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Critmas Thoughts About Nott and Felderwin

We've got so many interesting things to chew on over the holiday break, and today, reading through all the reactions here and elsewhere, I felt like posting a little theory based on information we've gathered over the past two episodes. So I put on my special order tinfoil hat made specifically for goblin theories.

Theory: Nott's main goal isn't to get polymorphed, Nott's main goal is to get her child/children polymorphed.

So, to unpack that a little, I'd like to start with the point that Nott is a fundamentally selfless person based on her characterization up to this point. Deeply flawed, sure, but I think that based on the end of the dragon fight, and her comments to Caleb recently, her primary concern is the happiness of others. And I think that doesn't really gel with a long term goal of changing her body and leaving her goblin life behind. I think she totally wants that. She 100% wants to not be a goblin, but if there was theoretically a situation where only one person can get body swapped, she would use it on her child.

Now, the difficulty is probably in the fact that we don't know for sure that Nott has a child, but I think we have enough circumstantial evidence to place it in the realm of possibility.

1) Nott is pretty good at being a mother, makes me think she's had experience.

2) She specifically mentioned that she is of child-bearing age in Zadash. With a very short lifespan, I would suspect that goblins function like rabbits. Their primary survival tactic is population. Rabbits become fertile around six months or sooner after birth. Scale that up to a goblin lifespan, and I wouldn't be surprised if goblins can start producing offspring around four to six years old depending on available food. She might have been pregnant multiple times in her life at that rate.

3) The contents of her care packages seem a little odd for Yezza. Now, if memory serves me correctly, she said that she didn't know if Yezza made it out alive when they both fled the goblin camp. I think we have two options here: she's lying and Yezza is in Felderwin taking care of her child/children, and she's sending care packages with supplies for him and her children, or she really doesn't know if Yezza survived, and she's sending the packages back to the tribe. I could see a situation where a slightly sympathetic goblin friend, possibly the children's father, or another member of the are receiving the packages in a child support payment kind of situation.

So, a big event recently that made me come to this idea: Nott's actions in the Fun Ball's Library. If Nott's goal is her own transformation, her actions are fairly selfish. Caleb was clearly unhappy and in distress, and he wanted to leave and said so multiple times. Nott staying and trying to unlock more books makes a lot more sense to me if she was driven by a desire to find the power to transform her child/children. Yes, she cares about the M9, she would clearly die for them. But at that moment, her first concern was her children.

Additionally, she seemed up for the idea of checking up on Felderwin when it was mentioned that the Xorhasian army had attacked. She hates her tribe, if it was just a situation where the people who made her life miserable where in danger, she might not care, she might even be happy. But I think she's worried about her kid/kids, possibly also Yezza if he's alive and she knows it.

Now, this final part is just my wild speculation, but we've all got several weeks to kill so here it goes: When they return to Felderwin, I think Nott's tribe is going to be in a Return to the Shire situation a la the end of the LOTR books. I could see the Xorhasian army attacking or besieging Felderwin and finding this little tribe in the surrounding forest/hills and pressing them into slavery as camp workers or cannon fodder. The goblins might even be somewhat complicit, willingly allying themselves with the drow to feed off of their success.

[syrffioadar-blog]

Exandria: 1790 (Spoilers)

At the close of episode 36 of campaign 2, the Mistake was confronted with a ship (which purely out of speculation, I’ll refer to as Captain Avantica’s ship.) A fairly well armed ship at that. Given the double masts, and at minimum single row of gun ports, I feel like it’s safe to say that the ship they encountered is at least the size of a classic brig, possibly a smallish frigate. For reference, the Jackdaw from AC: Black Flag is a brig. And it’s probably safe to say that the Mistake, with a single mast and built for speed, is equivalent to a gunship from the above picture. I am absolutely tingling with excitement to see how this plays out in NYC!

But that’s all preamble. Given that the party is encountering cannon bearing brigs and frigates, and a whole host of other technologies from the siege engines of Hupperdook to the foundries of Nicodranas, this all begs a few interesting questions: When are we? Is this all Percy and Ripley’s fault? How far will Exandria progress? I feel that, usually, when people try to tackle these questions, they try to base their answers mostly off of military technology, and that’s not ridiculous by an means, but it leaves out all the sexy and exciting points of architecture, civic infrastructure, and bookkeeping. With these points in mind, I’d like to give my meaningless opinion and hear others.

