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Mixing time periods

Has anyone mixed time periods while worldbuilding and had it work out well for them? I mean taking aspects of different time periods and creating a whole new world based on a little of this and a little of that.

My current ideas are: Vikings but also pirates and also Victorian and make it steampunk, clockpunk or dieselpunk, whichever works best. Floating cities optional.

Thoughts?
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Oh...I suspect that has been done. I've seen space shows based on pirates and victorian era stuff. And yes, it worked out well.

But, even our own world is full of those who are far removed from others in way of technology and culture. I dont think you would have much to worry about in saying what if this.

In my own story, I am do not have this, but somehow, my ships styles have crossed a few hundred years innovation. I am hoping no one will notice.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
My 'Empire' series does this to an extent. The Solarian Empire spans literally thousands of miles, incorporating multiple cultures at different technological stages of development.

Kheff might as well be ancient Egypt, a land where time sort of stopped in the bronze age.

Niteroi is a sort of imperial Roman era slave state, where wealth is measured in slaves.

Avar is more or less feudal western Europe, a realm of knights and serfs.

Carbone is renowned for its scholars and sorcerers - kind of sort of ancient Greece. Their work led to medical advances like crude inoculations and spyglasses, along with sophisticated engineering principles.

Equitant, founded by discharged soldiers given land deemed worthless, transformed into a center of technological innovation. Their artisans created everything from music boxes to printing presses to semaphore towers to bicycles. The lords of the slave states deemed these mechanical wonders a threat to their way of life and employed heavy handed measures to keep most of them confined to Equitant for centuries.
 
If you’re asking has anyone in general mixed time periods then manga / anime would be a great example. Studio Ghibli mix up European and Japanese culture to make this steampunk hybrid and it works really well. Floating cities always make me think of Laputa Castle in the Sky. I’ve seen loads of anime that has been inspired by Victorian and Edwardian England, and it’s mad but they somehow make it work.

I have mixed up time periods or cultures using Norse / Viking, Celtic and Old English, but they have definite crossovers, as it’s from a similar region, and there would have been (and still is) and that mixing of cultures irl.
 

BearBear

Archmage
Has anyone mixed time periods while worldbuilding and had it work out well for them? I mean taking aspects of different time periods and creating a whole new world based on a little of this and a little of that.

My current ideas are: Vikings but also pirates and also Victorian and make it steampunk, clockpunk or dieselpunk, whichever works best. Floating cities optional.

Thoughts?
Absolutely and it's fine as long as the advanced civilization has the moral fortitude not to interfere with the less advanced races. Even so, it's not always easy to just rout out entrenched tribes using guerrilla warfare with poison tipped darts or crafty pirates using reasonably intelligent tactics like fast ships, traps, suprise boardings, improvised explosives and ambushes.
 
Absolutely and it's fine as long as the advanced civilization has the moral fortitude not to interfere with the less advanced races. Even so, it's not always easy to just rout out entrenched tribes using guerrilla warfare with poison tipped darts or crafty pirates using reasonably intelligent tactics like fast ships, traps, suprise boardings, improvised explosives and ambushes.
I was actually thinking that the countries wouldn't be far apart technologically, but that I could mix elements of the various time periods and cultures into one roughly equal world.

Imagine if the ancient Egyptians were never defeated by Rome and they survived to have electricity but the culture stayed mostly the same and just kept up technologically with the rest of the world without changing any more than necessary.

Or, a world that evolved differently from ours and ended up ahead in some areas but behind on others. Electricity? Yes. Internal combustion engine? No. Floating cities? Yes. Internet? No. Kind of like how Star Wars is so advanced but still has glorified sword-fighting.
 

BearBear

Archmage
I was actually thinking that the countries wouldn't be far apart technologically, but that I could mix elements of the various time periods and cultures into one roughly equal world.

Imagine if the ancient Egyptians were never defeated by Rome and they survived to have electricity but the culture stayed mostly the same and just kept up technologically with the rest of the world without changing any more than necessary.

Or, a world that evolved differently from ours and ended up ahead in some areas but behind on others. Electricity? Yes. Internal combustion engine? No. Floating cities? Yes. Internet? No. Kind of like how Star Wars is so advanced but still has glorified sword-fighting.
I don't see any issues
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I was actually thinking that the countries wouldn't be far apart technologically, but that I could mix elements of the various time periods and cultures into one roughly equal world.

