Worldbuilding 2d: Rivers

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

As I said, we're going to talk about topography, but strangely we have to talk about trade first.  You can see from the post title I'll come around to talking about rivers eventually.

A few things we have to understand about trade.  As regards everything that exists in the world, things fall into two important categories where trade's concerned: (a) things we've got; and (b) things we haven't got.  When we haven't got something, that's called a "dearth," a shortfall or a scarcity.  There are always so many things we haven't got, it's always safe to say we've always got a dearth of some kind.  That's important.

When we have just enough of something, where everyone gets their share and there's no more, then there's nothing to trade.  Of course, we can clobber our neighbour, steal his stuff and go trade it ... but let's not be dicks.  In fact, let's be clear as we're talking, we're in some obscure village somewhere in the game world, counting what we have and what we don't ... and as it happens, the village has just enough donkeys.  So there'll be no donkey trading today.

On the other hand, if we have more of something than we need, that's a "surplus."  A surplus can be loaded up and taken somewhere, to exchange it for those things we haven't got.

The process of "exchange" bumps into a few issues.  For one, the ideal of exchange supposes that our neighbours have things we don't have, while we have things they don't have.  We trade our surplus and they trade theirs, and everybody's happy.

But if we happen to live next to neighbours on all sides who live in the exact same kind of village we do, growing exactly the same crops, with the same number of donkeys — and, to make it worse, the same dearth we have AND the same surplus — well, then, trading pretty much sucks.  What's worse is that because we probably DO live near each other, in the same climate, on the soil, where the same things grow, in an area that goes on for dozens of miles, that bumps us into issue number two: trade often requires a lot of travel.

Obviously it's nice if there's a big city a few miles away, as we can haul our surplus to the big city and use it to ease some of our dearth — which explains why so many people live within a few miles of a city, even if they don't count among the city's immediate population.  We don't, however.  We didn't have the money for land in the big city, so we're out here in the boonies.  And, too, our ancestors who lived a thousand years ago didn't have a big city either, because it hadn't been founded yet; all they had was a few farms by this cruddy river, hundreds of miles from an even older big city that was founded way earlier.

What I'm saying is this: hauling stuff long distances has always been a problem for someone.  At any rate, all that nice stuff we'd like from the city also had to be carried a long way.

That's why when we pick boonies to live in, we check carefully for a "river."  A river is a highway — even when it's not deep enough for a great big ship, a river can still support a flat bottomed boat, one that's light enough it can be dragged over shoals or portaged around waterfalls.  This isn't fun, but it's still BETTER than walking our surplus the whole long way.

But ... sorry, no, we're not going to talk about rivers yet.  Getting there.

In the same way that it's ideal for folks in the next region over to have things we don't have, and vice versa, it's also ideal when we have access to more than one neighbour.  A river helps with that.  Using an American example, Louisville can trade with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Evansville, St. Louis or Memphis, plus a host of other places up and down the Ohio-Mississippi river.  If we take a European example, Strasbourg can trade with Basel, Mainz, Koblenz, Cologne or Rotterdam, up and down the Rhine.  This greatly increases the possibility of our finding the exact things we want to allay our dearth, while finding options for where we want to trade our surplus.

A sea is even better than a river, especially a small sea.  Big oceans provide vast numbers of customers, but also great distances, terrible storms and advanced equipment and scientific knowledge ... whereas a small sea gives us scores of possible trading partners and distances that can be managed inside a month, home and back again.

The continent of Europe is blessed with many, many small seas.  Each of these juts up into the core of the European continent, so that no part of Europe is excessively far from water.  Even better, Europe is filled with multiple navigable rivers — the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, the Vistula, the Elbe, the Guadalquivir, the Loire — that flow out of the interior in every direction, so there's always some easy highway from the darkest corner of Europe that will get products out to the sea and into the hands of paying customers.

Unlike, for example, China ... where much of the broad lowland produces the same limited crops, meaning we must travel hundreds of miles to find people growing something else.  The coast bulges outwards and is filled with tiny islands that make navigation along the coast dangerous ... while the coast is directly adjacent to the Pacific ocean, with its terrible storms that roll in and drown China's vulnerable shoreline.  The large navigable rivers, the Yangtze, the Huang Ho, the Han, the Pearl — all flow in the same direction, providing no easy travel from north to south, only east to west.  And they're far apart from each other, unlike the Danube and the Rhine, whose navigable headwaters come close together and encourage trade straight through the middle of Europe.  While geographically homogeneous, enabling China to consistently form itself into a large entity with periods of strife, as a matter of trade, China had serious problems.  This pushed the giant state to undertake giant solutions, such as the construction of the Grand Canal, more than a thousand years before Europe commenced its own canal building.

It probably doesn't occur to the reader to consider TRADE when laying out rivers, coasts, mountains and so on, but as I've pedantically explained, trade is the reason people leave home.  They don't wander into the dangerous and trackless world as a lark, for vacation or out of yearning to know what's out there.  The 13th century world isn't Disneyland.  People undertake the risk of travel because they must ... they need things they haven't go, sometimes things they must have to survive.  A tiny class of people make a living from this trade, but historically that takes time to happen.  The Hanseatic League arises more than seven centuries after the fall of Rome; and itself doesn't experience serious competition until another 250 years pass after its formation.  Global trade doesn't happen until long after the time frame of a fantasy medieval game world ... which means most likely that your world won't have any serious form of organised trade, anywhere.  Most trade in 8th century Europe is painfully local.  By the 11th century, journeys of hundreds of miles are rare; Marco Polo makes his journey to China in the 13th century ... when merchants have just begun to make trips of that length.

Arguably, long trips were being made across the Sahara from the Guinea Coast to the Mediterranean as early as the 10th century; Mansa Musa doesn't make his historic journey from Mali to Mecca until the 14th.  Guinea suffered from the same problems as China.  Most of what they had was homogenous; gold only had value outside of Guinea, which meant a tremendous trip across the largest desert in the world to get things like iron, salt and cloth.

Trade should be on your mind as you lay out the details of your first continent.

Okay.  Let's talk about rivers.

Make a sheet on a drafting program or drag out a sheet of paper.  Maps can be all sorts of goofy crazy-fun things, but let's keep this fairly simple.  Create a body of water that takes up about a quarter of your sheet.  It can run off the page in any direction or be completely enclosed inside the sheet, it's up to you, but it shouldn't take up more than one quarter of the actual page.  Because this water is going to have a river running into it, and because it's pretty big, it's a salt water body.  Later, we can talk about lakes, but just now we're going to imagine a river scrubbing salt-like materials from the land and pouring it into our body of water over a million years, where those chemicals are going to stay.

Now, get out your blue pencil or make a blue line that starts at the body of water and runs in a squiggly line, making the line as long as you can.  Make the line do "river-like" turns and bends, meaning you shouldn't make it too squiggly.  Imagine the water rolling between banks, turning left when it reaches a group of hills, and left when it meets a mountain range, and then back and forth when it settles onto a flat plain.  Don't draw in the hills and mountains, just imagine that they're there.

Good.  Now pick a place along the length of the river, anywhere from its "mouth" — where it reaches the sea — to three quarters of it's total length.  Make sure the place you pick is at least one quarter below where the river starts.  Make a small circle on the spot.

Everything between the circle and the body of water is navigable.  Different lengths of the river have different depths, as the river gets larger as it goes along, but all of the river up to your circle allows at least some kind of barge or towboat.  The circle you've placed is a TOWN.  The head of a river's "waterway" is always the best place for a town, or a city, because this is where the river highway "ends."  The Mississippi's headwaters reach Minneapolis, which is why Minneapolis is such a big damn place.  Ocean-going vessels can move up the Mississippi as far as Baton Rouge — which is why that place exists.  The Dneiper river in Russia is navigable as far as Smolensk.  Small craft can navigate the Danube as far as Ulm in south central Germany.  The medieval Rhine was navigable to Basel in Switzerland (though there were issues above Strasbourg).  Relating to my earlier point, the distance between Ulm and Strasbourg is 167 km, or 104 miles.  That's all.

[There are navigational issues along the Danube, at the Iron Gates for instance, but we don't need to worry about happy-fun details like that for now; like I said, let's keep this simple]

Your circle on your river is a very important place.  Everything on that part of the map spends all its time figuring out how to get it's stuff to THAT town ... so give the town a name you're going to have in your mouth constantly.

All right.  I want you to draw another blue line, make another river, or tributary, that starts somewhere along the length of the first river anywhere between the river's mouth and the town we just invented.  We can make it start at the town, or we can make it start at the mouth, or anywhere between.  Make this second line as long as you like, but have it flow generally in the same direction as the first line.  Sort of the way the Ohio or the Missouri flows toward the Mississippi, or the way the Snake River flows toward the Columbia, or the Guyandotte River flows toward the Ohio, or the Tisza flows toward the Danube, or the Marne toward the Seine ... I could do this all day.

