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CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 02:47 PM
So I was wondering, what would be a realistic way to build a sewer system in a city built in a swamp? The main idea is that there are wells where people get water, the wells are linked to the same water system, and the wells have purify water enchantments placed on them. There's also canals in the city.

I was thinking that much of the waste goes into the canals, which drains into the ocean, and that there were wizards and dwarven engineers who helped mess with the ground and make channels separating the waste water from the drinking water?

I'm not great at engineering though, which is why I need help with this. I'm thinking of a campaign where the main point is that someone's tampering with the water supply and unleash an epidemic across the city.

scurv
2013-02-24, 03:04 PM
I would look to real world systems on this, But people tend to be squeemish about the thoughts of their wastes being in their water.

Although if you are wanting a sewer system for a city, Just lay it out under the roads (some exceptions to be made most likely) You will be able to put in both the drink water pipes going in, and the waste water pipes leaving.

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 03:05 PM
I would look to real world systems on this, But people tend to be squeemish about the thoughts of their wastes being in their water.

Although if you are wanting a sewer system for a city, Just lay it out under the roads (some exceptions to be made most likely) You will be able to put in both the drink water pipes going in, and the waste water pipes leaving.

The thing is that I don't want it to be too anachronistic, you know? It's magic-based. But thanks.

ArcturusV
2013-02-24, 03:10 PM
The thing is, even with a fantasy setting the important thing to remember is "There is always a lowest bidder". While your dwarves might come up with some way to have a tunnel system beneath the muck of the swamp and purification plant, etc. Or you master mages have found a way to drain sewage into the swamp and purify the swamp into a potable freshwater lake each day.

... or your city might have gone with the guy who just mutated (Possibly by magic), or found a local strain of waterborne critters that eat human garbage and waste and left them in the water to thrive off the city's waste.

scurv
2013-02-24, 03:11 PM
Well, for something like this, gravity is a tool. So water sources can be kept high, Much like water towers, And drainage tends to be in lower area's.
The roman aqueducts might be worth looking in to for this,

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 03:17 PM
Well, for something like this, gravity is a tool. So water sources can be kept high, Much like water towers, And drainage tends to be in lower area's.
The roman aqueducts might be worth looking in to for this,

Hm, that is a possibility...


The thing is, even with a fantasy setting the important thing to remember is "There is always a lowest bidder". While your dwarves might come up with some way to have a tunnel system beneath the muck of the swamp and purification plant, etc. Or you master mages have found a way to drain sewage into the swamp and purify the swamp into a potable freshwater lake each day.

... or your city might have gone with the guy who just mutated (Possibly by magic), or found a local strain of waterborne critters that eat human garbage and waste and left them in the water to thrive off the city's waste.

The person who commissioned the project knew what they were doing and had a very vested interest in making sure the quality was as high as possible.

ArcturusV
2013-02-24, 03:26 PM
Hmm. Though no promises that all that worked on it had the same level of interest and ethic necessarily. "He payed for Mythril pipes? Pssh. Use Pig Iron and pocket the change. MOAR PROFIT!"

Though building on a swamp needs... geeze... so many things. One: A way to drain the swamp in order to actually build a city on it and not just a few huts on bits of dry land. Two: To KEEP draining it constantly. Three: To prevent flooding of the drained area as every time you drain it the land settles lower than the rest of the swamp. And so on. It makes for a city that is kinda set up for failure. If any one thing goes wrong, the swamp reclaims it pretty quickly.

Or you can build it as an elevated city, everything is on stilts and such. In this case the swamp probably SHOULD be your "Sewer" system in effect.

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 03:28 PM
Hmm. Though no promises that all that worked on it had the same level of interest and ethic necessarily. "He payed for Mythril pipes? Pssh. Use Pig Iron and pocket the change. MOAR PROFIT!"

Though building on a swamp needs... geeze... so many things. One: A way to drain the swamp in order to actually build a city on it and not just a few huts on bits of dry land. Two: To KEEP draining it constantly. Three: To prevent flooding of the drained area as every time you drain it the land settles lower than the rest of the swamp. And so on. It makes for a city that is kinda set up for failure. If any one thing goes wrong, the swamp reclaims it pretty quickly.

