ have a revelatory moment and turn from the immoral “dark side” of profits first, last, and at all points in between. While I have no doubt that individuals can experience a Dickensian transformation and re-prioritize the long-term over the immediacy of profits, all these works suffer from the same fallacy of wishful thinking:

As soon as these newly-enlightened CEOs tried to implement their new policies of “corporate responsibility’, the board of directors would vote the CEO out, because their job is to make as much money as possible for the stockholders. And if they didn’t, those shareholders would revolt and force changes in the board’s makeup, because they didn’t invest to be responsible corporate citizens, they invested to make money.

It follows that any corporation that is well-run will always prioritize profits over corporate responsibility, doing the bare minimum required by law (and less if they can get away with it, or think they can). Which puts the burden on responsibility onto the shoulders of those who write those laws.

Economic Protections

There are four primary tranches of protections created by, and enforced by, the government of the time. the first of these is economic – protecting the banks from failure and making sure that profitable businesses pay their fair share of taxes to support the work of government.

The latter function had always been part of the role of government, and often characterized (or mis-characterized) as self-interest on the part of those governments. The exemplar of rebellion against such self-service has always been the Robin Hood myth, but it has become recast as a form of social rebellion – in essence, claiming that if you object to some element of what the government is doing with “your” money, you are entitled to evade the tax obligation as much as you can.

But it was the credit restrictions and other financial reforms that emerged from the Great Depression as part of the New Deal that were the primary economic protection implemented in the course of the Pre-Digital Tech Age.

Extremes of perspective as a tool for GMs

I’ve often found it useful to think of government regulation as ‘defining the perimeters’ within which corporate entities can seek profit-making opportunities. This is a view which completely discounts the costs of compliance, making it an ideological perspective, but it simplifies and exemplifies the government perspective on such matters.

Business interests, on the other hand, live in what they like to think of as ‘the real world’, in which those practicalities have to be taken into account. There is a clear conflict between these interests, creating an ‘us-vs-them’ environment that is extremely useful for storytelling.

Neither of these perspectives are entirely accurate; they both carry their respective philosophies to illogical extremes. Realities can be more nuanced, and this can also be useful grist for RPG plotlines.

It must be remembered that the players (and hence their PCs) will almost always view both from the perspective of the ‘citizen’ caught in the middle, validating plotlines of both corporate greed and government overreach. By painting the extremes so starkly, and allowing gradations of social responsibility in specific cases, and taking this perspective into account, the direction of ‘satisfying’ plotlines can be easily discerned.

Which makes this a useful conceptual tool for the GM.

Personal Protections

Ralph Nader started the personal protections function of government, expanding the policy function from protection against criminal deprivation to a broader mandate with his drive to force the wearing of seat belts in automobiles, balancing the liberty to choose (or risk) of the individual against a policy of protecting people from the consequences of poor personal choices.

He argued, and fought for, the principle that part of the job of government was to protect people from themselves. From this beginning grew the entirety of what is now called “Consumer Protection”, which attempts to force business interests, through government regulation, to ensure that products are (1) safe to use, and (2) able to satisfy the purpose for which they were purchased.

Caveat Emptor

Many don’t realize it, but truth-in-advertising laws derive from this same tenet. Consumer Protection seeks to overturn the old warning of “Caveat Emptor” (Buyer Beware) – but it can only ever do so imperfectly, so that principle still has validity. Interestingly, it was originally a warning against buying stolen goods, and is often now manifested in the proverb, ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is’.

Regulation, after all, does a fairly poor job of anticipating potential future needs; it fairs much better when there is a concrete example of misbehavior that it can legislate against, and from which it can generalize.

Acceptance

It took a surprisingly short time for people to come to accept this role of government, and even to expect it to protect them. Nader published “Unsafe At Any Speed” in 1965; a decade later, and many jurisdictions had laws which mandated the wearing of seat-belts (compliance is, as always, imperfect).

The US was a little slower than elsewhere, but not by very much. Compare the details of different national regulations from the table in Wikipedia: Seat Belt Legislation with those of the US from the state-by-state table in Wikipedia: Seat Belt Laws In the United States..

National Attitudes for Characterization

This delay, widely attributed (rightly or wrongly) by the rest of the world to the conflict between personal liberty and consumer protection, has begun to assume mythic proportions and an underpinning perception of the USA held by many. Australians generally believe that they have more rigorous Product Standards and consumer protections than anywhere else in the world (which is sometimes true, but I could not say its definitively accurate in all cases).

Generalized, this provides a valuable touchstone for differentiating characters from different parts of the world – Americans are more likely to accept personal risk, and have shaped their legal protections to accommodate this (hence their gun laws). Non-Americans are more willing to trust their government to patrol and limit their personal risk, and consider the benefits of doing so to be worth the price.

Neither perspective has to be right or wrong, but they are a reality that the GM can employ.

Medical Protections

This gives me the opportunity to wax on about one of my favorite subjects, Snake Oil and Snake Oil Salesmen. I’ve been fascinated by the subject of deceptions and frauds and scams for a long time, covering everything from the manipulative genius of Derren Brown through to the intricacies of mystery plotlines and a long-standing fascination with Optical Illusions.

But I’ve already covered that subject extensively in earlier parts of this series, so I won’t do that; suffice it to say that this is one area of life in which consumer protection was (and is) sorely needed.

The FDA was formed in 1906.

The history of the FDA can be traced to the latter part of the 19th century and the Division of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which itself derived from the Copyright and Patent Clause. Under Harvey Washington Wiley, appointed chief chemist in 1883, the Division began conducting research into the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market Wiley’s advocacy came at a time when the public had become aroused to hazards in the marketplace by muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair, and became part of a general trend for increased federal regulations in matters pertinent to public safety during the Progressive Era.

— Wikipedia, Food And Drug Administration

By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless “cures” for diabetes and tuberculosis.

— Same source

FDR greatly increased the regulatory powers of the FDA as part of the New Deal. These regulations also granted emergency powers to the FDA, which were employed to authorize the mass vaccinations against Polio in the 1950s.

After the Thalidomide Scandal of the 1960s, these powers were significantly enhanced again. Americans were largely spared the horrors of Thalidomide thanks to the refusal of Frances Oldham Kelsey to authorize it for sale in the US because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug’s safety, a position for which she came under attack by the manufacturer.

Experts estimate that thalidomide led to the death of approximately 2,000 children and serious birth defects in more than 10,000 children, with over half of them in West Germany. I have to admit to a personal stake in this story – my mother was prescribed Thalidomide but found it to be of little benefit, and so stopped taking it, and so I have no observed defects resulting from the drug; I have always regarded this as a bullet dodged. I have a distant cousin who was not so lucky; his left arm ended at the elbow, and I was constantly amazed by his ability to overcome this limitation.

What none of the articles report is the allegation contained in Arthur Hailey’s Strong Medicine, alleging that even after the Scandal broke and the connection between birth defects and Thalidomide was established, it continued to be sold in various third-world markets as a medication for morning sickness. While some of the criticism of the novel’s flaws is valid, I still regard it as a fairly balanced review of the benefits and potential pitfalls of a for-profit drug manufacturing environment and the regulatory necessity that the environment necessitates. Say what you will about his characters, Hailey did good research for his novels, making them useful reference sources for GMs.

There is, of course, serious downsides to the level of protection provided by these regulatory requirements – delays and expense. Watershed moments in medical regulation that occur outside the scope of this era include the creation of the Generic Drugs industry, which derives from a more streamlined approvals process in the 1980s, the carving out of exceptions in the case of life-threatening health emergencies that derive from the AIDS epidemic, and which led to 21st century reforms which enabled the rapid approval and distribution of Coronavirus Vaccines – despite the claims of some, now the most widely-tested vaccines in existence.

It is ironic, but a measure of the level of acceptance of medical regulation by the public, that the complaint of many who otherwise oppose government regulation is that these vaccines had not been sufficiently tested.

Environmental Protections

It’s a shame that the same level of respect is not endowed upon the EPA – an agency proposed and created by Richard Nixon in the 1970s after about twenty years of growing demand for environmental regulation.

This is not to suggest that there was no regulation prior to the founding of the EPA; there was, but it was distributed through many agencies, piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory in what it permitted and what it made illegal.

Pesticides, for example, were regulated by both the US Department Of Agriculture and the US Department of the Interior. There may have been some additional regulations regarding its transportation under the Department of Transport, too.

A lot of the modern perception of corporate culture actually stems from the problems attacked by the EPA through the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and the public perceptions created by popular culture in the 60s and 70s, for example by songs such as “Down By The River” by Albert Hammond.

Throughout the 1970s, there was a growing litany of stories about pollution and contamination of soil and water intruding into the public awareness. But my favorite references from popular culture stem from a later time:

• SIlkwood (1983 film starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher);
• Erin Brockovich (2000 film starring Julia Roberts)
• A Civil Action (1998 film starring John Travolta), and the 1995 book of the same name by Jonathon Harr;
• and The Pelican Brief (1993 film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington), and the 1992 book of the same name, by John Grisham.

To those references, you can add awareness of the history of Wittenoom in Western Australia (made famous internationally by the Midnight Oil song Blue Sky Mine, and the decades-long fight for compensation by victims of Asbestosis here in Australia plus the broader international lawsuits on the subject (refer Wikipedia – Asbestos and the Law – Litigation). I could also refer to the Ozone layer and current attempts to eliminate single-use plastics – attempts which appear to be failing – but this section is more than sufficiently comprehensive already.

Between them, these paint an almost cartoonish impression of business’ willingness to look the other way when it comes to environmental concerns. When generalized, this impression provides a foundation for environmentally-related plotlines, in much the same way as oversimplifications of the pharmaceuticals industry and consumer protection provide a framework for drama.

Responsibility By Proxy

Citizens have grown so used to the protections provided by these and similar agencies that they have generally forgotten what things were like before they were significantly empowered. There is a general sense in some circles that they don’t have to worry because the government wouldn’t let anything bad happen, and even that excessive regulation can be pared back without risk of significant harm.

Business, too, has grown accustomed to having restrictions placed upon them by such agencies, and while they will continually demand the elimination of regulation as “red tape”, they too have the attitude of “nothing bad will happen”. In general, this stems from a myopic perspective in which only they are able to flout, evade, or escape the protections, rather than considering the cumulative impact of many such acts of contamination.

The economic protections put in place by the New Deal were systematically weakened and watered down by successive governments until history was permitted to repeat itself, resulting in the GFC. New regulations were then put in place, only to be weakened or eliminated by the Trump presidency – which led to the recent banking crisis, and could easily have resulted in another GFC / Great Depression, had not intervention been successful.

Similar stories are emerging about environmental contamination after the weakening of the EPA, and the active undermining of public confidence in the FDA over Coronavirus vaccines and treatments is well-known. But all these lie in the future of this era, when the general perception is that anything can be fixed by an enlightened government – but there is always a question as to whether or not the price of that cure and clean-up is worth it.

Aviation

After making a big deal about how I was saving this subject for this article, even though Aviation was born during the previous age, I managed to completely forget to include it when I initially laid out this article. Fortunately, I remembered before it was too late!

Aviation – specifically, powered heavier-than-air flight – began with the flight at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers, though there were several others who came close, creating many competing claims to the honor.

Clement Ader of France flew 50m in 1890, but failed to achieve sufficient altitude to claim the honor – at least, according to some. Ader claimed in November 1906 that he had made a successful “uninterrupted flight” of around 300m on October 14, 1897, for two officials from the French War Ministry were not convinced – and the test was designated a military secret and not publicly revealed until 1910. This claim was widely believed at the time, but later discredited.

On 14 August 1901, Gustav Whitehead claimed to have carried out a controlled, powered flight in his Number 21 monoplane at Fairfield, Connecticut. An account of the flight appeared in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald and was repeated in newspapers throughout the world.[citation needed] Whitehead claimed two more flights on 17 January 1902, using his Number 22 monoplane.

Whitehead claims are ignored or dismissed by mainstream aviation historians,

— Wikipedia, Early Flying Machines

— though a few consider them to be the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight – with no proof that they actually took place.

On 6 May 1896, Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful sustained flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. It was launched from a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia.

— Same source

— but these were unpiloted, and attempts to scale the aircraft up to sufficient size to permit the carriage of a pilot failed when the resulting aircraft proved too fragile.

Perhaps the most credible alternative claim belongs to Richard Pearse of New Zealand.

Witnesses interviewed many years afterward describe observing Pearse flying and landing a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, nine months before the Wright brothers flew.:Ambiguous statements made by Pearse himself make it difficult to date the aviation experiments with certainty.

— Wikipedia, Richard Pearse

The problem is that all the evidence is undated. Confusion over the date was enough to deny Pearse credit for being the first – though he still has his champions, even today.

Pearse himself admitted in a 1909 interview, “I did not attempt anything practical with the idea until 1904” – but what he meant by ‘practical’ remains unclear; did he mean that he made his flights in 1904, despite the witness recollections, or that he didn’t take the successful flights seriously until then? Pearse died in 1953, so we can’t seek clarification, but in a 1915 letter to the Evening Star, Pearse wrote,

“The honor of inventing the aeroplane […] is the product of many minds [but] pre-eminence will undoubtedly be given to the Wright brothers […] as they were actually the first to make successful flights with a motor-driven aeroplane.”

— Same source

To his credit, Pearse also described his flights as failing to be sufficiently controlled to qualify; his rudder would not work at speeds of less than 20 mph.

There were a number of other claimants to the honor, but they also fail to attract sufficient credibility either as to the dates, the flight profile, or whether they even took place.

So the Wright Brothers retain the official nod.

Aviation In WWI

Aviation developed in leaps and bounds during WWI, initially for aerial reconnaissance. Specialized variations began to appear, and pioneers pushed the limits of their machines, leading to the development of fighters, bombers, and trench strafers. Arguably, it was in the logistics of coordinating ground activities and aerial action that would be the greatest legacy.

Post-War

After the war, these early aviators began taking contracts for the delivery of mail at premium prices, and – in general – accepting any excuse to take their machinery into the air. But, as yet, they had neither the range nor the cargo capacity to be commercially viable operations.

And this is a series about economics.

Commercial Aviation

Aircraft engineering steadily improved through the post-war years, increasing both range and carrying capacity. To some extent, these were aspects of the same problem – heavier lifting capacity enabled the installation of a larger fuel tank – so it would be more correct to state that engine & fuel efficiency, aerodynamics, controls, and instrumentation steadily improved. Eventually a tipping point was reached at which point a commercially viable aircraft could be manufactured, not as a bespoke custom creation, but as an industrial product.

The Douglas DC-3 was the first commercially-viable aircraft. Capable of profitable operation carrying passengers alone, or of being reconfigured in various ways to make it a cargo aircraft, it was an extremely reliable workhorse.

Everything that commercial aviation became by the time of the oil crisis – the chosen end-point for this historical period – began with the DC-3.

Origins

8 years before the DC-3, Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, and a year later, Charles Kingsford-Smith flew solo across the pacific. These were harbingers of the impact that commercial aviation would have on the world, proving that it was now possible to get almost anywhere by air.

The DC-3 was preceded by the DC-2, a 14-passenger aircraft that competed with the Boeing 247.

In the early 1930s, fears about the safety of wooden aircraft structures drove the US aviation industry to develop all-metal airliners. United Airlines had exclusive right to the all metal twin-engine Boeing 247; rival TWA issued a specification for an all-metal trimotor.

The Douglas response was more radical. When it flew on July 1, 1933, the prototype DC-1 had a robust tapered wing, retractable landing gear, and two 690 hp (515 kW) Wright radial engines driving variable-pitch propellers. It seated 12 passengers.

— Wikipedia, Douglas DC-2

The year after the debut of the DC-2, Douglas unveiled the DC-3. It was all Boeing’s fault.

TWA’s rival in transcontinental air service, United Airlines, was starting service with the Boeing 247, and Boeing refused to sell any 247s to other airlines until United’s order for 60 aircraft had been filled. TWA asked Douglas to design and build an aircraft that would allow [them] to compete with United. Douglas’ design, the 1933 DC-1, was promising, and led to the DC-2 in 1934. The DC-2 was a success, but with room for improvement.

The DC-3 resulted from a marathon telephone call from American Airlines CEO C. R. Smith to Donald Douglas, when Smith persuaded a reluctant Douglas to design a sleeper aircraft based on the DC-2 to replace American’s Curtiss Condor II biplanes. The DC-2’s cabin was 66 inches (1.7 m) wide, too narrow for side-by-side berths. Douglas agreed to go ahead with development only after Smith informed him of American’s intention to purchase 20 aircraft.

— Wikipedia. Douglas DC-3

Many factors converged to make the DC-3 exceptional – improvements over the capabilities of the DC-2 in virtually every respect were incorporated.

The DC-3 cruised at 207 mph (333 km/h), carried 14 passengers in sleeper configuration or 21-32 passengers with traditional seats, or 6,000 lbs (2700 kg) of cargo, and could carry them 1500 miles (2400 km). It needed shorter airstrips than the DC-2. It was faster, cheaper to run, easier to maintain, more capable in the air, and more reliable.

Let’s put all that into a practical comparison:

Eastbound transcontinental flights could cross the U.S. in about 15 hours with three refueling stops, while westbound trips against the wind took 17½ hours. A few years earlier, such a trip entailed short hops in slower and shorter-range aircraft during the day, coupled with train travel overnight.

— Same source

Faster aircraft were soon developed – that cost a lot more to run and carried a lot less. Transports with greater capacity were developed – but they were slower and more expensive per pound of cargo. More economical aircraft were developed – with a fraction of the capacity, speed, and reliability. The DC-3 seemed to have magically landed on the ‘sweet spot’ of the optimum configuration.

If that were not the case, it is unlikely that it would have had the economic impact that it did; something else would have been the ‘iconic’ aircraft of its era.

Mail

The Universal Postal Union adopted comprehensive rules for airmail at its 1929 Postal Union Congress in London. Since the official language of the Universal Postal Union is French, airmail items worldwide are often marked Par Avion, literally: “by airplane”.

For about the first half century of its existence, transportation of mail via aircraft was usually categorized and sold as a separate service (airmail) from surface mail.

— Wikipedia, Airmail

The impact of air mail is best measured in days. Before the service, there would have been a zone around the poster in which next-day delivery was possible (let’s simplify and assume a single delivery each day, even though many locations had two or more mail deliveries daily).

Beyond this range, there would have extended psuedopod zones along railroad lines, in which overnight delivery might still have been possible, depending on the speed of trains and the terrain over which they had to run. Outside these additions to the ‘next day’ zone would have been another of roughly equal distance in which ‘day after next’ delivery could be achieved, and so on. For coast-to-coast mail, 3-5 days of travel were required.

The DC-3 made next-day delivery to anywhere serviced by air traffic possible. If the postal destination was not in such a location, it might still have been a two-day process – at worst.

For anything truly urgent, cables by telegraph remained faster – but forewent privacy and length. And for most commercial agreements, privacy is essential.

But the greater impact was on personal communications. Before air mail, the speed of communications meant that a letter a month was the most that could be reasonably expected from family members who had moved elsewhere. It might take a week for such mail to be delivered, so there was no sense of immediacy; everything was at a distance. Even when rail transportation improved delivery speeds, occasional long letters remained the norm.

With air mail, everywhere became so much closer that it created a psychological point of difference; people thought about mail differently, even when they weren’t using the service. It became a reasonable expectation to get a (much shorter) letter every week, perhaps containing a photograph or souvenir. People’s lives became far more entwined.

This effect was doubled or more with respect to international mail – instead of three months by ship, it might be a week or two to send a letter by air.

Business Travel

Business travel to somewhere some distance away used to be a major undertaking – one planned to be away for a week or more, and that’s just within the continental US. Significant planning was required. This naturally compromised the scope of business.

Air travel used to be very expensive. If a New Yorker really had a business need to visit (say) San Francisco, three-to-five days rail travel – each way – was involved, plus the duration of stay in the remote city.

If you could afford air travel, that becomes one day each way. It’s still not enough to travel casually, but it is enough to make such travel routine. And, with the shorter time requirements, it becomes more acceptable to travel for just a few hours or for a day. If your schedule worked out, you could even travel and have a business meeting the same day.

Networks of businesses and employees become possible. Instead of needing to contract locally, you could negotiate with suppliers anywhere else in the continent – you might need to factor additional freight costs for the commodities, but with those factored in, you effectively had dozens or hundreds of suppliers competing for your business.

And you, in turn, were competing with dozens or hundreds of rivals who wanted to provide a better deal to your customers.

Air Freight

And that’s without factoring in any impact from air freight. This trades speed for price – but when you absolutely have to have it ASAP, air freight was the answer. Initially expensive, but economies of scale would make mail-order shopping a reality before the 1950s.

For a while, there were even products custom-built to travel by air freight – lighter and flimsier, but cheaper. It soon transpired that unnecessary bulk became a significant negative factor for local customers, too; leaner and cheaper was an effective market division.

Tourism

The price of air travel also yields to economies of scale. At first, something only the rich could afford, but by the 1960s, it was entirely reasonable to pack up the family and fly somewhere for a week’s vacation once a year. In the 70s and 80s, this effect would become international in scope.

Instead of spending four or five days in the car getting somewhere, and then four or five days coming back again, you could be there tonight – and spending six or eight days at your holiday destination.

Travel for tourism would not become casual until after this era was concluded, but non-casual travel for tourism starts now.

Personal

It suddenly becomes possible to travel in order to attend some family function. It’s still a big deal, but it can’t automatically be ruled out. This has two impacts of note.

First, it brings family closer together, breaking down the barrier of distance that made family cohesion so much harder to maintain. This is already underway because of the impact of air mail; personal travel acts as an amplifier.

Second. it reduces the impost of such family functions; instead of something really major (significant anniversary, marriage within the immediate family, parental funeral), it becomes acceptable to travel more regularly, so you need less of an excuse (birthday, graduation, whatever).

Secondary impacts

These are all primary impacts, stemming directly from the economic realities and possibilities of air travel. Secondary ripples are just as significant. Spending and shipping gifts becomes far more normal. Lots more people want to pay for transient accommodations, and food, and entertainment. There’s a wholesale shift in spending patterns for at least part of the year.

In the past, you might have cabled a florist, who fulfilled and delivered your order. Now you could send a cutlery set or nick-knack personally chosen to be valuable to the recipient. Result – store that sells the nick-knack has your money and the florist does not.

This isn’t a complete transformation; florists don’t all close overnight. What changes is personalization; where once, it would have been extremely difficult to arrange, it now becomes possible to include a personal, handwritten, card with a floral delivery without your going anywhere near the city of delivery.

Although it won’t be expressed in such terms, or even noticed, until the next era, what has happened is that distance has compressed. Faster travel makes the world smaller, makes more people (effectively) neighbors, and more closely connects the world.

But not half as much as the next significant development in this era will – though that will have to wait until the next chapter, I’m out of time!

In the next chapter – Space Flight, Miniaturization, Atomics, and RPG economics!

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

Welcome & General Introduction

With each part of the series, we find ourselves treading ground that is more and more familiar.

That’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it becomes more and more familiar, a curse because it gets harder to offer something new to readers, and because it gets easier for distinguishing features to get lost and confused.

From A Writing Perspective

This blurring is something that I’m keenly aware of, and will be fighting hard to overcome. But it’s not helped by the fact that right off the bat, there’s a half-truth necessary.

I could have called this ‘the Atomic Age’ – but Atomic Energy never had the impact that SF writers of the era anticipated. Why that was the case is one critical element of this article.

I could have called this the ‘Post-Industrial Age’ – but that implies that Industrial growth isn’t relevant, and that’s completely false-to-fact. The cause of ongoing industrial growth as an economic driver changes in this era, but the growth itself remains as relevant as ever – and that’s another central subject of this part of the series.

It could have been called the ‘Home technology Age’, which is completely accurate – and completely ignores the features that distinguish this age from the one that follows, sending entirely the wrong message. So the growth of Home Technology and its social consequences are a third defining factor of this age that needs examination.

In the end, I’ve titled it the “Pre-Digital Tech Age’ – but that implies that computers and digital technology in general play no part in the economy of the time, and that’s true only in comparison with future time-periods to come (‘The Data Age’ and ‘The Information Age’ – names subject to change!). So the nuances of the role of computers in society and the economy is another focal point that needs to be addressed.

it’s actually fairly rare for the title of one of my articles to drive the delineation of content so profoundly; quite often, the titles are amongst the last things that I fix, having used a working title as a placeholder during the writing – but this time around there is so much depth and nuance buried within the title that this discussion serves as something of a table of contents for the article to come!

Beyond those content elements, there are the four items that I’ve been foreshadowing at the conclusion of previous parts of the series – ‘The Gold Standard’ (again), ‘Resources & Regulation’, ‘Inflation & Hyperinflation’, and ‘Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed’, and there is the relevance in various RPG genres to discuss – fantasy, various sub-genres of Sci-Fi, spies & secret agents, apocalyptic visions, and more.

All this and a (mostly) cold war, too! Which adds up to 73 sections and sub-sections. Fortunately, I don’t have to cover all of this in just one article. – I’ve left myself scope to split it in two or even three. I would have preferred to cover it all in one got, so that I could steal the next for the article that I originally intended to write, before it morphed into this whole series, but that’s probably not possible, with so much to cover – unless I can squeeze most of them down into just a paragraph or two.

I have checked (as I usually do when this is a possibility) and the article does break naturally into both 2 or 3 parts. So we’ll just have to see how I get on!

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of that wealth, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contains the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

Beginning & End-Points of the “Pre-Digital Tech Age”

Defining the beginning and end points of these eras grows more complex with each additional part of the series, because these are thematic dividing lines, drawn somewhat arbitrarily; it would be easy to select different start and end points just by tweaking the thematic definitions.

Deciding whether or not make such changes ultimately comes down to whether or not the significance of those themes would be buried, confused, or lost by the change, so there are limits that have to be recognized. I’ve chosen definitions and end-points that I think recognize those limits, but this is subjective to a certain extent.
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Sidebar: A storytelling parallel

When you have a strongly serialized campaign, you can encounter similar questions regarding the points at which one ‘adventure’ ends and the next begins. I use the same basic criteria – thematic content and whether or not those themes become muddied, confused, or lost by expanding the end-point. That’s not the only way of handling the issue, but I think it’s the one that adds the most value to a campaign.

A far more difficult question would be whether or not I have chosen this approach to this article because I’m used to using it in RPG campaigns. I’ll leave that assessment to others, though.

The Rise Of Fascism

The beginning point is easy, because I announced it in discussing the end point of the previous part of the series. Fascism held a great appeal in the early part of the mid-twentieth century, something that I’ll look at as the article proceeds.

The original intent was to set the dividing line at that point in which Fascism began to have influence at an international level, but I soon found that this was much harder to pin down than I had expected – and the earliest possible interpretation of that definition intruded into a time when the previous era had clearly not yet run its course.

Overlap with The Age Of Electrification

This requires a softer boundary between the two eras, in which the transition is slower, more gradual, and more nuanced. A little reflection should have told me this would the case; after all many parts of the US did not achieve electrification until the 50s, and some took twenty years longer than that again.

Either the earlier era didn’t end so much as peter out, or some arbitrary dividing line had to be drawn, beyond which those communities who had not yet achieved full electrical supply were considered pockets of exceptions to the general rule. Ultimately, a hybrid of the two options seemed the best choice, one in which this era gradually becomes dominant over the previous one; priorities change, themes differ, points of distinction morph and shift, and one historical period becomes another.

Local vs National vs International

The dominance of issues on the national scale, rather than a uniform transition nation-wide, became the (rather nuanced) dividing line. So this era starts with the rise of ultra-nationalism in the 1920s and early 30s, first at a local scale and then as a significant national trend, even though the previous era had not yet reached its conclusion.

Beginning Of The End: The 1970s Oil Crisis

A similar problem arises when contemplating the end of the era. It’s not as though there was some watershed moment in which the perceptions of reality shifted; instead, there was a gradual drift from one set of policy priorities and agendas to another.

Thematic definitions make it clear when things started to change – the 1970s Oil Crisis, when suddenly scarcity of available resources intruded upon world consciousness like a bolt from the blue. This is so profound a change relative to the preceding period that it makes a natural demarcation point.

End Of The End: Windows 3.0 or The Fall of The Wall?

But not every thematic element of the era came to an end at the same time. Others persisted, creating another fuzzy boundary. It proved impossible to choose between two quite different end-points for the transition, simply because they had such different spheres of influence.

The two flagship contenders were the rise of personal computing (another somewhat amorphous boundary, represented by the release of Windows 3.0 on May 22, 1990) or the fall of the Berlin Wall (on 9 November 1989), symbolic of the end of the Cold War that had been such a dominant part of international relations and national economics & society through the 1950s and 60s.

Windows 3 began the transition to Graphical User Interfaces, and commercialized computing for the business and personal worlds. It’s easy to draw a straight developmental line from that point to the ubiquitous dominance of the modern smartphone, a thematic connection that is definitive of the era that follows; so that is a strong contender.

And the sudden and completely unexpected (at the time) fall of the Wall was a cultural landmark that sharply divides the Pre-Digital Tech Age from the era that follows it.

As with the beginnings of this era, I decided to answer the question by avoiding it completely. So that six-month period marks the transition between eras that defines the end of this historical period.

A rejected flagship moment: 20 July, 1969

Another watershed moment that, from a whole-of-planet perspective, at least deserves consideration was the first manned landing on the Moon. yet, it took hardly any thought to dismiss it as a contender.

The first moon landing was the culmination of years of effort on an international scale, but it did not mark the end of man’s exploration of space; arguably, the first weather and communications satellites (Vanguard 2, launched February 17, 1959, and Project SCORE, launched 18 December 1958, respectively) were better signposts to the long-term impact on human society.

Moon landings continued until 14 December, 1972, and three more planned missions were canceled. In terms of the cultural big picture, the fact of these cancellations looms just as large as the first success, so it can be seen that the ‘definitive moment’ quickly gets spread out over a substantial time frame.

More telling even than this uncertainty is the fact that social and economic trends already extant continued beyond them all. As a human achievement, Apollo 11 is a globally-significant landmark, but in terms of delineating one historical period from another, it is somewhat lacking.

Sci-fi economic footnotes of significance

There are two scenarios in which the first manned Moon landing would be a valid end-point, and they deserve amplification, however brief:

Scenario 1: Lunar Colonization

Had a successful case been mounted for ramping the Apollo program up rather than shutting it down, the next stage would have been lunar colonization. The case would need to be made that this would have a marked impact on terrestrial problems and cost-effectiveness would need clear demonstration, probably achieved through the opportunities for commercialization of colonial activities. While this scenario seems unlikely, given the existing social trends, it is at least a plausible possibility. The impact on society – technologically, socially, and economically – would have made the first landing a sufficient watershed moment that it would define a new socioeconomic era in human history.

The problem was that NASA was so busy working on achieving success that they never planned beyond it, simply taking it for granted. Had a credible plan for the development of Lunar resources been formulated and presented as taking effect after the initial success (whenever that was to be achieved), and all subsequent missions designed as stepping stones to that development, then the cost to date could have been redefined as an ‘investment in future prosperity’ that could have undercut the harshest criticisms of the Program.

Changes to our history would have to have predated Apollo 11, though they probably would not have attracted public attention. It’s also arguable that the landing difficulties experienced by Apollo 11 would have mandated Apollo 12 proceed as it did, historically, establishing the capacity for precision landing. But from that point on, history would have been increasingly divergent.

Scenario 2: Delayed Lunar Landing

It’s arguable that the Apollo program was a victim of it’s own success, that it took every shortcut to achieve that success because of the Space Race, and that the long-term national interests of the US might have been better served had it taken a different direction – aiming not for the showy Moon Landings but for sophistication in technological capabilities and a 25-year plan that focused on efficiency, reliability, and the development of foundational technologies. Unmanned Satellites / Mercury; Space Platform / Gemini; Space Station / Apollo; Colonization. This would have had the mantra ‘never a backwards step’, with each stage having a clear technological target with planned commercial .spin-offs after the achievement of that target, and each step building on the one before it.

Under this plan, instead of ‘before the end of the decade’, the lunar landings would have come in 1980 or 1985. Personally, I don’t think this scenario is as realistic as the first, failing to fully account for the cold war mentality and imperative; the goal of doing things ‘better’ instead of ‘first’ is a much harder sell. There’s too much hindsight in the mix, in other words, too much that was not obvious at the time.

Setting such criticism aside, however, it makes for a compelling sci-fi foundation. It especially makes sense in an environment in which the US government is receiving advice from non-terrestrials, being a more logical developmental program. A bold move, risking war, to handicap the Russian space program through an act of sabotage would have minimized the fallout from the delays, resulting in an environment well-suited to dramatic adventure in an RPG with just enough plausibility to succeed – as a piece of fiction.

Once again, it is the ongoing economic impact that makes the resulting Lunar Landing a significant-enough event to delineate the end of a socioeconomic era.

Themes Of The Pre-Digital Tech world

Having defined, however loosely, the boundary points of the era, the themes that dominate society and economics in the resulting period can be observed. I have to emphasize that these are not being identified from a perspective of assessing the ‘dominant themes’ of a defined span of history; instead, these themes are what give the era its cohesion, and define those end-points.

There are 12 of these themes to which I want to call attention.

Theme 1: Liberty Vs Collectivism Vs Authoritarianism

A hangover from the previous era is the conflict between the principles of individual liberty, collective welfare / security, and the abdication of liberty to perceived authority. The conflict between Business and Unions is an ongoing aspect of this broader theme; the political conflict between Democracy and Communism (in various forms) is another, that did not really exist prior to this era, and in its most overt form, one that is fully self-contained by it; and, of course, the perception of an authority greater than the will of the populace, to which individual liberty should be sacrificed, is both an element of the Democracy / Communist confrontation and of the earlier Fascism / Rest-of-the-world conflict.

Perhaps less obvious is that any form of ‘planned society’ – including those who abdicate personal liberty to the will of a religious authority, and those who call for a technocratic society – also falls under this heading. Such planned societies were popular concepts among sci-fi writers and futurists, and there was an actual political movement aimed at achieving one in the 1930s as an answer to the Great Depression (see Technocracy Movement.

Theme 2: Golden Hangover: A Mixed Blessing

There was a growing sentiment at the start of the era that the benefits of a Gold Standard or other form of fixed currency were not worth the liabilities. Such standards for national currencies can function reasonably effectively in isolation, but as soon as international trade enters the picture, problems arise. As explained previously, the Gold Standard is now considered responsible (at least in part) for the Great Depression becoming a global phenomenon rather than being confined to the USA. It was also my conjecture that it also played a significant part in creating the economic conditions that led to the rise of Fascism; blaming war reparations for those conditions now seems an oversimplification and superficial.

Throughout the early part of the era, governments would flirt with the concept of floating currencies as fixed valuations of currency came and went. By its end, the jury had made its call, and fixed currencies were largely relegated to the dustbin of history. The repeated turbulence of that transition would be another hallmark of the era.

