Bronze vs. Iron vs. Steel

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I was looking at Goodman Games' newly announced DCC, "Legacy of the Savage Kings." Exploring old ruins is a D&D staple, but, perhaps taking a cue from Tolkein, weapons pulled out of ancient ruins tend to be about as good as the ones made in the characters' modern day, or even better.

Now, this is great for special weapons, but it seems a little strange from the standpoint of a world full of intelligent living beings.

Has anyone, perhaps, thought of having ancient weapons be of less-impressive metals, like bronze or iron? What did you do to mechanically model the older weapons, if so?

I was also thinking that smelting steel might originally have been one of the dwarven nation's "treasures." Would the secret of creating steel be important enough to go to war over, or was the development of it over iron a historical footnote for the most part?

 

[deltadave]

Mechanically, I give Bronze a -2 to hit and a break chance if a player rolls a one on their attack, typically a second roll between 1 and 10. The lower the roll the more damaged the weapon... anything from broken at the hilt to slightly bent. Iron is slightly more resistant to damage, but more prone to snap if actually damaged. 1-5 on the second roll and broken on a 1 or 2. it is also a -1 to hit. Historically, steel diffused thru trade and the knowledge of making it did the same as smiths with the knowledge of making it went where their labor was most valuable. Over time a few centers of weapons manufacture sprung up where raw materials were good and trade routes crossed...

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I didn't want to make this reply too long, so I have painted a broad-brush picture here and I have necessarily simplified some of the issues and skimmed over the details. A metallurgist would take issue with some of the comments I'm making here.

What most people "know" is that steel is iron with carbon in it. They naturally imagine that the converse is true, i.e. iron is steel without the carbon, and that in some way the early metallurgists "discovered" how to mix iron and carbon to make steel - but nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the historical Iron Age-Dark Age method of smelting iron was to smelt it in charcoal. This naturally tended to impregnate the iron with an enormous quantity of carbonl, so the problem facing the Dark Age smith wasn't how to mix carbon and iron to make steel - it was how to get the excess carbon out.

(This was done by a process of heating the steel bar which caused the carbon to rise to the surface. The bar was then given a sharp twist, cracking off the surface carbon, and then re-heating it again.)

Therefore, the term "iron" is ambiguous here. Technically, Iron Age iron was really very, very high-carbon steel.

The second thing that most people "know" is that bronze is somehow softer than, or otherwise inferior to, steel. But this isn't necessarily true either: bronze is an alloy that can be made extremely tough. It depends on the quality of the materials and the precise techniques used.

For roleplaying purposes, I suggest dropping the whole concept of iron -v- bronze -v- steel unless you're playing Runequest.

If you want an environment where the dwarfs have metallurgical secrets which are worth going to war over, then you'd be well-advised to say that the dwarfs either (a) have access to exceptional alloying materials (mithril anyone?) or (b) have knowledge of manufacturing processes like nitriding or (c) understand annealing or (d) use techniques like the Dark Age "pattern-forging" method wherein layers of metal that have been heated past the eutectoid point are interleaved with layers that have not to create a material which is tougher and more flexible than a blade made out of either.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Well, my goal is two-fold:

1) Have ancient weapons be mechanically different from modern ones. My friends and I once found an old World War I bayonet in the Vienna Woods. It was fun to play with, but even at that tender age, we could see that a modern bayonet or machete (we were military brats) would be a better weapon. The same effect becomes much more obvious if we jump back to a weapon from the Middle Ages or from Classical times. The cache of weapons hidden on the 7th level of a dungeon that hasn't felt fresh air until the adventurers cracked its seal shouldn't routinely have swords just as good as the ones they brought in.

The bronze vs. steel dichotomy works in that it's a reflection of a real-world technological advance the players will identify with, instead of creating a fantasy metal and insisting that all weapons are forged with it, or with some arcane technique.

2) Dwarves allegedly have some great skill with metal and stone. Mechanically, they're nothing special, unless you're worried about a mineshaft caving in. Giving dwarves a signficant and real world technology as their secret (originally) adds a mythological touch to #1 and makes the stories about dwarves carry some weight. I'd be perfectly happy scrapping every magical/unusual material from my game world to this end.

Neither seems like it's a super-hard goal to accomplish, I just was hoping to get some ideas on how to achieve the ends.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Then I'd say that's simpler. How about the real-world historical parallel of the Crusades?

On the one side, you have the Turks. Generally Moslem, often tolerant of other religions, often educated and literate, understood the need for personal hygiene. On the other side, you had the Franks. Generally Christian, religiously intolerant, mostly illiterate, bathed (according to historical records) not more than once a week or so (which meant they died in droves of assorted diseases when they got to the Holy Land). But, the Franks had been fighting each other for an awful lot of generations and their weapons and military techniques were the end product of a very, very long arms race.

The Franks wear proper mailshirts, while the easterners tend to rely on leather and lamellar products which are cheaper to make and lighter and cooler to wear, so the Frankish armourers produce better mail just through practise.

