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The Arcanamach
Master of Realmslore
1842 Posts |
 Posted - 07 Aug 2013 : 21:11:28
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| What can I say besides WOW. Gray your work on the history of the creator races is amazing. |
I have a dream that one day, all game worlds will exist as one. |
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Gray Richardson
Master of Realmslore
USA
1291 Posts |
Posted - 08 Aug 2013 : 18:31:07
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Thanks! Since you've got me thinking about it, here's another tidbit of lore: The secret of Batrachi glassteel.
The primary building and craft material of the aquatic creator race was glass. Metal was not favored because it was hard to mine, refine, melt, and mold, and immersed in saltwater, all metals corrode with time. Metal weapons will not hold an edge in seawater. Glass was favored because the primary ingredient was their most abundant resource: sand.
Primitive octopoids discovered naturally occurring volcanic glass, and carved from it exquisite blades of black obsidian that were deathly sharp. They observed how volcanic heat and sometimes lightning would melt sand to form glass. In time they discovered ways to create glass artificially.
Initially, it was just the plain old brittle kind. Though they learned to sculpt it and tint it to make extraordinary works of art, silver it to make mirrors, cut it to make tiles, and crush it to make glazes that could be applied to tiles and surfaces. The aquatic creator race enjoyed color, and every surface of their architecture was adorned.
At the zenith of their art, octopoid alchemists discovered the secret of glassteel, a form of glass that exceeded the strength of metal. Though not ductile, glassteel can endure tremendous force before breaking. It is lighter than steel, and weapons made of it hold a very keen edge that never needs honing or sharpening.
Glassteel is made from alchemical processes that require baking in great heat, much higher than that used to create ordinary glass. Alchemists could use volcanic vents, or build special furnaces that floated on the surface, on rafts or pontoons. Sometimes they would build their furnaces on land, sandbars, the tips of mountains that thrust above the waves. Though land was scarce in Toril's Blue Age, there were a few spots of solid surface that would suffice.
Glassteel actually contains no steel. Some modern recipes may call for it, but that is either a red herring designed to protect the alchemist's true recipe, or an inaccurate guess. If such recipes produce anything, it will not be true Batrachi glassteel.
Glassteel is made from 20 parts sand (or quartz). 7 parts sassolite, a white mineral found near volcanic fumaroles and in evaporite deposits at the bottom of dry lake beds. 2 parts lime. 1 part corundum (a mineral often called ruby or sapphire depending on color). And lastly, one last part containing a mixture of alchemical salts, which may vary from alchemist to alchemist, but the composition of which they guard jealously. The ingredients are added and mixed according to a very precise process at extremely high temperatures. Then the glass is cooled and tempered by reheating and cooling it to specific temperatures for specific times, over and over again for several successive cycles.
The aquatic creator race, and their successors, the Batrachi, used interlocking blocks of such material in their grandest architecture. There are glassteel towers of Batrachi construction found in certain swamps of Faerûn to this day. They have stood for over 30,000 years—a testament to Batrachi craftsmanship in the art of glass. |
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The Arcanamach
Master of Realmslore
1842 Posts |
Posted - 08 Aug 2013 : 20:23:45
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| Very nice write-up (again!). One question though: Can you describe these floating furnaces in more detail? How do they get a furnace hot enough to create glassteel onto a raft/pontoon? |
I have a dream that one day, all game worlds will exist as one. |
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Gray Richardson
Master of Realmslore
USA
1291 Posts |
Posted - 08 Aug 2013 : 22:42:25
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The octopoids were very skilled with all types of ceramics. The glass furnaces were made from ceramic that isolated the heat in a chamber and insulated it from the outside. Such chambers could be cast as a single ceramic container or made as a box lined with ceramic tiles shaped to focus and reflect the heat inwards. There was insulation enough that the outside of the chamber was little hotter than the surrounding air.