In particular, World War II showed the extent to which industrial productivity was hamstrung by a fixed currency; in order to afford the war, without the now-evident problems of reparations, the US abandoned the Gold Standard (only to restore it at War’s end), but the writing was now on the wall for the concept.

That’s not to pretend that a floating currency doesn’t have its own problems, amongst them the temptation to run a deficit economy, spending tomorrow’s money to better one’s political today. When justifications for such spending are economic in nature – smoothng over rough economic waters, for example, by taking the top off anticipated future prosperity, or investing in creating the conditions necessary for such future prosperity – they can be justified; as soon as rationales move beyond these limits, however, cracks begin to show.

Currency controls are a hybrid option that has become more widely known of late, but ‘managed economies’ were largely viewed as a pipe-dream capturing the weaknesses of both systems through this period of time. Even now, the jury is still out on that front. During the era in question, a ‘responsive’ floating currency became the dominant choice, globally, despite the shortcomings.

Theme 3: Unlimited Resources

Although some were sounding warnings about limited natural resources through the latter part of the era, if not sooner, they were mostly ignored; both populations and governments operated under the presumption that there were unlimited resources waiting to be found.

No-one was so foolish as to deny that commercial quantities were clustered and concentrated in different parts of the world; this was viewed as the very foundation of international trade, and the basis of an ever-increasing standard of living.

Theme 4: Unlimited Opportunities

It followed that there were unlimited opportunities for those willing to seek them out, and this also colors international relations throughout the period. In particular, diplomacy became perceived as a means of achieving those opportunities in the post-war world.

Theme 5: Unbounded Optimism

The combination of the two meant that there was a perception that mankind was heading for a golden age, if only the horrors of extreme nationalism and atomic annihilation could be avoided. Much of the appeal of this era lies rooted in this perception, and it is still often viewed through rose-colored glasses because of it. This nostalgic preference for simpler times continues to be a political factor to this day; this lies at the heart of the MAGA movement, for example.

Theme 6: Legacy of the New Deal: Big Government

Throughout the preceding Age Of Electrification, the influence of Government had been waning, blamed for all sorts of social shortcomings. In particular, the failure of social engineering programs like Prohibition had highlighted the limitations of government. The Great Depression, and the need for government regulation, and the New Deal, combined to redefine the value of Government to the lives of the ordinary citizen.

Ongoing manifestations of this theme include the regulation / deregulation principles of many opposing political forces throughout this era, often characterized as Big vs Small government, and anti- vs pro- business conflicts. These competing social movements had existed long before this era began, and would continue long after it ended; what changed was the way in which they were perceived, both politically and by society at large.

In particular, progressive movements embraced the regulatory principle and conservative movements, the deregulatory principle. This is true not only of the Republicans and Democrats of US Politics; it manifests in the policies of many political parties in many countries around the world, and has become largely definitive of what those parties represent.

During the Pre-Digital Tech Age, Big Government and progressive movements dominate in the US, with conservative governments largely restricted to a social pattern of ‘two steps forward, one step back’. Many of the institutions and principles established in this era, and in the preceding Age Of Electrification, are still present and relevant today, though many have come under direct attack recently. The responsibilities accepted by governments and the institutions created to discharge them are characteristic elements of the era.

Theme 7: Delegated Responsibility

Are American readers familiar with the term “Nanny State“? It is more widely applied, and has many more interpretations in different parts of the world, than most readers will recognize, but in general it is held to describe a government that is perceived as overprotective of some segment of the nation under its authority. None can argue that there have been instances of overreach by governments in the past – Prohibition is the red-letter example. In general, the term is over-used, in my opinion – but there is a truth at the heart of it that manifests in the Pre-Digital Tech Age: the abdication of personal responsibility because the Government is there to act like a protective parent.

It can be argued that there is a line beyond which government protection should not extend, so that people are forced to stumble and fall and learn for themselves. The alternative is just as authoritarian as Fascism, albeit with a greater concern for the welfare of the citizens at its heart – a genuine Nanny State. I’m not going to try to debate that argument, or even take a stand on the issue, at least not in the course of this article; what matters in this context is not political philosophy, it is simply that the practice of delegating responsibility for personal safety of citizens begins in this era, and is characteristic of it.

Theme 8: The Power of Greed

Frequently cast as in opposition to protection of its citizens by Government is the ability of business, and individuals, to profit. In particular, the conservative position is to support business in an alleged environment in which that ability is constrained by excessive regulation. I think that this is a particularly short-sighted interpretation of Government regulation; you can’t get blood from a stone, and a smaller profit sustained over a much longer time-span will accumulate to a vastly greater sum. The real problem is impatience, the demand for immediate profit-gratification; make your money as quickly as possible, sell up, and hook your sleigh up to the next cometary rising star.

But that’s neither here nor there. In the context of this article, it is sufficient to note that shortsighted governments erode long-term protections to facilitate short-term satisfaction of greed; or, at least, that such satisfaction is the objective of short-sighted corporate executives, creating a perception – rightly or wrongly (probably both, depending on which example is drawn upon) – that a dominant social force is a conflict between business and the individual (which includes the customer). This perception is fostered throughout the era by politicians of all stripes for political advantage.

Theme 9: The Restraint of Greed

There is a principle in contract law that states that no agreement is legally-valid if there is an inequity in power between the parties. Thus, an agreement obtained under duress is legally invalid. This principle is frequently forced to apply well outside the boundaries of contract law, however – there are those who apply it to “Big Government” (implying that there is an inequality of power between government and those who elect them), and those who apply it to “Big Business” (implying that no contract with a commercial operation of any scale can ever be equitable). These interpretations give rise to “Sovereign Citizen” nonsense, but also give rise – through the delegation of protective responsibility of citizens to government authority – to the premise that it is a function of government to restrain the rapacious greed of large corporations.

This is the source of power of the belief that there is a conflict of interest between profits and customers, and that the maximizing of one must be detrimental to the other. This perception is at its height in this era, at least in some circles.

Theme 10: Regulation and Deregulation

These perceived tensions, often artificial in nature, give rise to the ongoing cycles of regulation and deregulation that have already been mentioned.

In this historical era, the forces of regulation are dominant, as already explained; short-term profiteering by corporations with no sense of responsibility to the public create a need for regulation that is hard to argue with. The problems generally arise through the implementation of regulation, and the inherent decrease in efficiency that results.

The forces advocating deregulation generally throw the baby out with the bathwater; rather than advocating the efficiency of regulation (not a very ‘sexy’ political position, but a responsible one), they favor complete deregulation because of the business and social costs of inefficient regulatory mechanisms.

Theme 11: Socialism Vs Authority

One can never completely ignore the lure of naked power, either; there are those who advocate against the welfare of others simply because it creates a pathway to power. When generalized into easy-to-digest soundbites, this becomes a conflict between Authority and Socialism, with the latter generally conflated with other political systems such as Communism. The polarizing effect of the Cold War pushes extremists into positions with respect to this perceived conflict. Although this line of argument had little impact in this era, because the focus was on the direct conflict of the Cold War, it has since become more tenable and overt as a political stratagem. But that didn’t stop politicians from trying, throughout this era, to paint any policy of which they didn’t approve as ‘socialist’, however accurate or inaccurate the characterization.

This frequently pushed their opponents into a position of being perceived as supporting policies and doctrines that they actually opposed, giving rise to the term “spin”. There were also times when public messaging would be subjected to “spin” as a defensive move. While this is a minor and secondary theme of this era, it starts here and will only grow worse in subsequent historical periods.

Theme 12: Anti-Fascist Hangover: Privatization

Finally, another minor theme that would become far more widely-applicable in subsequent eras is Privatization – the sale of a public utility or service contract to an outside entity that can be operated for a profit. In Australia, where the sugar rush of deficit economics was deemed by the culture to be unacceptable, this became a way of infusing treasuries with sizable chunks of cash; more importantly, by estimating the proceeds of such sales, even though they had not yet taken place, governments could spend the money in advance. This is deficit economics behind the curtain.

Citizens were rarely given advance notice or the ability to veto such sales; at best, some sort of guarantee of service standards could be demanded, for whatever they were worth.

It is noticeable, though, that many of the institutions privatized by various Australian governments were always in private hands in other nations. Locally, the attitude was that this guaranteed service delivery at the most affordable price; the anticipation was that service standards would slip, or the costs of those services would increase, or both. At first, there was little evidence of this, but those success stories were followed in time by others that were not so well-received, and still more that lived down to expectations. Those still lie in the future, beyond this era.

That is not to say that there were no examples of privatization elsewhere; there were. Because of the Big Government flavor of the era, though, I have a sense that most of them occurred afterwards: National carriers (airlines, train services), banks both central and not, telecommunications providers, city bus lines and metro rail services, health services, even prisons and energy grids. While the majority of these fall outside the extent of this era, there are some notable exceptions that demonstrate that this economic practice was as much a part of this era.

Fascist Germany privatized almost everything, in direct opposition to the public perception of the policies of the regime.

“It is a fact that the government of the National Socialist Party sold off public ownership in several state-owned firms in the middle of the 1930s. The firms belonged to a wide range of sectors: steel, mining, banking, local public utilities, shipyard, ship-lines, railways, etc. In addition to this, delivery of some public services produced by public administrations prior to the 1930s, especially social services and services related to work, was transferred to the private sector, mainly to several organizations within the Nazi Party.”

— Germa Bel, “Against The Mainstream: Privatization in 1930s Germany 1”, The Economic History Review, quoted by Wikipedia – Privatization.

Great Britain privatized its steel industry in the 1950s, and the West German government embarked on large-scale privatization, including sale of the majority stake in Volkswagen to small investors in public share offerings in 1961.

— Wikipedia, same page

Perhaps more than the actual practice, though, the era was characterized by ongoing threats of privatization. Governments through the era of electrification were increasingly perceived as the neutral power-broker forging balanced agreements between business owners and unions, and there was an ongoing perception of bias when the government itself was one of the parties to labor disputes, for obvious reasons; privatization was seen as a way to cut this Gordian knot. Other motivations would dominate the argument in the 1980s, and that might be one reason why so many acts of Privatization too place then.

It was also seen by some as a way to “shrink” Big Government, placing regulatory powers ‘where they belonged’ (in the hands of industry players), but in a broader context, the privatization debate was all about expectations of government, which were changing throughout this era.

Twelve themes, not all equal in impact or scope, but all characteristic of the era in one way or another.

Having erected the goal-posts and tied the backdrop to those pillars, we’re now in a position to see how those themes impacted history, and how history shaped those themes.

World War 2: Economics

Fascism was seen by many as the path of the economic future, so successful did it appear through the 1930s.

By late 1923, the Wiemar Republic of Germany was issuing two-trillion mark banknotes and postage stamps with a face value of fifty billion marks. The highest value banknote issued by the Wiemar government’s Reichsbank had a face value of 100 trillion marks (10^14; 100,000,000,000,000; 100 million million). At the height of the inflation, one US dollar was worth 4 trillion German marks. One of the firms printing these notes submitted an invoice for the work to the Reichsbank for 32,776,899,763,734,490,417.05 (3.28 × 10^19, roughly 33 quintillion) marks.

— Wikipedia, Hyperinflation

The history of this period in the Wiemar Republic is replete with stories of people turning up to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of banknotes; while these may be an exaggeration, they are close enough to characterize the impact of the Great Depression on the German economy. In 1923, prices of goods were doubling every two days because the purchasing power of the currency was devaluing so quickly.

Eventually, the currency was replaced with a new one that sliced twelve zeroes off the value and indexed the value of the new currency to the value of gold at the same rate as the old currency prior to the period of inflation; while there was some slippage of value, in general, the new currency held.

That alone wasn’t enough to restore prosperity, though, just to stop the slide. The period of ill-will toward the government that followed was instrumental in bringing the Nazi Party to power.

The fascists set about restoring economic vigor by selling off a range of significant publicly-owned utilities, and reinvesting the proceeds – a lot of it in military equipment, much of which was supposedly banned by the Versailles Treaty, but some of it in engineering and industrialization. And it worked, or seemed to – and that was what caught the attention of the rest of the world.

The Economic Truth of Fascism

What wasn’t appreciated at the time – in fact, was completely unknown until relatively recently, because the Nazis burnt almost all the records (for reasons that will become obvious) – was that the reality was a house of cards. While there is no doubt that Hitler and his fascists had ideological grounds for their repressive actions against various population segments, the money generated by the seizure or assets were enough to keep the regime’s economic heads above water, at least for a while.

But they were spending money that they didn’t have, and hiding the fact with every dirty bookkeeping trick under sun (and then hiding that fact by literally burning the books and issuing blanket statements of economic vitality with no substance behind them). Having spent big on a significant military, as much for the economic benefits of funneling cash into the industrial base as for any other reason, they now had no option but to use it.

Initial attacks were carried out with an ulterior motive: the banks were seized and any wealth within, confiscated. One source estimated that at the time of the invasion of Poland, the Reich had liquidity to pay its civil servants for no more than three weeks.

Once on the treadmill, every act of conquest had to be paid for with another, though each enlarged the industrial and economic base, slowly stabilizing the system.

So well-hidden was this economic reality that a myth of stolen / hidden Nazi gold remains in vogue even today; assuming that the economy was stable meant that all the stolen wealth had to have been hidden away somewhere, just like the stolen art and cultural artifacts. In reality, it was spent almost as fast as it rolled through the door of the counting-house, the ultimate game of economic smoke-and-mirrors.

World War 2: Nationalism

The war had many impacts and repercussions. Most of this is already well-known, so I’ll only hit a few high-points and connect a few inobvious dots that may have escaped popular perception.

The first of these was a profound impact on a sense of nationalism. Every nation affected by this experienced it a little differently. Malta resisted conquest with grit and determination that remained unmatched until the invasion of Ukraine a little over a year ago, and this remains a unifying point of pride to the entire small country. England pulled together to resist the Blitz; rationing persisted into the 1950s as a consequence of the war, and these were as responsible as any other factor for the downfall of the Churchill government, post-war. Notably, the damage inflicted on their manufacturing capacity permitted modernization that helped bring prosperity back. Denmark’s covert resistance and France’s more overt resistance movements became points of national pride, too, and helped stitch these countries back into unity far more quickly and resolutely than anyone could have predicted. Germany was flattened by the combined militaries of the allied powers, necessitating almost total refurbishment post-war; this investment eventually made West Germany prosperous enough to enable it to stand alone, post-War, and even to absorb East Germany. A new wave of modernization there made Germany the economic powerhouse that it is today.

Cold War

With the conclusion of the War, Russia went its own way, abrogating just about every agreement that Stalin had made at the Malta Conference. Russia created a web of puppets around itself that became the USSR. But everyone else was accustomed to thinking of the collective over parochial national interests – or, more correctly, perceived that without unity as a backdrop, those parochial interests were under threat. So they were strongly invested in the United Nations and NATO, when the latter arose in response to the Eastern Bloc. Subjugation vs Internationalism – the first brought a forced conformity, the latter brought the freedom to have national interests within the scope of the larger picture.

The cold war was as much about post-war unity and reactions to the Fascist Regime of Nazi Germany as British pride at having weathered the Blitz.

World War 2: Industrialization

I’ve touched on this already, but it’s worth adding to the discussion – war damages forced rebuilding of industrial infrastructure throughout Europe and Japan. This was never like-for-like; modernization was at least as cost-effective as simple replacement.

But the country that industrialized the most during the war was, arguably, the US, and it lost virtually nothing of its pre-existing industrial capability. What it discarded was a lot of its economic and social preconceptions and assumptions. At the height of the war, tanks and aircraft were rolling off production lines faster than anyone would have believed possible at the start of the conflict. In part, this was because people pulled together in a way that would never happen outside wartime; in part, it was because national pride had been deeply wounded by the affront of Pearl Harbor.

In 1939, total aircraft production for the US military was less than 3,000 planes. By the end of the war, America produced 300,000 planes. No war was more industrialized than World War II. It was a war won as much by machine shops as by machine guns.

Aircraft companies went from building a handful of planes at a time to building them by the thousands on assembly lines. Aircraft manufacturing went from a distant 41st place among American industries to first place in less than five years.

— Wikipedia, United States aircraft production during World War II.

Similar scales of production were achieved in the production of armored vehicles (see Wikipedia – American armored fighting vehicle production during World War II) and Naval production (refer Wikipedia – Naval history of World War II).

Post-war, the awareness of what was possible in terms of industrial production underpinned both expectations and policies for business, government, and workers. Neither of the first two groups listed made sufficient allowance for the unwillingness of workers to shoulder the economic burdens that had been acceptable during wartime; the coalition that had brought about the conditions that had achieved so much production quickly fell apart, eventually leading to confrontations. In time, more balanced positions were found on the key issues and more realistic targets were adopted, but even at the resulting diminished scale, the US was the world’s largest manufacturer and economy for the remainder of the era.

World War 2: Technology

There was a perception that technology advanced by leaps and bounds during World War I, but in that respect, the earlier conflict was blown out of the water by developments during WW2.

In the five years (or so) prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, there was FM radio, Nylon, the Z1 (the first freely programmable computer), Nuclear Fission and the Defibrillator.

During the war, the cavity magnetron (the root technology of both Radar and the Microwave Oven), Polyester, the V-2 rocket, the non-infectious viral vaccine, the Jet Engine and the Atomic Bomb. There were developments in all forms of armament, in tanks and armored vehicles, in troop transportation, in devices for remote sensing, navigation, communications, cryptography, surgical techniques, chemical medications, naval vessels, aircraft design, engines, small arms, anti-tank weaponry, bomb design, and engine technologies – and that list is not exhaustive. You can throw in everything from artificial fuels and fuel additives through to aerodynamics on top of that, and literally hundreds more – most of them little things that made some existing product or process just that little bit better or more efficient to use or manufacture..

While a few of these had only military applications, most of these developments would play prominent roles in the post-war world, both directly and as the foundations of technologies to come.

Post-war: Industry

Every time a technology was refined into a domestic application, it needed a manufacturing plant to deliver the resulting product to the customers waiting for it. While the industrial boom that may have been expected after the standards st during wartime may not have eventuated, the diversification that followed made up for it. This was another aspect of the ‘golden age’ perception of the 1950s.

Cold War Tech & Secrecy

Technological advance didn’t stop with the end of the war, of course. Fueled by the Cold War that officially started in 1947 but whose origins could be traced to late February 1946 and George F Kennan’s Long Telegram, discussion of which was instrumental in formulating post-war strategy against the Soviet Union.

Aside from the general drive to out-produce and out-advance the perceived enemy, there were continual efforts to safeguard existing secrets – and for the US, that started with Atomic Weapons and ended with anything else that could be obtained, or delivered, by espionage. Ongoing efforts were invested into protecting such secrets and developing technologies that could assist in the pursuit..

Paranoia in Nationalism

It was very easy to slip over the mark into paranoia in the intensity of the cold war environment. In the US, this led to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and Joseph McCarthy.

In England, they did their best not to fall into that rabbit hole, and – arguably – tried a little too hard; the exposure of the Cambridge Five struck their intelligence services like a thunderbolt, and – internally, at least – they became even more paranoid than the Americans, as shown by the extraordinary lengths to which they went during the Spycatcher incidents.

Once again, the manifestations may vary from nation to nation, but most were touched by cold war paranoia in one way or another.

Post-war Personal Prosperity

The more of something you make, the lower the unit price tends to become; there are all sorts of efficiencies that become possible through scale.

The lower the unit price of many things become, the more individuals from any given economic class can afford without significant increase in payment beyond compensating for inflation, of course.

The technology / industrial boom that followed the war thus manifested in a steadily-rising standard of living even for those in the lower rungs of the economy.

New Products: Home Tech

Of course, the higher your income bracket, the sooner you could afford the latest must-haves and the better the toys that you could afford, so there were distinct phases of technological adoption.

Non-portable Color TVs, for example, started off $500-$750 in the 1970s (when the technology was new). By the mid-80s, a decade later, a price somewhere in between those two would not only buy you a comparable TV, it would buy you one with stereo sound – despite the shrinkage of the dollar with inflation. These days, for a comparable unit, we’re talking USD $85 to $120 – and you can get a lot bigger and better, again despite all the shrinkage in the size of the dollar over the last 40 years and the massive improvement in display quality. In fact, if I correct for inflation, the price of a modern TV in 1985-dollars is $30-$40.

If it’s new, it costs a lot more. If it’s been around for a while, a new one costs a lot less, in relative terms.

That means that standard of living was rising faster than wages were, and that was a source of consumer confidence. Again, golden age, right?

The God Of Convenience

Somewhere along the line, somewhere in the 1950s, Convenience and comfort became the new Gods of home life. The scene in Back To The Future in which Alex’s grandfather puts the TV on wheels so that the family can watch Jackie Gleason while they eat will always exemplify this development to me, but there were many more manifestations – everything from remote controls to air-conditioning to auto-changing turntables to TV dinners.

This was another manifestation of the conspicuous rise in standard of living; simply having a capability was no longer enough, you had to have its usage or operation that little bit more convenient than it might have been, even if that cost a little more.

New Markets: Rise Of The Teenager

Those factors alone would have been enough to create prosperity for the business owner, but the 1940s also saw the rise of a newly-invented market – the teenager, initially characterized as a Bobby soxer (a female teenage fan of then-contemporary pop music, especially that of Frank Sinatra.

It wasn’t long before teenaged subcultures flourished. The concept that these subcultures might have their own product preferences and could be marketed to directly with products designed to appeal to them, not to children or to adults, took a little while to develop, but by the 1950s it was in full swing, both in retail and in society in general.

In order for a subculture to become a viable market, they have to have some earning capacity. There were two viable choices for teens looking to earn coin of the realm – they could work in the new Supermarkets, or they could work in a fast-food franchise, both of which boomed in the 1950s.

Supermarkets

Supermarkets evolved from the grocery stores of the 1930s and 40s. The primary point of differentiation was that customers took products directly from the shelves rather than interacting with a shopkeeper who could advise on product choice. The purchase was then completed by a cashier who totaled the payment owed, usually accompanied by a packer who placed purchases in bags to make them more convenient to carry.

The fact that product knowledge and judgment was not required made these roles tailor-made for teenagers, who cost a lot less to employ than an experienced grocer would demand in earnings. The speed and ease of shopping (and lack of waiting) also made them attractive in the new convenience-first environment. This also permitted a sharp rise in the variety of products on offer, so they were soon outperforming grocery stores on almost every front.

Fast Food

Fast food had been a ‘coming thing’ since 1916, or perhaps 1912, or maybe 1902, or even 1896 – but it didn’t really arrive until the first White Castle in 1921 or the first McDonald Brothers restaurants in the 1940s. And the milk bars of the 1950s swamped both – for a while, at least.

Being served food prepared by someone of similar age (and presumably tastes) proved a powerful marketing tool, but not a recognized one – teens were hired because they had to be paid less. Anything else was just a bonus!

Retail Outlets

A comparatively minor source of teen employment that should not be overlooked is working in the retail outlets that catered to the teen market. These were people who spoke the same language as the customers, with whom those customers could identify, and the marketing benefits were far more strongly recognized (if still not the dominant employment factor).

It’s an interesting question whether or not the teen market would have arisen spontaneously anyway, given the combination of factors that created the employment opportunities for the age group. The more cynical could suggest that, given a subculture (however unidentified) with cash in their pockets, people trying all kinds of methods of extracting that wealth would have arisen, and inevitably, one of them would have stumbled across the magic formula.

I’m not sure of the answer, but I’m completely confident that once stumbled across, the teenage market would be just as thoroughly and permanently embedded into the culture.

Distribution

The final factor that is needed for an economic boom is some method to convey product from maker to potential customer – mass distribution, in other words. This is where the New Deal paid unexpected post-war dividends; rail is constrained in its destination, and expensive to lay; it needs those costs to be amortized (“spread over”) multiple customers over a substantial period of time to recoup those expenses. On top of that, the motive power units were also expensive and took time to earn back the investment – but they were absolutely essential to earning anything from a railroad.

Roads are comparatively cheap (and come in a variety of standards with different price points), can be constructed relatively quickly, create a web or network of destinations, all of which are equally-accessible, and can be used by a basic vehicle that the road-builder doesn’t even need to supply!

While the major cities could be serviced more cheaply by rail, and a subsidiary road transport network, and a few places could be serviced by river traffic, road freight was the obvious solution then, as it largely is now.

Air freight was a restricted choice back then, though unit costs have come down with increasing services; but rising costs have begun to bite, and its my impression that air freight is right on the cusp of becoming less economic than road transit once again, save only internationally.

Okay, that gets me to the 1/3 mark, and about 40 minutes past deadline – which becomes an hour and 40 minutes once I allow for edits, spellchecking, etc. So the decision is made to split this article into three parts….

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media.

That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games.

I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two modern media that I mentioned.

After all, they can proceed from the premise that there is no one-to-one identification between star characters and the audience, permitting producers to put audiences in a privileged position with a flashback sequence, or a prologue sequence.

In the past, I have stolen this leaf out of the TV/Movie playbook to great effect, and have recommended the same to readers here at Campaign Mastery.

I’ve also built entire campaign infrastructures around the concept of “Show, don’t tell”, going so far as to give villains an initial appearance in-campaign purely to establish who they are and what they can do, and discussing the impact on campaign pacing at length.

Today, I’d like to take a fresh look at the whole question of “Show, don’t tell,” offering up some alternative techniques that may not be quite as obvious, and even showing that following the maxim is something that a GM can occasionally get away with not doing – if it’s done properly.

Buckle up, it might be a bumpy ride.

Flashback From Tomorrow

Imagine a crystal ball, a magic item that does nothing but show PCs what the GM wants them to see. What it shows has to be accurate and truthful, mind, but illusions and deceptions are capable of deceiving it, and so are player misinterpretations.

Or perhaps, it’s a one-off – a magic pool or portal that reveals “the past”.

There are two approaches to this technique: the first is to make it an intentional and recurring part of the plot structure within your campaign, and perhaps an entire phase of the campaign might be dedicated to obtaining the item.

The second is to have it be only intermittently available, or available regularly but with a severe cost attached (name me a mage who is prepared to sacrifice a point of INT to power the device, even occasionally), or as a singular one-off. Heck, you could even have a Deity drop by just to show the PCs what they need to know (for plot purposes), so long as you can provide a reasonable in-game justification for them doing so (“I’ve a substantial bet riding on this…”)

I actually got this idea from a Superman comic that I must have read back in the 60s or 70s – Supes heads back in time because, while their game rules won’t permit him to change history, they will permit him to observe it.

Narrative shifts to third person

So you have an eyewitness, or someone who has been able to reconstruct the events (even if only theoretically) who is an excellent storyteller, start to relate the story, but after an introductory paragraph or two, you throw in, “so clearly does [X] describe the scene that you can almost imagine you are there…”.

You then shift to a third person narrative, and start off by mentioning a sensory impression or two that are clearly not visual, but are more visceral, just to lend truth and gravitas to that statement, and describe the past events (complete with errors and distortions) as though the PCs were actually there – even to the point of permitting them to ask questions. They can interact with you, as GM, but not with any participants in the scene.

For fun, there have been a time or two in which a delusional or paranoid NPC has used this technique to give the PCs a front-row seat to moonbeams. Once, the players were not fooled, on a second time, they were completely taken in.

The Prologue Encounter

Once again, this comes in two flavors, the major and the minor.

The minor variant is an encounter added to the plot simply to give a critical character (probably but not necessarily the villain) a foundation.

The major variant is an entire adventure whose sole campaign-level function is to achieve that same end, of providing a foundation for the character in preparation for their role in the ‘main’ adventure.

In terms of building a consistent and comprehensive campaign, this often seems like the perfect solution – you create and display the building blocks and then start assembling them into structures and plotlines. But there are potential drawbacks that have to be considered.

First. the prologue encounter may not unfold as expected, or may go further than expected. This is what happened when I introduced Mortus in my superhero campaign – I had planned a short-term solution that would leave him around as a building block, but the players rejected that because it was only a short-term solution and found a more difficult solution that actually resolved the character’s main driving plotline. The resulting character is still floating around out there, and will still be able to participate in the main plot when it comes around, but in a significantly-different role – essentially, as an ally, and not an enemy. As explained at the time, I could have blocked their solution, but had no good reasons to do so, and realized (before it was too late) that the main plotline could survive the change – and so accepted the change in campaign plan.

But that was all fortuitous – it could just as easily have meant that the character could not play his part in the big picture that I intended to paint, and that would have placed the campaign in a far more precarious position. It would have left me with a difficult choice: block PC agency in an unreasonable way, or find a replacement for that building block, one that was inevitably going to be second-rate because this character had been deliberately designed to tick all the right boxes.

Second, the prologue may go beyond foreshadowing into ‘giving the game away’. Surprises and plot twists are an integral part of any campaign, and the suspense from not knowing what is going to happen is essential. The better a prologue establishes a character, the more that suspense can be undermined, especially once imaginative players start speculating. You can evade that problem by having the PCs present for only part of the ‘origin story’ of the building block, with a key transformative experience taking place behind the curtain in between character appearances – but you can pull that trick only so often before it becomes predictable and boring, and starts to undermine your credibility, and the credibility of the prologue, defeating the entire point of its existence.

Third, there is a pronounced impact on campaign pacing. Creating building blocks takes time, and its time in which the players can feel that they are simply treading water and not getting anywhere. If you need a slowdown in the pacing, that can be fine – for a little while. But it does need to be counterbalanced by definite and visible progress in other areas, and that won’t happen by accident. It can even reach the point where you need to introduce problems for the PCs to solve that are intended to play no part in the main campaign plotline, simply so that they have a sense of achieving something along the way. But that stretches a campaign out, too.

Finally, what do you do if the prologue adventure, and the character at its heart, falls flat? It’s happened to all of us from time to time. If their one-and-only appearance were to be in the main plotline which justifies their existence within the campaign, you can get away with this, though the results will be less than optimal; if it happens in a prologue, you may be forewarned in time to do something about the problem, but if your solution fails, the ultimate plotline – the important bit – will suffer.

So this is far from an absolute solution.

Tell without Show

Until this week, I never considered this a viable option. But here’s the thing: an RPG is not a TV show or a Movie or a book; it’s a medium that in some respects resembles those, but in other ways, is absolutely unique.

The players are used to information coming from the GM. Whether he puts that information into an interactive format like an encounter, or pretends to be someone else providing the information in a dialogue, or simple narrates the relevant backstory (assuming one of the PCs knows it), it still boils down to the GM talking and the PCs listening – at a metagame level.

As much as that can be seen as a handicap, a barrier to immersion, it can also be a liberating realization.

Simple Foreshadowing

Another technique that can be used is to foreshadow without demonstration.

The PCs come across a village whose central shrine or temple has exploded. No explanation given. No backstory, no warnings, no prophecies, nothing. They are asked to help out in relief efforts, they rescue a trapped NPC and make a quick side-trip to a neighboring hamlet to buy supplies, they maybe beat off an attack by bandits who want to take advantage of the situation, and they are on their way.

In the next major town, the same thing has happened, but relief efforts are well in hand. They haven’t heard about the first incident though, and think this is purely a local problem.

This primes the PCs for an encounter / adventure that confronts the agency responsible,and introduces that agency through its handiwork,without it ever making a direct appearance until the Main Event. It’s very old-school in a number of ways.

This approach definitely has it’s virtues, but it also comes with significant shortcomings. It’s relatively superficial, and that can be at odds with the importance to the campaign that the GM attaches to the villain. It can undermine verisimilitude. It applies a blowtorch to campaign pacing, turning it up to 11. And it bets the farm on the integrity of concept and the excellence of realization of the villain in question.

While it’s undoubtedly the easiest technique to employ, it’s quite possibly the hardest technique to do well.

Techniques in context

How does one select amongst the different techniques? Well, my general philosophy is always to base the decision on the pacing desired, but to mix it up. It’s better, in terms of realism, to slow the campaign a little and then have it lurch forward, only to slow again. All possible techniques are on the table, and the decision should be based on whatever is best for the campaign at that point in time.

Always take into account the player response – if they are expecting to make a big step forward in terms of the overall plotline, any slowing will only frustrate them. It’s better in this situation to give them a step forward and then a more significant slowdown – achieving the same overall pacing while giving them time to come to terms with the changes in circumstances.

The way you handle any given encounter will therefore vary significantly depending on when in the campaign it takes place – your pacing needs will be different in the start than in the middle, or the end.

Some plotlines / encounters / building blocks lend themselves more strongly to one particular technique than another, and that forces a choice on the GM: tolerate or integrate the incompatible pacing element, schedule the encounter for a time when the pacing element is compatible with the overall plan, or force the introduction into a non-optimal pattern that fits the overall campaign better at that time.

I’ve often said that there is an artistry to campaign planning that is poorly understood and under-appreciated, especially by those who do little or no planning. When you have multiple options, the choice between them can be sometimes made on logical grounds, but sometimes it will come down to instinct; put hundreds or thousands of such decisions together and you end up with a distinctly different ‘picture’. What is highlighted and what is hidden in shadows?

It Doesn’t End There: Elements Of Mysteries

Initially, that’s where I intended to end this article – a nice, snappy couple of thousand words, done and dusted. But then I happened to watch an episode of a TV Crime procedural (which one doesn’t matter), and was struck by the similarity between the problems faced by the RPG GM and those of the director of such a TV episode.

They often don’t have the luxury of lengthy prologues – indeed, some formats stipulate no prologues at all (and others stipulate no flashbacks, which are essentially ‘a prologue shifted to later in time’ in this context). They have critical information being delivered by a character telling, not showing. Those may not be the only similarities, but they are enough to be going on with, for now, because it means that the solutions employed by the TV shows may have validity when applied to an RPG.

Anatomy Of A Mystery Plot

Before getting into that, though, I think that a little homework is in order – a different way of looking at the components of a mystery plot that might be useful both to readers and to the analysis of the TV Detective solutions.

Above, we have a quick infographic that I threw together this morning that – properly analyzed – tells you almost everything you need to know about the successful execution of a mystery plot in an RPG.

Solution Layer

We start on the left-hand side, where layers of content are described. The second layer is the primary plot – it could be called the “Mystery Layer” but the mystery itself is frequently less important than the solution, so I chose “Solution Layer” instead.

Action Layer

On top of that, there is the “Action Layer”. Characters need to “do” something in the course of the plot, in fact, every PC should have some active role to play in addition to contributions to the solution of the mystery.

Personality Layer

On the other side is the Personality Layer, which comprises both reactions by the characters participating to events and circumstances (and the opportunity to express same), and personality / character -driven content that is completely unrelated to the mystery.

Note that this content often cherry-picks aspects of the personality of the character, and that’s fine; no-one expects the entire personality to be on-show.

Background Layer

At the bottom, appropriately, is the most fundamental layer of them all – the background layer, which consists of any layers of the game world or its past (including past events surrounding the PCs) that other layers reference. As with the personality layer, content from this layer referenced during the adventure is heavily cherry-picked, and should only contain material that is, or appears, relevant to the plot or the character aspects on display.