The Franks swing straight-bladed pattern-forged swords. The amount of metal and the sheer effort involved in forging one of these weapons meant that the average Frankish sword costs more than a house. The easterners use wavy-bladed things designed as a weapon of last resort for a horseman.

The Franks fight in formation, using military techniques that survived from Roman days. The easterners fight in a sort of rabble.

When the First Crusade hit the Holy Land, the Moslems didn't have the faintest idea what had hit them. There were only a few thousand Franks, and yet through a mixture of ferocity, treachery, luck, and unbelievable brutality, they marched directly through all the major cities in the Holy Land, up to the gates of the Holy City of Jerusalem, besieged it, captured it, slaughtered almost all the inhabitants and set up a Christian as King.

If you make your "ancients" the historical equivalent of Moslems, you can portray them as a people with a good understanding of medicine and astronomy and mathematics who wrought wonders of architecture etc. (hence your dungeons) - but were easily subjugated and assimilated by the invaders.

Give the "ancients" recurved short bows, curved scimitars, crescent axes and lamellar, and the "invader" peoples crossbows, straight-bladed swords, Viking-style Dane Axes, mail and plate armour, and maces. The "ancients" had robes and togas while the "invaders" had tunics and doublets. The "ancients" were bearded and dark-skinned and cultured, the "invaders" mostly clean-shaven and pale and thuggish.

It's got a decent grounding in history, so the different styles are quite easy to imagine (and you could also find appropriate illustrations easily enough).

For the dwarfs, the easy answer is that their hills contain sources of tungsten and titanium (hey, it's fantasy) that they can mine.

 

[John Morrow]

The second thing that most people "know" is that bronze is somehow softer than, or otherwise inferior to, steel. But this isn't necessarily true either: bronze is an alloy that can be made extremely tough. It depends on the quality of the materials and the precise techniques used.

That's because people are looking for a ready reason why the Iron Age replaced the Bronze Age and it makes sense to assume that the Iron was better. There reality, as I understand it from reading about Bronze Age weaponry, is that the early Iron was either only about as good as or even inferior to the Bronze but the Bronze was an allow that required Tin and both Copper and Tin were much harder to get than Iron, which was relatively easy to find and process. Basically, the key wasn't that the early Iron was superior to the Bronze but that it was a lot more plentiful and cheaper than Bronze.

That's not to say that Bronze is perfect, however. A Bronze sword can easily bend into a nice right angle if it hits another Bronze sword, bone or metal (they demonstrated this in a documentary that came out about when the movie Troy was released by hitting a pig carcass with the sword). I think there are accounts in Bronze Age stories of people bending their swords back into shape with their feet. The early iron wasn't much better because it had other problems with breaking. Steel, on the other hand, and particularly the multi-layered steel like the Japanese and later Europeans produced, is quite a bit superior because it has a softer Iron core which gives the blade some flexibility and bend while having a high-carbon outer surface that can hold a razor sharp edge.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The legacy of the ancients is a D&D staple. I mean there all these underground fortifications AKA dungeons right? And they're well stocked with magic items and gold and so forth. With the greater availability of magic items on the surface it's perhaps been lessened in 3rd ed but it's an important part of both Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. Possibly Eberron too, I'm not sure if the civilisation of the giants had better stuff or not.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The legacy of the ancients is a D&D staple. I mean there all these underground fortifications AKA dungeons right? And they're well stocked with magic items and gold and so forth. With the greater availability of magic items on the surface it's perhaps been lessened in 3rd ed but it's an important part of both Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. Possibly Eberron too, I'm not sure if the civilisation of the giants had better stuff or not.

But does that presuppose that the modern day has been wholy unable to improve upon what the ancients could do? That there's nothing better than maybe one day wholly recreating what the ancients had?

That's great for a Dark Ages style game, but that's not really what my preference is, nor can I believe it's universally shared otherwise.

 

[VirgilCaine]

What most people "know" is that steel is iron with carbon in it. They naturally imagine that the converse is true, i.e. iron is steel without the carbon, and that in some way the early metallurgists "discovered" how to mix iron and carbon to make steel - but nothing could be further from the truth.

For roleplaying purposes, I suggest dropping the whole concept of iron -v- bronze -v- steel unless you're playing Runequest.

I thought iron was iron and you add carbon to get steel.
But anyway, I won't worry about bronze vs. iron vs. steel in D&D anymore. Thanks.

But, um, what about bone and stone vs. metal?

 

[S'mon]

Papers & Paychecks - very cool posts, thanks! I've always been annoyed by stuff in modules about how bronze weapons and armour have loads of penalties vs the modern steel version - I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure that bronze went out of fashion because it was far more expensive, not because it was crap.

Whizbang - nothing wrong with a 'world of progress' setting, of course, and military technology is one of the few things that pretty reliably improves over time, surviving even civilisational collapse. So maybe all the Ancient Empire's magic swords were shortswords, Roman-style gladiuses/gladii. Maybe the best and heaviest armour they produced was scalemail. They never invented the compound bow or longbow (or crossbow of course), just regular shortbows. No need to make their scalemail inferior to the modern version, just make it scalemail.