Furnaces needed a fuel source. A variety of those were used, from natural to magical, including captured or summoned fire elementals. Additionally, an air intake, usually attached to a bellows of some kind, and a chimney or exhaust system was used to inject a fast airstream to stoke the fire intensely hot. Because heat rises, the furnaces had tall chimneys to carry the heat up and away from the infrastructure of the raft, pontoon, or boat structure.
Although, the octopoids didn't have wood, so these floating structures tended to be made from less flammable materials anyway. The pontoons could be made from bladder materials, or skin, a type of silk made from web-producing sea creatures. Even ceramic pontoons were common. Many of the raft structures were made with pumice.
For mass production of glass blocks, they often roped scores of such furnaces together, with the alchemists overseeing round-the-clock production with workers bringing materials up to the surface on a continuous basis.
Furnaces could be made larger to make mass batches of glassteel,which could be poured into special molds to form the interlocking blocks they used for construction. The blocks could then be tempered in separate tempering kilns designed for that purpose. The largest of the melting furnaces were about the size of a trireme. And that was about the upward limit of how large such furnaces could be made.
The Batrachi, though did not always employ the furnace method to make blocks for construction, but often used a seamless method developed by the octopoids sometime around the beginning of the Days of Thunder. It involved using magic and often fire or magma elementals to hold and heat the materials in situ which resulted in structural shells of such strength and integrity they could withstand the pummeling of the waves and currents without the blocks shifting over time. Such buildings were strong enough that many are still standing today some 30,000 years later.
I think the ones in the Tun marshes are of that variety, although there are many more examples found at the bottom of the Trackless Sea.
There is a spectacular octopoid city with many fine examples of intact octopoid architecture, great domed and bubble-like structures, and spiraling towers. The buildings are mostly a deep cobalt blue, with jewel toned accents and colorful mosaics. Those ruins are located not too far due west of the Isle of Moray in the Moonshaes. The ruins had been settled for a time by a colony of aquatic elves, until recently, when the colony was entirely killed off in a sahuagin attack. |
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Wooly Rupert
Master of Mischief
USA
36781 Posts |
Posted - 08 Aug 2013 : 23:48:01
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Friend Gray, this is indeed some good stuff!
What would you say would be the distinctive characteristics of octopoid structures (other than the building material)? As in, do they favor narrow openings, tall ceilings, funky triangular protrusions every 17.3 inches, etc?
And for humanoids, such as the aforementioned and now passed sea elves, how usable are these structures? Comfortable, awkward to enter, that sort of thing... I'm doubting that octopoids built their structures with demihuman comfort in mind. |
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The Sage
Procrastinator Most High
Australia
31701 Posts |
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Gray Richardson
Master of Realmslore
USA
1291 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2013 : 06:30:53
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Octopoid architecture is very distinctive in that it generally has no angles. It's all curves. They mostly look like mounds: round, oval, teardrop shaped, and sinusoidal. The domed structures though are very shallow, tending to be much wider than tall. Only rarely are they perfectly circular; they are usually narrower along one diameter than they are along the opposing axis. On the inside the ceilings generally resemble tapered barrel vaults.
Over the millennia, as sand or silt has washed over them, the less tall structures may have accreted a thick enough layer that they have come to look like sand dunes. Perhaps with the occasional tell-tale glint of colored glass flashing through in places where a bare spot catches the sun or a light source just right.
Taller structures tend to look like mounds piled upon mounds, resembling streamlined ziggurats, with an oval or teardrop cross section.
Their towers were usually paraboloid in shape, reminiscent of London's "Gherkin" building, though generally thinner and not at all constructed with anything like modern skyscraper techniques. Some towers had a teardrop cross section, suggestive of a plump airplane wing pointing vertically into the sky.
The airstreaming (or aquastreaming) was not merely aesthetic, but essential for supporting the infrastructure against pressure differences and powerful currents generated along the ocean floor. The interlocking glass blocks they used were ingeniously crafted to give and pivot at the joints just the slightest bit to avoid shattering when subjected to huge forces. In violent currents, the facades of octopoid buildings may be seen to ripple ever so slightly along the surface of the structure, almost like the scales of a fish.
