New Card Game: Broke Hobo

Merry Christmas, everyone! 

BROKE HOBO:

Inspired by wizard and poker, this is a fast and light game for the penniless peasant.

Broke Hobo

Game Type: Trick-Taking, Deduction, Bluffing

Deck: 1 pack, French suits, with jokers.

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Skills: Addition, pattern recognition, estimation, communication

RULES:

The first player shuffles the deck and deals out 5 cards to each player, then sets the deck aside.

Starting with the dealer, each player plays one card to the table, to form a trick. The card a player plays is called their bid. Bids can be any card, they do not need to follow suit or sequence.

Once all players have bid, the dealer asks if anyone wants to change their bid. This cycle goes until everyone is satisfied. Players then reveal their hands.

Whoever has the highest scoring hand taks the trick. If the hand is tied, nobody wins the trick, and the hand is redealt.

The game is played over a number of hands equal to the number of players +3, with dealership being passed to the left at the end of each hand. The dealer should at least quickly shuffle the deck before each deal.

The player with the highest scoring card pile at the end of the last hand wins the game. If the game is tied, the winner between the tied players is whoever won the most cards.

SCORING:

The same scoring system is used for both the value of a hand, and the value of the points pile at the end of the game.

Cards are each worth their normal rank value. (Jacks=11, Queens=12, Kings=13)

Jokers have a value of 0, but can still score bonus points.

You score 5 bonus points for each additional card in a run. (2 in a row is 5 points, 3 in a row is 10 points, 4 in a row is 15 points, etc.)

You score 10 bonus points for each additional card of equal rank, called a meld. (2 of a kind is 10 points, 3 of a kind is 20 points, and 4 of a kind is 30 points.)

A single card can not count for both a run and a meld at the same time. Should this occur, it counts for the meld only. Likewise, a single card cannot be part of multiple runs or multiple melds. (For example, given a run of 1, 2, and 3, you can not treat 1-2 as a run and 2-3 as a separate run, because that would mean the 2 is in multiple runs.)

STRATEGY:

First off, in general, because you are forced to bid 1 card each hand, the obvious goal is to bid your lowest value card in an attempt to maximize each hand score and win as many tricks as possible. However, winning tricks alone is not necessarily going to win you the game. A player with fewer tricks that score higher values and bonus points is more likely to win than someone with a disorganized pile of low-value cards with no runs or melds.

Players must have their winnings revealed for all to see, so you can track what cards have already been removed from the deck. (For example: If you see 2 kings on the table, and you have 2 kings in your hand, you can be pretty confident that you have the highest hand.)

You can prevent an opponent from getting bonus points in the end game by avoiding bids that, if won by an opponent, would form runs or melds for them. So maybe you bid a trey instead of an ace because two players have aces already; if you win the meld, you get 2 points more.

If you can estimate that you are more likely to win a hand, you can also take a risk by intentionally bidding cards you want to win from your own hand. The farther into the game you get, the easier it is to predict your odds of winning a hand, based on what has been won, and therefore can not be in your opponents hands.

Finally, because nobody knows what you have in your hand, you can manipulate the others at the table. By bidding higher than anticipated, you can give the impression that you have a higher hand than you do, possibly invoking others to bid defensively, rather than taking risks themselves. You can also manipulate your opponents through deceptive body language. Aside from the scoring system, bidding uses all the same techniques as betting in poker.

While the game is highly random and no player is ever guaranteed a success in any hand, knowing how to mitigate that chaos over multiple hands makes all the difference. Knowing when to take a risk and when to play it tight is key to success.

The Four Cartomantic Traditions

As a game designer, I often find myself spending a lot of time studying the history behind my chosen medium of expression. As anyone who studies history can tell you, when you look into history, you never know where your research will take you. For me, for some reson, I keep winding up landing in the occult. Whether it's researching the historical reality of alchemy as christian taoism, or researching what a "spell" actually was before fiction authors needed a macguffin- or studying antique divination techniques -I always seem to keep coming back to the more effeminate arts of implication and emotion.

Divination is particularly fun, because behind all the ghost story mumbo-jumbo, what you essentially have is a primitive form of story-telling game! Cartomancy is my favorite. Sure, I've done card readings before, but do you know what's far more exciting? Just making up a whole work of fiction using nothing more than a pack of cards. You never really know what's going to happen next, and when inspiration strikes, it's like uncovering a hidden subplot in your favorite TV show!

I'll eventually write a detailed article about the history of cards and how to use a pack of cards as a writing prompt. For now though, I'm just going to share something I've noticed about cartomancy that nobody really seems to talk about within divination communities:

1. Cartomancy is a purely Western European phenomenon. Many cultures had playing cards before tarot ever appeared, and many other cultures inherited them through trade later, but no new cartomantic movements have ever developed outside of the Western European sphere of influence.
2. Furthermore, within Western Europe, there are essentially 3 major traditions of cartomancy. One in the South, one in the Northwest, and one in the Northeast.
3. There is a 4th modern movement, but I think we can safely dismiss that as simple commercialization and commodification that goes hand-in-hand with mass industry.

Itallian

Tarot, the most recognizable of the 3, represents the Italian tradition. The tarot deck is the closest modern descendent of ancient Italian suited playing cards, which inspired the French-derived suits a century later through trade. Tarot retains a suit of dedicated Trump cards, an innovation unique in the history of card game design, not present in any of the preceding or following designs.

Italians and other latinate cultures still use tarot cards as just normal cards. They can play any game for the French suited cards by simply removing the trumps and subbing our suits for their tarot equivalent. While there are French tarot cards, French suited packs with trumps, these are rare at best.

