Americana (3.5e Campaign Setting)/Technology

Americana is on the verge of a revolution. Though the Twenty Years' War threw a wrench into it, the great industrial nations have been riding an upward trend of technology since the end of the Great War. Now, magic and science are standing together on the edge of a great evolution in everything, from the way goods are made to the way war is waged.

(The technology level can be placed, with some standout exceptions like the Zeppelin, at roughly the early-to-mid 19th century.)

The sword's day as king is nearly ended--new technology, such as rifling of guns and the percussion-cap mechanism, has made the firearm more accurate and more reliable in all weather. As a result, all that prevents the final death of the battlefield of blades is the difficulty of making firearms en masse--and that may soon come to change.

Coal is king in Americana. It powers the short-range trains that connect the guts of the nations, turns the sidewheels and propellers of the steamships and paddlewheelers that haul goods along the oceans and rivers, and fires the DC generators that bring light to the biggest cities. It also turns motors in the sky as well as on the ground or water- with no rail or road lines to cross the mountains that bracket the continent, fleets of enormous zeppelins and airships float over the peaks and across the plains, carrying the cargoes too valuable to risk being lost to bandits and Natives. Not a day passes without some enterprising land pirate watching an airship float silently overhead and dreaming of a way to assail the behemoths, and though none have succeeded in their crazy plans yet, someone surely will if they keep at it.

Camera

Magical cameras are used fairly broadly in Americana, but sites with particularly high levels of background magic interfere with their operation, and at any rate they don't shoot in color due to a flaw in the interaction between silent image and amanuensis. Attempts at solving this flaw have proven to be one of Americana's most astonishingly persistent magical conundrums; the Academy of Indianapolis has a 7,500 SP bounty standing for any magician who can make a magical camera take an image in color.

No solution for background interference has been found that wouldn't inhibit the camera's operation; as such, though it's mostly theoretical, mechanical cameras have been and are being developed, using the properties of silver nitrate and lenses to engrave images onto glass plates. These cameras are more reliable in high-magic situations, but are highly fragile and bulky. The range is smaller than that of a magical camera, the exposure time is ages long by comparison, and the glass plates are prone to overexposure (as well as being heavy in bulk and shatter-vulnerable). Mechanical picture-taking is far from a solved problem, but a small, devoted crowd continues to chisel away at it.

Electricity

Electricity, as a concept, has been known of since well before the Great War--it is one of the core magical concepts alongside fire, ice, and acid, and the principle of magnetism has powered compasses for untold years. However, the process of bottling that particular genie has been a long and torturous one, largely pioneered in parallel on opposing ends of the continent in Seattle and Detroit towards the middle of the century.

Seattle's perpetual rain brought with it considerable accompanying lightning, which attracted the attention of a mage named Ulrich Cooke. Applying his magical knowledge of the use of lightning in battle, and how electrical attacks tended to attract towards swords or spears, he attached a metal rod to a kite string and sent it aloft from the Sky Needle while holding the other end--something he himself admitted later he went into with little or no planning. The proceeding three lightning strikes knocked him off his feet and very nearly killed him, but after getting some help and some more equipment, the second attempt was able to divert the charge down a metal wire into a metal coil contained under an alchemical bell. This produced the first known battery charge, and proceeding sophistication of the design allowed Seattle reliable, effortless lightning--lightning rods atop various buildings redirect charges to a massive battery housed near the base of the Sky Needle, which then redirects power along insulated wires to similar coils on poles along the roads, which glowed when powered.

In Detroit around the same time, an arcanomachinist named Edwin Williams suffered an interesting accident--Williams was a fan of magnets as connective devices, and when a lightning-powered golem underwent a massive electrical meltdown half a block away, the resultant wave set everyone's hair on end and dropped all of Williams' magnet-secured shelves off the walls. However, the mess sparked a brainwave for Williams--the connection between electricity and magnets had been largely theoretical to that point, and the incident cemented the aspect in his mind. He bought the remains of the golem and cannibalized its mechanisms, developing a machine which floated a magnet in a copper coil. When he connected the coil to the golem's head and spun the magnet rapidly, the eyes lit up. Williams coined the concept "galvanic current", and quickly began developing larger versions of his "generator", which quickly attracted a slew of followers.

