One Man Revolution

In the time-traveler or world hopping kind of stories, it's a common trope to see the main character try and change the world with advanced technology. But what about natives of some setting taking a comparatively smaller but more believable step forward by revolutionizing some aspect of war or ruling or trade with a little tweak or change in outlook?

Like when the Macedonians fielded super long pikes in battle, or the Byzantines figuring out Greek Fire in time to save their city. What sort of realistic innovations could your adventurer without any knowledge of our history figure out in a medieval-fantasy setting that's not just a steam engine centuries ahead of its time?

Maybe they'd learn to sterilize medical equipment.

Romans more or less understood this. Also used surgical staples. Also understood hygeine.

There's a reason they fucking steamrolled the world. They had really good R&D

>not just a steam engine centuries ahead of its time?
The steam engine is fucking ancient.
And the first "practical" steam engine, the Newcomen engine, is extremely simple.
Watt engines are a bit more complicated, but barely.

Anyways, the answer is a book.
Something along the lines of Galileo Galilei's, "Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences"
There's a reason Galileo is called "the Father of Science"

>They had really good R&D
They had piss awful R&D, all they had were fabulous mathematicians.
But the took interest in locals and were great at finding uses for things, so like 98% of the novelties and tech they stole while expanding got put to good use.

do you have an actual source for that?

>There's a reason Galileo is called "the Father of Science"
Aren't there a bunch of fathers of science?

Yeah...Science's mom was kind of a whore.

They disinfected injuries with vinegar and boiled tools between use.
Not that user, and I don't have a specific source, but they did it.
Wouldn't be too hard to google that shit, but you can do that if you care.

Romans had spooky good tech. Concrete and everything.
We're pretty sure they even had erythrocyte sedimentation rate tests.

OK, fine. He's the father of Modern Physics.

OP, if you really want maximum effect for your effort, introduce the book and the printing press. Both are easily done with medieval technology; a book's a book, and a Gutenberg printing press is a screw press by another name.

Once you have both, unless you're stamped out within a decade, mass literacy and media follows. That's a game changer for any pre-press civilization-in a world where magic can be studied and cast from written rites, it's a miniature Singularity.

Maybe, but Galileo's one of the biggies.

>Roman erythrocyte sedimentation rate tests
Please elaborate?

Go read up on pike squares, or pike and shot. They were battlefield formations that radically changed early modern European warfare, as it signalled the end of cavalries as the primary weapon of European armies, and it really pushed the whole concept of combined arms forward.

In the game I'm DM'ing, I'm preparing to introduce Artificers to the world through a bastard Half-Orc that, through his half-brother, a pretender to the throne, is able to fund and field an army of thousands of orcs with pikes and dire wolf cavalry. The pike squares will manoeuvre and pin the enemy cavalry/infantry, while the dire wolf cavary sweep through them. The kingdom that they are attempting to conquer relies on cavalry, and they will get absolutely smashed.

My PCs roll over most of their encounters because they are smart/lucky players, so I want to place them into a situation where they can win the battles, but lose the war.

They were centuries ahead of their time in technology and methodology. All roads lead to Rome for a reason - whenever a legion set out to conquer a new land, they built roads to it along the way. They invented concrete, fiddled with the idea of a steam engine in the late BC/early AD era, and had architectural prowess on par with the Greeks. Their men were as much civil planners as they were soldiers. Shame that good old fashioned nepotism and beauraucracy did them in.

>Please elaborate?
endocrine -> within blood
sedimentation -> deposit
rate -> over time

It's the "blood test" you get at hospitals.
They draw blood, put it in a tube, wait an hour, then measure it with a ruler.

It sorts out into four chunks, in order: clotted blood, unclotted blood, white blood cells, and this yellow-ish bit (various stuff).
The chunk's lengths, relative to each other, can identify a wide variety of medical conditions.

Hay, paper making, movable type, positional notation, distilling, horse collars, semaphores, double entry book keeping, there are hundreds of very simple ideas and techniques which could profoundly change the usual bog standard medieval-fantasy setting.

So all it takes is a test tube and a good cork?

I thought it was going to be something insane like glass microtubes blown by hand.

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Another thing, OP; exploring mathematics is a resource cheap way to introduce useful concepts. All you need is a brain, something to write on, and no small amount of grit.

Know how to calculate cosine? You can, given a protractor with a weight(a primitive theodite) and a known horizontal distance, measure the height of any object no matter how tall, and vica versa. Combine with the compass, some measured lengths of rope, spikes, and a standard unit of distance, and you have the basic tools for modern surveying.

