There are countless small drekir societies, bands, chiefdoms, and tribes mainly, that are spread out across many of the planar and have over the years developed their own very distinct material cultures and tool traditions that befit those environments. So this page is not talking about any singular or particular culture, but rather general trends in the types of materials and tools used by drekir. This can have understandable variations in specifics, techniques, etc. The setting is generally inspired by Precolombian indigenous American technologies as well as periods like the late neolithic, middle paleolithic, and chalcolithic of other regions of the world. Expect this to cover general ideas on tools, wares, baskets, pottery, clothing, and the ergonomics of such. For specific tools and tool traditions though, I would refer to specific cultures! This is more to talk about materials. See these as guidelines to explain these technologies.
Mundane and Magical Tool, Jewelry and Ware Materials
There are a lot of different materials that see common adoption across a lot of drekir cultures all over the DragonScape, both familiar to us, mundane and magical and so this isn’t going to talk about every type of stone, but generalities in the materials that one may find in a culture and the general processes in how its turned from a raw material into a tool and/or jewelry and/or object.
Knapped Stone Industries
Perhaps one of the most widespread, next to copper metallurgy, is the creation of lithic tools and jewelry through the process of knapping. Stones such as Chert, Obsidian, Chalcedony, Basalt, Agate, Glass, Quartzite, Flint, etc. As well as mana based spellithics such as manachert, spellglass, etc.
Most all drekir, be they survivors of the initial sivilão scattering or the humans turned awakening drekir 100 years later, are generally not folks with much if any knapping experience, let alone generations of flintknapping tradition.
So most of the knapped lithic industries that develop tend to begin in the early experimentation of knapped lithics by drekir survivors, desperate to make blades that wind up discovering and producing opportunistic flakes.
Knapping relies on fine grained, high silica stones that fracture conchoidally producing microscopically thin feather fractures that are extremely sharp. These fractures can be somewhat predictable and the razor edges these fractures produce can create very effective tools. Most people may imagine Biface technology when they think of a lithic arrowhead, knife, etc. Though the lithic technologies of the drekir are often notably different.
And so these often will begin to develop into more intricate flake and core technologies. Where drekir construct tools off of the razor sharp flakes they strike off of a variety of different cores. There are generally 4 broad types of flintknapping cores that are created by drekir to produce favorable flakes.
Opportunistic cores Are generally where early survivors start, simply you find a rock, you break a rock without much preparation or forethought. The sharp flakes you get are what you get.
Conchoidal/Bifacial cores Are simple in which the knapper selects a core and strikes off a flake, the core is then flipped over to the other side and that prior flake scare is used as the platform to knock off another large flake, that flake is removed, you flip the core over and repeat that process. Over time producing a self sustaining core that will produce a varied array of reasonably large flakes. This is a simple process that gives a knapper some light control in the flakes they produce and allows for a variety of flakes that can be turned into cutting blades, projectile points, scrapers, drills, burins, etc. In many drekir cultures, these cores are converted into simple bifacial tools such as handaxes, more on those later.Levallois prepared cores Are more intricate, in which the core is prepared through shaping to preferentially produce a specific shape or type of flake. This can be done to make the core solely for a single optimal flake, or it may be designed to produce multiple flakes.
Unlike non prepared cores and their flakes, these flakes are often more precise triangular, rounded, or squared shapes that are also easily hafted, allowing for the construction of projectile points, knives, spears, wood chopping tools, amongst many other flake tools either without a lot of further modification to the flake.
Prismatic Blade prepared cores Are also intricate prepared cores in which the core is shaped into a long, cylindrical form with a flat top, optimal for producing long, reasonably straight, often pointed double edged flakes that are very effective for making knives, points, drills, burins and many other sorts of tools.
Generally these flake/core strategies are the more common forms of flintknapping rather than the far more familiar bifacial styles of flintknapping we commonly associate with flintknapping.
Bifaces do still appear though, With many bifacial cores being turned into larger tools such as achulean handaxes and bifaced choppers, though there are cultures that make more of the commonly understood bifaced projectile points, knife points, woodworking tools etc.