The community of science brought Cooke and Williams together, and the two quickly began operating in parallel, something that was hindered by their separation. This would be solved not by either of them but by a member of their circle, Samuel Marconi, who would invent the Marconi Wire and change the world. Today, both Cooke and Williams continue to work on the theory despite their advanced ages, but the baton has been passed to a younger generation--particularly Williams' young, fiery rival, Nicholas Newcomben, who is on the verge of something new and astonishing.

Alternating Current

“	Voltage is electrical pressure, the force that pushes electricity along to its destination. In the same way that water forced from a pump stops moving quickly away from the pump, electricity further from the generator will become less and less strong.	”
—Part of a public forum on electricity by Nicholas Newcomben

The major flaw with Williams' galvanic current is that it loses voltage over distance. This means that to avoid using all the world's copper on conductors, Williams' generating plants have to be very close to their power users--and electricity generation is loud, smoky, and constant. A New Yorki by the name of Nicholas Newcomben has been working on the problem, financed by the dwarven rail magnate Gregor Westmarch, and the two of them are close to a breakthrough. Periodically reversing the current flow in a system will allow the voltage to be "stepped" up and down at transformers, allowing for much more lossless generation and transmission--thus resulting in a need for fewer conductors, fewer generating plants, and the ability to move the generators further from city centers.

This is an exceptional technological breakthrough, but if it takes off it will ruin Edwin Williams' electricity monopoly--and Williams, while a scientist du jour, is also ferociously jealous and vindictive. He has already made an enormous amount of money and cemented his place in history, at least in his mind--a threat to either of those would be something to oppose with every means he can bring to bear. And an imaginative mind is a force that can be used both for good or evil...

Firearms and Paraphernalia

The firearm predates history, having been used in varying forms of sophistication throughout the Great War. The most prevalent form of the firearm today is the muzzle-loading flintlock musket, a metal tube on a wooden crossbow-style stock in which is placed powder, wadding, and shot. It uses a flint-and-steel mounted on a hammer mechanism to ignite powder in a pan on the gun, thereby igniting the main powder charge in the barrel and sending an iron bullet from the mouth of the gun at incredible speeds. Apart from the mechanism itself, the flintlock is a fairly simple weapon, if slow to load and unreliable in bad weather. Nevertheless, it is an effective weapon when grouped en masse, and is quickly forcing older hand weapons out of existence, especially since the development of the ring bayonet towards the end of the first century. Its main weaknesses are the extreme reload time, which makes it less viable if not paired with hundreds of other muskets to fire in volley, and the exposure of the pan, which is touchy about igniting in damp weather and produces an easily visible plume of smoke when fired.

The cannon is effectively a musket on a larger scale--a large metal barrel on wooden mountings and wheels, often designed to be pulled by a horse or team of horses, which uses more primitive fuses to fire an equivalently sized metal ball at colossal speeds. It is the ultimate siege weapon, capable of dismantling most any structure apace, and of late has shown effective application on the battlefield as well in smaller, more portable forms. Cannons require a multiple-man team to put out shots at any rate higher than one every fifteen minutes, with the largest guns needing huge firing crews. Apart from a few corporations, which mount cannon on their zeppelins to deter ambitious bandits, nobody outside of a nation-state has or has any need for a cannon, and few will have the required support structure anyway.

Flintlock pistols also exist, the pistol being of similar design to the musket but smaller, and based on the hand crossbow. These weapons feature much shorter barrels which allow them to be fired with only one hand, but equivalently shorter range. The reload time is no less long, either--many pistoleers, as they are known, carry a preponderance of weapons and simply draw new ones in a fight, choosing to reload later. The pistol is under particular fire from the upper-crust of society, as it has become a favorite of duelists in some circles and thus threatens the supremacy of the rapier, and is seen as less honorable or distinguished as a result--not to mention much more deadly.