The strong symbolism of the tarot deck made it ideal for early cartomantic practices, which most likely originated in India and were spread indirectly to Italy with their cards the century before. This may have been in conjunction with the exodus of the Romani, but it seems to have actually began well before that. One thing is certain: tarot cards are not Egyptian in the slightest, and never were. Card history has a clearly documented lineage in which all card game systems are ultimately descended from ancient Chinese gambling games where early paper bills were used as the game pieces. Because Tarot was one of the earliest traditions to gain significant reputation among noble houses and the peasantry alike, it has also been the most enduring.

Tarot treats the pack as a highly abstract and symbolic form of reading, dealing with potentials, feelings, and ideas more than physical reality or events. It is likely that earlier cartomancy was originally an expression of spiritual beliefs that were either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented to have oracular capacity, and that this attitude ultimately spawned cartomancy. Remember, this was at a time where "magic" was just the word for an evil "miracle". People believed angels were ever-present, that god was actively involved in everyone's personal lives, and that the heavens were constantly trying to communicate with us in a direct and literal way.

The big innovations in tarot came when diviners (Lenormand, Etteilla, Crowley, etc.) decided to have dedicated oracle cards made from the tarot pack, resulting in the rider-waite-smith pack. With all cards nolonger reversible as though they were face cards, it then became possible to create secondary meanings for cards when they appear in the reverse, or "prone" position after using an inverting shuffle, such as a riffle. While this is unique to tarot, it is not universal, and there is much less consensus on reversed card meanings. Modern practice also tends to make use of tarot as a primarily reflective, introspective, or meditative practice of self-exploration, rather than pure divination.

French

The French tradition uses the nameless pack, sometimes referred to as the French or German suits. The German suits are actually an artistic misunderstanding of the original French suits. (Or maybe it was the other way around. It all happened very quickly, and not enough records were kept. However, because the French suits retain some semblance of the Italian names, it is more likely that they came first)

Some people recognize the English naming of the French suits as its own pack, despite simply being a mispronounciation of the original French words, (Spade=Espada) or an anglicization thereof (Club=Baton). The French, English, and German naming and art schemes are all part of the French tradition of cartomancy.

The original French pack came into existence as an attempt to make new cards instead of importing them. The more northern countries had a larger population of poor people with expendable income however, so it was rational to try and make a pack that was affordable to the market. This was primarily accomplished by stripping the art down to icons that were very nearly monocolor dots; pips; though it was also achieved by reducing the number of cards printed, often starting with the elimination of the trumps suit, and following with some portion of the pips or faces. There were packs published with as few as 20 cards. As a consequence, people at home using these partial decks made up games that fit them, which is the cause for the glut of old card games in these packs which require players to remove some portion of the deck. After decades of variation, the 52 card pack became standard as a way of being able to play most of the contemporary games people talked about in these countries.

The French tradition of cartomancy was born directly out of the Italian tradition, hence many of the similar readings for equivalent cards, and common card spreads and reading conventions between them. However, the French tradition tends to focus primarily on affirmations; yes/no readings, with a specific interest in the material of reality, especially regarding romance from the perspective of a woman of the time.

German

The German tradition is the least known and least recognizable. The decks used in the German school are not used to play any modern games, and so are mostly unknown to the general public. The German school arose in the 19th century, beginning somewhere near the end of the 18th century in France. Packs of cards began to be developed specifically for the purposes of divination, as there was a growing interest in the subject in the region. While some of these "gypsy" packs were indeed designed and used to play certain types of games, very few of these are known today, and none are even widely played.

By the 1830s, there was a significant increase in the number and variety of these card packs. However, because they had to compete with an existing card industry, gambling industry, and gaming culture, their popularity was limited. Additionally, by this time, divination was beginning to be painted in a satanic light... and the packs themselves were highly variable from one brand to another making it hard to make any stable games that could be played from one place to another by memory without bringing a specific pack with you. In an attempt to improve the market, many packs were printed with card names in multiple languages. Despite all of this, they did flourish in their target demographic: diviners.

Because many diviners of the day exaggerated their exoticism to seem mysterious and supernatural, and many were also travelling attractions, they were later on recognized as a group as "gypsy" cards, or even more generically as fortune telling cards. While the majority of the production was in France, the majority of these cards actually were marketed and sold in Germany, with the German diviners developing their own unique reading method from scratch. Here we can see the beginning of a cynical sort of commercialism, hell-bent on taking advantage of the spiritual and uneducated.

Because the objective was symbolism, even the most barren of gypsy cards have well defined artworks. However, they still needed to be affordable, so they were often small, with the majority centering on a 32-36 card range, with the typical loss of the trumps and 2-5 or 6-9 seen in many of the old regional French packs.

This limited range of symbols to pull from prompted diviners to invent ways of creating more depth, specifity, and meaning. Like their counterparts in other places, they did this by drawing more cards. However, unlike the Italians and French, they created a whole new system of cross-referenced meanings derived from card pairs. Like the French, they decided to focus on literal, material, physical readings, but they focused on the general, over-all picture like with tarot.

Because there is little precedent for single-card readings in these packs, there was never much incentive to develop inverted card meanings as occurred in tarot.

Over time, a pattern developed in this tradition, where certain brands would name their pack after a famous fortune teller- whether that person ever actually used their cards or not- to increase sales. As a result, several of the German tradition persist today, complete with incompatibility. The earliest are the Sybille decks, of which there were always many variations. Following are the less-known hegenauer, beidermeier, kipper, and zigeuner packs. Finally, the most famed set, the lenormand pack, named after mademoiselle lenormand, supposed fortune teller to Napoleon.

Given the time period, it is actually likely that she was at least aware of the German decks and their reading methods, but since her nepphew destroyed all of her stuff after her death, we'll never know! In fact, aside from word-of-mouth, we basically know next to nothing about her.

(From eye witness descriptions, it sounds as though she did a combined reading using multiple types of decks. The querent would pose their question, and she would then decide the most appropriate spread from each deck. The querent would then be told to draw the appropriate number of cards from each pack for the individual spreads, and Mlle. Lenormand would lay them out all in order to obfuscate the actual spreads in use.)

