Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Karha City Limits

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're taking one last look at the city by The Hill before we change everything again.

What We Have So Far

While we've discussed some of the changes that Karha would undergo, we haven't really taken a look at the city as a whole since the end of the Bronze Age.  Back then, the city resembled a stone-built metropolis, with tall apartment buildings leaning against massive trees, ringed by community centers and purpose-driven construction, all surrounded by the giant stone walls that would keep the leaping predators of the world at bay.  Sprinkled among this were bronze sheets and statues, water fountains, and a great deal of tile glazing.  People lived surprisingly decent lives, with a few modern amenities (indoor lighting, air conditioning, running water) despite the fact that stone brick is still the dominant building material.

Since then, we've advanced technology by one giant leap, and magic by a similar bound.  Iron can be used, though steel is not yet a widely manufactured product.  Basic machinery is possible, though true engines are not yet a reality.  Professions are common, and the middle class, headed by mages, has arrived.  Education is increasingly public and centralized, and with it comes the basics of those sciences that will bring the largest changes to the city... especially engineering and material science.

One further reminder that will affect the way the city is built moving forward:  magic has a cost.  Our society uses sigils, which prevent the worst effects (namely, slowly becoming a monster), but still, magic must be consciously used, and overuse strains the body and mind.  Even if mages go running through the streets, planting sigils everywhere, they can't cause a magical effect to be constantly on; they're effectively buttons that can be pressed, and they can only be pressed a limited number of times before the button-presser passes out.

With that out of the way, let's look at Iron Age Karha!

A Bird's Eye View

The building materials haven't changed.  The building shapes certainly have.

As we've mentioned before, the fact that the world of Istenaiti has 1/10 the gravity of Earth is a mixed bag.  For our purposes, the biggest drawback is that stone construction is normally sturdy in large part because of how heavy it is.  On Istenaiti, it is ten times lighter, and therefore ten times closer to being a giant sail than it would be on Earth.  Granted, the weather on Istenaiti doesn't tend to have major gusts, but it could have them, and when we left off, the buildings of Karha were about as big as they could safely get.  Any higher would see them topple during windstorms.

Over the past several centuries, the advancements made in construction would mostly go toward reinforcing buildings against wind shear.  Vertical weight isn't a major concern, so support structures like, say, trusses, would be reserved for the largest buildings.  Using joints and braces to more effectively turn stacked buildings into one giant, heavier surface would be common.  So would giving buildings wider "feet," in the form of buttresses.  Short arches would be used to attach floors to walls, allowing some of that stress to transfer horizontally.  Sharp exterior edges would give way to smoothly formed, rounded edges.  Since weight doesn't help, iron would be the support material of choice on the interior; bronze, which resists the ridiculously common wet better than iron would, would still be seen on the exterior.

A high-end option, literally, would just begin to make its appearance at the tail end of the Iron Age:  wooden housing.  It has even worse weight problems than stone construction does, and couldn't be used to make anything large at ground level, but its light weight actually makes it great for construction in the upper levels of the hyperforest.  Given the massive size of the trees, dozens of small houses could safely shelter from the winds on the road-sized branches of the middle layer, and careful construction could easily see more houses built all the way up into the crown, several hundred meters from the ground.  This previously hadn't been an option for the simple reason that so much wood wasn't available before.  Ironically, the trees were so large that only branches and loose wood could be collected before.  Even now that mages can use water jets to cut through the absolutely massive trunks, dropping a tree would generate a small-scale earthquake and, more devastating, a pressure shockwave that would extend for miles.  Even cutting larger branches would put everyone within a hundred meters or so of the tree at risk.  Harvesting a single tree would thus require a huge chunk of Karha's industry, and would likely take months (when we ran our calculations, we came up with 85 man-years per tree; that was at the extreme low end).

All this points to a simple fact:  as a matter of survival, clear-cutting trees in Karha's city limits simply isn't an option.  Managed forestry is in order.  Wood is now available, but it is the luxury option, rather than the standard.

