The Size of Antwerp's Economy

This post may disagree or discount previous posts written about game infrastructure.  Where disagreement occurs, this post (the latest in my thinking and therefore design on the subject) is right and former content is wrong.

A few weeks ago, Ian Pinder asked me a question about the meaning of "market" as a reference, and how more market references would affect the trade system.  This was a fair question that I mostly ignored, because I did not have a good answer.  To some degree, a larger market provides a more direct route to far flung trade cities, and more market references increases the total number of references in a region, but aside from that, not much effect.

Formerly.

I can answer the question now because of a connection relating the trade system to the infrastructure system. Before I can get into that, however, a bit of a primer on how the infrastructure system helped describe the world.  You might, for instance, remember me posting maps similar to this:

Basically, looking something like a Civ IV map.  Stavanger is a type-1 hex, Randeberg is in a type-4 hex, as is Hole.  The two hexes south of Stavanger are type-7 (the Lake Camp hex) and type-5 (call it the "SE hex").  These five hexes will serve to make a point, then we can move on.

I wanted to emphasize that each individual hex is interpreted as a stand-alone economy (food, hammers/labor and coins/wealth).  The system I've adopted does NOT use the Civilization strategy where one town counts the surrounding squares or hexes).  For calculation purposes, Stavanger only counts what's in the hex that contains Stavanger: 7 food (loaf and two slices), 5 hammers and 6 coins.  Randeberg is therefore 4 food, 2 hammers and 2 coins.  The Lake Camp hex is 1 food and 2 hammers.  It would be an error, then, to lump these together and say that Stavanger included all these food, hammer and coin references.  I just want to make that clear.

Some readers might also remember that while one food symbol in a hex indicates 1 food, while two food symbols in a hex equals 3 food and not two.  To translate the symbols to numbers, consider the symbols to indicate the exponent in the following formula:

2^f -1

Three food symbols would equal 7 food, four symbols 15 food and so on.  Stavanger's food supply, therefore, would be 127 food.  Likewise, it's labor supply as shown above is 31 labor and its wealth is 63.

In the new system I'm building now, Stavanger would be a "guild" town (type-1 settlement hex, different from a type-1 rural hex, which has no indicated town in it).  As a guild town, it gathers local goods for transshipment (+1 wealth symbol), it mills local resources into higher-scale products (fish into dried fish, milk into cheese, cattle into leather) (+1 wealth symbol) and the economy is run by guilds who produce high end materials (+2 wealth).  Stavanger also gets +1 wealth symbol from being on the sea.  That's five total, or 31 wealth as I've described.

Stavanger also has 1 market reference in the trade system: so in this new system, that market reference adds another +1 wealth symbol.  This makes it the same as the map above, though as it happens for a different reason.  In any case, this gives us 63 wealth for Stavanger as before.

But what does that mean?  Well ...

If we add up the total number of references (markets and otherwise) in the world (as mapped so far), we get 25,624.  Each of those references is worth as much as 1 reference of gold, on average about 3,894 oz. of gold, or 33,937 g.p.  That's a total of 869,606,567 ... or, divided into a population of 245,385,032, a total of 3.54 g.p. per person.

A "food" represents the amount of food necessary to feed 100 persons.  "Labor" equals the amount of work 100 persons can do.  And "wealth" is based on the per capita income of 100 people, or 354 g.p.  63 wealth, then, is an economy of 22,326 g.p.  Not counting churn, that being money that passes through the hands of many people on a regular basis, enabling one coin to have the purchasing power of multiple coins, depending on the churn.  But let's not worry about that and concentrate on hard numbers.

Individually, Stavanger is one hex in a region of 14 producing hexes called Rogaland, which then counts as a larger economy. Rogaland is part of Denmark, which is obviously a much larger economy, within all of Europe.

Using the system described, if Stavanger had two market references, it's economy would double.  If it had three market references, it's economy would quadruple.  Four and five market references makes for a BIG economy.

The largest market cities I've included in my design so far, based on references, include Constantinople (9), Lubeck (11), London (12), Bremen (14), Hamburg (15) and Antwerp (18).  Some cities, like Paris, haven't many market references, but have many other productions that will help boost the economy, but we'll keep with just market references, because that's easy to calculate without having to actually map out the area.

Consider Antwerp.  It, too, is a guild town, so we give it 4 wealth symbols.  It then is on a river, so that's another symbol.  Then we add 18 more for market references, for a total of 23.  That's a wealth of 8,388,607.  Multiply this by 354 and the total is ... 2,972,775,783.

Yep.  The trade in Antwerp alone is worth more than three times all the wealth produced by all goods in all the world.  And that sounds crazy impossible ... except, I will remind the reader again of the churn, which is the only possible explanation for Antwerp's economy.  The money changes hands so fast there than it creates a 3 billion gold coin economy in a 17th century world.  And that is not out of proportion.  There was a reason that Spain did not want to let the Southern Netherlands go.

Hamburg isn't nearly as big: only a billion.  Bremen is half a billion, London is 125 million and Lubeck is 70 million.  But it is as I said: there are other things that will affect economy other than market references. Remember the rule from Civ IV that banks increase the economy by 50%?

So far, we're just playing with the simplest of numbers in a system I haven't designed fully.  There's a long way to go.

Defining Culture and Other Things

Five years ago, I wrote a series of posts using the game Civilization IV to describe a methodology for creating micro-infrastructure for the game world.  I wrote posts about food, production, workers and various elements hit upon by the Civ IV makers ... and admitted that other elements, like culture and health, were "problems" that I hadn't solved.

Some problems take time.

I have occasionally struggled with connecting my trade system to other systems that I've proposed, such as the infrastructure system or the more recent tech system.  I have made three attempts on this blog since 2015 to express the tech system as clearly as I can, but it turns out I can't even clearly explain it to myself.  It is a headache of the first order, no doubt about it.  In any case, those "never-too-much-economics" posts are part and parcel of the same problem.

In a sense, with far, far less relevance to the universe than anything Einstein did, I'm struggling right now to come up with a "unified world theory" that would pull these disparate parts of my rules together into a cohesive whole.  I'd like to write a little about that, then write a little about what "culture" might mean in a D&D context.

Here is my thinking, regarding the pulling of these systems together.  The trade system designates the existence of produced goods, tied to regions.  The infrastructure system breaks down a region into smaller and smaller bites, so that we can know the amount of buildings, roads, supplies or production a specific hex has, as small as we wish to go (though I limit my production measure to 6-mile hexes, it could go deeper). The infrastructure, then, could be used as a means to determine the exact points of origin for trade goods, from fish to iron mining to the making of clothing.

The infrastructure also includes a measuring system for available food, labor ("hammers") and wealth ("coins"), stolen from Civ IV.  This measuring system might be directly affected by the trade system, so that if a town produced, according to the trade system, "cheese," then the food supply in that specific town, in a given type of infrastructure hex (remember all those "groups" posts, from 2011?), could be increased because we have a trade reference from that town.

Okay, stay with me here.  This gets complicated.

If we add in the proposed tech system, then we know that a specific level of tech produces an availability of building types: granaries, harbors, theatres, forges, etcetera.  These buildings, then, could also be fit into the infrastructure framework, so that a Type-I hex, with a settlement in it, would mean that the specific building was present, IF the tech were sufficient and IF the circumstances (near the water, say) were right. Furthermore, if we want to steal further from Civ IV, then the improvements that arise from that game could be detemined, in part, by the trade system (which indicates that wheat fields or coffee plantations, whatever) are definitely present in the region's hexes, and in part by the tech system itself, which indicates roads, monuments, city walls, waterwheels and so on.

