egyptian

I think personally I would want bronze = bronze. It's heavy, and it's a little soft. One rough fight and you're sword is bent, and you've got to find a couple flat rocks to pound it back into shape. Tempering, pattern welding, shaping and folding...these are alien concepts. Once the bronze cools in the mold it's as strong as it's ever going to be. Iron and steel are bizarre based on what everyone knows about metal. It takes astonishing amounts of heat to melt, far more than anything you know of can generate. It's hard, and it's strong, and it's strangely flexible. It also rots if you don't care for it, slowly turning orange red and flaking away to nothing. I think for me the alien-ness that PhilHibbs describes is less about changing the properties of things, and more about shifting how we think about them. It's not easy to slip free of modern perspectives though, so his view may well be the right one for a lot of people.

Hero (the aeolipile guy) was working on designs for windmills in first century AD. All this thinking about Bronze Age technology led me down the rabbit hole, and ended with me spending most of my morning reading about the development of textiles in antiquity.

First off, thanks for all the answers. I didn't quite expect so many responses to what I thought was a pretty innocent question! re: The Greatsword Thing-from my admittedly limited research it seems like we don't see evidence of bronze swords of more than about 100cm, and most are 60-70. The one one bronzeworker who I heard comments from said that the 'leaf swords' which we find in abundance were near the limits of bronze's mechanical strength. I'm sure magic would let you make more impressive weapons, and in a magic-pervasive world it's certainly reasonable, but it would probably make that base cost we see in the rulebook a couple shades higher. Maybe it's enough to just have some expected technologies missing. No flint and steel obviously, and characters will probably want to keep a firepot so they can carry a glowing coal from one campfire to the next. No book bindings, but scrolls are everywhere and can be flipping massive (look at some of those Torah scrolls!). No horse collars mean that horses are for transportation, and oxen for work. No potatoes means that everyone knows there should be something else in the stewpot, but they don't know what...

I'm really new to Runequest, and still trying to get my head around the setting. One of the things that's giving me some trouble is understanding the technology level of Glorantha. I know it's 'Bronze Age', but I also see a lot of things that would be anachronisms-heavy horse, two-handed swords, crossbows, heck some of those clothes dyes probably wouldn't have been around until the 19th century! I'm as ready to accept differences in the march of science in a magical world as anybody, I'm just curious if there's somewhere to start so I know what is and is not available in this world. Thanks in advance, any help is much appreciated.