The most famous model is the petit lenormand, which is a rebranded version of a game-deck in the German tradition called The Game of Hope. (Think of it as monopoly crossed with snakes and ladders with a randomized board.)

Oracle Cards

And, of course, we have the modern tradition of oracle cards. Unlike the other three traditions, which evolved out of using a toy to predict the future, no oracle cards can be used to play any sort of game whatsoever. Oracle cards are designed exclusively for fortune telling purposes. The vast majority of oracle cards do not have any foundation in past traditions, they are a wholly unique construct in their own right. Most oracle card packs are nothing more than modern art packs with generic new age horse crap attached to them. Overall, the entire oracle card tradition is nothing more than the extreme commercialist/materialist nature of modern society colliding with the idea of cartomancy as a sellable product.

Terminologically, many cartomancers who study beyond a single pack will refer to unique decks as their own fortune telling "system", though this is a misnomer. The system is the methodology of extracting information from the cards. Technically, it is absolutely possible to use the system of one tradition with a pack from another- it would just require a lot of work to get started. For example, to use a lenormand pack in a tarot spread, you would need to research the original single-card meanings, and then reinterpret those meanings into the abstract. To use tarot cards for a German tradition reading, you would need to invent paired meanings for every possible combination of cards in the tarot pack; an onerous task indeed.

That said, there is something of value in the cards themselves which lend them inherently to the methods in which they are used. Simply because a system is theoretically interchangeable with any medium, doesn't mean every combination will be as effective. If one follows the original spiritual foundations of cartomancy- that the heavens communicate directly to all of us in literal ways by arbitrarily manipulating the incidental arrangement of materials- we can see that cartomancy is, at its roots, a form of indirect necromancy. Unlike traditional necromancy, In which the diviner is a vessel-like medium for a channeled spirit, cartomancers instead consult the spirits on their own terms, with the card pack acting as a surrogate host, or medium of possession.

Doesn't this just say it all though? Two 19th century white girls asking a brown girl to use magic to tell them who they'll marry.

Metal

Hi, I'm an Iron Worker!

OK. So, most of anyone who knows me probably knows that I work in a steel mill, and that my job is some sort of fancy inspection thing where I give ultrasounds to pipe. That's not the whole story, that's not even a fraction of it, but I've learned that the only people who will ever understand what it really is, are other people who do the job. Outside of my coworker peers, I am alone in this experience. And that makes me sad, not out of loneliness, but because experiencing the triumph of the modern manufacturing process is something I believe everyone should have in their lives- especially regarding pipe in this age. Today, I'm going to talk to you about my area of expertise:

Steel.

I'm not a metallurgist, welder, or smith, but I work with their products. I know how the material works, and I know how their processes work, even if I haven't got the practiced hand or memorized knowledge to replicate it myself. You've got to be humble when you tell a welder of 30+ years that he botched it.

Why are we talking about this in a game design blog?

Let me answer that question, by asking you what you think of when someone mentions "crafting" in an RPG. Most people immediately think of a blacksmith. (Some people jump to a carpenter, alchemist, or mechanic first, but the blacksmith isn't far behind) I think this is because they often assume "crafting" means "shortcut to fancier combat gear".

The folly of crafting systems.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate crafting systems in RPGs? I haven't written a detailed blog about this? Wow. I think about this like once a month. OK. Here goes. The main problems with crafting rules in an RPG are as follows:

• RPGs are typically built to focus on some sort of adventurous narrative experience. Crafting is the opposite of that. Being a skilled craftsman demands decades of practice, study, training, and research. In other words, while an adventurer runs out on a whim to chase adventure, the craftsman stays home to make yet another slightly better quality version of the same thing he's been making in the same shop for 20 years. That's pretty hard to reconcile with the normal flow of play.
• Crafting is time consuming, tedious, and boring. For example, I am a trained artist, specializing in dry media and drawing techniques, especially graphite, metal point, and ink. I love art and I love my artwork. But I hate drawing, in the same way that I hate mowing the lawn or washing dishes. It's a pain in the ass, but the results are worth the effort. Basically, there is nothing fun about the process of making something- it is the opposite of fun.
• Crafting is almost never focused on as a primary function of play. It is almost always an after-thought brought on by simulationist tendencies in the dev team. Eventually, someone goes "Wait, if the players can be blacksmiths, shouldn't they be able to make swords?" the answer to this should (almost) always be "Only if the game is actually about artisanal weapon smithing". (That actually sounds like a really cool premise for a non-traditional RPG...)
• Crafting is not game-balanced. I'm going to put it plainly: In real life, a craftsman with good, experienced hands and a mind for business, can put almost no material or time investment into their work, and sell the product for a fortune. For evidence, please read about Yves Klein. The man made a fortune painting sheets of blue. His most famous of those bland blue squares is worth 760,000 - 1,200,000 USD. It's just a sheet of blue canvas. So, given that product value is not equivalent to investment, and not all trades are equal, how do you balance that in game terms? These days, pussies players demand fairness balance in the form of arbitrarily stratified power advancement. Character wealth typically plays a role in that. You realistically should can't have a shortcut to golden glory in the form of a single character option, or people will call it cheating imbalanced.
• Real life craftsmanship is actually pretty hard. Naturally existing materials don't normally want to become chairs, or candelabras, or dildos. (You know, what with all that momentum, conservation of mass and energy, thermodynamics, & etc.) You have to force those materials to your will. Most trades demand more than knowledge, they demand a certain personality type. Who you are needs to mesh with the nature of the material and work. If it's a bad fit, you'll never be especially great at it. Unfortunately, things that are both difficult and subtle like this don't translate well to exciting play at the game table. Because it isn't fun.