Now, decide if this second river is navigable.  It needn't be.  Depending on our climate, it could dry out half the year or it might roll through a canyon to debouch into our first river.  Obviously, if we made the second stream enter where we placed our first town, it's not navigable at all.  

Let's say we started the tributary about halfway along the navigable part.  And that we've made the second river navigable for about half as far up river as the first.  We can put a little circle at the top of the second river's navigability ... and a circle where the two rivers meet.  That's also a great spot for a town.  Boats can navigate up from the sea, meet with boats coming down the two rivers, so that no one has to travel the length of the river to get the most out of what's available for trade.  This is how St. Louis became so important, and Lyons at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone.  Nizhny Novgorod, at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, is another great example.

We've drawn two blue lines and three circles and already we've got a solid foundation for where the money's flowing; this gives us insight into political interests as well, as politics always "follows the money."  We can talk about that another day.

Where the reader sees a blue line, I see a trough.  Rivers always flow down, and as they flow they wear away the land and make it lower.  If we look at the space between the two rivers, we should recognize this is higher than both of them.  It may be only a little higher; as little as 50 or a hundred feet, just enough that when it rains on the land between the rivers, the water flows this way or that.  If we want a plateau, then all the land between the two rivers will be littered with additional tributaries, like Nebraska or Poland.  Land like this is called "well watered," because the ground water sits below the plain and residents can easily drop a well and get some.

On the other hand, we can put some hills there, not high ones, just enough to annoy residents trying to get from one river valley to the other, pushing more of their local trade towards the easy rivers.  Hills divide peoples, as fewer people live in the hills and communication is reduced.  On the other hand, hills provide new items of trade, fulfilling the dearth greatly desired from the people who all grow the same crops and raise the same animals in the lowlands.  Hills have minerals, clay, gravel, forests and so on (depending on climate), causing the peoples of both river valleys to push roads up into the hills to get at those things.  Then those things are rolled down hill to the river and "trans-shipped," which means unloaded from wagons and loaded onto boats.  One big important mine creates a road down to the nearest point on the river ... and lo and behold, we have another town that makes all its business loading and unloading things.

We can put mountains between the two rivers, increasing the isolation between the two cultures and providing the potential for even more interesting trade goods: gems, building stone, metal ores, larger timber, furs and so on.

We can pick a place along either river, where it isn't navigable, and call it a "ford" ... a place where the river becomes shallow enough to cross with a wagon.  That makes a good place for a village.  We can pick another place on the river where the current slows and the water gets deep, where it's easy to row a boat from one shore to the other; this makes a good crossing point, and thus another good place for a town.

If the river has a "gate," where the water falls and is pressed between two steep banks, that small section of the river isn't navigable.  This creates another need for one or two towns; so the goods can be unloaded from ships, rolled downstream by wagon, and put back on another ship.  This is the "Iron Gates" (there are two) on the Danube I mentioned earlier.  Only one has to be circumvented, creating the important cities of Orsova (above) and Turnu-Severin (below) in Romania.

This seems a good place to pause.  Take a moment and put in another tributary.  Make a whole new river on your map and give IT a tributary.  Now make a rough guess at the land between each watercourse, making them nearly flat, hilly or mountainous, as desired.  I'll start with "headwaters" next post.

Ship Routes - Mediterranean

At my last count this morning, I have received 14 positives - looking good, and I thoroughly appreciate all the support thus far.  Now come on and get out those last six.

As a bit of inspiration, I've been working on this project about ten days now - I've finished the biggest, below, as well as the seas around Arabia.  Almost have the seas around India finished now, then its the Sea from France to the Baltic to the Barents Sea (a big one, but not quite as big as the one below).  Here are ship routes for the Mediterranean and Black Seas:

Typically, blogger doesn't manage the image very well.  Thankfully, I've put the map up on the wiki, where it can be seen in strong detail.

This map wasn't meant to be especially pretty, and I'm noticing now I've left a few notes on it.  Ah well.  Primarily it was meant to be serviceable.

In principle, the map is intended to show the shortest routes between port/market cities of various sizes.  Take note that the size is listed next to the city - thus Palermo, on the top of Sicily, is rated at 6, Corfu is rated at 2, Marseille at 5 and so on.  Most of the cities are rated at 1.

I began with Genoa, rated at 18 (found at the left top of the map).  This was determined by the number of references I found for Genoa being a commercial/trade/market/port - which turned out to be many.  I have reasoned that Genoa is able to import goods directly from a distance up to 180 hexes, or 3,600 miles.  A port with a rating of 1 can only import goods a distance of 10 hexes, or 200 miles; thus, small ports are dependent upon other small ports to obtain goods from a great distance.  Each time that goods pass through a trade city, a cost is added (which I would cover in the trade system course, if I get those other six positives) - thus, direct shipping decreases cost.

The next part, however, is complicated.  The reader will notice, very near Genoa, to the west, is the port of Savona (rated 7).  IF it happens that an outbound route from Genoa through Savona is the same distance (always counted in hexes, without fractions) as it would be without going through Savona, then Genoa declines the direct trade to any ports in that direction and they fall to Savona.  This is worked out because Genoa's route through Savona is the same distance as Genoa's route would be without Savona.  Therefore, if we look at Oneglia (further west from Savona, the 'n' obscured by the large red 1), Genoa is 3 hexes away.  Genoa is also 2 hexes from Savona and Savona is 1 hex from Oneglia, so Genoa does not import directly from Oneglia - or, at least, the price of goods from Oneglia is considered to be increased in price due to tariffs owing to Savona.  Savona, in turn, does not import from San Remo, west of Oneglia, because Oneglia controls that trade and so on, down the coast.

Now, if it happens that the next city down the coast is limited in it's imports (Oneglia is rated as 1), then the origin city skips the intervening city and imports from as far away as it is able.  Savona, for example, goes through Oneglia's hex to import from Algiers, far from the south.  But Oneglia hasn't the economy to import from Algiers (max. 10 hexes), so Savona imports from Algiers directly.  Genoa then imports goods from Algiers through Savona.

This is infinitely more complicated than most anyone in the world would do it, I know - and it wasn't the way I started.  I began by assuming that anywhere could import from anywhere.  The result, however, meant that every port had to be compared to every other port for the prices table, and this was simply getting out of control (too much to manage).  As well, this new method vastly cuts down on the possible trade routes - and this leaves empty hexes.  While making the Mediterranean map, I considered what I might do with those hexes.

Suppose we consider all the hexes with lines in them to be patrolled by naval ships.  However, hexes empty of trade routes are not.  That would mean that pirates would keep out of the trade routes, but they would deliberately haunt empty hexes next to the trade routes, waiting for a ship to fall off course.  In turn, any hex that was two hexes away from a trade route would logically be empty again, since it was too unlikely to find an off course ship there.

Now look at the map again.  See those empty three hexes directly west of Corsica?  Prior to the making of this map, those hexes weren't very important.  Looking at it now, however, there is an incredible amount of trade going back and forth past those three hexes: Marseille, Savona, Livorno, La Spezia and Genoa are all big, big ports with incoming and outgoing traffic going right by those hexes - and the shelter of west Corsica to hide in, assuming the patrols between Ajaccio and the Italian ports can be avoided.

Or consider Malta.  Without my design, Malta turned out to be not on any shortest route between anywhere.  The sea all around it is empty, unpatrolled, but on the edge of the routes going past Sicily.  How well does this fit in with the legends of the Maltese Knights preying on shipping?

Sometimes, we set out to achieve one goal and we stumble across something completely different.  For example, consider now that there is a strong reason to be a really good navigator - since the routes where the patrols run change direction abuptly in mid-sea in order to match up with the next port city.  If you're running a ship and you simply plow ahead, you're going to run right out of the lane.  You may still be the same distance from your destination, but now you're vulnerable to attack, where otherwise attack would have been very rare.  You've probably increased your chance of being attacked by pirates 16 or 20 times, just because you're a poor navigator.

Old Posts 21-30

For those who may be interested, please feel free to comment on any of these old posts.  All comments go straight to my email, so I will see them.

I'll start collecting the list of Top 10 Posts that people have proposed and create a poll out of them for the weekend.

Here is a list of 10 posts that I created in July, 2008:

Values.  Trade Prices.  My first belated attempt to explain the same pricing system that I would repeatedly explain over and over, as I searched for the words to do so.  My inability to convey this concept through text nagged at me for years.  Believe me, if you sit next to me at my computer, it is really easy to understand.

Haulage.  Trade Prices, Transport.  Same thing as above.  Just as I would do this on my wiki, ultimately very slowly and with many pictures, I tried to explain my method for calculating the price of things based on a sound economic principal, rather than on km/mileage between markets.