Firstly, as of the start of S1E1, Exandria was already a post-medieval society.

Second, if I had to put an Earth year date on Exandria, I think it’s safe to say that, as of the start of the second campaign, Exandria is equivalent to roughly the 1790’s to 1810’s.

Third, Exandria will probably never get past an early Victorian level of technology without significant magical or alchemical assistance, unless oil exists.

Some bold claims, let’s talk about them!

PART 1: END OF AN ERA

Since I just threw shade at military technology, let’s use that to establish that this was never a medieval setting. It’s worth mentioning that, as modern understanding of the ‘Dark Ages’ has progressed, D&D and fantasy genre material in general has started to add a little disclaimer to their descriptions of things, usually something along the lines of “Well, it’s really late medieval or renaissance really, and also maaaaagic.” Well we’re going to ignore the hell out of magic. Why? Because it really feels like society in general in Exandria is trying to ignore magic. And given the results of the Age of Arcanum, it’s easy to see why. We all generally ignore the fact that nuclear weapons were used on other humans, and we’re still sitting on a stockpile large enough to end life on Earth. It’s uncomfortable to think about the fact that Caleb could, in a few levels, kill everyone in a settlement like Alfield and still have spell slots left over. So, is/was Exandira a renaissance society?I think it’s safe to say, Exandria was at least late renaissance, bordering on early modern even at the start of campaign one. A couple clear markers show us this. First, military technology! Long after I’m dead, people with Dr. but not that kind of Dr. in their title will argue the exact date that the medieval era ended. I personally like to look at architecture for the watershed moment that ended the medieval era: 1453, the Fall of Constantinople. When Sultan Mehmed II’s bombards destroyed the walls of the city, the era of the castle ended. Black powder and bombard level primitive artillery already existed before Percy introduced the world to flintlock firearms. He was able to walk into an alchemical supply shop and buy a hogshead of black powder in season 1 after all. So the medieval era is over, artillery exists.

Now, people totally kept building castles and classically fortified structures after 1453, but they were rapidly becoming obsolete (they really tried to make it work, like Star Forts) and would soon become follies.While this has enormous impacts on combat, the castle was also central to medieval civil society. And all the day to day things that made it, well, medieval. Without double-entry bookkeeping, it really makes sense to have a single, highly defended repository for records and knowledge. Paper is precious during the medieval era, literacy is limited, and having your records and knowledge protected by a castle made sense. If Lord Bob’s retainers from across the river got drunk and decided to come to town to do some raping and house burning, you don’t want your only book of land deeds in that house. You don’t want the only tax ledger in town to be lost. You want that shit in the keep! Monasteries had walls for a reason, anywhere you wanted to store knowledge needed to be safe from enemies and fire. So the solution was stone walls for both.But once that castle loses its defensive purpose, you begin to slide down the slippery slope to equality! Shocking, right? But it makes sense. Castles also helped with the vertical integration of power. At the top you had God, then below that you had The Body of Christ, his Church on earth, and the nobility, which god has placed there to exact his will upon the world. Below that? Everyone else. And the castle reinforces that system. The nobles are literally up on a hill in their stone tower, and you go give them wheat every harvest, if you want to petition for justice in the case of a crime, or have a dispute settled, you went to the castle, where a lord upon his throne dispensed a ruling. It’s a slow, multifaceted process, but getting rid of castles is part of the march of civil liberties. A few other things that existed as of the start of the campaign:

1. Police! Police are an incredibly modern concept.  Yeah, they’re called guards, but they’re police. The first modern police force: 1829.

2. Sewers. It’s safe to assume that Nicodranas’ stone sewer network is not new. While ancient cities often had sanitation infrastructure, complex stone sewers like Nicodranas’ could be compared to London’s initial sewer mega-project, started in 1859. Also, early saltpeter production was mostly from poop. So gunpowder needed poop infrastructure to scale up.

3. Again, double-entry bookkeeping. While double entry was probably invented by Jewish merchants in the Middle ages, it’s proliferation was a major boon to the Reniassance. Medici’s bank likely employed it as of the 14th century.

4. Towers without buttressing. Now, this one is tenuous, I’ll freely admit, but I don’t think any of the tower of Zadash were described as having noticeable or significant buttressing. I’m going to assume that Marquet’s Cerulean Palace was constructed with some kind of magic, and ignore it. If the towers of the Tri-Spire are several hundred feet tall and lack flying buttresses, we’ve progressed beyond that architectural technology to more subtle support structures. We could likely then, compare the three towers in Zadash to Rouen Cathedral, the tallest building in the world in 1876.