The ring bayonet is a recent invention from the geniuses at Detroit, and saw widespread distribution in the latter half of the Twenty Years' War. The bayonet is a simple concept--a blade or spike which attaches to the end of a musket, thus turning the five-foot weapon into a short polearm. Original "plug" bayonets socketed into the business end of the musket, thereby making it a one-or-the-other decision; the new ring bayonet is mounted on a ring which fits a socket at the end of the barrel, thus allowing an underslung blade without stopping the musket from firing, and allowing troop formations to switch from ranged to melee infantry simply by a change in grip. Ring bayonets have proliferated to most every nation that fields mass troops, but are rarely seen outside the military and will be viewed with some curiosity or suspicion in non-national hands.

All firearms use black powder as a propellant. Black powder, or gunpowder, or firepowder or any number of other names, is a dark, gritty chemical powder created from a mixture of three simple chemicals: sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter--better known to magicians as the active ingredient in the classic spell ingredient bat guano. Black powder simply burns quickly if left in the open, but when compressed and contained, burns so fast that it can be considered to explode. Supplies of black powder are vital to any nation fielding a modern army, and all have their own ways and means of supplying themselves; as such, within the boundaries of the nation-states, powder is never in short supply (if somewhat expensive). Black powder becomes useless if damp, hence the axiom "keep your powder dry" for being ready for anything.

Bullets are, logically, vital to any firearm that wants to shoot something. While a firearm can theoretically shoot anything small enough to fit in the barrel, iron balls custom-sized to fit the barrel will fire the farthest while causing the most damage. These are quite heavy when you have more than a few, and have little application apart from guns unless you're also skilled with a sling. Cannonballs are effectively bullets writ large, and have even less application outside their intended use. A variety of varied shots exist, too many to list here.

The paper cartridge is a specialized solution to the slowness of musketry; a shell of paper containing bullet, wad, and powder all prepackaged, eliminating the need for a powderhorn and cutting ramming time down dramatically. The main inhibition to these cartridges are twofold; they are fragile, being made of paper, and as such not always suited to the battlefield, and they are complex and expensive to make. As such, distribution is small, but it is rapidly increasing.

The various nation-states and other people and forces who rely on the firearm are well aware of the shortcomings of the flintlock, and have been fiddling with alternate firing mechanisms since the real dawn of massed musket combat in the Twenty Years' War. So far nothing has panned out, but some of the most ingenious people in the world are putting their minds to this problem. It's likely that something will soon, and if it does, it could well spell the doom of the melee weapon for good--something many would embrace and equally many would shun.

Why Bother?

Firearms can be basically equated to crossbows in terms of damage and style, with pistols equating to hand crossbows and muskets to light or heavy ones. A musket with a ring bayonet can be treated as a spear or glaive and switched between the two as a free action; a plug bayonet will have to be taken out, requiring a quick action. Statistically, firearms are more powerful than their archery parallels, but have a variety of drawbacks to compensate.

Since firearms use explosions to operate and silencers have not been developed yet, they are not exactly sneaky. Any use of a firearm during a surprise round will instantly end that surprise round, and a gunshot will alert anything within a fairly significant distance that something violent this way comes. Firearms are also capable of being hampered or outright disabled by water, and take a long time to reload--all firearm reloads require at least a standard action, similar to a heavy crossbow. Using paper cartridges or taking Rapid Reload or similar feats can cut this time down. Additionally, black powder is quite volatile and can be ignited fairly easily--a powderhorn exploding will be at least as devastating as a fireball, but with actual concussive force as well.