Connective Sub-layers

These layers are all bound together by a web of connective sub-layers, usually implied rather than stated outright (usually because the connections are obvious at the time). If a character is distrustful of charity (personality layer) and this drives his behavior in the plot (solution layer), the association – the relevance – between the two is self-evident. And any history that explains that character trait is similarly bound to the other two datums by obvious connections.

The Solution Layer is dissected to the right.

Conundrum

Starting from the bottom, we have the initial conundrum – the puzzle or mystery that is to drive the plotline. There is usually only one of these, but there can be exceptions to that rule. As soon as you introduce a second one, though, the players will immediately suspect a hidden connection between the two, and will strive mightily to force the solution into a mold that creates such a connection, even if none actually exists.

Leads and Investigations

That initial mystery leads to some preliminary leads, and the investigation of same. These, in turn, lead to more substantial leads, the investigation of which leads to actual pieces of the solution. In most Detective shows, these have to be provable in court; and there can be no illegalities along the way; these constraints are an opposition force as significant as the actual target of the investigation.

Solution Pieces

These are the provable facts that bind one solution to the initial conundrum together, and only one solution. Any facts that dispute that solution have been explained away, leaving a proven solution, however unlikely that solution may have initially appeared.

Outlining a Mystery

There’s a reason Detective TV shows are called “Police Procedurals” – they are as much or more about the process of following a lead to a piece of the solution as about anything else.

The trick is making those procedures and processes interesting, even if they lead to dead ends, despite their being repeated every – single – time in every – single – episode.

There are four components to such investigations – there’s the starting point, the circumstances, the technique, and the outcome.

The Starting Point

NCIS is great for starting points that are unusual or distinctive enough to create interest that can be sustained through the course of an investigation. The more unusual or impossible the starting point, the more interesting the mystery. That’s the whole reason that locked room mysteries are an ongoing sub-genre of mystery!

The Circumstances

No investigation takes place in isolation – they all happen somewhere, and often involve interactions with the people who populate that somewhere. On top of that, the method of investigation can often be dictated by the circumstances, and may involve the potential for random encounters with the public, and those can be made more ‘entertaining’ at the GM’s whim.

I love dropping localities into my campaigns where (by the standards of the campaign) everyone is a ‘weirdo’ in some way or another. Whenever a plotline or an investigation leads into that locality, it’s an open license to have fun with it.

And sometimes, those plot threads can be significant, too.

The Technique

I commented above that the nature of the circumstances can often dictate the investigative technique, and that’s true, up to a point. Beyond that point, the entire choice of technique belongs to the PCs; the GM has no say in it.

This can pose a problem insofar as the PCs choose a technique that doesn’t lead to the desired (from a plot perspective) outcome. The GM has two basic options when this happens – he can compound up some plot thread that takes the PCs to the outcome desired by some indirect route; or he can use die rolls to lead the PCs to an alternate technique.

The latter is rarely, if ever, the best choice. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, though.

This problem usually results from the players either having some fixed notion of what they ultimate solution is going to be and shaping their investigation to suit, or from the players failing to think of the more appropriate technique (or dismissing the appropriate technique when they shouldn’t).

Recognizing the cause is important; if the first, confirmation bias can set in if the GM goes along with the ‘preliminary theory’ of the players. If the latter, then this isn’t an issue, but time pressure can be (under some circumstances). The decision of what to do about this choice of technique has to derive from the cause, and the urgency of implementing that decision is also dictated by its origins.

The Outcome

Finally, even a straightforward procedural step (perhaps dressed up by interactions with an interesting and colorful NPC – “circumstances” again) is forgiven if the outcome of the investigation is interesting enough.

As a general rule of thumb, the more boring the outcome is going to be, the more effort I put into dressing up the circumstances or injecting something “fun” into the mix – just to sustain interest in the plot.

Ideally, the outcome will be the most significant element, followed by the investigative process, followed by either of the other elements.

Preliminary Step

In creating a mystery plotline, the GM usually has the initial conundrum and the solution, and needs to plot a pathway that leads from start to finish in an interesting way. The fact that you don’t need to lead to the final answer all in one hit, just to a piece of that solution makes things easier.

That solution must include any attempt to cover-up their guilt or the crime by the guilty party or by a third party (and why, in that case) and how that obstruction can be overcome.

The first step is to spell out these key pieces of the solution, and the initial conundrum.

Investigation Structure

I next list the preliminary leads – the things that the characters will know they can investigate purely from the initial conundrum and any relevant background.

I order these in the sequence that they seem most likely to be followed up on by the PCs, allowing for the possibility of them splitting up to tackle the problem in multiple directions at once.

I then list, separately, the pieces of the final solution – who did what, to whom, when, how, and why, and why this wasn’t obvious from the start.

This permits me to construct sequences – a preliminary lead to a substantial lead to a piece of the solution. I continue until either every piece of the solution has been achieved, or I run out of preliminary leads.

Those sequences are often someone telling a PC something, and that means that “Show, Don’t Tell” is engaged as an operative principle. So now is the time to select an appropriate technique to impart the information.

There’s a song from the 1970s that just came up on my playlist that’s relevant: The Kursaal Flyers Little Does She Know, the chorus of which goes:

“Little does she know
That I know
That she knows
That she’s cheating on me.”

Think about that for a moment. There’s an action (cheating) with a reaction (she knows) that the singer has observed. That reaction is a mystery, one that he has solved by deducing the cause, and observing the behavior of the cheating partner. It’s not big enough or complicated enough to be an RPG plotline on its own, but as a connection from preliminary lead through investigation to solution, it’s a valid example of the sort of plot thread that binds the elements of investigating a mystery together.

If I have solution pieces left over

If this happens, then I need more leads. There are three possible sources: spin-offs from other leads, unrelated sources coming forward, or active developments.

Spin-offs from other leads

This is often the best source to employ, because it creates a plausible coincidence. Too often, coincidence is not plausible in an RPG or literary construct, however realistic it might be.

As a consequence, there is often a fatalistic element to RPGs in which everyone and everything has a purpose or a destiny.

Once the players decide that’s the case, it doesn’t matter what the GM does, he will be perceived as running a plot train in service of that purpose or destiny (I know, I’ve been there).

So the injection of a little obvious coincidence like this helps balance the ‘books’ and avoid that problem.

Unrelated Sources coming forward

Someone goes to the media or the police or whoever and makes a statement that deepens the mystery or complicates the circumstances, but inherently creates new preliminary leads for the investigators to follow.

This is the other side of ‘plausible coincidence’ – a coincidence of timing that (at least initially) can be viewed as working against the investigators but which ultimately leads to the solution to the mystery.

One such preliminary lead is always “How do they know what they claim to know?” and another is “Is what they claim to know accurate?” Those two are always part of such package deals. “How do they know [the victim] / [the accused]” is often a third – and those are all on top of anything they actually have to say.

Active Developments

Finally, it’s all too common to have criminals who just sit pat during an investigation and wait to get caught.

No, no, no! The environment and investigation should be dynamic and changing as the plot unfolds. At the very least, the criminals should try to keep tabs on the status of the investigation (‘Columbo’ uses this all the time – the ‘most helpful’ person is usually the criminal, being helpful so as to keep themselves close to the investigation).

But they should also undertake a clean-up of loose ends, and take advantage of any opportunity to obscure their involvement.

All of these activities have the potential to open up new leads for the investigators to follow. The most likely suspects after the most helpful NPCs are always those doing the most to obstruct the investigation, or someone connected to them.

By the time I have gone through the leads that I already have listed and added any secondary ones that seem interesting or reasonable, the mystery can often swing from having insufficient leads to having too many!

If I have preliminary leads left over

There are two courses of action to take with respect to excess preliminary leads: first, have them be dead ends, or second, use them as alternate paths to substantial leads or even other preliminary leads.

I always prefer the latter, because it means that there’s an alternative set of pathways for the PCs to follow without my resorting to “Make an INT Roll” (or, in the Heroes system, a “Deduction” roll) in order to get a clue that the PC should be able to see, but that the player can’t.

An alternative to that “Make A Roll” is to have an NPC associated with the PCs make a suggestion, or puncture an invalid assumption that is blocking the solution path from the player’s vision. But I’m also careful to have some of these lead to dead ends, so that the players never treat NPC pronouncements as “Ex Cathedra” pronouncements.

Action Sequences

Next, I go through the investigation and look for action sequences that I can insert. Most of these don’t have to happen; some of them can provide the link between ‘preliminary leads’ and ‘substantial leads’. I make sure that every PC has some occasion when they have to either do something or make some important decision, and the ramifications.

Personality Layer

There are two different aspects of the personality layer of plot to take into account. The first is personal plotlines, and the second is personality reactions.

Personal Plotlines

These are less common in fantasy campaigns, but not unheard of even there. If you have PC plotlines that are entirely separate from those of the collective group, then you should look to advance one for each PC in the course of the adventure. That frequently means that the start or finish of the adventure, but I look hard for opportunities to break out of that restriction.

A status check for the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club is illustrative:

• Dr Hawke: is renovating a disused hospital in New York into a Sanatorium, while dodging attempts by the City’s Coroner to appoint Hawke as his successor, and managing his relationship with Honeydew Halliday, an NPC.
• Steffan Bednarczic: raising his daughter, Anya, trying to keep her out of trouble, while navigating his relationship with Melanie Chen (an NPC) and her family while keeping a low profile. Other members of the Club have ‘adopted’ Anya and are training her in various disciplines, and one is pushing her to try out for the Olympic Pistol team, she’s so good a shot.
• Fr O’Malley: Beset by impending changes in his circumstances as the New York archbishop hands the diocese formerly serviced by O’Malley and his recently-deceased friend Fr Donelly over to a new priest, a firebrand named Fr Alvarez, while engaging in the lives of his regular parishioners and supporting the charities that help them.

There’s one other, but the player hasn’t been in contact for a year now, so we’re preparing to write them out of the ongoing campaign.

Personality Reactions

It’s so much easier with the Hero System because the things that a character cares about are spelled out by the owner during character construction. But, even without that, a GM can learn a lot by observation of the PCs and listening to the players talk about them.

There are always going to be plot developments and circumstances and interactions that a character cares more about than others – things that will push one or more of their ‘buttons’, causing them to become more engaged and enmeshed in the plot.

I go over everything that I have in the plot so far and look for such triggers, and what impact they might have. I also look for circumstances that might frustrate the player (more than the character) and give them an opportunity to vent or calm down, as necessary.

Background Layer

Most of the background should already be available but there’s always something that needs more detail because it’s appearing for the first time in this adventure and is relevant to one of the cast of NPCs involved in the mystery.

Often, the biggest problem is distilling everything that you could talk about into just those background elements that you need to impart, or to remind the players of. Hint: You can almost always be more ruthless than your first instincts when culling irrelevancies.

A logical topology

The results are a logical topology, a view of the structure of the adventure. There’s always a temptation to translate that into a sequential structure, which is easier to play because it simply runs from A to B to C, but your players will often void any such script.

Thus, while you can and should package isolated elements together so that you can run them efficiently, with sufficient color and personality, but let the players decide how they are going to navigate the maze.

Wrap-up

It seems that I’ve imparted most of the tips that I’ve gleaned from Police Procedurals as I’ve traveled through this topological perspective on mysteries. That’s fine, and a consequence of the relatively unstructured approach taken to this article.

A mystery adventure is like a campaign in miniature; all the elements of a campaign are present, like timing, and sequence, and player agency, and an awareness of pacing and how to manipulate it.

That means that campaigns are good for practicing the structural processes that you need to employ for the creation of a satisfying mystery, and a mystery plotline can be a useful small-scale rehearsal for the processes that you need to construct a successful campaign.

So pay particular attention to the problems and solutions that you encounter in running mystery plotlines, and in particular to how the different techniques of “Show, Don’t Tell” impact the pace, and you’ll get better at creating (and running) both adventures of this type and campaigns overall!

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

A word of advice: Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

Welcome & General Introduction

I’ve said it before: With each passing entry in the series, the more familiar the ground becomes, the more like what we experience every day.

Think about that for a moment – it means that the building blocks of our current society are mostly in place already, and we’re just arranging the stack in the right shape. Historians like to stress the changes and highlight the differences that distinguish one era from another so that those characteristics become identifiable traits, and that’s perfectly valid in terms of creating awareness of history – but I think this relationship of relatability gets somewhat lost in the process.

These eras are more alike than they are different. One small change replicated a million times for several million families becomes a huge change in terms of influence, but it’s still just a different shade of the same essential picture.

Another consequence is that there is no consensus on where dividing lines should be drawn – they blend into one another and overlap and it’s consequently easy to group them this way or that. This played a notable part when it came to laying out this part of the series – my initial thought (back before I started) was that the Automobile was the narrative thread that tied everything together, but when it came to the actual writing, the spread of electrical power became more and more significant, even to the point of usurping the role of dominant theme.

And that had consequences for the structure of the series. There was so much to say on various subjects that I’ve had to split what was going to be one article into two.

From A Writing Perspective

As originally conceived, this era would start with the early automobile, continue through mass production, head into World War I, the roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and then emerge out the other side through the New Deal.

Well, by the time I had all that laid out, I had 47 sections and sub-sections, and I know that some of them will grow and need to be subdivided, and that there will be the occasional sidebar along the way – I know I will need to do one on Radium, for example, and another or Lead Poisoning, and one on home-grown electricians. One on the periodic table might sneak in, too.

It’s too much. So I’ve split it roughly equally in two. It means that this article will end kind of abruptly, only to pick up exactly where it left off, next week.

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

Along the way, a number of important principles have been established.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of what wealth even is, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – that economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contain the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

The Industrial Era II: The Age Of Electrification & Motoring

Electrification may, perhaps, be said to have begun in the latter days of the age of steam, but it didn’t come to full flower until this time period (the same thing happens with aviation between this era and the next). For that reason, many view Motoring as the definitive feature of this era, and the personal independence that it fostered (though that would not fully flower in some respects until the 1950s!)

In many respects, at least in its first half, this era is characterized by the development of these two industrial phenomena and their consequent impacts.

Three Trends

There are three trends in particular that I want to highlight as functional themes for the era.

Government vs Individual

Motoring, and the motor vehicles that make it possible, is symbolic of the individual being at liberty to go where he will, when he will, to a far greater extent than had ever before been possible. This sense of independence translated into many other spheres of activity, and the success of the suffrage movement (which was spreading like wildfire in this time period) created the perception, perhaps for the first time, that governments were answerable to the common people. Government actions were frequently seen through the filter of personal inconvenience and personal responsibility, and were frequently seen as government overreach.

This was also the era of the rise of the FBI and it’s claims to early fame under the stewardship of the controversial J Edgar Hoover; again, there is the theme of government vs the individual, carried to extremes and with a criminal twist.

This simply wasn’t part of the age of steam; government had been seen as protecting and nurturing the citizenry to the collective benefit of all, and within the boundaries of birth and society, how far one advanced was a function of intellect, networking, and conscience (or the lack thereof).

This only makes it more interesting to look at what happened to the most economically successful individuals of that prior age, the robber barons. Now in their declining years, they often became concerned with their footprints in history and how they would be perceived by future generations; perhaps belatedly, they seemed to grow consciences and become benevolent philanthropists. Perhaps this was the result of greater scrutiny and judgment of them as individuals rather than a social class which had intrinsically permitted the taking of certain liberties.

Or perhaps they were concerned by the changing social standards and the prospect of their past deeds being judged against the new standards of what was tolerable. Avoiding this danger demanded the rise of the “faceless corporation” and economic entities that were no longer characterized by a single individual as focal point. There were a few holdouts against this trend, as individuals seized the opportunity to become household names through deeds of adventure and bravery, who are remembered to this day – not always in a positive light.

Industry vs Unions (of individuals)

Individuals also had greater economic freedom than ever before, thanks to improvements in manufacturing and the consequent decline in price of mass-produced commodities. Individuals who were becoming accustomed to independence and oversight of their own activities, employed in their hundreds or thousands in harsh working conditions – the rise of unions as a collective voice was inevitable.

This created a new dynamic, that of the individual worker vs the industry or the factory owner. Often, it was seen as the role of government to function as powerbroker and umpire in the resulting confrontations, and it is this new social oversight function (and the way it differs from the perception of government listed in the previous section) that makes this more than simply another manifestation of the rise of the individual.

Of course, this became a focal point for political differences almost immediately; progressives became aligned with worker’s rights, while conservatives backed the business interests. Collectivism vs Big Business would not be resolved in this era; in fact, it’s still a hot-button issue today, more than a century after this era began.

The Growth Of Technology

The third theme to play out throughout this era was the rise of science. It wasn’t called that during the age of steam; back then, it was philosophy, or perhaps, natural philosophy. The transition didn’t happen overnight, but well before the end of this era, it was complete.

More significantly, science created technology, and technology empowered the people. Another term sometimes used for this era (and it’s more relevant to some genres of RPG than others) is “The Age Of Wonders”. There was a universal optimism for technology and what it could make possible.

Some of these wonders would take decades to mature and have their full impact on society; others would fade away as horrifying realities were uncovered. In the case of the former, I will defer doing much more than mentioning them until the era in which they become significant (Aviation, for example), but the seeds are laid in this time. The latter, on the other hand, are stories that will have to at least be touched on as the article progresses.

These three themes will pop up repeatedly in the course of these discussions, so much so that I will avoid mentioning them as much as possible; to do otherwise would make the contents dreadfully repetitive. So, I’m alerting readers now to remain alert to their relevance while we proceed.

Electrification

These days, electricity is so ubiquitous that it seems to have materialized in full bloom, like the flipping of a light switch. It wasn’t so.

“The commercial distribution of electricity started in 1882 when electricity was produced for electric lighting. In the 1880s and 1890s, growing economic and safety concerns lead to the regulation of the industry.

In 1878, in the United States, Thomas Edison developed and sold a commercially viable replacement for gas lighting and heating using locally generated and distributed direct current electricity.

Robert Hammond, in December 1881, demonstrated the new electric light in the Sussex town of Brighton in the UK for a trial period. The ensuing success of this installation enabled Hammond to put this venture on both a commercial and legal footing, as a number of shop owners wanted to use the new electric light.

— Wikipedia, Electric Power Industry

The first central station providing public power is believed to be one at Godalming, Surrey, U.K. autumn 1881. The system was proposed after the town failed to reach an agreement on the rate charged by the gas company, so the town council decided to use electricity. The system lit up arc lamps on the main streets and incandescent lamps on a few side streets with hydroelectric power. By 1882 between 8 and 10 households were connected, with a total of 57 lights. The system was not a commercial success and the town reverted to gas.

— Wikipedia, Electrification

In 1882, Edison launched generators in both London and New York. The big problem was that he was using Direct Current (which was a much simpler technology than Alternating Current) and it has massive inefficiencies and power losses over distance – so customers had to be situated close to the generators. Edison seriously proposed generators every couple of city blocks in NYC – generators that his company would sell, install, and maintain..

Westinghouse and others solved the problems of alternating current, and after a bitter fight with Edison (sometimes referred to as The War Of The Currents, the AC system became standard. The benefits of this change has made this the universal choice all over the world, though early DC systems would linger here and there – Helsinki had a DC system until the 1940s, and the last DC generator servicing NYC wasn’t shut down until 2007.

Those advantages come down to a far lower transmission loss over distance, and the ability to convey high-voltage current (still more efficient) and ‘step it down’ locally using transformers. This made it practical to have large, efficient power generators that were located great distances from the customer and became far more affordable through economies of scale.

Mergers reduced competition between companies, including the merger of Edison Electric with their largest competitor, Thomson-Houston, forming General Electric in 1892. Edison Electric’s merger with their chief alternating current rival brought an end to the war of the currents and created a new company that now controlled three quarters of the US electrical business.

Westinghouse won the bid to supply electrical power for the World’s Colombian Exposition in 1893 and won the major part of the contract to build Niagara Falls hydroelectric project later that year (partially splitting the contract with General Electric).

— Wikipedia, War Of The Currents

This generator wasn’t the first to be powered by the falls, but its completion in 1895 marks the boundary between this era and that of the past.

In 1938, the UK set up their National Power Grid, making electrical power of a uniform standard available throughout the country.

In the United States it became a national objective after the power crisis during the summer of 1918 in the midst of World War I to consolidate supply. In 1934 the Public Utility Holding Company Act recognized electric utilities as public goods of importance along with gas, water, and telephone companies and thereby were given outlined restrictions and regulatory oversight of their operations

The electrification of households in Europe and North America began in the early 20th century in major cities and in areas served by electric railways and increased rapidly until about 1930 when 70% of households were electrified in the U.S.

Rural areas were electrified first in Europe, and in the U.S. the Rural Electric Administration, established in 1935 brought electrification to rural areas.

— Wikipedia, Electrification

By 1930, nearly nine in 10 urban and non-farm rural homes had access to electricity, but only about one in 10 farms did. It wasn’t that farmers had no use for electricity. In 1923, the National Electric Light Association, a trade organization of electric companies, conducted a study in Red Wing, Minnesota, where a handful of farms were given access to electricity and electric appliances. Those households reported significantly higher productivity and happiness.

In May 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) “to initiate, formulate, administer, and supervise a program of approved projects with respect to the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric energy in rural areas.” The REA was part of the suite of public works projects under the New Deal designed to counteract the Great Depression. Congress set aside $100 million ($1.88 billion in 2020 dollars) for the new agency, enabling it to make loans to finance the construction of electricity generation and transmission to rural areas.

“When you read books from that era, one of the things people always talk about is how rural communities can solve different problems by forming a co-op,” says Price Fishback, an economic historian at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on New Deal programs. “Every county had several co-ops of varying sizes.”

A co-op is an organization that is collectively owned by its members, making them both customers and shareholders … but there were few examples of co-ops designed to distribute electricity – only 33 electric co-ops existed in the United States in 1930.

Once co-ops organized and drafted a proposal, they could borrow at low interest from the REA (between 2 percent and 3 percent) to finance construction of transmission lines and to pay for wiring and appliances for farms and homes.

“The REA hired engineers to help design new ways to build the lines,” says Kitchens. Rural electric customers required a different type of load than urban customers, allowing engineers to use single-phase wires and space utility poles farther apart. The REA was also able to make bulk purchases for materials and standardize construction practices to further reduce the per-mile costs. These techniques allowed the REA to reduce the cost of laying rural power lines to an average of less than $825 per mile by the end of the 1930s — a significant drop from the roughly $2,000 per mile utilities had previously estimated.

Progress on electrification temporarily slowed with the outbreak of World War II, but by the end of the war, roughly half of the farms in America had power. After another decade, farms had nearly caught up to cities in access to electricity.

— Econ Focus, Electrifying Rural America

These landmark events show that it took about 40 years for electrification to become widespread. World War 2 then intervened, but even that only slowed the spread. By 1955, most places in the US and western Europe had access to mains power.

This map shows the spread of electrification, defined as public access to mains power as of 2017: But even into the 2020s, there are a few remote communities even in England that are not yet electrified.

This variability makes it hard to draw a dividing line between this era and the next, but – since I’m making the rules of this series and have no need to be consistent – I’m going to define the end of this period as the late 1930s, while the next era – defined by the rise of fascism – will actually overlap with this one.

Automobiles

I once saw a Top Gear segment in which the hosts (well, two of them) tried to identify the first automobile to have a controls arrangement that was recognizably the same as the ubiquitous and global arrangement found today – power under the right foot, clutch, brake, steering wheel, and maybe gear lever. They ended up with a Renault as I recall, having tried out three or four forerunners.

The history of the automobile is as rich and complex a subject as you will ever find, stalked by Characters and Personalities. But that’s not actually what we’re here for; what interests us is the social impact of cars, and the economic impact of road transport.

Socially, the automobile represented freedom and mobility far in excess of what could be provided by horse and carriage. Trains can only go where the tracks lead, and laying track is expensive and manpower-intensive work. Once the track is laid, train is far more efficient for freight and mass-transit – but only to the places where the train stops.

A recurring theme in the journey through Arkansas that the PCs in my superhero campaign have been undertaking lately is the number of times a community’s fortunes have ridden on the back of the rail line. They represent prosperity and growth and industry, and should they close or simply cease stopping somewhere, so those things all vanish like soap bubbles popping. In any sort of rural or semi-urban landscape, railroads are life, and deadly serious.

All that changes when a community reaches a certain size of urban center. Rail can carry masses of produce and products to a central rail yard, but distribution from there requires something else – the truck. The subways are busy carrying people around, and wouldn’t solve the door-to-door need of businesses; road freight is the only option. Without them, and their carrying capacity and speed, horse and cart is necessary, and a truck can haul eight times as much in a trip if not more. And that makes the truck cheaper to operate, and that in turn can make the difference between a business that is growing and prospering, and one that is floundering and failing.

Mass Production

But, in a way, the produce and products needed to fill that truck are only possible because of the automobile, more specifically, due to mass production, famously introduced by Henry Ford. Except that this is an urban myth – Ford adopted the techniques and made them famous, and even led journalists to coin the term, but he was riding the crest of a wave with much earlier origins.

Some mass production techniques, such as standardized sizes and production lines, predate the Industrial Revolution by many centuries; however, it was not until the introduction of machine tools and techniques to produce interchangeable parts were developed in the mid-19th century that modern mass production was possible.

In the Industrial Revolution, simple mass production techniques were used at the Portsmouth Block Mills in England to make ships’ pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. It was achieved in 1803 by Marc Isambard Brunel in cooperation with Henry Maudslay under the management of Sir Samuel Bentham. The first unmistakable examples of manufacturing operations carefully designed to reduce production costs by specialized labor and the use of machines appeared in the 18th century in England.

Prerequisites for the wide use of mass production were interchangeable parts, machine tools and power, especially in the form of electricity.

— Wikipedia, Mass Production

One of the pioneers in the field, working for Ford, was Frederick Winslow Taylor (who most people have never heard of). In 1908 Taylor was awarded the Dewar Trophy for creating interchangeable mass-produced precision engine parts, Henry Ford downplayed the role of Taylorism in the development of mass production at his company, but Taylor’s techniques were used to perform time studies and experiments to mechanize factory processes by Ford management, focusing on minimizing worker movements. The difference was that while Taylor focused mostly on efficiency of the worker, Ford also substituted for labor by using machines, thoughtfully arranged, wherever possible, regarding the worker as a machine operator and part of a larger process, rather than a processing unit in their own right.

Mass production makes it possible to make thousands of X in the time that it used to take a skilled worker to make one X, or more. That this is accomplished by a hundred or more workers is not all that relevant, because of the earning differential between the master craftsman and the pay scale of a (relatively) unskilled worker – those 100+ workers actually cost no more, or even less, than the single expert. And that means that the manufacturing cost of X drops more than 1,000-fold – say, from $400 to $0.40¢. Distribution might have added another 10¢ to that, advertising and promotion 5¢, profits for various hands in the distribution chain may have doubled the resulting price – but that’s still only $1.10 each to the customer.

I’ll deal with the impact of that reduction on consumers and consumerism a little later. For now, suffice it to say that the things that people already wanted became a LOT cheaper, and many products for which price would have restricted demand sufficiently to make them unviable suddenly became completely affordable.

Sidebar: a brief conversation about Design

The master craftsman was still needed to create prototypes, which engineers then translated into designs and assembly processes. There would still have been quite a lot of variability in the efficiency of the processes – a good engineer could make things possible that an ordinary one couldn’t conceive of, and make the resulting units cheaper at the same time.

Liberated from the need to be practical, designers started to focus on style and form, and this produced whole new schools of design, frequently called ‘movements’.

These ‘movements’ were philosophies of design that influenced everything from furniture to decoration to art to architecture. Art Nouveau was one, and the industrialized minimalism of Bauhaus is another (The Wikipedia page dedicated to the Art Nouveau movement is massive and full of images depicting variations on the style – strongly recommended as a ‘style guide’ to the start of the era).

The Bauhaus movement can similarly be used for cutting-edge designs in the latter part of the era. At the heart of the Bauhaus movement was capturing a sense of modernity and efficiency in design through bends and minimalism, and the success of the movement can be discerned from the fact that office furniture in the Bauhaus style still looks ultra-modern modern today. I can pretty much guarantee that readers have seen the style in use, even if they didn’t recognize that fact at the time.

You don’t have to employ these styles if they don’t fit your campaign world – the key point to emphasize is that mass production makes widespread adoption of A given style inevitable. You can pick any style that seems right to use as your template.

The Price Of Comfort

The Victorian and Edwardian eras are times of great change in the prices and availability of things. Mass production was a massive amplification of this effect, but it was already well underway. Only in more modern times have the true prices of some of the decorative and personal choices become known.

Victorian England, for example, is characterized by a particular shade of green – it was used in wallpaper and paint especially.

Scheele’s Green, also called Schloss Green … was invented in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele. By the end of the 19th century, it had virtually replaced the older green pigments based on copper carbonate. It is a yellowish-green pigment commonly used during the early to mid-19th century in paints as well as being directly incorporated into a variety of products as a colorant.

It began to fall out of favor after the 1860s because of its toxicity and the instability of its color in the presence of sulfides and various chemical pollutants.

The acutely toxic nature of Scheele’s green as well as other arsenic-containing green pigments such as Paris Green may have contributed to the sharp decline in the popularity of the color green in late Victorian society.

— Wikipedia, Scheele’s Green

In fact, there was a range of closely-matching colors that collectively are now referred to as Scheele’s Green – Hex #478800 (RGB 71, 136, 0) is most common, but Hex #3c7a18 (RGB 60,122,24) would also be accepted.

Toxicity

In the 19th century, the toxicity of arsenic compounds was not readily known. Nineteenth-century journals contained reports of children wasting away in bright green rooms, of ladies in green dresses swooning, and of newspaper printers being overcome by arsenic vapors. There is one example of acute poisoning of children attending a Christmas party where dyed candles were burned

— Wikipedia, Scheele’s Green

The lessons from these cautionary tales fell on deaf ears. Until the 20th century, it took a single day’s study to become a licensed electrician in the UK; other jurisdictions may have been more strict, but it was a matter of degree, not of kind.

As a result, there were all sorts of horror stories caused by incorrect wiring causing electrocutions and fires. It is fair to say that these were spread widely by the Gas Companies of the time (who were rivals to the Electricity suppliers) , and may have been exaggerated, but there remains enough proof that it was going on.

An Electrical Issue

In Australia, from the 1920s through to March 2000, there was a magazine called Electronics Australia. In the late 70’s, I came into possession of many issues from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and enjoyed reading a number of the articles, and especially a regular column called (I think) The Serviceman, who was an electrician who repaired televisions and other electrical appliances in the vacuum-tube era and beyond.

This provided me with my first exposure to the divide-and-conquer logic of diagnosing faults, something that has come in useful on any number of occasions, but that’s a side-issue.

One such column talked about an incident at a caravan park in which a borrowed (and badly-wired) extension cord made something – a boat? a fuse box? “live” and fully capable of electrocuting on touch. This was in the 1970s.

Luckily, the device supposedly being powered wouldn’t work in that configuration, and the person reporting the incident was clever enough to work out what the problem was without endangering himself (it transpired that both supply and extension cord were mis-wired; neither error on their own was catastrophic, but the combination was potentially lethal).

The deeper issue was that many caravan parks have (had?) home-wired electrical distribution systems by people who didn’t know half as much as they thought they did.

I’ve never forgotten that material, since (at the time) my father was living in a Caravan Park and my sister and brother-in-law were running it, and I had re-read the article/column just before visiting them, purely by chance. It stuck.

Even today, buildings are being discovered in which the builder either cut corners (and should not have), or otherwise messed up – usually in the act of restoring them. Some were ready to collapse under the wrong combination of circumstances, dangerous to reside in. Standards back at the turn of the century were not as rigorous as they are now, and training even less so, and that’s a dangerous combination.

A Healthy Radioactive Glow

Another area that was poorly regulated until the New Deal was pharmaceuticals. All sorts of snake oil was sold, so much so that the term has become associated with deceptive marketing in general.

Many 19th-century United States and 18th-century European entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil (often mixed with various active and inactive household herbs, spices, drugs, and compounds, but containing no snake-derived substances whatsoever) as ‘snake oil liniment’, making claims about its efficacy as a panacea. Patent medicines that claimed to be a panacea were extremely common from the 18th century until the 20th, particularly among vendors masking addictive drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, alcohol, and opium-based concoctions or elixirs, to be sold at medicine shows as medication or products promoting health.

— Wikipedia, Snake Oil

The discovery of Radium and of Radioactivity in general led, almost immediately, to its incorporation into all sorts of products and services. These days, it’s frequently referred to as Radioactive Quackery, which is defined as any practice that improperly promotes radioactivity as a therapy for illnesses, but I like to extend it to the misuse of radioactivity for convenience.

Radium was added to toothpaste, spa water, drinking water, and foodstuffs. Uranium, especially in its natural oxides form, was used in paint, sand houses, cigarette packets, jewelry, pendants, wristbands, and so on. For me, though, the ultimate example was the portable fluoroscope used for making sure that shoes fitted properly (see Wikipedia — Shoe fitting fluoroscope).

It was the practice of painting watch dials with radium that ultimately brought an end to most of this nonsense (some anti-5G products continue to extol the virtues of radioactivity, however, and there’s the negative-ion craze of a few years ago).

In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed against the United States Radium Corporation by five dying “Radium Girls” – dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters were instructed to lick their brushes to give them a fine point, thereby ingesting radium.[35] Their exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer.

During the litigation, it was determined that the company’s scientists and management had taken considerable precautions to protect themselves from the effects of radiation, but it did not seem to protect their employees. Additionally, for several years the companies had attempted to cover up the effects and avoid liability by insisting that the Radium Girls were instead suffering from syphilis. This complete disregard for employee welfare had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.

As a result of the lawsuit, the adverse effects of radioactivity became widely known, and radium-dial painters were instructed in proper safety precautions and provided with protective gear. In particular, dial painters no longer licked paint brushes to shape them.. Radium was still used in dials as late as the 1960s, but there were no further injuries to dial painters. This highlighted that the harm to the Radium Girls could easily have been avoided.

— Wikipedia, Radium / Luminescent Paint

Remember what i said about warnings falling on dead ears?

In the U.S., nasal radium irradiation was also administered to children to prevent middle-ear problems or enlarged tonsils from the late 1940s through the early 1970s.

— Wikipedia, Radium / Commercial Use

The Luxury Standard

Despite these risks, consumers embraced the fact that comfort and even style were now commodities that they could afford. New businesses sprang into existence and were quickly profitable.

One consumer is a flyspeck. A thousand is something significant. An entire target market can make or break a manufacturer, and did, on a number of occasions. Competition between brands could be cut-throat, and manufacturers who risked offending customers – be it with poor service or shoddy goods – frequently paid the price.

There was an immediate impact on the upper end of society. With ordinary people now able to afford what would previously have been symbolic of success and prosperity, new symbolic tokens were needed. Hand-made – complete with imperfections that revealed this fact – became the new “gold standard” for luxury items. Fortunately, we seem to have shed that particular form of vanity at some point, though the attraction of hand-made luxury items remains.