Oh yeah, party central, right here.
Grab a hammer, let's pour our souls out into a piece of the Earth so a horse can walk in comfort.

So, given that crafting is boring , excessively difficult, and totally unfair, how can we represent this concept in play? Up until 2014, I said "You don't, because it's a stupid little niche thing that only some players care about anyways." but then 5th edition D&D came out, and I now have a new answer: "You don't, unless you plan to rip off D&D as shamelessly as possible." So, what did D&D 5e do? Basically, they codified bluebooking without calling it that. Instead, they called it what bluebooking actually is: downtime.

Bluebooking is the practice of playing a group game solo while you are away from the table and/or while your character isn't with the group. Basically, the player makes a "bluebook" which they share with the DM, and is available to the table to read if they like. The player writes what they want their character to be doing during their off-stage time, or between sessions, and the DM responds by writing the results of that activity between sessions. It's an obscure practice used mostly by OSR grognards and roleplay elitists. (Interesting that two unmixable fandoms both invented the same technique simultaneously. I guess outrageous pretension just tends to create thematic trends.)

5e codified this concept in their downtime mechanic. The DM awards player characters with "days" of downtime as if it were a currency. (When I say currency, I mean the RPG theory term, where HP and XP are types of currency as well.) Between sessions, players can "spend" days on pre-structured downtime activities, which produce various results based on how many days you spend on them. When you spend a day, you choose a quality of lifestyle that you'd like your character to live in during that time, which the DM is supposed to use to figure out what societal strata you fit in with, and you have to pay lifestyle expenses (actual game-coin) for each day spent.

This system is brilliant because it does the impossible: It allows gameplay to represent crafting without playing through craftsmanship. It removes the whole process from play entirely, but still represents and handles the process. Bloody smart is what it is.

In an effort to be simple, easy, and balanced, they have intentionally ignored any connection to actual craftsmanship, instead focusing on paying in downtime to make monetary progress toward the complete value of the crafted object. Since the most expensive lifestyle has the same value as your progress rate, which is arbitrarily fixed at 10gp per day, you will always get a discount on a crafted item unless your character is a complete fop. So not only is it efficient, it's also magically pretty close to balanced!

Unfortunately, this leads to some pretty piss-poor roleplaying when the players have absolutely no idea how things are actually made. Now, you can't blame them. Most gamers are kids, and even the greatest polymaths can't learn it all. Even so, if you're going to play a character whose whole schtick is that they are a metalworker, and you're going to run the character for a while, at least have the decency to mine wikipedia for some technical jargon!

The rest of this is just going to be me rambling about the steel manufacturing process. Read on if you have any interest in just how fucking badass humanity really is.

We made this. We do this, all around the world, every single day. And we are really, really good at it.

So what is steel?

Steel is an iron alloy containing primarily carbon as the alloying element. All metals containing iron are "ferrous" metals because that's just latin for "iron-y", which is good, because irony is already a totally different word, and we already have too much of this homophone-homonym horse shit as it is.

Steel is unique because it is possible to make an extremely wide range of physically different steel products from very small changes in the process. Other metals, such as aluminum, are more difficult to alter on a molecular level. A grade of steel  has its properties determined by the following:

Carbon Content. The more carbon in the steel, the harder it gets. Sort of. Usually. With conditions. We add carbon to iron during the smelting process by burning coal.

This is why simply "not using fossil fuels as fuel" isn't enough to stop climate change. Fossil fuels aren't just fuels, they're manufacturing materials, inherent to many industries. We don't just burn this stuff, we make stuff out of it. If you can think of a better way to get the carbon into the steel, you're a fucking genius, because we've had engineers trying to find a profitable workaround for hundreds of years, to no avail. Coal (actually coke, it's more efficient) is still the primary method of controlling carbon content in raw steel.

Not an especially detailed thing, but it covers the broad strokes.

Crystal Structure. When steel cools, its molecules form a crystalline lattice on a microscopic scale, alternating with fields of iron and carbon. These alternating crystals form in clumps, called "grains". The size of the grains of carbon and iron, and their shape, have significant impact on the final mechanical properties of the product.

Crystal structure is primarily controlled through heat treatment; raising the steel to a given temperature to let the molecules move more freely, holding at that temperature for a controlled time to let the molecules move around, then quenching at a controlled rate to form crystals of a desired size and lock the molecules in place. Different types of crystal structures sometimes have specific names as though they are different materials, such as martensite.

Additionally, we can shape the grain structure of the steel through forging, which changes what those properties are like at different places in the product. This is why forging is often favorable to casting; you can make a product that is not only hard/strong enough, but also has its strength/hardness directed at the work surface.

Hmm. Looks like the forging has some sort of non-metallic inclusion in there...

Other Alloying Elements. Of course, you can also make other types of steel alloys by mixing your base steel with some other stuff to interfere with the crystal lattice in new and interesting ways. Stainless steel contains at least 10.3% chromium, for example. (The chrome interferes with corrosion on a molecular level by filling particular voids in the lattice, and thus interfering with the movement of individual atoms, preventing them from being chemically dislodged. This also makes the metal very hard and thus fairly difficult to work with once made.)

Look, it's complicated, OK? There are huge regulation code books full of this shit.

Removal of Impurities. During the smelting process, we go through all kinds of insane effort to get rid of elements which were trapped in the metal during Earth's formation and cooling. Raw iron ores and recycled scrap are full of all kinds of useless mineral and gaseous crap that interferes with the crystallization of the steel, and creates concentrated points of tension or residual force inside the metal. Some of this stuff is poisonous as hell, too, so it often isn't enough to get it to precipitate out of the metal, you also need to make it go somewhere safe, or mix it with something that makes it safe.

