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Yora
2014-05-11, 11:52 AM
The next adventure of my campaign will extensively take place in an old mine. However, it's set in a roughly bronze age environment and all the things I know about mining are from the 1800s onward. There surely wouldn't be minecarts on iron rails and possibly not even standard size posts and beams to hold the walls and ceilings up.
Anyone know something more about the subject to share with me?

JustIgnoreMe
2014-05-11, 12:24 PM
Look at Cornish tin-mines. Tin is part of the bronze process, and the Cornish were mining it for centuries.

Thinker
2014-05-11, 12:54 PM
From the numerous tools and fragments that have been uncovered, it is evident that three methods of mining was used by the Bronze Age people. The simplest employed bone tools, which ranged from the leg and rib bones of cattle, sheep and pigs to the more extravagant antler picks. More than 8 000 such tools have been uncovered, many of them stained green by the copper ores.
Stone hammers, which were really just beach pebbles with signs of heavy hammering on one end, were another tool used, and more than 900 of these have been found.
In addition, fire setting was commonly employed as a way of loosening the rock. Fires were built up against the face and the effect so weakened the rock that it was possible to mine it. Evidence of fire setting has been discovered up to 200 feet down in the tunnels, suggesting that there must have been a strong system of ventilation.

...

Walking through the mine, one is struck by the labyrinth nature of the mine, with its plethora of tunnels and shafts veering off in every direction. Some offshoots are so tiny, measuring just centimetres wide, that it is clear they could only have been worked by the smallest of children. But even the tunnels that constitute the official 200-m-long underground tour are quite compact. The tunnels vary in width, the narrowest being just 5 cm in width and the lowest roof 145 cm high. Indeed, those not overly fond of confined spaces would find the attraction somewhat hair raising.

source: http://www.miningweekly.com/article/a-glimpse-into-bronze-age-copper-mining-2013-10-11


You may want to look into the Great Orme ancient copper mine.

Gildedragon
2014-05-11, 12:55 PM
I know a lot of the process relied on exposed veins of copper/copper-based ores
As such the process was more akin to quarrying
Though tunnel mines were done where the rock was soft enough (bronze wasn't commonly used for mining tools as far as I know)

Coidzor
2014-05-11, 02:25 PM
The next adventure of my campaign will extensively take place in an old mine. However, it's set in a roughly bronze age environment and all the things I know about mining are from the 1800s onward. There surely wouldn't be minecarts on iron rails and possibly not even standard size posts and beams to hold the walls and ceilings up.
Anyone know something more about the subject to share with me?

Is there magic or some kind of natural ability to burrow through stone involved? Or is bronze going to be plentiful enough that they're using bronze tools to mine more copper or tin?

Because right now it sounds like either your characters are going to have to be tiny or something's gotta be altered for this venue to be appropriate.

NomadHunter1985
2014-05-11, 02:35 PM
I agree with Coidzor.

Yora
2014-05-11, 03:22 PM
I looked at some tin mines from just 200 years ago, and even those are really cramped. I don't see how six humans in armor could realistically go down a gnome mine and be able to fight anything. :smallbiggrin:

Normally the advantage of steel is that iron and charcoal are readily available, while copper and especially tin are much harder to get. However the advantage of bronze is that it is much easier to make once you got the ingredients, all you need is a campfire and some clay. Compared to that, making steel of a quality equal or better to decent bronze is really quite high tech and requires a lot more knowledge and technology.

In the setting, gnome (and giants) are the only ones who know how to make good steel. Everyone else can only make copper. Steel weapons and tools can be bought from the gnomes, but are very expensive. While the raw materials for the steel are easy to get, the infrastructure is very expensive and it can't compete with the much more common bronze in economy of scale. Cheap, very low-grade steel could be more readily available, but would actually be inferior to good bronze.
The mine for the adventure lies in a rather remote region and was run as a small scale family business, nowhere near the opperations of the great gnome kingdoms with their iron mines and foundries. But since the miners were still gnomes, they would have had much better chances to buy iron tools from the kingdoms for an affordable price than other people. So even these small mines could make the use of more advanced, steel-based mining methods.

I know that gold nuggets can be found in sandstone made from ancient river and lake beds that have been compacted for millions of years. Unlikely that it will ever come up in the game, but are there other valuable metals or minerals found in relatively soft rocks? Those would be a lot easier to work.

Given that it's a gnome mine, most shafts would be just large enough for humans to crawl on the ground in a single row. However, I think there could also be some larger primary shafts, where they would have transported the ore and rock to the surface, and support beams inside. These could be large enough to allow humans to stand upright and fight normally. And if the hill is sedimentary rock, there could also be natural caves that had been cleared to serve as shortcuts.

Because right now it sounds like either your characters are going to have to be tiny or something's gotta be altered for this venue to be appropriate.
Make it appropriate? Crawling on the ground in single file in an unknown place full of potential dangers doesn't sound just appropriate, but really awesome for an adventure location. :smallbiggrin:

Gildedragon
2014-05-11, 03:29 PM
Silver
Cherts (if you're in a chalcolithic-Iron Age period then stone tools are gonna be somewhat common... And v pretty; steel patterning could be intentionally done to evoke fancy cherts
Meteoric ores (aluminum, iron, etc)
Sulphur
Lead
Antimony (look up Peruvian Bronzes; they aren't tin based but pretty hard anyway)
Quicksilver ore
Magicworldwise: mithril ores
Orichalcum (if it isn't a copper alloy)
Some glow in the dark ore?