Now, that said, there are good reasons firearms are elbowing out melee weapons. First is the ease of use--all firearms count as Simple weapons. Point, click, dead. Some of the more interesting new types may count as Martial, but the basic flintlock gear is all very easy to train a man to use. Second is the power--firearms are more deadly than their archery counterparts. You can represent this in a number of ways--I like using the Brutal idea from 4e, wherein all firearms count as Brutal 2, so that any damage dice that rolls under a 2 gets rerolled. Simply using larger dice or more of them is also an option. Finally, firearms have much longer range than their counterparts--a crossbow's maximum effective range is roughly 60 yards, whereas a modern musket can max out at closer to 100.

Some Promising Examples

Rifling is a concept being developed in Los Angeles by a promising young inventor named Jose Martinez. While playing gridiron with his children in the park one day, he observed offhand how much more accurate a gridball is when thrown with a spiral. This sparked something in his mind, and given that he was a weaponsmith at the Grand Compton Armory in his day job, he quickly set about work on an ambitious project--finding a way to make bullets spin when fired, which he theorizes would make them much more accurate and capable of longer effective range.

Martinez has been undertaking this work in absolute secrecy--he works for the Grand Compton Armory, he's of no illusions as to how dangerous this invention could be, and how many people would either want it for themselves or want him dead if they knew about it. So far he hasn't taken it to his bosses--the process he's developing, while effective, is quite time-consuming to produce. He's not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

The percussion cap is a design currently being tested in Chicago. Foul weather during the Battle of Joliet crippled Chicago's mass muskets and left them vulnerable to Dallas' more well-trained infantry, and while Joliet didn't exclusively lose them the war it certainly didn't help. Chicago has been very interested in developing weatherproof firearms as a result, and a man named Johann Maynard has developed something he calls the "needle gun". A paper cartridge contains a specially designed bullet with an explosive primer at its base. When the trigger is pulled, a needle attached to the hammer--hence the name--pierces the paper cartridge and strikes the primer, igniting the powder and firing the gun. All the ignition is contained inside the barrel, making for an extremely reliable firing system.

The main inhibition to mass production of the needle gun is the complexity and delicacy of the paper cartridge involved, but if anyone has the means to produce something complex easily, it's probably Chicago. Maynard, compared to Martinez, is extremely excited for the possibility--if the needle gun pans out he's almost certainly due a knighthood and it will likely mean his beloved Chicago becomes truly ascendant in the world stage.

The revolver is Detroit's answer to their perpetual war with New York. With a much smaller population, Detroit relies on their technology edge. Every musket has to be good as five or six New Yorki muskets--and two ingenious House Oldsmobile inventors, observing a mass production mechanism one day, had the idea to do just that. The revolver replaces the usual firearm's firing chamber with a metal cylinder containing five or six firing chambers, which can be rotated by hand into position and allow for extremely rapid firing compared to a normal musket or pistol. This design has two problems; even with cartridges, which it has to use, reloading takes enormous amounts of time. Additionally, the design DOES have an unfortunate tendency for all six cylinders to fire at once at times, which is obviously dangerous and has crippled several test shooters.

Josephsteen and Stanislev have been working on this design for the past year, and House Oldsmobile is extremely excited about the possibilities; this could be enough to bring them up to a seat on the Council, especially with the recent hardships of House Chrysler. As such, the revolver is one of the most closely guarded secrets in Detroit today. Most of the other Families are aware that Oldsmobile is sitting on a powderkeg, and are trying ferociously to figure out what they've got.

Certain other technologies are being experimented with, particularly the concept of breech-loading firearms: loading the gun via the base of the barrel rather than the mouth, thus cutting down on reloading time. However, a method of doing so that doesn't involve magic reinforcement preventing the gun from blowing up has yet to be perfected, and no promising examples have yet been developed. Other technologies are being envisioned--the concepts of magazines, repeating rifles, and metal cartridges--but none of these is beyond the brains of their inventors yet. It is well that they are not--if any of these made their way to the real world, the age of the sword would not just be dead, but buried deep.