When I'm inspecting steel with ultrasound, significant impurities and voids trapped in the steel (inherent defects) are one of the major things I'm looking for, along with existing failures (cracks) and process defects (insufficient weld penetration, etc.). Voids and non-metallics dramatically reduce the structural integrity, and thus the operational life span, of a steel object, and can lead to premature failure. These failures can result in thousands of dollars of property damage, environmental damage, and possibly even cost lives if the part in question was between a person and a large amount of potential energy. As a consequence, many steel products used for hazardous or essential purposes; including pipelines, aircraft components, bridge parts, boilers and pressure vessels, boat hulls, power plant piping, crane rigging, and many other things I've probably never even heard of; have international standards which codify their proper manufacturing and inspection. Most nations have laws demanding industry adhere to these standards as a minimum.

Super-duper simplified.

By standardizing all of the above properties to create a type of steel with the exact qualities needed for a given product, you can make a codified "grade" of steel that can be trademarked, patented, manufactured, and sold. This is what metallurgists do. Today, we have fancy (and pretty) charts which show the exact physical properties generated by all the different known heat treatments for a given alloy of steel.

This property, the ability to make steel suitable for so many different applications, is why it has reigned supreme as a manufacturing, industrial, and structural material for thousands of years. To get an idea of how much it matters, consider this: we weren't able to make a grade of aluminum strong enough for a truck frame until 2013. Sure, we could make very hard aluminum alloys, but strength and hardness are not the same thing.

A hard metal has very high resistance to deformation of any sort, but is also typically very brittle. That means that once you apply force beyond its deformation limit, it isn't going to bend much before it just snaps. Imagine trying to bend a granite rod.

A strong metal, conversely, has very high deformation tolerance. In stronger metals, we can more clearly see the distinction between elastic and plastic deformation. Elastic deformation is a range in which the material bends, but returns to it's original shape. Springs have very high elastic deformation tolerance. Beyond the elastic limit however, you have plastic deformation. When metal plastically reforms, the molecular structure is being shifted internally, and the steel is taking on a new shape. Plastic deformation is what we achieve when we forge metals. Imagine bending a metal bar.

Strong, but not quite strong enough against mother nature.

For a sword, you want both. You want a piece of steel that is as hard and as strong as possible, so it will almost never get damaged, and when it does get damaged, it'll just get bent or pitted rather than chipped or snapped. Unfortunately, for a very long time, it seemed as though the two were inversely correlated. The stronger the steel got, the more flexible it became, (Like how gum is soft but you can stretch it for miles) and the harder the steel got, the more brittle it became. For centuries, the forefront of metallurgy in iron and steel was driven by weapon and armor smiths looking for the right alloy and process to get just a little more hardness per strength.

Not that weapons actually snapped very often. More likely, they'd splinter or chip.
...
You know, like real tools?
...
You have used real tools before, right?

Folding your steel, like what the Japanese used to do with their katana and other similar swords, was one technique smiths invented to overcome the limitations of the material available to them. See, back in the day, we didn't know atoms were a thing, and we didn't think of smelting as chemistry, so we didn't really fully understand why iron from one place might be better or worse than the iron dug up from some other place, or why some smelting operations just made "better" steel. So, when raw iron rods arrived at the forge, they were... inconsistent. At best.

The solution was to flatten out several bars, however many you need for the product, heat them up to some ungodly temperature, and then smash them together with a hammer, forming a forge weld. Then you heat it all up and twist the structure. Then you heat it and flatten it. Then you heat it and twist it. Repeat arbitrarily. The Japanese opted for flattening it out lengthwise and folding it back on itself to create repeated forge weldings, each layered on top of one another. Do enough folds or twists, and you'll have the crap steel and good steel pretty thoroughly mixed, with roughly even properties. To be clear: folding of steel does not make it any stronger. It just spreads impurities more evenly. (And looks really pretty) If you live in a civilization with access to a Bessemer blast furnace or better, this is a lost art, and sadly, there's a good reason for it: we're just too good for that primitive crap.

A fairly elaborate forge welding being done for a decorative work.

So how does smelting work?

Smelting can be described, most simply, as melting metal out of gravel. It works, because most minerals, aside from silica and a few others, have insanely high melting temperatures, much higher than those of most metals. (This is why lava is capable of killing you by sheer radiant heat before you ever get near it; it is composed primarily of molten minerals that are well above even their own melting point.)

How did we figure all that out?!

It wasn't easy. On the scale of human history, from the time physiologically modern humans appeared, it took us over 10,000 years to do it. All of modern industry is standing on the shoulders of countless forgotten giants, lurking in our prehistoric past.

What is casting and founding?

This process is called continuous casting.
Molten steel is poured down a slide and cooled as it falls.
This thing runs as fast as the steel pours- it ain't slow.
Once solid enough, it rides on rollers.
Successive rollers shape the steel.
Somewhere down the line, a machine cuts it into billets. This is the process EVRAZ uses to make its base material.

Casting is a manufacturing process in which molten metal is poured into a mold and allowed to cool. It is... an imperfect manufacturing process. Cast iron and steel products have a random, coarse, evenly distributed grain structure that is typically not useful in any particular way beyond its generic mechanical properties. The cooling of the steel involves significant shrinkage, which puts serious restrictions on what shapes can be cast such that the steel does not become trapped in the mold or deform in ways which reduce its structural integrity.

All steel begins its career as a cast product, typically as a billet (giant flat slab) of raw steel. This initial casting is called founding, because it is all tied up with the smelting or recycling process preceding it. A foundry is a generic term for any facility that casts billets from a smelting or recycling process.

The old process was done in "heats". You'd cast a billet as a big block, and let it cool from the top. The top would experience most of the shrinkage, and is the primary point at which inclusions are accumulated. This malformed and defective top portion is cut off, leaving a clean slab from the bottom. The top is then thrown back into the start of the process, to try and extract more usable steel from it.

