So, I said when I showed the (then-)latest map of Lüm at the beginning of the week that I'd say more about the subway on Sunday. Well, today is Sunday, so here we go. Originally this was going to be part of the post on transportation in Newbridge, but I decided maybe it warranted its own separate post.

Anyway, yes, the subway is something I just decided this week that Lüm had... and it's something I probably should have decided earlier, because it would have changed some of what I'd written about transportation for the earlier neighborhoods. I'm not going to go back and rewrite those earlier entries now, but there will definitely be changes there when and if all this is compiled into a book. I think the reason it didn't occur to me earlier that it would make sense for Lüm to have a subway is that, well... I think the idea that "fantasy=medieval" is so culturally pervasive nowadays that it's easy to let it guide your thinking even when you're consciously rejecting it. Curcalen is decidedly not a medieval world; its conveniences and achievements are due to widespread and innovative use of summoning magic rather than technology as we know it, but it's supposed to be at a level of advancement maybe roughly equivalent to Earth in the late Machine Age. It totally makes sense that it would have a subway, or some magical equivalent. But I guess I didn't think of it because subways just aren't something generally associated with fantasy... but that's mostly because fantasy is generally associated with (some romanticized version of) medieval Europe. Take that association away, and there's no reason at all that subways can't exist in a fantasy world.

I think maybe the same issue is in play to some degree in Dadauar. Thanks to the high-powered magic available to the onirarchs, the world of Dadauar—at least inside the developed countries, though surely some of this would have spread to other nations—is even more advanced than Curcalen, perhaps comparable with modern Earth, though with its amenities and mechanizations brought about in very different ways. But am I really keeping that in mind when I write about it, or am I still at some level bound by an assumed association to the Middle Ages? Eh... well, I think maybe I have been doing better in this respect with Dadauar than with Curcalen, if only because I've been writing about it longer, but still I'm sure there's room for improvement, and maybe I ought to give some thought to whether there are any analogues of modern developments that Dadauar should have that I haven't considered. And the world of B'gor is currently seriously undercooked—despite its having been the eighth (planetary) world added to the Wongery there are only five articles about it so far—but that's something to keep in mind as I flesh it out too; it's maybe not quite at Curcalen's level, maybe more the rough equivalent of Earth's Industrial Revolution, but it's sure well beyond medieval.

Anyway, as will be shown in the new version of the city map I'll post tomorrow, I've also decided that there's a train running through Lüm—which, again, is something that it totally makes sense for there to be, but that I hadn't thought of before. (This, at least, won't have as much retroactive impact on transportation in previously covered neighborhoods, simply because the train doesn't happen to go through any other neighborhoods I've covered yet.) There may be more such features and advancements added to the city as the year goes on... but again, the main reason I specifically chose a city on Curcalen as my subject for City '26 was because I figured it would help kickstart the development of that world, and in that respect I think so far it's been fairly successful.