Because they were made of glass — variously transparent, translucent, or opaque — octopoid buildings have no structural windows. Windows do not disrupt the shape of the surface, which is smooth at every point.
To distinguish "walls" from "windows", they merely use blocks that are either opaque, glazed or tiled along the surface of the structure where they desire not to see out (or for others to see in). It's often hard to spot the "windows", the transparent spots, among the often baroque ornament, glazework, and mosaics that adorn their buildings. But often huge sections are transparent, and the top points of domes typically have no ornament at all, creating the appearance of an oculus to let more natural light in from above. Octopoid windows tend more to open upwards to the light that filters down from the surface or to the luminescent light of creatures swimming through the waters above like twinkling stars.
A very distinctive feature of octopoid architecture is that their entrances always open upwards. Typically, what appears to be an alcove or niche in a wall will have a round porthole in the ceiling. The recess may extend all the way downwards to the floor or only halfway to about waist height.
Entering upwards and exiting downwards is deeply ingrained in the octopoid psyche. They always hesitate upon going through a doorway; their eyes will poke down and peer out of the opening, surveying the area cautiously before the rest of their body follows. The niche side always faces outwards from the building or the room. This gives the "upper ground" to the defender. The niche may have a transparent or half-silvered window to gaze out for surveillance purposes.
On the inside of the room is a ledge or corresponding niche with a porthole that opens downwards. The inner niche is usually set higher on the wall, and may have a ramp or a little bit of an upward sloping tunnel to reach it. Or the niche may be set in the wall about waist high, in which case the floors of the inner chambers may be offset (upwards) a few feet from the floor in the exterior hallway or outside of the building. Humanoids often mistake such features as garderobes—which they do resemble somewhat.
Typically the offset between the inside floor and the outside floor level is about half a story. Entering successive rooms that are offset in such a manner in a multi-level structure might be confusing if you were not aware of the fact. You could end up several stories higher or lower on a different level than where you started, all without having seen a staircase or ramp. In fact, octopoids never used stair cases. Their hallways could be vertical or sloping at steep angles. They were swimming beings and their architecture reflects their freedom of mobility along all 3 dimensions.
After the Ramenite metamorphosis, the Batrachi became ambulatory, vertebrate beings. Their surface architecture from that point forward began to reflect more humanoid considerations—with hallways, staircases, arched doorways, and all the usual conceits to gravity and feet. But as much of their cities and buildings were built underwater as above, and the underwater portions of their habitat preserved many of the distinctive features of their octopoid forebears.
There were a few unique adaptations to their hopping ability. They loved terraces and tiered balconies that one could hop between. In lieu of stairs, they often had successively elevated platforms offset by about 4 feet, that they could easily hop to ascend. These look somewhat like staircases made for a gargantuan-sized creature. Often the platforms were cantilevered on supports out from the wall of the building or tower, looking like an array of leaves or lily pads jutting out and spiraling around the circumference of the tower or building.
Batrachi had a powerful need for access to copious water, and so they engineered extensive and massive water infrastructures. Aqueducts to transport water vast distances. Dams to flood valleys and fields. Canals for travel (they favored canals over roads), and to link rivers, lakes and seas. Levees, dikes and seawalls to channel rivers and harness the tides. Watermills for milling grain, wood, textiles, etc. Though not many of those structures have survived to the current day. Still, scant traces and ruins of such grand architecture can be found in a few places around Faerûn, and make for exciting places to explore. |
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Markustay
Realms Explorer extraordinaire
USA
15724 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2013 : 12:50:45
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So where do squidbillies come from? 
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"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me" --- Dudley Field Malone
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The Arcanamach
Master of Realmslore
1842 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2013 : 23:18:58
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| Well, when two squidbillies fall in love, inevitably, they get drunk and/or stoned and... |
I have a dream that one day, all game worlds will exist as one. |
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Days of Thunder campaigning
