For propulsion, a small steam engine can work. And it doesnt need much power, so even an earlier crude engine would suffice. And if you have a boiler for the steam engine, you can use it’s heat to heat air for a balloon. Now in reality a steam airship would require a very large boiler and balloon, and certainly would not be able to carry much fuel to go far. But it’s atleast within plausiblity to allow bending to allow for gameplay. Just like you can ride elk… sure you could but in reality they’d make for a terrible mount. But its a cool thing for gameplay.
Hot air balloons do exist… but, to the best of my knowledge, the ones that do not use hydrogen or helium at all… well, they require you to have some kind of very, very energy dense fuel, some kind of refined oil… which requires you to have an industrial civilization that can refine that oil…
…as well as advanced metal working that can shape and form metals/alloys at very high temperatures, quite precisely, which also basically requires an industrialized civilization.
You need the strong alloy in your hot air balloon’s burner, to be able to handle heating air hot enough that it can lift something of human weight without melting.
(Much of mankind’s development in metalurgy basically comes down to figuring out how to make and safely contain hotter and hotter fires, to be able to refine and work stronger and stronger metals)
Also… hot air balloons basically just get blown around by the wind.
A thermal airship, that can actually be directed, steered and propelled… requires an internal combustion motor.
That is why I did not suggest these things as workable at the scale of being able to transport a human.
As for teleporters and strict realism…
Yep, this is what you’d call either hard fantasy, or magical realism.
Basically, the idea is that you have a very gritty and realistic world, that is also punctuated by, starkly contrasts with, a very real magic system or supernatural class of entities… which does follow rules, but these rules are exceptionally complex and opaque to all but a very small few, and usually even those small few have an understanding that is incomplete and flawed, knowing only a rough approximation of just a portion of an astoundingly more complex reality.
Just because magic exists does not mean that your entire setting acts as if it is well understood and commonplace, or that the magic in the world makes every grueling task trivial.
For propulsion, a small steam engine can work. And it doesnt need much power, so even an earlier crude engine would suffice. And if you have a boiler for the steam engine, you can use it’s heat to heat air for a balloon. Now in reality a steam airship would require a very large boiler and balloon, and certainly would not be able to carry much fuel to go far. But it’s atleast within plausiblity to allow bending to allow for gameplay. Just like you can ride elk… sure you could but in reality they’d make for a terrible mount. But its a cool thing for gameplay.
Hot air balloons do exist… but, to the best of my knowledge, the ones that do not use hydrogen or helium at all… well, they require you to have some kind of very, very energy dense fuel, some kind of refined oil… which requires you to have an industrial civilization that can refine that oil…
…as well as advanced metal working that can shape and form metals/alloys at very high temperatures, quite precisely, which also basically requires an industrialized civilization.
You need the strong alloy in your hot air balloon’s burner, to be able to handle heating air hot enough that it can lift something of human weight without melting.
(Much of mankind’s development in metalurgy basically comes down to figuring out how to make and safely contain hotter and hotter fires, to be able to refine and work stronger and stronger metals)
Also… hot air balloons basically just get blown around by the wind.
A thermal airship, that can actually be directed, steered and propelled… requires an internal combustion motor.
That is why I did not suggest these things as workable at the scale of being able to transport a human.
As for teleporters and strict realism…
Yep, this is what you’d call either hard fantasy, or magical realism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_fantasy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_realism
Basically, the idea is that you have a very gritty and realistic world, that is also punctuated by, starkly contrasts with, a very real magic system or supernatural class of entities… which does follow rules, but these rules are exceptionally complex and opaque to all but a very small few, and usually even those small few have an understanding that is incomplete and flawed, knowing only a rough approximation of just a portion of an astoundingly more complex reality.
Just because magic exists does not mean that your entire setting acts as if it is well understood and commonplace, or that the magic in the world makes every grueling task trivial.