A Home in Karha

Your typical Karhan at the end of the Iron Age is either a herdsman or a farmer.  Farming technology being what it is- enhanced by earth magic- fewer farmers are needed to produce enough food for everyone, but "fewer" still translates to "most."  Hunter-gatherers could still make something of a living, but they'll be wandering far enough afield that they probably wouldn't keep house in Karha proper.  A few animals would see heavy domestication, especially if they were animals that couldn't leap, since that means fences could keep them in place.  As on Earth, the animals would be chosen for docility and utility, so cows probably won't be available (hooves are a bad idea due to friction problems), but certainly something cow-like would.  The most likely candidate to replace horses would probably resemble a centipede, with a low-slung body and multiple legs that could grasp the ground firmly.  Other Earth-farm analogues would likely appear, but even if they superficially resembled the animals of Earth, they would uniformly have wider, stockier shapes, and fat levels would be higher.  After all, these animals can safely afford the extra weight, without having to use extra muscle.  Crops, surprisingly, would match up rather well with those that like fairly moist, uniformly mild weather on Earth.  They would simply be far larger, because again, they can afford to be.  Berries would grow on small trees rather than bushes; a blueberry would be about the size of a plum.  Fruit orchards would be cultivated up in the branches of the hyperforest, rather than on the ground, with fruit collected by large nets hung beneath.  You could reasonably beat someone to death with a carrot.  So on and so forth.

When they aren't tending plants, herd animals, or collecting ripened foodstuffs, your typical Karhan does similar things to what the people of Earth did from the start of the Bronze Age to the end of the Industrial Age; they would work at home to make or trade for daily necessities.  Home would almost certainly be one of the apartment rings that surround the many trees within Karha.  Pneumatic elevators would take them to their floor, one of about 15 to 20, and a short walk along the hall in the innermost perimeter of the ring would end at their front door.  Their apartment would be an open floor plan, with simple stone furnishings that look like they'd almost grown out of the floor.  A sigil by the door activates the overhead lighting for a set period of time, and food is made by activating the stove via a similar sigil, then cooking on the heated stovetop.  On cool days, the stove is kept on, and blanket-thick drapes are pulled across the windows.  On warm days, the air conditioning might be used to fill the room with a constant, pleasant breeze.  Those children not old enough to venture into the city or clever enough to warrant school will play here or in the halls.  Adults not in the fields will knit, sew, cook, or perhaps carve the various implements that make life easier.  At night, mattresses are unrolled, their thickness a sign of how rich the family is.  Shy parents might use drapes to give themselves a bedroom, but many won't bother (and a rare few may have a true room to themselves, if one of the adults can use earth magic).  Perhaps surprisingly for such a bare apartment, a hot bath is always an option, or even a shower should one be inclined.  Food isn't exciting, but it is plentiful, and our Karhan likely has time to look out over the city before heading to bed... which could be at sunrise, noon, sunset, or midnight, depending on which species said Karhan is.

This view only changes slightly if our Karhan is one of the growing middle class.  The interior is more intricately carved, there are more sigils, and the apartment is more comfortable, but it likely isn't any bigger, nor any less made of stone.  If our Karhan is doing well in their profession, we can expect to see signs of it in the form of wooden furniture or even wooden partitions within the apartment; ironically, this makes the apartments of the well-to-do feel smaller than those of the peasantry.

If our Karhan is truly wealthy, such as a councilor, we won't find them in the apartment rings at all.  A Llaikan Karhan will have a small villa on the ground, rounded with an open space in the middle, similar to the atriums in Roman villas, save that the whole of the villa is covered with a stout, sloped bronze roof; one can never be too careful of falling rollstones.  A Rontakowa will have one of the coveted treetop homes, the higher the better, made of real wood.  A Siculi will have a small fortress surrounded by traps, designed to be partially flooded during the multiple daily high tides.  For the last, the open nature of the design is less a construction requirement and more a testament to how fearlessly the Siculi confront the tentacled monsters of the beach; even at rest, they must demonstrate their worth.

Conclusion

As demonstrated in the concluding descriptions, our worldbuilding is now stout enough that we can make reasonable inferences about cultural trappings and even behavior casually.  This is a sign that our iceberg of information is doing its job!

Next week, we'll continue to add to that iceberg.  Since we've just applied magic to our technology, it's time to complete the loop by adding technology until we hit a new magical breakthrough.