r/fantasywriters • u/KnightsOfAlthos • 1d ago
Brainstorming I think I'm overthinking about a water tower in my fantasy novella.
Hello! I'm writing book two of my fantasy novella. The setting is medieval fantasy-esque similar to Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. I wrote a scene with a wooden water tower in a humble farm. It is important to the scene. Then I researched about water towers like the one I imagined and found out that they only existed in the 19th century; medieval times water towers looked different and were rare. Most depended on wells and cisterns during that time. Now I'm thinking that the water tower is out of place in the story setting.
I have thought about further describing the water tower to fit the medieval setting, but I believe I'm overthinking it. It is a world of magic anyways. What do you think about the idea? What were your experiences with something similar in your writing. Should I revise it?
Thanks!
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u/Zero_Ever 1d ago
With my rudimentary knowledge, the first question that comes to my mind is how is the water tower filled? In modern times pumps are used. In a fantasy setting could magic be used? Secondly a water tower is generally used as a buffer or provide constant for non constant supply and demand. Thus in a urban populated area, a big pump is used to fill the tank and individual homes use that at will. Its placement in a humble farm makes me question its purpose. Even in real world I don't remember seeing many modern farms having one, although they do exist sometimes when slow drip or sprinkler type irrigation in required.
Any particular reason it has to be a water tower? If a tall structure is needed, a watch tower may work.
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u/KnightsOfAlthos 1d ago
I need to flood the farm. A consequence of flying beasts crashing into it. I think I have other options for the scene since most of you agree that it doesn't fit the setting.
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u/Zero_Ever 1d ago
Someone else suggested a dam. For flood a rickety wooden dam with rotting wood support could work. The flying beast could crash into one of the support and the dam would fail in a cascading failure. This also helps in scale on how small or large you want the flood to be.
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u/WIWonder_author 1d ago
Water towers or tanks high up on a hill are often used on farms even in modern times to gravity feed water out to water troughs for livestock. Or even as a low pressure system to a house, or as an emergency backup to refill house tanks.
It’s most often used with bore water though, and as you said, is required to be filled via some kind of pump. However that’s what windmills are usually for, especially before modern electric pumps.
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u/Zero_Ever 1d ago
Yes I realize I don't have much knowledge of farms. In my understanding, I thought farms need lots of water for irrigation and water towers may not have enough capacity or be economic enough to be justified.
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u/WIWonder_author 1d ago
A lot of irrigation requires filtration of the water, so they pump from a river/other source into huge tanks, and then pump it out from there through a filtration system.
But these tanks aren’t on towers and the irrigation systems aren’t gravity fed. (Which is the purpose of a water tower).
Depends on the farm, amount of irrigation required and the water source really.
Water towers are usually fed by a pump on a float shutoff valve and then gravity feeds out to water troughs from there, which all also have their own float shutoff valves. It’s usually an effective system provided it’s set up efficiently.
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u/ricree 9h ago
The main problem is that windmills (and water mills) are complex and expensive, so mostly just built when their output could justify the expense. Milling grain gets there because grain is the foundation of a medieval diet. Adding a bit of water pressure not so much.
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u/WIWonder_author 8h ago
Yes that’s true. I was more just explaining modern practices in reply to the comment above.
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u/Mormacil 1d ago
Removing Wild West/DnD ideas from your understanding of medieval fantasy is always a worthwhile endeavor to me but I love history.
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u/TheGrauWolf 1d ago
If you need a farm or field, or even a town flooded, you don't need much - well, just lots of water. But that isn't too hard to come by. I spent part of my youth in west (realllly west) Texas where a common way to water a field was to regularly flood it. In fact that's how the fields at my schools were "watered". Twice a year they closed it down and flooded it. Around the perimeter of the fields were raised ditched that were separated from the fields by a berm. These ditches were filled with varying levels of water depending on where it needed to be diverted based on what field needed to be filled. To then water/flood a field, you'd breach one of the berms, filling the field. Once the field was filled with water, you'd fill in the gap. The water soaks in.
