2023-12-11 8:59:40 ¶ ●

I wanna pick someone’s brain at Arkane for how they chose to make the Dunwall setting in the specific time frame it’s in

Specifically that it’s late Victorian to early Edwardian, but they’re starting to run electricity (powered by supernatural whale oil), and they very specifically and explicitly do not have anything approaching germ theory.

Clearly they have some idea that inhaling fumes is bad (see: Whalers), but I can’t find any hint that they would have miasma theory either. What DO they think causes disease? In game several people are investigating the cause of the rat plague but the closest they’ve gotten to a causative agent is “rat parts???” like not even the droppings or fluids of a rat, just “rat.”

I know that is supposed to resemble the bubonic plague, but there’s no mention of fleas on the rats we can find being studied. If the plague is closer to my personal guess that it’s some sort of turbo hantavirus, then Sokolov has no chance of figuring it out if he doesn’t know that germs are a thing.

Did the Abbey of the Everyman decide that germ theory was heresy or something and that’s why they don’t have it?