Those improvements and buildings, indicated by the tech and the trade system, then augment the infrastructure still further, telling us how much additional labor a waterwheel adds, or how much additional food a windmill adds, or how much additional wealth a market adds ~ adjusted according to a long-standing system that has already proven itself.

Places with higher tech will have universities, customs houses and banks, while places with lower tech will not.  These things, in their own way, will affect not only the description of the region and city, but actual details regarding how the city is structured and how that affects what the players want to do.

Part of that means coming up with a meaning for culture.  It's too important to skip over, as the creation of culture by a civilization, particularly as it advances, should be there to define everything about the player's experience as they walk down a street in Paris as opposed to a street in Stavanger.  That has to be measured: and the presence of a measure for culture taken from Civ IV is too damn enticing to ignore.  We have all these marvelous figures to tell us how much culture a specific place creates, due to the presence of its buildings, products, tech and so on ... all that is needed is a meaningful description for what this "culture" actually means concretely.

Not an easy fix.  I've been climbing over Wikipedia for several days, following one link to the next, from culture to social norms to meta-ethics, looking for something that defines the difference between how people with high culture think vs. what people with low culture think.

Fundamentally, humans are ruled by a reward system, which itself is buried in the physical mesolimbic pathways in our brains, something we can't do anything about.  As a species, we are driven towards pleasure and away from fear ... so that culturally, as we've advanced, we've done our best to build systems that contain fear while providing as much pleasure as possible.

Where pleasure is provided only to a few, the system eventually collapses under violence perpetrated by the many, whereupon it is either replaced by a similar system that temporarily provides pleasure for the powerful, or a better system that provides pleasure for a larger proportion of the population.  See, the key to the balance isn't to eliminate misery, it is to reduce the number of miserable persons to a level that they can't meaningfully threaten the number of persons who are living with a tolerable level of pleasure plus those that are living with a lot of pleasure.

This is the "bread and circuses" equation, that says that if we provide nominal pleasure to the miserable, in the form of something that distracts them a little while, they will concentrate on their small amount of pleasure long enough that they won't feel the need to rise up and kill all of us who are enjoying massive amounts of pleasure all the time.

Therefore, I think I've hit upon the fundamental definition of "culture" in the measurable sense is that it establishes the amount of social control in the region.  More coliseums, more theatres, more religion, more of anything that is properly defined by the Civ IV structure, less random misery and street-chaos by the population.  We don't need to make the population happy, just complacent, rewarding them with small amounts of pleasure for obeying the law, paying their taxes, fulfilling their duty by fighting for the monarch, turning in anyone conspiring against the state and resisting any desire to change their lot in life.

Thus, the higher the amount of culture, the more viciously and coldly will come down the deadly hand of social control on the hapless player character who stupidly flaunts the law, supposing that everyone here will find it "cool" or "edgy" to speak ill of Queen Juliana the VII.  That may play out in the sticks, where people are miserable, but not here in this Type-I, Tech-13 city where we all LOVE her.  In fact, I don't think we will even give you a chance to apologize.

That doesn't give me an incremental scale, not yet ... but it does provide a framework from which I might evolve an incremental scale, given time.

Anyway, this is what I'm working on right now.  It is bound to spawn all kinds of interesting posts.

A Programmed Trade System

I've been approached by a programmer who, reading the recent posts, has expressed an interest in making the trade system into a program.  We're just discussing it, right now.  No time lines have been set.  Only the scantiest of details have been discussed.  There is enough for him to try out a few things, to solve some up front problems.

We'll probably be looking at some kind of beta stage, as a problem solving tool.  And, whenever that comes to light, I'll probably have to take down the trade content on the Patreon account, since if the auto-trade system works, people might look at those files and see how to duplicate our work.  That's a very real thing, but it won't happen for a while.  In the meantime, I'm going to continue working on upgrading things, particularly as I have reformatted everything and worked out an interesting availability system.

Just now, I'm tagging items according to the climatic classification that each market city exists in, according to the Koppen system.  I'm hoping this will narrow the distribution of certain agricultural resources in my system.  For example, looking up "olives" would probably tell me that they're grown in a warm, Mediterranean climate, but that wouldn't be very helpful.  On the other hand, by tagging every market in my system where olives originate, I can get an exact distribution for olives and everything else, helping me build an availability system not only based on what climates have access to olives, but which ones don't.  And that applies to every other product as well.

I was also thinking of making a mirrored distance table - the table that calculates the distance of any given trade city from every other - for the winter period, which would involve finding all the calculations for very cold regions (specifically, humic micro-thermal climates, like most of Canada), doubling or perhaps trebling the distance between markets to simulate the decreased likelihood of trade during the winter months.  This would just mean that when I wanted to calculate a city when my game was taking place in December, I'd simply go to the other table and use that.  No doubt, northern products would increase in price and decrease in availability (and thus disappear from my equipment list), while places that made use of northern trade routes, such as the Baltic Sea, would have to ship through more southern cities and ultimately that would increase the price and lower the availability of many things that yet originated in relatively warm climates.

Work, yes, but the results could be fun.

So, still thinking, still developing.  I still have many ideas.

New Pricing Table

For those supporting me on Patreon (it's only $10, one time, for one month, to see it), I have added the new pricing table to my Google drive.  The title includes "28oct17" ~ but I'll leave up the old pricing table a bit before taking it down, if anyone wants to get a copy and hasn't thought to do that.

Patreon will be taking out donations in just three days, so if you'd like to pledge $5, $10 or $20 towards the continued great content of this blog (going by what people have told me), now would be a good time.  It's early enough that you still have plenty of time to find money for Christmas, yes?

Thanks for reading and for your fine comments.  I've already been thinking of ways to implement some of the additional changes I suggested in today's earlier post ~ but I'm not rushing to do anything just now.

How Much, And If At All

I've gotten through my equipment list and established Sets for each object.  I realized as I went that the Sets are quite crunchy enough to manage every item, as many things are simply excessively rare and happen to be made of things that are bound to be made of a common good: say, a floating castle made of stone, as an example of something not on the list.  That can be solved by simply dividing the reference availability by the workmanship number on the table, but even that has to be arbitrarily tweaked somewhat.  I'm never happy with an arbitrary solution, so no doubt I'll be messing with this system until I am happy ... or until I die, which ever seems more likely.

Still, I'm more pleased with it than I have been with any other availability system, and that's good.  I'm just rebuilding the pretty table for players to use during the game, then I'll post it on my drive for patreon users.

There's a different aspect to availability that needs addressing, and that connects to the quantity of goods that can be bought (a whole other headache).  I'll use elephants as an example.

Let's say that we're in Stavanger: a cool Norwegian climate in the summer and bitterly wet and cold in the winter.  In my system, the total number of references for elephants in Stavanger is 0.0200.  I have 7 world references for elephants just now (there would be more, but Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have not yet been added to the system).  Here's the breakdown of how the sources of elephants affect the Stavanger market:

All of these are in India.  The distance between Stavanger and Mysore, Bombay, Galle, etc. are all over 300.  Myingan, in the region of Pagan, in the Empire of Toungoo, is in Burma (and I'll bet you recognize none of those names), making it the farthest away.

It's no use arguing that these are mastodons in Norway, because the table clearly shows where they're coming from.  And since 0.015625 is the minimum for set one objects, and since and "elephant" is a set one object from elephant references, this puts elephants in Norway.  I can eliminate elephants by arbitrarily listing them as "set 2," but then I would have to remember to personally change that set if the trade numbers were being generated for a market in India.  No good.  The programming has to work for everywhere.

Put that on a shelf for the moment.

