Dungeons and Plumbing and the Gong Father

I know for a fact this is one of those rarely thought about subjects. I know from years and years and years of playing and looking at dungeons and designing dungeons that this is one of those subjects very very few people ever touch - plumbing. what happens to all the waste and trash and debris and, well, corpses that appear in dungeons. Or castles for that matter. I do not know why but it is one of those things I always think about.Notice that in the NPC Almanac their is a Groom of the Stool.

 

Do you know how important plumbing is! 

Trash disposal, corpse disposal, offal disposal, and just the general waste that seems to accumulate wherever 'higher thinking' individuals stop and hang out for a while. It is true. Nomadic tribes were probably nomadic for reasons other than following game animals and moving with the seasons. I mean, sometime they only changed camp by like a mile or so. That's not following game that's avoiding trash accumulation. As soon as anyone settled down for the long haul, the offal had to go somewhere.(With Native Americans we know they were fairly clean and tidy, burying their offal or disposing of it far away or in fields. Offal breaks down fairly quickly.) 

Now cities were a little different. One could not just scratch a whole in the ground and get rid of it. There was just too much and it was too inconvenient. So of course plumbing was invented. Now, roughly 5000 years ago, the Harrapan of the Indus Valley developed indoor plumbing. This is brilliant and occurred 1000 years before the pyramids of Egypt were constructed. That should indicate how important plumbing was and is. 

Of course castles had plumbing. One would defecate into holes that were emptied outside the walls or into pits. Enter the gong farmer. So collecting 'gong' was an important, if not low status, job in medieval times. The waste was collected and sometimes sold or just dumped in fields. It makes great fertilizer. I would not suggest trying this at home. There are probably ordinances against it and, if anyone has been so lucky, fields sprayed with human excrement smell atrocious. It can sting as much a chicken poop. 

Stephen and myself discussed this the other day on our morning twitch stream. We came up with all manner of solutions to the offal problem in a fantasy world. A portable hole could be set up on a castle. Maybe several portable holes could be used. Mini-dimension doors could flush the offal away to some other plane. With magic, there are many solutions to the problem. There are also monsters that could solve the problem. Carrion crawlers and the neo-otyugh were suggested by commenters as solutions. However, on thinking about that, carrion crawlers would be dangerous and, who in their right mind would sit on a privy knowing a carrion crawler or neo-otyugh would be down there. 

Assuming magic such as dimension doors and bags of holding are not readily available, we are back to basics. So look into plumbing and try to incorporate some aspect of it to castles and such. Dungeons are a whole new ball of yarn. Without endless holes, deep pits, or flowing water, offal would have to be carried out. Enter the gong farmer again. The lowly gong father is a very important cog in the machinery of civilization. Imagine, you will, the formation of gong guilds. These gong guilds would control a lever of civilization, the baseline of the civilized world. These guilds might be powerful enough to influence the elites. The gong guilds would, of course, be led by the.....

Gong Father!!!!