Old Money

Which brings me to the tale of old money and the Robber Barons of the Age Of Steam. These people, and their families, began to turn toward benevolence as a means of reforming their images. Those of a cynical bent might suggest that the fate of the French Aristocracy during the revolution of 1789 had something to do with it, but for me, the gap is too great.

Inequity in social positions through wealth had been around since the landed Gentry of the middle ages, but until now it had been considered commendable, a tribute to the intelligence and business savvy of the entrepreneur.

In many cases, family money had descended through multiple generations, and wealth was long-established. Yet, it was in the Age Of Steam that many nobles lost access to their traditional sources of income and began having to pay for maintenance of their regal mansions and castles out of their own pockets. By the time the Age of Electrification begins, many have been forced to find innovative ways of raising additional funds – like tourism and souvenirs, hosting weddings, and so on.

In some cases, this was not enough, and the only solution was to sell the property to someone else who could do a better job of preserving it. Most found ways of keeping themselves afloat, even if it meant selling off some other lands.

Often, the person doing the purchasing of the larger estates was an individual whose wealth was wholly the product of the Age Of Steam, so this was only a partial redistribution of wealth, and certainly not enough in and of itself to overcome growing resentment on the part of the ordinary citizen. The wealthy had lost their protective halo of social class, and needed to find some other means of justifying their access to a greater level of prosperity.

The answer eventually found was Charity and Benevolence. Funding scholarships, and expansions of Universities, and new Hospital Wings, and the like, became the way to show that you were using the wealth your family had accrued for the benefit of society as a whole.

The Great Depression would further change this social class, but I’ll get to that later.

New Money

There were no shortage of rags-to-riches true-life stories in the late 19th and early 20th century. Someone with an idea could convince others to invest in it, and turn that investment into a fortune.

The great difference between those with this ‘New Money’ and the ‘Old Money’ is that the former had once been of lower social class than the former, no matter what their wealth now was. This gave rise to the trope of the Nouveau Riche (French for ‘new rich’) which started as a derogatory term denoting someone who had acquired wealth in the current generation and, usually, didn’t know how to behave in their new social class as a result.

That this concept is still with us is easily shown – I simply refer the reader to the movie, Caddyshack!

The concept itself dates all the way back to ancient Greece, and also appears in the Roman Empire. So it’s nothing new!

Beyond the original meaning, it has become associated with those who behave as though they had just acquired their wealth, whether they had inherited it or not. Actions such as conspicuous consumption and ‘common’ (vulgar) behavior.

Gaining acceptance within the new social stratum was made intentionally difficult by those already within it, perhaps out of snobbishness, perhaps out of valid criticism of the worst examples of the Nouveau Riche from real life. To achieve it, the newcomers had to be seen to behave like the perfect examples of the entitled upper-class, and even to marry into the ‘right family’.

The foibles and eccentricities which the Old Money could get away with were forbidden to the New Money. But they frequently found ways around the obstacles and roadblocks; for example, if prevented from donating a new wing to a hospital, they might establish a new hospital somewhere else and use their wealth to recruit only the best and brightest, establishing it as a leader in the field of medicine.

It’s going too far to describe this as a game between the two sub-classes, though it often took on childish and comic proportions, as the example above shows. But “I can be more generous than you are” is a valid trope for those who could fairly be accused of being Nouveau Riche.

Unions

I’ve already made a point of the inevitability of Trade Unions given the other social changes taking place, but the history deserves a bit of a mention.

Trade unions in the United Kingdom were first decriminalized under the recommendation of a Royal commission in 1867, which agreed that the establishment of the organizations was to the advantage of both employers and employees. Legalized in 1871, the Trade Union Movement sought to reform socioeconomic conditions for working men in British industries.

— Wikipedia, Trade Unions in the United Kingdom

Initially, following British laws, trade unions in Australia were suppressed, particularly under the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. A trade union or other association could also be regarded as illegal because of being considered a “restraint of trade”.

The British Master and Servant Act 1823, and subsequent updates, were generally regarded as heavily biased towards employers, and designed to discipline employees and repress the “combination” of workers in trade unions. The law required the obedience and loyalty from servants (i.e., workers) to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract, or disobedience, subject to criminal penalties, often with a jail sentence of hard labor; and the calling for strikes was punished as an “aggravated” breach of contract.

Over time though, the position was slowly liberalized and through the British Trade Union Act 1871, alongside the subsequent Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act 1875, trade unions were legitimized.

— Wikipedia, Australian Labour Movement
(note the British spelling)..

Labor unions represent United States workers in many industries recognized under US labor law since the 1935 enactment of the National Labor Relations Act.

National labor unions began to form in the post-Civil War Era. The Knights of Labor emerged as a major force in the late 1880s, but it collapsed because of poor organization, lack of effective leadership, disagreement over goals, and strong opposition from employers and government forces.

The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886 and led by Samuel Gompers until his death in 1924, proved much more durable. It arose as a loose coalition of various local unions. It helped coordinate and support strikes and eventually became a major player in national politics.

— Wikipedia, Labor Unions in the United States
(note the American spelling)..

As the final extract makes clear, just because they were technically illegal, it didn’t stop unions forming; the law simply raised the stakes. The same was true in the other jurisdictions cited, too. After all, if no-one had ever committed a particular illegal act, there would be no law against it!

The rise of unions created an occasionally awkward four-corner dance between workers, unions, employers, and governments. Through the 20th century, there have been two driving forces within politics (occasionally superseded by other issues) – a liberalizing movement seeking to protect workers and amplify worker’s rights, and a conservative element seeking to protect business from unions.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher greatly reduced union powers; in Australia, the same was done by Malcolm Fraser and successive conservative governments.

But neither eviscerated worker’s rights to the same extent as the US, where state-level republicans enacted “Right To Work” legislation, that, despite the name, essentially permits the dismissal of a worker for any reason whatsoever save only members of a few protected classes – you can’t dismiss someone because of their race, for example. But you can dismiss that person because you don’t like the color of their socks. Twenty-eight states have “Right To Work” laws.

Unlike the right to work definition as a human right in international law, U.S. right-to-work laws do not aim to provide a general guarantee of employment to people seeking work but rather guarantee an employee’s right to refrain from paying or being a member of a labor union.

— Wikipedia, Right-to-work Law

The reason these Right-to-work laws have had this effect is by restricting or removing the ability of unions to protest and protect workers affected by unfair dismissal. While the intentions of the laws may be laudable, they frequently combine with other pro-business legislation to prevent regulation of labor practices.

The principle that Federal Law, when applicable, overrides any state law, and the constitutional guarantees in the Bill Of Rights overrules even Federal Law, afforded some protection for workers, despite the local legislation (that’s why the ‘protected classes’ exceptions exist).

Strong workplace protection legislation at a federal level, for example, would be binding on all states whether they agreed with it or not. Lately, some states have been enacting laws that would seem to disregard the Constitutional and Federal regulations, permitting the employment of teenagers in mining operations without adequate protective equipment for example. It seems inevitable that another in the long series of confrontations between Workers and Employers is coming in the near future.

Those confrontations have been taking part since before Unions became legal. Business always believes (correctly) that it can maximize profits if it is freed from regulatory restraint, but also believes that its only responsibility is to the stockholders of the company. Regulators, on the other hand, believe that corporations should have other responsibilities, including fair treatment of the workers who make the business functional, and that employers can’t be trusted to shoulder those additional responsibilities without legal force. That’s the thinking that gives rise to the EPA, amongst other government agencies.

The Boom-and-Bust Cycle

It’s going too far to blame the economic prosperity oscillations conflated in the term “Boom-and-Bust Cycle” on these periodic stouches over restriction and regulation. They don’t cause them; natural chaos in a noisy system does that as underlying trends shape the noise into temporary patterns. But they do make things a lot worse than they otherwise might be.

The Great Depression was caused by the collapse of institutions selling shares to ordinary people without adequate protections for those citizens. Afterwards, FDR wrote many such restrictions and protections into law. Businesses squeaked, but under the circumstances, didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Successive governments weakened those laws and protections as a result of cases put forward by the business community of how much better they could make the economy through this tool or that measure. George W Bush was the President who oversaw the removal of the last of the FDR protections. What happened? The GFC.

Would the GFC have occurred without the removal of those restrictions? Yes. But the practice of companies buying debt – and the potential future repayment of that debt – as a commodity would have been far more restricted, and the failure of one or two institutions after making bad investments would not have threatened the collapse of the entire financial ecosystem. At least, that’s my understanding of events.

Here’s the point: those tensions, those rises and falls of the stock market, those lobbyists pushing for deregulation (or against proposed regulation) and their opposite numbers pushing for tighter regulations, those are intrinsically part of the economic consequences of the electrification of society.

Organized Crime

The [Mafia] organization’s name is derived from the original Mafia or Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, with “American Mafia” originally referring simply to Mafia groups from Sicily operating in the United States, as the organization initially emerged as an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia formed by Italian immigrants in the United States. However, the organization gradually evolved into a separate entity partially independent of the original Mafia in Sicily.

— Wikipedia, American Mafia

The Cosa Nostra weren’t all bad. They settled disputes and prevented oppression by land-owners, acting as Judges and Juries in a time when neither Judges nor Justice could otherwise be attained. But they also committed numerous criminal acts, and facilitated more.

Their central philosophy seems to be that crime is going to happen anyway; and so it needs to be regulated. Not too much from any one victim, nothing from those who deserve or are awarded their protection, and so on. If you accept that philosophic stance, it’s probably a reasonable position to take.

All that changed when Sicilian immigrants came to the US.

The Mafia in the United States emerged in impoverished Italian immigrant neighborhoods or ghettos in New York’s East Harlem (or Italian Harlem), the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn; also emerging in other areas of the Northeastern United States and several other major metropolitan areas (such as New Orleans[10] and Chicago) during the late 19th century and early 20th century, following waves of Italian immigration especially from Sicily and other regions of Southern Italy. It has its roots in the Sicilian Mafia but is a separate organization in the United States.

Mafia groups in the United States first became influential in the New York metropolitan area, gradually progressing from small neighborhood operations in poor Italian ghettos to citywide and eventually national organizations. “The Black Hand” was a name given to an extortion method used in Italian neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th century. It has been sometimes mistaken for the Mafia itself, which it is not.

From the 1890s to 1920 in New York City the Five Points Gang, founded by Paul Kelly, were very powerful in the Little Italy of the Lower East Side. Kelly recruited some street hoodlums who later became some of the most famous crime bosses of the century – such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Frankie Yale.

— Wikipedia, American Mafia

With a tradition of breaking any law they didn’t like, illegal unions were an obvious avenue for the mafia to exploit, and one that would have earned them goodwill from many citizens.

Prohibition

On January 16, 1919, prohibition began in the United States with the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution making it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcohol. Despite these bans, there was still a very high demand for it from the public. This created an atmosphere that tolerated crime as a means to provide liquor to the public, even among the police and city politicians.

The profits that could be made from selling and distributing alcohol were worth the risk of punishment from the government, which had a difficult time enforcing prohibition… Criminal gangs and politicians saw the opportunity to make fortunes and began shipping larger quantities of alcohol to U.S. cities. The majority of the alcohol was imported from Canada, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest where stills manufactured illegal alcohol.

In the early 1920s, fascist Benito Mussolini took control of Italy and waves of Italian immigrants fled to the United States. Sicilian Mafia members also fled to the United States, as Mussolini cracked down on Mafia activities in Italy.

Most Italian immigrants resided in tenement buildings. As a way to escape the poor lifestyle, some Italian immigrants chose to join the American Mafia.

The Mafia took advantage of prohibition and began selling illegal alcohol. The profits from bootlegging far exceeded the traditional crimes of protection, extortion, gambling, and prostitution. Prohibition allowed Mafia families to make fortunes.

— Wikipedia, American Mafia

Prohibition took a small problem and made it far worse, largely because proponents were too busy dreaming of the ‘perfect society’ that the lack of alcohol would create. Temperance movements had been dreaming of a prohibition on ‘the demon drink’ for decades.

The temperance movement in the United States began at a national level in the 1820s, having been popularized by evangelical temperance reformers and among the middle classes.

— Wikipedia, Temperance Movement

Would Prohibition have worked if its proponents had been more practical, holding off until adequate enforcement was possible, ensuring that counseling services were widely available and free, and perhaps providing medically-supervised chances to wean an individual off?

I doubt it. The more effective the interdiction, the higher the price would have gone, and the more incentive there would have been for the Mafia to find every weakness in the system – corruption, bribery, blackmail, and – if necessary – murder. It would have made things worse, not better.

Would preventing Prohibition have stopped the Mafia? I doubt that, too. It would have restricted them to the traditional avenues of exploitation – gambling, extortion, and so on – and hence their growth – at least until the advent of the drug trade.

The mafia dons actually opposed the family getting involved in narcotic smuggling. But by then, their control over younger, more ambitious members was slipping (not that it had ever been all that strong), and narcotics brought money – lots of money, more even than they had seen in prohibition. And money is power, and power makes the decisions. So it may have delayed the inevitable, but that’s about all.

No, the rise of Organized Crime of some sort is a natural consequence of the social changes in the economic times, and as inevitable.

Individual Leisure

Let’s turn to an altogether more palatable topic – leisure time. I don’t think I need to quote a definition, everyone knows what it is.

Leisure used to be the exclusive province of the upper class, but that ship had sailed long ago. Leisure was now available to all in at least some measure.

Unions played a part in the increase, negotiating shorter working hours. While opposed, many businesses found that worker productivity actually went up when workers were content and well-rested.

Equally importantly, new industries rose up to fill that leisure time, and extract the newly-disposable income. Entertainments – theaters and movies and radios; Sporting facilities and tournaments; restaurants, holidays and tourism, and so on. None of these would have become as ubiquitous as they now are without the new economic drivers; there was not enough membership in the upper classes to support them as industries. They had to target the masses.

Economic consequences

Any time you introduce new industries to an economy, you make that economy more robust, at least in theory. But that’s a theory that overlooks interdependence, because it complicates the situation too much. Nevertheless, even if it’s not completely right, it’s also not completely wrong.

Mass entertainment was one of the things that got the world through the Great Depression. Not only from a pressure-valve psychological point of view, but also from the point of view of keeping currency circulating through the economy. That keeps a core of the businesses functioning, and that keeps the banks functioning, and that enables everything else to keep ticking over.

The New Demographic I: Suffrage

I mentioned this in discussing the previous era because suffrage started then, but it spread like wildfire once it got going. So you have a newly-acknowledged sub-class, given power and authority and some measure of respect as a result, who are nevertheless constrained to the roles deemed acceptable in the Age Of Steam – can anyone else see problems arising?

Women’s liberation movements may have been largely inchoate in this era; the technological foundation wasn’t there yet, nor the political will, for anything more to be the case. But the seeds would have been planted now, the offspring of suffrage, and there would be early manifestations that would have revealed the future trend to anyone who looked closely.

Those manifestations would have been small things – a small increase in the level of responsibility afforded women, such as giving them control over household budgets and letting them own businesses in their own names. Greater freedom of choice in the areas traditionally afforded women, such as what to serve for dinner.

Trivial little things that could not reasonably be opposed, but from those beginnings, male control over women would begin to be eroded. Those who, in modern times, wish to turn back the clock are doomed to fail, because they are turning back the clock to a time when womens’ movements were about to explode in full force; they are simply creating a venue for history to repeat itself. To have any chance of success, they would have to target an era at least 70 years earlier than their stated goals, and undoing suffrage – and that’s unconstitutional, and so doomed to failure, too.

There are small social cues that would also have started to manifest themselves. It would no longer be necessary for a woman in public to be escorted by a ‘trusted’ male. Safer, perhaps, but 99,000 times in a hundred thousand, such safety measures would not be needed. And this was still an era in which gentlemen would come to the assistance of a woman in distress.

Women therefore would be better able to make choices for themselves – and their inclination (at least after the War To End All Wars) was to party. But I’ll get to the roaring 20s in due course – where aren’t there yet.

Governmental Lack Of Control

Control is absolute – you either have it or you don’t. With business grabbing control for themselves, and unions grabbing some of what was left, and individuals grabbing self-determination and a key economic role, and the number of such individuals doubling, and science taking some of what little remained, it could no longer be said that the government had absolute control over anything (except, perhaps, the military).

What they had, instead, was influence. They could shape the outcome of the inevitable confrontations, even those to which they were a party.

They didn’t realize this; from their perspective they were presiding over new prosperity, ultimately responsible for it all, and it would last in perpetuity because they would make it so.

The First World War would shatter that overconfidence and cause a shift in political attitudes; but I’ll get to that next week. For now, the subject is the pre-war years and the sense of optimism they held.

Fixed Currency

If you increase the amount of currency circulating in the economy, but not the fundamental wealth of the economy, that means that each dollar (or whatever) in that economy has to shrink just enough to make the books balance. The problem is that you have to predict in advance what the economic growth is going to be when you have no control over it, then match that with your currency production.

It simply is never going to happen. There are all sorts of dire consequences for producing too little – banks failing, economy collapsing, failures of public confidence, that sort of thing – so the only solution is to produce an amount that you know to be too much, but not too much too-much.

That’s called inflation, and it means that the currency gets a little bit smaller against your fixed standard. And that means that everything gets that little bit more expensive.

There’s an argument that a fixed currency is more stable than a ‘floating’ currency. I’m not going to delve into that, right now; but its worth recognizing that all the major economies have that attitude, and the confidence that goes with it.

Instruments Of Debt

Another consequence of the fixed currency is that there’s only so much money that the government has to spend. That’s going to become important next week, but for now, let’s look at the question: if the government needs more money, what does it do?

Answer: it issues instruments of debt, which it then sells to the public, and to other governments, and to its own wealthy citizens.

Not for free, mind you; they have to promise to repay more than they have borrowed. They percentage difference is called the Bond Yield.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical or two.

Scenario 1: Interest Rates much higher than bond yield

Bonds are typically issued for periods of 5 or 10 years – that’s when the debt has to be repaid. Let’s say we have an average of 4% inflation over a five-year period:

Year 1: 1×1.04 = 1.04
Year 2: 1.04×1.04 = 1.0816.
Year 3: 1.0816×1.04 = 1.124864.
Year 4: 1.124864×1.04 = 1.16985856
Year 5: 1.16985856×1.04 = 1.2166529024

A 5-year Bond Yield of say 10%? That means that the government has borrowed $100, say, and promised to repay $110 – which, by then, will be worth 110/1.2166529024 = 0.82192710675935177878387149771205 x $110 = about $90.40.

Who’s going to take that deal? It’s not going to happen.

Scenario 2: Interest Rates lower than bond yield

Same inflation rate, to make things simpler.

A 5-year Bond Yield of 30%? That’s borrowing $100 and promising to repay $130. Even with the devaluation caused by inflation, you’re still going to have $130/1.2166529024 = 0.82192710675935177878387149771205 x $130 = about $106.85.

That’s better, but it’s still only a 6-7% gain over a 5-year period – clever investing in the stock market is likely to earn more than that.

Then, too, 4% stable growth is a pretty healthy economy, and governments aren’t all that desperate to borrow money when times are good. So let’s mix it up a bit:

Scenario 3: Interest Rates much lower than bond yield

Year 1: 4% inflation. 1×1.04 = 1.04
Year 2: 2.5% inflation. 1.04×1.025 = 1.066
Year 3: 1% inflation. 1.066×1.01 = 1.07666
Year 4: -1.5% inflation: 1.07666×0.985 = 1.0605101
Year 5: 0.5% inflation: 1.0605101×1.005 = 1.0658126505

Call it 6.6% inflation over the 5 years. Notice that there’s a recession in year 4, but the government manages to keep it from becoming a depression – just barely – in Year 5.

How’s a bond yield of 20% sounding about now? Where do I sign?

But the government can’t afford to put the bond yield too high, because that’s all money that the government loses. Ideally, you want the yield to be just enough over the forecast inflation rate that it becomes an attractive investment.

You also have to factor in the security of the investment – governments have to repay their debt, or they won’t find anyone willing to lend them money. That helps keep the bond yield down to reasonable limits. So let’s set it to 2½ times the forecast inflation rate, plus 5…

Scenario 4: Realistic forecasts

So let’s say that the economic woes described in Scenario 3 are unexpected, but so is the growth of 4% in the first year, and set expectations to a more modest 3%.

2½ × 3 = 7.5, +5 = 12.5%.

First year, growth is great at 4%. Second year is a little down on expectations, but that’s okay – it’s just a “market correction” because of the higher than expected year 1 result. Year 3 is down, and the economy is noticeably slowing. The government is exerting all its influence to try and get things happening, but the economy usually has a mind of its own. The cause is something unexpected – maybe there’s been a collapse in housing prices, or the biggest bank in the country has been hacked, or something (if it were something expected, the government would have done more to prepare for it).

Year 5, and the government response is dragging the economy back into the black – if it doesn’t have to pay out too much in 5-year bonds (and ten-year bonds from five years earlier).

Overall, the inflation rate is 6.6% over 5 years. The stock market is likely to have gained clever investors three times this much – at the risk of losing their shirts. The yield that had to be set at the start of the 5 years, of 12.5%, is about 6% better than inflation – with the security factor, that’s probably good enough.

There are a couple of other tools the government has. It can set interest rates to push the inflation rate down or let it rise. And, if it finds that it isn’t selling enough bonds, it can issue some more at a higher yield – rinse and repeat as often as necessary.

Access To Education

I’ve talked a lot about social mobility, the capacity to improve your social standing, without ever mentioning it explicitly. One of the major tools of upward mobility is access to education, because it makes you able to hold down a better job, and actually makes you more intelligent according to some.

Access to education comes in three basic flavors.

Vanilla

The vanilla is universal basic education.

The Separatist Congregationalists who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620 obliged parents to teach their children how to read and write.

In 1852, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to pass a compulsory universal public education law. In particular, the Massachusetts General Court required every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school, and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were “unfit to have the children educated properly.” In 1918, Mississippi became the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law.

In 1922 an attempt was made by the voters of Oregon to enact the Oregon Compulsory Education Act, which would require all children between the ages of 8 and 16 to attend public schools, only leaving exceptions for mentally or physically unfit children, exceeding a certain living distance from a state school, or having written consent from a county superintendent to receive private instruction. The law was passed by popular vote but was later ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.

— Wikipedia, Compulsory Education

Western Australia was the first Australian state to make education compulsory, in 1871 – the same year as Michigan, Washington state, New Hampshire, and Ontario.

This was 9 years before England did likewise.

Pistachio

Not everyone likes pistachio. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. So I’ve used it to symbolize option #2 – paid education. Private schools, and then a guaranteed university place. Only the wealthy can afford this, it’s been their ‘edge’ for many years.

Byakuya

Byakuya is a Japanese combination of white truffles imported from Alba, Italy; Parmigiano Reggiano cheese; and sake lees, a byproduct of the sake production process. The resulting frozen dessert costs an absolutely eye-watering ¥873,400 ($6,696) for a single 130 mL (4.4 ounce) serving.

— Foodandwine.com / world record most expensive ice-cream via Google

Option three isn’t for everyone. It costs too much, for one thing. And it’s not necessarily going to appeal to anyone outside Japan and fans of Japanese cuisine.

That makes it perfectly symbolic of scholarships and endowments – money provided by the wealthy to be used to give the meritorious an education, on the principle that they are likely to improve or benefit society as a result, and that in turn benefits the donor of the money.

And it makes you look good.

Vanilla with Sprinkles

Finally, there’s a fourth option – government scholarships.

Both this option and the preceding one raise the question of how you find the potential recipients. Do you only consider those who apply, for example? Or is there some sort of standardized testing that might automatically trigger an offer? Or perhaps you need a letter of introduction from someone?

If it’s available, the standardized testing is probably the easiest answer. But it means that states with poor educational standards are going to miss out, each and every time – and further assumes that such problems have no bearing on the test scores of individuals, that you are in fact comparing Granny Smiths with Red Delicious Apples.

When you take those considerations into account, you suddenly find that there are no easy answers. That’s why so many donors leave it up to the Universities themselves – when they find a student they would desperately like to keep, but who can’t afford it, they put his name forward for a scholarship.

Well, that system isn’t perfect, either.

This article will continue next week! Still lots of ground to cover!

Refer footnote for artist credits. Cropped and contrast-enhanced to highlight the background content by Mike

I love being able to bring something new to the attention of others. So much so that I’m diverging from the intended schedule (which called for the next part of the series on Economics on RPGs) to bring news of something exciting to readers.

The subject of today’s article has so many new elements to it that there is literally something that should be of interest to just about everyone.

In fact, there’s so much to get your head around that I’m not entirely sure where to start.

Perhaps, with a disclaimer. Yeah, that’ll work.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Contrast enhanced and background added by Mike.

Disclaimer

I am not affiliated in any official way with the project and do not stand to gain or lose financially by its success or failure.

That said, I can’t be said to have my hands completely clear of the project, in at least one sense.

I first became aware of Quantum State when the author, J. C. Kohl, reached out to me through Campaign Mastery with an invitation to look it over as a source of new content for blog posts.

Of course, I was interested. Who wouldn’t be? And I have to admit that the name was intriguing.

Correspondence / Core

That was the beginning of a series of emails back and forth, fourteen of them plus fourteen replies, over a two-month span.

Quantum State is a fresh new take on tabletop roleplaying with a focus on immersive experiences and engaging gameplay inspired by the Western, Cyberpunk, and Dark Fantasy genres. Its a technomagickal romp that focus on complex narratives, boundless discovery, and social emotional development.

Like most TTRPGs, players will create a Character to interact and explore with a world created and maintained by a Docent (GM). These Characters are built by selecting 2 of 9 Base Classes (each themed after a classic adventuring archetype that should be readily familiar to players) that will grow in an advanced Hybrid Class over the course of their adventuring career.

The Core Rulebooks include two texts: the Character’s Handbook(for players to make and maintain characters and the Adventure Guide (for Docents to build their own worlds and run the game).

Both the texts had been drafted and playtested and were in the process of being edited for publication. J C needed a fundraiser to obtain the funds needed to complete that process and guide the project through to publication.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Contrast enhanced and background added by Mike.

Clarification

The genre mix was not what the name, Quantum State, had led me to expect. As I explained to J C, I had often thought that Cyberpunk and Fantasy could play together nicely in a shared worldspace, doing things with magic that traditional cyberpunk does with technology. The infusion of “Wild West” threw me for a bit of a conceptual loop, though.

The two-archetype hybrid model, on the other hand, definitely seemed to relate to the quantum concept, in the sense of two sub-particles coming together to create a distinctive combination.

I suggested that focusing on the latter in promotional activities. That led into a conversation on how to market the RPG, which led to an advance copy of the first-draft press release.

I responded to that with detailed advice on how I would revise and edit it, advice that J C was happy to take on-board. So I bear some responsibility for the shape of the campaign and its marketing.

Expanded Clarification

Before we got to that, J C expanded on the fundamental concepts and how they related to the name, “Quantum State”:

The “Quantum” part of Quantum State is a reference to our default setting (called the Core State)…

Part of the character building process involves the selection of a Birthrite (a replacement for what is traditionally “Race” in most fantasy releases).

Refer footnote for artist credits.

Each Birthrite is an entire game setting unto itself, themed on different ideologies taken to their extreme conclusions, working in tandem. A Birthright doesn’t necessarily give a player a set of beliefs to follow, but indicates what type of society they were raised in/dominated their life leading up to the current adventure.

There a 4 “main” ones that have sweeping influence over the world:

• Axis (Cyberpunk/Hyper Capitalism)
• Kronin (this one is actually hard to define because I’ve never seen it before, but Biopunk/Anarchy)
• Armistice (Imperialist/Space Romans/Stratocracy)
• Requiem (Dark Fantasy/Theocracy)

A selection of the Birthrite Icons; refer footnote for artist credits. Background and compositing by Mike.

So how does this relate to Quantum State? Glad you asked.

You see, after the release of the core rule-set, we’d like to release a deep-dive expansion for each of the main four Birthrites… [that would include] pre-written adventures/missions set in that specific setting.

These expansions [would] also include missions set in alternate versions of these setting that are largely the same except [for] one thing that flips the ideology on its head [that] is taking place and causing chaos for civilization.

For example, in a Quantum State of the Axis Birthrite, instead of the normal Cyberpunk working for big corporations/gangs, they may find the mission focused on the rise of a grand workers union that aims to bring down the corporate elites.

Or we could have a different Quantum State of Axis where the players are working for a faceless Bureau interested in controlling rare, reality shifting artifacts. So in a Quantum State, everything is largely the same, but still different.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Contrast enhanced, and spot color & background added, by Mike.

Okay, Parallel Worlds – I always have a soft-spot for alternate worlds, and this implied the possibility of substituting one of the alternate versions for the “core” version. This wasn’t one game setting, it was a collection of 16 or more variations on a game setting with fixed focal points of difference, and the promise of potential collisions between the resulting ideologies.

That’s a much richer and more diverse game setting than is usual.

The Problem

J C then described the problem he was experiencing. First, he lives in Florida (An economic and social bonfire, as most reasonably well-informed readers would be aware).

Second, the US economy in general, like that of the rest of the world, was in a slow economic meltdown caused by interest rates In Australia, it’s being called the “Cost of Living Crisis” – I don’t know what terminology other regions are using. But it’s real, and it’s everywhere, and it’s sharpest impact is on financial discretion and discretionary spending.

Fundraising, of all sorts, becomes a lot harder under such economic circumstances, and existing cash reserves shrink faster than they otherwise would, increasing the need for more fundraising. Starting to see a catch-22 here?

J C had his team together – editor, digital designer, art team, etc, and the raw text was finished and tested. The machinery to take that raw text and turn it into salable product was all ready to go – as soon as he had the funds to pay these people for their services.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Mirrored, contrast-enhanced, and background added, by Mike.

Size and Scope

Exacerbating these problems is the size of the project – over 950 pages of content without artwork which created a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The size of the problem left J C unsure of how to progress the project; no reasonable course of action seemed open to him.

He mentioned that he did have a reasonable amount of Concept Art available as a starting point, and a Quickstart Guide that was ready to go.

That led to a discussion over digital-only vs print, and subdivision into smaller volumes, and how these would impact marketing and expenses.

The key takeaway from this conversation was J C convincing me that subdivision beyond the two 475-page volumes already discussed was not practical, but that the basic principle of a smaller release to bootstrap through the problem was the only viable solution.

This was not news to J C, his logic had already led him to the same conclusion; I think he just needed to hear reassurance from an outside source. In particular, if the bare-bones first release doesn’t hit its targets, the whole project could fall apart.

There was some discussion of finessing the publication road-map and the different mileposts, and the inclusion and treatment of art.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Individuals moved closer together for more efficient use of available screen space by Mike.

Content by the Numbers

J C broke the content down for me like this (paraphrasing mine):

Nine base classes, each with 4 class features, which are combined in pairs…

…to yield 36 hybrid classes, each with 6 additional class features, which can alter or improve base class features.

32 options for equipment training packages built around a modular equipment system, with options for customizing equipment as well as hybridizing it with mods.

550 perks that “passively tweak the way a Character plays”, with new perks available every second character level, plus a couple of extras along the way.

Refer footnote for artist credits. Contrast enhanced and background added by Mike.

Character progression is designed to encompass a 40-level career.

1330 ‘heroic action’ entries that are the analogue of spells (and which may literally be spells with some classes), but which include things like advanced melee techniques.

It was this listing that convinced me that there was no reasonable way of subdividing the content into smaller volumes. But I think my response to this breakdown is relevant:

Well, when you can’t eliminate a liability, the only thing to do is to repackage it as a marketing point. Emphasize the ability to customize characters, the diversity of characters, the resulting diversity of possible adventures, the richness of detail, the scope of vision that makes it all possible, and the value for money that will be received by backers.

That was the final stimulus J C needed to break his decision paralysis, which led to the draft press release I mentioned earlier..

Anatomy Of A Press Release

After sending my suggestions through to J C regarding the press release, I summarized what I had suggested with some advice that is worth passing on to every other writer / GM that has to deal with the issue.

Think of it as being like fishing: The first 2 paragraphs are the bait. The next paragraphs are the hook, line, and rod, and the last paragraphs contain a call to action.

In order, you answer the questions, “What’s this message about? Why should I care about its content? Does it have any credibility? What do I have to do about it, now that I’m interested?”

Another perspective: if you replace the call to action, the press release reads like a brief but valid Kickstarter promotion. It works for customers / backers as well as the media. That gets it a big tick :)

Refer footnote for artist credits. Cropped, contrast-enhanced & darkened, and background added, by Mike

The Kickstarter

The fundraising program launched last week, not quite in time to bump aside the article on Guesstimating. As I write this, it has 24 days to go, and 19 backers have pledged $2,041 of a $15,000 target.

Tiers of special interest are:

• The Bulleteater Tier which gives you the illustrated Quickstart rules and adventure and the Light (text only) Character’s Handbook for a mere $5, designed for those without the available funds for a more substantial investment.
• The Mercan Tier which is the full-price version of the above. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give you anything more, so I don’t think there will be many subscribers to this tier. $20.
• The Malowari Tier gives you the Quickstart rulebook and the Light (text only) equivalent of the DMG. This obviously lacks the character construction elements that make Quantum State unique, but gives you the world-building & adventuring resources and a pregenerated set of characters with which to explore it. $20.
• The Homestead Tier – gets you the light (text only) versions of both the Character’s Handbook and Adventure Guide, plus the illustrated Quickstart rulebook. $35. For those on a budget, but who can’t say no to 950+ pages of innovation, this is the best option.
• Remnant Tier adding another $15 gets you to the Remnant tier, which includes both the light (text only editions and the fully-illustrated PDFs when (and if) they become available, while helping to ensure that they do become a reality. This is the price point that I would personally zone into. So far, three people agree with me.
• Kronin Tier – finally, there’s the option at $200 for hardcover copies of both fully-illustrated books (and all the lesser versions to keep you productively occupied in the meantime). Yes, this is a lot – more than most RPGs – but the page-count is also a lot more than most RPGs.

There are others – you can opt for the PDF version of one of the books and hardcover of the other, for example – but those are the comprehensive ‘step up’ stages.

Stretch Goals

This is the biggest weakness of the campaign. Because the goal here is to get the core out, the only real stretch goals are to bring the ‘better editions’ closer to becoming reality. Unless, of course, J C throws in a few surprises along the way – additional adventures, for example, or previews, or a PDF of just the concept art. Who knows?

Certainly, the campaign needs something to give it a boost. Right now, Kicktraq is projecting a final result of $9039 – not enough to reach the $15K target, by some thousands, and progress appears to have stalled after the usual initial flurry.

Refer footnote for artist credits.

Verdict

I think that a project of this size and scope deserves more than that.

There’s more than enough material that its potential as a game system extends well beyond the current setting, and the setting itself promises a unique integration of strange bedfellows that can provide solution foundations for many GMs wanting to implement a more innovative concept in their own campaigns.

This isn’t just a game setting, it offers a new “how-to” for construction of your own game settings.