My trade system bases the price of an elephant on the number of references vs. the number of elephants.  I have 50,637 head of trained, domesticated elephants in the world, obviously in India and Burma.  This doesn't seem like many, but it compares with established numbers early in the 20th century.  And I don't have many references, because the source comes from the 20th century and even India had been advanced enough that not every town in the country named elephants as a resource.

If we take that number and divide it by 7, we end with slightly less than 7,234 elephants per reference.  If we multiply the number of references in Stavanger by 1 reference of elephants, we get 144.55 elephants in Stavanger.  In Norway.

That's ridiculous.  There are only 2,500 people in the town of Stavanger in my game, so where the hell are they keeping all these elephants?

It helps to think of products appearing on the market tables as things going through the market, rather than as things being kept there.  Most of anything is a wholesale product, piling up in a given town like Stavanger before being distributed throughout a large section of the hinterland.  Stavanger market serves a population ten times its number, and of course merchants in Stavanger import things they expect to then ship forward to other trade cities.

If we think of the number of elephants, or any other product, as the amount going through Stavanger in a year, it reduces the physical appearance of every commodity.  If we divide the year into 52 weeks, however, it still means almost three elephants moving through Stavanger per week, but that's at least a little easier to swallow.

Technically, it could be the same three elephants, or even one elephant, being sold over and over, since that's how economies work.  We could also argue that only the paperwork is moving through Stavanger.  A fellow doing business in Stavanger has a plantation in India and as such, he's managing his elephants overseas; yes, you can buy an elephant in Stavanger, but you have to pick it up in Mysore.

That's a way of handwaving the issue and it has been the thought process I've had for a long time.  Besides, no player character wants to buy an elephant in Stavanger, even if it is only 89 g.p.  Even if the thing is in a stall, as a DM I'm going to be a complete asshole about it and tell the player the elephant is going to die if it doesn't get a sufficient shelter or moved pretty quick to a warmer climate.  That's a way of controlling it too.  That and the fact that an elephant eats 450 lb. of food a month.

None of this actually solves the problem, however ~ as I say, it is handwaving.  Logically, the trick it to establish another variable that states an elephant won't or can't be sold in such-and-such a climate, even if the adjusted references say it exists.

And that is easy to write and to propose but it includes hundreds of other items that must also be arbitrarily limited in market appearance based on a very wide variety of issues.  Saltwater fish and shipbuilding being sold inland (along with defining what is "inland"), furs and heavy cloth items even being available in hot, humid climates (why would you want a fur even as a rug in Burma?  And who would bring it thousands of miles to market it there?), wagons existing in places without roads and so on.  These things are fiddly and highly particular to some areas and we're talking about a lot of work defining the margins of where a product occurs and where it doesn't.

On top of this, add the argument of seasonal availability, something I have always wanted to incorporate but which was just a bridge too far.  I think I see now how this could be done more easily, but again it is a process of going through each item one at a time and arbitrarily deciding whether something can be bought in a given season at all, and then how much of what is sold in what season ~ and even that doesn't yet take into account fruit that is shipped a thousand miles vs. a hundred.

I've hand-waved that by saying an apprentice mage with a freshen cantrip can restore a cubic yard of vegetable material a day, enabling a full wagon to be restored entirely every four-six days, depending on the size of the wagon, long enough for it to be hauled from Andalucia to Warsaw or further.  But a system that argued that Israeli hushhash couldn't be bought in Stavanger at all would be better.

These are long-term plans, and hopefully will be implemented one by one.  The hold-up until now has been a base system that could be used to adjust items; now that I have found one (hopefully, it holds up), I can patiently figure out these other issues one by one, creating features that will discount something if it is such and such a distance from the sea, if it is autumn, if it is in such and such a climate that discounts its presence and so on.  A long, frustrating process towards a deeper, grittier detail, but I think in the long run worth it.

I look back at what I've created thus far; it would be hard to imagine something this big and this complex at the beginning of this project without losing heart at ever accomplishing this much.  Yet I have accomplished it, because I didn't think of the whole scale.  I just thought of one little bit of it at a time, letting the process itself determine the monolith of the project that it became.

Wonderful Opportunities for Adventure

This afternoon, I had a discussion with a regular reader who tells me that I should find a programmer and have my trade system made into a format that will let people plug in data and spew out the results.  It's a lovely idea.  Unfortunately, I don't know a programmer, programmers don't listen to instructions, I don't believe there's enough demand for the product to justify paying a programmer the necessary money, or even splitting the money even with someone who, if they did listen, is merely translating my work into a different format.  I love the idea.  It's just that it doesn't make sense.

A Typical World

A part of me says, "Fine, do it for them."  I hear from people who tell me they like the idea, but it is just too much work.  They start into it and they lose the verve and it never gets done.

What most people would want to do with a trade system, with a typical world that I see posted on line, to resounding cries of "I love your art style," would be a cake walk for me.  The map on the right, from socksandpuppets.com, consists of 12 habitations, not counting the "base camp."  It would be easy to build up a distance table, then select a hundred products and build a trade system for this that would serve the world well enough to, as Ian Pinder said, "search for adventure" within that system.

It also came up, "Would I make the world itself?"  A hundred years ago, back in 1984, after making a world that looked somewhat similar to the picture above, I was asked to make an imaginary world for others.  At the time, I charged the outrageous price of $150.  I can't imagine doing something like this now.  Back then, I did hand drawings.  Now, to do it on computer (as I am not hand drawing and shipping anything), I certainly wouldn't be cheap.  And it wouldn't be worth it anyway.  For what most DMs use a D&D world for, stealing a map like the one linked should be enough for them.

At this point, on this subject, I'm merely poking the bear.  I doubt there are more than two or three persons who would find any use for this service, were I to offer it.  I haven't hesitated in the past to monetize this blog, so I don't worry about that.  I only wonder, is this something I want to actually do.

Distances between Markets

So, what have I been doing?

Very boring stuff.  I finished the rebuild for the sources table, the table that describes the origins of all goods and services in my known world; I did it mainly because I was looking down the barrel of adding Great Britain and Ireland into the system and that looked like a tremendous headache.  The rebuild eliminated the need for a 14 meg excel file, drastically reducing the size of the problem ~ so well worth the effort.

Once finished, I was free to add more data.  I finished my Burma map back in October 2015; that had never been added to file.  I finished Senegal and Mauritania back in June 2016; that, along with Cape Verde, had never been added.  I finished Britain in January this year; I've already talked about having to add that.  And I finished Iceland this past July (and the map of that has since been reworked).

Altogether, these places had 169 markets.  In the past year, bit by bit, I've worked out the sea distances, worked out the land distances and added roads to the maps.  The last week I've spent adding the markets to the distance calculation program, which basically means putting in the distance and then linking it to a cell, that is in turn linked to another cell and another and so on, round and round the world.  I've talked about this before.  Just for the hell of it, however, I'll put up a screenshot of a small part of the table:

All the numbers shown indicate the number of "days" of merchanting travel.  Column A shows the markets, labeled by kingdom, province and market city.  Column B is the minimum number of the horizontal list two lines below and stretching out to the right.  For example, the Folkestone number, B377, describes the smallest number among those of C379 through O379 ~ with a +1 added as a cost for importing it into the hex.

Don't bother looking to compare the numbers ~ they won't add up.  That's because the file is in mid-calculation.  For it to work properly, one city must be given a fixed number, which all the other cities then calculate against.  The template table, however, gives the cities no fixed number; so every time they are calculated, the numbers tend to drag one calculation behind all the other circular calculations in the document. This means the minimum number calculation is one step behind the number calculations for the horizontal lines shown.  And if I keep pressing the manual calculation F9, the "minimum" numbers will just increase to infinity.