Or you can build it as an elevated city, everything is on stilts and such. In this case the swamp probably SHOULD be your "Sewer" system in effect.

That's why it took so damn long for someone to figure out how to do it effectively. Plus magic helps, you know?

But thanks, all this advice helps!

mjlush
2013-02-24, 03:57 PM
So I was wondering, what would be a realistic way to build a sewer system in a city built in a swamp?

If the water table is higher than the sewer tunnels there going to be full of water ... worse there not going to have anything to drain into.

This is manageable you can have all the sewers draining into a huge sump and a massive pump to lift the water out into a and channel it out of the city. Great place to have a huge battle!!!!

I remember adlibbing a sewer system and the players caught me on getting the drainage right :-)

Rhynn
2013-02-24, 04:03 PM
Why are your wells so shallow they're using swamp water? If you've got a swamp, you've got groundwater, right? Make the wells deeper, so they tap groundwater. No need for magic water purification. If you need to get some uphill, use pumps and aqueducts (ancient romans had this technology). Then just put sewers under them (again, ancient romans had large sewers; just google "ancient rome sewers" and check the images). The sewers would probably follow the main thoroughfares of the city, possibly with large chambers in intersections (to handle heavy flow from multiple pipes during rainstorms, etc., without overflowing into the streets). Add a lot of small, narrow, difficult-to-navigate side passages and maintenance passages connecting the main passages to each other and to the surface.

I seriously doubt that you'll find any ancient or medieval cities where waste and drinking water flowed together, just for the reason of wells tapping groundwater, while the sewage goes into the nearest river (London didn't get its drinking water from the Thames, that's for sure; well, maybe they partly did, but they knew that it was bad for you, and that's why it was better to drink beer).

You could even add a few connections to the city catacombs, to cellars, and depending on the age of the city, to buried sections of the city that have since been built over...

There, nothing strikingly anachronistic.

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 04:06 PM
Why are your wells so shallow they're using swamp water? If you've got a swamp, you've got groundwater, right? Make the wells deeper, so they tap groundwater. No need for magic water purification. If you need to get some uphill, use pumps and aqueducts (ancient romans had this technology). Then just put sewers under them (again, ancient romans had large sewers; just google "ancient rome sewers" and check the images). The sewers would probably follow the main thoroughfares of the city, possibly with large chambers in intersections (to handle heavy flow from multiple pipes during rainstorms, etc., without overflowing into the streets). Add a lot of small, narrow, difficult-to-navigate side passages and maintenance passages connecting the main passages to each other and to the surface.

I seriously doubt that you'll find any ancient or medieval cities where waste and drinking water flowed together, just for the reason of wells tapping groundwater, while the sewage goes into the nearest river (London didn't get its drinking water from the Thames, that's for sure; well, maybe they partly did, but they knew that it was bad for you, and that's why it was better to drink beer).

You could even add a few connections to the city catacombs, to cellars, and depending on the age of the city, to buried sections of the city that have since been built over...

There, nothing strikingly anachronistic.

This is something that I want to work with in the campaign. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak) But thank you, seriously. You've got some really excellent advice.

Surfnerd
2013-02-24, 10:47 PM
You could also have an old city under the current city. you know before the swamp got so swampy. They could have had already setup systems. Then you just had to extend them from the mucky undercity up into the new city. You could have had the best of the best using the greatest materials back when the city was less submerged and more easily accessible to trade.

Then when the water table began to rise and they spent a fortune building the city up ontop of itself, they had to use the remaining funds to tie into the old piping systems of fresh water and sewage. Maybe not all work across the city was done to the same standards and outbreaks and sickness occur. Then you could have sewage management issues in the undercity. Perhaps with the unreliable water system someone has invested in an above ground aquaduct to bring water to the city for a price.

Its interesting that a war over water could erupt in a city sinking into the muck.

Rhynn
2013-02-24, 11:07 PM
This is something that I want to work with in the campaign. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak) But thank you, seriously. You've got some really excellent advice.

