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2E Forgotten Realms Adventures (description of Baldur's Gate)

Worshippers of Gond and the curious (who pay a small admission fee) can see many wonders of artifice in the temple's Hall of Wonders. Currently on display are a mechanical scribe (handset-type printing press), a steam dragon (crude steam engine), a pump of gond (bicycle-like man-powered pump for farm irrigation and filling bilges and reservoirs), a system of self-filling oil lamps (fed from a central oil tank), and other wonders. The temple sells specimens of all displayed devices, at very still prices.
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Visitors often remark on the harbor's sheer size and crowding, and the massive cranes, scoops, and cargo carts (which run along the docks on rails of steel!) that can make loading or unloading here a swift, if expensive, process. The dock equipment ... was devised and built by the priests of Gond, who receive a 1-copper fee for every usuage of a cart or crane. (Elminster mutters darkly that divine inspiration in this case came from merely looking at a harbor or two on a certain other world. This may well be true.)

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Originally posted by The Sage

Any chance you can elaborate on the function of both 'ancient schema' and 'Babbage engines' in terms of *your* campaign, Quale?

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So Saieth Ed


Lantan is of course 'on the list' of places to deal with, eventually (watch upcoming Realmslore columns for more about a different thus-far-neglected island), but in general I see two factors at work governing what fantastic gadgets from Lantan get into circulation: price (how many folk in the Realms will pay serious coin for, say, a clockwork toy, or even a clock when the sun and local religious observances govern daily events, and in daily society no one makes or keeps appointments "by the minute" or "on the hour"? palaces and temples have their own timekeeping, and no one else lives that way) and self-control: really powerful weapons (beyond individual battlefield firearms and the printing press, which have already found their ways onto the mainland) are probably either kept on Lantan, or are sent out of Lantan only under strict conditions (like having a Lantanna "minder" with them at all times, under the fiction that the gadget in question is so complex that it will only keep working under the continuous supervision and maintenance of a trained Lantanna. In other words, young maverick inventors of Lantan are going to be restricted in what they can export by their long-seeing seniors (who thanks to the religion of Gond have the moral authority to do so).

If you're at all interested in steampunk, a within-Lantan campaign might be the way to go, and I'd put it on two levels: secret inventions of sophistication being kept within families (just as the noble houses of Waterdeep show off some things at revels, but keep others as dark secrets), and a public (that is, openly within Lantan) mechanization that's about at the level of what Phil and Kaja Foglio have depicted in their marvellous GIRL GENIUS comics, with machines known as "clanks" and whatnot.

Whether or not the published Lantan ends up looking like this or not, Lantan is the "sleeping giant" on the Realms scene, with the potential to rise to become an alternative to magic, but easily kept down to the status of "oddity" if players and DMs don't want technology to play that large a role in their games.

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Originally printed in Faiths and Avatars on Page 62
Gond is always making new things. He often presses Oghma for their
release into the mortal world without thinking through completely the
impact they will have. He is fascinated with making the theoretical real and either does not consider or often does not care about the implications for the use of his inventions and discoveries.

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