Worldbuilding 5d: Gong, Granaries & Graves

I must explain before starting this post that there's is no absolute boundary between a hamlet and a "village."   This is why village-sized hamlets historically went on calling themselves "hamlets," even after they'd reached the size of towns.  For convenience, however, I need my own definition of village, particularly in the context of this series of posts.  So I will ask the reader, please, to understand that the difference between hamlets and villages are not made by size of population, but rather by type of hex.  A hamlet in a type-5 hex may be as large as what we think of as a village; but it isn't rated as a village in this discussion unless it occurs in a type-4 hex or better hexes.  There is an exception; the black-circled "settlements," as I call them, occur on the map as villages, towns and cities, according to their size.  Any settlement (unlike the brown-circled villages) adds +1 food, +1 hammer and +1 coin to the hex's production; this is due to the characteristic importance of these special centres.  I know it's all complicated, and that it seems needlessly so, but the reasons are baked into how infrastructure is designated in the first place.

The reader may remember that I alluded to hamlets as the largest group habitation that occuring in type-6 and type-5 hexes.  However, there are hamlets, and there are hamlets.  As a hamlet in a type-6 farmland hex increases its food supply, on the way towards the hex becoming a type-5, the community fosters children and sustains the lifespan of its elder residents.  Growth adjusts the local dynamic, as more food needs to be hauled out at harvest, more care is needed for more residents, more roofs need thatching, more hands need more tools and so on.  All these things could be made at home, but it becomes more practical, as exports of food rise, to obtain these things from elsewhere ... and this brings more outsiders into daily contact with the hamlet's residents.

There are other things that arise from an increased population, and the animals they begin to keep.  For example, the accumulation of bodily waste that tends to fill up privies and cess pits.  Called "gong," which is a convenient euphemism from the old English word gang, meaning "to go," tends to heap as the number of hamlet buildings swell from fifteen to fifty ... and this produces a new sort of specialist, a "gong farmer," or "nightman," as it was generally agreed that the work of digging up was something to be done at night and out of sight.  Gong has an inherent value as a fertilizer, so it was gathered up and taken beyond the power of smell to official dumps called gong pits.  There the gong was mixed with compost products like rotten food, straw, bones and wood ash.  It takes about 8 months to naturally turn this into a sludge that could dry out, so gong pits were rotated at different times of the year, rather than the same pit being used all the time.  The technical mixing of gong into serviceable fertiliser was more complicated than we might first imagine.

Gong pits, of course, might seem like a good place to get rid of certain kinds of evidence — but the local farmer responsible for these pits would be instantly aware that something was amiss, probably within a single day ... especially since the most sink-worthy pits would also be the ones most often added to nightly.  Nevertheless, stumbling around the outside of a hamlet at night might incorporate these landmarks of the nose interestingly.  That is, provided we're not running the sort of ridiculous disney-fied game that includes safe cards.  After all, it is shit.  Someone's bound to be offended.

Another added difficulty is the number of dead bodies that accumulate over time.  Remember, the growth from small hamlet to large hamlet is slow, but even a community of 100 people will produce 800+ dead bodies in two centuries.  At first, it seems practical to plant Papa and Mamma in the back yard, but six generations and a lot of infant deaths do become a problem, particularly in cultures that don't respect cremation as a solution.  Some cultures favour such solutions as "torn apart by beasts" and quietly dug unmarked graves in forests for the shorter-surviving children, but the number of "important" people who are considered too celebrated for this treatment will mount up.

I'm sorry if I sound less than respectful of the dead here.  In this culture more than any other in history, we greatly ignore the real social problem of what to do with all the past ancestors ... appreciating that a small and rarely-spoken of profession manages that problem for us.  I address it here because there grows a very real need for a graveyard of sorts, once a community reaches a certain size ... even the size of a mere hamlet.  Nowadays, we always associate graveyards with churches because our memories are skewed by movies and churchyards nearly always built 150 years after the actual community was founded.  We have documents telling us that after that after the 7th century CE, that a burial in Europe was under the control of the Church and could only take place in consecrated ground.  This sounds all nice and decent, but it can easily be recognized from any understanding of what Europe was actually like prior to 700 CE that this had to be ignored on a widespread basis — hell, in 700, isolated monks were busy in Ireland copying Bibles, preserving the last shreds of literature about God and Christ in a continent featuring widespread wars between "godless" Saxons, Slavs, Avars and Bulgars.  The Franks may have found sunny Jeebus, but even they didn't have the wherewithal to track down every dead body in the hinterlands of a thousand ex-Romana villages and dictate how bodies were buried.  What with the collapse of society, people still died in their beds and still had to be buried somewhere ... 

