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I've been thinking about my setting, and I think I need a better technology level. I've noticed a common anime/JRPG tech level trope, where medieval weapons are mostly the go-to (armor to a somewhat lesser extent), and many things about the world feel medieval, but at the same time there is a lot of modernity to the world (trains, homes and shops that look like something out of a modern US city, very modern looking clothing). A good example of what I'm on about is the anime Fairy Tale. I've seen it in some JRPGs, too. I also like the feel of Eberron. I enjoy many aspects of this tech level, and I want to crib heavily for my setting. Some decisions I've made:
Mass production is a thing. Most of the clothing people wear came out of a factory and was bought in a shop. The same applies to household and recreational goods. T-shirts and jeans (and my favorite, plaid flannel shirts) are pretty common, but the fashion industry is in major swing, and almost everybody can afford to spend on it. A modernish service economy is in unprecedented boom, and agriculture employs very few people. Canning and freezing have been mastered, and food can easily and cheaply be transported worldwide. In most countries, between 70% and 90% of the population is urban, though there are outliers. Poverty is low and the standard of living high. With a crystalline mirror and some magical tinkering, you can create something kinda like a cross between a smartphone and a tablet, and these are gigantically popular. Like, "everybody wants one, and almost everybody can afford one, so it's revolutionizing society" popular.
Magic is prevalent, though only since the Gods were killed (about a century ago). There were spirit casters like Witches, Druids, or Shamans before the Gods died, but they were low in number. These casters still exist, but now Alchemists, Wizards, Arcanists, Magi, and the like also exist. There is no Arcane-Divine magic divide, since God magic and Spirit magic aren't all that different in practice, just in source. Once that divine power entered human hands, the current Golden Age began. This divine power people wields is very dangerous when abused, however. Every government has monster hunters (the Player Characters, basically), who are also tasked with dealing with abuses of this power.
All the weapons of Pathfinder are common. Gunpower is alchemical in origin, will go off when wet, and doesn't cause much fouling or corrosion. Firearms are still a pretty new invention and are slow to reload and gives away a shooters position with a bang and colored smoke, however, and elite warriors like the PCs are way stronger than normal people and can draw bows most couldn't, so archers haven't disappeared yet, but they tend to be seen in elite units (especially since archery takes years to learn, meaning most archers were sporting archers in school [governments tend to encourage that]). The average soldier has a melee weapon or a musket, though many second line and reserve units still issue crossbows. Light and medium armor are used, and a lot of skilled warriors aren't armored at all, but plate armor isn't much of a thing.
I like environmental friendliness, so electricity generated from wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal power is used. Coal was used, but it turns out alchemist's fire is actually a powerful and cheap way to drive a steam engine, so coal isn't seen much. Trains are ubiquitous, but not cars. We don't yet have alchemist's fire engines quite small enough for them (alchemist's fire is cheap and available in massive quantities, but engines burn though it at a massive rate, so miniaturization is a gigantic pain), and electric cars don't have much range do to poor batteries. Currently, almost nobody, even the rich, buys cars, because they just can't go far at all and streets aren't designed to accommodate them. Cable cars are as ubiquitous as trains, and dominate urban transit along with bicycles and, to a declining degree, the horse. Horse transportation is still a big thing in rural areas, the military, and law enforcement. You could use a thunderhorse (kinda like a horse golem), but those are pretty hard to create, so only a few people have them.
Children are required to attend school, and as a general rule if you want to go to university you can. Pretty much everyone is literate, and finding out somebody is illiterate would be a shock, prompting wonders of how somebody can function in society at all.
That's what I have so far. Can you guys ask me questions about the tech level to help me hash out more details? Give opinions?
Since I've been playing Final Fantasy VI recently, I've been taking note of a lot of the little things that help put together the game's mid-to-late-1800s/early-1900s aesthetic. So I'll take a few shots for this.
What's the main method of communication, especially long-range? Have telegraphs/telephones been invented yet - that mirror trick you mentioned, is it available even to non-casters? Or are some/most people still relying on hand-delivered mail (Pony Express type stuff) and messenger birds? Or is it irrelevant due to the easily and cheaply available magical communication that even a mundane person can use? (Though I imagine you still have your Pony Express type transport regardless, for things that aren't just communication/letters/information - shipping packages and the like).