Spellithics
Spellithics Are also of course a family of simple mana technology that can be made either purely from mana or stabilized via the addition of various powdered silica minerals. Both Spellglass and Manachert are made by compressing pure mana under an intense amount of pressure, often this is done (as most of these) by compressing mana for a prolonged period in a simple press with a heavy amount of rocks.
Spellglass is a potent, intensely sharp glass like material comparable to materials like obsidian or well, glass, presenting extremely sharp edges upon fracturing. Is also very potent in exuding elemental energy meaning it can be elementized to exude intense amount of elemental energy, making it very useful for producing extremely and continuously hot, acidic, or electrified edges in addition to the unelementized, but still very sharp normal edges. However, due to spellglass not being stabilized it is known to sublimate into manafog as a form of rapid corrosion, with most fresh, sharp edges becoming unusable and dull within a week from their forming. This short life tends to limit the use of spellglass to disposable flake tools rather than long term tools.
Manachert is the stabilized type of spellithic, when a source of finely powdered silica is added to the mana (sand, clay, knappable powdered stone, etc.), that silica contains and stabilizes the compressed mana within it creating a sort of seal to keep the mana from sublimating. Manachert, while not as sharp or elementally potent as spellglass, Still can produce razor sharp edges and exudes some degree of elemental energy. It is more comparable to stones like Quartzite, Chert, or Basalt, with varying grades depending on the quality of manufacture that could range from unworkable and grainy to waxy and glass like.
Ground Stone
There are a wide variety of stones that, while not suitable for knapping, can be formed into a variety of shapes, objects, tools and forms through a process of grinding. This is often done through a process of shaping the stone via pecking and breaking before grinding it against an abrasive stone to eventually reach a final shape. While this is a long and painstaking process, it can be done with almost any stone to make beautiful jewelry and decorative objects as well as tools. But the grinding and fine polishing of stone is often more done for decoration rather than for tools as the ease of making knapped manalithics means that having to turn to grounded tools as seen in the prehistory of humanity is not as necessary if natural quality stone cannot be sourced. Moreover many stones that can be polished to beautiful states for jewelry are either not useful as ground stone tools, or rare and seen as too valuable for that. Though there are niche yet also widespread forms of ground stone tools that appear. These are often made for very specific sets of tasks as, depending on the desired tool, a wide variety of common stones can be ground to suit the purpose of that application.
Ground Stone Chisels and Celts are a great example of a widespread form of ground stone tool. With stones such as Granite, Basalt, Jade, Slate, Shale, and other various stones that are painstakingly pecked and shaped, ground, polished, and formed into stout woodworking tools with strong dullish edges that allow for a high degree of force concentration, breaking wood fibers. Various groundstone adzes, axes and chisels are seen throughout the dragonscape for the felling of trees.
Cutting tools made of polished stone are uncommon, mostly adopted in regions where there is both a lack of quality knapping stone and also a lack of mana intensity due to low plant life, mostly meaning extremely cold arctic tundras and ice sheets. But stones such as Shale and Slate can be ground into workably sharp blades that are often made as a means of keeping limited knappable stones and spellithic stocks for more specific uses.
Drekir Metallurgy: The Chalcolithic Expanse
Metallurgy is widespread though rarely is seen on the scale of other technologies. General, more familiar metals that we may associate with metallurgy such as Iron and Steel are both usually unavailable in a native state and require long, intricate processes to smelt and hammer to form usually outpacing the reasonable expectations of the small populations of drekir who themselves possess limited, if any, knowledge of such metallurgy.
But there are many metals that are effective, require less infrastructure to work, and are both easy to begin working and allow for a high expression of skill. The most common metal for tools, wares, and jewelry in the whole of the DragonScape is Copper and particularly native, pure copper that is either scavenged as melted nuggets from ruins, quarried from native copper trapped in rock formations and caves, or more uncommonly smelted copper ore. But due to its widespread and varied use as a metal in many cultures of drekir I wanted to cover it in depth as it becomes the defacto utiliarian metal of the DragonScape, even if it does not see as universal use as lithic and bone implements.
Generally it is shaped into a variety of tools, such as utilitarian knives, blades, projectile points, spearpoints, chisels, adzes, axes, fishing hooks, awls and needles etc. As well as wares such as pots, pans, skillets, bowls, and cups. Finally it is very commonly worked into a variety of artistic mediums such as decorative plates, jewelry and piercings of all sorts, amongst many other utilitarian and decorative tasks.
There are two general methods of shaping copper that are done in the dragonscape, cold hammering and smelting/casting. Though of those two cold hammering is far more common.
Cold hammering is the the act of hammering a metal at room temperature and, thanks to coppers softness, allows one to easily (though laboriously) shape it with a hammerstone and a stone anvil via hammering it into shape. Though due to coppers work hardening eventually making it too brittle to work without breaking, it is generally annealed in a moderately hot source of heat such as a general wood fire, cooled off and then hammered again.
This process is repeated until a general shape is achieved.
There is variation in this process as well, some cultures will hammer a native nugget into a rectangular ‘ingot’ and then hammer that ingot into a final shape. Others hammer the copper into a somewhat flat sheet from which desired shapes are broken out of via sawing with stone (or preferably acidic chert) implements, chiseled out via bone or stone implements, or simply broken via stressing the metal. Once the general tool shape is finished it will usually be ground into a more refined shape and sharpened if needed.
Some cultures will often due Hot hammering (hammering a hot piece of metal), though this is less common due to the difficulty of making tongs that can stand up to prolonged use without very heat resistant metals.
Smelting and Casting is the act of smelting a copper ore to extract the copper from within it and of course can be done to native copper as well. This is done by producing extreme amounts of heat such as with a charcoal or firemana forge, both of which pumped with air via some sort of bellow system, with some sort of crucible to hold and from which to pour the molten copper. A mold of stone, clay, claysand, sand, etc. is prepared with a desired shape imprinted into the mold that is filled with the molten metal that is then left to cool. After it has cooled the shape must be further refined via cold hammering, grinding, and other sharpening/polishing to achieve the final desired shape.
While this method can allow both unfavorably sized pieces of native copper and otherwise useless copper ores to be turned into copper shapes and forms, it does usually take a larger amount of effort, infrastructure, and preperation which tends to make it less common.
This also allows for Bronzes: Such as Tin Bronze, Arsenical Bronze, Aluminum Bronze and other bronzes to be made for a variety of functions! While Bronze objects, tools, weapons, wares, etc. are not as common as copper in the DragonScape, they are highly present in a variety of alloys and styles. But as those can be read about far more readily than most other things, I will hold off here.
Stalndão Copper
Stalndão Copper Is one of the earliest stabilized manametals to appear in most every plane of the DragonScape and is technically an alloy between a small amount of the manametal stãl, less than 3%, with the remainder being copper. It can vary in color from a slightly redder shade of copper to a vibrant red or violet tone depending on how it was made and with what amount of mana.
It is made simply by annealing copper in fire mana repeatedly for several cycles of cold hammering and annealing, through this process the fire mana may resonate a small amount into the metal, stabilizing and alloying with the copper without smelting. Alternatively, stãl can simply be smelted into the copper in the same process as making stãlbronze.
It’s general advantage is in its slightly increased hardness via work hardening and in its ability to be lightly elementized, giving it mild but beneficial magical properties.
Stãlbronze: The Draconic Metal
Stãlbronze is simply a copper alloy involving the compressed mana metal Stãl, and copper! While stãl does not smelt by fire, due to the resonant properties of copper it is known to disperse and mix into molten copper effectively. The copper in turn stabilizes the stãl, preventing it from sublimating out of reality (due to being mana.)
Stãlbronze, while losing the extremely supernatural qualities of pure stãl, does present a very effective bronze that is comparable to aluminum bronze in it’s qualities. It can also be far more logistically straightforward than any other bronze since stãl can be made off of mana alone, but due to the inconsistent manifestation of mana, which comes and goes through reality almost at random, someone looking to make stãlbronze must exploit a mana pool very quickly as, within a few weeks time that mana may well be gone. This problem is compounded by the immense mana cost in making stãl, which may take the valuable resource away from other, more mana efficient crafts such as alchemy.