At the point where I saved this image, the numbers are all very high and incorrect because of this.

The address line shows the distance between Portsmouth and Southampton: =0.8+$B$356.  Portsmouth and Southampton are two hexes apart, and sea travel costs 0.4 "day" per hex.  What does that number mean?  It means that if the goods originating in Portsmouth were divided by 1, those goods in Southampton would be divided by 1.8, for determining their availability.

Adding these boxes is niggling work and none of it can be errored.  One error blows the whole calculation.  It really sucks if I get a value error somewhere ~ that value error will just proliferate, no matter what I do; the only thing to do is to close the document and reopen, losing all the work.

Thus, I add a city and save; add a city and save; add a city and save.  And each city added means four or six or thirteen calculations, or more.  At the end of my work this week, Copenhagen ended with 57 direct connections, more than any other city on the list.

I have a system which says that every market is not directly connected to every other market.  Large cities with high market numbers reach further than small cities; a place like Ramsgate reaches only a few other places.  Too, if the route between market A and market B passes through market C, then I record A-C and B-C but not A-B.  That reduces a lot of the possible combinations ~ and it feels right that market C moderately controls the trade between A and B.  The only real effect is that A and B are considered one extra "day" apart.

Well, I have this finished.  All told, I have 1,235 markets now, all interconnected.  The next thing is to add the goods and services from the new market cities to the rebuilt table I finished in late September.  I still have to adjust that new, rebuilt table layout to the old prices table layout, but that's a few hours work when I have the time for it.  Thankfully, I have this finicky distance-work table updated.  Nice to have it behind me.

I'll add it to Google drive for the Patrons - if you want to play with it, add a 1 to the highlighted B column of any given market and then keep pressing the manual calculation until the numbers stop changing.  The final numbers will give the accurate number of days between the market you chose and all the other markets.

It is easy to build a table like this for your own system.  I started with just 30 markets.  Those were simple days.

Re-Crunching Done

Phew.

With respect to the redesign of my sources and production calculator spreadsheets, which will mean nothing to those not steeped in my trade system, I'm done.  It's rebuilt, cleaned up, made to look pretty and now available on my Google Drive, for those of you who have paid the access fee.

Truth be told, some of you who have donated to me in the past have bowed out of my Patreon in the last six months.  Your names are still on the system, when they shouldn't be ~ still, I'm relaxed about it.  You were great about supporting me and I thank you.  Still, I'm going to have to downgrade your access within a few days, so don't waste time if you want a last look.

For anyone who wants to see the completed table, you'll have to either pledge $10 to my Patreon account (in which case you'll get access the 1st of November) or donate the money to me directly, in which case I can set you up as soon as I see your email.  I've worked many, many, many days and hours on this; I'd be grateful for a remittance at this time.

For myself, I'm in a position now to comfortably add Burma to the system, which was the straw that broke the back of the old set-up.  Then I can add Great Britain, Iceland, part of Africa ... but all at my leisure.  I may put down numbers for a while and work on something more, ahem, shall we say blog worthy.

Been a rough go, this change.  Obsessive.  Glad it's behind me.

Sea Routes in the British Isles

Something light-hearted and simple, then.  Back in 2014, I published a group of sea trade maps.  I'd like to draw the reader's attention to this one that was posted then:

Since I finished creating the map of Britain, I've been working on an updated sea route map that would include the British Isles.  It looks like this:

Frankly, I'm glad this is done.  It is one more step towards adding England to the trade system, a long, involved process.  I've updated the map on my Google Drive, for those who have donated $10 or more to my Patreon account.  Thank you all again.

When Trade Tables Go Bad

One of the systems that became part of the lessons dialogue, described in the last post, was my own, an implemented version of my trade table.  I feel, therefore, that I'm a bit responsible for problems that arose surrounding that table - specifically, that while the numbers were consistent and related to one another, they weren't affordable.

This is likely because of the generalized production numbers that I included in my wiki descriptions of the trade system - those numbers that described such and such many tons of ore or timber divided by the number of references (those numbers can be found at the bottom of this page).

Those numbers really matter, since although they are pulled from the air, they affect the price of everything.  I built my trade system from actual production numbers from the world, gathered from the United Nations Industrial Commodities Statistics Yearbook and from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.  I took numbers from 1988 and then adjusted those to reflect more of a 17th century industrial production, for the most part dividing the numbers by 500 or, in the case of some very technologically developed products (like metals that weren't isolated until after 1650), by numbers between 1000 and 5000.  Over the years I have tweaked these numbers, to adjust for problems like a lack of affordability, taking a hard line with some things (like metal industries) and a very soft like with others (like chemical industries).

I kept meaning to post the original numbers that I had based all this, but it got forgotten and those numbers never were added to the wiki.  It's taken me an hour just to find the original files . . . on a secondary drive of a computer I keep for its memory capacity (because it is still running on windows 5, believe it or not), under about seven different folders, the last two of which were marked "unsorted files" and "old trade tables."

I've cleaned the files up to get good screen shots of the details, but these two files are so old they predate microsoft windows, being initially created on a Mac Plus that looked exactly like this:

Seriously - I remember staring at the little logo next to the disk drive
as this little thing would sit and think and think and think

I can only hope that these numbers will be helpful.  I do encourage people, with their games, to adjust those production numbers, before dividing them into references.  I'll post these on the wiki too, after I finish with this post. (where they will be much, much easier to read for most readers).

Oh, sorry.  For some reason, the animals are on the ICYB table when I know they came from the FAO.  Ah well, so it goes:

FAO Numbers

ICYB numbers

It will be noted that I don't use the numbers for a lot of these because I found a different way to do industrialized goods on the system.  I spent a lot of time trying to make the industrialized numbers above work, wasting my time really, before foregoing them and basing prices completely on the availability of only raw materials.

In all honesty, these numbers can be anything you want them to be.  It is important to remember that reducing the number will make the product more expensive; growing the number will lower the base price (which then can be raised again by increasing the number of references, so the user of this system wants to look for a sweet spot).

Pricing Table Sorta Done

This week, I "finished" my pricing table.  That is to say, it isn't as though I won't continue to add things to the table or give it more details, but rather that it is once more game functional.  If I want to find a price for an object in Qarshi, south Uzbekistan, I can once again calculate that price in about a minute forty-five seconds.  Once upon a time, it took less than a minute, but the table is huge now and as such more challenging.

I said a year ago that adding France broke the original table.  This month, in the space of about ten days, I added 110 market cities in Spain and Morocco without hardly a quibble.  That's the trick: we make things more complicated in order to make them simpler.  My world now has 1,066 distinct markets selling 1,519 individual goods and services.  Fun times.  Compare this with my discussion about the system on the wiki.

The pricing table is available on patreon for a $10 donation . . .

. . . aaaaaaaaaand we interrupt this post for a fire in the building.  I was in mid-sentence above and realizing that there was a burning smell and that it was not my imagination.  I checked in the hallway and it smelled like someone had burned something on a stove - but worse, definitely worse.  So I called 911 calmly, then exited the building as I could hear the pumpers coming.

The apartment down the hall had a pot burning on the stove all right - and the apartment was empty.  So, when you think you forgot to turn off the stove before leaving home, yes, that sort of thing happens.

I'm back at my desk now, no harm done.  As I was saying, the pricing table, technological terror that it is, works fully now.  The first part of this won't mean much to the casual reader - it consists of calculating out the distances between markets and then dividing that distance into the unit I use to determine the presence of a given resource or form of manufacturing:

A very small sampling, showing that the base market for this
calculation is Barcelona, recently added to my tables (the distance
is 1 hex, so that everything made there is divided by itself).