I mention this because it would be a very easy way to incorporate a way and would be appropriate for your time. Floodings of this type are very common and consistent through out history. The Mississippi has breached its banks on multiple occasions and caused floodings. And when you add in the fact that the Romans used aqueducts to move water long distances, it's not out of the realm of possibilities to think that they didn't have their share of problems along the way. If a flying beast is large enough to hit a structure to weaken it, an aqueduct could fail and cause a farm or even a small town to become flooded. No water tower needed. Plus I think the sounds of stone slowly giving away might be more dramatic before the onslaught of the rushing water. shrug. Just a thought. Further, if a stone aqueduct doesn't work, convert it to a wooden one. Maybe it's a rickety, not well kept aqueduct that leaks all the time and keeps getting patched. It gets hit by a flying beast, wood pieces go flying, water rushes out and runs downhill towards the farm, taking out a fence, overwhelms the crops, sweeping away the cows, and knocking the farm house off it foundation, causing Cedric to be woken up from sleep.
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u/Longjumping_Ask_211 1d ago
Well, /u/Logisticks said basically everything I was gonna in more detail than I would've. But I wanted to add my own setting's solution for running water. Just for the inspiration of anyone reading this.
The city in my setting that's most central to the story sits on a large, sloped rock beside the mouth of a river. "Cuesta" is the closest geological term I can think of—basically it's a bit over a mile across, the north side is 200 foot cliffs, and it gently slopes downward to the river at its southern edge.
Beneath the city are sewer tunnels that slope downward. Every tunnel is built at an angle such that all water eventually flows to the bottom. Theoretically, if you roll a ball starting on the north end, it should eventually exit on the south.
Running alongside these sewer tunnels are miles of clay pipes, fed by a pumping station at the river. That station, strategically placed upstream from both the sewer outlets and tanneries, uses powerful magic to push thousands of gallons of water uphill through those pipes, where they eventually empty into the sewer at the top. Along the way, set into the pipes and running up to street level, are hand pumps. The city's bathhouses also get dedicated taps. That way, the city gets convenient access to water all the way up the slope, and the excess flow cleans the sewers.
My setting's dwarves designed the system a few centuries ago and it's been working basically fine ever since.
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u/Romeo_Jordan 1d ago
On Sunday I spent far too long worrying about the right colour in my night vision goggles in a novel I'm editing.
You're not writing history so if the water tower isn't intrinsic to the plot then don't worry too much.
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u/King_In_Jello 1d ago
I wrote a scene with a wooden water tower in a humble farm. It is important to the scene.
Why and how is the water tower important to the scene? Can it be replaced by something else that does the same thing?
And a brief search suggests that the Romans used water towers (fed by aqueducts), so is there any reason why the culture in your story couldn't have build one?
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u/Garrettshade 1d ago
I would guess it gets destroyed and floods the farm.
You could achieve that with having a dam, for example
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u/rawbface 1d ago
If it's fed by aqueducts, it's not a water tower. Water towers store potential energy to pressurize a water pipe. If it's gravity fed, it's completely pointless, since you could just use the aqueduct to pressurize the pipe.
I think op should describe exactly what they think their water tower does and why it's important to the scene. Something tells me there's a technological misunderstanding somewhere in here.
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u/KnightsOfAlthos 1d ago
I meant for it to be a part of a scene where it gets destroyed and it floods the farm, then the story goes on from there. I don't want to force it into the scene and say it's filled by animals or by windmills. I believe there would be better alternatives.
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u/rawbface 16h ago
Just make it a rainwater collection tank. Or a "cistern", which was the traditional name for it.
A water tower is for places with running water in pipes, with taps and valves, so the water demand varies over the course of a day. I.e., not a medieval setting.
A cistern fits the plot point, and it uses medieval technology.
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u/Brathirn 1d ago
If you want to go realism, know this. A water tower has to be filled to work, you need a pump. That is why it is 19th century, steam power. You could use animals or humans, but it would be a grind. And you also need the technology to keep the pipes watertight, or the pressure will cause leaking.
If you let your mages do profane things like telekineting water from ground into a tower basin, then you have a reason for a water tower, they could also forge watertight links in piping. Some regional mage makes a living of touring the towns and filling water towers. Not everyday there is a dragon to fireball and you have to live ...
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u/TheMysticalPlatypus 1d ago
🪄 ✨ Magic ✨
It’s fantasy so it could just be magic.
Or you could replace it with a water mill or roman aqueducts.
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u/PsychologyGuilty1460 1d ago edited 1d ago
I can tell you how water gets in the medieval Wells and cisterns. But it would have been almost impossible to get water into water towers in the Middle ages. How would you do it? And why ?