While simple stãlbronze involves just copper and stãl, over time more intricate and complex alloys would begin to see spread and use, mixing other metals such as tin, nickel, lead, aluminum (while it’s still available in the human ruins of the DragonScape), amongst other metals to create different metals for different practical or aesthetic or symbolic uses.
Other metals worked by the Drekir
Gold and Silver are very commonly worked metals, often in a similar fashion to how that culture works copper. Gold and Silver are almost always used in the creation of artistic and decorative objects as well as in jewelry and luxury goods. Sometimes they are used as alloying metals in the creation of a style of Stãlbronze. A stãlbronze of copper, gold and silver is known to make Ori, a metal particularly potent to magical elementization and alchemical energy allowing very magical, almost enchanted items to be made with the metal.
Aluminum Is a metal found in a pseudo-native state beneath the ruins of the American plane, in which it has melted into large “nuggets” of aluminum that are frequently dug up by drekir peoples of the region. This metal is more typically casted thanks to its low melting temperature and is often used in the production of artistic and decorative objects as well as jewelry and luxury goods.
Lead Is an easily worked and common, but not heavily used metal that is often melted and casted into shape or, if lacking, cold hammered. Its most frequent uses are in more niche applications where its density and weight are useful, such as in fishing weights, tent weights, and in some styles of thrown weighted darts and sling projectiles.
Animal Sourced Organics: Bone, Chitin, and Shells
Organics sourced from animals are a universal and common tool material. Drekir are mesocarnivores and as such eat a lot of meat and, due to that, are left with a lot of animal bones, large plates of insect chitin, and shells in their day to day subsistence in varying amounts.
Combined with the ease of making jewelry and tools out of these materials means that they often appear more commonly than other materials listed as general tool and decorative materials, most commonly piercings for bone and chitin and small cooking vessels for a variety of shells.
Bone
Bone is very useful for making pointed tools such as sewing needles, awls, fishing hooks, spear and projectile points, and as tips for digging sticks as well as edged tools such as knives and scraping tools
Chitin
Chitin, specifically from the exoskeletons of the many varied giant insects and crustaceans of the DragonScape does make a suitable material for making different decorative and utilitarian objects, wares, tools, etc. Often chitin comes in in thin plates and takes an edge well, leading to the most common tools made of it being cutting tools such as knives and blades, projectile and spear points, and types of saws suited for wood.
It can also be molded via heat treating to construct a variety of containers such as buckets, baskets, bowls, trays, and other containers for objects that are not hot. Much like bone it is also a popular medium for making jewelry as well as decorative plates.
Chitin, like other organics is often alchemically treated, this can be done to make it a more effective spring, or to make it heavier, denser, harder or more brittle to make it more suitable for other tools and objects. In many regions it often joins bone as a substitute for metal, with alchemically treated chitin being a specialized minority in a tool industry.
Shells
Shells are often more niche than bones and chitin but nonetheless can be found amongst many coastal people who rely on shellfish as a core part of their subsistence and is often used in very distinct ways. Shells can be used without modification as small vessels for heating things over a fire, for melting glues or cooking small amounts of food and things inbetween. It is also common to grind shells into a gravel or sand for use in construction projects or for stabilizing spellithics. It is sometimes also used for making tools by grinding the shell into shape and/or grinding an edge or point into it. This is often done to make simple cutting tools, scrapers, fishing hooks, points, and other things.
Unlike bone and chitin, seashells tend to not take well to alchemical treatment and tend to not be used in that manner.
. Many larger bones have been worked into smaller woodworking adzes and chisels as well. Bone is also a very suitable, pointy material for making a variety of piercings with bone being perhaps one of the most popular materials for piercing generally speaking. It is also popular for making percussive and wind musical instruments thanks to many bones offering a hollow, tube shape.
Ivory from teeth and tusks from a variety of animals is worth a mention here as, while Antler is not much of a thing in the dragonscape, ivory is and is very useful in making very stalwart impact tools such as chisels, soft hammers for knapping, and punches while also being quite vibrant when polished.
Horn Also deserves a mention due to its unique qualities, while it is often made into various containers, projectile points, and decorative objects. It can be shaped through boiling and forming and is a popular material for the construction of drekir short bows due to its ability to build up elastic energy. When combined with the sometimes large horns of many creatures makes it one of the best materials aside from wood for bow construction.