The line of totals (in bold) along the top are then applied to the pricing table itself, thusly:

Once I paste in the generated numbers into the "input references" column, all the costs for all the products on the table (including cost of containers for liquids or composite parts for items) is automatically generated.  The change is instantaneous.

There's then a random number that is rolled to see if the given reference is available today.  If it isn't, then none of the things on the market table will show as available for purchase.  At the moment, the random generator is designed to deny only very rare things, leaving most of the equipment table the players will use intact.

In the long run, however, I can build a personalized determination for each item, based on things like seasonal availability, status of the buyer, familiarity with the town where the item is purchases, special skills in hunting out items, time spent looking for the thing wanted or whatever other framework I'd like to add.

I wanted to point out that those who may not be interested in building a trade system that the numbers in the input column can be changed manually, as well.  Therefore, if the user wanted to increase or decrease any given substance or product, just because, the table will manage that.  This means that a user who only wanted one equipment table for their campaign could play with the file, minutely adjusting things until getting exactly the numbers that fits with their campaign.

I will be adding to the table; there's the random number/availability thing to work on and there's also wages to be added (there's been minimum work on that).  These are things I've wanted to build for a long time but couldn't, largely because the file needed to be better organized and designed.  I've built it now to expand it much further.

Interesting . . . I was just thinking, I gave a class this morning on Decision Making as a DM, and then within about half an hour I had to make a decision whether or not to call the fire department.  Same process, really.  Ain't life great?

What Matters

"Then there's Alexis again. Damn it, Alexis. If you're a regular reader of his blog you've been subjected to all manners of posts on the fantasy economy via the man's extensive and elaborate trade tables (here's an example). The point often missed by folks, including me when I first started looking at them (*cue eyes glazing over*) is that they're NOT about modeling 'reality' or a 'realistic' economy. They're just about modeling an economy . . . period."

And imagine - some people don't like being talked about.  This is from JB's B/X Blackrazor post from Wednesday.  I think it is an accurate description of what I'm trying to do.  To accomplish the goal takes exhaustive charts and number crunching; it does take tremendous amounts of work on my part.  I am well aware that the value of doing this escapes others.  Surely, it would be better to apply that effort to the development of the adventure or to non-player character creation.  Why waste time with a bunch of figures that only translate to numbers that can be generated on the fly?

That perception is understandable.  Certainly the makers of the game saw the world in exactly those terms.  Certainly the time that has been spent by the makers of games has concentrated far more on "what" to buy rather than how much that thing should cost.  Moreover, we as a society have very, very little understanding of how the economy works in the world we actually live in.

For example, take this document that was offered by one of the commenters on JB's blogpost, called Grain Into Gold.  It is a very rational document.  It attempts to establish a basis for the production, distribution and consumption of goods by starting with grain production, in order to give the user a handle on how an economy is 'grown.'

Quite rationally, he begins thusly:

"At an overly simplified level, farming requires two bushels of seed sown to produce eight bushels of seed harvested on an acre of land. This varies by crop types, but is often true. It is likely that the farmer will lose a like amount (around 25%) to taxes and spoilage together. The result is that assuming a farmer brings in a yield of eight bushels of seed per acre, after preparation for the next year's planting and taxes are taken into account, he will only have half his harvest to feed his family."

 Unfortunately, while the proposals made are 'simple,' they are also presumptive.  I would be the first to argue that this is necessary - my own system, for example, specifies a presumptive total for the amount of grain that applies to a set number of references.  Thus when I say that one reference = 6800 tons of grain, I'm saying the same that the designers are saying above (I presume, since I could not find the name of an author attached to the document).  One farm produces eight bushes of seed per acre.

Except it doesn't - at least, not in a fantasy world.  Most sources that can be found on grain production prior to 1400 will argue 1.5 bushels per acre; 3 was possible but tended to apply only in unusual places.  This was due in part to the means we had of tilling the land, the lack of horses to do very heavy labor (oxen cannot plow as much land as horses nor as efficiently), lack of crop rotation, lack of fertilizers, poor seed to start with and dozens of other factors that were slowly overcome. Eight bushels per acre describes a period well after 1700, after changes in the Earth's weather affected by the Little Ice Age and discoveries in the New World, as well as the onset of science.

Moreover, the example applies in no way to rice culture in Asia nor to the comparable abundance of food in West Africa and the New World, where 'cultivation' applied almost wholly to how much effort one chose to give in gathering food that wasn't sown and yet existed in profound abundance (ever looked at how many actual tons of bananas that an acre in Rwanda will produce?).

Let's put aside those problems, however, and simply accept that the designers are accurate for the world being represented.  I want to point out how much wasted effort is applied to the calculation being asked:  Once we've created a number for how much is produced, we then create other numbers which are as ad hoc as the first: taxes are such-and-such, spoilage is such-and-such, such-and-such is needed to feed the farmer's family.

Why go through this calculation?  The only real number that matters - as the document itself declares - is the excess.  In determining the yield per acre, why not simply discount everything else?  If the spoilage depletes the yield by 1/4th, then isn't the yield 6 bushels an acre?  If the family eats half of what they produce, can't we say that the farm yields 2 bushels an acre?

The way it is written, we're to presume there is no excess: except that there IS.  The farmer "loses" the 25% of the grain to taxes but the economy doesn't.  That remaining 2 bushels of grain will still be used or sold somewhere - so the relevant data we need is how much of that grain is consumed by the lord and his household?  The document doesn't tell us.  The government appears to take their cut of grain ("Boooo!" says the designers) and then we continue to look at the economy from the farmer's perspective, as though the economy of a nation is based upon what the farmer can get at the market or what the farmer's troubles are with the millwright.

What do we care?  We want an economic system for our world, not a microeconomic lesson in a farmer's troubles.  Here is where most ideal 'systems' fail: they reflect the perspective of ordinary people living ordinary lives who continue to think that money that is paid in taxes is "lost."  Taxpayers chafe at the taxes, but they do understand on some level that money is needed to pay firefighters and policemen and to buy asphalt and equipment for road repairs.

Yet when people talk about these things and their cost, they use phrases and descriptions along the lines of money "wasted" on education, roads, infrastructure, bureaucrats and the like, because once money is taken out of our pockets it cannot be spent as wisely as we will spend it: as in, "If the government hadn't taken so much money in taxes, I would have enough to take a trip to Cancun; instead that money is going to go to some stupid pencil-pusher whose job it is to count wolves in fucking Alaska."

I am eternally amused by the money "wasted on pencil-pushers" argument.  It is as though the pencil-pusher in Alaska, once he is paid, will take the money and burn it in his fireplace in order to keep himself warm.  On the contrary, he will spend the money at grocery stores, car dealerships and liquor stores in Alaska, rather than allowing you to channel that same money into a foreign country, something you don't care about but which the government does.  It has to care because if the Alaskan economy doesn't do a little bit better with the government wasting money there in paying pencil pushers (which keep the grocer and car dealerships on their feet in a place where no sane non-pencil pusher would live), then disaster happens.

This is why my trade system, such as it is, takes no account whatsoever of what one farmer on one piece of land produces or how much he keeps - because none of that matters.  The farmer is a dupe, an instrument of labour that the government endures because it is easier to encourage him to spend his labour in making us 2 bushels per acre than to have him sitting around angry and starving.  Who cares how much more than that he produces?  No one else will see it.  We only care about those two bushels.  The farmer's angst (let him boo, so long as he keeps grinding his life into the soil to make us what we want) is the same angst you feel as you grow up and realize you don't have any power either.  You may bitch and moan all you want about taxes but mostly you're just quibbling over a buck here and there.  On the whole, you want the government to exist and keep taking taxes from people (preferably, other people) because the alternative would really, really, really, really suck.  More than "Boooo."