I have often said that I love to promote Kickstarters that have already achieved their funding goals and are reaching for the stars. I get ample opportunities to do so because I’m often not informed of fundraising projects until they have already achieved their initial targets.

The big benefit of doing so is that you are guaranteed something in return for your backing, at least as strongly as it’s possible to do in our chaotic world.

But I also love to promote Kickstarters that are worthy of success even if they are not currently on track to achieve that success. The big advantage to doing so is that if the project fails, it doesn’t cost you anything.

Quantum State Train Banner, excerpt cropped and enhanced by Mike. Refer footnote for artist credits.

An Epic Kickstarter Deserves An Epic Response

I chose the title for this review with some care and deliberation – then had to abbreviate it for SEO reasons. This section’s title is what it should have read.

The size and scope of Quantum State are sufficient to amply deserve the appellation, “Epic”, and the combination of elements in the game setting also earn that adjective quite handily a second time over. And yet, the premise also opens up gameplay to small-scale adventures set against this vast backdrop – the best of all worlds, some people would say.

The innovative game mechanics alone are worth pushing a modest sum toward the $15K target.

With the many reasons to back it, I can only presume that lack of public awareness is the major hurdle that Quantum State has to overcome. So I can only hope that this review helps overcome that hurdle.

If the project interests you, don’t just back it, tell other people about it – that will only help you get what you want! If you aren’t personally interested, but know someone else who might be, tell others about it, too, because that’s what friends do.

A project this big deserves big support from the RPG community, if only to encourage innovation and taking a risk. It’s clear from his emails that J. C. has put his heart and soul into this project for some years now – so let’s see if we can make it happen.

You can join in the fun, or find out more about the project, by clicking any of the illustrations used to decorate this article, or by clicking this link: .

Artist credits:

• Art Director: Alba Palacio – https://www.artstation.com/albapalacio
• Environment Concepts (Desert, Forest, Mountain, Train Banner):
  • Benjamin Reinsch – https://www.artstation.com/benjaminreinsch
  • Juho Huttunen – https://www.artstation.com/northernhermit
  • Diogo Yoti Yoshikawa – https://www.artstation.com/diogoyoshikawa (Also did the Gigaheart Logo)
• Character Concepts (Adept, Apothic, Brawler, Delinquent, Marine, Warden, and Light Armor variation examples):
  • Arnaud Carrasco – https://www.artstation.com/arnaudcarrascotexier
  • Lua Marquez – https://www.artstation.com/luamarques
• Emblems / Icons: Kerem Karadumon – https://www.artstation.com/fumonero-art
• Quantum State Logo: Raule Napier – https://maisonnapier.com/

The subject today is Approximations and Guesstimations in RPGs.

I’ve got a number of article ideas in various stages of development, intended to break up the series on Economics in RPGs. When the time comes to select between them, one of the key parameters that has to be assessed is how long the article will take to write, relative to the amount of time available.

Criteria: Enthusiasm

If I were to choose on the basis of what I most feel like writing – also a valid criterion – I would probably have chosen to write about a new game mechanic that I thought up a few weeks ago. But that article will need quite a lot of time and effort to finish, though the concepts are quite clear.

Criteria: Preparedness

The choice could be based on the level of structure and organization that has been done in advance, I would be writing an article on a source of plot ideas that pre-dates that game mechanic by a fair period. It’s been waiting around while I look for a third example, because I didn’t think the two that have already come to me were sufficient.

Criteria: Forgetfulness

If I were to choose based on how much of the concept behind the article was beginning to slip away, crowded out by more recent focuses of activity, then it would be an article on diseases that was inspired by something one of my players said, a month or two back.

Most of the content is still clear to me, but a couple of key details are becoming vague. If this rot proceeds too far, it can lead to the article being abandoned completely; I have a couple of other articles that fall into that category – one on Rumors and another on GM Decision-making.

Criteria: Clarity

Another approach would be to choose the idea that seems clearest to me at the moment – which would probably be a short one on the utility of whiteboards; it’s clearest because the idea only came to me this weekend. Or I could spin something off-the-cuff about the plotting difficulties of the adventure that’s currently being worked on for the Adventurer’s Club because it’s more of a sand-boxed concept than most of the more structured plots that I create.

Criteria: Writing Time

Both the game-mechanics article and disease article fall foul of the writing time limit; I don’t think either would be ready by the time deadline came around. By the time I factor in the lack of enthusiasm and the impact on my speed of writing, the plot mechanics article also begins to look a little dubious. The others are either abandoned (at least temporarily) or look okay on that front, but – being new to the queue – they also have a lack of urgency.

Assessing this factor requires practice at guesstimation and hand-waving, and since that’s what this article is about (as mentioned earlier), the stars seemed to align and the choice was made.

An educated Guesstimate

The more structured and prepped an article is, the more reliably the writing time can be guesstimated.

The Game Mechanics Article

The Game Mechanics article has 86 planned sections – some only a paragraph or two long, others involving a lot of statistical work behind the scenes. If I figure an average of 250 words to most of those sections, that’s an estimated 21,500 words.

In a previous article, Lightning Research: Maximum Answers in Minimum Time I think it was, I estimated that stream-of-consciousness writing – like what I’m using for this article – I could get through an average of about 1000 words an hour, more on a good day.

I started writing last week’s article on Economics in RPGs: The Age of Steam at 9:30 AM and finished it at 12:30 AM – call it 15 hours – and it came close to 14,000 words, so the average holds up fairly well.

So that estimates a best-case situation of 21 hours of writing – all of Sunday and Monday.

But if there’s significant amounts of research or layout challenges like tables or bespoke illustrations, that average goes down – way down. It halves for each of those factors. While that won’t affect every one of those 86 sections, it will affect enough of them that parts of the article will be written at 250 words per hour, maybe less. That adds 3 hours for each of these sections – so figure 8 of them times 3 additional hours, and that’s another 24 hours of writing, for a total of 49 hours. Call it an even fifty hours.

But note this: I didn’t have to calculate this when eyeballing what was going to be possible for today’s article – one glance at what was intended was enough to rule it out. Practicality probably means that I’m going to have to break it up, maybe into three or four parts – and I don’t want to start another series of that length until the Economics series is done.

The Disease Article

This doesn’t suffer from the same handicaps. The outline consists of 36 sections, and there isn’t a whole lot in the way of research / illustration / layout to eat into the 1,000 words an hour estimate.

On the other hand, I have a suspicion that the average section length might be a little greater – call it 300 words on average – so that’s an estimated 10,800 words and 11 hours writing time. But I have to make allowances for the fuzziness factor – figure a couple of extra hours groping around as a result. Thirteen hours is about three too many.

Again, I didn’t calculate this at the time – it was enough to simply eyeball the breakdown and get an uncomfortable feeling about getting it finished in the time available, and that was enough to take it off the table.

Skill & Experience

In effect, what I was doing was eyeballing the proposed articles and utilizing my more-than-ten-years experience to guesstimate the answer to a simple yes-no proposition: “Was I confident of getting the article done in time?”

That poses significant question – one that is the core subject of this article – and begins to elaborate on a “how” back-end to an answer : How accurate should guesstimates be in an RPG?

Guesstimate Standards Of Accuracy

With this as a starting point, I can define a couple of yardsticks for the accuracy of a guesstimate.

1. Binary
2. Within 50%
3. Within 20%
4. Within 10%
5. Within 5%

Binary

Yes / No.

Black / White.

Too much / not enough.

It’s Doable / It’s not practical.

Simple binary assessments are the broadest of the lot, and the easiest to make accurately. They completely ignore any gray fuzziness about the middle – any fuzziness gets relegated as potentially falling into one of the two categories, and is then judged as though that were the projected outcome. So there’s no ambiguity.

Fuzz?

Nor is there any accommodation for fuzzy-making ifs and buts. You either assume a best case, a worst case, or a somewhere-in-the-middle case, and make a hard call based on that assumption.

In fact, you can go further – on any project lasting more than a day, there’s the potential for something to go wrong along the way; on any project lasting more than a week, there’s a fair likelihood of that happening; and on any project lasting more than a year, it’s a near-certainty. Allow for multiple people working on the project and make it man-days, man-weeks, and man-years (with apologies to female readers).

So you can simply assume best case, somewhere-in-the-middle, and worst-case, respectively, throw in a fudge factor to overcome the risk, and eliminate the fuzz.

Within 50%

The next order of reliability is pretty vague, but its’ the first one that gives an answer to a “how many” or “how much” question.

If the correct answer (not known at the time) was “10”, this level of estimate reliability is “between 5 and 20”. You’re almost certain to be correct, but the guesstimate doesn’t have a lot of precision.

In fact, the precision has been sacrificed to obtain reliability; the range is so broad that almost any combination of “if” or “but” can be accommodated; the specific events along the way just steer the outcome toward one extreme or the other, or – more probably – both, more-or-less canceling each other out.

This is like gambling that you won’t roll a 3, 4, 5, 16, 17, or 18 on 3d6. Yes, it will happen from time to time – but most of the time, this would be a pretty safe bet.

Within 20%

There’s a significant increase in accuracy when you go from ±50% to ±20%. Again using an actual result of “10”, this is predicting 8-12. Depending on the circumstances, you might then target the low estimate (8) or the high (12) with your planning.

This is actually as close as realistic guesstimates are likely to get; even if you aimed for the next highest accuracy bracket, accommodating fuzziness and reverses of fortune by selecting the higher end of the 20% range costs so little and gains so much benefit that it’s common practice.

Within 10%

To get to within 10% accuracy, you are normally obliged to go beyond guesstimating to a more formal estimations process – the equivalent of what I did when analyzing those two articles for expected completion time requirements. This is essentially a more rigorous and formal guess, and is likely to be inaccurate because of good luck or bad luck as often as it is correct.

The larger a planned project, though, the more likely it is that changes in fortune (good or ill) will happen often enough to enter the realm of predictable statistics – and that permits formal estimates to incorporate allowances for these events. Those allowances, in turn, are what enable estimates to achieve this level of accuracy.

Nevertheless, in an RPG, it’s not impossible for characters to be able to think fast enough that they could apply such an estimating regime “off the cuff”, without even thinking about it – and that, in anyone else’s language, is simply a more accurate guesstimate.

Within 5%

If 10% accuracy is achieved by breaking a task down into smaller units that can be more accurately forecast, plus making allowances for setbacks along the way, then the logical next step is to apply a formal estimating process to each of those smaller units, breaking them down still further into sub-units if necessary.

This level of accuracy also generally means that a general number plucked out of the air is no longer good enough; that’s what I meant by applying a ‘formal estimating process’. You might, for example, apply formal statistics and industry standards for key parts of the process. Still more likely is a commitment to deploying additional resources as necessary to prevent (or try to prevent) estimate variances greater than this target.

Which means that what you really have is a 10% estimate, but a promise to work harder if you look like falling short by more than half of that, which essentially guarantees hitting that 10% mark, no matter what happens.

You can’t achieve this level of estimation without a relevant skill; but if a character posses such a skill, the same logic given in the previous section comes into play. Most characters will need a skill roll and either a very good result or overcoming a significant penalty in order to get an estimate on this scale of accuracy out of thin air. Only the rare super-genius with relevant skill, can hope to do so routinely.

Confidence In Guesstimates

The above standards all skirt around the question of reliability of the guesstimate – which can be interpreted more usefully as the level of confidence that a character can have in an estimate. What might initially appear to be a relatively simple function of skill and desired / required accuracy gets complicated somewhat by changing the techniques used to generate the estimate.

I’m going to simplify the problem by separating the two, then getting formal estimates out of the way as simply and quickly as I can.

Formal Estimates

I’m further going to simplify the proposition by assuming that any additional rigor of process is assumed.

• Succeed by 1 / Succeed with a modifier of -1 / -5% = Binary with 90% confidence
• Succeed by 2 / Succeed with a modifier of -2 / -10% = 50% accuracy with 75% confidence
• Succeed by 3 / Succeed with a modifier of -3 / -15% = 20% accuracy with 60% confidence
• Succeed by 4 / Succeed with a modifier of -4 / -20% = 10% accuracy with 50% confidence
• Succeed by 5 / Succeed with a modifier of -5 / -25% = 5% accuracy with 40% confidence
• +10% confidence for each additional point of success or each additional -1 /-5% modifier

This works the problem three different ways for three different types of game system. Which one you use depends on the circumstances of the roll, with the basic mechanics of the system being a secondary consideration.

Succeed by x – you have a fixed skill target. Depending on the game system, you might need to roll more than this target or less than it. The difference between the actual result and what you needed defines the ‘quality of success’, i.e. how much you succeeded by.

For example, Target number 14 or better on d20; actually roll a 17; 17-14=3; so this is ‘success by 3’.

2nd example: Target number 11 or less on 3d6; actually roll a 9; 11-9=2; so this is ‘success by 2’.

Succeed with a modifier of x – means that you are adjusting the skill target to try to achieve a specific desired target. Failure doesn’t mean that you haven’t produced a successful guesstimate, just that it is either less accurate or less reliable than you wanted. Simply go up the table the number of points or 5% increments by which you failed to get the level actually achieved.

3rd example: Target number is 60% or less on d%; actual roll is 37; 60-37=23; so this is a ‘success by 23%, which isn’t enough for ‘success by 25%. It’s a “succeed by 4’ result.


Use this type of roll when a character wants to make a formal estimate of something. The character should announce, before they roll, what their desired accuracy or confidence level is (they can’t specify both, the other one is determined by the die roll).

For example, a character succeeds by 5, having specified a 20% accuracy target. Achieving that standard of accuracy requires success by 3, and a base 60% confidence. That leaves 2 levels of additional success to be reflected in additional confidence, which is +20%, so the GM can provide a fairly close estimate and specify that the character is 80% sure that the end result will be within 20% of that estimate.

Example 2: Perhaps the character has said that he wants to be 100% confident in his estimate, even if that means the estimate is less precise. Same rolls and level of success. Start with the ‘success by 1’ category; base confidence 90%, so getting that to 100% would use only 1 more of the achieved success level. So, move on to the next level of result, 50% accuracy. Base confidence is 75%, and two levels of success are used in achieving that accuracy. Three more are needed to get to 100% confidence, and that uses up all five. So the character can be 100% confident of his ±50% estimate. Any higher on the accuracy list won’t leave enough levels of success to get to the 100% confidence (which is another way of saying that getting to 100% confidence doesn’t leave enough levels of success for the character to actually succeed at achieving higher accuracy). So the result is 50% accuracy at 100% confidence.

Okay, that’s the bare bones of a functional system for formal estimates, that assumes that the character is doing whatever is necessary to achieve the accuracy and reliability of estimation. Good enough – so let’s move on to the more interesting question of guesstimates.

Guesstimates

With guesstimates, it’s a fairly simple proposition: the greater the margin of error you allow, the more reliable a guesstimate will be.

A Realistic Approach?

The more realistic option would be to multiply the reliability and the confidence together to get the skill level of the character, written as a percentage of success. So if you had a 70% chance of success, whether that’s from 7 or better on d20 or 12 or less on 3d6 or whatever, your calculation would be:

Accuracy /100 × Reliability (%) = 70,

or, more usefully,

70 × 100 / Accuracy = Reliability

But what is “Binary”? it’s not 100%, and it’s not 50%. Realism, it seems, has functional limits in playable game mechanics – what a shocker!

Functional

Okay, so let’s go for something that’s more functional and less realistic as necessary, i.e. more abstract.

We can start by counting each level of accuracy as a ‘rank’ or ‘tier’ of results. That immediately kills the ‘binary’ problem, but replacing it with an abstract value.

Next problem: should ‘rank 1’ be the best possible result (5%) or should it be the entry-level ‘binary’ result? Well, let’s work on the mechanics and see what would be more convenient:

Skill Success (d20/3d6) – 2 × Accuracy = reliability (out of 10)

That looks like it should work and shouldn’t be too big a problem.

Now, if “binary” is a low rank number, reliability for a given skill level will be high, and each step up the accuracy ladder produces a less reliable result. That’s exactly what we want.

The alternative has reliability going up with increased accuracy, i.e. smaller fudge-factor – which is completely wrong.

So, “Binary” = rank 1; 50% is rank 2; 20% is rank 3; 10% is rank 4; and 5% is rank 5. But, since 10% and 5% aren’t normally available for guesstimates, unless you are exceptional (and hence are likely to have an exceptional skill level), let’s impose some additional difficulty: 10% is rank 5, and 5% is rank 7. There are no rank 4 or 6 results.

Example: So, for a skill of 12 or less required, we get

12 – 2 × Accuracy = Reliability out of 10.

• Binary, rank 1: 12 – 2 = 10 /10. Perfect reliability, complete confidence.
• 50% accuracy, rank 2: 12-4 = 8/10. 80% confident.
• 20% accuracy, rank 3: 12-6 = 6/10. 60% confident.
• 10% accuracy, rank 5: 12-10 = 2/10. 20% confident. This skill level doesn’t really support this level of accuracy in a guesstimate.
• 5% accuracy, rank 7: 12-14= -2/10, 0% confident. That confirms the previous assessment.

The same results would be produced if the goal was “eight or more on d20”, or “60% or less on d%”.

The shape of failure

Now, these are the results that can be expected from a successful skill check – no penalty levels or anything else, a straightforward succeed or fail.

Which raises the question, what does a failure look like? After all, even on a failure, a guesstimate should produce a number, however inaccurate and unreliable it might be.

How about this: on a failure, the actual result is as dictated by the next lowest rank (but the character doesn’t realize it) and the margin of failure subtracts 10% off the resulting confidence level per point.

Example: A character rolls to attempt a 20% accurate estimate; needing 13/-, he rolls a 16, and fails by three. The GM delivers an estimate that is somewhere in the 50% range (either high or low) but not the 20% range, and advises the character that he has only a 13 – 6 = 7 out of 10, less three for the failure, = 4 out of 10 = 40% confidence in the result – which will eventually prove to be a significant over- or under-estimate.

Subjects Of Guesstimates

Guesstimates and Estimates are useful for the GM because they permit him to generate an approximation for his own use, on the fly, if one is needed. There are all sorts of values that may need to be guesstimated in this way, and they all have their own unique foibles that should be used to tweak the general accuracy values that have been used to date.

Weights

Estimating weight is a more detailed way of asking “what will it take to lift / move [an object]”. There are a couple of useful facts that I use regularly for estimating weights.

Like-for-like

A typical, solid, house door weights around 45 kg (100 lb) – in my opinion and without measuring it or looking it up.

A castle door is 6 times as thick, four times as tall, and two-and-a-half times as wide (and there are two of them). There are three steel bands reinforcing it, one of which holds a heavy steel ring for people to grip while opening or closing the door. The doors are closed and barred by a beam that’s 1/10 of a door’s height, four times as thick, and five times as wide. The steel bands etc add a mid-sized motorcycle to the weight – call it 190 kg (420 lb). A character wants to guesstimate the weight of the doors as he wants to lift them off their hinges.

45 is an inconvenient number, I would use 50 and then trim 10% off at the end.

6 × 4 × 2.5 × 50 = 24 × 2.5 × 50 = 60 × 50 = 3000 kg. So each door would weigh about 2700kg (6000 lb).

Double because there are two of them = 6000 kg (12000 lb).

0.1 × 4 × 5 × 50 = 0.4 × 5 × 50 = 2 × 50 = 100 kg. less 10% = 90kg (200 lb) for the bar.

190 kg or 420 lb for the bars, locks, and what-have-you.

Total: 2700 + 90 + 190 = 2790 + 190 = 2980 kg (12000 + 200 +420 = 12620 lb).

In practice, I would use calculations like this to estimate it – but would round off to 3000 kg or 12500 lb.

Lifting those doors would take a King Kong. Unless you used a lever – one that wouldn’t break, like a steel beam with a wedge-shaped tongue and a solid slice of tree-trunk as a fulcrum. Doing that would cut the effective weight to 1/4 of the normal, or less – 750kg or 3125lb. The problem then becomes one of anchoring the character to the ground when he pushes down, because that’s well within the capabilities of a really strong human.

I don’t have to know the density of wood, or the exact measurements of the Doors – all I have to remember is ‘standard solid wood door = 45kg / 100 lb‘.

Water

Lots of things have a density around the same as water. People, for example. It’s probably not all that far off wood, to be honest. 1000 kg per cubic meter – or close enough to it. For those stuck in a non-metric system, 60 lb per cubic foot is about as inaccurate, underestimating the weight as much as the metric figure over-estimates it.

Liquid Gasses

Liquid Helium = 125 kg per cubic meter. And the tank.

Liquid Oxygen is slightly heavier than water – add 10%. And the tank.

Liquid Nitrogen is about 10% lighter than water. And the tank.

LPG gets up to a whole 1.882 kg per cubic meter, about 1/500th the weight of water for a given volume – at room temperature. Liquefied, it’s about 1/2 the weight of water by volume, plus about 5% to the result. And the tanks.

Those pesky tanks…. online sources, supposedly knowledgeable ones, list empty domestic LPG tanks as weighing 14.8 kg, or 11kg, or 14kg or 12kg or 10kg or 20kg.

Looking at the numbers more closely, though, the lower numbers are simply pressurized, while the higher ones appear to be also refrigerated. So, because it’s convenient, I would use estimated weights of 10kg for non-refrigerated tanks and 20kg for refrigerated tanks – the latter being the ones used for liquid helium, oxygen, and nitrogen.

That’s for the full sized ones that are about human-height in length. The little caravan-sized LPG bottles are 5-6kg in weight, and an empty scuba tank is 16kg. Compressed air and a valve will add about 3.5 kgs to the latter when it’s full.

Steel / Metal

There’s actually a range of 100 kg per cubic meter. I don’t care about that – the middle-of-the-range value of 8000 kg / cubic m will do me just fine. Multiply by 62 to get (approximate) lb per cubic foot.

Human ability to guesstimate weight

If we’ve got something to compare with, even without a scale, we can get to around 20% accuracy. But once we go far beyond a couple of kg – 4 or 5 lb – we are pretty appalling at estimating weights even if we have a known weight to compare with – at best, we’re talking the 50% accuracy. Estimating by eye actually tends to produce more accurate results.

How much more accurate? Well, there’s this study to contemplate: 17,205 People Guessed The Weight Of A Cow. Here’s How They Did.

In a nutshell – from a photograph, the average estimate was out by 5%. If you exclude the results to only those who had worked with cattle for a living, they were out by 6%. And the pattern of results is almost identical – right down to the cluster of underestimates around the 900-lb mark. (For the record, my guesstimate from the photo was about 1400 lb).

But, at the same time, a study of emergency personnel estimating the weights of patients (How accurate is weight estimation in the emergency department?) by the (US) National Institutes of Health found that they had only “moderate” accuracy – and that if a patients actual weight couldn’t be determined by measurement, dosages would be more accurate if based on the patient’s estimate of their weight, which tended to be “excellent”. Specifically, Patients: 3.9% error; 7.7% for Nurses, and 11% for Doctors. The percentages who got the results right within a 10% range were 91%, 78%, and 59%, respectively – the equivalent of 90%, 80%, and 60% confidence in the system described above.

So we’re better at estimating the weight of a cow than we are at estimating the weight of a person. Think about that for a while.

It’s also a known fact that manufacturers can trim 10-20% of the serving size out of a product by weight and a lot of people simply won’t notice unless there’s something to clearly call attention to the fact. If you introduce redesigned packaging at the same time and use that to imply some other cause for the reduction in gross weight of the product, even fewer will notice or care “New Eco-friendly packaging”.

We aren’t really very good at estimating weights.

Sizes – Lengths and areas

We have huge advantages when estimating small lengths and areas – the human body comes ready-built with all sorts of handy measurement scales (of varying reliability).

The second joint of adult male index fingers is about an inch. Hands are typically about 4 1/2 inches across and 7 inches long. Wrist-to-elbow is about a foot, and people are about 6′ tall. Strides are about a yard. Scale everything down for a female, of course. What’s more, we know fairly accurately whether or not we have longer fingers, longer hands, thinner hands, and so on, and so can adjust our personal scales without thinking about it.

Add a little experience or skill, and you can estimate the length of a two-by-four reasonably well – at least, until you try and cut it to size.

There are factors that can reduce accuracy considerably – if we have to turn our heads to see the far end of a span, or if it’s curved instead of straight, and so on. But our depth perceptions are a lot more accurate than we often think they are, up to a point – and that point is considerably broader than expected.

For distance and length estimates, 10% error is high. Divide the accuracy values by 4 unless you have some reason to reduce accuracy, in which case you should halve it.

We aren’t so successful at adding additional dimensions to get areas, and are even less successful at interpolating volumes. For areas, divide the accuracy by 2, and for volumes, use the base values.

Temperature

It’s a pet personal theory that might hold no more water than the top of a ball, but my personal impression is that 1°C (roughly 3°F) is about the smallest temperature change that can be felt by the human body strongly enough to cause a desire to modify our clothing choices.

Despite this, we aren’t very good at interpreting and measuring changes in temperature. More than about 2° of fever is “you’re burning up”. It’s as though we count “1, 2, many, ambulance”.

Environmentally, we can employ broad scales based around our comfort – cold, cool, neutral, warm, hot, too hot – but that’s about it. Subjective and relative scales play a bigger role in our thermal perceptions – ‘cold enough for a jacket’, ‘warm enough for a t-shirt’. Right now, my room feels “chilly” – which tells me nothing about the actual temperature, except that it’s slightly cooler than is comfortable for my current clothing choices. My thermometer informs me it’s 18°C (64°F).

There are all sorts of complications regarding acclimatization, too. I vividly remember wearing a short-sleeve shirt to work, many years ago, and coming out at lunchtime to discover “Huh- it’s snowing. Funny, I don’t feel cold.”

Age is also a factor – I know for a fact that I’m more sensitive to the cold now than I was twenty years ago. Not sure about hotter temperatures, though.

Within a temperature band, our perceptions can be fairly accurate – but the edges of the temperature band will be fuzzy, and the whole concept is relative and individual, anyway. Above about 43°C (109.4°F) Air temperature, temperatures are simply “hot”.

We are more sensitive to water temperatures; not too much hotter than that, we stop sensing temperature at all (and move directly to sensing pain) – and not far above that, even pain goes away.

The human pain threshold is around 106-108°F (41-42°C) for water temperatures; most adults will suffer third-degree burns if exposed to 150°F (65°C) water for two seconds, or 140°F (60°C) water for six seconds, or 130°F (54°C) water for thirty seconds.

A 32°C (90°F) day and a 38°C (100°F) day may feel similar – depending on the atmospheric humidity. But with water, 32°C is tepid – even slightly refreshing – and 38°C is notably warm, like a hot bath.

So we’re talking about a narrow span of temperatures within which we can make estimates, and those estimates are vague and perceptual. That’s why cars are such death traps on hot days, when the internal temperatures can climb 30° or even 40° higher than outside – a tolerably-hot 35° (95°F) outside can be a lethal 65°C (149°F) or 75°C (167°F) inside – and 75% of that increase occurs within 5 minutes of closing the car and exiting it. “I’ll just pop in [to the store] for some milk” can be a death sentence.

Elapsed Time

Within a span of a second or two, humans can be fairly accurate. if we use some sort of metronome system to count seconds, we can get to about 2 minutes with reasonable accuracy.

Human heartbeats are often cited in fiction as something that can be silently counted to estimate time. In reality, not so much – a normal resting heart rate can be 60 to 100 beats a minute but it can vary from minute to minute. Children often have higher heart rates than this. Any sort of stress or activity can send it skyrocketing to 190 or more beats a minute. The highest ever recorded is 480 beats a minute – comparable to the heart rate of a mouse.

Taking away any such ‘counting mechanism’ throws open the doors of subjective error. No, that’s too mild an expression – total inaccuracy comes closer.

External cues can help – I use albums (typically 42 minutes, or up to 74 minutes for a CD) to tell me when I need to take a break for eye health – I’m just about to do so, in fact! But these trade any reasonable accuracy for reliable inaccuracy.

Complicating everything is the fact that humans have several different timing mechanisms in parallel, each of which has a different level of susceptibility to various temporal illusions.

Throw in the cognitive variation – direct perception vs estimated temporal distance from the memory of events – and you have a total mess.

Temporal Illusions

Let’s start with quoting part of the summary of an article from the (US) National Library Of Medicine: Human time perception and its illusions by David M Eagleman

“Why does a clock sometimes appear stopped? Is it possible to perceive the world in slow motion during a car accident? Can action and effect be reversed? Time perception is surprisingly prone to measurable distortions and illusions.

“… Perceived duration can be distorted by saccades, by an oddball in a sequence, or by stimulus complexity or magnitude. Temporal order judgments of actions and sensations can be reversed by exposure to delayed motor consequences, and simultaneity judgments can be manipulated by repeated exposure to non-simultaneous stimuli.”

Saccades are “rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation. They range in amplitude from the small movements made while reading, for example, to the much larger movements made while gazing around a room” according to the (US) National Institutes Of Health. They aren’t just changing the direction in which you are looking, in other words, they involve changing what you are looking at..

I can’t do better from that beginning than a direct quotation of the relevant section of Wikipedia’s article on Time Perception:

Main types of temporal illusions

• Telescoping effect: People tend to recall recent events as occurring further back in time than they actually did (backward telescoping) and distant events as occurring more recently than they actually did (forward telescoping).
• Vierordt’s law: Shorter intervals tend to be overestimated while longer intervals tend to be underestimated.
• Time intervals associated with more changes may be perceived as longer than intervals with fewer changes.
• Perceived temporal length of a given task may shorten with greater motivation.
• Perceived temporal length of a given task may stretch when broken up or interrupted.
• Auditory stimuli may appear to last longer than visual stimuli.
• Time durations may appear longer with greater stimulus intensity (e.g., auditory loudness or pitch).
• Simultaneity judgments can be manipulated by repeated exposure to non-simultaneous stimuli.

There’s also the Kappa effect, a form of perceptual time dilation – recurring stimuli, whether spacial, auditory, or tactile – either seem to occur at greater or shorter intervals than is actually the case. For example,

When mentally comparing these two sub-journeys, the part that covers more distance may appear to take longer than the part covering less distance, even though they take an equal amount of time.

…and more besides – there’s Flash-lag effect, the Oddball effect, and reversal of temporal order judgment. I’m not going to detail these, because I think it time to move on to my main point. Besides, I’m running out of time – exposing the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the time estimates with which I opened this article! It’s worth your time to read the whole page. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…waiting…

…waiting…

…waiting…

…waiting…

…waiting…

… oh, back already? Okay, let’s continue!

Relationship to Optical Illusions

Optical Illusions occur for one of two main reasons: (1) Our brains are hardwired to take shortcuts that give ‘near enough’ answers and let us focus on what we are supposed to be doing, and the illusion exposes and exploits this fact; or (2) we received an evolutionary advantage of some sort and the illusion exploits and exposes an unintended consequence.

I’ve offered numerous examples of the first, notably in Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see?, but don’t think I’ve mentioned the second before.

Basically, if you can get everyone in a theater looking at one specific point on the screen, you can have something emerge from the vicinity of the “blind spot”, which causes an instinctive impression of a threat, causing people to jump.

Horror movies have been using this for ages, and it’s why some old conversions-to-TV were less successful just because the TV screen has different proportions to the movie screen – the advent of Widescreen has solved the problem.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that our perception of time – in the form of our perception of dynamic events – derive from exactly the same causes. Viewed in that context, it would be utterly astonishing if our perceptions of time were not subject to temporal illusions and distortions!

I’m short of time, so I’m just going to toss this out there for people to chew over.

1. While there are similarities, there is also the possibility that animals perceive time differently to humans. In particular, our color vision (which is better than that of most animals) may incur processing loads that make us more susceptible to temporal illusions.

2. There could well be species that take advantage of this effect, at least hypothetically. But that requires them to primarily hunt humans as preferred prey.

3. There is every likelihood that aliens and other non-human sentients would experience temporal illusions – but they might not be the same temporal illusions that we perceive.

Impact on Reliability of temporal guesstimates

Extremely short-term temporal estimates can be made by most people with reasonable accuracy through the use of mental timing tricks. You can estimate your personal reliability by two simple experiment:

1. Count to 100 in your head at 1 second intervals, timing how long it really takes (don’t look at the timer). At 100, stop the timer and see how accurate you are. Then repeat the test for counts of 10, 20, 30, and 60. Experiment with resets by taking a few seconds in between the tests or not (which will examine how the long count has tinkered with your sense of how long a second is).

2. Do the same thing, but this time silently mouth a word that takes about a second to say – the word I generally use is ‘elephant’. Compare with the results of the first experiment. Most people will observe a significantly greater reliability in test 2.

With skill, short-term temporal estimates can be made “reasonably accurately”. If you intend to do something in exactly a minute, without watching a clock, the odds are that you will start to do that thing within 40-90 seconds. But this depends on how much of the interval is spent doing something else and how much is simply waiting around – waiting makes it more likely that you’ll start early, without waiting the full minute, while doing things makes it easy to underestimate how long it’s been, causing you to start late. And observe that +50% is considered “reasonably accurately” in this context!

From about 3 minutes upwards, reliability becomes increasingly strained. Without visual cues or references or some sort of alarm, getting someone to do something “in an hour” could mean they do it in 40 minutes or in ninety minutes – the error margin scales!

“In a couple of hours” has an error of more than an hour. “In a week” has an error of more than a day. “In a month” – assuming that you don’t forget entirely – has an error of more than a week. (Conversely, “In 28 days” is much more accurate, because of the pattern imposed by this interval being divisible into weeks). And so on.

Here’s one more experiment to close out this section.

3. You’ll need a small group. Give someone the stopwatch, While the group watches, they start the watch and make some sort of visual display. At some point 10-120 seconds later, they stop the watch and write down the time they did so, while everyone else writes down their estimate of how long it was. Repeat (with different intervals) until you have 10-20 measurements for each participant. Then compare.

Time Required

If it’s hard to assess how long it’s been since something happened, it’s even harder to predict how long something will take to happen. Not only are all the temporal illusions still in effect, but you have to estimate the difficulties involved in completing the task and how long they will take to overcome.

I estimated this to be a typical-length article – about 4500 words or so. I passed that number a long time ago – it’s now 7140 words and counting, about 58% more than expected (so far).

That is a failure of the assumption, not the estimating process, but it’s an illustrative point, I think.

That said, the closer to an estimate you can make the process of guesstimation, the more accurate you will be. Even if it’s just breaking down the task into a number of roughly-equal sub-tasks will have a significant impact on accuracy.

I touched on that in pointing out that “28 days from now” is a lot more accurate than “a month from now”, because 28 days breaks down into four sub-tasks of equal length and with a recurring pattern; the base error margin is based upon that of the sub-task, not the task as a whole. You have to add a component for compounding errors, but that’s relatively small, and can be expected to mostly cancel out.

There are limits to this trick, though. “In three months” isn’t much worse than in “13 weeks”, due to the size of the “13” – in a nutshell, “four” is a number that we can directly comprehend, “13” is a number that we can only comprehend in the abstract. The “three” in “three months” doesn’t substitute for it, because “month” is inherently variable and fuzzy.

