Gloranthan water supply and sanitation

[Brootse]

Which Gloranthan cultures use water and sanitation pipes? I don't remember ever seeing mentions of them. They did exist in Bronze Age Earth though.

[Richard S.]

I would imagine they would be found in some important Lunar cities, Nochet, Ktalorela, and maybe some places in the west.

[Joerg]

Harald Smith aka @jajagappa has made aqueduct care one of the main duties of his Nochet Campaing House (i.e. Esrolian urban clan), which you can read about at RPGGeek, or over here in this thread

 

[Joerg]

 

Actual pipes for transport of liquids wouldn't be that common - covered canals are an equivalent of pipes, more easily managed, and possibly more hygienic.

Water pipes come in a number of different materials.

Metal pipes are known to the Mostali, and may have been used by them in work done for humans. They would hold pressure well.

Ceramic ones were made like bottomless vases which could be mortared into one another - such pipes can even handle some pressure, and could be used instead of arched bridges for aqueducts to cross valleys. Possible users in Glorantha might be Esrolia, Peloria, and maybe the west (although they have concrete, aka opus cementitia, which may be cast into half pipes or open water runs, in the west).

Wooden water pipes have been used in central Europe, originally for free-running drinking water, but on a seminary on camera inspection for sewers I learned about a case where such a medieval pipe section had been connected to a more modern sewer system. In places where bamboo grows it may be used for this.

Weirder material may include giant insect legs (hollow, could be connected by pushing thinner ends into wider ones).

,

Canals or aqueducts would be way more common than pipes, above-ground, elevated, or underground, in wooden, stone or just clay runs. Basically an application of irrigation technology to bring water into urban areas.

 

Most urban cultures with public waterways for fresh water probably would use trough-shaped canals, possibly covered by stone slabs or wooden shingle.

Dara Happa should have those, Harappa-style, at least for the cultured parts of their cities.

Places that rely on cisterns will have canals (likely covered) to capture rain, and healthy ones will have sedimentation basins before lifting the water into the higher cisterns.

 

Urban sewers are first and foremost ways to handle rainwater or meltoff. Cloacas for fecal matter may exist in some places, but many places recognize it as valuable fertilizer and may separate the solids before dealing with the liquid waste. You really don't want any kind of "solids" (however quishy) to block up the sewers.

[Brootse]

Thanks!

[Psullie]

given that Gloranthan diseases are caused by malign spirits and not bacteria water sanitation would be more about charms and rituals to banish the offending entities. I'd expect city cisterns would be regularly cleaned by the local priesthood and monitored for signs of Mallia's corruption.  

[womble]

There is a potential discrepancy in how diseases are meant to work:

The Game System chapter does, indeed state that diseases are not caused by the pathogens we recognise, but by disease spirits. However, the Alchemy rules for medicines say "...If a disease has been caused by a disease spirit..." (my emphasis) implying that there are other mechanisms. The error is probably with the Alchemy rules.

[Luthorin]

I am not gonna risk anything - I'll stick to beer.

[Joerg]

6 hours ago, womble said:

There is a potential discrepancy in how diseases are meant to work:

The Game System chapter does, indeed state that diseases are not caused by the pathogens we recognise, but by disease spirits. However, the Alchemy rules for medicines say "...If a disease has been caused by a disease spirit..." (my emphasis) implying that there are other mechanisms. The error is probably with the Alchemy rules.

There are other forms of disease. The plague spread in Seshnela by the priests of the Bright Empire was not curable by normal means, which might suggest a different cause of contagion.

Poisoning is a form of disease, too, based on stuff you eat or drink, which makes normal hygiene still an issuet.

Excrements are known carriers of disease - it is how broo make their weapons transmitters for any disease they may carry. The stuff may be just the homing signal, or it may contain the seeds of new Disease spirits, and as long as you can sear away those seeds, you might be able to avoid an infection (becoming the breeding substrate for that new Disease spirit - multiple seeds may merge into one spirit).

Parasites are another form of disease. Intestinal worms surely are known in Glorantha, beings of Darkness that invade your body. Leeches, fleas, lice, ticks, maggots, attached to your flesh or even eating through it... Don't inflict it on your players' characters unless they can deal with some body horror, but you could mention it as color for places they really don't want to go.