It is this fundamental principle that goes far, far beyond arguments that an economic system only applies to "What the players do in town."  Without a clear, solid understanding of what the government is doing around and in spite of  the players, there is no framework.  If it wasn't for all the boring, uninteresting details involved in funding the theatre, paying the rent or the mortgage, or the taxes, cleaning the carpets in the lobby, fixing the chairs, paying the heat and other utilities, paying staff to clean the fucking washrooms, the space for the players to act the play (the part you came to see) wouldn't be such a great time for the audience.  For that matter, the actors like to be paid as well, as does the director, the stage manager, the gaffer and the grip, the costume designers and the make-up artists, so you're dinged as you even walk in the door.  That's a tax, too.

Is it a lot of work?  Fuck yes.

Those who say, however, that we need to spend more time concentrating on making better non-player characters or applying ourselves to making better adventures are completely missing the point.  We're not talking just about the price of the local beer: we're talking about a beer-drinking culture versus a wine-drinking culture, a beef-eating culture vs. a fish-eating culture, a culture where everything is made out of wood and a culture where everything is made out of stone.  When people dismiss such nuances in behaviour it is plain that they've had a very, very narrow experience with life, with the way people choose to live, with how they choose to spend their time and their effort, with their philosophy of life or with the way that human nature affects everything about a culture, from its daily grind to its government.

To some, if I say beer-culture versus wine-culture, all they hear and understand is that these people drink beer and these people drink wine.  To others, that mere distinction is incomprehensible. Germany IS Germany because it drinks beer.  Italy IS Italy because it drinks wine.  No European is unclear about this.

But then, why not just designate this crowd in the world as wine drinkers and that crowd as beer drinkers?

If it were only that easy.  Italy is divided between those people who eat tomatoes and those that don't.  Germany is divided between hill people and river people.  There are endless divisions, endless - and they're all based on what we grow, dig out of the earth, drink, smoke, wear and so on.  There are a million distinctions and every one of them arises out of two things: what we can buy and what we want to buy.

Until a DM understands that, a DM might perhaps want to keep quiet about how the world works.

Market Towns

Regarding the trade table system, I was asked by Maxwell to discuss my use of "market towns" - what is the difference between those and non-market towns, how are things bought in a market town and if I conglomerate resources from other towns together.  I thought it best to write this as a post rather than a comment, as then I can stretch my legs a bit on the subject.

When I first began accumulating references from the encyclopedia I use, I soon found many, many references to towns that were markets for the surrounding country, commercial centers, important ports and so on.  Any reference that I found like this I noted along with all the iron, cattle, wool cloth and whatever else I found, as a service called "market."  As expected, I didn't find a market reference for every habitation - but I tended to find them for every significant city in my world.  For some places, such as Antwerp, Hamburg, Barcelona and so on, I found references to their market significance over and over again, in some cases mentioned as often as 17 or 18 times.  Like every other reference in my system, each time that a place was connected to a particular good or service, including markets, that counted as one reference.  Sometimes, a given article in the book would mention the same product twice or three times - each time it appeared in a different sentence, I noted it as a separate reference.

Unlike the map of Pon that I created to discuss the trade system, my world has many, many places that not only are not counted as a market, do not technically have any trade references at all (the encyclopedia didn't refer to them by name).  Just look at this one small part of France and Belgium:

Scene of WWI

On the map, places that have a circle within a cross are 'market towns': Laon, Noyon, Cambrai, Amiens, Lille (partly cut off, right at the top left of centre).

Some of these places have references that are not markets: Lens makes canvas, linen, grows hemp and mines coal; Guise makes bronze, smelts copper and iron and manufactures tools; Arras grinds flours, weaves carpets and tapestries, distills lamp oil and smiths metal; Compiegne makes cloth, rope, ship's rigging (though it is nowhere near the sea), builds boats (it is on the Oise River, a navigable connection with the Seine), makes terra cotta and raises racehorses.  All of these are details I found in the encyclopedia.

Most of these towns have no references: Encre, Denain, Formies, Vervins, Gilly, St.-Pol-sur-Ternois and so on.  In my conception, this doesn't mean these places don't have an economy - it is only that, given a 17th century, backward world, that economy does not affect the world in a larger sense. The people of Bohain-en-Vermandais pick from their orchards, they collect the wool from their sheep, they gather medicinal herbs, they make ceramics - but there is no trade for these things in Bohain itself, because the town is simply too backward to have an established merchant class.

Oh, but how do I know that the people of Bohain do those precise things?  Ah, because Bohain is in the Laon "zone" - and I do have references for the region surrounding Laon, if not the specific towns in that region.  Thus to some degree every center in the Laon zone has orchards, sheep, a herbal culture and ceramic making; and these things are taken by individuals into the market of Laon, where the guild receives their goods and licenses those specific people to make those specific things.  Laon then trades these things with Cambrai and Amiens, as well as every other market town in my world.

It would be the height of impracticality for me to try to make every town in my world a 'market' town.  Just look at the math required to handle the small bit of the world shown - compare that to my whole world, that has more than 10,000 villages, towns and cities.  I don't have that kind of time.

But suppose the party does find itself in Bohain?  What can the party buy?

It is tempting to say they can buy ceramics or medicinal herbs.  However, these things are carefully controlled by the local guilds and there is a strong feeling that the best thing to do is to sell these things in Laon - not only for the coin, but also for the relationship between the seller and the buyer.  If I sell my pots to you, an adventurer, that's all very well - one time only.  But then I'm going to have to explain that sale to my usual buyer, who buys my pots every season, who is now out a profit because I shortchanged him on my usual supply.  We see these things as quite ordinary in the modern world - but back then, when supply was carefully managed and the world was very, very small (in terms of one's relationships), this would be a potential threat to one's permanent position in the community.

Am I saying the players can't buy anything in Bohain? No. I've made a provision. I mentioned this just a few months ago.  In non-market towns, players will be able to find goods (when available) at the stockyards, the mason, the innkeeper, the chandler's and the carpenter's. This includes the town market as well:

Has to be opened in a new tab in order to be read easily.

Players can buy local artwork, land, fruits, vegetables, grains, greasy wool - very common things that might be for sale anywhere.  Though it must be noted that, according to common laws at the time, goods were for sale only on expressly permitted days of the week.  Often, in Europe, this was Sunday, because people weren't working in the field and were in the village to attend church; it was also a good opportunity for the church to sell some things of its own (Jesus chucked the money-changers from the temple but they went back).  Sometimes things were for sale only on festival days - though this was really a 13th-15th century thing, largely replaced by the time of my world.  If we go back even earlier, the 12th century and before, goods were never for sale in a place like Bohain.  The village wouldn't have made any of the things that I've described because the education for making things hadn't spread outside the very big cities.  Three or four centuries before that, Bohain was little more than a wide place in the road (it was founded around 691 AD), where the dwellers were living on subsistence agriculture and probably did not even possess what we would think of as a "lord" - more like a tribal chief.

Food that is grown and then stored locally in a subsistence culture is never sold to anyone - that's just a guarantee that you'll starve to death during the next drought.  Thus if you're running a world that is more backward than mine (which has a very establishing world-trading culture, permitting bulk food to be brought in to stave off hunger on a nation-wide scale), you might want to make rules for how large a town has to be before the inhabitants are willing to sell food.

