Worldbuilding Wednesdays: No Renaissance for the Wicked

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 another technological leap forward.  For reasons, this leap is much shorter than the last one.

What We Have So Far

The collective peoples of Istenaiti are, as of right now, sitting at the tail end of the Iron Age.  Several technologies are considerably more advanced than that, while a few are further behind.  Karha, the City by The Hill, is a massive, walled city of glazed tile, bronze accents, and stone construction.  Furry Rontakowa, scaly Siculi, and human-like Llaikan all cooperate to mostly mutual benefit, and most violence is oriented toward the apex predators, monsters, and dungeons that also populate Istenaiti.

The next set of technological advances might seem small in light of how far we've come so far, but what we're about to hit was less transformative due to the technological advances involved than due to the social reconstruction that occurred as a result.  What we're talking about is the Renaissance Era.  The name is a little Eurocentric, but the changes involved aren't: regardless of location, when civilizations reached this point, growing education allowed for artistic expression on a scale unseen previously.  Rather than cities and cultures working together to craft a single wonder, a masterpiece could be crafted by a single person that would stand the test of time just as proudly.

More importantly for our purposes, this time period is transitional; it covers all the advances from iron to the rudiments of machinery.  Many of those advances are incremental, rather than innovative, and the result for our civilization is a bunch of improvements instead of opening up new areas of thought.  We'll show you what we mean by covering the biggest singular improvement:  metallurgy.

Stainless or Otherwise

On Earth, the Iron Age heavily featured one specific iron alloy: steel.  Stronger, more durable, and (once you know how to make it) significantly cheaper than bronze, the discovery of steel production was a game changer, and it happened around the same time as the development of iron working, since the materials used to heat the iron often turned it into steel.  On Istenaiti, the materials normally used to heat iron are:

1. Magic

Since magic doesn't inherently add carbon to iron, the smiths of Istenaiti don't have the opportunity to accidentally discover steel.  They instead have to wait until intentionally discovering steel is an option.  This happens when Istenaiti's budding scientists begin investigating materials science, which in turn only becomes possible when education develops to the point that "proto-scientist" is a viable career path.

Such as, say, now-ish.

The present level of technology, we've already established, is advanced enough that the science of linguistics can be developed.  That in turn is what led to the explosive development of magic, which has now looped around to create the Istenaiti version of the Renaissance.  We can finally see individuals experimenting with earth magic and trying to figure out how to summon or manipulate individual elements, as well as others seeing what happens to various rocks and ingots when they're melted.  In this environment, discovering that mixing certain materials into molten iron creates steel is less an accident and more an inevitability.

Just as with Earth, figuring out how to make steel will rapidly lead to it being used for most of the things bronze was used for.  It will also quickly lead to other experiments to see if more super-metals can be produced.  This won't be as wild an advancement as it was on Earth, since large-scale warfare was the primary driver of metallurgy, and that is missing on our world.  Still, construction is going to undergo a drastic change, especially since there's a massive economy of scale going on; roughly similar amounts of effort will create a single sword or a single I-beam.  This may well lead to the first true skyscrapers before the advent of the Industrial Age.

Speaking of swords, the development of steel leads to the last advancements in military technology before gunpowder.  On Earth, the arms race between cheap, effective weapons and expensive but strong armor culminated in knights, cavalry that were so heavily armored that they were more likely to die from being knocked off their horse than by a weapon attack.  On Istenaiti, full coverage is both expensive and not terribly helpful, given that adventurers must be lightly armored to succeed.  Still, steel shields will prove useful, and heavily armored sections that don't need to move (such as greaves and bracers) will benefit from steel.  Weapons will definitely make the transition to steel as well; though bronze and iron are more than enough to kill most creatures, steel holds an edge for much longer.

Something we may not see, at least in its original form, is the crossbow.  Mechanical assistance for launching arrows isn't nearly as necessary on Istenaiti as on Earth, and even if it were, fire magic (for motion) or air magic (to reduce air resistance) would be more helpful.  Still, something that looked superficially like a crossbow but with etched fire and air sigils might make an appearance, especially if the resulting weapon took up less space than a conventional bow.

Culturally Sound

Adding steel support to buildings gives the architects of Istenaiti room to be truly expressive with their buildings.  We were already at the point where 15-to-20-story buildings were possible, if constructed carefully; now, we can remove "if constructed carefully."  Steel support beams sunk into the bedrock will keep buildings standing, even if they aren't ideally crafted to shed wind.  Given that carving is much easier with earth magic than with a chisel and hammer, buildings will rapidly become more ornate.

Buildings with artistic sensibilities will lead to another, often overlooked advancement: acoustics.  Discovering that sound can be channeled and deflected by changing the shape of an internal space will lead to the secondary discovery that sound can be similarly affected artistically with air magic.  It will also lead to the discovery that the same thing can be done at a much smaller scale, and the basic form of many instruments will be developed, especially those that rely on reverberating internal chambers.

Again, we can look at Earth's development to get an idea of what this means.  Before the advent of acoustics, the principal types of instruments were the drum, the flute, the harp, and the horn.  Afterward, we have the violin family, guitars, and pianos, as well as more advanced versions of the others.  As complex metallic constructions became possible thanks to metallurgy, brass instruments were also developed.  Effectively, every major development in musical instruments between the Bronze Age and the advent of electronic instruments occurred during the Renaissance.

Well, not every advancement.  But enough that we can pretend it's true.

The High Seas

Metallurgy leads to magnetism.  Magnetism leads to development of the compass.  The compass allows for the first rudimentary travel beyond sight of the shore.  And, on Istenaiti at least, being able to travel beyond the shore means that it is finally possible to sail.

As a bit of a reminder, Istenaiti has two moons and one moon-sized light, Lumera.  Each has a different orbital period, but all of them are less than a month in length.  Combined with lower gravity on Istenaiti itself, this leads to a tidal cycle best described as "utter chaos," with the average tide change occurring every few hours and varying by more than twice as much as the average tides of Earth.

As a further reminder, because of friction and gravity, the largest, fastest predators of Istenaiti are the creatures that live in this chaotic intertidal zone, also known as "the space any potential sailor would have to traverse to get to a boat."  Up until this point, venturing into the water would be madness akin to possessing a death wish, as all the krakens and sea dragons of our world would attack you before you left the shore.

Steel makes it possible to cheaply build hulls that could withstand the various coastal monsters.  A compass makes it possible to take those hulls out of reach of both the coastal monsters and the equally devastating tides.  As on Earth, the Renaissance becomes the era of exploration, though for slightly different reasons, and the ships doing the exploration will more closely resemble World War-era military vessels with large sails.

What won't happen yet is the use of ships for large-scale trade.  Loading and unloading a ship is almost as dangerous as getting it to and from shore.  That will remain true until innovations such as articulated gangways are developed, which on Earth occurred during the Industrial Age.

Conclusion

Once steel becomes commonplace, a number of other inventions become possible.  The biggest that we aren't discussing is printing, because it is going to lead to the first real conflict in thousands of years.  We'll cover the consequences of the printing press next week.