Imagine if the ancient Egyptians were never defeated by Rome and they survived to have electricity but the culture stayed mostly the same and just kept up technologically with the rest of the world without changing any more than necessary.

Or, a world that evolved differently from ours and ended up ahead in some areas but behind on others. Electricity? Yes. Internal combustion engine? No. Floating cities? Yes. Internet? No. Kind of like how Star Wars is so advanced but still has glorified sword-fighting.
You get into a problem here. Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and what not were to a greater or lesser extent, slave states. The people in charge - those with money - measured at least part of their wealth in the number of slaves they owned. Anything that threatened the value of those slaves - like technology that reduced the number of slaves needed to perform a given task - was intolerable. These societies did have the potential to become technological societies, after a fashion. But that potential was deliberately suppressed.

This is one of the issues I dealt with in my 'Empire' series.

Niteroi was a slave state. It's rulers, the Maximus, sat the imperial throne more than once - and when in power suppressed anything that might threaten that system.

Equitant was founded by discharged veterans who were offered plots of land in a temperate forest at the edge of civilization. They pretty much had to make everything themselves, which turned them into skilled artisans. For a long, long while, that was Equitant's reputation - an edge of nowhere province with talented artisans. Then daring merchants started bringing artistic curios to Equitant. The artisans improved these devices, added their own flares, sold them back down south. At this point, the *real* powers that be could tolerate these innovations as exotic toys or curiosities with specialized use even as the empire unravelled.

Then, after a long period of turmoil (and more than a few short lived imperial dynasties), Emperor Fabius took the throne. His family was neck deep in the trade with Equitant. Unlike the Maximus clan, Fabius saw innovation, properly constrained, as a good thing. He brought together Carbone's academics and Equitant's artisans. In short order, they produced slews of inventions and innovations, most of which were immediately placed under direct Church/State control - most notably semaphore towers and printing presses. Items like spyglasses and clockworks were tolerated as curios. Other devices - mechanisms for digging and agricultural work - were suppressed - at least outside of Equitant and a few other places. This situation persisted for centuries - until the Traag war came along, and the Empire needed every advantage it could get, including Equitant's previously suppressed wonders.
 

BearBear

Archmage
Anything that threatened the value of those slaves - like technology that reduced the number of slaves needed to perform a given task - was intolerable.

I fundamentally disagree. The slave state of the modern era is alive and well both figuratively and actually. We use slaves even more ruthlessly than we ever have, by turning them into a multi-billion dollar business over and over again. Human trafficking, mining, farming, service industry.

A slave is defined as a person who is owned by another person and can be sold at their will. By employing a third world country to extract lithium, cobalt, nickle, etc through the use of indentured servants, child labor, and actual slaves, you are in fact an indirect slave owner. The value of slaves is not in danger.

The slaves are alive and well and just as necessary, they've only been hidden in larger industrial added value, cost reduced process.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I fundamentally disagree. The slave state of the modern era is alive and well both figuratively and actually. We use slaves even more ruthlessly than we ever have, by turning them into a multi-billion dollar business over and over again. Human trafficking, mining, farming, service industry.

A slave is defined as a person who is owned by another person and can be sold at their will. By employing a third world country to extract lithium, cobalt, nickle, etc through the use of indentured servants, child labor, and actual slaves, you are in fact an indirect slave owner. The value of slaves is not in danger.

The slaves are alive and well and just as necessary, they've only been hidden in larger industrial added value, cost reduced process.
Different story in the ancient world. There was a deliberate choice made on the part of the reigning authorities to suppress technological development because that threatened the value of their slaves.

It is a somewhat different story in the present era.
 
You get into a problem here. (cropped the rest because it was long)
That would be a good argument for not copying the countries and cultures directly, but making something with a similar feel. I'm more drawn to aesthetics than details and could make some sacrifices since accuracy isn't the goal. Also, BearBear does have a good point.
 

