Kevin's Watch

Where are the carts, wagons, chariots etc.? Did the natives of the Land never envision the wheel?

Stone knives, stone ships, sharpened wooden daggers...is metal so very rare? The ebony sword of the Warmark, was it mahogany??

Cattle, pigs, chickens...LFB says Triock is a sheppard, but doesn't identify what that animal is. No burgers, bacon or Popeyes?? "Bloody hell, we eating mutton chops again??"

Mirrors. Covenant asked for a mirror, a knife and some water before finding the 7th Ward, all he got was the knife and water..Does SRD hate mirrors? Did he have a bad experience with one and now punishes the characters by making them either extremely rare or outright dangerous??

Have a nice day!

If you ever read Mordant's Need you'll see that SRD does indeed have a fascination with mirrors...

Such details are not only unnecessary to the story being told, they would be counterproductive by virtue of excessive fixation on such things. As an example, who cares about how exactly people "go to the bathroom" in the Land? Lastly, too much detail can clutter up & slow down a book very quickly...

spoonchicken wrote:Such details are not only unnecessary to the story being told, they would be counterproductive by virtue of excessive fixation on such things. As an example, who cares about how exactly people "go to the bathroom" in the Land? Lastly, too much detail can clutter up & slow down a book very quickly...

I agree with that, but I am talking of items that would change the story somewhat, not clutter it. For example, wagons would have been much better for Troy to have used to carry tired and wounded or even to just get supplies to Doom's Retreat to carry out his original plan, that he did not mention this to the Lords strikes me as pure stupidity. What warlord would not utilize every such advantage in mobility is simply unfathomable to me.

As for the mirror, I also have read Mordent's Need and just wondered if SRD's failure to have such items in the Land was purposeful.

The metal is a bit harder ( ) to understand, obviously some metals exist but they seem to be rare to use and mostly done with the purpose of channeling Lore (heels of the SoL, Iron rods of the Loremasters, etc). Even the pure gold used by KotS was for absorting TC's attack and increasing it's intensity. That being the case, perhaps Troy's ebony sword was magical in nature as well, if not being of wood.

Thoughts?

spoonchicken wrote:Such details are not only unnecessary to the story being told, they would be counterproductive by virtue of excessive fixation on such things. As an example, who cares about how exactly people "go to the bathroom" in the Land? Lastly, too much detail can clutter up & slow down a book very quickly...

It might make things more difficult for SRD...with Cov takin' a White Gold Leek here and there...who knows what might happen...lightning again, fire lions...

There's obviously some use of metal, even ordinary uses [men with axes, for example] but it seems perfectly reasonable that metal usage is limited given the nature of the people of the Land: consider the extensive and necessary destruction that large scale metal production requires...and notice that the people of Braithairrealm (sp?) use quite a lot of metal.
For Hile Troy to use wagons in any meaningful way, he would have had to build an entire infrastructure to produce them.

Because of the oath of peace, and the reverance towards all growing things of the Land, it seems the people of the Land wouldn't mine for iron ore or precious metals. Forging iron in furnaces would need a lot of trees or something like coal. Perhaps the metal-shod staffs of the Lord's was made with meteorite iron. Like orcrest, and Lena's surupamearl-work , it had to be found in it's natural state.
In the third paragraph of the chapter Variol-son:

...the wind blew across the foothills of the plateau, blinding all the windows of the keep under deep inches of frost and immobilizing the lake with ice...

but I'm sure there isn't glass in the windows even though it might sound like it.

edit: as an afterthought, if Trell and Lena had a special talent to mold and shape stone, is it possible others had this talent as well. If they could sculpture stone with earthpower is it reasonable to assume that amythest might exist in the Land. This would add a considerable amount of sparkle to the Hall of Gifts, don't you think!

...kind of makes it a bit silly though to not have Revelstone react to the cold - glass, wood...something to cover the openings in the building against the snow...

I agree with Krazy Kat that it is primarily the Oath of Peace that keeps the Land free of such things as the wheel, and makes steel such a rare commodity. Anything formed of wood requires the lore of the Lillianrill, and masters of such lore are still rare in the Land. (at least, that's my understanding.)

jacob Raver, sinTempter wrote:...kind of makes it a bit silly though to not have Revelstone react to the cold - glass, wood...something to cover the openings in the building against the snow...

They had tapestries they could use for that, and I would assume curtains too.

How did they weave those tapestries without wood, err, wood?

The windows in Revelstone may not have needed to be covered during the winter. In past times the people of the Land wouldn't have had to put up with the coruption of the Law of Nature and Foul's Winter.

But I still like to think that High Lord Kevin and the Giants had found a way to make glass - or better still, a way to melt amethyst to make a transparent stone that would be a thousand times more durable that glass. And if so, maybe the artists of the Land could have added depictions within the pane, like the tapestry the Legend of Berek Halfhand. Ok, maybe I'm going a bit too far!

Actually, the Giants would have found tons of iron and precious metals when they were making Revelstone, and Coercri, I'm sure!

You also run into questions like, if there wasn't much metal, did the Warward use stone then for their weapons?

Triock had a stone knife that Covenant used to shave himself with. Maybe some of the soldiers that grew up in the Stonedowns had stone swords. Maybe they also had stone bows and arrows

I've always puzzled over the metal sword thing. When the company of Prothal went into Morrinmoss all the soldiers were told to keep their swords from making a clangong noise, so as not to upset the Forestal.
Where would they get metal from? The only other time I remember metal being mentioned (apart from the heels of the Staff of Law) was when the Ur-Viles used an iron plate to attack Soaring Woodhelvin.
I dunno jRsT. Maybe it's one of those things that isn't supposed to make any sense - like a red herring, or simething!

I think it's just a small slip by SRD...something he didn't think would need explaining...and maybe it doesn't, I dunno.

I could have sworn that shutters on the windows in Revelstone were mentioned (though it might have been the 2nd or Final chrons). That would take care of the exposure during Winter.

Oh, yeah, they were. But that wouldn't really handle snow (was there snow near Revelstone?).

Darkdenubis wrote:
Cattle, pigs, chickens...LFB says Triock is a sheppard, but doesn't identify what that animal is. No burgers, bacon or Popeyes?? "Bloody hell, we eating mutton chops again??"

I believe that Triock is a cattleherder...so there are cows in the Land. Also, there were several references to salted beef as well.

There are some kind of carts around, I remember the Waynhim attacking Satanfist's food supply carts during the siege of Revelstone.

amanibhavam wrote:There are some kind of carts around, I remember the Waynhim attacking Satanfist's food supply carts during the siege of Revelstone.

I just got done reading that chapter last night. I believe that the Waynhim attacked troughs containing offal and gore, the diet of Satansfist's army.