Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
Huh, post of mine got removed. Weird. Don't even think it was particularly objectionable or controversial... and posts replying to it are still fine. Alright then. Moving on!

I think a big thing to remember about the Ancient world is that we actually have a very narrow window into it; we only see basically the capital city and the main academic/R&D center (I'm not sure exactly what Elpis' real world parallel would be; I kinda default to Oxford or MIT), and every single window into the world outside of that area is through the eyes of either an actual member of the government or an inner-city public servant. So we have very little ability to gauge what greater Ancient society was like, we just never meet someone outside that bubble. The people in the volcano story exist entirely in a faceless, voiceless abstract; all we know is that they exist, so we can read very little into their existence and worldviews from that.

...Well, that they exist, and that vineyards and wineries are a thing. Which feels tongue-in-cheek, but that's actually helpful; the existence of vineyards and wineries confirms the existence of industries that we couldn't necessarily take as a given in a world where everyone can just create things by magic.
Don't forget about the researcher doing experiments by hand in Elpis that are on one of the far off and can't reach due to map boundaries floating islands. Where they're seen as a bunch of weirdos.