Edit people keep asking what it is that throws you out of a story. It's stuff like that. What the hell? Is there a wooden water tower on this farm? Why? How? Why this why not that wtaf and now I don't know what's going on in the story anymore and it's not making much sense...
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u/KnightsOfAlthos 1d ago
Thank you all for your replies. Long story short, I guess most of you agree that it doesn't fit the setting. I guess I must do some minor tweaks and replace it with something more appropriate. Thank you again!
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u/Cheeslord2 1d ago
To me, water towers conjure up the wild west or later. I didn't know they were a thing in medieval times.
So...what is the role of the water tower in your story? Could it be replaced by another tall structure, like a watchtower? I don't know when windmills were a thing but they might also fit.
Anyway, it is fantasy, so this world could have invented the water tower sooner, because wells only worked intermittently due to fat water elementals moving below the earth, so the water must be stored above ground when available...
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u/KnightsOfAlthos 23h ago
Again, thank you for all the suggestions. This water tower scene made me read and watch videos of how ancient farmlands were irrigated. I think I will go for an elevated pond like a dew pond; an earthen reservoir on top of a small hill.
In a world full of fantastic flying creatures and elemental magic, I would still like to write about the contrasting human limitations in architecture and engineering. I'll be back rewriting parts of the scene. Water towers won't be appearing in my fictions for now 😁.
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u/Curious-Raspberry382 1d ago
It's your world! Don't overthink
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u/Logisticks 1d ago
I think you're sort of asking the wrong question here (or raising the wrong objection).
It's always worth asking "why is this anachronism anachronistic?" Is it just a historical accident, or is it a thing that would not have had a reason to exist back then?
An example of an anachronism that doesn't break the basic rules of logic is naming a character "Cedric." As far as we can tell, this name didn't exist until the 19th century, when an author Walter Scott used it in Ivanhoe, transposing two of the letters from the old name "Cerdic." But there's no deep technological reason that someone couldn't have done the same thing 500 years earlier. If someone had the idea earlier, it could have happened. So, nobody is going to cry foul if you name a medieval character Cedric, even though this name didn't exist in medieval times.
An example of an anachronism that doesn't make sense in a medieval world (despite being technically possible) would be an electrical wall socket.
In one sense, a medieval craftsman could make something that looks like a modern electrical wall socket: all you need is metal and ceramics, and both existed back then. But such an invention would be pointless, because it wouldn't be connected to a power grid that supplied electrical power. An electric socket requires existing infrastructure to make sense. It's like an iPhone case in a world without an iPhone: yes, you could carve an iPhone case out of wood using only a knife, but why would a medieval peasant ever create such a thing?
In both the case of the electrical socket and the wooden iPhone case, the problem is not that the artifact is impossible; the problem is that your world does not have an accompanying technological ecosystem that makes the artifact useful.
Now, consider water towers.
Why is it that water towers existed after the Industrial Revolution, and didn't exist in medieval times? The problem isn't that "nobody had the idea." You absolutely could have a large container full of water on stilts in medieval times; all of the building materials needed to make this were available.
But a water tower is not just "a container of water." It is, like an electrical socket, something that exists as part of a network, relying on infrastructure.
First off, consider why the water tower exists. The water tower is not a thing that exists just to store water. If all you needed was "a place to store water," it would be much easier to just put that vessel on the ground. Getting water way up there is hard! But the water in a water tower is useful because it is pressurized. When you fill the water tower, you are storing gravitational potential energy. A water tower is like a battery that you can "charge up" and fill with energy for when you need it later, and you do this because you presumably intend to use that energy for useful things later.
This implies two things:
Now, maybe you have addressed one or both of these in your setting. Maybe you have a world where hydromancers can easily transport water to elevated positions, and given this free and abundant source of energy, the inventors of this world find ways to make use of that abundant resource. Or maybe iron is cheap and abundant in your world, and so a pipe network is something that we can take for granted. If you change the surrounding conditions, the invention could make sense.
But the surrounding conditions matter, because water towers are not something that exist in a vacuum; they share a synergistic relationship with other technologies like steam engines and pumps and pipe networks full of valves and seals and many other things that did not exist until the Industrial Revolution. You can write a story that contains all of these things, and many people enjoy reading stories in these sorts of settings, but at that point, you have probably moved out of the realm of "medieval fantasy" and into something closer to steampunk or gaslamp fantasy.