 

So how will perfectly "healthy" excrements in your drinking water or food attract disease in Glorantha? E.g. by noxious fumes which allow disease spirits to materialize and attach to whatever comes into contact with the stuff.

Decomposing matter will be surrounded by small creatures and spirits of Darkness anyway - that's one of the characteristics of Darkness, consumption. Disease spirits often have an origin in Darkness, like their mistress Malia. People with spirit sight will perceive low level spirit activity wherever such processes of life happen.

This life can be overcome by the other elements, or lured out by offering it better nourishment in a poultice of life-giving Earth (which is mythically destined to be overcome and devoured by Darkness). Fire will burn or drive them away, air will push them off and shred them to pieces, water may carry them away or magically sear them off. Darkness may be commanded to devour the more malign ones. All of that may prefvent the disease to anchor itself in the body, or may even draw it out.

Alchemists may devise poisons which drive out evil spirits. Stuff like peyote?

[womble]

The bit in Game Systems distinctly mentions pollution as attracting Disease Spirits. The reason excrement is excreted is to get rid of the pollution it contains. There's no such thing as 'healthy' excrements. There may be excrement from healthy bodies, but the excrement itself is polluted and creates pollution. If it gets into your water supply, it'll draw disease spirits.

[Jeff]

Boldhome has water supply and drainage of remarkable sophistication:

Water and Drainage

Boldhome has an inexhaustible supply of fresh running water from the mountains. The valley has several hot springs, which dwarf ingenuity and engineering have tapped for hot water and baths. Even during the coldest Boldhome winter, there are plentiful sources of hot water in the city. There are several public baths in the city. 

The dwarfs not only tapped the hot springs, but also built an underground water and drainage and sewer system throughout the pockets and Sartar’s Palace. All of the dwarf-built residences have a private toilet that connects to the sewer system and is expelled through the 40-Spear Conduit. 

 

[Brootse]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

Boldhome has water supply and drainage of remarkable sophistication:

Water and Drainage

Boldhome has an inexhaustible supply of fresh running water from the mountains. The valley has several hot springs, which dwarf ingenuity and engineering have tapped for hot water and baths. Even during the coldest Boldhome winter, there are plentiful sources of hot water in the city. There are several public baths in the city. 

The dwarfs not only tapped the hot springs, but also built an underground water and drainage and sewer system throughout the pockets and Sartar’s Palace. All of the dwarf-built residences have a private toilet that connects to the sewer system and is expelled through the 40-Spear Conduit. 

 

Thanks! I was just about to ask about Sartar.

[David Scott]

Pavis (the big rubble) also has sewers, the dwarfs built from the Faceless Statue's bowelstones. They also made them into plumbing, and sewers. The dwarfs also built the Great Drain under new Pavis for Dorosar. See Pavis GTA.

[Brootse]

22 hours ago, David Scott said:

Pavis (the big rubble) also has sewers, the dwarfs built from the Faceless Statue's bowelstones. They also made them into plumbing, and sewers. The dwarfs also built the Great Drain under new Pavis for Dorosar. See Pavis GTA.

So they did! I had forgotten all about that.

Edited September 28, 2018 by Brootse

[soltakss]

On 9/27/2018 at 6:08 PM, David Scott said:

Pavis (the big rubble) also has sewers, the dwarfs built from the Faceless Statue's bowelstones. They also made them into plumbing, and sewers. The dwarfs also built the Great Drain under new Pavis for Dorosar. See Pavis GTA.

They also have Soil Men, who go around at night and put "soil" into carts and take them away, so you have a combination of sewers and manual disposal.

[jajagappa]

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

They also have Soil Men, who go around at night and put "soil" into carts and take them away, so you have a combination of sewers and manual disposal.

Although Nochet has plenty of sewers, they also have nightsoil gatherers - usually gangs of trollkin supervised by the local dark trolls - who deliver what refuse they don't consume enroute to the temple of Black Esrola, who then blesses it for the nearby farmers to use.

[StephenMcG]

On 9/27/2018 at 7:23 AM, Joerg said:

Poisoning is a form of disease, too, based on stuff you eat or drink, 

 

On 9/27/2018 at 7:23 AM, Joerg said:

Leeches, fleas, lice, ticks, maggots, attached to your flesh or even eating through it..

