Worldbuilding 5i: Making and Marketing

It can be understood that wherever there is money to be made, there's a clever group of people who want it all, and thus take steps to seal off others who might want some for themselves.  The notion of a "guild" was to establish that these people are permitted to make a thing and sell it, within our controlled system, whereas those people were not — no matter how well they knew their business.  This gave the guilds a monopoly over their own product, at least for those places within their reach ... that is, within the cities.

Guilds sprang up all over Europe, with each controlling various manufactures over small or large areas.  A tinsmithing guild might control all the smithies in one village or small county; or a plutocracy of individuals might unilaterally agree to set prices in dozens of places at the same time.  These agreements and monopolies would expand and ebb with the centuries, as various guilds would rise and fall, with their influence being disrupted by war, plague, famine and of course the death of those with the wisdom to manage large complex webs of control.  Smashing shops, destroying raw materials and made goods, even burning fields or driving out farmers were recognisable tactics.  After all, it's often better to burn a competitor's tailored goods, if it makes the ones we sell more valuable.  Think of it as the "Goldfinger" theory of economics, albeit on a small scale.

A single village or type-4 hex, with all of 2 hammers, hardly matters in the grand scheme of things ... but larger entities can nevertheless benefit from such minor players, especially when there are hundreds and hundreds of villages.  The largest problem is that a village, with minimal roads, transport and sitting out in the back country, suffers somewhat from a lack of materials.  The women's fingers may be nimble, but they need cloth to sew garments.

The solution was called the "putting-out" system.  A guild capitalist would provide the raw wool, cotton, silk, metals, clay, sand, woods and so on, making deliveries of these things to the crafters, who would transform these raw materials into clothing, tools, masonry, pottery, furniture and so on.  And because the crafter would become dependent on the merchant providing the raw materials, the latter could impose conditions of how hard the crafter worked while charging the crafter for the materials in a way that would create debt slavery.  This was done perniciously in a culture that had no laws to protect the crafter from such vampires.

Some manufactures cannot be easily done on this scale.  Paper-making requires a large mill, many workers and an abundant and organised supply of linen and cotton rags.  Mining is likewise a big scale operation, as is metallurgy.  The seasonable managing of logging industry, or fulfilling masonry contracts, requires a very organised system of transporting enormous weights of materials.  A small group attempting to manage operations of this size could easily fall into debt ... and in this case the "putting out" came in the form of credit.  Again, the guild merchant could then skim off the top, benefiting from the industry, while foreclosing on everything if the debt wasn't paid.  This is more or less still how things are done today.

Often, the rough work is done in backwaters and then finished in towns.  A village might make pottery, but the ordinary pottery would be transported into a larger center (a "settlement) to be painted or glazed.  Pieces might be made in a village, like angles, nails, thread, twine, wrapping and raw cloth, which would then be taken to the next step elsewhere.  Again, this is still what's being done today, only on a global scale.

As I described earlier, in a type-4 village this work would be done in individual homes.  Such places would need a steady source of heat in the winter to ensure constant labour, so a proper hearth should be present — well removed from flammable materials that might be part of the manufacture.  Jobs that needed a bellows or larger space, such as shoeing animals or making horse shoes, would require an attached outdoor enclosure.  Anywhere indoors would need a good source of cheap light, so glass windows would definitely exist ... though not very large, just 9 inches across.  The workbench would always be immediately under the window, so the light could be used.  With many materials, working by candlelight would be too dangerous.  Remember, the artisan would buy the raw materials; if the materials were destroyed and no product left to sell, the guild merchant lost nothing; but the crafter would be eternally in debt afterwards.  One fire was disastrously risky.

On the whole, these made items would never be sold by the Guild Merchant in the village.  More money could be obtained from a larger town or city ... so the "market day" I discussed on the village post would not include these crafted articles made locally.  And because the village is not a "market center," as I define it, the actual available things that can be bought are locally-produced, locally-controlled products: cereals, vegetables, fruits, treenuts, furs, animal feed, straw, raw fibres, livestock, eggs, honey, wooden planks and so on.  Because baked goods must be eaten the same day, a baker can successfully locate in a hamlet or a small village, but the number of goods and their kind will be limited, just like your local modern bakery.  If you're not there by eleven in the morning, most likely the loaves you want are already sold.

As such, we're talking about a "Town Market" for food items and a "Stockyard" for animals.  We have the baker as mentioned, the granary and maybe some very fundamental amateur crafts like a parasol, a child's doll or a "toy," being no more than a simple carved animal.  A coastal village reasonably supports a small fishmonger.  A cobpipe is also likely — but nothing at all on a greater scale than this.  A player party shouldn't expect to find rope, weapons, clothes, vehicles or vehicle parts, not even a saddle or a bit, though if it's horse country, a riding horse is probable.  Players need to comprehend that a village is not the local convenience store.  If it makes no sense for a farmer-labourer-villager to possess such a thing, why would they have it in stock?

Suppose, however, that the players ask one of the local tailor crafters to make a shirt.  From what would he or she make it?  The material is all committed to the guild merchant's expected return; and so is all of the crafter's time.  Three hours to make the player's shirt, even if the fabric is provided, means three hours less time making the guild merchant happy.  And it's this latter that really matters, not the opportunity to make one shirt for some fly-by-nighter who will be gone forever once the shirt is done.

Now, point in fact, there is an opportunity for the player to become the guild merchant.  The present supplier has to be bucked out of town, as a monopoly is being threatened, but a strong party should be able to handle a bunch of toughs who show up to reassert the former merchant's control.  Plus, the players could choose some village so out of the way that even a supplier isn't to be found.  Crafters could be shipped in with the right enticements.  They could also pick a craft in which the existing merchant isn't engaged.  He wants textiles, but we want to make, oh, clocks or musical instruments.

Meanwhile, it's an easy way for the players to get into "business."  They don't need to be around full-time, they can run their credit however they like, it makes them members of the community and they have a potential source of steady income without achieving name level.  This is something a party could start doing at 1st level, if they were careful about what craft they inserted and where they did it.

Very well.

I have a few things left to describe for 2 hammers.  I think the reader understands what a "shearing station" is, or an irrigation pump.  The former includes a clensing dip, some skill at managing sheep and the apparatus for collecting and redistributing the wool to a buyer further up the chain.  The latter is a small mill for hauling water out of a river and pouring it into an irrigation ditch, which then transports water throughout extensive fields.  These things are interesting in that they exist, but there's little to say about them.

The "hostel" is more involved ... but I'll leave this off until writing a post about roadhouses and inns, which both occur with three hammers.  Now I can set about updating the wiki page and approach the next size of non-settlement habitation, the "country town" that occurs with the type-3 hex.