Commodities List Part I.  Trade Commodities.  A list of goods and services corresponding to my trade system at the time I started my blog.  At that time, my system did not include Holland, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, North Africa, India or a variety of other parts of the world.  Covers minerals and ores, foodstuffs, textiles and woodworking.

No Pics Please, We're Mathematicians.  RPG Trends.  Some pithy remarks on the apparent importance of artistic expression that was very central to the gaming community at the time.  Some points about my personal inclinations towards math and D&D.

Commodities List Part II.  Trade Commodities, Trade & Production, Worldbuilding Theory.  A continuation of the first post, covering alchemy, building materials, metalwork, crops, market gardening, livestock and fish.  Includes a list of largely unreadable tables that account for all the references in my world at that time.  I was new to blogging, so that was a waste of time.  Some notes on how I designate some parts of my world as occupied by non-humans.

Sources Table.  Trade & Production.  Broken link to my sources table, which is now only available through Patreon ($10 donation, button on the side bar).  [Hm, delete the post or leave it as a record of where I once was?]

Prices.  Equipment Table, Goods Manufacturing, Trade Prices.  Again, an early attempt to discuss how the value of commodities and transport are translated into the specific price of a specific good.  This is better done on my present-day wiki.  Includes content, however, on the progression of iron ore to pig iron, wrought iron and ironmongery, distinguishing one from another.  Gives equipment list for ironmongery products.

Player Wrongs.  Legitimacy in DMing, Ranting, RPG Trends.  Discussion of "player rights," DM responsibility and anti-politicization of the game.  I am actually talking about Legitimacy Theory, but I would not stumble into a direct connection between RPGs and that until 2014.

Answers.  Trade Prices, Worldbuilding Theory.  Arbitrary numbers in developing a trade system, rehash of the earlier haulage and values posts.

Commitment.  Personal Memoir, Player Participation.  How lack of commitment leads to the dissolution of game play, social pressures to participate in events other than D&D, lack of respect the game has in the outside world and the failure of players to respect the game enough to sacrifice in order to play it.

Reading these posts each week is a terribly sobering experience, one that I can't say I'm enjoying.  I know that others have written to say they were enjoying these posts at the time, now that I read them I wish I had known more, or been more willing to make a better effort all around.  I suppose it really only matters what I do today.

Anything that Isn't "Easy" is Impossible

I wonder if Apple or Samsung regularly receive letters and missives from readers saying, "Hey, I really like your phone and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you help me do that?"

When I began designing a trade system for my game world, I had one fundamental goal: that it would define different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.  I had no sense of there being a "right" way to do this.  I began by accumulating a list of manufactures and resources according to their origin.  Using the real world as a model, this soon became a prodigious list, with hundreds of unique references and thousands of sources.  For a time, I was confounded on how to turn this list into a format that would produce prices, then adjust those prices according to how far said goods were shipped.  To make it work, I had to adjust my thinking process again and again; I had to throw out preconceptions for the sake of practicality.

Those preconceptions included "supply & demand," the basing of value upon labour, or upon produced food and determining a flat-rate cost of transportation for things being shipped.  I had to accept that any system I created had to function "illogically," because all the details and particulars were never going to be accounted for.  We can't account for them today, with millions of economists, strategists and other experts working on them today.  I'm just one person.  I have limitations.  Therefore, realistically, the trade system would have to be unrealistic.  And because of that, it would end up as counter-intuitive.

This evaluation and eventual manifestation took 16 years.  During that time I tried everything.   I rebuilt the system fifty different ways.  Try to imagine what it was like to organize all the data, make lists, make calculations and then run tests with the players, with pencil and paper, only to find that it produces absurd, aberrant numbers ... and then to face up to the players disparaging your system and expressing things that make you feel humiliated.  Then, doing it all again.  Fifty times.

Long before I had dedicated readers, I had dedicated players.  They tolerated this procedure for literally years, gamely giving each system a try, recognizing the value of the idea if not the idea's success.  Those players never saw a successful version.  That first gaming period of my life ended in 1997 and it took another seven years before I finally sorted out the system.

I write this to explain that whatever prejudices I had about how a working trade system would function were steadily eroded away by failure after failure.  In the end, the final result was the one that worked, not the one I wanted or the one that best reflected the real world's economic trade system (which, it must be noted, is organic and in some degree misunderstood by everyone).  My trade system, however, does do what it was meant to do: it provides different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.

I've been approached by others who claimed to have a "better" system than mine ... and yet I have never seen any of these systems laid out as plainly and directly as I have on multiple blog posts; and upon further investigation, they all admit that no, they don't do what mine does, specifically what mine was designed to do: provide different prices, et al.  Meaning that they're not a trade system at all.  They're a glorified pricing system for one game world location.

I've also been approached with the general message, "Hey, I really like your trade system and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you use your time to help me do that?"

Recently, I've been giving the answer, "No."  I've come to that because in the past, when I've tried to help, my advice is never taken.  It is assumed that while it's nice that I made the decisions I made, the new maker wants to make their own decisions.  They think the trade system they want should function differently.  It should be based somehow on supply & demand, or labour, or a gold standard, or any one of a hundred economic principles that have been thoroughly debunked in the real world for a century now.  If you want to be laughed out of a room by a group of economists, mention supply & demand.

Additionally, every once in awhile I see someone has discovered the pdf for "Grain Into Gold."  These people are always excited, because at last they've found the economic Mecca they've been searching for all these years!  This "simple and sane supplement" is an exercise in pulling economic numbers out of your ass.  I've never seen anyone write, "I've done it!  I built a trade system based on Grain Into Gold."  Because it doesn't work.  It's hot garbage.  Yet it feeds the standard belief system for most people who want to build anything for their campaign world.

It promises that this is going to be easy.

This is why people come to me and ask if I'll help them build their trade system, their way.  Because having me do it is easier than doing it themselves.  After all, I've proved I can do it.  I have the evidence.  Anyone can read it.  And in fact, anyone can copy and implement it exactly as I've done it ... only they don't.  Because it is too much work.  It isn't easy.  Which begs the mantra that titles this post.

My trade system wasn't easy.  Took 16 years to invent it.  Took another 10 to get it into a truly serviceable order.  Expanding it has been an effort I've undertaken for almost a year now, one that I'm wallowing through, because the project is immense.  Making any change is an enormous headache, because the system functions like a delicate machine.  It is adjustment-unfriendly.  Yet every instance I use it in a game, every time I need to sort out some detailed element of the game's money or economy, I am enormously grateful for the time I've taken.  No matter how awful it was to make the bloody thing, the bloody thing is bloody marvelous.  It is both unequalled and unadaptable ... and is therefore intimidating as hell for any other user, particularly those who won't break their body and mental prejudices to accept the thing as it is, and to do the necessary work to make it function in their world.

I've decided I no longer care.  I haven't any respect for those who won't work.  Nor do I have any interest in using my time to hand-hold someone who has the benefit of my work but feels that isn't enough.  And I say this while trying to raise money for a completely different project ... which I know perfectly well can't be reinvented by someone else without my help, because it required an expertise in history, culinary art, dungeon mastering and creativity to manage.

Therefore, as long as I don't explain how I did it, I hold an intellectual patent that no government can issue.  So, when I said yesterday I would offer "proof," that certainly did not include providing more examples of the product.  From my point of view, that would be enormously stupid.

Work is not just tiring.  It produces results.  Results carry knowledge in the process and knowledge is power.   Power brings independence and opportunities.

When the reader resists or refuses to work on their game world, there are no results.  Without working to make something result, knowledge isn't gained; and without knowledge, there is impotency.  Impotence offers only dependency and subjugation to others.

"Easy" has a cost.  It is time, and life, and self-respect, wasted.

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.

The Evil, Insane Killer Distance Table

What have I been doing lately? I had my doubts about going into this, as it definitely defines one of my crazier views on what comprises D&D, but what the hell. If you're going to read this blog, you might as well have the whole picture.

Here is the whole picture:



The purpose for this flow chart, which vaguely resembles central Eurasia, is forthcoming. First, I recognize that it is none-too-clear. It has been processed twice, once from Publisher to JPeg, then onto the Blogspot website...so it is naturally a mess. A slightly clearer version can be downloaded here, where at least you can read the names.

If you know nothing about my trade tables, and you care to know, I suggest you search "trade" on this blog and go through some of my earlier posts. In the meantime, I'll give a quick description:

Individual regions produce a given amount of product; this product is collected in "trade cities," which are represented on this chart. The distribution of the products once they are produced and gathered together at their export points (trade cities) is dependent on the distance these cities are from each other. What I have been working on, painfully slowly, these last two weeks is a complete distance table which would identify the distance of every city from every other city. Fun, eh? I'm not close to finished, and I won't be for far longer than I like to think about.

