Fioracitta Discussions

[Alex Greene]

I'm going to open this here and just let you know that if and when anyone has any questions or comments about Fioracitta, let me know here (and if this thread is more than a week old, open a new thread and tag me in the opening post - I don't like thread necromancy much either).

Current topics:-

- comments about problems you may have in receiving the hardcopies (the covid crisis is still upon us, and some post may be delayed still)

- whatever you might find about the book that grabs your interest

- hopefully, deeper questions for anyone who's had a good look through it.

- and yes, there are one or two things in the book which might be counted as Easter eggs ...

[Prinz Slasar]

59 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

- hopefully, deeper questions for anyone who's had a good look through it.

One thing that confused me a bit was that sentence about building height in the Gioconda district. "[...] their imposing towers climbing into the sky as civic engineering can provide." (p 162)
I'd searched for further informations in the illustrations and text paragraphs but didn't find more about it.

Is the sentence written in a hyperbolic sense?

[lawrence.whitaker]

On the subject of delivery delays, we can't help or do much if you bought your print copy via Drivethru. As the book is produced via print on demand, any print or delivery issues need to be taken up with Drivethru directly: we cannot assist. 

If you buy a book directly from us, then we have a procedure on our website. 

[Alex Greene]

1 hour ago, Prinz Slasar said:

One thing that confused me a bit was that sentence about building height in the Gioconda district. "[...] their imposing towers climbing into the sky as civic engineering can provide." (p 162)
I'd searched for further informations in the illustrations and text paragraphs but didn't find more about it.

Is the sentence written in a hyperbolic sense?

The real world Tower of Arnolfo in Florence is 95 metres high. Civic engineering in the Renaissance created some buildings which were imposing back then, but which would seem to be lacking in ambition compared to the skyscrapers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Large buildings, and large interiors, were a thing for the real world Renaissance, as architects created new ways of reinforcing structures against gravity, and this is reflected in the fictional setting of Fioracitta - in its temples, the Tamaggian temples, in particular.

I think the words "as high" should have gone in there somewhere. I would have to check to see if it was in one of the manuscripts I sent. I would hate to find that I wrote over the words "as high" in my haste to cut and paste the end of the sentence in one of the edits, because mea culpa if that is so.

I thought I had written something about towers rising 60-100 metres above the ground somewhere.

Edited October 12, 2020 by Alex Greene

[Prinz Slasar]

9 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

I think the words "as high" should have gone in there somewhere. I would have to check to see if it was in one of the manuscripts I sent. I would hate to find that I wrote over the words "as high" in my haste to cut and paste the end of the sentence in one of the edits, because mea culpa if that is so.

Sorry, my fault. I didn't use c&p and left these two words out.

 

[Alex Greene]

Okay, well in this case I'll definitely have to bring in something about how big the interiors and exteriors of Fiorese civic and other buildings are expected to be.  I'm definitely inclined to come up with a Fioracitta Companion, in that case, as one of the items on top of my to-do list after Scandals.

[Alex Greene]

I just had someone ask me about the really flexible history of Fioracitta, and the new historical events table which allows you to write in a chunk of history or a single event that isn't in the listed histories.

I told them what I'm saying here - this includes players. If they want to create an ancestor so they have an ancestor spirit to conjure up, that's what the tables are there for. As long as you and the GM write down the details, once written, so they can be brought up again later in the same campaign.

And if you finish your Fioracitta campaign, and come back later to start afresh, you don't have to have that ancestor, or that historical event, or even that Shadow Society group or whatever, turn up in Fioracitta in that entirely separate campaign.

Each campaign, each GM's campaign, can be different; with differing details in its history, different historical characters, and so on. You can literally never run out of adventures in Fioracitta - and they can all be just as canon as the next group's version down the road.

[Nozbat]

On 10/12/2020 at 2:07 PM, Alex Greene said:

thought I had written something about towers rising 60-100 metres above the ground somewhere.

That would be maybe on the tall side.. This is a picture I took in San Gimignano and I think I remember the towers being only just over 50m tall.. that said if you're standing below they look massive

They have a very narrow base and I'm not sure that they could support a greater height. I did once see a document in Trinity Library, Dublin that gave instructions about how to build a Round Tower (the Monastic type ones to stop nasty northern peoples stealing illuminated manuscripts and using them to wipe their bottoms with). The height- width ratio was measured in cows. Therefore if your round tower was going to be 10 cows high it had to have a base of 3 cows wide. My rather fertile imagination still wonders how you balance cows on top of one another to ensure you only build 10 cows high rather than 11 cows and have it fall over.

[Alex Greene]

Giotto's Campanile in this world is about 84 metres tall, so I imagine that in my Fioracitta there would be architects who would create towers that high or higher, up to the limits of stone and wood.

So imagine an architect who discovers that some glassblower is making sheet glass plates metres across, and some other guy is using Rhonaran concrete for walls and buildings (unlike our world, they never lost the secret of making sturdy concrete when their Empire fell), and who decides to build a tower of glass reaching more than a hundred metres, with experts in material sciences from Prosoche University joining in ...

Edited October 21, 2020 by Alex Greene

[Nozbat]

2 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

n this world is about 84 metres tall, so I imagine that in my Fioracitta there would be architects who would create towers that high or higher, up to the limits of stone and wood.

How many cows wide and how many cows tall? (We Irish still work in cow measurement and never got into this new fangled metre system)

9 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

unlike our world, they never lost the secret of making sturdy concrete when their Empire fell

But I agree absolutely with what you said and am reminded of the most spectacular building I have ever been in, The Pantheon, which even two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon's dome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. If those skills had not been lost and there had been a continuous development and improvement of engineering and construction techniques allied with magical abilities there is no reason why the towers should not be taller than in the real world...

I’ll now go back to more mundane things of planning how a small band of brothers walk from the Saxon Shore  to Ratae without being murdered, plundered or discombobulated 

[Alex Greene]

1 hour ago, Nozbat said:

How many cows wide and how many cows tall? (We Irish still work in cow measurement and never got into this new fangled metre system)

 

56 cow heights (withers height) or 32 cow lengths (nose to tail). 827 hands.

[Nozbat]

7 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

56 cow heights (withers height) or 32 cow lengths (nose to tail). 827 hands.

Ach..this is how it works... I always stacked them, one on top of the other, but could never get over 5 high before they fell over 

[Ian Absentia]

14 minutes ago, Alex Greene said:

56 cow heights (withers height) or 32 cow lengths (nose to tail). 827 hands.

That's absurd.  You'd never be able to balance that many cows on their noses.  And cows don't have hands.  With foundational math like that it's no wonder Ireland is considered a tax haven by artists and tech companies.

!i!

[Nozbat]

Just now, Ian Absentia said:

That's absurd.  You'd never be able to balance that many cows on their noses.  And cows don't have hands.  With foundational math like that it's no wonder Ireland is considered a tax haven by artists and tech companies.

!i!

That’s true, Ian... I had failed to remember cows don’t have hands... and I’ve noticed another flaw in Alex’s argument.. Do the cows have their tails extended? Or flat against their bottoms? And what about the floppy bit at the end of the tail? Is that counted too? 

I’ve just tried to balance my cow on it’s tail and it is now in a very mad mood so evidentially that doesn’t work either

As for maths...we Irish have always been into creative accounting