Perihelion Wiki: Library/SanitationSystemOfNoontimeGlory

So, I was doing some reading about Roman-era sewer systems, and it struck me that this would make a fun little thing to toss into the game.

: Khazharkhan is going to spend some designing a sewer and water system for the inhabitants of Noontime Glory. In basic outline, this will resemble the sorts of systems the Romans built -- a system of pipes carrying running water will flow to every building in the city, with a separate set of pipes for carrying off waste water.

: Unlike the Romans, waste water doesn't get dumped into the nearest river; instead, there will be small parks (ie, constructed wetlands) to re-purify the waste for each neighborhood. The magical nature of the universe lets him push things a bit further than the Romans could go. He's going to design small, specialized prayers to the local elementals, so that they get Essence for causing water to flow /up/ to tanks on the roof, so that each building can have gravity-driven running water, and so that they will report the exact locations of leaks and blockages to sanitation engineers. The earth elementals get prayers to keep the pipes in good running order, and the wood elementals get prayers to make sure the constructed wetlands stay maximally healthy and efficient at recycling waste water. And so on and so on.

: Note the quid-pro-quo here; both the elementals and the humans get immediate benefits from this engineered cult. Khazharkhan wants to build a system that can persist and be replicated elsewhere even if he and the other social PCs are killed. And he relies on greed as the most reliable emotion for engineering stable social systems.

: I'm assuming that Craft/Architecture? will cover civil engineering projects; if not I'll spend the XPs to get that Craft/Civil? Engineering as another specialty. If he spends Virtue dots, he should be able to average 16-17 successes on the Craft roll, and another 10-11 or so on the Bureaucracy check (to set up the micro-cult).

: His main goal is to design a sanitation system that humans can build and extend with minimal intervention from him. In-game, he is turning his inhuman Solar genius designing a system that is far superior to anything a human could have come up with in the first place, but which they can understand and maintain once he's shown them what to do.

First, and most importantly, Khazharkhan has no wish to take his meals in the middle of a stinking midden. He wants to live in a city, rather than the back end of anywhere. This means that he intends for Noontime Glory to grow to at least 100,000 people, and preferably a million people. But cities in the ancient and medieval world smelled really bad: with poor sanitation, waste collected in cesspits and grew really foul. (Even with as few as a thousand people these issues start to arise.) Therefore, he is going to make sure that there is a properly-engineered sanitation system to ensure that our city doesn't smell.

Second, he wants to be able to sneer right back at those bloody deathknights serving the Silver Prince. They are not going to be able to put on that goddamn "we are condescending to visit your primitive civilization" act when they visit us again, if he has anything to say about it. So expect him to keep coming up with more SimCity? style improvements. :)

Third, he wants life in Noontime Glory to not just be better than in the rest of the Threshold or the Realm, but stupidly better. Most people were raised in the Immaculate faith, and it's easier to persuade humans to betray their most deeply-held religious beliefs and loyally serve the Anathema if they get immediate physical rewards -- like running water and vastly reduced disease rates -- out of it.

Last, this is part of his effort to thoroughly integrate the elementals into our rule. The more rewards they get serving us, the harder it becomes for Immaculate monks or the Celestial bureaucracy to turn them against us.