[Idea Mining] The Giant's Realm

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm developing a piece of fantasy setting, for a game or for fiction I don't know yet, and I'm looking for some help. The concept is a province whose borders are defined by being on top of the corpse of a really big giant. Like, there's a village of Upper Ab, so the distance between the navel and the sternum is about 2.5 miles.

That's also roughly the distance that the belly is from the ground, so unless the giant is sunk into the ground, the people are living at >15k feet above sea level. That's fairly extreme, but there are permanent settlements that high or higher today. The problem is getting up and down the sheer flanks seems like a heroic feat. How doable would that be? Would they have to climb like crazy sherpas? At that scale, would the pores be decent handholds? Might some sort of vast packed-earth ramp have to be put in place (and is that even more fantastic engineering), or is there a better solution I'm not seeing? I'm seeing the giant's hands resting with fingers interlaced on the sternum so maybe you'd just climb the elbow and walk up the slope of the forearm and there are more modest ramps at the wrists?

Another question is: assuming that the giant doesn't rot, how feasible would it be to mine such a carcass for sustenance? Like, instead of agriculture, people dig for skin, fat, and meat? Could that last for generations, or would the corpse be stripped in short order? I'm willing to have the giant covered in a layer of soil for farming, but if meat-mining can work, I'd like to use it.

[Foxwarrior]

That's a puny giant you've got there.

http://chartsbin.com/view/12730 shows meat-eating rates. Given the free supply of meat that somehow isn't rotten, people would probably eat even more than that. Say 300 kg per year because I don't think that's a low estimate. Since this giant is maybe 22 thousand times taller than a human, it has maybe 3*10^14 kilograms of meat. That's 1 trillion person-years of delicious giant-meat.

3 miles is a long way to climb up and down a giant, even if you have a staircase going through the body of the beast.

[Prak]

Someone needs to make this a minecraft mod...

You could also make the giant buried under a lot of rock and soil, so people grow crops, but also mine the mountain for meat.

[shadzar]

afraid to ask... male female or androgynous giant?

have you considered the gender parts yet as to how people would react to those or what not? do they avoid those regions? are there 2 mountain top cities?

dead but not rotting? hey it is your fiction, do what you want. are the nostrils inhabited by nose goblins? do they mine for gold?

is it humanoid? winged? is the giant floating in the ocean like an island? is it clothed?

has the corpse been there long enough for vegetation to start growing on it naturally?

are the eyes opened or closed?

does rainfall collect in the mouth like a giant lake? are there fish in this lake? is a town fishing in Mouth Lake?

any mining (meat or otherwise) under a town would cause it to collapse unless rigormortis has set in to prevent muscular movement/relaxation/tension.

does the head or other areas have hair reaching to the surface of the world/water so that people could braid it into ropes or rope ladders?

does the corpse give off heat for geothermal use?

are you sure it is dead not sleeping? (not you the author, but you the people living on it)

[Winnah]

Depending on your fantasy ecology, there will be limitations on decomposition due to the sheer size of the creature.

Unless you want your civilisation to contend with similarly scaled insect and vertebrate necrophage, the main factors will be autolysis (chemical degredation of remains), putrefication and fermenation (chemical breakdown by microbes). The scale you are talking about will not neccesarily lead to a uniform breakdown of the corpse.

Depending on the age of the remains, you may end up with patches of naturally mummified remains at higher altitudes, or even handwave some partially petrified remains.

The soil can simply be a product of microbes taking advantage of the resource pulse. Keep in mind, that this may cause areas of erosion, particularly on steep areas of the corpse.

As for resources that can be gained from mining...

The giants bones are likely to possess far more strength than any other organic material. Maybe the bone dust is used as a building material, like an additive to super-strength concrete.

There are also likely to be numerous chemical deposits, such as ammonia, sulphides, etc. Depending on the age of the remains, maybe some of these chemicals crystalised and are treated as gemstones, or perhaps they are highly sought by alchemists for various uses.

[angelfromanotherpin]

afraid to ask... male female or androgynous giant?

The safe answer is androgynous... but I instinctively hate the safe answer, so I'll probably go male so it can have a chest forest. I imagine that the junk has a lot of jokes made about it but is actually really boring to look at.

dead but not rotting? hey it is your fiction, do what you want. are the nostrils inhabited by nose goblins? do they mine for gold?

