Below you will find the present list of prices for the city of Dachau, wherein my online campaign was running. When decided which city to choose for producing numbers for equipment, that seemed the natural choice. Now that the creative portion of my book is behind me, I'll be wanting to get my online campaign running again - I figure on a Sunday somewhere on or before the 20th of October.
Like before, I expect a wave of people writing to tell me how ridiculous some of these prices are. I would encourage those people to a) check their premises; and b) recognize that none of these numbers were 'invented' by yours truly, but were in fact generated after considerable research and designed to reflect prices as they would occur in the 17th century. The prices are not reflective of the present state of the Industrial Revolution, they are not beholden in any way to any RPG system in existence and they are not meant to 'fit' the pretense of any campaign, including my own. Moreover, what difference does it make what the price is? If the party finds it hard to avoid the thing, or feels they can live without it at that price, then that works rather well, doesn't it? Is it really necessary to make everything automatically convenient for the party?
Conversely, if something is just too cheap, you might remember that prices vary in my world, as I demonstrated on the last post. You might also consider that the cheapness of a thing is not always bad, as it enables the poor people a little more comfort in their drab and miserable lives.
That said, I am eager and happy to answer any honest, interested questions which might occur to the gentle reader, and to accept criticisms that don't begin with opinions about the price. I do make mistakes. There will be errors I've made on this table. I'm quite flawed as a human being. Please point them out so I may fix them. The more we both know, the better.
DACHAU MARKET
Very interesting! My only suggestion is that the weight of wine seems to be off by about 1/2. 1 gallon of water weighs 8.35 lbs, and the specific gravity of most wines are very similar to that of water.
ReplyDeleteJumping Jesus on a pogo stick!
ReplyDeleteThis is the coolest thing ever and I hope at some point you publish your whole trade tables. I'll buy the CD-ROM or whatever they come on.
ReplyDeleteQuestion about currency: 10 or 20 sp to a gp? And is one silver piece a day's wages for a manual laborer?
I'm surprised that armor is so cheap and that church bells are so expensive.
Adam
Wow. How do you calculate all these things? Will your program be available?
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Ara
To those asking for methods, everything is posted.
ReplyDeleteI second the request for your source material if you would be willing (distance tables, routes, and reference counts).
There are some typos... bone needles have no weight or cost, and distilled alcohol quantities are listed as both 6oz and 8oz in the tables. Still, it's way better than I could have done without someone to check it over for me before posting.
Alan and Chris,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up. I'll make those fixes. You're right Chris ... it seems I spend half my life editing.
As for providing tables, I'm going to write a post about that today.
Foolish of me.
ReplyDeleteI meant to remark on the point that occasionally items are too light or too inexpensive to appear on the table. Any result of zero, such as that pointed out by Chris, should be treated at 1 half of 1 unit. Thus, the bone needle would be two for a c.p. (always the lowest coin in this instance), and one half of 1/10th of an ounce.