Two immediate problems. First, I have not made any specifications for production trade cities for Western Europe, most of Africa, India, East Asia or the New World. This would seem like a problem. However, since I can't wait until that stage of the process is completed (it has taken me five years to get to where I am now, which isn't bad, considering), I am forced to estimate the distances to those areas and basically ignore any portions I have not done. For example, while I don't know the trade cities for India, China, Indochina or Western Europe, I do know how much product those regions produce. Whereas for most of Africa, the East Indies and the New World, I have nothing. Haven't even started working on those. C'est la vie.

You will note that there are only a few sea distances noted on the chart. Sorry. These just don't work out on the table. I use the maps that I've made (you've seen some of those maps, hopefully) to establish the number of hexes between ports. Since ships can virtually travel in any direction, it isn't worth it to note all the possible existing relationships. Those which are noted are those which are important to Central Europe, where my party is and where I am concentrating on for the distance table.

You may also note there are rivers, which have two numbers associated with them. The first, lower number is the distance downriver, with the current; the second, is the distance upriver. This makes the table more interesting, as the difference can decide which path a particular trade route takes. It also means that I can't simply assume the distance between A and B is the same as between B and A. I have considered simplifying this and averaging the two distances, but...well, I'm nuts. I like the irregularity.

All told there are more than 400 cities indicated on the chart. I have no program or programming ability to enter the individual distances and have a computer find the shortest distance, although I know this is possible. Sadly, I'm deficient in this regard. So if any nerd has an idea how to make this process shorter, so that I don't have to calculate each and every distance by fucking hand...grumble, grumble...I would like it.

Oh, there are some interesting points on the table, for anyone nerdy enough to really have a close look. For example, they might see that the river which flows through Kiyev--the Dneiper River--inexplicably becomes a road between Kremenchuk and Khortytsia. This is because, up until the 20th century, this part of the Dneiper was not navigable, which served to make the Ukraine somewhat backward, and helps explain why historically there was little foreign control over the various hetman tribes which dwelt in the lower Dneiper Valley; also, why the Tatars consistently controlled the Crimea and the Sea of Azov so long. Goods shipped to Kiev tended to go westward, up the Pripet River to where they could be moved to the Bug and the Vistula, and floated down to the Baltic, rather than south to the Black Sea. The main passage between the middle east and central Russia was through the Caspian, to Astrakhan and up the Volga. I should also point out that Smolensk, the point of highest navigation for the Dneiper, was more often in Polish hands than in Russian...it was less practical for Russia to trade from the Dneiper than it was for the Poles.

The Trade Process

I am not ordinarily the type to talk about my dreams, and I don't like to listen to others tell theirs. They don't make good stories and people over-describe what seemed to happen. I usually employ an agreement where they must tell me the circumstances of their dream in three sentences or less. I believe I'm going to break that rule and use four.

I was playing a violent game of hockey. The game paused long enough for the officials to clean the ice of blood, whereas I and a teammate went outside into the Southern California hinterland. There, I spent some time explaining to my curious companion the vegetative qualities of the chaparral and the manner in which the sun changes aspect with reference to the earth, producing the seasons. Then we returned to the violence of our hockey game.

The dream is so me. I don't play hockey anymore, but when I was young, I did, and violently. I took the part of a defenseman enforcer, not great on skills and finesse, but mean and energetic. This should surprise no one.

The other half of the dream, though, that speaks to something I love more; I love explaining things, answering questions, getting people to know something they didn't know. I feel that everyone should know what chaparral is, even if they've never seen it, even if they're never going to see it. And the change of seasons is just damn cool. I'm aware many people don't 'get it,' they can't picture the way the earth moves, or they didn't pay attention in school and no one has actually bothered to explain it to them since.

So why wasn't I a teacher? Honestly, it's because teachers are allowed to educate only upon very rigid lines and in rigid subjects, to a select number of persons yearly. I didn't like the idea of anyone peering over my shoulder, deciding what subjects to which I should limit myself. No, no, the preferred profession was writer ... which I am, and which allows me to be unlimited in my choice of subject. Potentially unrestricted, too, in the number I can reach.

Yesterday's post was of little interest to many readers, no doubt. Economics is not a major role-playing game driver, and my particular take is unwieldy for most and apparently purposeless. Why not just make numbers up? Still, a number of people did show an interest, and this post in particular is being written to answer the questions of one who commented on my facebook yesterday.

The arc of adding a market to the trade system is a multi-step process. This is a good thing, as when I get tired of working on one step, I proceed to another, and slowly work my way around the world one region - and one task - at a time. I don't think I've ever written down the full arc before, so honestly there's something pleasant in doing so, even if it bores three quarters of my audience stupid.

1) Research the encyclopedia. This is the stage at which the references quoted on yesterday's spread sheet are obtained. I'll post a small example from the encyclopedia, to give a feel for what data is being parsed:

PLYEVEN, a city, formerly known as Pleven, in north Bulgaria, the capital of the district of Pleven. The city is located on the important Sofia to Varna road, and is connected with the city of Somovit on the Danube, about 25 mi. to the north. It is an important Turkish commercial center. It has a large textile factory, and is a market for wine and livestock. Pop., 38,997.

There are five references here. Plyeven's commerce is mentioned twice, so it counts as 2 references for market. I use 'cloth' instead of textile (sounds more Medieval), while wine and livestock are plain. This is recorded, along with any other references to Plyeven's economy that might occur on some other encyclopedia entry, then I move on to the next location.

Here are a partial list of locations in South America that I haven't yet looked at:

... Managua, Manaus, Manizales, Manzanillo, Maracaibo, Maracaibo, Maranon, Mar del Plata, Marianao, Marie Galante, Martinique, Masaya, Matanzas, Mato Grosso, Mayan Architecture, Mazatlan, Medellin, Mendoza, Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes, Merida, Mesopotamia, Mexico, Mexico Federal District of, Mexico Gulf of, Mexico City, Minas Gerais, Mollendo, Mona Passage, Monterrey, Montevideo, Montserrat, Morelia, Mosquito Coast, Nassau, Natal, Netherlands West Indies, Nevis, New Granada, Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Niteroi, Neuvo Leon, North America, Oaxaca, Orinoco, Orizaba, Orizaba, Oruro, Ouro Preto, Pachuca, Paita, Pampa La, Pampas, Panama, Panama Canal, Panama City, Para, Paraguari, Paraguay, Paraguay, Paraiba, Paramaribo, Parana, Parana, Paranagua, Paricutin, Parnaiba, Pasto, Patagonia, Paysandu, Pelee Mount, Pelotas ...

At present, I don't know what might be included in any of these places. It is still a mystery. By the way, to get this list, I went through the encyclopedia page by page some 17 years ago.

2) Add the data to the Sources document, the one posted yesterday. This step doesn't need much explanation. Usually I record the actual material in word before adding the information to excel.

3) Identify cities. Using the map from the Collier's Enyclopedia, I create a list of cities that needs to be researched in order to identify if they existed or not in 1650, how many times they were destroyed or diseased (affects the present population), and who is in possession of the city at the time of my world. For an area like Spain, this would be upwards of 700 places. I also obtain the latitude, longitude and elevation for these cities from a website called fallingrain.com. The reader can find the Spain Cities Workbook on my wiki, if they want to take a look. I haven't finished gathering all the location numbers for these, but they've been researched.

Cities that are not in existence are removed from the map AND from the sources document. Cities that are mentioned in the Sources document (and from the Encyclopedia) but do not show on the Collier's map are combined with the region in which the city lies. Thus, if there is a town named Vuy in Provence, and it does not show on the map, then Vuy's produce is transferred to Provence in general, to simplify it. The alternative would be to create Vuy on the map, and since there are many, many of these places (A single French department may mention up to ten such locations) it would only increase the general workload. One draws the line somewhere.

4) Create the regional map. I still have the series of images I created on the blog for Switzerland long ago when I mapped that area. The purpose of the map, apart from contributing to the running, is to establish a consistent measure for the distance relationship of one city to another. Since the map is measured in hexes, and the trade system is based on the number of hexes (and elevation) separating cities, the map is essential. Because the map is multi-purpose, I complete it entirely before moving onto the next step. There are also reasons why this is helpful, as elements that matter in the distance measurement includes the existence of rivers, other towns, where the highest hexes are and so on.

There are plenty of examples of my maps around.

5) Update the cities table. This is the other table shown on the wiki link above, the one that says "Cities 19feb13." This is a list of all the cities I've researched to date that have been finalized, plus some notes here and there on other tabs. The population for the regions is based upon the individual adjusted population for the cities compared to the population in 1952. Some of the regions have the area measured in hexes; I haven't settled down to do nothing but count hexes in quite a while. It isn't that important, but there are reasons to do so that have a relationship to the character generator. That's another story.

