Asbestos . . . is most commonly associated with the industrial revolution era of history . . . for most everyone is asbestos is firmly rooted in industrial era.
That's because everyone capable of having an opinion about this is from a firmly
post-industrial society. If you and I were to play a word-association game, "asbestos" would provoke responses like "old buildings", "insulation", "cancer", and "face mask". But get some well-educated people from the 12th or 13th century playing, and they'd be all "impervious to fire", "comes from below the earth", "magical", and "worn by a saint". You and I only think of it in modern context because that's when it became popular. I'm not saying you're wrong, because you're not--but there's a big difference between something
seeming modern and its actually
being modern.
Fantasy games don't include Asbestos unless they want to be tongue-in-cheek about their fire resistant armor . . . Its not part of any of the fantasy archetypes (unless you count parodies).
I'm not familiar with asbestos being used in ANY fantasy-type setting, actually, for any reason. Can you give some examples? Either way, as long as we keep the material in line with its actual, measured, physical characteristics (as opposed to something like, say, nether-cap wood), then we can say that Dwarf Fortress is at least ONE place where asbestos is given the treatment it deserves.
I would prefer if it was renamed something else (dwarf wool? Rock cloth?).
Now, here I
do disagree. We call adamantine (cotton) candy to avoid spoiling the newbies, which is well and good. We don't need them knowing that Wolverine's claws are down there, that should be a surprise--and indeed, tunneling through hundreds of vertical feet of otherwise-accurate rock and suddenly finding a spire of metallic diamonds
would be a surprise. But I feel that calling asbestos "chrysotile fiber" or whatever would be doing the players a disservice, because it would be failing to inform them of the material's useful insulating properties, place in real-world geology,
and that pesky little fact that working with it can slowly kill you.
It doesn't make sense that the Great Wall would be a thing [Marco Polo] would mention. . . . And they certainly wouldn't have made a big deal of it to a foreign guest . . . Plus, the vast bulk of what we call the Great Wall was built centuries later under the Ming Dynasty.
Yup. That's why I said it was
doubtful--there actually is a lot of evidence in his favor, which I should have mentioned in my earlier post, like how he quite accurately describes the route, and little details like the size of the Chinese paper money, and fruits & nuts that grow on Java. But then again, he consistently blows anything Chinese well out of proportion--claiming that Kublai Khan maintained a stable of 5,000 elephants in his personal menagerie, for example--and since he must have passed the Wall at
some point, you'd think he would have done the same thing there. But not a word.
And for clearly nonsensical things. You need to check if he claims he personally saw them, or was he told about them.
He wrote that all 3 Polos personally took part in a battle (as siege engineers, no less) to capture a Song Empire city, which we now know was taken by the Mongols two years
before the Polos even arrived in China. All in all, the book is a lot of surprisingly accurate firsthand evidence, mixed with a lot of absolute bullshit. A large part of the blame may be assigned to the book's editor/ghostwriter, a fellow named Rusticello, who had perpetrated similar literary frauds before. Will we ever know the truth about Marco Polo? Since our main source material is essentially the 13th-century version of the Weekly World News, probably not.
[EDIT:] I meant Mongols, not Ming. Sorry, brain fart. [/EDIT]
Author
Topic: Request for a new type (or types) of stone (Read 13322 times)