Sea travel. Are most ships still reliant on wind power, or have steamships (or fire-powered ships, as you mentioned alchemist fire-fueled trains) entered the field? Are most ships still wooden, or have metal ships begun to be made on a large scale? Are there submarines - even primitive ones?
On that note, what of air travel? Primitive planes? More advanced ones? Airships? Or is flying still left to winged races, mages, and people who can afford wings of flying and similar magic items?
One of the things that's most telling about FFVI's setting is the ubiquitousness of clocks. Ever notice how there's a clock - either a big grandfather clock, or a little foot-high desk/table/shelf clock - in nearly every building in FFVI? And how if you go back to games like IV and V which are set in more "medieval" settings, there's no clocks anywhere? I'm not necessarily saying fill up your world with Elixir-filled clocks like you're starting a bad game of Oregon Trail, but perhaps might want to look at Wikipedia and TVTropes for some examples of what those eras were like, and just casually mention small things like clocks, clothing, streetside sights, and the like when giving your players scenery descriptions. TVTropes actually has a bit of a convenient list on those pages for common fashion and everyday sights you'd see wandering around an average city in a world set in those eras.
Hope that's a start at least =) I'll be watching this thread, as I've said in many other places recently this is my preferred setting era as well, and am in the process of revamping my own homebrew world in preparation for my next campaign, set deep in the Age of Steam.
What's the main method of communication, especially long-range? Have telegraphs/telephones been invented yet - that mirror trick you mentioned, is it available even to non-casters? Or are some/most people still relying on hand-delivered mail (Pony Express type stuff) and messenger birds? Or is it irrelevant due to the easily and cheaply available magical communication that even a mundane person can use? (Though I imagine you still have your Pony Express type transport regardless, for things that aren't just communication/letters/information - shipping packages and the like).
The mirrors are available to pretty much anyone, and it's had a profound effect on society in the same way that easy internet access and mobile phones have profoundly changed modern society.
The one problem is that the devices rely on magical towers, and those towers are built where the people are. Once you get out into the boonies where there aren't any towers nearby, or if the towers are blocked by terrain or magic, you start to lose access to the information network they tap into.
Sea travel. Are most ships still reliant on wind power, or have steamships (or fire-powered ships, as you mentioned alchemist fire-fueled trains) entered the field? Are most ships still wooden, or have metal ships begun to be made on a large scale? Are there submarines - even primitive ones?
Alchemist fire fueled ships are the most common, usually in paddle wheel configuration. Metal clad wood is the norm for hulls. We do have submarines, but it's a new technology and they have many dangers and limitations.
On that note, what of air travel? Primitive planes? More advanced ones? Airships? Or is flying still left to winged races, mages, and people who can afford wings of flying and similar magic items?
Flying is difficult. Alchemist's fire engines use fuel too rapidly to work for airplanes, and coal isn't powerful enough. There are airships, which work by sucking the air out of the balloon to leave behind a vacuum, which has enough lifting capacity to compensate for the large quantity of alchemist's fire needed. These are used for passenger transit (ships are used about as they are IRL). Drake riders are used as cavalry all the time.
One of the things that's most telling about FFVI's setting is the ubiquitousness of clocks. Ever notice how there's a clock - either a big grandfather clock, or a little foot-high desk/table/shelf clock - in nearly every building in FFVI? And how if you go back to games like IV and V which are set in more "medieval" settings, there's no clocks anywhere? I'm not necessarily saying fill up your world with Elixir-filled clocks like you're starting a bad game of Oregon Trail, but perhaps might want to look at Wikipedia and TVTropes for some examples of what those eras were like. TVTropes actually has a bit of a convenient list on those pages for common fashion and everyday sights you'd see wandering around an average city in a world set in those eras.
I'm actually not a Final Fantasy fan. Never really did anything for me.
Hope that's a start at least =) I'll be watching this thread, as I've said in many other places recently this is my preferred setting era as well, and am in the process of revamping my own homebrew world in preparation for my next campaign, set deep in the Age of Steam.
Thanks!
I'm actually not a Final Fantasy fan. Never really did anything for me.
No worries. Seemed the best example I had on hand.
The tech level you're describing is VERY Final Fantasy. I would have suggested looking to FMA, but you're going for a significantly higher tech level than that.