6) Draw roads. The roads are the actual representation of the distances between trading cities. A trade city is defined according to whether or not there is a market there, such as there is at Plyeven. I only record the distances between trade cities, those establishing the price for goods for the region they are in. These road distances are recorded on the nightmarish distance maps ... also included on the wiki link, as "Central," "East" and "West." This helps me build the total distance calculation between cities, which is based on the shortest distance between two trade cities.

7) Actual distance table is created. These tend to be immense ... and they are obsolete almost as soon as I create them. I've included one on the wiki link called "Group 03_HOM to MOD_21jan12" - which tells the last time I created one. Warning: if you don't set your iterations to 1, you'll get a circular warning error the moment you open the page. I described how that's done here, but that may not be useful if you have a different operating system than me.

I say obsolete because I only generate the page so that I can steal the meaningful data from it. These are calculation pages, which run the numbers until they stabilize and give me the answers I need. I'm not a computer programmer, I don't understand macros, so I have to do it this way, which is a work around that doesn't actually take much time. The relevant data on the table is highlighted orange.

Every time I add a new market city to the table, not only do I have to calculate that city's distance from every other city, but I have to calculate every other city's distance from the new city. That means, with some 600+ trade cities so far, one new city means 1200 new distance calculations. And since I tend to add multiple cities all at one time, that means tens of thousands of calculations to add the 30 to 60 cities I add at a go. That's the reason I haven't done this since 2012. I only want to do it when I really have every new place I want to incorporate, as I don't want to go through this process monthly.

8) The distances are combined in the All Zones table. This is the most critical table in my whole trade system. The table has been included, as well, in the wiki link. The first tab, Market Provinces, shows the distance between the trade cities (side column A) from the 'zones' represented by other trade cities (top row 1). Some zones have multiple trade cities, but only the nearest trade city in that zone is relevant to this table. Thus, Gilead (Jordan) transports out of Amman and Aqaba - but those cities nearest to Amman import from Amman, and those nearest to Aqaba import from Aqaba. The actual distances inside the trade zone are discounted for marketing purposes (again, gotta draw the line somewhere).

By copying any line off this tab, I can then paste it on the 'Input Distance' tab. This tab, you will note, has a yellow line at the top; the numbers from the first tab must be pasted as values only on that yellow line, where they are then calculated against the source references listed below. These references come from the MASTER tab of the source document I posted yesterday. The numbers here are then divided by the distance and recorded on the 'Calculation' tab of the All Zones file. Take a moment to compare the population of Croft divided by the distance between Croft and whatever line of numbers you've chosen to copy over. For example, if I grab Sarajevo in Bosnia and paste it on the yellow line of the Input Distance tab, the Calculation tab adds 1 to every number (so there is no dividing by zero) and the population of Croft is divided by 105.1 hexes (the distance between Croft and Sarajevo). Answer: 3,197 persons in Croft affect the economy of Sarajevo.

This is done for every single item described in the previous post, from markets to turtles. The totals are listed in green on the Calculation tab.

9) Transfer the All Zones totals to the Prices Table. This, finally, is also on the wiki link. I cut and paste the green highlighted numbers onto the 'Input Data' tab of the Prices Table (again, as VALUES). Instantly, new prices are generated on the 'Market Display' tab.

The process to generate a brand new market from the All Zones data, starting from grabbing a city of choice, copying those numbers, grabbing the result, posting it on the Input Data tab of the Prices table, takes less than 30 seconds. It takes longer to transfer the numbers to another computer, or onto the net, than it takes to generate them.

I hope that explains the process straight through, at least in general.

Old Posts 11-20

As a reminder, interest has already waned on the "Challenge to Find the Top 10 Posts."  No one has to put up more than one favorite, after all.  Moreover, I'm not sure yet that there are 10 posts that have been seconded.

Here is a list of the next 10 posts I created on this blog:

Play.  Advanced Gameplay, Fun, Game Prep, Rule-Making.  Discussion of how children play games versus how adults play games; rule-making and why it matters, increase detail in rule-making as games advance in complexity.  Conflated importance of frivolity and "fun" in the role-playing community.

Charisma.  Ability Stats, Character Generation, Charisma.  Method for determining background skills, relationships, childhood events and character flaws through the use of a d20 roll compared to the player's stats.  This post focused on charisma-related generation results.  Charisma as a dump stat.

Intelligence.  Ability Stats, Character Generation, Intelligence.  Difficulties in playing intelligence in games, importance of randomness in game design, defining "character."  Intelligence-related results for character generation.  Discussion of severe character flaws.

Wisdom.  Ability Stats, Character Generation, Wisdom.  Family background's irrelevance in common role-playing.  Wisdom-related results for character generation.

Constitution.  Ability Stats, Character Generation, Constitution.  Balance in gaming, definition of winning, character flaws.  Constitution-related results for character generation.

Strength & Dexterity.  Ability Stats, Character Generation, Dexterity, Strength.  Strength and dexterity related results for character generation.

There Has to Be More.  Campaign Structure, Manor Estate, Personal Memoir, Trade Commodities.  Influence of Almanacs on my youth and my developing interest in statistics and geography.  The importance of developing a campaign structure as a cohesive whole, difficulties associated with answering player queries regarding land, costs, commodity production and estate management.

What Price?  Manor Estate, Trade Commodities, Treasure.  Comparisons of purchase prices in the official game universe vs. gold accumulation from treasure.  Importance of Scarcity, reducing the party's buying power, many examples regarding prices that are too low to present a challenge [notably feeding horses].

Wide, Wide World.  Trade Commodities, Trade & Production.  Reasons for designing a trade system, implementation of a Colliers Encyclopedia for research, accumulation of trade references and commodity forms, plotting 17th century production vs. modern statistical date [using the U.N. Industrial Statistics Yearbook.

Random Good.  Campaign Structure, Game Prep.  Philosophy of minimal game prep, improvising a game on the spot.  Relationship of randomness (the unexpected) and improvisation in moment-to-moment play.


Frankly, I think the Random Good post is fairly garbage.  I was definitely off on a tangent that day; I'm not sure what the hell point I was trying to make.  The rest is fairly okay.  The introduction of the background generator tables, way before I systematized it into an excel generator, comes astoundingly early in this blog.  And naturally I was going to start talking about trade as soon as I had gotten my feet wet.

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.

Technology 18

This is the last in a series of posts intended to provide a technological framework for my world. The purpose of this framework is to create unique, regional settings for player interaction. A realistic simulation of the actual world is not a goal of this system and will not be given credence when approving comments.

Regions with a technology of 18 will have an average population density of 990,001 or more per 20-mile hex. This includes the following regions, shown on this table:

10 regions. This technology accounts for 1.0 hexes of my world, occupied by 2,546,345 humans.

Available Technologies

Scientific Method.  Strange to think of this being applied to the creation of magic, but that's how I choose to see it.  In Earth's history, it sparked off an invention craze, as the process empowered individuals to see the value in testing ideas methodically.  It isn't the name of the process that matters, but the fields in which it can be applied.  If magic existed, then surely the method would expand possibilities where the creation of magic items was concerned.

I don't want to give the impression that every magic item that exists in my world came from the above ten places.  At different points in history, there were different collections of persons, different opportunities for the necessary density to create the tech level necessary for the production of rings, wands, staves and so on.  For example, Balkh in northern Afghanistan, prior to its being completely destroyed by the Mongols.  Or Alexandria in Egypt, at the height of the Hellenic period, when the library was filled with thousands of scholars.  This sort of thing may explain the making of wonders throughout the world (I don't know yet exactly how to manage this sort of thing - I don't want to compromise the system I've been building so far).

At the exact time of my world, however, there would be some considerable advances made in the mastery of magic, I think, in the above places.

Economics.  Long before clarifications made by Adam Smith, developments in banking, trade and the open door policy of some regions towards money began to create a sense that money - more than legal writ or religious morality - made the world turn.

My world taking place in 1650 sits right at the dawn of this idea: Holland, that would rise to become the worlds first maritime economic power, was climbing out of 80 years of devastating war and political strife; Germany, likewise, had just experienced the 30 Years War.  France was still at war with Spain, which was broke.  Italy was in decline following the destruction of its Mediterranean trade by the Atlantic-Indian Ocean trade route.  England was in the midst of its own time of troubles as it sought to reunify the country during the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1651.  In just 20 years, however, several of these regions would expand radically in trade and commerce, launching the colonization of Africa and Asia that would lead to the French and English wars of the 18th century.