Bone can also be Alchemically treated to change is qualities, with many tool treatments making bone denser and heavier, making it more suitable for long cutting tools and heftier chopping tools. Though alchemical treatment of bone is done more to achieve these specific tasks as a substitute for knapped lithics or metallurgy as generally its more time and labor effective to use bone as is. It’s already quite effective!
Plant Sourced Organics: Wood and Bamboo
For tool usage its obvious that wood and bamboo would see use for things like hafting. But what about as tool materials in of themselves? In fact for the construction of specific tools using entirely wood or bamboo is a very efficient idea! Though these applications tend to be more niche.
Likewise in many cases these materials are embraced sometimes as much for their abundance and expediency as much or more as for their effectiveness.
All sorts of woods have all sorts of uses, from tool hafting and construction to just, countless things. So this is less to talk about all the potential uses of woods and more to give credit to a few niche tools and applications.One of the most important tools made entirely of wood, and one of the most common, are sharpened digging sticks made of hardwoods.
Simply sharpened, sometimes fire hardened, sticks that are used to displace sediment and soil. Though can serve a lot of uses as prying tools for uprooting edible vegetables or buried desired stones, metals, etc. For prying open large insect nests for harvesting food. They are also useful in generally digging and excavating by loosening up sediments and soils for gathering clay, digging hearths, and even preparing plots of land for agriculture.
Digging sticks really are important
Likewise wood of course is very good for making weapons for hunting or defense. Be it bow, atlatl or a wooden club or staff or be it a sharpened wooden spear, throwing stick, dart, arrow or other projectile, or other weapon for hunting, fishing or fighting. Even things as simple as sharpened wooden stakes, basic hand drills for making fire (or drilling), amongst countless other potential uses for moderately shaped or sharpened sticks. It could be used to make percussion tools like mallets and hammers, etc. Look wood is very useful even on its own.
Though wood tends to not take to alchemical treatment due to its high mana content, it often will cause such a dangerous reaction in the wood as to cause it to explode which, may not be incredibly dangerous in the typical methods of alchemical treatment, does lead to a broken useless piece of wood.
Bamboo
Bamboo and its varieties such as river cane, see very common regularly use across the Dragonscape planar in wherever they appear or where similar plant life appears. Presenting a practically shaped, easily worked and versatile medium for a variety of technologies. Bamboo can also be made extremely sharp which, while dulling quickly, enables a quick and easy to make edge for working soft materials such as meat and soft plant materials. Its also effective at making pointed tools making it effective for everything from stakes to projectiles and spears. With many being quite springy on top of that many are quite good candidates for tools such as bows and crossbow prods. And it coming in a straight, usually tubular line combined with its strong structural integrity makes it well suited towards pipes, structural posts and roofing tiles, as well as projectile shafts for atlatls, bows, and crossbows. It can even be used as containers for various materials, sometimes even as waterproof containers! Its useful stuff!
More particular to the dragonscape, most bamboo and river cane are able to prevent mana from passing between the “rings” of bamboo. Combined with the hollowed tube shape most provide makes bamboo a highly effective material for making Fogmask filters to resist high mana concentrations.
Bamboo moreover takes well to alchemical treatment, allowing for imbued qualities such as increased hardness and edge retention making bamboo more suitable to making edged tools, improving its springiness to make it suited for well, powerful springs! It can even be made to be more difficult to burn making it suitable as a cooking vessel! Its a very flexible medium for alchemical treatment.
Alchemically Treated Organics
As its been mentioned plenty above, is the process of instilling different alchemical and elementized mana mixtures, as well as chemicals and materials, to change the properties of an organic material.
This is often done through exciting mana via causing it to resonate, this is usually done by striking a container full of mana that has a tendency to ring. This is commonly pottery though stone, metal, and glass are also useful. This excited mana is then contained in a basin designed both to sustain the resonance for a time, and to vent some of that resonance out to disperse safely and prevent a warp explosion.