My first thought actually was to have the giant be made of earth and minerals and have the nose be a literal gold mine, but while the nose is totally still going to be a mine, I think the snot's going to just be giant snot and valuable for its own sake. Maybe it has magical properties, maybe it has rare and useful mundane ones, I dunno. I wasn't going to have any goblins, I feel like the giant is fantastic enough for one location.

is it humanoid? winged? is the giant floating in the ocean like an island? is it clothed?

Humanoid, no wings, on solid ground, starkers.

has the corpse been there long enough for vegetation to start growing on it naturally?

I don't know how long that takes, but sure. What kind of vegetation grows on raw leather, anyway?

are the eyes opened or closed?

One is open (there's a scrying facility built over the pupil), one is open and also missing. Legend says it was eaten by an equally titanic raven.

does rainfall collect in the mouth like a giant lake? are there fish in this lake? is a town fishing in Mouth Lake?

I'm pretty sure the rainwater would just go straight down the esophagus, but I'll research what might happen. Honestly, if it filled with drool, that would be pretty awesome.

any mining (meat or otherwise) under a town would cause it to collapse unless rigormortis has set in to prevent muscular movement/relaxation/tension.

Maybe? In any event, I assume that like any mining town, the houses are only near the opening and not actually clustered around it.

does the head or other areas have hair reaching to the surface of the world/water so that people could braid it into ropes or rope ladders?

Hair definitely goes to the ground, but it's probably thick enough that braiding isn't an option for tiny mans.

does the corpse give off heat for geothermal use?

Maybe? Probably a little to help offset the cold from the thin air, but it's not like they have the tech to use the heat for much else.

are you sure it is dead not sleeping? (not you the author, but you the people living on it)

Nobody's really certain, but it's like living near a volcano - what were you planning to do about it?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Depending on your fantasy ecology, there will be limitations on decomposition due to the sheer size of the creature.

Unless you want your civilisation to contend with similarly scaled insect and vertebrate necrophage, the main factors will be autolysis (chemical degredation of remains), putrefication and fermenation (chemical breakdown by microbes). The scale you are talking about will not neccesarily lead to a uniform breakdown of the corpse.

That's very interesting, and while it might be cool to explore if the breakdown period took long enough... it's actually kind of important to me that the giant's state of death be ambiguous. Actual large-scale rotting would be too much of a signifier.

The soil can simply be a product of microbes taking advantage of the resource pulse. Keep in mind, that this may cause areas of erosion, particularly on steep areas of the corpse.

Could you elaborate on the whole 'resource pulse' thing? I don't know the term.

The giants bones are likely to possess far more strength than any other organic material. Maybe the bone dust is used as a building material, like an additive to super-strength concrete.

Oo, that's a good point. I'll have to see where bones are closest to the surface.

There are also likely to be numerous chemical deposits, such as ammonia, sulphides, etc. Depending on the age of the remains, maybe some of these chemicals crystalised and are treated as gemstones, or perhaps they are highly sought by alchemists for various uses.

Can you elaborate on this?

[Winnah]

Resource Pulse:

Probably does not apply. I reread the thread and your initial post.

Most carrion is an emphemeral resource. Things eat it, use it for reproduction and whatever is left tends to break down quickly. As such, there is a lot of competition for this resource, which attracts scavengers, insects, fungi, bacteria and the microbes that create soil. Many of these species are fairly versatile and plastic in their methods for securing as much of this resource as quickly possible.

Given the size of this giant, the whole 'resource pulse' (there is probably a better term for this) aspect of decomposition is a non-issue.

Chemical Deposits:

A lot of chemicals are released as a byproduct of carrion decomposition. The obvious ones are ammonia and hydrosulphides, which create the odour associated with carrion.

While a lot of this material is simply released into the atmosphere, the scale you are talking about brings up the potential for noticable deposits of mineral salts/crystals.

This sort of stuff is used in fertiliser, explosives, treating plant fibres and tanning, as well as metallurgy. An actual chemist gould probably go into more detail.

[Whipstitch]

This is one of those tricky things where for a game, at least, your frame work should likely be based on what you think most players would expect to happen so things seem intuitive. I say that because the fact of the matter is that crazy shit goes down in an ecosystem when extremely large animals die and we don't know a lot about the particulars because such animals are typically some combination of long lived, aquatic or rare. So for various political and technological reasons that means a lot of the in-depth work has only really started in the '80s. So a lot of shit gets a big ol' "It's complicated" even before you factor in the crazy ass scale you're talking about here.