I tried Final Fantasy 1 or 2, and never really grew to like it. Didn't much bother with the series afterwards. My issue was the combat type. Once I grew out of Pokemon, I didn't much play games with that specific style of combat. I can't remember the last time I played a JRPG, just that this is a tech level that is very common to the genre.
I haven't watched Full Metal Alchemist. There are a lot of animes I haven't seen yet. As a kid, I watched Dragon Ball Z (loved it then, hate it now), Pokemon, Inuyasha, and a couple other animes and read Shonen Jump, then stopped watching anime and reading manga in my teens. I recently started watching anime again, and I'm liking it, but because of school I've only watched a few. So, my anime-fu is actually pretty weak, and I don't read manga at all.
My biggest inspiration tech-level wise is Fairy Tale, with a bit of Soul Eater mixed in. I suspect there are parallels to Eberron, but I read much of the setting (I do plan to pick up the main 3.5 book eventually, though. Probably useful for idea mining.). I'm also somewhat inspired by some of the Legend of Zelda iterations.
Though I crib a lot from Fairy Tale in terms of technology level, in terms of tone it doesn't fit my world. I prefer serious and semi-serious campaigns for roleplay, rather than the rambunctious humor, complete oddball characters, screaming out names of all attacks, and general quirkiness of shonen anime. Great in a television show, not what I want at the table. I like my games high powered but gritty in that combat is bloody and extremely graphic, evil people do really messed up things (innocents, including children, get killed or maimed with some frequency), and allies often die. My tone here is that of a world where humans (my world considers elves, orcs, halflings, and the like to be human) have killed the gods, and their spellcasters now wield that divine power themselves (which is how the world got to Pathfinder level magic, which is a fairly new thing in this setting).
This is good in that it has fueled the growth of a high tech world with little poverty and great standards of living, but on the other hand humans don't always use divine power responsibly. In come the PCs, who's job it is to hunt down those who abuse magic in ways that threaten lives. Also, the release of so much divine power into the world has driven the number of monsters through the roof, and the PCs are also tasked with handling monsters who pose a threat. There is also the one god the humans didn't manage to kill, who has gone crazy and is slowly corrupting weak willed humans, created evil cults that cause all sorts of trouble (he dares not manifest in the human world, because they will kill him like they killed the others). The scariest part is that these cults can infest anywhere, including the nicest neighborhoods around. So, life is good, and people like the PCs face down some of the worst horrors that can be imagined in order to keep it so. The quote "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." explains the general idea of the game pretty well.
I'm making a bit of a modification to some of the tech. I've decided that coal and fossil fuel don't exist at all, because the world is only as old as humanity is. Most substances that take millions of years to form exist because the Gods willed it so during creation, but the Gods specifically did not want coal and fossil fuel to exist. We have and use electricity, but batteries aren't very good at the moment, so alchemist's fire engines dominate transportation, except the cable car networks, which use electricity from the power grid to run the cables (here is how a cable car works, for those who don't know. Individual cars do not have engines.). Do to heavy fuel consumption as mentioned above, they are large affairs, so trains, ocean ships, and airships are the default, and airships generally have to refuel during cross ocean journeys. To facilitate that, there are tanker ships that serve as waterborne refueling depots for airships. This means that airships crossing the ocean congregate in specific routes (kind of like having an invisible highway), so that refueling ships can stick to those routes, making everybody's life a bit easier. When airships end up off course and away from these routes, fuel becomes a major issue, and crashes happen. So, airships carry enough life boats for all passengers, and if they are running out of fuel they intentionally land on the ocean so that the passengers can take to the boats and wait for rescue.
Another issue is that alchemist's fire engines aren't as safe as fossil fuel engines. Given the right conditions, it can explode, and alchemist's fire in and of itself is more hazardous to handle than petrol. This is another reason the car hasn't been adopted, along with high fuel consumption. It isn't safe for a non-professional to be working with one of these engines.
Firearms haven't been around very long at all. I am retconning the earlier mention of many soldiers carrying them. It's such a new technology, it is still in the hands of people who made them from scratch. Blackpowder is used instead of alchemical powder, because it has problems and I want it to have problems. With magic crossbows being straight better than regular crossbows and massed formations not being used much (troops tend to fight in scattered units, because a massed formation is a juicy target for mages or explosives, neither of which is hard for a military to come by), there is more hesitancy among militaries to adopt firearms. This will change in the future, and eventually firearms will become dominant, but that is then, and this is now. For the moment, they are quite uncommon, mostly in the hands of experimenters like PC Gunslingers.