The Marconi Wire

Towards the end of the first century, a New Yorki electrician and inventor by the name of Samuel Marconi found himself frustrated by the difficulty he was having communicating with his colleagues in Detroit. Messenger birds were slow and untrustworthy, magical communication was ungodly expensive, and ground-sent mail was not only slow but liable to be made unusable during one of the frequent diplomatic spats that the two nations were prone to.

Marconi had been experimenting with electricity for a considerable length of time now, and in his frustration began dreaming of using electricity to send messages between the nations. That dream stuck with him, and slowly over the next two years blossomed into a reality as he and several colleagues developed a system to send electric pulses of measured and varying length along a wire that could be translated into Common Tongue.

This system was first displayed to the world by Marconi in 76 A.G.. Dubbed the Marconi Wire, it allowed for near-instantaneous communication along a wire between two locations- as Marconi demonstrated by sending a message from New York while his assistant spoke in front of a crowd of Detroi machinists and investors intrigued by the design. The historic first message: "I bring you news of a New Age."

Suitably impressed, the Detroi funded a project to spread the new technology across the entire continent, and by the end of the Age of Chaos the Marconi Wire ran to every major city in every nation. The technology allowed for much smoother communication between nations, allowing diplomacy and large-scale trade to become feasible for the first time in history.

The Marconi Wire runs between every country, and a sending/receiving station can be found in essentially every town's post office. The Wire is operated by a private international trust- the Wire Corporation- which sees to maintaining and operating the service. Sending a "marconi" costs 5sp for every 50 words.

The Wire is a favored son of modern society, but occasionally comes under fire. The Twenty Years' War saw miles and miles of Wire demolished to hinder communications of various parties, particularly within Chicago's borders, and much of this is still being restored today. Additionally, bandits of all stripes are fond of attacking remote Wire relaying stations, often for the payrolls in their safes but occasionally to break down communication in an area to make fighting them more difficult. The Wire is thus one of the prime employers of adventurers, either to guard its repair parties or to investigate breaks in the system.

Weapons and Armor

The proliferation of firearms has somewhat hampered more traditional weapons development; anyone with eyes in their head can see that the day of the sword on the battlefield is all but done. Nevertheless, melee equipment and armor are still widely and deeply proliferated throughout Americana, for a variety of reasons, and old (and often powerful) equipment is being found in pre-War ruins constantly. And at any rate, a sword will still be sharp when it rains.

Weapons

The main weapons remaining on the battlefield at large are polearms, used to keep cavalry and melee troops away from archers and musketeers--the pike, the halberd and the long hammer are still often seen in a mixed line. The lance and the spear are mostly retired, though cavalry units may still carry them, and fighters in marshy areas favor the spear due to its versatility off the battlefield as well as on. Forms of spears known as harpoons can also be found on the decks of many a ship, especially those devoted to whaling. These are not designed for battle but sailors have been known to wield them with deadly effectiveness in a pinch.

Small weapons such as the dagger, shortsword, and club will never go out of style, and there are more variants of all three of them than can be counted. A particular style of black club known as a nightstick has become part of the standard uniform for most police forces.

Among magicians, due to the standardization of uniform, backup weapons have taken on something of the status of a fashion accessory; currently dirks are in style. Wizards and sorcerers may replace any appropriate Light Weapon Proficiency with any other provided it remains a similar type of weapon and within reason. Within reason is up to the GM's judgement. If two mages in one party have two different weapons then one or both of them will be out of style, and be seen among mages as somewhat gauche.