So, with economics, we have a sort of edge technology.  I choose to think of it thusly:  that the embrace of all peoples associated with the 17th century is augmented by the free movement of money as well.  The above city states will all establish themselves as banking centers, with opportunities for free trade unprecedented in any other part of the world.  This is complimented by the development of:

Corporations, the method by which many rich persons with a similar view of the world gather together to combine their wealth towards a common goal - whether to promote trade or to rework the political landscape of Europe.  These are spectacularly wealthy persons, sitting atop a complex arrangement of trade houses and guilds, associates, bribed officials and sympathetic monarchs.  And because it's bound to be loads of fun, the substance of these corporations will be the same as those underground organizations discussed at tech 14.  My world can then possess groups like the Illuminati, the Freemasons or anything else I may choose to include (though I admit I have a strong sentiment towards a certain Steve Jackson Game).

Naturally, this justifies the presence of the literal Gnomes of Zurich, which I once referenced in the online campaign.  But where are those gnomes found?  Obviously not Harnia and obviously not Zurich.

Conclusion

So, in the end, the last technologies are sort of evil and malevolent.  Rich bastards taking over the world.  Still, I'm not shooting for a realistic simulation.  These are just foils for very high level parties who need more to worry about than a simple army or two.

I suppose some may be disappointed with the high level cultures described.  After all, on the surface, Frankfurt in Germany (above) won't seem that much different from Mantua in Italy (tech 15), though they're separated by three degrees of technology.  The only differences will be that the average citizen in Mantua won't have two weapon proficiencies, won't easily break morale, will be somewhat more prejudiced and disliking of strangers and ultimately not intimately linked to a group like the Semi-conscious Liberation Vanguard ('front' sounds too modern).  That's a nuance that could be easily lost on a lot of players.

It is that nuance, after all, that lets us overlook most backwardly technological cultures.  They still raise and love their children, they still struggle for food and they imagine themselves to be aware of the world - even if those people in Dirtsville do believe in God and that he gives a shit about them.

So, what comes next?

Not sure about that.  Applying the actual tech levels to the actual territories of the world seems in order, along with fixing limitations to available character classes and resource development.  For those people who feel that one tech will leak into another, that much is obvious - but how, exactly?  Our culture has leaked like crazy into the developing world but anyone can tell you that's been there that the result never quite changes the way people in those parts think.  Now imagine 'leaking' that's limited to information brought by horseback and wagon, without moving pictures or recorded sound, and without instantaneous discourse between regions (except, reasonably, between high-level spellcasters, who would have very little interaction with the lower orders).

This 'leaking' that people describe is greatly hampered by a culture that takes a month to travel 300 miles over rough country - or that can't afford to travel 30 miles at all, what with fees and threats to life and limb.  We vastly overestimate the interaction between cultures in times before our own.  We simply can't imagine that the people living over there in the next valley - or the next street - would have so little discourse with us that we could easily hate them and have them hate us for centuries.

Sharing is something we've only lately learned to appreciate.  It's what very intelligent people do.

The Benefits of Gold

Hands up if you started working on your own trade system along with my posts and now you're anxiously waiting for me to get started on the advanced features.

Then again, hands up if you started working on your own trade system, only to think to yourself, "fuck this," then stop.  Hah.  Gotta bet that has happened.

I'm at sixes and nines regarding the advanced course at the moment - and none-too-sure what to get started on first.  Probably changing the actual references for Pon, rather than giving 2 of everything - and setting up more kinds of references, too.  I've got a complete, corrected list of raw material ratios per reference based on earth now - but I'm reserving that for Patreon.  It's tricky, trying to decide what sort of references to use . . . because somewhere down the line, something always gets simplified or left out.  Trying to account for everything is a long, dark, deep rabbit hole.  I could go with including everything - but then I'm building two trade systems, my own and one for Minaria.

Then again, I could chuck Minaria and just discuss my trade system, making all further references to Earth.  The problem with that plan is that: a) the earth references don't disentangle very well, making it hard to look at just one part; b) the earth system is ludicrously huge and therefore unwieldy for a tutorial.  Hell, right now the Earth system isn't even 'working,' exactly, because I'm steadily rebuilding the price calculations from scratch (that's step 7 of the trade system).  Because of those reasons, Minaria is better.

Perhaps I could just add 5 or 10 different references per month, going forward, until all the references were ultimately added to the Minaria system?  That might be doable.  I could discuss each type reference as it gets added (even make a specific page for it).

There is nothing in the world like inventing work.  I had this totally different idea today of building a town map in the shape of a hex that would be filled with hundreds of slots that buildings could be fit into, sort of like the Sims but more flexible . . . but hey, I don't even want to start something like that just now.  I wouldn't even know how to start it.

This is working up to a very long preamble I hadn't intended.  I was going to talk about gold.

Not the real thing

If the reader has gotten familiar with the wiki tutorial, it is very clear that gold is the critical element around which all other elements revolve.  I felt that it might do some good to talk about why I use gold and not some other base, such as I've seen others use, such as grain, food, labour or even population.  There are some strong, basic reasons.

To begin with, gold is the one that actual humans used.  There have been temporary cultures that used other materials, including banknotes, beads, ivory, livestock and even cowrie shells.  It should be pointed out that, with the exception of paper, these things were all discarded when something better came along - namely gold.  Paper, as well, only became practical as an international currency when the world became largely governed by just six or seven, predominantly European, world powers.  Prior to that, paper money was only effective in the borders of one's own country and usually only within the upper classes; the poor and foriegners still had to be traded with using metal coin or ingots.

Secondly, gold is durable.  Unlike grain, cows or paper, it can't be destroyed by simple means.  Gold doesn't chemically react with anything, though pure gold will tarnish with long, long exposure to the elements.  It can be dissolved in aqua regia, but there's very little of that around and in any case the gold can be reacquired from it if the right agent is used.  For the most part, the only way that gold is likely to remove itself from an economic system if it is actually lost . . . which most people try to avoid if they can.  Gold is bound to be lost into the sea and filtered down into dungeons (we are talking about D&D), but imaginatively it can be recovered and reintroduced.  There's always the possibility of someone like Mansa Musa, who turned up to dump huge amounts of gold into Egypt in the 14th century - but usually this happens only on a very small scale, and rarely, so that it becomes more a source for good stories than a challenge against a working system.  In any case, as I run the 17th century and not the 14th, my trade system is more world-wide . . . and a D&D trade system can be as absolutely stable as one wants it to be.

Thirdly, gold is convenient.  It is small, easily counted and provides for subdivisions when compared with other metals (unlike cows or grain).  An equipment table, even one based on grain, is bound to have the prices listed in gold or silver, so it is easier to use these as the base instead of having to first exchange the price of some other base currency into what we're going to use anyway.

Fourthly, gold is potentially everywhere - unlike grain, for example, which is difficult to grow in large areas of the world - including polar regions, basaltic/granitic regions such as Northern Canada, Siberia and Central Africa, jungles and deserts.  Grain is practical only for European-like temperate climes, just as cows.  Food would be a better measure than a particular kind of food, but then that would be difficult to add together (one could create a system based on calories, but really?  Even I don't want to do that).

Finally, gold is transportable.  I don't think I need to really go into that.

If we're going to have one substance that, everywhere in the world, is exactly the same price (as the system I've designed demands), then it might just as well be gold.  Nothing else comes close to being as practical - except perhaps copper, silver or platinum.  And if we're going to use any of them, we might as well be using gold.

Worldbuilding 2b: Land & Sea

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

Before settling on our first continent, take some time and envision the whole game world.  This doesn't mean we need to start drawing shapes on a map, assigning names and gawd forbid, official monarchies and empires.  For 15,000 years, the Old World had no idea the New World existed ... and we can make the same assumption with the wholistic map of our world.  Starting with a single slab of land, we can suppose that other slabs are out there, to be one day investigated and discovered, without our needing to draw anything.

As an example, suppose the game world is an "archipelago;" say, fifty continents in various areas ranging from Formosa to the size of Greenland.  We can pick any of them as our starting place, simply proposing that other lands are out there, but the characters don't have access to ships, or perhaps the nearest of these other continents is at war with the character's present location.

Such a world would have a great emphasis on ships and shipbuilding, on the players eventually owning their own ship to allow free passage to other places.  Continents that came close to touching one another would make important trading points, with strategic elements that demanded heavy tolls for ships moving through navigable straits between islands as narrow as 800 yards.  Likewise, all the most important cities would be harbours, since sea trade would be vastly more important than land trade.  All internal transport of goods would be directed towards getting things to port; just as it's always been with Britain, where no part of the island is more than 72 miles from the sea.  An archipelago worldbuild would include 50 Britains, all vying to produce the greatest fleet; but the party need never leave one island, and we need never build more than one, perhaps two, in the first ten years of our worldbuilding.  Yet, as the theme for this series argues, while we needn't do the work today, we'd know what work needed to be done in the future.  And we'd have plenty of opportunities for creating unique islands that are unimagined to us now, but which we could realise later.