5. Nautical Tech: This one is extensive, and I’ll freely admit I don’t know the most about sailing, but while ships in campaign one lacked cannons, they seemed to have square rigged sails and rudders, and if they have airships strong enough to go from air to water, they must have advanced enough in nautical tech to be able to make something like a carrack or galleon.

Given all of this, I’d say that at the start of campaign one, before the whole Percy thing, Exandria was already sitting pretty somewhere in the 1600’s at least, as I could see a world with dwarves and gnomes making advances in masonry, architecture, and city planning a little ahead of Earth. If the deal with Orthax never happened, I could see Exandria progressing from early artillery to wheellock firearms in 50-100 years.

PART 2: WHEN ARE WE NOW?

Oh Percy. Truly the Oppenheimer of Exandria. Leap-frogging wheellock firearms like that means that, in the years between campaign one and two, all the other technologies have probably been playing catch-up to weapons tech. So when are we now? It’s probably easier to move away from tech that exists, to tech that doesn’t exist, to support a date for the current, campaign two tech level. This brings us back to Captain Avantica’s ship, and Hupperdook.So steampunk should really be called coalpunk, because you can’t have a steam engine without coal. And no, charcoal isn’t good enough. You need fossil fuels. Charcoal is a big step up in power from burning a log, and it pales in comparison to coal. You can’t run a steam ship on lumber or charcoal, you’d never be able to carry enough. You also need fossil fuels for plastics and other petroleum products. It’s almost hard to wrap your head around how many things around you are made from oil by-products.So, do we have coalpower? That’s a tough question I haven’t been able to pin down. I’m not sure if Matt has even mentioned coal existing, and it’s possible he’s used that word, but used it to refer to charcoal. You really have to ask, does Exandria have fossil fuels to harvest? I wasn’t able to find an exact date for how old Exandria is. Civilization is fairly young on the planet, and if the planet as a whole is young, then there has likely not been enough time to process plankton into oil in the planet’s crust. Regardless, coalpower does not yet seem to be widespread, if it can even exist at all. The Gear Warden made by Cleff was mentioned to use both natural and magical propulsion, I believe steam was mentioned, but obviously the machine couldn’t be running on coal, as it was self-sustaining for years without refueling coal or water, so it had to be getting both its power from magical means. It’s very likely that, given both the industry of Hupperdook, and the water needs of Nicodranas, steam power might be in use, but the fire must be coming from magic, or less efficient wood or charcoal. Wood or charcoal are good enough for stationary functions, but nothing that moves would be able to sustain itself on those fuels, so they would need to get their fuel from magic. Also notable, Captain Avantica’s ship is still a sailing vessel, it hasn’t been replaced by steampowered ships. And you can’t get to wide-scale electrical generation from wood or charcoal.So given that we have flintlock weapons, infrastructure equivalent to the early modern era, but no fossil fuels (possibly), I think it’s safe to say that Exandria is around the start of the 18th century. Honestly, I feel robbed that they’re not walking around in clothes that look like this with greatswords. Caleb in a Mr. Darcy outfit is just... well, NSFW.

PART 3: CYBERPUNK EXANDRIA, RIGHT?

Unless we get a strangely direct explanation from Matt at some point about the presence of fossil fuels in Exandria, the future is a bit hard to predict. Essentially, if there are no fossil fuels, then Exandria could reasonably get to the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, but I don’t think they could truly industrialize without a magical/alchemical equivalent of fossil fuels. Current human society as we experience it is top to bottom a result of fossil fuels, sadly. If in his old age, Percy is in Whitestone, tinkering away in his lab while a pack of part-elf de Rolos run around and starts making an alchemically derived plastic, then hold onto your butts, Exandria is going full Shadowrun with dragon CEOs and everything.

Or they could just go high-fantasy Eberron style and chalk everything up to bound elementals. Oh wait...

PART 4: WAS THERE A POINT TO ALL THIS?

Not really, mostly an elaborate Trojan Horse to present a bunch of cool science and history facts that have been rolling around in my head since I started watching the show. And possibly the beginning of a whisper campaign to get them to play the Jane Austen RPG as a one-shot once it prints.