Melee weapons such as longswords, greatswords, warhammers, and greataxes are in decline--they are extremely difficult to conceal and lose out in distance to muskets. That said, there are many more of them on the battlefields than muskets right now, and they will likely remain there until more muskets appear or all the current users are shot, whichever happens first. Additionally, some places and parts of society have kept the melee weapon alive in various capacities. The western lizardfolk of the deserts are known for their scimitars, often wielded in tandem with a small shield or a second weapon such as a dagger. Rapiers remain the darling children of the upper crust, kings of the dueling circuit, and in some circles a dueling scar is a great honor. A rapier made by a master can bring many times its weight in silver from the right buyer. Axes and hammers of all kinds are common in the backcountry, especially among orcs, both for their power and their versatility off the battlefield. The brush machete is a common sight in the southeast, both among the Natives and the Atlantean Militia, and nearly every ranch in Dallas has a brush axe or six in a shed somewhere and plenty of ranch hands who know how to use them. The Dallas Outriders and many other national cavalry regiments still issue a saber as part of the standard kit, and you can find a similar weapon in the hands of most military officers, retired or not. A saber can be used one-handed but requires exceptional skill to do so. The sport known as baseball, which has been rapidly increasing in popularity, makes use of a large wooden bat as a major implement, which in a pinch can be used as a greatclub. Finally, a million variants of basic poles and staff weapons have proliferated throughout society, from the long iron poles lamplighters use to the shorter clubs the rich set prefer in their "golf" game, and anyone who knows how to fight with one can find such a weapon, if possibly an ungainly one.

Traditional archery is mostly extinct, and only practiced by Natives and enthusiast groups within the Nations--and even Natives are switching to firearms as fast as they can get their hands on them. Crossbows and hand crossbows are the archery weapons with the widest remaining proliferation in "civilized" society, but carrying any kind of archery weapon around will certainly get you looks. Archery does have one very important advantage over firearms, however--it is, comparatively, completely silent.

Why Bother?

Don't let the appearance of firearms dissuade you from using a sword or a bow--this is Americana, not America. The sword's days are numbered but there is still time for glorious blades yet.

Firearms have significant advantages on the broad battlefield--they take much less time to teach the use of than a melee weapon or a traditional bow, and while still not cheap are both relatively less expensive, easier to make, and with broader applications outside of war than most battlefield melee weaponry. You'll usually only see swords hanging in the houses of career soldiers, whereas every backcountry cabin or farmhouse will have a musket over the fireplace. The range of these weapons is greater than any bow and much more than any sword or spear, and their power is inarguable.

Now, that said, traditional melee and archery weapons have advantages. They're quiet, at least relatively, to the explosion of gunpowder. They require less delicate care, with no moving mechanisms to jam (or for those that do, repairs that don't require a professional gunsmith to make). They can be lighter, more easy to conceal. They require less apparatus to work--you don't need to reload a sword, or carry a ramrod and wadding to shoot a bow. Gunpowder and properly forged bullets may also be controlled substances in some parts of the world, or difficult to find in others. Additionally, if a melee fighter can close on a musketeer then all the musketeer has to work with is a heavier, somewhat unwieldy spear--provided they have a bayonet fixed. The element of surprise can also be considered--many groups ranging from petty bandits to certain entire armies have eschewed melee weapons entirely, and might have less training or experience on properly fighting in close quarters.

Finally, it must be considered that while powerful pre-War guns have been discovered, many of them no longer work or require strange ammunition and combinations that make them little more than decorative. A pre-War sword can still be swung if you have a hand to use it.

Armor and Fashion

Americana is in a strange place as far as armor is concerned. Heavy plate armor is rare nowadays, as developing armor that could stop a bullet, not crush the wearer, and not cost more money than most people would ever see has proved to be an exercise in extreme frustration for most armorers. Some are still working on the problem; most have transitioned back to lighter arrays such as chainmail and scale armor. Full or even half plate armor is no longer standard issue among any Americ military unit, but the Knights of Chicago do still own and maintain suits, mostly for ceremonial occasions, and plenty of suits remain in circulation, particularly among the rich who can afford them. Wearing heavy armor will usually get you odd looks, unless the suit is famous for one reason or another (pedigree, history, etc.)--that will get you a degree of awe.