Most modern facilities just continuously cast the steel, as explained earlier in this article. It's faster and produces no intentionally defective portion for redundant recasting.

What is forging?

This is an industrialization age diagram of 3 forging steam hammers.
They basically still look like that, but blockier.

Forging is a process by which a cast (or sometimes partially forged) base product is shaped by force into a new shape. This process actually bends the crystal lattice with the steel, shaping and directing its mechanical properties. In this way, we can make products with high shear strength in one direction and high compressive strength in another. We can make 3-storey tall drive shafts and jet engines.

There are 2 types of forging.

Hot forging is the classical technique of heating and hammering. The strength of the metal is reduced with heat, and then restored by a quench. With a hot forging process, you can apply a heat treatment simultaneously through careful timing of the heating and quenching process.

Cold forging is just shaping cold steel with brute violence. Cold forging can broadly be categorized into machining and finishing. Finishing is the fine artisanal work done on a base piece, such as carving the threads into a bolt, or grinding out the cutting edge of a blade. Much of a jeweller's work is technically finishing, as are most of the decorative arts in metalworking, such as polishing, etching, and engraving. Meanwhile, machining is much more like carpentry, where a base piece of metal is manipulated by tools. Machining often uses more cutting and grinding techniques to remove material and make a positive from the remaining space, but they also use tools to bend, fold, upset, or squash the metal as well.

Cold forging has a significant impact on the mechanical properties of the base material. Shaping cold steel crushes the crystal lattice, creating concentrations of varying mechanical properties. This is called work-hardening, as it makes the shaped area harder, but weaker. Cold forging also has a tendency to create areas of residual stress inside the steel. If these localized stressors are exposed to cyclical loading, (repeated impacts or pressure) they will quickly reduce in structural integrity, leading to an eventual failure. As such, cold forging must be done in a careful manner, with the intention to work-harden the steel into the intended properties.

EVRAZ Red Deer Works uses a combination of hot and cold forging to make steel pipe from steel sheet. The steel comes in a giant roll, which we unwind and flatten out. Then we cold-forge it with rollers to turn it into a tube. Where the two edges meet, we heat the steel with an electrical current to nearly melting point. Finally, while still screaming hot, the roller system forces the two soft edges together, forming a forge weld. This is called Electric Resistance Welding, or ERW.

What is the difference between a furnace and a kiln, anyways?

Boy, I say, BOY, do NOT make me come over there!

I have seen this mistake made enough times to be insulted by it. The difference is primarily in the shape of the thing, but the reason behind that shape matters more. Furnaces and kilns move and concentrate heat in different ways, to suit the demands of the manufacturing process. Furnaces and kilns are used on different materials, and have different objectives, so have unique structure- they aren't even made of the same materials!

I repeat: not fun.

A furnace is designed to concentrate heat in a focused work-area on the product being worked. By definition, it must achieve this while being open to the surrounding atmosphere, so the craftsman can manipulate the fire and product during the heating process, and so the product can be periodically heated and removed for working. This means, in order to get those high temperatures, you need to focus the path the air takes through the fuel and flames, to concentrate the heat as much as possible. This is why furnaces are often tall and skinny, they're trying to squeeze that fire into a tight column. It is not just a hot box, it's a vertical wind-tunnel of flame.

Today, we actually don't use these much, because we have invented far more efficient heating systems. Even people practicing traditional blacksmithing generally only use real forges for show purposes only, while they do their real work with a heating or cutting torch to heat the metal in whatever way they want. Because such torches can be set to produce a specific, invariable temperature, and will sustain that temperature without any input of effort, a task that would take several men in ancient times can be done in half the time by one man today, even using traditional methods. Torches are instantaneous, igniting at working temperature from a single click of the striker, while furnaces of coal or wood could take hours of work to reach useful heat. A torch directs and concentrates heat exactly where the Smith wants it, and can even be picked up and placed directly on the surface of a large piece while working. It's portable, it's versatile, it's consistent, and it's easy.

Some among you may balk at this knowledge, thinking these "traditional" artisans are somehow "polluting" their trade with modern technology, but this is just an uninformed knee-jerk reaction. A trade is not its materials, components, or its product, but the abstraction between them; the task the artisan carries out to translate materials through tools to product. What most people think of when they imagine an atrisanal trade is nothing more than its cosmetics. Blacksmithing isn't a system of tools used. The tools don't matter. Blacksmithing is the hand-forging of ferrous materials by any means. Whether the Smith uses a forge or furnace; or whether his hammer is of the peening or hydraulic variety; doesn't matter to the work in its finished form. One way or another, the steel was heated and shaped by human hand, not an engineered machine press, and that's what makes the difference.

For the record: When I did this, we didn't get fire spewing out of the chimney.
We ate hot dogs and marshmallows.
These guys are crazy.

A kiln, on the other hand, is designed to achieve a specified temperature uniformly throughout its total volume, and sustain that temperature for a planned duration. It really is just a (very, very) hot box. Kilns are often made of insulatory materials, usually a form of brick or cement, because they want to hold that heat as consistently as possible. They also direct airflow, but instead of concentrating it, they try to spread it and the flames evenly, and then direct the heat from the fire evenly up and outward through evenly distributed vents. There is usually some system of racking inside a kiln, (as opposed to the open interior space of a furnace) to support the individual pieces being fired during this process. This racking is not just a haphazard grid, it is also an integral part of the air flow control system, to try and ensure the heat moves evenly around and through each individual piece. (Games with crafting systems which include pottery, that allow you to make one finished item at a time, are totally out to lunch. Individual pieces are fired in large batches, all together, all at once.) Finally, most kilns are sealed during the firing process. When I say sealed, I don't mean they close the door, I mean there is no door. They brick it shut. It becomes a fully enclosed vault of fire. Kilns that have doors are usually pretty small pre-made things that colleges and manufacturers purchase, and they're usually gas-fired. Artists, for some reason, have this absurd obsession with building their own kilns, to the point that I'd call it fetishism. (This is one of the many reasons I hated ceramics back in my colleges days.)