The thing to keep in mind about JRPGs (and east-Asian fantasy settings in general) is the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western philosophy. In Eastern philosophy, there is a strong influence of concepts such as Ki, the vital energy of the body, such that attacking with a Sword isn't "just" about the physics of attacking with the weapon itself but also takes on a metaphysical aspect of how you, the wielder, empower the weapon far beyond what would scientifically be accepted as the weapon's physical limitations. This concept has heavily influenced JRPGs such as Final Fantasy in that melee weapons have a far greater effect derived, in part, by the "spiritual conditioning" of the wielder. The sword strikes so hard not because of the physical properties of the sword but, rather, because of the spiritual force behind the attack. This makes them fundamentally different than purely science-based weapons such as firearms and high-tech weaponry which are cold, dispassionate weapons. Consider Obi-Wan's disdain of blasters from Star Wars as primitive, inelegant weapons. You also have the concepts of Taoism which view the universe as an integrated whole and the scientific process of "dividing" the universe into discrete pieces for analysis hampers your connection to the Tao (sometimes translated as Great Integrity). In the philosophy of Taoism, a person is stronger when they integrate and submit themselves to the universal one-ness and their attack carries with it the entire force of the universe. By contrast, by relying on a weapon of science which derives its power from the slicing of reality into bite-sized bits, you carry no more power than the slices perceived to be directly connected to the weapon. There's no philosophical "umph" behind your attack. That's why medieval weapons are the "go-to" even amid all the otherwise modern, nearly-modern, or even beyond-modern technology used for other purposes.
If you want to mimic this concept, I'd suggest giving everyone access to "spiritual powers"...
That certainly explains a lot about anime, but for my own personal setting I like the approach I'm using.
Asian influences are important, though. This is a setting with long range transit and cheap mass communication. It's a global world, and Asian inspired nations are as important within the world as European inspired nations. For that matter, American inspired nations are important, too. I will use the Nyambe: African Adventures setting within my world, with the technology level, political situation, and theology updated to fit in with how I do things (I consider gods and spirits separate things, and spirit magic is how Clerics, Witches, Druids, Inquisitors, and Shamans cast, so we do have Orisha [and also Kami, who I consider more spirit than god in this setting]). Nyambe is an African inspired continent, and it contributes as much to geopolitics as the European, American, and Asian inspired nations do, and is about as wealthy and high tech as those continents are.
Now that I think about it, if we have airships, we have the naval screw. No way we'd have one and not the other. That relegates paddle wheel ships to river and harbor work.
Or you could just reskin the Oma as a bio-airship/personnel transport. Treat them as specially trained/bred/mind controlled beasts of burden that store passengers in their second stomach.
Lot of the "tech" in my world works with biological entities bred for very specific and specialized tasks.
Might not be to your liking, but may inspire.
Or you could just reskin the Oma as a bio-airship/personnel transport. Treat them as specially trained/bred/mind controlled beasts of burden that store passengers in their second stomach.
Lot of the "tech" in my world works with biological entities bred for very specific and specialized tasks.
Might not be to your liking, but may inspire.
This reminds me of the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield. The Germans had steampunk tech, mech-walkers and tanks and various kinds of war robots and such like, but the British in turn had bio-weapons and specially bred weapon- and tool-creatures genetically spliced and designed for various tasks. The titular Leviathan was an enormous whale-like creature that could fly thanks to a large system of gas sacks in its body and was used as a ginormous living air-warship.
If you haven't read it I do recommend it and its sequels Behemoth and Goliath, they're a fun romp through an alternate history of World War 1.
I'll have to give it a shot, sounds like it is definitely right up my alley, so to speak. Thanks!
Is this a campaign world or an idealized world you'd want to live in, 'cuz it sounds as perfect as the Land of Happy.
Sorry, maybe that was too harsh. But do remember a world without strife doesn't NEED heroes.