I think the post is great, I am with the general gist but, as a microbiologist,  need to pick up details.  Poisoning just is not a form of disease, there is no chance of a poisoning epidemic. And while leeches, fleas, ticks and lice attach they do not eat through and maggots consume only dead flesh (the reason they are being used clinically to clean wounds).

phew.  Almost Sheldon-like need to explain there. Apologies!

My concern was getting the details right as the paradigms changed.  It was more obvious in HeroQuest but the paradigms underpinning deist, sorcerers and animist magics are different.  Spirit diseases fit the animist paradigm, are kind of appropriate in deist societies but almost completely alien to the Western sorcery paradigm.

Do they explain these things differently or do they all accept d isease spirits?  If a disease spirit has infected you, can it infect someone else without leaving your body? If so, does the spirit split? If you overcome the spirit, does it die? 

My poor scientific brain quails when looking at a universe built on myth rather than rational observation and replication....  🙂

 

stephen

[womble]

Just because your method of interacting with magic is Sorcery doesn't make all the small spirits go away. The Westerners just use different tools to deal with them. They might also use different terms of reference, but they'll translate into the same entities in game terms.

[PhilHibbs]

To a primitive mind, a poison is just a disease that is not very contagious. However I don't see the same anti-poison attitude in Glorantha as anti-disease ski don't think they are the same.

[StephenMcG]

I don’t look on Gloranthans as primitives, they are highly sophisticated in their understanding of their world, possibly better than we understand ours.

I don’t think they would mistake a poison with the effects of a disease spirit.  I am working on the basis that the disease symptoms are the result of the disease spirit leaving the body to infect another person.  An infected person can only infect one other as there is no secondary spirits created during an infection.  

It does mean Glorantha would not see the kind of epidemics with geometric injection rates that we do.  The potential for sentient disease does raise other concerns though...

 

Stephen

[Joerg]

18 minutes ago, StephenMcG said:

I think the post is great, I am with the general gist but, as a microbiologist,  need to pick up details.  Poisoning just is not a form of disease, there is no chance of a poisoning epidemic.

But there is. Explosive microbial multiplication needn't take place in the host organism, it may be enough that their continuously produced metabolites poison the drinking water.

Fungal or bacterial spores may be carried by non-infected but contaminated organisms into new reproductive habitats, creating spread patterns very difficult to discern from contagious infections. Multi-stage parasites may be hosted by pets or husbandry.

I am thinking of biofilms, which are of course host to all manners of microorganisms in the Real World, but may also host microorganisms that require conditions for replication that aren't found in warm-blooded mammals.

And prions are effectively self-replicating molecule formations rather than micro-organisms. More of a poisonous meme. A virus is not an organism, but can usurp organisms.

And while I am no microbiologist, I work as a chemist in water analytics, with microbial hygiene or microbial water treatment a common topic, and I need a few related certificates. I tried to hurt the science as little as possible...

 

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And while leeches, fleas, ticks and lice attach they do not eat through and maggots consume only dead flesh (the reason they are being used clinically to clean wounds).

Bluebottle maggots consume only dead flesh. Other maggots aren't that finicky -- when our (senile) laboratory dog went AWOL six years ago, he was found after six days with a huge open head wound full of some unspecified, small maggots, way too small for bluebottle ones, but the veterinary told the holders that these maggots would continue to tunnel into the host organism and may ultimately reach the brain.

The owners decided to finish the elimination of the maggots at home after the veterinary had more or less suggested that euthanasia would be indicated, and they succeeded to remove all (or at least enough) of these maggots that the dog recovered and stayed around for another year.

The other arthropod parasites may carry microorganisms that also act as parasites - amoebas, monads, bacteria and viruses. If meningitis is observed on victims of tick bites, then the Gloranthan logic doesn't look for the virus causing the tick-borne encephalitis, or the borreliosis bacterium, but sees the tick bite.

 

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phew.  Almost Sheldon-like need to explain there. Apologies!

No worries. I get similarly riled when I read about "water memory" outside of fantasy literature.

