How common is wood in Duskwall?
Where would wood come from? The place doesn’t look big enough for radiant energy arboretums. Is it shipped in from some other city that has figured out a means of production? Are the deathlands full of 800-year-old trees just sitting there waiting for brave teams of lightning-warded lumberjacks?
Is wood a luxury item? Maybe this is the real reason why leviathan-hunting ships are made of metal. Has the classic ramshackle wooden hovel been replaced by a ramshackle corrugated steel hovel? Do crews of thieves hatch wild schemes to steal heirloom wood from the walls, floors, and ceilings of fancy estates?
With wood in scarce supply, have marmots retained the ability to chuck it? And in what quantities?
A wood chuck would chuck all the wood a wood chuck could chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood, based on current supply and market influx.
Had this question occurred to me, I would have said, obviously, that’s what the unification war with Skovland was about. Because they had all those lovely massive hardwood forests that grew around their balefire glades. And Doskvol wanted them. And is now merrily harvesting them.
Probably cheaper to get it from the Dagger Isles — all jungle and no Lightning Barriers. Akorosi wood is probably conspicuous consumption (“Hm? oh this cane? yes, four railjacks died bringing me the branch that made it. Not the best, but, well, good help is hard to find.”)
There needs to be a Settlers of Doskvol boardgame to answer this…
Mining for metal can’t be any less dangerous than cutting down trees in the Deadlands. I mean remember what mining was like back in the early 1800s (about the same level of tech) and then add that fact that you are digging down into the haunted Earth of the Shattered Isles! Come to think of it is rather be a lumberjack. At least, out in the open I’d have somewhere to run.
Colin Fahrion Maybe the earth’s fabric is more like flesh, on a mining scale. Supports had to be built in squares, to keep the shuddering earth from closing, and danger not just from “bad air” but occasionally a scream would build up and use your tunnel as a throat.
Tearing at the veins of the earth, indeed.
Subbitty sub subbed
Under the map for Barrowcleft (Barrow Bridge) : “Families of river-fishers work from ramshackle wooden huts…”
From the description for the Nightmarker : “Buildings: Open air wooden market stalls…”
I’m pretty sure I saw something about petrified wood from the Deadlands somewhere too, but I couldn’t find the quote.
So obviously there must be some wood coming from somewhere and it cannot all be so expensive considering the uses.
It is also possible that there are mushroom variants that can be cut and dried and used as cheap planking, and called “wood.”
Andrew Shields
: Oh ! that’s a marvellous idea, because you could make them grow underground and with little light !
The most prized wood comes from the Stygian Oak trees. Above ground, Stygian Oak trees are meager things, looking little more robust than a sickly shrub. Below ground, the roots grow to enormous size spreading wide and deep into the soil. So massive and thick are the roots that it blocks any chance for plants other than shallow root ground cover to grow anywhere in it’s vicinity.
Stygian Oak lumberjacks are usually called lumberminers as they must dig down underground to harvest the prized wood from the robust root structure. Peculiarly, the core roots of the Stygian Oak, which the lumberminers never sever, get thicker the further down they go. No lumberminer has ever found the bottom of a Stygian Oak core root — or at least none who have dug that deep have lived to tell about it.
Thi Fou the petrified trees are in Nightmarket, and also in the “risky” example of the Prowl action. The notion of “petrified trees from the Deathlands” is what got me started thinking about this.
Akoros is described as having forests… but forests of what?
Colin Fahrion Security is also a problem when lumbermining them. The roots whimper and twitch, so hardened extractionists get danger pay going down there; if one snaps mentally, then they’re strong, heavily armed, and near others who are hurting the tree and all the life it snared or made over the centuries.
Aside from that, adepts and whispers greatly prize the opportunity a Stygian Oak offers them. They douse a dug-out crater squirming with root fragments in a foul flammable concoction and set fire to it, then jump in the middle (when it is lit embers) and stand in the column of smoke. This is one of the safest ways to conduct divinations and interrogate the Ghost Field while connected across an impossible gulf of time and space through the smoldering roots. People may find the answers they seek, but they never come out of that smoke unchanged.
After processing, the Stygian Oak wood is famed for its ability to saturate with spirit energies if properly prepared, and interact with them if engraved with the right symbols.
Rumor suggests the Dimmer Sisters have a third floor seance chamber that is made from a cross-section of Stygian Oak, only lightly worked, still rough. There is only room for three in that chamber, and while it gives the answers they seek with eerie accuracy, those answers never please the askers.
This Stygian Oak lumbermining looks like a good work for the hardened teams of prisoners going out for resources 😀
Thi Fou Maybe there’s one under Ironhook that they’ve been excavating for centuries. Maybe the wood in the prison is from the tree that once stood there, and was named Ironhook by the locals.
Dravenshire & Co, one of the more unsavory lumbermining companies, once tried to use a team of hollows to dig out the Stygian Oak roots after there regular lumberminers went on strike. Let’s just say they never tried that again – hardened prisoners are a much safer bet. The entire region around that catastrophic Stygian Oak mining operation is considered highly dangerous due to the root entwined hollows wandering around the area. Hollows in nearby towns often wander off with strange purpose into the Deadlands in the direction of that single Stygian Oak tree.
Colin Fahrion Whether it’s fair or not, the Stygian Oak on the Fifth Ridge is called the Dravenshire Oak because, as the story goes, one of the hollows was filled with acorns and walked to that precise spot to lay down and let the roots burst out, seeding the tree.
Another version of the story says the hollow went to where the roots were finally ready to thrust a trunk and branches to the sky, and became the trunk and branches–because all Stygian Oaks break the surface by transforming meat to wood.
It’s just talk. But the Spirit Wardens have confiscated six corpses in the last month that had strange and complex acorn tattoos, and were tied in position upright with arms out-thrust. So, maybe SOMEONE out there believes the talk and wants to start a tree in Duskvol.
btw… gotta say Andrew Shields you’re one of the most fun people to improv story brainstorm spooky Blades in the Dark stuff with.
Thanks. It’s a great setting, and there are lots of delightful people in this community. I appreciate the opportunity we have to elaborate and expand each others’ ideas. =)
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