What new technologies do we get from the Blood Mist?

Alderstone and Falendar are ruins. For 260 years, nearly everyone has lived in small villages. Whether you look at what the GM’s guide tells you about how large villages are, or work backwards from “how many people should there be to train the next level of magic users”, you end up reckoning that the total population of the Raven Lands is at most 10,000 or so, which to put it in perspective is about 2% of the population density of England in Roman times. There really aren’t that many people.

The First Alder War involved an Alderland army of 7,000 fighting troops, which won decisively, possibly in combination with Teramalda’s army of 3,000; the dwarves then responded by mobilising and raising orcs, and judging by the resulting peace talks that suggests that they had similar numbers, so let’s back-of-the-envelope it and say you have 10,000 fighting troops on either side. Normally you’d need at least 5 people to support a fighter, either directly (squires, army logistics) or indirectly (peasants, merchants and bureaucrats keeping the economy ticking over); but the orcs were enslaved at the time and the Alderland armies came from the much denser economy on the other side of the wall. And, OK, both sides took mass casualties from time to time, and the demons didn’t help. Still, it’s hard to argue against there being 20,000-40,000 people, at least, before the Blood Mist.

So even in the Southern lands where the humans were the most numerous, population levels have crashed. Some villages died out entirely; most will nonetheless have been affected by disease, Bloodlings, inbreeding, political strife, famine, and all sorts of other fun things that happen when you’re cut off from society and have to fend for yourself.

Still, some will have been luckier, and there’s a lot to be said for having 260 years to yourselves without having to spend money on defences against marauding warlords (or, if you’ve already been subjugated by a warlord, on taxes to that warlord). Historically, the Black Death took a Malthusian subsistence-level Europe and dramatically raised the cost of the labour of the survivors, which some people have argued was a requirement for the French Revolution, Enlightenment and ultimately the Industrial Revolution. It’s not implausible to think that lucky, well-governed villages with a sudden need to use at most the same amount of labour and far less land, would have come up with ingenious solutions that could end up spreading across the land when the Blood Mist comes down.

Moving away from farming large fields by hand, and towards greater use of animals and tools, seems like an obvious thing to try (and that’s before you consider that the Bloodlings don’t go for animals, and druids can talk to animals). Irrespective of which tech level you reckoned the lands were at before the Blood Mist, given the need to maximise the utility of the small amount of fields that people can safely get to during sowing and harvest season, someone will have come up with crop rotation and the horse collar. Bloodlings don’t tamper with technology, so water and windmills that you can leave running overnight seem like a safe bet.

It’s hard to make a case for orc or ogre technology; the elves have always been perfect and see no reason to change; and the humans in the South have mostly been racketeered by the Rust Brothers. Still, Elvenspring, Halflings, or Dwarves could easily have been lucky enough to be in the right circumstances for technological breakthroughs.

So: what cool new technology can the players stumble across, and trade to other villages, or attempt to monopolise for their own purposes?