 

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My concern was getting the details right as the paradigms changed.  It was more obvious in HeroQuest but the paradigms underpinning deist, sorcerers and animist magics are different.  Spirit diseases fit the animist paradigm, are kind of appropriate in deist societies but almost completely alien to the Western sorcery paradigm.

Western sorcery used to describe spirits as energy complexes, and captured them in an enchantment named Energy Prison, copied from a Mostali device named Iron Energy Prison. Or in modern pseudo-scientific jargon, "quantum". Subspace, if you're a fan of the Star Trek franchise...

 

The Malia cult leaves an infected carrier covertly possessed even though he or she infects others (also through the RQ-rules mechanic of covert possession). This suggests that new disease spirits spawn somehow, or that colonies of microorganisms in the host multiply and transfer.

 

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Do they explain these things differently or do they all accept disease spirits?  

They might disagree about the exact nature of the disembodied entity, and there might be purely sorcerous essence diseases (infected ideas or memes?). There are divine agents of retribution that behave very much like diseases or STDs, like Orlanth's impests.

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If a disease spirit has infected you, can it infect someone else without leaving your body? If so, does the spirit split?

I assumed that the spirit spawns new ones which then grow in the new host body. As one would observe in a bacterial infection.

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If you overcome the spirit, does it die? 

If it gets expelled from the body, and presumably rejoins its source deep in the spirit plane. I'll have to read up whether overcoming a passively possessing disease spirit may keep the infection down without worshipping Malia to avoid the symptoms.

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My poor scientific brain quails when looking at a universe built on myth rather than rational observation and replication....  🙂

Taking the materialist view often doesn't help much there, either.

 

 

[StephenMcG]

Too much interesting Jeorg, but I think for a different thread...I have kind of derailed this one enough...

[g33k]

5 hours ago, StephenMcG said:

I don’t look on Gloranthans as primitives, they are highly sophisticated in their understanding of their world, possibly better than we understand ours.

I don’t think they would mistake a poison with the effects of a disease spirit.  I am working on the basis that the disease symptoms are the result of the disease spirit leaving the body to infect another person.  An infected person can only infect one other as there is no secondary spirits created during an infection.  

It does mean Glorantha would not see the kind of epidemics with geometric injection rates that we do.  The potential for sentient disease does raise other concerns though...

 

Stephen

It's not clear to me that spirits cannot reproduce in some fashion, so I wouldn't rule that out.  The Broo race, for example can implant not only a larval Broo but IIRC the "seed" or "egg" of a disease-spirit (or indeed a full-blown disease spirit; but that's not to the point of this issue).

I would also posit that a powerful-enough disease spirit could "spread" to infect (for example) everyone in the same hut, then a small cluster of huts, then a whole village.  It might become TWO disease-spirits if one of the victims wandered far enough away, a sort of POWrthogenesis. 

And to the OP's "water/sanitation" point... once water is fouled (whether in germ theory or disease-spirit theory), it might spread in trickles or leaks or droplets or etc etc etc.

Edited October 1, 2018 by g33k

[StephenMcG]

I wonder if some disease spirits actually inhabit the water source rather than a person.  I am going with the animist view of the disease spirit overcoming the spirit of the water body (I am presuming that even artificial water bodies used for long enough may develop their own spirit).  The disease spirit then, over time, transforms the water body into one huge potion that inflicts the disease symptoms on those that drink it.  

This would be like Jeorg's scenario of something like Clostridium botulinum growing in a location and producing a poison that causes impacts rather than the bacteria themselves doing it.  This would not mean that someone sick could infect another person but it could lay low a whole community that would then be open to raiding by a tribe of broo that would otherwise be too weak....

Sanitation programmes therefore would be specialist shaman that could detect and clear out such spirits...

Stephen

[PhilHibbs]

13 hours ago, StephenMcG said:

I think the post is great, I am with the general gist but, as a microbiologist,  need to pick up details.  Poisoning just is not a form of disease, there is no chance of a poisoning epidemic. And while leeches, fleas, ticks and lice attach they do not eat through and maggots consume only dead flesh (the reason they are being used clinically to clean wounds).

So is botulism a disease? And that is more than just a snarky nitpick - in RuneQuest terms, would you use Treat Disease skill or Treat Poison to deal with botulism? Clearly eliminating the underlying pathogen would be Treat Disease, but which should we use to treat the symptoms?