The tendency is to opt for a more "continental" world, which despite having differently shaped continents, would still be familiar to our sensibilities.  In such cases, we need not start with an entire continent; a mere corner of one, or a peninsula, is sufficient, with the rest of the continent being "out there" for when we need to make sense of it ... while other continents are likewise on the other side of small seas or large oceans.

Like the archipelago, two giant continents separated from each other by a straight as narrow as the Bosporus of Constantinople, or even the English Channel, produces a fascinating political and wide-scale strategic component to a setting that's just wedges of land.  Internal bays and large lakes help separate monarchies and promote opportunities for one part of the continent to trade with another.  A purely rounded continent is somewhat boring politically.  Consider how the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Mexico complicates interrelationships between regions, political divisions, peoples and trade.  Consider what effects a large internal sea like the Caspian causes with regards to climate, access, the movement of armies or subdivisions made by mountain ranges along its edges.  Naturally, we desire large open plains like the Germanic, or vast low hill areas like Russia, or a giant land basin like the Mississippian ... but continents allow for the creation of nooks and crannies too, like twenty tiny valleys in Switzerland or the chaotic terrain of Afghanistan.

A continental map can be made cramped by imposing an "Ice Age," expanding the frozen poles so that only a narrow band of the world is forested with something other than conifers — and there are no jungles at all.  The characters can begin in some small enclave surrounded on four sides by mountains and enormous glaciers ... yet able to thrive through the presence of open water, a warm current and the quirk of westerly winds.  The players are encouraged to gather sufficient supplies and wealth before daring to venture into the desolate empty heaths beyond their homeland ... because it takes a journey of a thousand miles through barrens and bare rock to reach the coastline far to the south, where decent civilisation starts.  This lets us imagine a whole giant game world, yet build only one small part of it for now, knowing as ever that the main world is out there.

An ice world of this kind would have dangerous sea voyages, as even the open sea would be fraught with bergs and treacherous seamounts.  With so much of the world's water bound up in ice, the seas will have lowered fifteen or twenty meters world-wide; islands that were once at sea level are now plateaus surrounded by low cliffs.  Trade in food is hypercritical, even with a dwindling population — once numbering a billion and now, after a thousand years of ice age, barely a hundred million.  The game world can imagine that the ice age began in the time of the Romans; or in the age of Charlemagne; or even after the Black Death ... with crops failing and populations on the move, seeking new places to plant their seeds.  This need not be dystopian; despite mass world migrations, innovation and invention might have continued; the world may even be more intra-cooperative and civilised, because scarcity and weather have smashed all pretense of self-reliance.

Why not lower the sea level further and suppose a world composed of contiguous land with scattered fresh and salt lakes?  Now we can go anywhere overland, with isthmuses between lakes being strategic political and trade centres ... but so much of the land suffers from desertification that we can easily produce an "island" of green and blue surrounded by ice caps and barren Gobi-like deserts all around.  As ever, we can eventually plan to allow the players to take the necessary journey to find some other part of the setting, but for the time being it's enough that they manage themselves amidst the four or five large monarchies — or even small city states, if we want to suppose a very small arable region.  We might even argue for a chain of these regions, following a string of fresh water lakes between high rocky mountains and highlands, like Inverness in Scotland, Northumbria or British Columbia.

The largest seas have the greatest potential for convection, producing rainfall that feeds the largest political empires; the trade winds would sweep these moist air flows against mountains; which would have extensive deserts on the other side.  Trade in water, actually carrying it from place to place in giant water wagons, might be an important lifeline for some parts of the world.  Merely locating a spring could be an adventure; in fact, the players might begin their first session having discovered an aquifer that only they know about ... setting them to argue what they could do with it.  Though granted, this wouldn't appeal to a droll, dull traditional party.

Different parts of the world could have aspects related to all four of these examples.  The East Indies have characteristics of the archipelago, and could be twice or three times as large if it stretched across the Pacific.  The Australian continent could be five times as big, stretching south to form up with Antarctica.  Siberia, detached from the rest of Asia and moved north, could serve as an "ice age" continent.  And we could merge Africa and South America together, making a larger desert with a great inland sea following the mid-Atlantic Rift.

But let me repeat: there's no need to draw the whole map out, not now, perhaps not ever.  Stress making enough of the world to keep the players busy today, and learn how to distract them should they take it into their minds to head off in a direction that hasn't been designed yet.  Put an insurmountable obstacle in their way, like an enormous desert, a mountain range with no known passes ... or an army of fifty thousand unfriendly humanoids.  Make the players understand that passage to other places in the world is for LATER.  Write "there be dragons" on the map the players have of the sea and MEAN IT.  When the players try to cross that sea, kill them with dragons and say, "I warned you."  Have no guilt.  They were warned.

'Course, you can always give them an opportunity to turn back.

Source Work

For about a month now I've been diligently reformatting my Sources table so that it could be made small enough, and clear enough, to include on my wiki. It can now be downloaded. It is 5 megs in size, down from the 20 meg nightmare it was before, and is organized by both region and production.

To remind some readers, the numbers included in the Source document are references from a 1952 Colliers Encyclopedia describing what goods and services are produced in what locations. The Encyclopedia, as might be expected, does not give numbers for how much is produced, only that the thing is produced. My trade system is based on the supposition that the more times a thing is mentioned, the more valuable it is. Thus, if gold were mentioned (as the source document says) 237 times, and coffee mentioned 78 times, Then all the gold in the world is worth 237/78 = 3.038 times as much as coffee. From that, I then obtain the total amount of gold produced, and the total amount of coffee produced, and divide each by the value of gold that each particular resource is worth, and that gives me a base price. I have gone into this before, at this much linked post, so I'll forego doing it again now. Just now I want to talk about the Source document itself.

It's too massive to offer any images here - the reader will simply have to download it and follow along. The table includes areas that I have lifted from the Encyclopedia thus far. Areas not included would be all of the New World, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and Oceania. Everything else has been surveyed and is part of this table. I'm going to make a push this year to try to survey everywhere else if possible, but it is dry work and I tend to leave off it for a year or two at a time. Try to imagine doing projects that you leave off for multiple years, only to come back and then finish them. I've been working on this version of my trade system since 1998.

Total references thus far: 31,257. It is probable that the references-equals-value ideal would be completely flawed, except that I'm working with an immense data base. I've literally pulled references from thousands of cities, regions, rivers, lakes, valleys, deserts and so on ... and with SO many references, it is possible to get a general sense of what was considered important in 1952. That date is relevant, because it is more than 60 years ago now, and speaks of an age untouched by computers, high tech, world-wide communications or air transport, and a phenomenal amount of trade infrastructure that we now take for granted. Being much closer to the actual desired represented period, the 17th century, I get a better picture from the old encyclopedia of local economies than I would were I working from, say, Wikipedia.

If you are looking at the document, you will see that the Master tab contains the complete references, organized by region. The 2nd row contains the total references for all the products. Column A would be the various Kingdoms, where as column B would be the regional trade zones. Each column B can be found in the other tabs - for example, the first Kingdom/Zone, Altslok/Croft, can be found on the North Asia tab, right at the top. There the breakdown of the references in that region shows that goods and services are collected from places called Croftshelm, Rithdome, Roth and Rothering. It may be assumed that anything with a population figure is a region, whereas other locations are likely cities. Most geographical features are distinguished as such. Rivers are referred to as 'basins,' as in the Rhine Basin. Altslok, incidentally, is an invented name for places in the Altai Mountains - these would be the dwarven names, since I have removed the real world human population from that region and replaced with with dwarves. Everything has then been renamed, and it is the D&D names that I use. I've got them so well memorized now, I sometimes have trouble remembering what the real world names are.

On the master page, it should be noted that there are two sections below line 566 where the regions have a different color, where the Ottoman Empire is listed again, and where it shows 'kingdoms' like Africa, America, China, etc. These pink areas have had their references designed, but are not yet actually incorporated into the trade 'system' that I use for my game. These areas are 'on hold.' The small group from line 568 to line 573 are ready to be added, as the maps have been made. Those on lines 575 and down have no maps to enable them to be added. Thus, the Spanish Empire between lines 450 and 494 (colored blue to indicate sub-kindoms) does not actually at this time include the Iberian Peninsula. Ah well, we do what we can. All the trade zones that have not been added are broken down on the 'World' tab.

Likewise, the Holy Roman Empire (details on the H.R.E. tab), from lines 86 to 181, also shows the sub-Kingdoms on the Master tab.