Queshire

Auror
This sort of stuff is the bread and butter of my world building, though I tend to look at specific elements that interest me and reskin them to fit the aesthetic I'm using. For example, one of my countries has a Princess that's technically the head of the country, but for all practical purposes the real head of the country for the last few centuries has been a line of Archmages. This is based off of a shogunate era Japan which still had an Emperor even though it was the Shogun who ruled. Another country heavily utilizes magitech. I've loosely based their history on the Russian revolution that saw the end of the Tsars.

Personally magic can be pretty useful when mixing together aesthetics. If the Viking's native rune carving or whatever takes care of their needs then they'd have less of a reason to care about the other country's steampunk technology.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
If necessity is the mother of invention, and magic takes away necessity...it might leave less technologically advanced than others.
 
Vikings but also pirates and also Victorian and make it steampunk, clockpunk or dieselpunk, whichever works best. Floating cities optional.
It very much depends on what you actually mean by those words.

Pirates have been around from ancient times right up until today. A pirate is just someone with a boat who robs people. Same with a Viking. I wouldn't be surprised if Viking is a relatively modern term (skip.knox probably knows and I'm sure he'll correct me...) for people from Northern countries who raided and traded with the rest of europe. Mainly coming from the sea, but they also travelled overland.

There is nothing stopping you from combining them. Just make sure you combine them in a logical way. If you have a steampunk setting, then that probably influences the ships pirates use. And the sort of things they like stealing (oil tankers are popular for modern pirates for instance...).
 
I also just uploaded a picture to the gallery that's essentially a la
If necessity is the mother of invention, and magic takes away necessity...it might leave less technologically advanced than others.
An interesting point. And then there more vs less religious cultures could add wrinkles. Maybe a more religious culture would shun magic as blasphemy while a more open culture just uses it because it works and makes things easier, so why worry?

Or a culture very proud of its science refuses to use something as untamed as magic but a culture with a very old religious tradition of using magic would rely on it and be more faith-based than determined to solve all the mysteries of the universe.

Or a culture that did use magic overreached their ability to control it and had a Chernobyl-like disaster so now all use of magic is either banned or very restricted and regulated. The general population probably fears it while some royal's going to take the throne one day determined that it's a good idea to start researching it again.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
>I wouldn't be surprised if Viking is a relatively modern term
"Modern" is a relative term. <g>

It's pretty clear that the sense in which we understand the term dates to the early part of the 19thc. The word itself, and its various cognates, is some centuries older. Determining exactly what contemporaries understood by a particular word is tricky business indeed. In contemporary accounts (e.g, 9thc to 11thc), terms like "Northmen" are common. I don't know I can name a source from that period that uses the word Viking.

(see? that's what you get when you mention a historian by name!)
 
My understanding was that to be ‘Viking’ was to believe in a sort of way of life more than the term describing an entire race, for example you would have the country of Norway, but not all Norwegians would have been ‘Viking’, just a proportion of people and groups who subscribed to living the Viking way, but all Norsemen or Northmen as above mentioned would have at some point had Norse mythology as their main belief system, until Christianity became the presiding belief system.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I hope others who know this time period will chime in here, because I'm late medieval and early modern. Whole different world.

AFAIK, though, there's no such thing as "the Viking way" nor indeed was anyone during those centuries calling anyone a Viking. Vikingr was a verb, but its meaning is hard to interpret and anyway comes from later times. One person might go aboard one ship during one sailing season, and maybe they would loot a few villages. Maybe that same ship would sail the following year, but that one person stayed home. Viking or not Viking?

OTOH, there were hundreds and even thousands who sailed in fleets of long ships, landed in England or France, and actually stayed there over the winter, raiding inland. That fits much closer to the modern notion. Still others left but came back the next year, and the next and the next. But for part of the year they were back home. Then there were invading armies, such as the one that hit northern England in 1066.

You could call any and all of the above Vikings, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify a common way of life across them, or even a common set of values. The place you're most likely to find that would be in the sagas. And in portrayals of the Northmen in Christian chronicles.

Sometimes I think there's a kind of historical sweet spot in documentation, where there's just enough to catch the eye, but not so much as to lead to clarity. We humans love our puzzles, so we keep getting fascinated by the stories. And it always helps if the era is a bit blood-soaked. <g>
 
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