>So all it takes is a test tube and a good cork?
Pretty sure you need a few chemicals, but it's shtick is being the simplest most cost effective way to find/verify ailments.

>cosine
Wait, disregard that, meant tangent.

It's too damn late. Keep this thread alive, eh?

On whoops, got the name wrong:
>endocrine -> within blood
*erythrocyte -> red blood cell

>Keep this thread alive, eh?
I make no promises, but I'll be up for 3-4 hours.

I imagine greek fire was the same, though I don't know the story.
However, Macedonian phalanxes was an evolution not really a revolution.
Greeks had been fighting with doru spears in phalanx formations for centuries.
The macedonians gradually increased the length of theirs until they had to use them in two hands.
Phillip II increased their length even more to the point they were impractical for part-time soldiers, but not for his professional army. This is when the sarissa phalanx became notably deadly.
Alexander the Great perfected the formations use alongside skirmishers and cavalry, which is when the sarissa phalanx became regarded as invincible.

So you see that these sorts of 'revolutions' are in fact slower evolutions that take gradual steps. However, eventually a tipping point is reached where enough development has taken place for a piece of technology to make it consistently better than competitors.
Sarissas winning against dori formations 9 times out of 10 doesn't mean they're 9 times better- they might just be 10% better and so they win by 10% every time.

One thing most people forget: Zero. As in, the number. It makes negative calculations much easier, and allows for true place value notation (what we use). This in turn makes all math easier, makes it more accessible to nonspecialists (which is what kicked Greek and Roman asses, think back to story problems in school, only you can't use numerals to solve them), allowing more mathematical knowledge to generated.
Also, do not discount being able to think both abstractly and practically. Most of the basic advanced mathematics are born out of a practical need, but plenty of things have been generated out of abstract thought and logical continuation of already present knowledge. For example, X^4. Common enough for us, absolute heresy to the Greeks - who ever heard of a four dimensional object? Greeks abhorred partial numbers, and irrational numbers even more (Pythagoras threw the Greek discoverer of pi overboard). The Egyptians seemed to have casually played with fractions (we only have few mathematical papyri, but indications are that they were instruction manuals, and they used very advanced fraction aaths), and had a number system that used symbols for various powers of ten.
Ancient Indians and the Maya had zero (India also gave us place value notation and started developing a form of proto-calculus), medieval Arabs gave us algebra, we still use the Babylonian base 10/60 (it was weird) for angular calculations and timekeeping, and my point is: don't discount math. Ever. Especially easy accessible math.

Zero came pretty late but it's still ducking ancient.

It would also be difficult to persuade people with modern mathematics (or even demonstrate it).
In antiquity *everything* was figured as geometric relationships, but nowadays we abstract as much of that away as possible.

You could probably wow people with the practicalities of spherical geometry... if you happened to study it on your own at some point.
We don't teach that in school anymore because it's super tedious but also quite simple, so we let computers do it for us these days.

How much would these kinds of innovations really change the world in the lifetime of the innovator? Aren't they a bigger deal for how later math benefited from them?

Plus, is there any setting that doesn't know zero? We use it all the time for game mechanics.

I will introduce them shitposting

Its important to remember that what made the romans so good wasn't magical, its was simply their philosophy:

Whenever they found someone who did something, ANYTHING, that was better than what they did? They stole that idea and took it home.

And over time, they travelled far and wide enough that they managed to condense all the best ideas and tricks into one place, funneling disconnected knowledge and resources and putting it all together for the first time. Its such a simple idea, but the payoff was a civilization that, in many ways, STILL defines much of Europe.

But they suffered the fate of all empires. The moment that the leaders of an empire start fighting themselves for control of the they already have, instead of fighting to advance those holdings, the rot sets in. You start crippling yourself to spite the man next to you, and take the empire for granted instead of being vigilant.

Ancient man already had shitposting. Read the wall writing of Pompeii.

Human nature doesn't really change, only the tools available.

How has no one mentioned Radio yet?

How would you make a radio in Medieval or even Renaissance times, though? That doesn't seem like something that could happen by accident, and you'd need to expressly have the radio already in mind to even try.

Advanced dentistry.

Just have it start with an adventurer that hunts monsters studying monster teeth (because monster teeth is generally the leading cause of death in his profession, after a fashion) and coming to learn an incredible amount about what makes and keeps teeth healthy and strong.

>The one who buggers a fire burns his penis
>O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin.
>We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus.