Lighting

1. Lighting

   #1

   Okay. How do your people see? We in the 21st century take good illumination for granted, allowing us to stay up and active for many more hours than our ancestors. Like so many things in a fantasy, people just kind of gloss over it... or think that candles illuminate like a 100 watt bulb. So how do people light up the night in your setting? How late do they stay up if they can light the night?

2. Balls

   #2

   One magical/ technological item I have had for Elves and Dwarves are Glow Balls. It seems unlikely that Elves would risk fire in their natural environments. It seems unlikely that Dwarves would keep wasting precious oxygen to generate light. So I came up with these solutions.
   
   Elven GlowBalls or Elven Lights are small baseball sized orbs (9 in/ 23cms in circumference). Using a static enchantment, the enhance a stone ball to glow like a firefly, with white/ green light.
   
   DeepLights of the Dwarves are larger (11 in/30 cms in circumference). These are chemical lights mixing sulfer and some mushroom based microbes, if kept warm, will continue to give off an amber glow for quite a while.
   
   Necroballs (from the Nekron thread http://www.rpgcitadel.com/guild/index.php?topic=1798.0) are hybrids between DeepLights and ElvenLights. They are chemicals enhanced by small spells. They give off a deep purple light. The closer they are to a tower (manna transducer, the brighter they glow). They will glow for a while if kept warm away from a tower, but they will eventually extinguish.
   
   Humans just use candles or wasteful wood fires of course. Well that is not true in Antioch, and soon the entire Human part of the Known World. They use sphere lanterns, a design similar to the one created by Leonardo DaVinci. It is a glass globe (usually held up from the ceiling by a macrome/ net mesh), with an interiour globe. (Kind of like a thick C, with the opening to the ceiling. The wick is in the bottom of the interior opening. The clear oil used in the sphere lantern is poured in from a stoppered opening on the top. The oil/ kerosene magnifies the light from the wick, spreading it out into the area. Kind of neat application of the laws of shape and the laws of projection, coupled with an understanding of optics. (Some will have magnifying lenses at the bottom of the spheres to "spotlight" the light.

3. Lighting

   #3

   In one of my settings people use mori rock, a softly glowing mineral that glows brighter when struck against a hard surface, and can be used as a hand held staff or in a larger quantity as a street light.There are several different colours of this rock,and in city street lights each signifies a new area of the city.The rock will not start fires,and if looked after well will last for decades or even centuries before it needs to be replaced.

4. Lighting

   #4

   Whale oil--imagine a whale with a derrick on its head... One city in the Byzant Empire uses natural gas to light up the city streets. Some of the larger Elven homes are open enough to allow a minimum of light to be used within. The Elven Homeland has a nice climate year-round, so spacious homes with lots of windows are feasible. Also, some homes are designed to allow the maximum sun &/or moonlight in, with carefully placed skylights. There have been a few recent discoveries of ancient Dwarven mountain kingdoms (lost during the oppression by the Olde Empire), that used a form of fiber optics to channel light throughout. Mostly, everyone just uses good old fashioned fire for light, whether in the form of kerosene, coal, whale oil, candles, or wood. Throughout much of the more heavily Gothic cities of Formour and Byzant, the cities are lit most of the night by shops open late, with normal flames (lamps, et al) providing enough light to navigate to it.

5. Lighting

   #5

   In one of my settings, weak wizards could find a good job at going around town, and lighting 'lanterns', i.e. rocks on pillars, with a Continual Light Spell. That spell would make them glow for several days, and if the wizard was especially successful (critical success) they'd most likely become permanent.
   In the worse parts of town, the lighting tends to be more sparse, as most of the 'fireflies', as they are called, don't go there, run through there lighting a few lights, or get mugged/beaten/whatever on their way (being a wizard who lights steet lights implies that you don't have the magical power for a better job).

6. Lighting

   #6

   In a realm I was contemplating, where magic is just another skill, low level spells are pretty common, and just about anyone with a brain has one to three of them that fit their job, many people would have "Light 1". While this would normally create a ball of light suitable for reading for an hour or so, if cast upon a prepared globe, it would last for many hours.

7. Lighting

   #7

   I was just thinking, if there is a relationship between magic using and showmen/ entertainers (so magic would generally be pretty weak), then there might be an entire "class"/ profession of magic users who do nothing but stage craft magic. These guys would cast a light spell on a mirror, and use their control over it to run the "lighting" for a show.
   
   An interesting thought. Hmmm. This is one I have to contemplate more.

8. Lighting

   #8

   There's a magical tradition in the works for an upcomming book along these lines. From a non-magical viewer's perspective, there isn't a difference between pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and summoning that same beast via a magic circle. If anything, the stage magician's "spell" appears more magical due to the theatrical flourishes, as opposed to spending hours carefully drawing a circle, encoding the sigils, and chanting for an even greater period just so that a rabbit "happens" along & hops into the circle.
   
   As for using magic to enhance other types of theatrical performances, such as a play or a band, this is an interesting new twist, and one I need to think about further...

9. Gas Lamps

   #9

   These are not the gas lamps you are thinking of. Every building has a steam boiler to generate hot water and steam for heating and other purposes. So every compound will have its own lighting system.
   
   The steam heats coils in a glass "jar". The "air" inside the jar is a combination of noble gases and some base chemicals. When the gas is heated enough, it begins to glow. Thus there will be streetlights, house lights, and hall lights, in most buildings and compounds that have a boiler.
   
   In most cases, these lights are not used in personal spaces. It is only recently that shutter systems are used to cut off these "lamps".

10. Lighting

    #10

    Dungeoneer's flashlight Agar
    « Details
    Main Cat:Items
    Cat 1:Tools
    Cat 2: Magical
    Submitted: Nov 20, 2003 11:45
    Updated: Oct 28, 2005 21:47
    Comments: 3
    Views: 1050
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    ID: 371
    Votes / Rating: 4 / 3.5
    
    
    If you don't already know about this classic innovation, you really need to.

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