Is it a world I'd want to live in? Yes. The average civilian actually has it pretty good. The issue is keeping it that way. There's an old quote, misattributed to Orwell, that says "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." That describes the attitude of the setting pretty well. The world itself is pretty happy and well off, but largely because people like the PCs are constantly fighting to keep it that way. The wave of divine power (released by the deaths of so many Gods) flowing into human hands that enabled all this magitech and the explosion in living standards has also driven the monster population sky high and made a lot of them more powerful, some people abuse this divine power in ways so dangerous that they have to be put down, and the one God humans failed to kill is slowly corrupting weak willed humans into violent, sadistic cultists in a long term plan to slowly destabilize the whole system (and if he worms his cult into a major national government...). All of these are problems that fall to the PCs to handle, and the monster problem is of a big enough scale that keeping it contained is actually a major effort that gets a lot of attention. The PC-types (Mythics, basically) are getting run ragged going around dealing with all the higher level stuff, and professional standing militaries are kept around to handle the lower level stuff (the zombies that like to reanimate without a necromancer, hordes of goblins with no visible source, the weaker types of fey [Fey were created to be masters of the world, then lost that position to the human races. They are still pissed off.]). Geopolitics isn't really a focus, but war hasn't been done away with at all, and neither has espionage or sabotage, so those angles could be played up.
Low poverty isn't certain in a world with mass production, just ask our country. Plenty of ways to leave folk behind, economically speaking, despite having the power to feed and shelter all of them. What do the peasants do with their time?
True, but when we look at the US and Western Europe, most in poverty are fed and sheltered, just not very well, and a lot of poor people can afford things like phones. The US has major poverty problems, but it's of a different sort that people starving in the streets. The same is true here. Poverty and wealth inequality are there, but people are still measurably better off than they were before all this stuff with killing Gods, and even the poor can afford to have things a medieval peasant couldn't dream of.
No cars, horses (or mechahorses) as the best ATVs, reliance on railroads, and the like mean there's a huge disparity between the magitech-rich cities and the stone-age wilderness. Farming villages and communities are probably candles in the darkness of a brutal and dark no-man's land. This leads to certain mindsets and mentalities. As well as, from time to time, resentments about the folk who live in the cities.
Doesn't help that the outskirts attract a lot of the increased monster population, and that the city folk are more numerous than rural folk. It's also like the modern US where the actual farmers are actually pretty well off, but their hired help is much less so, but most rural folk aren't actually working in agriculture. Given that there are so many monsters hanging about, the PCs end up around these parts with some frequency.
If electricity is used, perhaps complete with steampunk impossibility tech, how is it generated? Lots of little tiny dynamos/generators that can be set up all over or big giant generators that can be sabotaged to widespread effect?
Depends on the source. If it's hydro, it's one big dam that could be blown to absolutely devastating effect. If it's wind? Pretty decentralized. Solar can be either, depending on type of generator.
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I tried Final Fantasy 1 or 2, and never really grew to like it. Didn't much bother with the series afterwards.
Yeah, I didn't much care for FF1/2 myself.
My issue was the combat type. Once I grew out of Pokemon, I didn't much play games with that specific style of combat. I can't remember the last time I played a JRPG, just that this is a tech level that is very common to the genre.
Fair enough, that combat system is in all of the Final fantasy games I an think of except for Tactics, and some of the really new ones have things a bit different too I suppose. IMO if you play most Final Fantasy games, you're playing it for the plot, not the combat system. But yes, the tech level you describe is VERY Final Fantasy.
I haven't watched Full Metal Alchemist. There are a lot of animes I haven't seen yet. As a kid, I watched Dragon Ball Z (loved it then, hate it now), Pokemon, Inuyasha, and a couple other animes and read Shonen Jump, then stopped watching anime and reading manga in my teens. I recently started watching anime again, and I'm liking it, but because of school I've only watched a few. So, my anime-fu is actually pretty weak, and I don't read manga at all.
My biggest inspiration tech-level wise is Fairy Tale, with a bit of Soul Eater mixed in. I suspect there are parallels to Eberron, but I read much of the setting (I do plan to pick up the main 3.5 book eventually, though. Probably useful for idea mining.). I'm also somewhat inspired by some of the Legend of Zelda iterations.