Have a look at the places that fit into the Laon zone:



Now compare this with the references (or sources) that I use for Laon, garnered from the encyclopedia:



I color code these for ease of identification: lime green is foodstuffs, or manufactured food, blue is textiles, purple is alchemy, gray is materials, red is metalwork, bright green is fruits, nuts and vegetables, tan is livestock.  In all, 94,552 residents and 25 total references.  Saint-Quentin is as large as Laon but it isn't a market town - even though it produces nearly half the goods of the zone.  How does that work?

Easy.  Saint-Quentin is a religious center.  Something that readers must get out of their heads is the 'logic' of their own century: people from another age thought very differently.  All those textile products, all that sugar refining, a third of the metal industry?  All done by monks in monasteries, making up the vast balance of the goods made in the zone.  Laon isn't the market town because it happens to make the most stuff: it is the market town because it has good access to Alsace (to the east, not shown on the map) and ultimately to Italy, it is a big town, apparently it doesn't do anything BUT market goods and it isn't Saint-Quentin.  The bishop will designate the market wherever the bishop damn well pleases.  Can the players buy goods in Saint-Quentin?  Probably not - unless they have some relationship with the monks, which might be possible IF the party cleric is the same religion and has gained some respect among his peers.  I have noticed that my players' clerics tend to be anything except Catholic (they favor Celtic, for the most part); chances are they'll have to hoof it to Laon.  I did have one player that choose a Catholic priest - Andrej, in the online campaign - and the campaign tended to play out to his and the party's benefit because of it.

The various goods, then, are collected in one market place because of the encyclopedia and because it makes the system easier - but ALSO because it creates that ever-important scarcity I am always going on about.  The players must go to Laon; they must wait until the next time the market is open; no, they can't buy this thing they are looking at because it is promised to someone else - and so on.  Scarcity creates adventure.  The party decides that if they can't buy it, they'll steal it.  The party decides not to wait for next Sunday, but to do without because they want to go now - or they have to go now because they are on the clock and the girl will die if they don't get there before Friday.  The party would rather not walk five miles to Laon right now, but if they have to, they have to - and if something happens on the road, then it does.

Scarcity makes adventure.  Ease of access destroys adventure.  First rule of the trade system.

Climb That Wall

Let's talk about walls.

I've been working on the above table since this morning; I've decided to quit on it for a bit.  My previous take on this thing - the material components of musical instruments - was highly simplistic and I've meant to upgrade it.  This is still mostly simplistic - but it is more detailed than what I was doing before.

Thing is, it makes me want to pound my head on the desk.  Not that I won't eventually get through it - but the detail is exasperating for a variety of reasons.  Here are a few: just how much of a cello is made of sprucewood versus boxwood?  I can't find any information regarding that on the net.  Cellos are virtually always made of maple, which I don't have anywhere on my system because I have not found one damn place in Europe that boasts of making it.  Oh, I know that it's there, I just don't have any references for it and as people know, I'm insane about sticking to the originating material.  Still, I can assign it the same price as beechwood, I can even argue that in a world full of magic that MY cellos are made of beechwood and good-gawdammit, they sound exactly the same (so f-you).

I can argue that but unfortunately it annoys the bleeding crap out of me.  Moreso the fact that cello bows are made of two damn woods that are both found in the new world and for the love of fuck, I haven't included Brazil and the Yucatan into my trade system - so, no Pernambuco or Brazilwood.  Ever try to research if a cello bow can be made of some other wood?  It's fruitless.  I did find a single phrase that said, effectively, "We can't be sure what wood cello bows were made of before the discovery of the New World . . ."  Great.

Listen, I know that all of you can just put a brazilwood reference into some forest near the tropics of your world, but I'm screwed.  I have to make the cello bow out of blackwood for the time being; this is a dense wood from Africa - I did find someone advertising a cello bow made from it, though it probably sounds like bowing a cello with a taxidermy-dried cat.

I was supposed to figure out a harp next and . . . nope, not today.  I'm just not up to it.  This is what I mean by a wall.

Everyone hits them, working on their world.  The stuff can be interesting; I know a lot more about cello construction than I did an hour ago.  It can also be frustrating, searching for a specific thing that no one else in the world thinks matters.  On the other hand, without the net, I wouldn't have a hope - so there's that to thank.

What is it, however, that is going to get me back into the driver's seat, to look up harps, harpsichords, organs, drums, squeezeboxes, violins, flutes, recorders and so on?  Frankly, the players will.  Because everything has a price and the players will want to have a comfortable choice.  What am I going to tell bards in my game future wanting to pick an instrument?  That I couldn't be bothered?  That, sure, the cello price is logical but the flute price is pulled out of my ass?  Not me.

This isn't going to come off as kind: but I'll say it as someone raised by people who were much more concerned with themselves than with their children.  We do this thing for other people; if a DM doesn't have the will to sit down and make the world because it is exhausting or difficult or just takes too much time, I count that as, well . . . selfish.  That DM still wants to be a DM; they just want to do it without the work necessary to deserve it.

In my outline of How to Run, I mentioned the work we put into our worlds to make them beautiful. Here is the relevant passage:

"My world can’t rely on being what I hope it to be. It must be everything others hope it to be or it has no value. The cool, bitter reality of the effort is that I will have to build, install, renovate or ornament parts of my world in a way that I might find garish, graceless or camp: because that’s what players love. Theatre owners cannot only put on the plays that they happen to like. That is no way to bring in an audience. As I have said, I don’t even have the luxury of only pleasing an ‘audience’ – my players want to feel they own the place they’ve entered. They want to feel at home. I have to compromise my sense of beauty and please the entering crowd – else the crowd will simply walk out again.

Therefore, my world must be a masterpiece. It must devour the players, swallowing them whole, and doing it with a virtuosity that leaves them begging and panting in the world’s belly, never wanting to get out. I want my world to be something they cannot quit. The difficulty of that does not matter. It is what both my players and I demand. To have players I can count on, that they should wish to play at every opportunity. They should crave it. They know another world like mine is difficult to find.

That is why I waste my time with what seems like a silly detail - what sort of wood is a cello made of, how many ounces of spruce exactly and so on.  The lack of this sort of thing is what inspires endless youtube videos pointing out how one girl in the far background of one shot in a two-hour film was obviously not in character.  That lack is what drives you crazy when you see a tiny bit of pixellation in one short cut scene 18 hours into a game you paid $63 to own.  Gawdamn fucking lazy bastards - they should have fixed that.

So yes, it bothers me that I don't have maplewood in my campaign.  And it bothers me that I'm not going to find details on how much of what things a harp is made from, by weight, because it matters.  It all matters.  Moreso in a game where virtually everyone else's campaign is this horrid collection of crumpled papers, half-painted figures, buttons and game pieces for enemy orcs and a DM wearing a sloppy t-shirt that needed cleaning Tuesday.  I know I'm competing with that - but I'm still not inclined to be lazy.  My world must be a masterpiece.  So I'll overcome the annoyances and just get it done.

I used these once upon a time; more than 30 years ago.

Building an Index Table

For those who are familiar with excel, this is fairly straight forward stuff.  As I go forward, however, it gets harder to explain what I'm doing.  I'll try to make this clear enough so that if the reader finds they're wallowing a bit, someone close should be able to help them walk through it.

At this point, we're going to make what I call the "index table."  Basically, we're just going to divide the distances we've generated into the references we've generated.

I suggest making a table that looks like this:

Table A

It has a lot of empty space, but this is just a set up.  The reader will note that there's only 1 iron reference in our whole system, all coming from Alzak.  That's interesting; all those mountains in Pon and I didn't roll a single iron reference.  Well, scarcity, right?  It would certainly make a campaign heavy on wooden weapons, particularly if we wanted to make the only iron forging located in Alzak as well (which would give the Dwarves a considerable advantage in the world); but I'm digressing.