The link on Wikipedia says that bodies were generally buried in mass graves, exhumed and stored in ossuaries — and this too sounds very dear and yet ridiculous for isolated farmers scratching out a living in the deep, dense forests of backcountry Europe, with little labour to spare on burying bodies and digging them up again.  This may be all well and good for the village folk, blessed with roads and people who can read & write, who are the only people history has a hope in hell of caring about, but rest assured that tiny hamlets everywhere just do their best with what they have.  Reasonably, a priest or a friar makes the rounds every few weeks and reads words over a body already buried ... and in a community without the drive to build coffins, a sack and a mass grave certainly meet the requirement.  Nonetheless, this grave still occupies space, and that space can surely be called a "graveyard."

Take note that more civilised parts of the world will always do these things with greater sophistication.  The village will have a small church, it will have a local priest, and the graveyard will be a neat little laid out affair.  Cities go a step further, with large crypts and all the ossuaries the profession responsible can build.  In a grander sense, really big places can build their own necropolises for the dead.  But we're not talking about a place where a modern historian could expect to find anything, because the dead of nowheresham Germany were never buried in a manner that an archeologist might dig up.  There are billions of bones buried under the soils of Europe and Asia, and the Americas too, that are simply lost to time.

Nonetheless, when dressing up the game world, we shouldn't forget to add that important repository.  Player characters might take a moment and consider where they ought to bury their own, for one thing; and the manner in which a cemetery or a gravesite is respected could help with the locals sentiments.  Some players are clerics, after all — though they should always be sure they are the right kind of clerics before irresponsibly chanting words over a body of another religion.

Yes, I know, I know.  A discussion about graves and cemeteries should have said something about undead.  The trope is so obvious, however, I don't see that anything needs to be said.

Let's move onto something else.  I've mentioned a "garner" a few times now.  For my game world, I'm defining a garner as a temporary repository for food, gathered together or "garnered" at harvest time with the expectation that it will be distributed or moved to a place where it can be sold off, most likely before winter begins.  When I speak of long-term multi-year storage of food, it should be understood that I'm speaking of a "granary."

A granary is specifically built to keep grain, which can last for 5-7 years, while a beet or a carrot won't.  The single most important part of a granary's design is to keep the grain dry, so it won't rot.  This is accomplished in a variety of ways.

A granary can be independently built, but as a place grows it gains a sense of community, the idea that "we're all in this together."  And because it's clearly understood that we all want to live when the crops don't make it some year, not just the most selfish among us, a large enough habitation will build an institution granary for the general welfare.  A portion of everyone's crop for the year is added to the total, to be paid back when crops fail.  So the granary is like a bank, where funds of grain are deposited for the future.

The granary is carefully managed by a steward who maintains the quality of the grain and keeps a close watch on how much is stored.  Even a small theft would certainly be recognised, as this is the steward's bread and butter, the thing that sustains his or her family.  It's a good job; with responsibility comes status, and a masterful granary steward can be a friend to the community.

He or she can also be convinced to trade grain for coin, since coin takes up much less space and can later be translated into grain in the future.  With enough coin, the steward can send off for a load of grain from elsewhere and make sure the granary is very full, all the time.

I bring this up because I've often seen player characters lay in massive supplies of flour for journeys that will last only ten or twenty days.  This, of course, increases their encumbrance something awful.  The argument is always that as they eat the flour, their encumbrance will lessen ... and they don't want to be caught without food.

However, there's nothing to stop the party from buying grain instead of flour.  A sack of grain is lighter than a sack of flour and any grain mill along the journey can be paid a very small fee to exchange a sack of grain for its equivalent in flour.  This fee would be less than the difference between grain and flour at the market.  Now add to this the possibility of buying the sack of grain from the local granary (again, for less than the cost of grain at the market) and then going around and having it milled.  All without the burdensome demand of carrying around 10 forty-pounds of flour.

Look at the maps I've posted.  Any type-6 hex or better will have a mill.  Any type-5 or better will have a public granary as well.  With most such hexes only six miles apart, is there really any need to lay in a hundred pounds of flour?  Keeping in mind that the granary steward and the miller will be happy for the money, as money is scarce in a hamlet ... and can be used to shore up the buildings and feed cats to kill mice, along with other convenient uses.  Each time the players come through, they make a friend or two, they save on their encumbrance and they gain a better sense for how the game world functions.

I have two other small facilities to discuss before moving onto bigger things, but I'm running out of steam.  I seem to have caught some kind of cold; perhaps it's covid, but I don't it.  No breathlessness so far.  Take care, I'll write soon.