They are NOT the same thing. You can not fire a vase in a smith's furnace. You can not heat a sword for forging in a kiln. If you try, you will soon wreck something. There's one more misconception I'd like to clear up while we're on this topic. There are two types of furnaces.

Blast furnaces are huge.

I already explained what a forging furnace is like; a vertical wind tunnel full of fire. This type of furnace, along with the surrounding equipment necessary to make useful products from it, is called a forge. People in a forge shop generally would not refer to the furnace as a furnace, unless it was specifically damaged somehow. This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from a smelting furnace! A smelter is not just a fire tube or hot box; it is a complex and highly specialized machine. Modern smelters aren't just a single machine inside a building, they ARE the building. You can not simply smelt ore in a forge! You can not easily heat a steel rod for forging in a smelter! Think back to the section about how smelting works. A smelter needs to concentrate heat, achieve a specified even temperature for a specified duration, contain the liquid product during the heating process, expose the liquid product to oxygen, and all sorts of other tasks. It has multiple moving parts, and there are many variations on this system for making various steel materials.

An Apocalyptic Tradition

In the beginning, there was darkness.

A gorgeous view on one evening's drive home.

What do Gygax's Greyhawk, Vance's Dying Earth, Arneson's Blackmoor, Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, Bledsaw's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and Bakshi's Wizards all have in common?

The end of the world.

But hold on, I need to qualify something here. The word "apocalypse" and "world" are being used in a particular way here, which you might not agree with. Specifically: I am using these words in a very old, archaic sense.

First, when I say apocalypse, I am not talking about an atheist's nuclear haulocost, where all meaningful life ends and there's nothing else to tell. D&D assumes literal souls and a bodily afterlife in a similar sense as ancient religion. In ancient times, an apocalypse would simply be a mass transition of life to afterlife; a metaphysical exodus, if you will. Generally, they'd mean all life in the world, all at once, but then again their storytellers did enjoy exaggeration a bit too much.

Second, when I say world, it might help to understand that for most ancient people, in their minds at least, the world ended at the horizon. Even the most well travelled of men still drew maps of the whole "world" in which land could be seen extending off the edge of the page, sometimes even with notes of what lies beyond! In this ancient sense, "world" is not synonymous with "planet", "universe", or "dimension". Rather, one's world is merely that part of existence which is considered to actually matter. And yeah, a fair dose of nationalism, racism, and other tribal tendencies are what produce the distinction.

So, when I say all of these games are apocalyptic, or postapocalyptic, or that an event brings about the end of the world, don't get all up in arms- I'm speaking in a foreign tongue.

The End. Again.

Here's an article to give you an introduction to the roots of this tradition. Unfortunately, the guy's editor isn't a fan of citations apparently, so if that isn't enough evidence for you, here's some of the stuff that got cut. For further info, Grognardia brought the topic to discussion, from another blogger's campaign plans, and it was this discussion which led to the initial link above. Some other highlights budding off from that and going back in time is this colorful description of the birth of D&D, and this brilliant memorial to Dave.

If you want a broader discussion of the implications rooted in the assumptions the game system is built with, take a look at this old forum discussion.

But this isn't just the ramblings of some dude and his audience who noticed a coincidence. This guy understands it personally; he used to game with the original development team and received credit in the 5e corebooks. He knows this game like it's in his blood. But more than apocalyptic or postapocalyptic, D&D isn't even medieval! It's a bizarre sort of American fantasy. Its inherently American nature can even be found in its fundamental drive: the hunt for holes in the ground full of treasure.

The whole Darksun campaign setting is explicitly postapocalyptic, and is one of the most iconic and beloved settings ever published, even after being abandoned. (Something that can not be said of settings like Birthright, Council of Wyrms, or Spelljammer, which are typically remembered as boring, incredibly gay, or both.)

Need some more? Since the very beginning, each edition has made references to ancient histories full of fallen empires as the basis for all of the ruins. This theme stands true through to today.

How to build a classic.

In the first D&D book, we get this description of what the early game was about:

"First,  the  referee  must  draw  out  a  minimum  of half  a  dozen  maps  of  the  levels  of  his  'underworld',  [...] When this  task  is  completed  the  participants  can  then  be  allowed  to  make  their  first descent  into  the  dungeons  beneath  the  'huge  ruined  pile,  a  vast  castle  built  by generations  of  mad  wizards  and  insane  geniuses'."

Later, in the third book of that set, not quite the "DMG" by name yet, we get a glimpse into just what Greyhawk's underworld really was like:

 "'Greyhawk  Castle',  for  example,  has  over  a  dozen  levels in  succession  downwards,  more  than  that  number  branching  from  these,  and  not less  than  two  new  levels  under  construction  at  any  given  time.  These  levels  contain  such  things  as  a  museum  from  another  age,  an  underground  lake,  a  series  of caverns  filled  with  giant  fungi,  a  bowling  alley  for  20'  high  Giants,  an  arena  of evil,  crypts,  and  so  on."

In 4th edition, civilization persists only in small gatherings and clumps, known as "points of light". The world surrounding is untame wilderness and the ruins of empires past.

The 5e DMG contains the following assumptions, which can be found in the first chapter:

"Much of the World Is Untamed. Wild regions abound. City-states, confederacies, and kingdoms of various sizes dot the Iandscape, but beyond their borders the wilds crowd in. People know the area they live in well. They've heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few know what lies beyond the mountains or in the depths of the great forest unless they've been there themselves.

The World Is Ancient. Empires rise and fall, leaving few places that have not been touched by imperial grandeur or decay. War, time, and natural forces eventually claim the mortal world, leaving it rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and their ruins. Chaos and evil often follow an empire's collapse.