Three months ago was February 29th – except there isn’t one of those. It was also February 28th, February 27th, February 26th, March 1, March 2, and March 3. And, in fact, if something happened a week to either side of those dates, we’d probably still call it about ‘three months ago”.

Travel Time

Travel time is an interesting question to contemplate, given the problems already identified with time. It breaks down into two components: one linked to the speed, which provides the equivalent of the “counting elephants” throughout the trip if it’s consistent, and one relating to delays and interruptions – traffic, red lights, and so on.

A short trip

I live 2.4 km (1.5 miles) from the departure point of the 415 bus. While busses aren’t quite so predictable in speed – sometimes they have to stop and pick up / set down passengers, sometimes they don’t – that’s a relatively short distance. So you would expect the bus to be fairly reliable.

The trip going the other way is more than twenty times this distance. Busses are frequently 5 minutes early or 7 minutes late. At a reasonable frequency, those numbers can be 7 and 10 minutes respectively. On that basis, you would be forgiven for expecting the error at my bus stop to be 1/20th of 10 minutes, or about 30 seconds. Heck, you could be conservative and call it a minute either way.

That’s not what’s observed. While it’s rare for the bus to be more than about 3 minutes early, it’s not uncommon for it to be 3, 5, even 7 minutes late. Ten minutes after departure. That’s a 70% error rate.

Two factors account for this: the inherent variability, which can also impact on the accuracy of initial departure – call that two minutes of the total, and two critical traffic lights. The first one is just before my stop, and it accounts for another minute of the error. The remaining four minutes all stem from a single traffic light where the traffic is heavy and the window for transit is small – creating the potential for significant delays. Not every time, but often enough – more than one trip in three, at least.

And, as explained in Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs, once delays happen, they tend to snowball.

A longer trip

My dad lives around 550km from my home town; it’s a trip that he makes regularly. It takes about 6 1/2 hours. The biggest variable is how long and how often he stops for rest breaks – typically, two or three times, one of which is to eat. Call it twenty minutes and the other stops 5-10 minutes. so that’s 25-40 minutes in stops. Google says that his route should take 5 hrs 59 minutes – adding in the stops and you get 6h 24m to 6h 39, or an average of 6 hrs 31 min. His estimated error could be as much as 29 minutes from this, or 7.4%, but it’s more likely to be 5 minutes, give or take – a mere 1.28%.

Metronomic regularity, controlled by the speed limits, a predictable loss to traffic, and a minimum of traffic lights – that combination more than outweighs the variability of the number of stops. If he gives an ETA, departure delays are more significant than how long he has to stop along the way, and if he’s not within half an hour of the ETA, something has gone wrong along the way!

Travel Time estimates

Travel time estimates are exactly the opposite of most types of estimates – the longer the trip, the more reliable an estimate will be.

When estimating the travel times for the PCs exploring the towns and cities of Arkansas for a new Base Of Operations in my Superhero campaign, he made reasonable allowances for traffic and worst-case assumptions for other forms of delay. Most of the time, these failed to materialize – and as a result, a planned 10-hour day left the PCs a couple of hours per day ahead of schedule. And that’s with a couple of unpredictable delays added onto the schedule, accounting for another hour or more.

After a single day, the Red Cavalier was so far ahead of schedule that they were able to spend three or four hours exploring neighboring Mississippi in a side-trip – and were STILL ahead of schedule when they resumed the main exploration.

Making anything other than conservative estimates would have been irresponsible of the NPC doing the planning – but nine times in ten or more, those conservative estimates badly overestimated how long things would take.

Score check: Deadline started 21 minuets ago. Word count is now 8190.

I allow myself an hour before I consider delivery to be ‘late”, but I still have a few sections to write, and then have to spellcheck, edit, format, and illustrate this magnum opus – which will probably take 30-40 minutes, maybe longer..

Conclusion: I’m not quite going to make deadline unless I finish in the next 10 minutes. Delivery 30-40 minutes late is moire likely.

Vaguer Guesstimates

Of course, the discussion above are all concerning the more precise types of guesstimate. But there are a set of others that are likely to come up from time to time, and they need to get discussed, too.

Weather

There’s a great tendency to slice weather up into discrete daily events with no rhyme or reason behind them. I’ve taken exception to this from time to time and offered alternatives to simply rolling on ‘random weather tables’ that build memory of yesterday into the generation process.

See, for example, Ask The GMs: Weather, Not Climate – and the unfinished series on The Diversity Of Seasons, which at some point I will get back to!

Never does this need resound more solidly than when a PC asks what tomorrow’s weather looks like.

Tomorrow’s weather never starts from zero; it always starts from the conditions that applied today, and then gets modified by the changes that are going to take place in the course of the next 24 hours.

Such meteorology is a pain for the GM because it’s a lot of work that’s rarely required – hence the existence of those random tables in the first place!

Things are a lot easier in Fantasy games, when the state of the art was something along the lines of “Red sky in morning, Sailor take warning”. Sure, they knew the seasons, and roughly when they would start, and what the climate said the weather would be in each season – in fairly descriptive language, but that was about it.

From the invention of the thermometer, that starts to change. First, you get written records and precise numbers; and then you get interactions with barometric pressure. The telegraph brings the chance to observe the progressive shift in weather from place to place as changes transit, in something close to ‘real time’. And then weather balloons, and weather satellites, and better weather satellites…. and forecasts become practical, and just keep getting better and better.

Right now, three-day forecasts are 90-95% accurate, at least where I live. This drops over succeeding days until it’s only about 50-50 a week from now. Each day added is an exponential increase in the difficulty of accurate forecasts, so it’s going to take some sort of breakthrough to extend the forecast window much further.

But here’s an interesting fact: the weather service that I used back where I used to live is not accurate for where I am now, and not accurate for the next suburb out. That’s three different weather patterns in a distance of about 1.65 km – just 1.025 miles. For more on this, look at The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 1: Winter, and specifically, section 4, Winter In Sydney.

Concurrent Patterns

At one point, I had to use the train. Railway stations on my line are only a minute or two apart. I went from rainy to cloudy to sunny in the space of about 4 minutes.

It’s my theory that it was only when travel became fast enough that we could be in two places in a short enough interval of time to notice how different weather could be from one place to the next. Travel by car, and those places were 5 minutes or so apart – enough time for the heavens to open or close. Suddenly, it’s not so obvious. Travel by horse or by carriage, and we’re talking at least 10 and more likely 20 minutes – plenty of time for the weather to turn. And the diversity of weather pattern becomes as clear as mud.

Implications for the GM

Reliability of forecast means that if you keep it narrative, it will generally be as reliable as it can be expected to be – with room for the occasional unexpected divergence.

But that only matters if the PCs are staying put somewhere. As soon as they move, perhaps as little as 1/2 a kilometer (1/3 of a mile), all bets may be off – especially if the weather experienced is within spitting distance of the weather forecast..

Stock Markets

Something else with a memory is movements on a stock market. In fact, i once wrote a software stock market simulation program which factored random events both in contrast to the prevailing trend and as a direct effect on the market index. At the end of the ‘day’ it went into ‘overseas markets mode’ and did something similar there, but added a factor describing the relevance to the market being simulated. The last thing that it did before the markets ‘opened’ the next day was to compound all these effects and use them to determine (1) an initial market ‘adjustment’ and (2) revise the ‘prevailing trend’ to accommodate the last 24 hours.

Actually, the ‘prevailing market trend’ was actually three different trends – a short term trend (daily), a mid-term trend (ten-day cycle) and a long-term trend (sixty-day cycle). These then combined in a biorhythm-esque way to create the next short-term trend and update the other trends when the day incremented.

Did I say that weather forecasting was a lot of ultimately-meaningless work for the GM? Well, stock-market forecasts are even more work and even more pointless. So far as I’m concerned, daily stock market movements in an RPG are comprised of equal parts ‘the speed of plot” and 3d6 up, 3d6 down. At most, if yesterday was up, there will be a 50% chance that today’s will also be up if the general news in the campaign is good and a 50% that it will be down if the news is bad.

If your PC want to predict what I will roll on 6d6, even with a bias from yesterday and the events scheduled for the day, go right ahead.

Manpower

How many people do you need to get X finished in Y time? This takes the task completion of the earlier section and compounds its variability with still more imponderables and unpredictables like relationships and leadership and industrial action and politics.

IF all things were to remain equal, it wouldn’t be much more difficult to extend that ‘time required’ guesstimate to derive a manpower figure required to reduce the guesstimate by X%.

The longer the resulting ‘project time required’ is, and the larger the workforce that is required, the more certain it becomes that all things will NOT remain equal.

On top of that, there are practical limits to how much task subdivision there can be. Throwing 10,000 people at a project that should take ten man-days does NOT mean that it will be complete in anything like 1.44 minutes. No way, no how. Not even 15 minutes.

So you assume that things will go wrong 50% of the time, and expand the workforce to accommodate that, and put a hard limit to how much time can be saved.

Obviously, the nature of the project is all-important; the more independent parts it can be broken into, coordinated, and supervised, the more simultaneous tracks can be accommodated. Each track is then subject to its own Manpower assessment, with the net effect that quite large projects can be completed in reasonable time. This applies to everything from building a skyscraper in a year or three to the Apollo program.

Don’t forget those administrative functions and overheads in your guesstimating, either!

Costs & Budgets

Hand in hand with manpower estimation comes the last of these specific categories.

There’s a simple rule of thumb that I use from my days in IT: “You can have it good, you can have it fast, or you can have it cheap. Pick one.”

The traditional form is “Pick two”, but if there is sufficient obsession with one of the three, the second is also necessarily sacrificed.

So, normally, you might be able to say “I want it good and I want it cheap.” Okay, that makes time the sacrificial lamb; you need to hire university students and promising grade-schoolers, buy their attention with cheap trinkets and promises of street cred in the IT world, and let them work on the code for as many years as it takes.

But if you want it really good, those won’t be enough; ‘cheap’ has to get tossed overboard, and instead you are Google, hiring the best and brightest for whatever it takes and paying them for as long as it takes.

There are, quite frankly, so many variables in this sort of estimate that another rule of thumb comes to mind: Estimate a best-case cost and multiply it by ten. Unless you want it good, or fast, or cheap, in which chase multiply it by 20, instead.

Shortcuts in engineering and software projects never seem to go where they are supposed to, in the long run.

Guesstimates for the GM

You will need guesstimates, and an understanding of the limitations inherent in them, to answer player questions and requests.

You can either do a lot of work basing these on reasonable and realistic estimates, or you can cheat and base them on guesstimates of your own, which you then modify as events arise that help or hinder.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Okay, my deadline came and went two hours ago. I’m up to 9840 words, and still have that extra work to do, so I’m estimating publishing at
3:20 AM, local time – more than 2 hours late.

Update 2, 3:34 AM: Illustration done, spellchecking done. Formatting and final editing underway. Publication estimate is revised to about 4:15AM, about 3 1/4 hours past my (self-imposed) deadline.

Update 3, 5:22 AM: Formatting was a nightmare; for some reason, even though it was automatically generated by the CSM, the link to the Creative Commons License wasn’t resolving, and it was taking the rest of the caption with it – including the end-of-caption instruction. And all text until the next hyperlink. That, and everything that followed, was present – as part of the caption. But it’s all done and ready to post, 4 1/2 hours past deadline.

But I think it’s been worth it.

Welcome & General Introduction

With each passing entry in this series, we get to ground that is more familiar to all of us – either part of, or directly related to, our everyday lives, or part of the collective zeitgeist concerning the forces that influence those lives. This makes analysis easier (I know more of what I’m talking about and understand it in greater detail) and harder (because this isn’t a history lesson, I want to make these posts interesting to read and containing some novel content that readers will not have previously encountered – and that gets harder because readers also know the subject better).

Each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

From A Writing Perspective

I try never to hide things ‘behind a curtain’ here at Campaign Mastery. Not only does a brief discussion of progress on the series (and elsewhere) help give each article an immediacy that might otherwise be lacking, but you never know what will provide the spark of inspiration to a reader. On top of that, I think that relating to readers on a more one-to-one basis – just friends talking together – makes my writing more personable and more accessible.

It’s always interesting, for example, to compare plans to delivered product. When I outlined this week’s post in (optimistic) hopes of including it in Part 3, it had 22 sections with, I thought, a nice logical flow from one section to another, but I hadn’t actually put much thought into the content – too busy focusing on Part 3 and on the many other big projects that I have underway (two of which have now been completed, and several others having advanced in the last week, BTW).

I found time in the intervening week to contemplate the story that is to unfold in this part of the series, and found a different narrative flow – one that I think is (gasp!) better than what was there originally, because it provides scope for some of those original thoughts and perspectives. One of the immediate consequences was highlighting the absence of some material that should have been included, but wasn’t.

This involved reordering some of what was already listed for inclusion, and the addition of some seven additional sections, taking the total to 29 – not counting these preliminaries.

Adventure Parallels

I see a lot of parallels in those changes with the way adventures develop in the course of writing them. I don’t want to get side-tracked too far, but the point is worth explaining, in extremely abbreviated fashion. If you’re looking for more details, consult One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post – the process is essentially the same. Incidentally, that also shows that this is hardly the first time that the equivalence has come to my attention!

Okay, so my plotlines all start as a single line or paragraph summary:

A happens, B happens, C happens, A causes D to happen as a result of B, C blocks the obvious solution, D players decide on a solution, E they implement it.

(That’s about as generic as I can make it).

How the pieces of the puzzle interrelate will be different every time, and often rooted in existent campaign circumstances and player-developed characterization & personal histories. This then gets broken down into bullet points:

• A happens
• B happens
• C happens
• A causes D to happen as a result of B
• C blocks the obvious solution
• D players decide on a solution
• E they implement the solution.

Each of these bullet points then gets broken down into individual events that collectively tell the ‘story’ contained in that “Act” of the adventure. Sometimes, a single PC might be involved, sometimes it will be all of them, the details vary.

A through C comprise three important elements of any adventure – conveying background events that the PCs would be aware of, relaying where the PCs are at the start of their involvement in the adventure, and describing exactly how the PCs come to be involved in the adventure. A fourth element that I usually try to include is advancing the personal lives of the PCs in some fashion, frequently involving players making decisions that won’t impact the PCs right away but which will profoundly influence them at some future point.

• A happens
  • Scene A1
  • Scene A2
  • Scene A3
• B happens
  • Scene B1
  • Scene B2
  • Scene B3

….

Here’s the connection: Quite often, when writing (say) Scene C3, I will discover the need to establish something earlier in the adventure, in an A or B section. I might also discover that the adventure will play better, will make more sense, and have more consistent characterization, if something from A or B does not come to the immediate attention of the players. So there is an organic growth in sections, and some redaction, and some conflation (collapsing two scenes into one), and some misdirection, and quite a lot of re-sequencing.

That’s the big advantage of bullet points and a simple word processor – I can move these bullet points around, up or down, as I find necessary or desirable. I can even build alternate paths into the adventure so that there’s scope for greater independence on the part of the players – no railroads in sight.

And, of course, once actual play – or, in the case of an article, writing – starts, all bets are off; this is a plan, not a road map.

One final illustration of the process and results, and I’ll move on:

The next adventure for the Adventurer’s Club campaign is “Lucifer Rising”. The “A, B, and C” sections (plus the D section – PCs personal lives) – comprised about 6 scenes for each PC, with one of these leading directly to the main adventure. So my co-GM and I carefully listed circumstances and developments for each PC, and planned a round-robin in which each PC gets an even share of the spotlight and no-one ever gets two scenes in succession.

When the time came to actually turn these into prepped-and-illustrated text, it became necessary to foreshadow some things, and break some large scenes up, and shuffle a few things around, and the upshot is that the “A through C plus D” now comprise 11 rounds of the round-robbin, and half the adventure, maybe more – and half those scenes didn’t even exist in the original outline, but were designed to bring the party together at the right time to participate in the main adventure.

It was once written that one of the greatest pleasures that can be found exists in creating order from chaos, or words to that effect. That’s what this is – a chaotic maelstrom of plot ingredients that have to be assembled in the right sequence and quantities to tell the singular story of these PCs in this set of circumstances encountering this specific plotline and wrestling it to some sort of conclusion.

Okay, so with that out of the way, let’s move on to what we’re actually here to talk about: Economics in the Age Of Steam! First, the usual preliminaries:

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At – repeated from Part 3

So far, I’ve established a number of important principles.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of what wealth even is, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – that economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contain the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

Industrial Era I: The Age Of Steam

There are those who would argue that the Advent of the (various) East India Trading Companies was the suppression of individuality and the rise of the Corporate Culture – certainly, that was the subtext of the second and third Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. While these events certainly began the process, I think the conclusion draws too long a bow.

Nevertheless, the rise of corporate power to rival that of governments, who had risen to usurp much of the power previously vested in nobility, was a seminal transformation that would come to full flower only in the Age Of Steam. Without this preliminary influence, the latter era would be profoundly different; the fact that the rise of some corporate power of this type was a consequence of dominoes already in motion, and hence more-or-less inevitable, makes no difference.

But it’s worth remembering, for context, exactly how powerful these non-governmental corporate entities were: they largely reduced Government to the roles of ‘Caretakers of the Economy’ and ‘Makers of laws regarding the interaction between corporations and everyone else’. The wealthy owners and stockholders must have felt like they were sitting pretty, perched at the top of the pyramid, the undoubted apex predators of the modern world. A pity, then, that so little was known at the time of the fate of the Dinosaurs and the warnings that fate holds for other Apex predators: when conditions change, survival is threatened from unexpected directions.

1. Rise of the Common Man I: Democracy

Democracy wasn’t a new idea; they had a form of it in ancient Greece, though it wasn’t quite what we would recognize as fitting that term, today. Some writers use the term “modern democracy” to distinguish between the two.

The seeds for ‘Modern Democracy” were sewn in the Magna Carta, way back when. Although those seeds had sent forth buds and shoots in subsequent centuries, it was as the Age Of Steam approached that they came to full flower, in the form of a tax rebellion in an English Colony.

Personal studies in ensuing years have shown that the simplified and sanitized mythos of the formation of the United States Of America are, well, a simplified and sanitized form of a far richer and more complex story. To understand it more fully, you need to appreciate the European influence on Benjamin Franklin (especially the influence of the Bohemians), and how these were translated through his publications into a philosophical doctrine; you need to understand the business and commercial realities extant in the Colonies at the time, especially those of Boston; you need to acknowledge the one arena in which Nobility still trumped Politics, and Government still trumped Commerce, War, and that a conflict between France and England led to attempts to clamp down and ‘bleed’ the Colonies of resources that could be used to fight that war; and you need to follow a trail of breadcrumbs through history that led to the Revolution, and the way a group of progressive intellectuals and hard-nosed businessmen came together to transform the philosophies inculcated by Franklin and others into the foundations of a new type of Political relationship between Government and Common Man.

All of which is far too complicated to go into in any further detail here and now! Suffice it to say that Government was rendered a servant of the People (at least in theory), giving the ordinary citizen more (collective) authority and power than ever before.

2. Power distributed

What’s interesting about this is that this represented a contract between the newly-formed proto-government and its citizens (who were given no say in the matter but who grabbed it with both hands – eventually and gradually), completely cutting out the middle-man, the corporations. That it was a continuation of the trend toward distributed power that had begun, arguably, with the Magna Carta was not given a lot of attention at the time – though it is worth noting that the Magna Carta remains at the heart of the American legal system to this day, renamed “Common Law”.

What was new was that the new political structure also distributed responsibility amongst the citizenry, who then conferred it on representatives to act on their behalf. If something needs doing, you tell your representative, and if enough of your fellow citizens agree, they smell it on the wind and either work to have that something done, or risk losing their selection as the representatives of that block of citizenry.

Cynics may suggest that this distributed power didn’t amount to much more than a clever con-job by the Founding Fathers; as anyone who has studied Australian Referendums knows, it’s hard to get a lot of people to agree on a lunch menu, never mind anything more substantial. The wonder of American Democracy is not that it is so hard to get amendments to the Constitution passed, it’s that so many of them were passed, despite the difficulty. Thus, the real authority remained vested right where the Founding Fathers wanted it – in their hands.

This cynical appraisal falls short, in my book. Certainly, with each additional State recognized, the difficulties of further Constitutional amendment increased exponentially, but the Prohibition folly shows that it was still possible. But it did create the ongoing tension between small government and big government, the one attempting to claw power back from the central authority and the other authorizing that central authority to act on behalf of all the smaller holders of power.

3. Rise of the Common Man II: The Gold Rushes

I mentioned these in relation to the Ages of Exploration and Sail, but the biggest Gold Rushes occurred in the Age Of Steam. Individuals could accrue vast wealth from virtually nowhere, and the mobility conferred on them in those eras put individuals in a position to capitalize on the opportunity – if they were brave enough to risk it all. The mythic image of the eccentric prospector has become ingrained in the modern sensibility, but this downplays and satirizes the boldness – or desperation – that was a necessary element in the makeup of those fortune-hunters.

Notably, it was often not those who actually found the precious metals who actually grew wealthy as a result; more commonly, it was those who provided services to those rugged individualists. There was a time, for example, when Laundry was carried by sailing ship from the California goldfields to Hawaii for cleaning and back again – a sweet racket for someone, to be sure!

At the time, this harsh reality did not intrude upon the myth; popular perception was that the lucky could “strike it rich” overnight. Nevertheless, the mere fact that it was possible must have had a profound effect on people, even those not directly engaged in ‘seeking their fortune’ in such financially-perilous pursuits, this is a factor that often seems under-appreciated, but it helps to explain the opportunism that manifests in the second Industrial Era, and the stock-owning frenzy that ultimately led to the Great Depression.

Rags-to-riches stories were not only possible, but everyone knew they were possible; they simply had to wait until fate presented them with their chance, then be brave enough to take a chance and seize the opportunity. This adventurousness plays out in a number of different ways through the time period.

4. An End To Slavery

There is, understandably, a lot of focus on the American divestiture of the slave trade, created by the melodrama of the Civil War; the fact is that Slavery was already dead as a trade through most of the rest of the Western World by the time that conflict started. In many respects, this was slavery’s “last stand” against the progressive forces within society that sought to outlaw it. Although not fully stamped out as a practice by the outcome, it was certainly a milestone and the last chance to reverse the course of events in this social arena.

It’s really difficult to put yourself into the mindset of the newly-emancipated. So much of your perceptions of reality must have been shaped by the events that had shaped your life, and even extremely-accessible depictions such as “Roots” couldn’t fully immerse the viewer in that mindset, though they tried. The TV adaption of Arthur Hailley’s novel was first aired in 1977; I was 14 at the time, the eldest of four children, but all of us (save my youngest brother, not yet 5) watched it avidly. You can judge the impact that it had by my attitude toward the institution of slavery, revealed in part 3.

Certain constituents of that mindset can be appreciated, though – a sense of liberty and freedom, a renewed capacity for pride and self-respect, trepidation over an unknown future, and a sense of hope and opportunity, all must have contributed to the psyche of the emancipated. And there are those themes again, resonating with the attitudes in others created by the awareness of what was possible.

What killed the slave trade? Idealism aside, I don’t know that any explanation that I’ve heard or read fully accounts for it, partly because of the focus on the American experience in that ending. Not that the ending was uniform or complete; there are associational links to Apartheid, which lasted into the 1990s. Certainly, the acceptance of the principles of human rights which found such firm expression in the US Constitution played a part (since those principles are fundamentally incompatible with the practice), but – as I pointed out earlier – the slave trade was already dead or dying elsewhere by the time of the US Civil War. Britain held in 1772 that Slavery was not recognized in British Law, for example. In Scotland, slaves worked in the coal mines until 1799, when an act was passed which established their freedom and made the practice illegal.

Ultimately, I think that economics were what killed the slave trade; mechanization made it possible to do more work with lower overheads without slaves. This enabled men and women of conscience to exercise those consciences, while weakening resistance on the part of the unprincipled and exploitative. Supply vastly exceeded demand, and (as usually happens in such cases), the market collapsed. History, in other words, wiped out the slave trade, and any other interpretation is simply putting a fair dress on an ugly reality. Oh, I have no doubt that there were a few idealists – there always are – but they were tilting at windmills until the social and economic conditions changed for the more progressive. I might wish it otherwise, but that’s a personal reaction.

An appreciation of historical dating

The other factor that is relevant is the popular misconception over when the US Civil War took place. Sure, most Americans can recite the dates (1861-65), but there is always the impression that this was a long time ago, even when discussing the Age of Steam, which started in 1712, or 1764, depending on what you consider the seminal event. Most simply date it to the 1760s and leave the nuances to one side. The key point is that the industrial revolution was already some 60-70 years underway by the time of the Civil War.

I suspect that people conflate the gunpowder weapons of the age of sail with those employed in the Civil War and those used in the War Of Independence, and think therefore that the Civil War and American Revolution were closer together than the Civil War and modern day are. One of the points made in discussing Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool was that to characters who were adults in the 1930s (when our Pulp Campaign is set), the Civil War existed in living memory, and American Characters would almost certainly have heard first-hand stories from the events. Someone who was 20 in 1865 would be 65 in 1910; someone who was 30 in 1930 would have been ten years old in 1910. There’s plenty of overlap for Grandpa to tell his stories, and for the events of the time to have had a direct influence. Even if you advance the clock to 1938 – the current game year in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, more or less (we keep resetting the clock) – one’s parents would have been influenced by the Civil War, usually through the effect on their upbringing.

The other day, on Quora, someone posted a link to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man”, which happened to include the date of the song – 1983. Two months from now, that song will be Forty years old. That still boggles my mind, because it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long – 2/3 of my lifetime!? 1/3 sounds about right…

This is important to understand. Adults past the age of 25-30 tend to interpret temporal distances relative to their adolescence onwards; add another 10 years to that, and it’s post-adolescence. I finished school in 1980, so (psychologically) that’s the end of my adolescent time, which would have started about 6 years earlier – call it 1971 to be precocious. My 25th birthday was in 1988, my 30th in 1993, and my 40th in 2003. With those markers in place, let’s place “Sharp-Dressed Man”: when it first came out, I had been an adult for 3 years (trivial) but my teens had started 12 years earlier – more than half of my lifetime. When I was 25, it was 5 years old, which was 1/5th (20%) of my total lifetime, 5/17ths of my post-youth period (~29%), and 5/8ths of my adult life old (40%). At the time, I would have thought of it in terms of the 20% figure, relatively recent. When I was 30, five years later, my perceptions would have shifted to an adjusted middle-figure (10/22nds = 45%) – so still a part of the second part of my life. When I hit 40, it would have been 20/23 of my adult life since it came out – cementing a perception that it was part of the soundtrack to my youth. The distance to it would have then been locked relative to the distance I felt removed from that youth – not very far at all, and certainly not as far removed as the calendar would have it.

The same is true of any other life event – if it happened to me past 25 years old, it is part of my adulthood; if it happened in the 7-12 years preceding that, it is part of my youth; and before that, it was either part of my childhood, or it predated me. Forty was just a few yesterdays ago, not a wholly-ridiculous twenty years! Nor does it seem like 12-going-on-13 years since Campaign Mastery started – it wasn’t in the last five years, so it wasn’t “recently”, but it wasn’t that long ago. Ten years, though, seems a LONG time…

Perceptions of time are inconsistent and easily led astray, is my point, and that plays into when people “feel” the Civil War took place.

A side-note

This can also go a long way toward explaining the differences in attitude to Civil Rights between Blacks & Whites. To whites, the battle was a long time ago, in the 1860s; to blacks, that was just round one in a fight that was only partially won with desegregation in the 1950s – and schools are now as segregated as they were in the 1960s, according to some. The 1950s are a LOT closer to ‘now” than the 1860s – and the scars are that much more fresh. I try to always bear this in mind when something related to the subject comes up.

5. The Role Of Government

Although it wasn’t there yet, the Age Of Steam comprised a transition between government as an enabler of business and manager of society to government as steward of the economy and voice of the people. It still had responsibility for treaties, and for the wars that resulted when those treaties were violated; increasingly, those treaties were about economic relations and trade, not politics or humanity.

Militaries still answered to the government – it was when that relationship broke down that a coup became likely, a pattern that is replicated to this day.

Even the status of government as framers of law was under pressure throughout the age of steam, in the name of providing a stable economic platform for business. This relationship would remain turbulent through subsequent eras – the New Deal used the weapon of business (money) to bolster the economic underpinnings of society while new regulations clawed back authority to the government of the day, but the fact that such regulation was necessary in the first place simply shows how much ground had been ceded to business in the name of prosperity.

6. Locomotives & Robber Barons

Several of these economic and social threads came together in the Age Of Steam to create the Robber Barons.

I’m a long-time fan of the 18xx railroad board game series. This led me to a game (“Railroad Tycoon” I think it was) in my Windows-98 days, in which a player took on the role of an entrepreneur of the railroad industry and competed against the others (computer players), each of which had a profile based on one of the Robber Barons of the railroad era.

Individuals could parley modest beginnings into vast fortunes by hitching their wagons to new industries such a transcontinental railroads. While some seed capital was necessary, those gifted with sufficiently silver tongues could convince others to lend their wealth and resources to business proposals, becoming investors in the business formed to administer the resulting operations.

These businessmen were often real pieces of work – ruthless, greedy, underhanded scoundrels. In reality, there were more of them outside the transport industry than there were within it, as the list provided by this Wikipedia page makes clear. Furs, Steel, Finance, Tobacco, Electric Power, Oil, Barbed Wire, Coal, Steamboats, Copper, and Timber are just some of the fields of enterprise of individuals identified as Robber Barons. Many of the names are also going to be familiar to readers: Astor, Carnegie, Gould, Harriman, Morgan, Rockefeller, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Hearst.

It was common practice for these wealthy entrepreneurs to donate ‘gifts’ to institutions – hospitals, universities and the like – or even to establish them from scratch. Institutions, Buildings, Chairs, & Schools would thus be named after the benefactor who was providing the cash, conferring a certain level of immortality.

At the same time, I can’t help but note the transformative effects that the railroads had on society. Uniform time in the UK resulted from the need to synchronize clocks at all railroad stations so that people could know when the trains would be there to convey them to their destinations, and the impact of the railroads came up time and time again in my research into the history of townships in Arkansas.

Prosperity rode on the steam locomotive, it seems. If the railroad passed through your town, or better yet, stopped there, it would bring trade and wealth; if it bypassed your town, it was at risk of withering and dying.

The railroads enhanced and amplified another existent trend from the age of Sail – travel for social and recreational reasons. It was now possible to take a trip to the seaside for a day or two, or hop down to the nearest major city for shopping and return upon the same day. In fact, the economic influence of a city over a region could be measured to at least some extent by the travel time on the rails.

7. Victorian Sweatshops, Workhouses, & Poorhouses

“In Britain, a workhouse was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. (In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses.) The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631.

“The origins of the workhouse can be traced to the Statute of Cambridge 1388, which attempted to address the labor shortages following the Black Death in England by restricting the movement of laborers, and ultimately led to the state becoming responsible for the support of the poor. However, mass unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers in particular, and a series of bad harvests, meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable.

“The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilizing the free labor of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertilizer, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.

“As the 19th century wore on, workhouses increasingly became refuges for the elderly, infirm, and sick rather than the able-bodied poor, and in 1929 legislation was passed to allow local authorities to take over workhouse infirmaries as municipal hospitals. Although workhouses were formally abolished by the same legislation in 1930, many continued under their new appellation of Public Assistance Institutions under the control of local authorities. It was not until the introduction of the National Assistance Act 1948 that the last vestiges of the Poor Law finally disappeared, and with them the workhouses.”

        — Wikipedia

Conditions

Although there were various attempts to use the labor of inmates for profit, or at least to make the poorhouses self-sustaining, whatever income could be obtained never matched the running costs.

Perpetually short of funds, the poorhouses were nightmarish places of last resort. Although slavery had been abolished in 1799, poorhouses frequently treated those in their care as little better than slaves. There was never enough money for adequate food, adequate clothing, or adequate healthcare.

“A government inquiry into conditions in the Andover workhouse in 1845 found that starving paupers were reduced to fighting over the rotting bones they were supposed to be grinding, to suck out the marrow.”

“Some Poor Law Unions opted to send destitute children to the British colonies, in particular to Canada and Australia, where it was hoped the fruits of their labor would contribute to the defense of the empire and enable the colonies to buy more British exports.”

        — Wikipedia, same article

It was quite common for the wealthier members of society to donate goods and money to the poorhouses, and this was often the difference between the poorhouse closing its doors or remaining viable.

It was also normal for whole families to enter the poorhouse at the same time – there was no-one to look after the children if a parent was forced into one by economic distress, so not placing them in a workhouse would have been both cruel and a potential death sentence. For those who were almost making ends meet, a compromise might be to place the children in such an institution until the parents got back on their feet. To the credit of many, these parents did return for their children after securing a more stable income, and there were also a few success stories of children who learned a trade sufficient to give them a secure, even prosperous, life as an adult.

Orphanages

“By the early nineteenth century, the problem of abandoned children in urban areas, especially London, began to reach alarming proportions.

“The workhouse system, instituted in 1834, although often brutal, was an attempt at the time to house orphans as well as other vulnerable people in society who could not support themselves in exchange for work.

“Conditions, especially for the women and children, were so bad as to cause an outcry among the social reform-minded middle-class; some of Charles Dickens’ most famous novels, including Oliver Twist, highlighted the plight of the vulnerable and the often abusive conditions that were prevalent in the London orphanages.

“Clamor for change led to the birth of the orphanage movement. In England, the movement really took off in the mid-19th century although orphanages such as the Orphan Working Home in 1758 and the Bristol Asylum for Poor Orphan Girls in 1795, had been set up earlier. Private orphanages were founded by private benefactors; these often received royal patronage and government oversight.”

        — Wikipedia

In The USA

“Orphanages were also set up in the United States from the early 19th century.

“In 1806, the first private orphanage in New York (the Orphan Asylum Society, now Graham Windham) was co-founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

“Under the influence of Charles Loring Brace, foster care became a popular alternative from the mid-19th century.”

        — Wikipedia, same article

America didn’t just copy the Orphanage model through the Age Of Steam; according to historical research by the University Of Virginia, they also copied the poorhouse concept and relied on philanthropic donations to care for those who were poverty-stricken.

But there were a couple of alternatives that were also popular. “The contract system placed dependent persons under the care of a homeowner or farmer who offered to care for them for a lump sum. The process of “auctioning” the destitute resulted in an individual or family being placed with a local couple or family bidding the lowest amount of public funding needed to care for them. It should be noted the contract system and auctioning the poor were not prevalent outside rural or lightly populated areas. Part of the reason was evidence that the practice of entrusting the care of the poor to the lowest bidder essentially legalized abusive behavior and near starvation existence.”

        — Poor Relief in Early America by John E. Hansan, Ph.D. (2011) | Virginia Commonwealth         University Social Welfare History Project, retrieved May 22, 2023.

The haves and have-nots

These sections are included to show that despite the prospering of the middle and upper classes, there were some at the lower end of society who were left behind. Caring for these and other unfortunates was a vital element of the economies of the era.