From there an organic material along with some sort of chemical are wrapped in a spell conduit material, most commonly wet clay, and steeped within that resonant chamber, the reality distortion generally causing those materials to meld together and add properties to the target material. This is generally done to augment the capabilities of a material or applying elemental and magical properties. Could be to make a sturdy saw of chitin, a leaf spring made of a bone, a tube of freezing bamboo to serve as a cooler for food, amongst other things. While these materials will degrade rapidly due to the unstable mana that had disrupted their microscopic structures, they can be very useful in the time in which they do exist.
Weaving and Ceramics
Last to mention of all of these tool traditions and industry materials are in regards to Baskets and Ceramics which are both widespread, even if not always universal, amongst drekir societies. Additionally these can and are made by a massive variety of materials and methods, as well as in shapes and forms amongst both utilitarian and artistic mediums.
Ceramics
Ceramics are varied across a variety of wares, structures, containers, jewelry and art. In addition to serving as an important ingredient in a variety of alchemicals. While ceramics are not a universal technology amongst the drekir, often even within planar and continents there is heavy variation in the use of ceramics, they are nonetheless common and used by many drekir societies.
Local clay is often gathered, soaked and mixed before being formed. The most common manner of shaping it into more 3 dimensional shapes such as pots is by rolling it into ‘ropes’ of clay that are then stacked and smoothed on top of eachother until forming something more resembling a pot, bowl, etc. Pottery wheels are notably uncommon in the dragonscape, only being present in a few of the larger urbanized societies in the DragonScape. These are then fired in a variety of ways. It is common to let a pot airdry and then to fire it in a conventional wood fire, but there are also a variety of kilns. Simple pit kilns and kilns of adobe or cob are not unheard of at all in the dragonscape though are far from universal.
Clay, being ever free form in what it may be shaped into, can be formed into countless useful shapes. Utilitarian container and storage vessels, cooking pots and eating wares, water containers and even as an ingredient for structural materials such as adobe. It can also be formed into artistic sculptures and decorative artworks, jewelry etc. With many generally utilitarian ceramics being heavily decorated in a variety of ways and methods! Clay and ceramic technology is far to broad to summarize here.
Basketry Is likewise broad, through the process of weaving (but not always) a variety of storage vessels, eating and cookware, and other such tools can be made in a lot of ways that are all generally effective and exist with a wide variety of regional variation. Basket weaving is itself an even more common industry than ceramics! With many of cultures not making pottery, but indeed making a lot of baskets for various tasks.
Woven baskets are the most familiar and may use a wide variety of materials, an immense variety of grasses, reeds, vines, tree bark and tree limbs, cloth, amongst other varied plant materials may be woven into a variety of baskets of a variety of shapes and purposes. With some woven baskets or “cooking baskets” That can hold water well enough to be used in cooking via the addition of hot rocks to boil said water!
There are also a variety of sheet or bark baskets that are typically made of a variety of tree barks. These are then peeled off of the trees during favorable seasons and then cut, folded, and formed into different containers. This can also include watertight containers that can also be used as cooking baskets as said prior.
Bundle baskets are also a common variety of woven basket that includes the use of cordage or things like pine needles that are bundled and/or braided together that are then wrapped and coiled around and over eachother to form a type of common basket.
Variation in Tool Tradition and Material Culture
You may notice I am not going into wide general statements about how drekir use these materials to make the tools, jewelry, art, and objects that define their respective traditions and cultures. There are just too many drekir societies to possibly make any general statements beyond the broad and vague aspects of how these materials may be formed into different tools, be they magical or mundane. Each drekir society, each of the dens within a clan within a tribe etc. Are going to be faced with different environments, available resources, social and cultural preferences, and other factors that make differences in how drekir use these materials to construct different tools.
A culture like the Broncens may be engaged heavily in metallurgy where as a culture like the Dragons’ve Paradise lacks metal and doesn’t use it, whereas a culture like the Seattlens have access to some metal but see it more as a luxury good rather than a thing to make tools out of. The Dorer of Logáu are heavily involved in ceramics but the Unjar don’t make any such thing and the Meché of the Americas rely heavily on treated bamboo as a substitute for ceramics. Some cultures make adzes and others chisels and others both. So on and so forth, the specific tools and material cultures of any specific drekir culture is best discussed relative to that one. This page is about generalizations, not about universal statements.