Conflict Shapes the World's History. Powerful individuals strive to make their mark on the world, and factions of like-minded individuals can alter the course of history. Factions include religions led by charismatic prophets, kingdoms ruled by lasting dynasties, and shadowy societies that seek to master long-lost magic. The influence of such factions waxes and wanes as they compete with each other for power. Some seek to preserve the world and usher in a golden age. Others strive toward evil ends, seeking to rule the world with an iron fist. Still others seek goals that range from the practical to the esoteric, such as the accumulation of material wealth or the resurrection of a dead god. Whatever their goals, these factions inevitably collide, creating conflict that can steer the world's fate.

The World Is Magical. Practitioners of magic are relatively few in number, but they leave evidence of their craft everywhere. The magic can be as innocuous and commonplace as a potion that heals wounds to something much more rare and impressive, such as a levitating tower or a stone golem guarding the gates of a city. Beyond the realms of civilization are caches of magic items guarded by magic traps, as well as magically constructed dungeons inhabited by monsters created by magic, cursed by magic, or endowed with magical abilities."

The Corbinet ("Apocalypse Stone") in captivity

Following through with the theme

But aside from the need of vast ancient ruin to adventure through, there's also a tradition of smashing the current empires into ruins as well.

Wrath of the Immortals is a boxed set adventure for the basic series of D&D. For those unaware of it, think of Basic as pre-1st-edition D&D. It evolved directly out of those little brown pamphlets sold by Gygax and Arneson back in the 70s. (First as a compilation, then as a series of revised editions, eventually culminating in the Rules Cyclopedia and Wrath of the Immortals) The adventure completely remodels the geography of Mystara (The default campaign at the end of Basic and early Advanced editions.) and creates a new, mostly undetailed world. Since this was pretty much the last rules publication for the basic line, it essentially set up the fans of that game with an empty world that they can play in, develop, and explore for decades to come.

Have you ever heard of the Rod of Seven Parts? It's a classic D&D magic item, and a sad loss for the 5e DMG. Here's a guy who already compiled everything I was going to tell you about it. In all of that though, he kind of misses one important detail: several versions of the Rod have the capacity to destroy the world as it currently exists, and several of the adventures centered on it could result in similar consequences if the players fail. The rod spans every edition until 5th, and even appeared in 4th, albeit a very strange iteration in its last appearance.

The Apocalypse Stone for 2nd edition is an absolute apocalypse scenario which unravels the multiverse on a cosmological scale. It is truly a complete end-times event. It's one of those "fuck you, hotshot" games in a similar spirit to Temple of Horrors. It is designed to eliminate broken characters with players who think numbers are all it takes to play D&D. This one teaches dice-happy players a lesson by using their murderhobo ways against them, by tricking them into kicking off the end of all things. That'll teach them to use their brains before they blindly loot everything in sight just because someone asked them to.

This adventure gets a lot of flack for being rather railroady and antagonistic to the players, which isn't actually true. Much of the criticism is actually resolved within the text itself, but the information is not provided in a linear fashion, so unless you really read the thing and its appendices, you'll only get half the story. (The #1 complaint, that the stone itself is a dumb idea, or that leaving it in the hands of mortals is foolish, is actually inherent to the story of the stone! The #2 complaint, that the trials seem pointless, is also justified by the nature of deities in the assumed D&D setting, something most players don't actually understand.)

Tales of the Outer Planes is a book full of mini-adventures which includes an adventure called to Hell and Back, which has the potential to unleash a terrible wave of diabolical evil across the outer planes.

Although not cannon to its content, players have found that Curse of the Azure Bonds has the capacity to ruin a whole campaign world, should things go terribly wrong and Tyranthraxus (or worse, all of the enemy factions together) gets his way.

Die Vecna Die!, also for 2nd edition, serves to explain why multiple worlds and their cosmologists were rewritten in the transition to 3rd edition. It is also the conclusion of a trilogy of Vecnan adventures, including Vecna Lives! and Vecna Reborn, which document his rise from arch lich to lesser god, and his attempt at reshaping the entire multiverse.

But even once we got to 3rd edition, the world just couldn't stop ending! In the later stages of the game, after it grew its ".5" appendage, we were treated to Elder Evils, a book filled to the brim with literal world-enders on a scale somewhere between Vecna and the apocalypse stone. And as if that wasn't enough, they had to add a few more elder evils through Dragon Magazine!

In 5th edition, publication entered seasonal (quarterly) releases of major adventures and campaign supplements. Generally: 4 adventures per year, 1 other book per year. These are significant publications with massive production value. Thus far, over half of the seasons have had apocalyptic potential. Tyranny of Dragons covered two seasons and focused on a 2-part adventure (Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat) to kick off the new edition, and pretty much invariably ends with the summoning of Tiamat, the 5-headed god of evil dragons- and leaves it to the group to decide where to go from there! Elemental Evil featured the adventure Princes of the Apocalypse- I'll let you guess what the cults of elemental evil are up to in that one. Rage of Demons contained Out of the Abyss, an adventure where multiple demon princes rise in the underdark and try to take over the material plane. Nothing like saving multiple planes of existence, to make you feel like a real hero, amirite?

I think this tradition really says something about what makes an exciting and interesting fantasy world: the greatest of heroes must triumph over the greatest of adversity. A lot of beginner DMs create these beautiful, perfect, peaceful worlds that are only really threatened by some external threat. In the absence of this "devil" element, there is no true conflict, the world is static and plain in its comfortable genericness. Let me give you a suggestion: don't be afraid to end the world. Don't hold so tightly to your fantasy world that you refuse to allow it to be threatened. Don't be a cowardly DM. Grow some balls and tell the players: "If you die, all is lost, and the world shall fall to ruin." ... and stand by it.