Have them hit caverns (if you're in sedimentary soils you're gonna find those anyway)

Oh opals (and other quartzites) and fossils might both be found as well

Coidzor
2014-05-11, 04:12 PM
I looked at some tin mines from just 200 years ago, and even those are really cramped. I don't see how six humans in armor could realistically go down a gnome mine and be able to fight anything. :smallbiggrin:

Normally the advantage of steel is that iron and charcoal are readily available, while copper and especially tin are much harder to get. However the advantage of bronze is that it is much easier to make once you got the ingredients, all you need is a campfire and some clay. Compared to that, making steel of a quality equal or better to decent bronze is really quite high tech and requires a lot more knowledge and technology.

In the setting, gnome (and giants) are the only ones who know how to make good steel. Everyone else can only make copper. Steel weapons and tools can be bought from the gnomes, but are very expensive. While the raw materials for the steel are easy to get, the infrastructure is very expensive and it can't compete with the much more common bronze in economy of scale. Cheap, very low-grade steel could be more readily available, but would actually be inferior to good bronze.
The mine for the adventure lies in a rather remote region and was run as a small scale family business, nowhere near the opperations of the great gnome kingdoms with their iron mines and foundries. But since the miners were still gnomes, they would have had much better chances to buy iron tools from the kingdoms for an affordable price than other people. So even these small mines could make the use of more advanced, steel-based mining methods.

I know that gold nuggets can be found in sandstone made from ancient river and lake beds that have been compacted for millions of years. Unlikely that it will ever come up in the game, but are there other valuable metals or minerals found in relatively soft rocks? Those would be a lot easier to work.

Given that it's a gnome mine, most shafts would be just large enough for humans to crawl on the ground in a single row. However, I think there could also be some larger primary shafts, where they would have transported the ore and rock to the surface, and support beams inside. These could be large enough to allow humans to stand upright and fight normally. And if the hill is sedimentary rock, there could also be natural caves that had been cleared to serve as shortcuts.

Make it appropriate? Crawling on the ground in single file in an unknown place full of potential dangers doesn't sound just appropriate, but really awesome for an adventure location. :smallbiggrin:

I can't see, there's nothing that can move that's interesting to fight, anything interesting would be already excavated or the sort of thing that would make me dead/insane just from getting anywhere near it, and I'm most likely to die of a cave-in or from being stung to death by vermin in a most boring and unsatisfying death. :smalltongue:

An adventure in the dirt and stone where there's not much to do, not much to see, and plenty of ways to die that aren't very interesting seems like not much of an adventure.

Now, taking into account that it's a gnome mine and thus much more technologically advanced than what was originally described, it'll just be really cramped except for whatever larger caves or whathaveyou that have been excavated or struck upon. But then if there's any actual tunnel fighting you run into the problem of having flanderized Tucker's Kobolds into a Rocks Fall situation.

Yora
2014-05-11, 04:37 PM
The place has been abandoned for a century. The reason the PCs go there is to follow a group of bandits who are using slaves to dig up something that has been burried in the mine long ago. There's a dozen of the bandits at the most, who are camping in old storerooms and shouldn't be expecting any attack (unless the PCs make a huge commotion). I expect combat to be mostly throat slitting and grappling or throwing heavy objects down shafts. And if the enslaved gnomes who do the digging can get their chains off, they can help by tuckering on the remaining bandits.
And with all the old mining equipment around, there should be lots of opportunities to cobble together some traps.

Regular 4 on 4 fights in an open room are about the only thing about adventuring that can't be done in such a place.

warty goblin
2014-05-11, 04:42 PM
Normally the advantage of steel is that iron and charcoal are readily available, while copper and especially tin are much harder to get. However the advantage of bronze is that it is much easier to make once you got the ingredients, all you need is a campfire and some clay. Compared to that, making steel of a quality equal or better to decent bronze is really quite high tech and requires a lot more knowledge and technology.


It's a bit more complicated than a campfire and some clay. A woodfire won't get hot enough to melt bronze (let alone copper), so you pretty much need charcoal for that as well. Molds can be clay, but were apparently not infrequently made of stone as well. For casting something thin like a blade, whatever one makes the mold out of needs to be able to be heated up to nearly the same temperature as the molten bronze. Otherwise the metal will solidify before it completely fills the mold, and the casting run is a failure. A mold for a blade poured from the tip or the pommel also needs a vent system to allow air to escape as the bronze is introduced, and needs to be sturdy enough to hold the still molten metal. Molten bronze is almost as fluid as water, but much denser so this is not entirely trivial. Axes were apparently sometimes cast in open stone molds and then hammered into final shape later, which alleviates the structural requirements of the mold, at the expense of more work post-casting.

Even with something cast in a form close to its final version, there's still an enormous amount of work involved in turning it into a useful tool or weapon. The entire piece needs to be cleaned, the bronze that seeps into the vent systems needs to be broken off, and then everything needs a truly substantial amount of hand-polishing. For an edged tool or weapon the edges need to be hammered in at some point; without work-hardening the edges the tool will be too soft to be useful. A sword cast from the point or pommel will need that area recovered to the desired shape, which is also a lot of labor.

And there's a lot of things that are pretty near impossible to cast in the desired form apparently. Anything involving large, thin sheets, such as armor, helmets, shields, etc. Socketed spears are another example; although people did work out how to cast the socket, it was apparently fairly common to forge the socket out as well. These need to be hammered out from ingots. Tin bronze does not forge hot well, so this has to be done cold. Because the metal work-hardens under hammering, this requires frequent annealing runs.

I wouldn't say that traditional bronze working is any simpler than traditional iron-working.

Premier
2014-05-11, 04:49 PM
They're not mines as such, but you should certainly read up on the underground city of Derinkuyu, and other similar sites in Cappadocia. I'm sure you'd find it inspiring.