On the battlefield, light armor is the ruler of the day for the most part, being preferred for its combination of some protection with flexibility and ease of motion--important qualities in the rough country of Americana. Padded armor is standard cavalry equipment, with some older units preferring the breastplate. Some chain and scale is often found in the ranks of the infantryman, but a chain shirt is the heaviest that standard gear usually reaches--heavy padding is the usual go-to. Leather armor is such a fondness of thieves and scoundrels that it's become something of a stereotype. New types of armor are being experimented with constantly, but most predict that a true "bullet-proof" armor is years off yet. That being said, something is bound to emerge based on sheer probability alone.

Mages, as mentioned, universally wear an outfit that has not changed in 111 years--and it shows. The tricorne hat, breeches, and overcoat of the magician is instantly identifiable no matter where you are, and stands out like a sore thumb from more modern fashions. Coats, top hats, and elaborate dresses are among the styles prominent in Nation society currently; mens' colors tend towards the earthy and drab, while womens' are more often colorful and gay, if a bit washed out. A fondness for the narrow silhouette was strongly in style recently, but is drifting out of style in favor of the triumphant return of the bustle and full curves with widening shoulders.

Note: See here and here for reference on what's going out and what's coming in respectively.

Zeppelin

Anyone who wants to have the might of science and magic working in tandem soundly proven, in recent years, needs only to go to a vastly broad space west of Chicago, which has been stripped down to the bare rock and leveled almost impossibly flat. If they arrive at the right time, they can stand on the edge of that pit and look down at their proof--or, perhaps, look up.

Details and Data

The Poletiazhelyi Airship--commonly referred to as the zeppelin after the prototype--is a lighter-than-air craft, if that can be believed, which is built by the Chicago-based Poletiazhelyi Airship Company. It consists of a metal frame wrapped in an outer-coating of canvas and containing a number of separated cells filled with augusten, the superlight gas discovered by von Zeppelin. The number is usually fourteen, but can range anywhere from ten to thirty-two. The separated cells are a safety mechanism to help prevent crashes--a puncture in one or several does not necessarily mean a quickly impending crash, as it would if there was only one gas cell. The engines, crew compartment, and cargo compartment are all combined into a metal pod, which is attached to the bottom of the zeppelin's frame. Some newer zeppelins have some crew and cargo space inside the envelope, to increase loading capacity--this is also true of the two passenger zeppelins currently flying.

Though Poletiazhelyi's original zeppelin was kept aloft by nothing but its augusten gas and powered by only one engine, scientists from across the continent have contributed into making great leaps in the design in only six years since it was first revealed--though the same basic principles still apply, the present-day zeppelin is a patchwork of magic as well as technology. Most zeppelins are now much bigger than the original and are powered by anywhere from two to five engines driving as many propellers, which means, though they burn more coal, they move much faster and can carry much more. And to make sure that nothing goes wrong--or that nothing terrible happens if something does--the current zeppelin fleet has been reinforced with a variety of magical spells, two of which are widely known: Protection from Projectiles, to help keep anyone from bringing the big ships down, and Feather Fall, in case any of them do go down.

Of course, all of this is not cheap. The original August von Zeppelin was hardly a bargain itself--Poletiazhelyi only got the materials he needed thanks to his credentials and fractional down payments of all the money he had ever saved up, banking everything on the Queen and the City being interested in what he had to offer (for the record, he is now the fourth-richest man in Chicago). But with the added engines, crew, and the massive magical spells, zeppelins are, for the moment, completely out of the price range of everyone except for Nation-States and a very few companies--even if one had the money to purchase a zeppelin, the coal costs alone make it prohibitive to use for most circumstances. The current fleet, not counting the prototype, numbers thirty-seven; Chicago owns twelve of these, New York and Detroit six, Los Angeles and Atlanta three, Las Vegas two, and Dallas one. One of the remainder belongs to the Poletiazhelyi Airship Company, and is used to train new crews; the other three are owned by the continent's largest corporations.