Society is often, rather simplistically, divided into the “haves” and “have nots”; the problem is that people will fall into one category or the other based not on their true economic circumstances, but on the (often unspecified) commodity that they either “have” or “have not”. If the criteria is swimming pools, then I”m a “Have Not”, for example, but if the criteria is a roof over my head and regular food supply, then I’m a “have”.

The reality is that there is a whole spectrum of social economic standards, and individual cases who fall somewhere on the line between ‘filthy rich” and “homeless and destitute”. The lower down this scale that you go, the greater the dependence on government and social institutions like charities, and the smaller your economic clout.

How many homeless vote in elections? If the majority did so, would homeless programs receive a funding boost? The questions may be rhetorical, but the problem is not.

In prior ages, demand for workers outstripped supply, and the responsibility for those who were unable to contribute while primarily belonging to the family, was shared by the entire village or local population. There was often a military career or work as a laborer or miner for those with no other escape from poverty.

In the Age Of Steam, for the first time, the workforce begins to outstrip the economic need for workers, but there were no social safety nets. The poorhouses were the result.

Above the poverty-stricken are the poor, who have little wealth and little power, but who make ends meet, and above them are the lower-middle class, who can afford to buy things and have some level of discretionary spending, and so on up the economic ladder. Each step up increases individual wealth and power, but holds fewer members once past the middle class; collectively, they have less inherent political power as a class. However, wealth is a multiplier of political authority, especially in the US, so the wealthy tend to wield disproportionate power.

The end of the poorhouses

Ultimately, heightened prosperity through industry reached the point where governments and institutions could afford more humane alternatives to the poorhouses. Many became asylums or hospitals or ordinary schools, though those outcomes were largely features of the Age of Internal Combustion, to be dealt with in Part 5 of this series.

They went the way of the slave trade, and for the same reasons. Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem of the poorest in society, as homelessness shows.

8. Rise of the Common Man II: The Middle Class expands downwards

That’s not to say that there weren’t new standards of prosperity being set in this era, because there were. People who were no longer needed to tend farms migrated to the cities, and became lower-level tradesmen – chimney sweeps, street cleaners, laborers, and the like. Some learned a trade and became plumbers and builders – both necessary in order to house those migrating. Others became entertainers through natural ability or steady hard work.

The more prosperity there was, the more capacity for prosperity seemed to increase.

A key concept in economics is that a single dollar can produce many dollars of economic impact as it passes from one hand to another in exchange for goods and services. This gives rise to the concept of money ‘circulating’ in the economy. Individual to Retailer to wholesaler to manufacturer to financier/stockholder, with the various levels of government taking ‘their share’ at each step of the chain.

It can be argued that it’s only if too many of those dollars end up flowing into the hands of one individual who then holds onto them, that economic trouble results. Disparity in wealth is the result, but its’ arguable that philanthropy is a counterbalancing economic influence, at least in the Age Of Steam (as noted earlier).

It is, perhaps, also worth noting that philanthropy has made a bit of a comeback in recent times – Gates, Bezos, and Musk all have strong philanthropic histories – and all of them coinciding with an age in which economic disparity is again a serious concern.

9. The Responsibility Of The Gentry

Readers may have noticed that until this point, there’s been virtually no mention of the Gentry. They were once the dominant force, now they are a footnote.

Over the age of Sail and into the Age Of Steam, their responsibilities shifted; not only are they heads and architects of many social programs and charitable institutions, they are largely expected these days to pay their own way. They have taken on the role of authorizers of government and protector of the commons against excesses by the government; they provide a long-term stability that extends beyond election cycles.

That is, they do these things in places where they have not been abolished. The question then becomes, what has taken over these functions in places like the USA where this has occurred?

That’s a question whose answers change from era to era, but in some respects, the answer is always “No-one”. At other times, charities, non-profits, private philanthropists, or even the government itself have taken on part or all of that role.

Party Politics

Arguably, at times and to a limited extent, the two dominant political parties have also stepped into the breach – the Republican championing of small government helping keep the tax burden on the lower economic brackets moderate, and encouraging small businesses that can employ those without incomes, while the Democrats champion the environment in which they live, the educational system that can permit subsequent generations to escape the poverty trap, and other social aspects of their lives – at least in theory and according to the dogma of each party. And so long as they stick to those principles, both have valid points to make.

There were no political parties until after the American Revolution. That makes them a phenomenon of the Age Of Steam. The histories of the parties in North America is convoluted and not entirely relevant to this discussion; suffice it to say that what is articulated above were the party positions through to the election of Barak Obama in 2008. Since then, two parties have become polarized to such an extent that bipartisanship, negotiation, and cooperation sometimes seems an impossible dream.

They most definitely were not the positions of the dominant parties at the start of the American Adventure. George Washington ran unopposed in 1789 and 1792. In 1796, it was Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party against John Adams’ Federalists. Adams supported a strong central government and championed the commercial interests of the North, while Jefferson supported States Rights and the Agrarian interests of the South. Fascinatingly, while Adams was elected, several Federalists refused to vote for his chosen Vice-president, giving that position to Jefferson. A measure of how times have changed – the two made it work.

A key point to make is that where an individual stood on social issues would be defined by the politics of the day – you can’t blindly apply the demographics of today, the results won’t make sense.

10. General Education & the Discovery of Talent

More than had ever been the case before, the opportunity for talent to catapult one out of one social stratum into another was prevalent – but limited. Those consigned to the poorhouses arguably had less opportunity than others – but should their talents be recognized, the philanthropic connections made the connection to a sponsor far shorter and easier to bridge. The trick was to get noticed in the right way.

This is also the era in which the changing economic and social landscape encouraged education for the broader public, and not just the wealthy. Details will vary from one country to another, and should be researched when the question is relevant.

In The USA

In so many respects of their early society, America was derivative of the practices in England, so it is refreshing to observe that in this arena, they got there first.

“Colonial New England encouraged its towns to support free public schools funded by taxation. In the early 19th century, Massachusetts took the lead in education reform and public education with programs designed by Horace Mann that were widely emulated across the North. Teachers were specially trained in normal schools and taught the three Rs (of reading, writing, and arithmetic) and also history and geography. Public education was at the elementary level in most places.

“In 1823, Samuel Read Hall founded the first normal school, the Columbian School in Concord, Vermont, aimed at improving the quality of the burgeoning common school system by producing more qualified teachers.

“After the Civil War (1861-1865), the cities began building high schools. The South was far behind northern standards on every educational measure and gave weak support to its segregated all-black schools. However, northern philanthropy and northern churches provided assistance to private black colleges across the South. Religious denominations across the country [also] set up … private colleges.

“During Reconstruction, the Office of Education was created in an attempt to standardize educational reform across the country. While supportive of educational improvement, the office lacked the power to enforce policies in any state.

“States passed laws to make schooling compulsory between 1852 (Massachusetts) and 1917 (Mississippi).”

        — Wikipedia – Education In the United States – 19th Century

In England

Until 1870 all schools [in England] were charitable or private institutions, but in that year the Elementary Education Act 1870 permitted local governments to complement the existing elementary schools in order to fill any gaps.

The history of education in England extends all the way back to the Saxon settlement of England, and the first cathedral schools which were established in 597 and 604.

“Nineteenth century reforms expanded education provision and introduced widespread state-funded schools. By the 1880s education was compulsory for children aged 5 to 10, with the school leaving age progressively raised since then

“There was an unprecedented expansion of education and apprenticeships in Tudor England [where] … Edward VI reorganized grammar schools and instituted new ones so that there was a national system of ‘free grammar schools.’ In theory these were open to all, offering free tuition to those who could not afford to pay fees.

“Boys were allowed to go to school and began at the age of 4, they then moved to grammar school when they were 7 years old. Girls were either kept at home by their parents to help with housework or sent out to work to bring money in for the family. Apprenticeships were the main route for youths to enter skilled trades and crafts

Unfortunately, after this promising beginning, the English education system suffered reverses. There often wasn’t enough money, and private endowments were already commonplace by the 1640s.

A further blow took place in the early 18th century, when “entrepreneurs began to resist the restrictions of the apprenticeship system, and a legal ruling established that the Statute of Apprentices did not apply to trades that were not in existence when it was passed in 1563, thus excluding many new 18th century industries.”

“In the 19th century the Church of England sponsored most formal education until the government established free, compulsory education towards the end of that century.”

        — quotes from Wikipedia – History of Education in England

11. Emancipation, Egalitarianism, Suffrage, & Equality

The age of Steam has been shown to be a time in which there was Emancipation and increasing Egalitarianism. Other social advances were beginning to demand recognition – equality (although this theoretically already existed after the US Civil War, the reality in practice was often different, especially in the American South) and Suffrage.

“Women’s suffrage is, by definition, the right of women to vote. This was the goal of the suffragists, who believed in using legal means, as well as the suffragettes, who used extremist measures. Short-lived suffrage equity was drafted into provisions of the State of New Jersey’s first, 1776 Constitution, which extended the Right to Vote to unwed female landholders and black land owners.

“However, the document did not specify an Amendment procedure, and the provision was subsequently replaced in 1844 by the adoption of the succeeding constitution, which reverted to ‘all white male’ suffrage restrictions.”

This pattern was not confined to the state of New Jersey; for example, in Sweden, conditional women’s suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty (1718-1772) – but then removed.

Internationally

New Zealand was the first to confer Women’s Suffrage but they were not an independent Nation at the time. Australia soon followed, but had also not yet been granted independence.

The first province to continuously allow women to vote was Pitcairn Islands in 1838, and the first sovereign nation was Norway in 1913

The Kingdom of Hawai’i was in the box seat for the honor, having instituted universal suffrage in 1840, but they had rescinded it in 1852. Some US States had women’s suffrage long before it became nationwide; it was a notion that was growing in strength throughout the Age of Steam. Exactly what the local legal position was at any given time and place therefore needs specific research when the information is needed.

That said, because games are played by a modern audience and this is fairly fundamental, I recommend that – if necessary – suffrage be artificially inserted into a campaign world.

Implications

There are all sorts of rights and expectations that generally come along with suffrage – the right to inherit, the right to own property, the right to work and retain payment, the right to own a business, and therefore the right to economic participation – and the right to pay taxes. Universal education, as already discussed, is not necessarily a given – but, once again, avoiding a discriminatory stance against a PC probably justifies at least something in this direction, regardless of historical reality.

Civil Rights?

Whether or not the same egalitarianism should be extended to the question of Civil Rights is far more problematic. This fight has been going on a lot longer, and passions are higher as a consequence. I once would have assumed a ‘yes’ answer to this question, but discussions with a black contact in America have revised that decision; she was firmly of the notion that such a choice would cheapen the struggle, and the sacrifices made in the past.

My current thinking is therefore that historical accuracy should be the starting point in this respect, but that this should be discussed with any player who might be affected beforehand. And, if their character is directly affected, it would be wise to allow them to land at least a couple of blows in the cause, even if these are not to be decisive.

However, there are certain campaign genres in which fantasy is a much stronger component, especially Steampunk – in such cases, I would diverge from historical Canon (maybe dumping the issue of racial prejudice onto some non-human species like Orcs.

12. Individuality & Eccentricity

America is all about individualism in the face of anything attempting to force conformity, or so various sources would have me believe. I think the reality is that there remain social norms that are considered acceptable, but that anything not mandated by those norms is tolerable – and everyone is encouraged to find something in that line to call their own.

Some of those somethings are more acceptable than others, it should be noted, but there is less “Jock Vs Nerd” mentality in place in this period of history. In the 1960s, being a “whiz at chess” put you firmly into Jock cross-hairs; in the 1860s, not so much. Instead, you are likely to be regarded as a prodigy and sponsored to further education.

England in particular, and Britain in general, are far more working-class conservative, but that simply means that those social boundaries are drawn tighter – until, quite suddenly, they aren’t. There’s an inner ring of conservatism, but outside of that, almost anything goes – so long as it doesn’t annoy or interfere with others. And, if you are outrageous enough, or entertaining enough, even those limits can be weakened or overcome, graduating you from a status of “an odd bird” to an outright “eccentric”.

This is almost as true in the Age Of Steam is it is through the 20th century.

An avid birdwatcher is an “odd duck”. Their social nonconformity is blessed by society, and tolerated. Someone who insists that the Crows are conspiring against them is first thought to be joking – “having a lark” or “having us on” – but, if serious, is definitely into the range of eccentric or socially-unacceptable; there’s no middle ground.

Eccentrics are tolerated, even welcomed, for their entertainment value, and sometimes as a social gadfly if they are seen to be advocating for a worthy cause; the socially-unacceptable are shunned to a far greater extent than would be the case in the US.

The freedom to be eccentric can be hard for Americans to wrap their heads around at times. This is just a small start on the subject.

13. Leisure and Wealth

In both cases, two things are required in order for this liberty to exist: the leisure time to pursue the matter, and the wealth to do so.

Both become increasingly available in the course throughout the Age of Steam. I can best illustrate this with an example from American folklore: the Cat Lady.

To an American, this is verging on the antisocial and mentally disturbed. To the English, if the cats are properly cared for, and don’t intrude on their rights to enjoy their personal foibles and space, she is verging on the eccentric, but is treated exactly the same as anyone else. Unless she is a brilliant comedian, though, she had better not cross those lines – don’t annoy others and don’t neglect the pets. Either of those pushes her from Eccentric to Pariah.

14. A Cure For What Ails You

Medical science exploded in the age of Internal Combustion, but the seeds were there in the Age of Steam. The problem was that because there was no scientific testing, and no governmental standards or controls, anyone could claim just about anything to be a cure for something.

The terms “Snake Oil” and “Nostrum” and “Home Remedy” all stem from this time period.

Many of their notions may have been wrong, even dangerous, but they were serious about trying to cure whatever they thought the problem was.

“During the … 18th century, science was held in high esteem and physicians upgraded their social status by becoming more scientific. The health field was crowded with self-trained barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, drug peddlers, and charlatans.

“Across Europe medical schools relied primarily on lectures and readings. The final year student would have limited clinical experience by trailing the professor through the wards. Laboratory work was uncommon, and dissections were rarely done because of legal restrictions on cadavers. Most schools were small, and only Edinburgh, Scotland, with 11,000 alumni, produced large numbers of graduates.

“The practice of medicine changed [in the 19th century] in the face of rapid advances in science, as well as new approaches by physicians. Hospital doctors began much more systematic analysis of patients’ symptoms in diagnosis. Among the more powerful new techniques were anesthesia, and the development of both antiseptic and aseptic operating theaters. Effective cures were developed for certain endemic infectious diseases.”

Many of the most lethal diseases declined in impact, but there are those who now claim that this was “due more to improvements in public health and nutrition than to advances in medicine”; others suggest that medicine, and the approach taken to it, was responsible for those improvements in public health and nutrition. It’s an argument that I’m not qualified to buy into.

“Medicine was revolutionized in the 19th century and beyond by advances in chemistry, laboratory techniques, and equipment. Old ideas of infectious disease epidemiology were gradually replaced by advances in bacteriology and virology.

        — quotes from Wikipedia – History of Medicine

15. The Gold & Silver Standards

“A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s.” (It would be reinstated later in the 1920s, terminated again in 1932, then reinstated again from 1944 until 1971, but those dates are way outside the scope of this article).

“Historically, the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard.

“Great Britain accidentally adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 when Sir Isaac Newton, then-master of the Royal Mint, set the exchange rate of silver to gold too low, thus causing silver coins to go out of circulation.

“As Great Britain became the world’s leading financial and commercial power in the 19th century, other states increasingly adopted Britain’s monetary system.”

“Up until 1850 only Britain and a few of its colonies were on the gold standard, with the majority of other countries being on the silver standard. France and the United States were two of the more notable countries on the bimetallic standard.

“The nearly-coincidental California gold rush of 1849 and the Australian gold rushes of 1851 significantly increased world gold supplies and the minting of gold francs and dollars.”

        — quotes from Wikipedia – Gold Standard

Consequences

With a currency pegged to a defined value, expressed as a certain weight of a commodity, the size of the economy is dictated by the amount of that commodity.

When more gold is found, a gold standard economy has more money to spend, and more money in circulation.

More people buy goods and services, which can lead to scarcity, which drives prices up.

Counterbalancing this to some extent is the fact that part of the value of a commodity is its rarity. Find more gold, and the value of gold dips a little.

Counterbalancing that are various mechanisms that take gold out of circulation – a central bank that adds to its reserves, a bank that does the same thing, a church that uses gold as a decoration, a private owner who sticks gold away in a vault instead of spending it.

It can be seen that a gold standard alone is not a guarantee of stable prices for goods and commodities, but it does actually help in that respect; and without growth in expenses, there is little pressure on wages, so the whole system is somewhat more stable.

Advantages

The following section is largely paraphrased from the same source cited above, and the quote is also from that source.

There are five major advantages recognized by modern economists as resulting from a fixed-commodity standard – whether that standard is Venetian Glass, Diamonds, Gold, Salt, Spices, or fluffy pink elephants.

1. A gold standard doesn’t permit some types of financial repression – in particular, deficit spending. You either have the money to spend on something, or you don’t.

2. While long-term price stability is considered an attribute of the gold standard, at least historically, analysis has shown that in the short term there can be significantly more volatility.

3. Currency Crises – the abrupt rise in the repayment cost of foreign debt – are far less frequent under a gold standard, because there is less currency volatility.

4. The gold standard provides fixed exchange rates between nations, which reduces uncertainty in international trade. This is complicated by the “price-specie flow mechanism”, which is a little bit less complicated than it sounds:

“Gold used to pay for imports reduces the money supply of importing nations, causing deflation, which makes them more competitive, while the importation of gold by net exporters serves to increase their money supply, causing inflation, making them less competitive.”

5. Hyper-inflation is less likely to occur, by definition, because it is caused by a loss of trust in a failing currency and the governments who create that currency.

Disadvantages

The following section is largely paraphrased from the same source cited above.

There are a whole heap of disadvantages, though.

1. Gold isn’t distributed equally throughout the world. A gold standard disproportionately benefits those countries that produce gold.

2. Some economists believe that the gold standard acts as a limit to economic growth. In particular, productivity gains do not cause the economy to grow, causing an effective scarcity of wealth to result; not only is this false-to-fact, the reduced credit in the economy that results inhibits investment, and this can cause an economy to stall.

3. Monetary policy can no longer be used to stabilize a currency prior to or during a recession because there is a fixed amount of money in the economy.

4. Banking Crises, in which a bank does not have sufficient liquidity to pay customers, become more common.

5. Deflation punishes debtors, causing debt burdens to rise, which causes borrowers to cut spending in order to direct more money to the debt. Lenders become wealthier under these conditions, but many will save some the gains, reducing the strength of the economy.

6. Inflation countermeasures are more difficult because they need to be backed by hard currency. This causes recessions to be longer and more intense.

There are a number of others, but those are the high points.

16. Oil & Resource Booms & Busts

Booms and busts in other commodities will always occur, but a floating currency tied to the hypothetical strength of the total economy mean that changes in the value of a currency are smoother than if the currency were tied to specific commodity. These market variations can have impacts as profound as a recession or even depression.

The reasons for this can be a little counter-intuitive, so let me see if I can explain it.

Let’s say that the economy contains $1 million in currency. That 1 million represents the value of everything else in the economy – so if there is suddenly a lot more of something else, like oil, the value of everything else has to fall, so that the total stays at $1 million. That means that more of the economy is suddenly tied up in oil – and the glut of supply makes the price of oil plunge. And there is always an overreaction – if everyone could rely on everyone else dropping oil prices by the right amount, everything would be fine, but you can’t. Oil producing countries don’t want to drop the value of oil, they want to sell it – effectively adding more gold to the economy, so that it grows by the amount of extra oil produced. That means that the countries that buy oil have to drop the price of oil by more, and the price that will eventually be settled on is one big guesstimate. yes, there will be a correction, eventually, but in the meantime, there’s that much less money to spend on anything else.

In other words, the currency can’t act as a shock absorber when your oil price (or whatever) hits a pothole or a speed-bump.

17. Wage Slavery & The Mines

“Slavery was abolished” – it says so, right there in black and white, earlier in this article. But along with the caveats offered at the time, there are still more that need to at least get mentioned.

There are many terms for this type of slavery – in America, it’s most commonly known as Debt Bondage, but the more general term in use these days is Truck Wages.

It works like this: worker puts in a hard day’s work, exceeding their daily quota. They get paid a fixed hourly wage for this plus they might get a small bonus for any excess over quota – but their pay will be docked if they don’t make quota. Comes payday, they expect to get a certain amount – only to find that the cost of the meals and accommodation provided by the company have been deducted, at whatever rates the company deems ‘fair and reasonable’, and the balance is paid in tokens that can only be redeemed at the company store – at whatever prices the company deems ‘fair and reasonable’. The net result being that you have effectively no money to show for your efforts – but you still have to work or you won’t get to eat.

This sort of scheme was rife in a number of industries, notably including the coal mines and steelworks of the Age Of Steam. This was especially true in the first half, but the practice (or variations on it) persist to this day; the United Nations estimated that there were 8.1 Million people still subject to it in 2005.

There have been numerous attempts to stamp this practice out, but it’s notoriously hard to do so. This is the sort of labor relations of which a true robber baron would be proud.

18. Steamships

The rise of the steamship had a profound effect on international trade. Not only could individual vessels carry many times the weight in goods, they cut a transit that would have taken months to weeks, or weeks to days. And they could do it cheaper.

Commodities that needed some preservative technique could be shipped ‘fresh’. Fish were often carried upriver in England on steamships, giving rise to the “Fish And Chips Shop”, for example.

Arguably, though, it was the travel time that was the biggest impact. if you were a clothing maker, for example, and it now only took one week for your materials to be delivered instead of four, you could cut the amount of money tied up in supplies to 1/4 of what it was. Similarly, if it only took one week to get your product to market instead of four, you could cut the money tied up in inventory to 1/4. This meant that establishing such a business required a lot less capitol, and was a lot more easily turned profitable.

The impact doesn’t end there, though. By only reducing materials and inventory by 50%, you could double the range of markets that you could reach, vastly expanding your potential clientele – and profitability. And you’re still making bigger profits because the transport costs are less.

From the point of view of the business owner, this is all good. But, it meant that you were competing against others from further afield – so there was an immediate downward pressure on prices; everything that could be shipped suddenly became cheaper, sometimes massively cheaper. So the consumer benefits too, finding that whatever they have to spend goes further.

Ignoring the impact of the Steamship is like ignoring the impact of the Railroad, and for exactly the same reason.

Now, combine the two – train to steamship to train to market – and your products can suddenly be competing globally..

19. Rise of the Common Man III: Professional Guilds to Labor Unions

The Professional Guilds of the ages of sail provided the template, but labor unions (known as trade unions in England) were an inevitable response to the combination of social progress and work practices of the era.

“While a commonly held mistaken view holds modern trade unionism to be a product of Marxism, the earliest modern trade unions predate Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) by almost a century (and Marx’s writings themselves frequently address the prior existence of the workers’ movements of his time), with the first recorded labor strike in the United States by the Philadelphia printers in 1786

“The origins of modern trade unions can be traced back to 18th-century Britain, where the Industrial Revolution drew masses of people, including dependents, peasants and immigrants, into cities. Britain had ended the practice of serfdom in 1574, but the vast majority of people remained as tenant-farmers on estates owned by the landed aristocracy. This transition was not merely one of relocation from rural to urban environs; rather, the nature of industrial work created a new class of ‘worker’.

“Workers sold their work as labor and took directions from employers, giving up part of their freedom and self-agency in the service of a master.”

Critics called this arrangement ‘Wage Slavery’ but had no idea what real wage slavery (described earlier) was.

The road to modern trade unions was a rocky one, collective bargaining frequently deemed illegal, but the inequality of bargaining power between employer and individual worker made some sort of organization and coordination not only essential bur inevitable.

This was the common man wresting some measure of control over his life away from both government and employer. Business in general was strongly disapproving, but outside the US, encountered little success in removing them.

In Australia, it’s still illegal to stop someone from joining a trade union (I’m not sure about the status in England). However, government policies that (in theory) grant greater negotiating power to the individual have been eroding union membership here, and it wouldn’t surprise me if something similar were happening there.

In the US, Republican legislatures have eroded workers’ rights so significantly that an employee can be dismissed for any reason the employer likes (unless they are part of a population group protected from such treatment. If he doesn’t like the color of your socks, you can be gone. If he doesn’t like mustaches, you’re gone. If he doesn’t like your bumper sticker, you’re gone – unless that sticker references your religious faith or something similar.

Labor unions continued the trend of decentralizing power that has already been mentioned – ironically by centralizing it around a different center, albeit one that was democratically selected.

        — quotes from Wikipedia – Trade union

20. Wealth distributed

The impact of trade unions was for wages to start going up and working conditions to start improving. This ate into the profitability of businesses, but they could afford it, thanks to the Rail/Steamship boom. What it did do was increase the bottom line for a myriad of low-and middle-income workers – and they turned right around and spent that money. Most of the time, any savings were only temporary. The result was a slow but steady trend toward a consumer-oriented society, as businesses arose for these workers to spend their money in, and manufacturers arose to make the goods to stock those businesses, and infrastructure sprung up to connect the two.

An individual’s spending power might be one-one thousandth that of one of the captains of industry who owned these commercial ventures, or less. But put 10,000 of them together to create a ‘market’ for your goods, or 100,000, and they possessed a lot of clout. Public Opinion became an extremely potent social force, one that the union movement was able to occasionally harness when dealing with a particularly egregious situation.

Had any of these changes taken place in isolation, it’s likely that they would have failed. Each needed the other to progressively alter the economic environment that next step.

21. Opportunity distributed

Of course, all those new operations – retailer, wholesaler, warehouse owner, distributor, freighter, manufacturer, and materials supplier – all needed to employ staff. Plus accountants and bookkeepers and lawyers, and so on.

To go with the industrial boom of the Steam Age, there was a boom in employment opportunities. The number of unemployed and unemployable slowly began to drop. Preparing more people for employment demanded better educational standards. And that produced a greater demand for the goods and services that an educated people demand, such as books and plays and dining choices and holidays.

22. Inherited Advantages

The children of old nobility, those who had acquired fortunes during the age of sail, and the robber barons were no more assured of a life of ease than had their antecedents in the now-bygone era. But they had advantages that ordinary people could only dream of – education, and life experiences, and access to capital, and contacts amongst the other wealthy and powerful and opportunities to use all this to their benefit.

Fortunately for society as a whole, most of them were also raised with a sense of obligation, and those who did not feel that sense quickly had one drummed into them; then, as now, everyone looks down on those who feel entitled or who behave arrogantly. By and large, they are not begrudged that initial advantage; that’s something that their ancestors or parents earned for them. It’s what they do with it that matters, just as what an ordinary person does with his or her personal gifts makes the difference in how they are perceived.

23. Genre: Murder most Foul

Closing in on the end of this article now – with about 20 minutes to deadline, I might just make it!

There are, essentially, four major genre categories that find a home in this time period, and the first are the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. It always surprised me a little that these weren’t more popular RPG fodder – right up until I realized that creating credible mysteries without railroading plots was a lot harder than it looked.

But then I realized that those “How To Host A Murder” sets are solidly a part of this genre – and heck, even my sister has played one or two (complete with full costuming, a step that my games have never demanded).

The economy in such games is better dealt with by ignoring it except when it’s relevant, What’s more, it should be treated as a static phenomenon, again unless economic and social change is an inherent part of the plotline. For the most part, it all just is, and always will be, unchanging.

And any change that should occur for plot reasons should be cast as generally a positive one, even if that means you have to be selective about the voice used to brief the players on the things their characters need to know – pick someone who has clearly benefited from the changes.

24. Genre: Things Man Was Not Meant To Know

The second genre contains cryptid hunters, explorers of lost cities, uncivilized wildernesses, exotic tombs, and hollow earths. But more than that, they contain those who stand as guardians against the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, those supernatural horrors that plot and scheme to take over the idyllic world of the Age Of Steam.

It matters not if they derive from Lost Lemuria, Sunken Atlantis, or some nameless Shadow Plane. It matters not if you sought out the confrontation, or have been tumbled into events head over heels.

The wealthy are always suspicious in such campaigns, because they have both the material means to satisfy idle curiosity, the world travels to put them in contact with such curiosities, and the loss of direct power that can breed anger over circumstances. Since you can’t address this without the social baggage and history that comes along with it, this genre is best addressed not by ignoring the transformative events that have swept across society, but by reveling in them.

25. Genre: Steampunk

Steampunk is, as I announced earlier in the series, not my forte. In fact, I know very little about what the genre is like to play – though I did employ some steampunk conceptually in describing the Mexico of my superhero campaign, admittedly without knowing exactly what I was doing.

So, here’s the skinny of the general principles I employed, phrased in the form of a recipe for success (I hope).

Pick an era, and a decade. Pick a second era for the current levels of science and technology, one that differs from the first by at least a decade. The first is the society and technological capability of the world around the PCs; the difference has to be explained through the use and manifestations of “industrialized magic”.

For example, I might pick the 1940s for the first era, and the 1870s for the second. That’s a 70-year gap, in which a lot of technological impacts have been experienced. They have hot air balloons and locomotives and machine guns and poison gasses and tanks and personal transportation – but all of it is based on ‘Industrial magic”, in whole or in part. In fact, it would be ubiquitous – everything you encounter would be ‘touched’ by it in some manner. Everything from the way lamps get lit to the way private secretaries carry out their duties. There would be robber barons who have gotten rich bringing this new technology to the masses. There would be some sort of magical radio – mass communications will have begun. And so on; everything that you describe has to be examined for a fun, magical, twist.

The economy is going to be as described, complete with changes and transformations, but always with the most positive spin on things that you can imagine – except, perhaps, for those who have been left behind, and who are dark and resentful. Every campaign needs some bad guys, after all!

26. Genre: Early Pulp & Other Gaslight

I’ve left “Other gaslight” in to cover anything that I haven’t though of, but there’s nothing that fits the category that’s coming to mind.

That leaves Early Pulp. To me, this also goes under another name – American Pulp, i.e. tough hard-boiled detectives chasing shadowy criminals through bars and warehouses. The more fantastic elements of European Pulp are part of an era a decade or two hence.

The primary reason is that there is nothing that is definitive of the early pulp era that isn’t part of this earlier period – save, perhaps, for the glossy automobiles. The pulp genre, i think, actually straddles the two eras, and takes advantage of that fact. It also steals liberally from the “Things Man Was Not Meant To Know” genre, if you hadn’t noticed.

27 Empires Colliding

The age of steam ends with one last hurrah for the old school, as political alliances deriving, in part, from still older relationships between royal families (both alliances and conflicts) create a domino effect that plunges the world into war. In the buildup to this event, the petrol engine is (essentially) perfected, supplanting steam power with gasoline and diesel, heavier-than-air flight begins, electrification begins, radio broadcasts commence, silent movies, speakeasies and prohibition – and the limitations of the Gold Standard and the wild optimism of the age comes home to roost. It’s not a sudden change; it happens piecemeal over the span of about a decade, and then continues to plunge headlong into a future of machinery and engineering. And space opera. And Pulp. It’s going to be a lot of fun – and hopefully, shorter than this outing!

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 this part:

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

Planned for part 5:

11. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Internal Combustion
12. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
13. In-Game Economics: Pulp-era

Planned for parts 6-7:

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

Planned for parts 8-10:

18. Digital Economics
19. Post-Pandemic Economics
20. In-Game Economics: Modern
21. Future Economics I: Dystopian
22. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
23. Future Economics I: Utopian
24. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
25. In-Game Economics: Space Opera

The plan is to do an article on something else next week. Which one of the several ideas I have on hold I’ll be excited enough to develop, I don’t yet know – just that it will be different from history and economics!

Welcome & General Introduction

Readers may have noticed that the previous part of the series promised the Renaissance and then barely mentioned the subject.

That happened because, at least at first, there wasn’t a lot of economic difference, and what trends later started to manifest themselves were essentially the same trends that drove industrialization in general.

The dog wags the tail, in other words, even if the tail started wagging first.

It must be noted that each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.

A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.

A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.

Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.

I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.

Related articles

This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out

the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,

especially the sections on

• Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
• Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
• Money & Wealth
• Cities & Architecture
• Politics
• Societies & Nations, and
• Organizations, and
• Races.

Where We’re At

So far, I’ve established a number of important principles.

1. Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of what wealth even is, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
2. Economics pressure Societies to evolve – that economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
3. Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
4. New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
5. Each society and its economic infrastructure contain the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
   • There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
   • There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
   • Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.

Look at the world around us, and you can see these principles playing out as we speak.

Given the impact that they have had on our lives in general, it’s fair to characterize our current era as the ‘digital age’, or perhaps ‘the internet age’. Inherent in, and developing within, most of that era are Artificial Intelligence Systems, from the ‘Expert Systems’ of the 1990s through to the modern AI developments of DALL-E and ChatGPT. Google’s Ad-sense, which selected advertising based on the browsing habits of an individual (and have done so since the late 1990s, more and more effectively), are (in hindsight) a milestone in the development of the new social trends, but only now are we reaching the point where they can intersect with social media to actually change lives significantly enough to consider us at the threshold of a new historical era.

And yet, the world around us doesn’t look all that different from what existed a few years ago, except in fine details – there is a clear continuity to recent history.

At least, that’s my impression – somewhat shaped by the ongoing development of these articles.

The general principles contained within those five bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be adding them to the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in this series.

From A Writing Perspective

When starting this article, I listed four major sections comprising 6, 11, 14, and 22 subsections, respectively. I knew exactly what each subsection was to contain. But…

53 subsections is a LOT. Each of the articles in this series to date have only managed to include two major sections, and the greater length of the last two proposed sections in this article would leave it triple the size of previous parts, give-or-take. Diligent efforts and a little conflation of subsections have incorporated 31 of them into a single post, which still makes this the longest article in the series to date; the 22-part Age Of Steam was more than would fit.

The good news is that this means that I have a significant head-start on the next part in the series!

The Renaissance, revisited

There came a time when culture and artistic expression seemed to start making great leaps forward, everywhere you looked. Underwritten by noble patrons, it became a measure of your enlightenment and social worth to be bankrolling as many outlets of culture and invention as you could afford. Not even the Church was immune to this measurement of social worth – that’s what gave us the Sistine Chapel.

The fine arts and cultural displays exploded in all directions – painting, sculpture, music, playwrights, poets, and natural philosophy.

In some respects, this could be seen as a defensive response to the rise of the middle classes in the late Medieval period, in which the power of the Nobility came under the most minimal of threats, albeit ones of their own making. Thrift, efficiency, and greed created the nascent Middle Class, whose members promptly carved out profe4ssional associations that usurped a little of the power that had been the exclusive province of the Nobility previously. To prove their superiority to these nouveau almost-rich, and justify their elevated social standings, the nobility needed to expand their social credentials; simply being seen as pious was no longer enough, even if it did bring the support of the church. Besides, theological circles were in the midst of their own internal politics and power struggles; who knew how stable that support might prove, or how ephemeral?