All we want to do now is insert our distance calculations from the previous post into the above table.

We'll have to make a reduced version of the distance post's last table, by keeping only the part highlighted in orange, below.  Note below how the cell K3 equals the cell C3 - but that the reduced version has no merged cells:

Table B

The cells K3 to K11 can now be attached to Table A, above: either by copy and pasting them as values (when you go to paste, use the drop down menu by right clicking and then select "paste special" and click the "Values" button), or - if you're really clever - incorporating the right-hand side of Table B right into Table A, as shown below:

Table C

I would normally be doing this on several worksheets in one document, to save space, but here I'm arranging the format just to make it clearer to the reader.  Honest, it is best to set up one worksheet per level of table in your document - even several documents, as I keep my distance calculations completely separate from my index calculations, just for my sanity.

Very well, I'll remove the little table on the left of Table C and we'll move onto the next part, which is slightly tricky.  Each number, from cell D4 to cell AI12 needs to be divided by the distance numbers.  The way we do this is to divide D4 by C4, D5 by C4, D6 by C4 and so on, the same way for every line.

We do this by creating another complete table, a near duplicate of Table C:

Table D

We'll call these the "top half" and the "bottom half."  D16 in the bottom half equals D4 in the top half divided by C4.  By putting "$" signs in front of the C and the 4, we ensure that when we copy left from D16, all the cells above will be divided by the same distances we've inserted.

I hope that is clear.  The benefit here is that if we want to put in the distance numbers for a different market (other than Marzarbol, which is shown here), then the "TOTALS:" will change automatically without our needing to build this table again.

These totals are the "Index" for the pricing table.  I can show the reader how to build further content from the Index, but obviously I'm interested in getting readers to donate $10 to my Patreon, to have a look at my own pricing table from start to finish.  Please excuse the pitch, but I'm not quite earning enough money to see me through to managing my bills before the first of May and I can use all the help I can get (either through Patreon or through direct donations).  We had a good donation yesterday and it lifted everyone's spirits, given that we're spending a lot of time counting every penny at the moment.

Making a Distance Table

Okay, the next problem.  Determining the distances between our market cities.  I think what I'm going to do going forward is to put up a test run on the blog, then clean it up for the wiki.  I also think I'm going to put a disclaimer on the wiki that I'm not going to explain excel there - but that I'll put a link for occasionally explaining excel here (especially when its requested and it is practical for me to do it).

First of all, let's throw up another copy of the map, this time completed with roads:

When doing this for your world, you're going to be tempted to create roads from every market to every other market.  Resist this!  Two things to remember: it is very expensive to make a road; and not having a road between Groat and Adeese, or between Alzak and the Gathering (sorry, name got cut off, it's in the bottom right), gives meaning to the control of Pon over the area.  The limitation of trade, forcing everything through Marzarbol, creates tension in the area, gives the inhabitants something to fight over and creates adventure potential.  So be careful how easily you slap-dash those roads out.

Note also that the road intentionally bypasses Rosengg and continues on to Alzak.  We need to make up our minds if we want to force trade to go through the mid-point town or have the potential to just continue on.  These things can also create interest in the shape and tenor of the campaign's economics - how important is that crossroads, exactly?

Okay, for this next part, I'm going to need you to change the settings on your excel program.  You're looking for "excel options" - on my computer, it looks like this:

If you're using a different excel, you should be
able to find this in the help menu.

That will take you to this page - where you must choose the "Formulas" option:

You will want to click the box that indicates "enable iterative calculation"  Then it is very important that you set the "Maximum Iterations" to 1.  This will stop your excel program from harassing you about making circular arguments.  We're going to be intentionally making circular arguments and we want to be free to do that.

This little discovery saved me immense amounts of work, I can tell you.

Okay, we're going to go through the looking glass, now.  This may be a bit of a mind-bender, but I'll try to make it as clear as possible.

First, you want to set up an excel table that looks like this:

If you're not familiar with excel, you are probably way out
of your depth at this point.  Please do your best.

Each of the boxes shows the distance between the various markets on the map above to other markets with which they're connected.  At the top, it can be seen that I've made a formula for Heap to Adeese that shows "D15+7."  7 is the distance in hexes between Adeese from Heap.  To this we add 1 to account for the market at Adeese, giving us a total of "8."  It is very important to realize that these two markets - Heap and Marzabol - on Adeese's line indicate markets shipping to Adeese, not from Adeese.  Shipping from Adeese is shown on the lines next to Heap and Marzarbol.  That needs to be very clear.

This above will take a little time to set up - but once it IS set-up, you'll never have to worry about it again, no matter how many additional markets you add to your economy in the future.  Moreover, you can add them one at a time - so that if you didn't want to include Adeese yet, you can just leave it out of all your lines - then add it at a later time.

Next, we want to replace the 1 in the D column with the following:

The function "=MIN(E4:F4)" will find the minimum number between those two results.  Since Heap and Marzarbol both count as 8 hexes (adding +1 to the seven-hex distance of their own markets), the cell at D3/4 will equal to 8+1 (for the Adeese market), or 9.

(If you want to know how to merge cells, look up "how to merge" in your excel help menu).

Note that the number under Heap in the Hills from Adeese has jumped from 8 to 16.  This is because now the formula is measuring the distance from Heap to Adeese and back to Heap again, and still adding both markets (14 hexes +2).  When you are working with multiple routes between cities, this will calculate the shortest distance between all possible routes instantly, no matter how many market cities you add to your system.

Okay, let's add the minimum-choice calculation to every line (in the D column only):

The numbers will adjust every time you hit return, but because

of the iterations they won't adjust more than once.  To adjust them

intentionally, hit F9 at the top of your keyboard.

You will soon notice a problem.  While you're not getting circular calculation warnings, the numbers will keep climbing no matter how often you hit the F9 button (manual calculation).  For the present, don't worry about that.  We will solve that problem later.  At the moment if your numbers are climbing to infinity (and you can see that by repeatedly hitting F9), you're doing this right.  (you'll also notice that there's a lag between the numbers in the EFGHI columns and the "minimum" in the D-column; do not worry about that, it is normal).

Our next thing to remember is that we don't need all our markets at any one time: we only actually need the one where the players are.  To get that, we only need to put a "1" in the cell of whatever market we want to calculate.  Then, once we hit F9 a sufficient number of times, the lowest number will ultimate self-generate into all the cells and it will stop changing.  With only nine markets, I only had to hit calculate (F9) four times for Marzarbol to completely calculate:

These are then the distances between Marzarbol and all the other markets in our system.  Marzarbol itself is divided by 1, while Heap's references are divided by 6, Groat's by 8, the Gathering by 11, Crow's Nest by 6 and so on.

If you prefer a purer distance in hexes, merely eliminate the "+1" from your calculations and all your distances will be shown in the exact hex difference between the markets.

This is exactly the system I presently use to determine distances.  Here's a screen shot of of my Distance Table for part of France:

Land distances are shown in brown; sea distances in blue.
The example is shown at the point where there is no market chosen,
so that is part of the reason for the high numbers.

When I finally do add England to my trading system, many of these markets will have additional connections across the English channel; which means I will have to individually update them.  It is typically a 2 to 7 day job to upgrade all the relative markets to a new map region, depending on how details the region is.  With England, it will be my last really heavy change - but for the moment, I haven't done Spain yet (so I have two big additions left to do).  Africa and the remainder of Asia shouldn't be too bad - though China might be something to consider, far in the future.  From this, however, the reader can probably see why I've been holding off adding Spain.

ith my next post, we can talk about the next stage in applying the distance table to calculating the references, to make them ready for the pricing table.