Augusten, the gas essential to zeppelin operation, is currently held under monopoly by the Poletiazhelyi Airship Company. They own the land where the original vent was located, and spent considerable sums of money purchasing the sites of two subsequent discoveries--one on the Cordillera Plain near Seattle, the other in the hills of northwest Atlanta.

Pre-War Technology

Large amounts of knowledge were lost in the Great War, and almost nothing is concretely known about the societies or peoples that existed before it. It is known that they spoke a wide variety of languages, primarily one close enough to Common to be largely intelligible to modern scholars, but much of what has been unearthed is arcane and beyond knowledge.

More concrete are the physical remnants of the pre-War era; equipment and structures, sleek and streamlined compared to modern-day designs and technology. Pre-War Equipment is often magical, or so advanced technologically that it may as well be. It is also very rare; pre-War technology has not survived the rigors of the years very well and is often relatively fragile compared to modern equipment.

Firearms, melee weapons, some archery weapons, and armor have all been discovered, along with various equipment, tools, and devices, some of which have easily determinable uses and some of which don't. Pre-War hand tools, to use one example, are very highly prized among craftsmen and workers; they are made of alloys whose composition and manufacturing has been lost, which appears to never rust and which holds up many times as long as iron or steel in common use.

Pre-War firearms are actually fairly neglected: they take calibers and ammunition which is no longer made and whose specs are indeterminate, and as such with some rare exceptions are mostly seen as museum pieces. Those guns which can be made to work with black powder and paper cartridges are extremely valuable, much more powerful than contemporary firearms, and sometimes magically enchanted. One of the most famous is the Hand of the President, which belonged to Father Elisha Westbrook and has been passed down to each head of Salt Lake since. It is said to cause anyone it hits to face instant judgement on the scales of Jefferson; the fate of those found wanting is not pleasant.

Pre-War armor is completely inscrutable to contemporary armorers. It appears to be made of cloth, but can stop bullets and blades with ease and is many times lighter than modern armor. Sets of this "weave armor" are worth many times their weight in silver, and the most powerful nation-states are said to have sets they bestow on important figures for their safety.

Pre-War weapons are almost always enchanted. They are mostly blunt weapons, made of durable materials many times lighter than anything contemporary machine shops can make. Short knives made of the same material as pre-War tools are widely known and are said to hold an edge for decades. Pre-War bows are usually compound, with strings and body both made of strange not-quite-metals and capable of putting out arrows with tremendous accuracy and force for their size and the effort involved.

Pre-War Buildings are made of steel, concrete, and glass, and stand many stories taller than contemporary architecture can manage even with the assistance of magic. Few of them still remain, with the largest concentrations in New York and Chicago, along with some parts of Los Angeles and Atlanta. New York's Triangle Tower is the tallest building in the known world, standing fifty stories and only truly ascendable thanks to ancient elevators now hooked up to modern Direct Current. Most of these buildings are owned and used by governments; the entire central offices of New York's government are housed in Triangle Tower, for instance, and the main church of Presidism is located in a pre-War arena in Atlanta known as the Dome. One notable exception is the Samson and Sons Arms Company, which owns a large warehouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles that has become their main manufacturing plant.

Outside of the cities, such buildings are more common but also typically shorter and in much worse condition. Some are famous, like the Red Roof Inn north of Missouri, which was the site of the signing of the Chicago-Dallas peace treaty. Others are unheard of. Many such structures actually exist mostly or entirely underground, and have become infested with monsters, turned into bandit bases, or repurposed by other forces unknown. These structures are almost always dangerous, but great treasures from before the war can often be found in them.

While architecture in the modern day typically has marched to its own drum, some architects have attempted to re-bottle the pre-War lightning recently thanks to advances in building technology. The most famous example of this is the twenty-five story Royal Tower in Chicago, which was considered extremely tasteless when it was built but has been coming slowly into acceptance, if not style.

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