Though I crib a lot from Fairy Tale in terms of technology level, in terms of tone it doesn't fit my world. I prefer serious and semi-serious campaigns for roleplay, rather than the rambunctious humor, complete oddball characters, screaming out names of all attacks, and general quirkiness of shonen anime. Great in a television show, not what I want at the table. I like my games high powered but gritty in that combat is bloody and extremely graphic, evil people do really messed up things (innocents, including children, get killed or maimed with some frequency), and allies often die. My tone here is that of a world where humans (my world considers elves, orcs, halflings, and the like to be human) have killed the gods, and their spellcasters now wield that divine power themselves (which is how the world got to Pathfinder level magic, which is a fairly new thing in this setting).
From what you've said here, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood has the sort of tone you're referring to. Its the level is mostly world war 1 though; with a few exceptions which are well beyond what we can do today - Fully functional metal prosthetics hooked into your nervous system; and some very odd science based on human experimentation.
This is good in that it has fueled the growth of a high tech world with little poverty and great standards of living, but on the other hand humans don't always use divine power responsibly. In come the PCs, who's job it is to hunt down those who abuse magic in ways that threaten lives. Also, the release of so much divine power into the world has driven the number of monsters through the roof, and the PCs are also tasked with handling monsters who pose a threat. There is also the one god the humans didn't manage to kill, who has gone crazy and is slowly corrupting weak willed humans, created evil cults that cause all sorts of trouble (he dares not manifest in the human world, because they will kill him like they killed the others). The scariest part is that these cults can infest anywhere, including the nicest neighborhoods around. So, life is good, and people like the PCs face down some of the worst horrors that can be imagined in order to keep it so. The quote "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." explains the general idea of the game pretty well.
Yep. Lots of the themes you're describing are very FMA:B, and the tech level you're describing is very FF.
I would definitely suggest checking This out. It's not Pathfinder, but it is d20, so I imagine thee is a lot you could pull from it.
Hmm. I'll see about trying out Fullmetal Alchemist once I get caught up with Fairy Tail. I have a lot of animes on my to-watch list already, though. Might give FF another chance some day, but I have a lot of entertainment on my plate right now.
I will definately see if FF D20 has anything I could borrow.
I got into a thought exercise on using compound bows in a military sense over at Giantitp. We have the tech to build them. End result was that if you issue them to soldiers, you can have a city slicker who's never touched a bow before shooting with range, accuracy, and penetration compared to an English lowbowman of old in a six month regime of basic and infantry training. With professional armies that fight in scattered units rather than mass formations, the advantages and disadvantages of these weapons beat out those of a modern crossbow or arquebus. Problem is, the pulleys are ugly compared to a bow of old. So, in comes mage hand enchanted bows that basically mimic the effects of compound bows. It's a cheap version of enchantment that has to be redone every couple weeks because it doesn't last, but it's quick and easy and any spellcaster could do it. Mechanical effects? +20 ft to all range increments, automatically get Str to damage, other effects are non-mechanical fluff effects (soldiers can learn to use it in months rather than years, can keep knocked for long periods of time, much easier to draw, less exhausting to draw, doesn't have to be 6 feet long to have intimidating penetration). They are a martial weapon and regular longbows and shortbows are exotic, because weapons training covers these bows, not the obsolete ones, and the obsolete ones are much harder to use. The arquebus takes a lot of tinkering/enchantment to overcome its issues compared to these bows, so it is a Gunslinger/archetype weapon for mechanically apt PCs, not a common military weapon. Cannons, however, do see some military use. Crossbows are ubiquitous among conscript and reserve levies that don't have the two months basic training and four months infantry training professional soldiers have, and among some city guards that haven't bought into bow training (some have, some haven't). Arquebus's are used similarly, but among city guard much more often than military, because they are loud and smokey, and that can give away the position of a unit.
I did some transit calculations to compare trains and worships and see which is likely more popular. I imagine alchemical engines as closer to diesel than coal, so I started with the Hindenburg, a diesel powered airship. I compared it to the Santa Fe Super Chief locomotive. The difference in cruising speed is only 16 miles per hour, accounting for terrain and weather variations. To put that in context, the airship will get you from San Francisco to New York in a little more than two days, two and a half to three if it isn't a straight shot, while the train will take a little more than three if it has some stops on the way, four if you need transfers. If we assume air travel is still new and expensive, it seems likely the train is preferred by most, with air travel being for the debutantes and top business executives of society, or for cross ocean travel. For anyone else, paying something like five or six times what a train costs just isn't worth the time savings.