This progress in the arts of expression and understanding are considered the defining traits of the era. But there were inevitable consequences.

1. The Enlightenment of Limited Hierarchical Authority

First, the Responsibilities of the Nobility toward their subjects had not changed. What changed was that, instead of the backing of a complicit and compliant Faith, these sponsorship gave rise to members of the middle classes who were empowered and funded by the Nobility, who were free to guide and shape the manner of satisfaction of those responsibilities, and who felt free to gently chide and chastise when they were not being performed adequately in the eyes of the artists.

There were limits to how far such criticism could be pushed, but a steady drip can eventually erode even solid rock. The nobility was far less resistant than that, even with the ongoing concept of Divine Right to back them; and even that was slowly progressing and developing in response to the social pressures and realities within which the various Churches existed. Little by little, there was a steady progression toward enlightened rule, in which the power and wealth of the noble was generated by the health of the lesser social classes, and the realization that protecting their prosperity also protected your own.

Not everyone was so enlightened, of course; there were social repressives who saw only the threats to their traditional autonomy; but the new Middle Class were mobile, and fully capable of undermining the wealth of Nobles who did not live up to their end of the unwritten social compacts that characterized the Later Medieval and early Renaissance.

2. The Principle of Objective Understanding

The accurate portrayal of reality in art requires an understanding of the underpinnings of that reality – be it the principles of the physical sciences and geometry or the fundamentals of human anatomy. The natural consequence is that these artisans became students of what was known as Natural Philosophy, and with it came the concept that there was a natural order within the objective reality of the natural world, one whose workings depended not on the opinions or philosophies of others, but yielded the same objective understanding whether one believed in them or not.

Not since the philosophers of ancient Greece had the primacy of observed reality been so elevated over assumption or dogma. All of modern science flows from this fundamental principle. Understanding was not so advanced, then – observations were couched in terms of better understanding of “God’s Creation”, and would be for more than a century. But the beginnings were there.

3. Church Vs Science, Dogma vs Discovery

Inevitably, observations contradicted some part of the accumulated dogma that religions had built up over the centuries, and were interpreted as challenges to the authority of the church. These confrontations between Copernicus, Galileo, and the like, have become the stuff of legend. Even today, some of this tension remains unresolved – there is not as week goes by but that a challenge to Darwinian Evolution floats through my Quora feed. And second only to that collection are flat-earth proponents trying to deny a different objective reality, challenges that also seem to date back to this era.

What’s important to note is that the Churches won almost every one of these challenges. In temporal, day-to-day power, they were still in a position of dominance. What makes those legends of defiance (real or imagined) survive to this day is not that Galileo et. al. won – they didn’t – it’s that they were ultimately proven to be right. And with every victory earned in this era that was subsequently shown to be without merit, the authority of the Faiths to rule was eroded.

Different phases of this ongoing conflict remain a feature of historical eras from this time forward. Until recently, I was confident in the ability of Science to win the day – and even now, Science is forcing concessions to reality from religious authorities – but by resorting to various forms of outright falsehood, religion has been able to claw back some ground in recent years. (It’s not my Intent to take sides in this debate, even though I have strong personal opinions on the subject that inevitably leak out. All I want to do here is acknowledge the conflict and its history),

4. The trend to Decentralized Economics

The progression towards a profession-based Middle Class that characterized the late Medieval era continued through the Renaissance. The economic power of this professional class had to come from somewhere, and those lower on the social ladder had none to give – so the only place from which to draw it was the Nobility. In fact, the Nobles ceded the limited power they gave up of their own accord in pursuit of economic efficiency, as described in part two of this series.

The smallest pebble rolling downhill in a snowy slope can become a huge ball of snow and ice. When the professionals had absorbed all the power and temporal authority that the Nobility were wiling to concede, they started agitating to take more. Sometimes they colluded with like-minded members of other guilds and trade bodies, and sometimes they tried to create alternate paths to power and influence. Thus was born modern politics in its most elementary form.

Sometimes, these efforts failed; and the status remained quo; but the occasional success which did not lead to disaster accumulated.

5. The rise of the Middle Class

Temporal authority thus continued to migrate away from Nobles and to commercial operations and professionals. To monitor the exercising of the authority that was claimed by this middle class, additional professions were created and given the authority to act on behalf of first the crown and then the collective society. The transformation from rule by decree to rule by law was slow and inexorable, and also continues to this day.

As the middle class grew and accrued more wealth and power, they grew from being a minor footnote in the economy of the age to being an equal driver of that economy. This completed the creation of the social conditions described at the start of this discussion, showing that some sort of Renaissance was an inevitable consequence of the practices of the later Medieval. It may not have taken quite the form that it did in our history; that’s a matter for some debate. But something was almost impossible to avoid; at best, repression may have held it back for a while.

6. An accumulation of Technological Improvements

Despite all the obvious progress and enlightenment, the Renaissance was, in many ways, simply a treading of water, an attempt by conservative elements to preserve as much of the status quo as they could despite the many progressive elements at work in their society. Repression was used as a weapon whenever it was deemed necessary and everyone tried to protect their own power bases and keep their positions intact. But there was one factor that could not be overcome; eventually, it rose to overwhelming prominence and brought about a new age.

A direct consequence of the study of reality by Natural Philosophers whose work was founded on the utter practicality of the reproducibility of results (whether you liked them or not), a steady improvement in the technology that was available was both unstoppable and inevitable.

There are two primary (and closely-related) spheres in which such technological refinement tends to have significant immediate impact: communications and transportation. Well, the best form of communications at the time was mail delivered by some form of transportation, and the technology to offer an alternative would not exist for some time to come. It is obvious, then, that refinements in the capabilities of transportation would be the first, and defining, element of the next historical era.

Pre-industrial Era I: The Age Of Discovery

Despite the laudable and noteworthy achievements of the Vikings, Renaissance-era transport was fairly profoundly limited. The vessels were simply unable to support a sufficient crew for long enough while delivering them quickly enough, to facilitate the great voyages of discovery. As the Renaissance unfolded, improvements in technology and vessel design slowly changed that; until at some point, a line can be drawn between the two.

There is little consensus as to exactly where and when that line should be drawn. So far as I am concerned, the change was messier and more subtle than most, and the two historical periods overlap more than a little. This can be discerned from the citation of Darwin amongst the significant figures of the Renaissance, even though he was only in a position to make his pivotal observations in the course of one of those Great Voyages of Discovery.

I, personally, draw the dividing line in the Court of Queen Isabella of Spain, being persuaded by a smooth-tongued wannabe to send an exploratory party to find a new path to India by sea. That might be a manifestation of decades of exposure to American propaganda, I have to admit, but it seems reasonable to me. This was a voyage that would take months if not years, but whose conclusion would profoundly reshape the world that followed in its wake.

1. Professionals

Columbus was very much the definitive prototype of that American Ideal, the self-made man. He rose from obscure and humble beginnings, the son of a Baker, and self-educated. He was widely-traveled as a youth and employed this to become a trader representing a number of Noble families, and was sufficiently successful that he was able to marry the daughter of a Nobleman of Lombardi origins. Sadly, she would pass away less than six years later, while Columbus was on another trading voyage.

His self-educated nature and inaccuracies in some of the documents on which he relied combined to cause Columbus to drastically underestimate the distance that would have to be traversed from Europe to Asia via a western sea voyage. Seeing potent commercial opportunities, he attempted to persuade a number of royal families to back an expedition, but the learned men who evaluated the proposals repeatedly recognized the fallacy in the plan and consequent underestimate of the costs involved, leading them to reject the proposal. Some estimated that Columbus’ budget was only a quarter of the true cost.

Nevertheless, he was sufficiently persuasive that Queen Isabella and Ferdinand II did not reject the proposal completely, but invested in his personal development and well-being, even giving him a salary roughly equivalent of the annual salary of a sailor of the era and giving him a letter instructing all cities and towns within their domain to furnish him with free food and board. Eventually, politics swung in Columbus’ favor, as some became convinced that he would again take his proposal elsewhere. In 1492, the Monarchs promised that he would be given the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he might claim for Spain.

Despite the impression conveyed by the role assigned him in modern narratives, Columbus never approached the continental US, instead exploring Central and northern South America.

There’s a lot to unpack in this story, but most of it can be packaged under the heading of Professionals: Columbus was from the lower middle class, but by making himself a professional Sailor and Trader and educating himself, he was able to rise to prominence, which he then used as a springboard to his famous voyages. He had the opportunity to become a self-made man. Not long earlier, that would have been close to unthinkable, but demonstrated ability and professional expertise now overruled the social restrictions of birth.

2. Professionalism to Guilds

It didn’t happen everywhere, but in many locations professionals had banded together to protect the collective reputation and authority of their profession, beginning a practice of self-setting of professional standards that continues into the 20th century. As those professionals gain in wealth, status, and authority, so does their collective political ‘muscle’.

3. Wealth plus Authority equals Power

Inevitably, the equation presented above results. This trend was already well-developed in the Renaissance, but it continued and strengthened as the independent traders and craftsmen gained in prestige and wealth. Many of the offices created to monitor the activities of the Guilds and Freemen and enforce the law, and even to codify that law, had started out as representing the Nobility, but increasingly, they were independent arbiters and a civil police force.

4. The Abdication Of Noble Authority

The more power that the Nobles handed off to proxies, expert or otherwise, the less direct authority they had to exercise of their own volition. Rule by decree thus continued to wane throughout the period, and the power of the Nobility became more and more about who they would appoint and who they would (financially) support.

5. The Impact on the Lower Classes

There wasn’t really a lot of change in the lot of the poorest members of society, however. Instead of being beholden to, and exploited by, nobles, they were beholden to, and exploited by, landlords, whose authority ultimately descended from those Nobles but which was no longer under their direct control.

I’m sure that there were cases in which this was an improvement in the ordinary lives of the poor, but it’s known that in several cases, living conditions became even harsher. The middle class had discovered systematized greed, and there was only one population group that they could exploit.

6. Patronage: the path to Prosperity

But there was an escape: Apprenticeship, and dreams of Patronage, presented a two-step path from nobody to Aristocracy, from the bottom (or close to it) to the lower reaches of the top. Of course, getting there was only half the fight – there were always those who would seek to cast you back down so that they could usurp whatever influence you had acquired along the way. Defining it as entry into a hotbed of political intrigue would be understating the case very dramatically.

Fortunately for those with a little less ambition or ability, this was a journey with many alternative stops along the way. Many of the wealthier families, themselves just below the ranks of the Peerage, sought to emulate the Nobility and provide Patronage. Others sought reflected prestige by finding those artisans who would eventually receive Royal Patronage. And some sought to simply become the preferred purveyor of goods and services to the Nobility, permitting them to promote the prestige of their work-product.

Every professional was expected to train the next generation, and there were usually incentives and benefits to taking on apprentices. So there were many measures of success and many roads to achieving it. Ultimately, all these pathways to prosperity are interpretations of Patronage, one way or another.

7. Rags To Riches: The Principle of Social Mobility

The existence of so many pathways to a better standard of success, some of them reaching into the uppermost levels of society, entrenched the concept of social mobility; regardless of your starting point, it was possible to elevate yourself through hard work and success and demonstrated forms of social propriety that you belonged to a higher stratum. Ability was a silk road to better times in the future, and there was always access to a further step up the slippery social slope from wherever you ended up.

Going ‘all the way to the top’ was rare, even the subject of myth, but the potential was there.

8. The Decline Of Dogma?

It seems a certainty that the demonstrated success of practical scientific advance and skill would have weakened the grip of dogma and religion on the populace. Three things stood in the way of such a development.

The first was that the Churches offered an alternative pathway to the top, one that was dependent on a completely different set of capacities than the less certain, more overt, choice. This sucked away much of the impetus that was generated by the surge of practicality. The second was that the Church excelled at laying claim to the strokes of inspiration that led to these practical developments, and being publicly critical of the Faith remained a quick path from social position to obscurity. The third factor was the mutual support network that had arisen between ruling nobles and the representatives of the Faith; while Divine Right was no longer publicly accepted as strongly as it had been, the Churches retained a lot of temporal power, and they used it to support those nobles who were ‘friends of the faithful”. Patronage again, but of a different stripe.

The battle may have been a defensive one, but the conflict wasn’t even publicly acknowledged – that’s how much capability the church had at its disposal for the squashing of those who directly challenged it.

9. The Last Defense Of Nobility

The authority of Nobility, and of the Churches, soon received a major boost, thanks to a new economic development: the discovery of new provinces with valuable commodities. The Spices of the East Indies, Sugar, Rum, Silver, Gold, Rubies and Emeralds… the list goes on and on. It seemed like every expedition brought a flood of new wealth into the coffers of the Nobles who underwrote the journeys of discovery, and those of the Churches who didn’t stand in the way.

Get in the way? On the contrary, they sent devotees into the wilderness on these expeditions to ‘convert the heathens and savages’. And since the locals were the source of the new wealth, however exploited, the church could cut off the spigot any time they really wanted to – once. Doing so would be tantamount to a declaration of war with the Monarchy, something that would benefit neither.

The vast treasures that they claimed gave the Nobility lots of money to splash around on patronages and military expenditures. Not so much that it couldn’t be frittered away on meaningless little wars in Europe, or their projections of power elsewhere; great trading empires would come and go, rise and fall, in the years to come. But the infusion of wealth, and the power that came with it, bolstered the positions of both Nobility and Church into the next era to come: The Age Of Sail.

10. Genre: Conquistadors

There have not been many RPGs to exploit this particular genre – in fact, there have been so few that Campaign Mastery doesn’t even list them as a genre type. But there have been a few – OI vaguely remember one with Black and White artwork that revolved around Ponce de Leon and the quest for the fountain of youth, and another (with no artwork) that cast the protagonists as Inca tribesmen seeking to defend their homeland against these invaders with their ‘thunder-sticks’.

Where there are two, it seems certain that there have been others.

I can certainly see the appeal of a Fantasy/Pirates campaign in which the PCs are a group of Conquistadors who earnestly believe in the virtues that are supposed to be definitive of the Nobility, seeking to survive and prosper in a world full of corrupt Churchmen, Ignoble rivals, and hostile natives. Heck, I see a lot of parallels with the Rebellion from Star Wars! Everyone’s against them, but something – perhaps atoning for some past misdeeds before they became enlightened – keeps them in the neighborhood, trying to beat the odds…

Pre-industrial Era II: The Age Of Sail

Just as the Age of Discovery blends into the Renaissance so well that dividing lines can be disputed (or even ignored altogether), so the Age Of Sail blends with the Age of Exploration. Nevertheless, there are some pronounced differences that distinguish the two.

One difference should be pointed out from the outset, as a means of framing the discussion: In the Renaissance, Power earned wealth; in the Age of Exploration, the two were on a more-or-less equal footing; in the Age Of Sail, money produces power.

1. The Educated Elite

The peerage is no longer able to lay claim to the right to rule by decree, but they remain wealthy landowners; the source of their power has shifted, as has (to some extent) what they can and can’t do with it, but the power itself remains. What’s vanished to a certain extent is any entitlement to advantage; although they start life with advantages, nonetheless. It is then up to the members of the Peerage to convert the potential represented by those advantages into wealth and power.

Those who succeed in doing so remain in an elite social class, with a second group of successful newcomers hot on their heels; the latter having earned (or stolen) vast wealth, and leveraged that into positions of power and privilege, they lack only the inherited prestige of titled ancestry.

With their traditional sources of income often diverted into the hands of others, estates begin to come under economic threat for the first time, and the easiest means of addressing this problem is to arrange marriages between those with the titles and those with the wealth to support those titles, conferring legitimacy on the latter and prosperity on the former.

One of the biggest advantages that the peerage can offer its children is a first-rate education, one that qualifies them for positions of authority and command. With the newfound dominance of wealth as the source and measure of power, this ensures that the elite are in positions that enable them to dominate, economically. To some extent, this buffers them from the changes, giving rise to the trope of the layabout inheritor of wealth and privilege who assume entitlement by reason of privileged birth – an entitlement that the ‘real world’ eventually beats out of them.

For the first time, then, there is a significant pathway for downward social mobility from the ranks of the formerly privileged, and a sense that titles have to be earned, and re-earned over and over again. There were always such pathways, but they were previously seen as ignoble falls from grace; now they are perceived as justice meted out by harsh reality. This counterbalances, to some extent, the upward social mobility that arrived in the Age of Exploration.

2. Politics Of The Wealthy

With positions under threat of poverty and irrelevance, and power in the hands of the wealthy regardless of origins, politics as something distinct from relationships between the noble families of Europe, and distinct from the internal politics of Theological bodies, emerges. Politics is sometimes referred to as ‘the game that never ends’, with every day presenting a new challenge to prestige and authority; this is very much a modern perspective on the subject, and one that derives from this era.

3. Brilliance Alone

Another indication of how significantly lives had transformed can be found in the treatment of natural genius. In days gone by, no matter how gifted a peasant might have been, talent was rarely recognized unless it happened to apply to a narrow band of ‘acceptable’ pursuits; social class restrictions dominated. In the Renaissance, it became a signal of prestige to unearth these talented people and sponsor their endeavors, but this was still something of a hit-and-miss affair.

The Age of Exploration saw it become possible for the best of the best to rise from lower-class birth to high social position, but it was usually necessary to hitch one’s wagon to someone already possessed of privilege in order to use them as a stepping-stone; even the archetypal example offered, Columbus, was dependent on the continued success of the wealthy families that he represented; had they failed, at least some of the blame would have landed at his doorstep, potentially bringing his social ascent to an end. His own success and ability helped stave off that downfall, so both were well-served by the arrangement, until he no longer needed their commercial patronage.

In the Age Of Sail, even this patronage became less important, because there were now other sources of wealth. The brilliant innovator could now approach men of wealth directly, and – should those men be convinced of the potential offered by the innovator – could have their research funded. For the first time, brilliance alone presented a pathway to a form of prosperity and privilege that had evolved to meet the needs of those who qualified to receive it.

This opened up the number of clever people who were able to contribute to society, and the accumulated benefits they produced for their societies are the source of the great acceleration in learning that became so noticeable in the 20th century. At one point in time, it was easily possible for a witness to the first object leaving the solar system to have been alive and aware of events when the first heavier-than-air flight occurred. Such individuals would now be 120 years of age, so it is unlikely to still be true, but twenty years ago, there would have been a number of centenarians who meet the description.

4. The Ascension of Economic Power

The treasure-troves being brought into the economies of Europe by the colonists and exploiters had delayed the eclipsing of the old Nobility, but wealth ‘there for the taking’ was a finite resource, and could only delay the inevitable. Increasingly, it became necessary to invest time, money, sweat, and blood before potential earnings became actual ones. Commercial operations, used to the concept of such investments, thrived and prospered even more than individuals.

To a certain extent, this could be seen as a continuation of the trend toward decentralized wealth and privilege; no longer focused on discrete individuals, but diffused throughout the administrative leadership of a collective with the singular purpose of pursuing profit.

Economic power was increasingly the dominant force within society, taking control of the resources that had once been the exclusive domain of those with birthrights amongst the peerage. To those living in such times, it must have seemed that this development had already been taken to its logical extreme – from our privileged positions, we now know better, but one would have been prescient indeed to foresee the age of steam and the robber barons and captains of industry that it made possible.

The extent to which economic power dominated can be observed through another factor: tithing and the common bartering of goods were practices that had largely been shed from society over the course of the Renaissance, and the last vestiges had died out in the Age Of Exploration. Everyone, from tenant farmer to landowner, received payment in currency, paid taxes on those receipts, and spent the balance (if any) as they saw fit – with a myriad of opportunists presenting alternatives on which to divest such pittances. Many such pittances created prosperity, and many such sources of prosperity created wealth.

In politics, too, these developments played a part. For the first time, a sense of national identity arose that was divorced from, or at least at arms’ remove, from the noble families who ruled.

5. The East India Trading Company

Perhaps the most powerful example of mercantile economic power is the rise of the East India Trading Company. Without looking it up, how many can name the founders and directors of this famous and infamous institution? I can’t, and I’m reasonably well-informed on the subject, but there is a view that these individuals are less important than the company that they ruled.

To be fair, much of what is known or perceived about the East India Trading Company is fiction, a blending together of the stories of two different entities: The Dutch East India Company and the East India Company of Britain, together with occasional contributions from the histories of other institutions such as the French East India Company and the Swedish East India Company (sensing a common thread, here?) Conflating all of these into a mythical super-organization is false-to-fact but resonates so strongly with the twentieth-century experiences of mega-corporations that it was, perhaps, inevitable.

There was also a Genoese one, a Danish one, and an Austrian one – and that’s not an exhaustive list!

Perhaps the best place to start in comprehending the overlaps and proper attribution of historical roles played by this plethora of institutions is with this disambiguation page, from which that list (and its links) derive. Note the timelines of the different organizations, which are listed in sequence of their founding.

Although it was not the first East India company to be founded to exploit trade with India, the dominant player in modern perceptions is the Dutch East India Company, more accurately titled the United East India Company. This amalgamated several existing companies to form the first joint-stock company in the world, in which any resident of the United Provinces of the Netherlands could buy or sell shares through several secondary markets, one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. It was granted a 21-year monopoly by the Dutch government to trade in Asia, possessed quasi-government powers including the ability to make laws, wage wars, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, mint its own currency, and establish colonies. Statistically, the VOC eclipsed its rivals in the Asian trade between 1602 and 1796, during which time it sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asian trading theater on 4,785 ships. The rest of Europe combined sent 882,412 people over a similar time-frame.

The nearest rival to the VOC was the English (later British) East India Company, which had a total of 2,690 ships and shipped a mere one-fifth of the tonnage of the Dutch company. At its peak, though, the EIC was considered the largest corporation in the world, and it seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonized a number of areas in Southeast Asia, using its 260,000 soldiers – twice the size of the British Army of the time. Eventually, it would eclipse the VOC, but only after the latter had ceased operations; it had a profound impact the global balance of trade, and were almost single-handed in creating the British Empire.

That’s how dominant economic power became in this era – private corporations had more power and wealth than governments, who had more power and authority than the historical peerage.

6. The Plight Of The Commons

Just because there was a pathway out of poverty for the cream of the naturally-gifted, and the poor were viewed as cogs in the economic machinery, that didn’t do much to better the lives of those who didn’t meet the standard of being exceptional. With little power over their own economic positions, it must have seemed to many that only the names of their masters had changed. Other people dictated how much their labors and products were worth, and how much they had to pay for access to the land that made farming and farm produce possible, and so on.

It was never formally described as such, but it was nevertheless a form of wage slavery, one in which the poor were ground up by the machinery of society for the betterment of the already-prosperous and wealthy.

7. The Slave Trade

Of course, even the poorest were better off than those victimized to the ultimate extreme of enslavement. This was a means of getting a day’s labor done while only spending a pittance of what it would have cost to pay someone to perform the same work. Although I deliberately left it off the list, slaves were another of those natural resources that were exploited starting in the Age of Exploration.

The increased workforce made expansion possible that would otherwise have taken decades if it were economically-possible at all, revealing another operating principle of modern economics – opportunities for employment will expand, in any prosperous economy, to the limits of the available workforce.

Connection to Now

There is a resonance with the current economic situation in our post-COVID world, at least here in Australia (and I see many similarities with the US economic situation) in that many businesses, especially in the agricultural sector had grown reliant on cheap labor imported from elsewhere. With Covid, that mobile workforce was largely halted, forcing businesses to adapt to employing locals; because the work is hard and pays relatively poorly, many viewed these as undesirable jobs, but even a partial employment boost was enough to empty the pool of available labor, leaving many operations struggling to recruit the workers that they needed for continued growth. Combining this with the pent-up demand for goods and services and the strain on economic supply chains and you have a high-demand low-supply situation that inevitably demands price rises (so that businesses can recruit in a constricted labor market). Where this will lead is beyond the scope of this part of this series, but was its original purpose – simply because of the high level of misinformation that I was seeing on the subject.

Personally, I find the concept of slavery to be repugnant, even as I am forced to accept the historical reality. It doesn’t matter that some were not abused; enough were, and it remains an affront that they had no power to alter their circumstances, being completely dependent on the goodwill of their ‘masters’. In many ways, this was a more modern recapitulation of the system of serfs and peasants, as though the emancipation of the lowest rungs of society demanded that these indentured laborers be replaced in order that those who profited from the exploitation of the workforce could continue to do so. This is an attitude that encompasses many aspects of my gaming worlds, however unrealistic it might be – slavers are always the bad guys and those who fight the practice are heroes, however flawed in other aspects of their personality they might be. Others may not feel this to the same extent or strength; it’s a bias that I’m happy to acknowledge.

Slavery was rife and expanding throughout the age of Sail. It was taken as the right of the social betters from Europe to dominate and exploit the ‘social inferiors’ – islanders, indigenous populations, and African natives. It took time for this to change, and even now the process can be considered incomplete.

The economics of the slave trade have to be understood as an essential component of the broader economic times; and not something that can be conveniently ignored, however uncomfortable a subject it might be.

8. Genre: Arrrh, There be Pirates

Strictly speaking, Pirates are a feature of the Age Of Discovery that preceded the Age Of Sail. The Pirates Of The Caribbean movies are set in the more contemporary era, however, and found their stories on the premise of the last dregs of the more noble past age confronting the reality of the modern day, of romanticism vs a harsh political and economic reality.

This underpinning gives a greater resonance between a modern audience and the characters of the time, enlarging the popularity of the whole genre, but in and of itself, it’s not enough.

My Pulp co-GM and I have frequently discussed the concepts of niche genres and come to the conclusion that such only really succeed in the era of Blockbusters by using infusions of something else. There was a time – Douglas Fairbanks etc – when a Pirate movie could stand on its own feet and be profitable, but the genre waned as the 20th century unfolded. A few attempts in the later 20th century to re-fire the genre, such as Master And Commander, didn’t flop but didn’t set the movie world on fire, either.

Pirates Of The Caribbean succeeded by ladeling in great infusions of fantasy, a few horror overtones, and drenching the whole in a cloak of comedy. Each of these brought in additional support from a different community of fans, and the combination was enough to create a hit. But that subtle philosophic element underpins everything, throwing in a broader context to the swashbuckling.

Seventh Sea is the premium representative of the Pirates genre in RPGs (and on of the outstanding crowdfunding success stories in TTRPGs. It also throws in slabs of fantasy and some deeper philosophical territory to underpin the game world, substituting exploration and politics and action-adventure for much of the comedy of POTC; and yet, I would lay odds that most Seventh-Sea campaigns occasionally – ‘lapse’ is the wrong word – into comic overtones, if not into genuine farce. Most campaigns do, regardless of genre, to be fair; very little can be grim and gritty and serious all the time without a little sunshine for contrast, every now and then.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully extricate the occasional burst of lightheartedness from the Pirate genre. It’s here to stay. The combination also resonates with another, more recent hit, this one set in deep space – the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie series. Strip away the super-heroics and the sci-fi elements, and what you are left with is an expression of the same swlect-band-against-the-world philosophic underpinning and the same comedic overtones.

9. Exploration to Colonialism and Expansion

Another significant difference between this era and that which preceded it is the psychological shift from exploration and looting / pillaging to systematic exploitation of resources. As described earlier, the wealth that was easy money for the taking had all been taken; what remained was greater in total value, but would require more to extract.

The resulting exploitation often came in a package deal with colonial attitudes. These undervalued native cultures and civilization, even to the point of trying to stamp these out (generally unsuccessfully) and overvalued the worth of ‘western’ society, largely by setting the metrics of measurement to suit themselves and elevating technological prowess to primacy amongst them. There is no doubt that these contributions to local societies were valuable, but the technological ascendancy did not equate to superiority in other fields, like ethics and morality. Just the opposite, it sometimes seems – but that’s because we are judging the whole based on the worst excesses and not the general standard.

Those ‘worst excesses’ were deplorable, there can be no doubt. Whether we’re talking about the Indian subcontinent, the Opium Wars, the dispossession of Native Americans and Canadians, or the abuse of Islanders, and Australian First Nations peoples, there’s plenty of dirt to go around.

Another contentious element (from a modern perspective) is the conversion and proselytizing of the natives to the religious beliefs of the West. If you are a believer, this is entirely justifiable under the notion of saving the souls of the natives; if you aren’t, its using dogma and religion to claim temporal authority via a religious back-door. Frankly, I don’t think there is<./em> a right answer in this aspect of colonialism; for what the religious authorities did to be “wrong”, you first have to believe that they did not believe that they were doing the “right thing”; without that guilty secret, the worst they can be accused of is misjudgment and arrogance, because if they truly believed, they had no other choice but to be driven by that belief.

Of course, the enslavement of some is the most egregious of these activities, as stated earlier – at least in my view. Doing better than that is, as the saying goes, a low bar to slither over.

The colonies were designed and intended to force the local populations into a global market for the goods and products that they could supply, an economic driver aimed at profiteering to benefit those Europeans who sponsored and established the colonies. That’s the economic reality that has to be taken into account in any analysis of the era.

10. More Rags To Riches

Administration of these colonies opened up still more channels for rags-to-riches stories. You could enlist as a sailor or man-at-arms, work your way up in military rank, retire from that and release yourself into an administrative position, and climb the social ladder until returning to your home ports with wealth and a record of ‘public service’ that made you a respectable member of society.

I have no doubt that some of those who followed this pathway sincerely tried to do the best that they could for the natives given over to their authority; the holy books at the root of the religions of the time, as now, were replete with instructions to care for others, be generous and honest, and so on, and these would have been taken to heart be many. But there were none to stay impulses toward domination, and plenty of opportunity for frustration to spill over into hostility when the natives forcefully assimilated ‘refused’ to see the ‘benefits’ of assimilation.

10a. Gold Fevers

I find it enlightening to contrast and compare an aspect of the era that followed with the colonialism of the Age Of Sail: Gold Fever and the Gold Rushes, in particular those of North America and here in my native Australia. Gold Fever led the victims to stake their entire existence on the prospect of striking it rich, and excused any lengths to which one would go in pursuit of that goal. The colonies were simply a less-directly valuable ‘gold’, and the resulting imperialism was the consequence of the blind pursuit of that ‘fortune’.

The Gold Rushes serve as a functional metaphor for the colonial exploitation of existing populations – right down to those who profited from the sale of ‘kit’ to those out to make a ‘name’ for themselves. Throw in the arrogance of assumed cultural superiority, and the recipe is complete; in the quest for wealth through dominion, any brutality or injustice was tolerable, when the ‘fever’ was at its height.

I bear this in mind whenever an analogous situation arises in a game, be it a government ‘trading’ with Orcs or a space colony which has been established on a world already inhabited. Even in an era of enlightenment, unless there is constant supervision, a cycle of excess and exploitation will arise.

11. Genre: The Wild West

I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns, for some reason. I’ve never played in, or run, a Wild West RPG. Nevertheless, there have been the occasional isolated example that has penetrated my defensive armor against such things – movies like Evil Roy Slade, TV series like F Troop, and the misadventures of Cattlepunk in Knights Of The Dinner Table, to name three. So my ability to exert any sort of expertise in dealing with this genre is limited and largely second-hand.

There are, for example, a lot of similarities between elements of the Superhero genre and the concepts that lie at the heart of the Wild West of American Myth, and I have extensive experience and expertise in the Superheroic genre that can be translated across that genre divide. All of which means that there’s the potential for me to offer advice and analysis of substance, but readers should probably take my contributions with a grain of salt; they may look good in theory, but have no practical value.

So, here’s my take on the Wild West Genre, for whatever it’s worth: The genre, as a whole, straddles two different eras: that of Sail (which is why it’s being referenced now), and the age of steam that follows. The broader concepts can be subdivided into three general categories.

• The Exploration Throwback – pioneering explorations into the unknown that are more strongly related to the Age Of Discovery and provide an outlet for those who yearn for the far horizon and being the first to find or do something. This aspect of the pioneering spirit is the one that was tapped to create Star Trek when it was sold to Paramount Studios and Desilu as “Wagon Train To The Stars”.
• The Outsider Of Justice – a loner stumbles across an isolated and lawless town and is persuaded to become the lawman who will pacify it. Or the independent-minded lawman dispatched from a distant authority to become law and order in the lawless west. This is the part of the Western Myth that was actually co-opted into Star Trek, and its also the part that resonates most strongly with the superheroic genre, and a lot of general action-adventure movies. Heck, there’s a lot of resonance with Dr Who, too.
• The quest for life and prosperity (and sometimes redemption) in an unforgiving environment surrounded by hostile forces – with the Wilder aspects of the Wild West muzzled (if not tamed), it becomes possible to eke out a living while dreaming of prosperity. Challenges will need to be overcome, but there is vast potential for social and economic gain if you can meet those demands. I’ve drawn on this concept any number of times in all sorts of genres, from Science Fiction settings to Fantasy adventures – sometimes, these are a gateway to a larger background, sometimes they are part of an ongoing series of smaller-scale confrontations.

Obviously, the last is the one that contains the Gold Rushes, and the Barbary Coast, and driving the Railroads west, and therefore are the part that crosses over into the Age Of Steam (no steam, no railroads!).

In all cases, finding some analogy that you can get a handle on is the key to unlocking the genre if you aren’t already an aficionado. With this foundation, I would not hesitate to run a Western adventure or campaign if I were asked to.

But it would be critical to understand the economics – where does the wealth come from, who has it, what are they doing with it, what opportunities does it present to those who don’t have it, and how do those without, survive?

12. Revolution Is In The Air

The rise of individualism, the redistribution of power and authority into a colonial mold, inevitably leads to revolutions as those with some power come into conflict with those who traditionally held power in their own right. Although history contains a few other examples that could be used, the one that everyone knows something about is the American Revolution. Colonial Rebellion, sometimes successful and sometimes suppressed, are the hallmarks of a paradigm shift into the Age Of Steam – even though they may predate or post-date the actual rise of Steam and Industry. .
Such revolutions and attempted revolutions are an inevitable response to the abuses of colonialism, and usher in an age of political turbulence that lead to the Victorian Gaslight period, a fertile setting for RPGs of many different and diverse genres.

But that’s for next time. For now, it’s time to wrap up this post and revise the series plan – and I’ll see you all next time!

Even in this relatively primitive economy, you can see some of the trends and practices evolving that we take for granted in the modern era, but the evolution of economic model in our history took a turn before those trends really manifested themselves, going from an Absolute Monarchy to a Limited Monarchy, and in the process sewing the seeds of both the Pre-industrial and Steam-age economies.

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 this part:

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

Planned for part 4:

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

Planned for part 5:

11. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Internal Combustion
12. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
13. In-Game Economics: Pulp-era

Planned for parts 6-7:

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

Planned for parts 8-10:

18. Digital Economics
19. Post-Pandemic Economics
20. In-Game Economics: Modern
21. Future Economics I: Dystopian
22. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
23. Future Economics I: Utopian
24. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
25. In-Game Economics: Space Opera

The game plan at the moment is to do 1-2 parts of the series, then interrupt it for an unrelated stand-alone article on some other subject before resuming. But don’t hold me to that schedule, it’s subject to change without notice!