A post-apocalyptic tech tree (if that’s where the Dead City is) sounds interesting to explore.

Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge has some good stuff about the shortcuts you’d be able to take if you were rebuilding a fallen society from physically nothing, while still retaining all the technical knowledge from before. That you obviously wouldn’t have to follow the same slow branches of discovery that technology happened to have taken historically, and your first, primitive trains can have steam-charged electric batteries if you can source the right materials.

The American cover for The Knowledge is so much better than the British one.

I think we’ll want to change Shared Wisdom quite quickly, as it’ll be boring just investing more and more into Shared Wisdom before charging through the tree at the end.

I’m just happy that someone else is also interested in tech trees!

@Kevan oooh, yes!! that does sound very interesting :0

@Josh understandable! this one ain’t a live wire yet, so it should be safe to fix in another proposal.

Not sure about the details or the reskin of Tech to something a bit abstract, but it’d be good to see a tech tree.

my reasoning behind the reflavor is partially that “Tech” feels like the wrong word if u spend it to actually /get/ the tech, and partially so that Innovations can include not only physical technological contraptions and whatnot but also shortcuts/methods/societal shifts and so on :0

[Lemon] Fair point on the societal stuff, but the fact that Tech is spendable makes it feel more like a physical, fungible resource. It’s a bit strange to say that a District can accrue Ingenuity in the abstract with no stated goal in mind (“oh, don’t mind us, we’re just being generally Ingenious”) and they can eventually spend all that on whatever is useful to them at the time, at which point they become less Ingenious.

@Kevan i’d view Ingenuity as a mixture of broad knowledge and /clever people/. gaining Ingenuity would be knowing more things about how the world works and/or having people learn things or be inspired; losing Ingenuity would be having those knowledge sources or ppl damaged/lost; and spending Ingenuity would be applying that knowledge and/or having those clever people put that inspiration to good use, after which the knowledge’s most obvious applications have been realised and the people need to get cleverer or newly inspired, or you need new, different clever people with a fresh perspective! this makes more sense to me personally than the alternative :0

i think i’m used to this sort of abstraction because of few TTRPGs where it’s common to have a nebulous and non-specific resource that, later on in the narrative, gets specified into whatever’s most interesting or useful in the moment! an example would be Blades in the Dark’s inventory system. BitD is a heist game where you decide how /much/ stuff you’re carrying, but not /what/ that stuff is exactly until you need it — retroactively making your character a better planner than you, the player, is capable of being or willing to be.