Tech spectrum:

• Bleeding edge: late interwar
• Common in the city: edwardian
• City outer boroughs: late victorian
• Towns near cities: mid-late victorian
• Rural areas: mid 19th century
• Other nations: vary from mid 19th to turn-of-century

Flight:

• Balloons have existed for many decades
• Small airships have existed for a while
• Military airships are being developed actively
• Planes are being researched

Guns:

• You can buy a repeater at a store
• City military has repeaters standard, some units use semi-auto or even machine guns
• Naval, fortress, and rail artillery is great war era
• Rural farmers use mid-to-late 19th century repeaters. Muskets are relics.

Cars:

• A curiousity for the rich in most towns. In the cities, they're on the rise, but share roads with horses and people. A few dedicated roads have been built
• Electric streetcars dominate the city

Trains:

• Vast majority of people use trains to get around any distance a streetcar isn't going to take them
• Trains average 40-60 mph in rural environments
• Steam dominates, but electric is common in the big city, and diesel-electric is the new hotness in the country

Consumer Goods:

• Poor and middle class purchase factory-built clothes and housewares.

• Mechanized farms provide most food

• Furniture, clothes, tools, etc that are hand-made are considered high-end luxuries

• The earliest automobile factories are being built now; every car on the road is hand-built u Home Life:

• City:

  • Poor:
    • Your home is heated by a coal stove. Wood suffices, but coal is cheaper. It heats the area around the stove, but your home probably isn't much bigger than one room anyway.
    • You cook on a coal stove, probably the same one that heats your home. It suffices for heating kettles, and boiling in pots. You likely don't prepare complex meals at home, as there are better places to do so (such as church). You don't really have time to cook anyway.
    • Your home is lit by candles, or possibly gas if you're lucky. Generally speaking, you probably don't stay up too late, because you must rise early for work, so you have less need of lighting.
    • You do not have a telephone or telegraph, and have limited need for one. If you can find the time--probably on a Sunday--you know where to travel in the city to find a telegraph office.
    • Your house mostly stores shelf-stable foods. An icebox is too expensive--the ice delivery in particular--and you can survive just fine on grains and cereals. Hot food can be found in the city, at work, at church, or other places. Once in a while--usually on Sundays--someone in the family might visit the market and bring back some produce or even meat, which is cooked and enjoyed promptly.
    • Unless your house is bereft of children and elders, you probably spare precious coin for a milkman, as the nutritive value is second to none.
    • You may be able to reach a market for produce or meat, but--leaving aside whether or not you can afford it--you just don't have time. It's closed by the time you come home from work anyway.
    • If you're lucky, you have an elder in the home who can do laundry for you, the old-fashioned way. Otherwise, you wear your clothes as long as possible, and pay dearly to launder them in utthe cheapest way possible.
    • You probably have cold running water--although some older homes require trips to a well--but definitely no hot water. To bathe, you must heat water on the stove and mix it with cold water in the bath. This is a laborious process usually reserved for special days like Sunday.
  • Middle Class:
    • Your home is heated by radiators, powered by a furnace that either burns coal (in older homes) or kerosend
    • You likely have a gas stove, though coal isn't unheard-of on the low end.
    • Your home is lit by electric lights, although you have a few gas lamps in case of infrequent power outage
    • You do not have a telephone or telegraph, but there is a telegraph office within walking distance of your house
    • You store most food in a pantry or larder, but you have an icebox for colder foods. An iceman delivers ice daily. You know someone on your block who has a new electric refrigerator and doesn't need ice delivery.isto
    • The milkman delivers milk and dairy products daily, which you use before they spoil, or keep cool in the icebox.
    • You can easily walk to a market to get fresh produce and meat, which is used promptly or kept cool in the icebox. Out-of-season produce is available at a premium. Meat is affordable.
    • You know how to do laundry, but you probably employ a service where your laundry is picker up (or you drop it off, to save money) and laundered for you in manufactories within the city. Higher-end households employ maids to launder for them, although they'll still mostly outsource the more common clothes and hand-launder the more expensive dresses and suits.
    • You have hot and cold running water in the home, available at the faucet. If your home is older, you may have to shovel coal into the furnace, but newer homes have civil gas delivery and automated boilers. You probably only have one shower or bath, and one kitchen sink.
  • Rich:

  Religion

  Church is a regular part of life. For centuries, the Church was a lifeline for the poor, providing essential social services long before anyone imagined a state being responsible for such. Their laws and traditions, while eroded by the practicalities of modern capitalism, still protect what few holidays and leisure days the working class enjoys, including a weekly day of rest and worship that serves as the only reliable, periodic vacation most people enjoy.

  There is one common religion, but many flavors and sects, and each