[Vebyast]

Xenoblade Chronicles is extremely relevant here.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Alright, usually Shadzar's ideas are retarded, but you need to have actual magical nose goblins in the setting.

[shadzar]

two villages fighting over the rights of the nose mining. Hoekville and Stimpson Town. and powdered toast man doesnt like them fighting.. he doesn't like it at all!

Steempy you fat bloated eedee-ot, you can go play with your magic nose goblins!

[crasskris]

You'll probably have muscle fiber quarries, where fibers are cut, then yanked free by large animals, e.g. elephants. The nutrient-rich fiber logs can then be transported similar to actual logs, i.e. with carts or via canals cut into the upper skin layer.

Also: icky.

[Sir Neil]

You could read spoilers for the Russian video game Pathologic.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04 ... 1-the-body

[...You Lost Me]

I'm not sure which way you want to take this. My thoughts are either that everything is big, so the giant's cells are bigger than normal, their muscle fibers are larger than normal, etc., but this leads to a problem in that the microscopic components of the giant are actually visible. That's weird.

The alternative is that the giant is composed to similar structures to us, but just more of it. But that rules out the possibility of awesome things like huge muscle fibers (because his would just be similar is size to ours) or huge pores for climbing (because he wouldn't need pores any larger than ours)

Perhaps if you left the dead giant under a gentle repose, you could rule away the rotting problems, but that also gets rid of anything that has to do with decomposition, so no ammonia mines. Perhaps he could just decay really really slowly.

I think this idea is super cool. People would probably scale his body with small pickaxes like bee stingers or something. It'd probably be several hours of grueling climbing, though, so you could have that spaced out with ledges nailed in by locals. His mouth could either drain the water out (urination would be weird though) or just fill up until every rainstorm caused a small flood on the head, leaving Neck Waterfalls.

[wotmaniac]

this thread kinda reminds me of THIS that I ran across a while back.

maybe there might be some stuff in there for you to mine.

[Grek]

So a first approximation would put the giant at 10000 times as big as a human. If his cells are proportionally bigger, that means his average red blood cell is about 7cm in diameter (about three inches) while your average cheek cell is about a half a meter tall.

[Prak]

Likewise any sperm cells left (if the giant were male) would also be roughly half a meter in length. If you're going to put in nose-goblins, you might as well have attack sperm too.

Also, I think that if you do decide to have proportionate cells, they should do something special.

[Winnah]

Staphylococcus would be big enough to munch on iron tools and weapons.

[JigokuBosatsu]

[Prak]

Attack Sperm
Diminutive Aberration
HD: 1/4d8+2 (3 hp)
Initiative: +4
Speed: 5', Swim (tactical*) 100'
Armor Class: 18 (+4 dex, +4 size)
Base Attack/Grapple: +0/-15
Attack: Flagellate +4 m (1)
Full Attack: +4 m (1)
Space/Reach: 1'/0'
Special Attacks: Irritation
Special Qualities: Blindsight 60'
Saves: Fort +2, Ref +4, Will +2
Abilities: Str 4, Dex 18, Con 15, Int -, Wis -, Cha -
Skills: Swim +5
Feats: Weapon Finesse
Environment: Temperate Aquatic
Organization: Load (280 million, see swarms)
Challenge Rating: 1/4
Treasure: none
Alignment: Always Neutral
Advancement: 1/2-2 HD (Small), 3-8 HD (Medium)

Irritation (Ex): Attack sperm, being mindless, are pretty stupid. Because of this, they will try to impregnate any object with a cellular structure or consistency roughly similar to an egg cell. This includes eyes, and really most internal surfaces of an organic body. It's also really disgusting to have a sperm cell the size of a salmon launch itself at your eye or mouth. With a full round action, and a successful attack roll against the target's AC as if the target were three sizes smaller, the attack sperm can deal 1d6 damage, and cause the Sickened condition.


*reduced to a reasonable speed from studies:

"Now some of you may be surprised to learn that if a sperm were the size of a salmon it would be swimming its seven inch journey at five hundred miles per hour. If a sperm were the size of a whale, however, it would be traveling at fifteen thousand miles per hour or Mach 20."

That would be a swim speed of 4,400'.