Well, if the water table / aquifer / groundwater is below the sewer, you could have parts of the sewer near some wells where leakage happens into the groundwater, polluting. Or if there's underground piping for some water sources, like wells on high ground or fountains (not anachronistic, again; ancient Rome had fountains that worked on plumbing), the pipes could be contaminated...

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-24, 11:48 PM
Well, if the water table / aquifer / groundwater is below the sewer, you could have parts of the sewer near some wells where leakage happens into the groundwater, polluting. Or if there's underground piping for some water sources, like wells on high ground or fountains (not anachronistic, again; ancient Rome had fountains that worked on plumbing), the pipes could be contaminated...

Perfect. Thank you so much. I really hope this campaign works out...

ArcturusV
2013-02-24, 11:51 PM
And remember a city on swampy ground is a constantly changing place. It may SEEM permanent, but every moment the swamp is trying to reclaim it. No matter how well you build it... eventually the swamp will reclaim it. And no matter how well it's put together, just one thing goes wrong and... poof... major catastrophe.

tbok1992
2013-02-24, 11:59 PM
A bit off topic, but if you're putting a sewer in your campaign, you HAVE to use the Tortle race from Mystara, preferably with most of the members having some levels in Ninja. And maybe add a learned ratfolk in there and a bunch of Broken Ones, for good measure.

Rhynn
2013-02-25, 10:10 AM
Perfect. Thank you so much. I really hope this campaign works out...

You're welcome - it was actually interesting to think about this... I'd absorbed a bunch about Roman plumbing and ancient/medieval sewers, but never really gotten to put it into use. And I can utilize this thinking to some degree for my own Waterdeep campaign's sewers...


And remember a city on swampy ground is a constantly changing place. It may SEEM permanent, but every moment the swamp is trying to reclaim it. No matter how well you build it... eventually the swamp will reclaim it. And no matter how well it's put together, just one thing goes wrong and... poof... major catastrophe.

That would make a really interesting environment! The sewers might even be repurposed old streets, sunken below the current ground level and built over... there could be collapses rooms and walls and ceilings all over, and more collapses might happen at any time... there'd almost definitely be some linkage or overlap to any kind of crypts or catacombs built in the region, and to cellars, castle dungeons, and the like...

You could have a completely non-magical villain (or villains) whose evil plan is to collapse huge parts of the city inside a single day or week, causing untold deaths and destruction. Heck, they could be ridiculously underpowered if they just had good stealth skills, decent speed (or unusual movement modes), and great knowledge of the secret ways of the sewers.

Randel
2013-02-26, 04:34 PM
If I recall, it should be possible to drain swampland by diverting or damming up the river or other water source that leads into it.

Basically, the people who built the city find where all the water is coming from, then divert it away so the swamp dries up. Then they build ditches or canals to the ocean (or just some out of the way place) to ensure the water keeps draining. It could well be that they built the sewer system primarily to drain away the swamp water in the event the water came back (perhaps every year or so in the rainy season, the rivers overflow and the place becomes a swamp again).

So, the city by default is on a dried spot of land that used to be a swamp but every once in a while, the river overflows and floods the place, making it a swamp again. As a result, they have a HUGE sewer system (with the big arching tunnels and the like) which are big enough to divert all that floodwater away. Normally, its pretty empty (so unsavory types slum in it) but during a flood the sewers fill up.

They get their fresh water from the diverted rivers upstream (which themselves come from a mountain or the like). There is still some water purification going on, but not as much as swamp water.

If you want the city to currently be in a swamp... maybe the damm broke or the river got un-diverted and it turned into a swamp again.

They get their water from upstream (maybe using pumps or aquaducts with pipes).

They have a huge sewer system designed to pretty much drain the swamp after flooding.

Most decent buildings have proper foundations or are on stilts so the returning swampwater/floods don't hurt them, but others were built on the ground itself and got flooded when the swamp returned.

Right now, water is pouring in so the area is kinda swampy but the sewer is able to drain the water before it gets to be a problem.


Note: I think that draining swamps was used to get rid of mosquitos that spread malaria. The swampland around the city could be home to nasty things and the people drained the swamp to get rid of them. Something is returning the land to swampland and the over-engineered sewer is whats draining away enough of the water to prevent that.