The goods and services on the top line are not listed alphabetically, but in order of the type of resource they are. The order is actually determined by the United Nations International Statistics Yearbook code, for that was the resource I turned to in order to get a basis for how much 'stuff' was made. The yearbook has numbers for clothing, tools, emery, furniture ... anything you'd want, mostly, except for gemstones. Gemstone world production totals are not published. Want to guess why?

From columns ACX going right, the production was obtained from the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization Yearbook, and it is because of this yearbook that 'melons' are included under 'vegetables.' I'm perfectly aware that melons aren't vegetables, but for production purposes the FAO includes them as such, for reasons they must have regarding the actual production of such things. Many of the parts of this table will seem irrational that way - such as the inclusion of 'chicory' with 'coffee.' The gentle reader must recognize that there isn't one item anywhere on this list that appears where it does without a REASON. Nothing is an oversight. Every single item has been vetted, researched and considered for reasons of production, world trade, its relationship to other items and its 17th century value of purpose. I'll explain anything that is asked after, but I request please that an accusation not be made about some error I seem to have made. There is more in this table than is dreamed of in Horatio's imagination.

One issue would be the apparent duplication of products. For example, in the cereals group from columns ADA to ADK, 'cereals' has its own column, which is then included under the ADL, 'Total cereals.' This is because the encyclopedia did not designate which cereals a region produced when it gave the reference ... and being a deliberate sort of person, I have included the separate 619 references that were not so designated. This also happens with things like 'smelting,' 'fish,' 'livestock,' 'alchemy,' 'foodstuffs' and a host of others. There is a way I manage these generalized products in the final trade table, in which they are distributed according to what is determined to be the primary goods or services that are available in that part of the world.

No doubt I've forgotten something. I'm sorry it can't be simpler. The world just isn't a simple place. I trust that people will get something out of the basic material. The very least would be a list of all the things that are included. Here they are alphabetically:

Adamantite, African oak, Agate, Alabaster, Alchemy, Alexandrite, Alfalfa, Alloys, Almandine, Almonds, Aloe, Alum, Amber, Amber jewelry, Amethyst, Amontillado sherry, Anchovies, Angora, Anise, Antelope horn, Antimony, Antimonysmelting, Apple brandy, Apples, Apricots, Aquamarine, Arak, Arbutus, Armagnac brandy, Armor, Arrack, Arrowroot, Arsenic, Artichokes, Artworks, Asafoetida, Asparagus, Aspen, Asti spumante, Attar of roses, Avocadoes, Azulejos, Azurite, Bacon, Badocsony wine, Bamboo, Bananas, Banking, Barbel, Barges, Barley, Barrels, Barum ware, Basalt, Baskets, Beads, Beans, Bear paws, Bearskins, Beaujolais, Beech, Beef, Bells, Berries, Beryl, Betel nuts, Birch, Birdcages, Bismuth, Bitter salt, Black bread, Black coral, Black currant liqueur, Black marble, Black powder, Black wine, Blackberries, Blackwood, Blankets, Bleach, Bloodstone, Blue quartz, Boatbuilding, Bobbins, Bonecarving, Bonito, Bookbinding, Boots & shoes, Borax, Boric acid, Bottles, Boxes, Boxwood, Bracelets, Brandywine, Brass, Brasswares, Bread, Breadfruit, Bream, Brewing, Bricks, Bristles, Brittany horses, Brocade, Bromine, Bronze, Bronzewares, Brooms, Brown marble, Brownstone, Brushes, Buckets, Buckles, Buffalo, Building stone, Butter, Buttons, Cabbages, Cabinet-making, Cacao, Cairngorm, Cakes, Calabar beans, Calico cloth, Cambric, Camelhair, Camels, Camembert, Cameos, Camphor, Canaries, Canary sack, Candles & wax, Cannon, Cantaloupes, Canvas, Carbon black, Cardamon, Carnations, Carnelian, Carobs, Carobwood, Carp, Carpentry, Carpets, Carriages, Carroubes, Carts, Cashews, Cassavas, Cassia, Castor beans, Castor oil, Casuarina, Catechu, Catfish, Cat's eye, Cattle, Cauliflower, Caviar, Cedar, Cellos, Cement, Ceramics, Cereals, Chablis, Chabrieres wine, Chain, Chalcedony, Chalk, Chamomile, Champagne, Charcoal, Cheddar cheese, Cheese, Cherries, Chestnut, Chestnuts, Chianti wine, Chickens, Chickpeas, Chicory, China, Chocolate, Chromium, Chrysoprase, Cider, Cinchona, Cinnamon, Cinnamon leaf oil, Cipollina marble, Citrine, Citronella oil, Citrons, Citrus, Civet, Clementines, Clockmaking, Cloisanne, Cloth, Clothing, Clover, Clover seed, Cloves, Coal, Coats, Cob apples, Cobalt, Cobaltsmelting, Cochineal, Coconut oil, Coconuts, Cod, Cod-liver oil, Coffee, Coffins, Cognac, Coir, Colza, Combs, Common opal, Confectionary, Copal, Copper, Coppersmelting, Coppersmithing, Copra, Coral, Coriander, Cork, Cormorants, Corsets, Corundum, Cosmetics, Cotton, Cotton cloth, Cotton goods, Cottonseed, Cottonseed oil, Crabs, Crayfish, Cream, Crimson marble, Crockery, Cryptomeria, Crystal, Cucumbers, Cumin, Currants, Curtains, Cuttlefish, Cypress, Daffodils, Dairying, Dalbergia, Damascene, Damask, Darekh, Dates, Deer & elk horn, Dhows, Diamond, Diamondcutting, Dimsum, Distilling, Dogs, Dolls, Dolomite, Donkeys, Doors, Dorset butter, Draft horses, Drapery, Dresses, Dried fish, Dried fruit, Dried meat, Drugget goods, Dry peas, Ducks, Dyestuffs, Eau de Cologne, Ebony, Edam, Edible bird's nests, Eels, Eggplants, Elaeocarpus, Elephants, Elixer de Spa, Embroidery, Emerald, Emery, Enamelware, Engraving, Equisetifolia, Ermine, Espadrilles, Esparto grass, Esparto ware, Eucalyptus, Euphorbia, Ewe's milk cheese, Faience, Fans, Felt, Felt boots, Felt caps, Fighting cocks, Figs, Figurines, Filbert nuts, Files, Fir, Fire opal, Firecrackers, Fish, Fish fins, Fish hooks, Fish meal, Flags, Flannel, Flatfish, Flatware, Flax, Flint, Flounder, Flour, Flowers, Fodder, Foodstuffs, Fowl, Fox furs, Frankincense, Freestone, Freshwater fish, Friezes, Fruit brandy, Fruits, Fur clothing, Furnishings, Furniture, Furs, Garlic, Garnet, Geese, Gem carving, Gemcutting, Ghee, Gin, Ginger, Gingerbread, Ginseng, Glassware, Glazed fruit, Gloves, Glue, Goats, Goatskins, Gold, Gold filigree, Gold inlay, Goldsmithing, Gooseberries, Gorgonzola, Goshenite, Gouda, Gowns, Gram, Grand Chartreuse, Granite, Grapefruit, Grapes, Greenstone, Grey-pink marble, Griffs, Grindstones, Grossular, Groundnuts, Gruyere, Guano, Guavas, Gudgeon, Guipure lace, Gum, Gum Arabic, Gum benzoin, Gum mastic, Gum tragacanth, Gutta-percha, Haddock, Hake, Halibut, Handkerchiefs, Harari, Harpsichords, Harris tweed, Hats, Hawk's eye, Hay, Hazelnuts, Healing earth, Heliodor, Hematite, Hemp, Hemp goods, Henna, Herring, Hessonite, Hides, Honey, Hops, Horn, Horn carving, Horn combs, Hornbeam, Horses, Hosiery, Hushhash, Hyacinths, Incense, Indigo, Ink, Iodine, Iroko, Iron, Iron flowers, Ironmongery, Ironwood, Ivory, Ivory carving, Jade, Jade carving, Jasper, Jelutong, Jet, Jeweled daggers, Jewelry, Juniper berries, Jute, Kaffir, Kanku, Kaolin, Kapok, Karakul, Kenaf, Kendyr, Kid gloves, Kid leather, Kirschwasser, Knives, Kokura-ori, Kola nuts, Kumiss, Kutani, La Rioja wine, Lac, Lace, Lacquerware, Lamb, Lamp oil, Lamprey, Lamps, Lapidary, Lapis lazuli, Larch, Lard, Laurel, Lavender, Lead, Leadsmelting, Leadsmithing, Leathercraft, Lemons, Lenses, Lentils, Leopards, Leopardskin, Lichee nuts, Licorice, Lilies, Lily roots, Limberger, Limes, Limestone, Linen, Linen Goods, Ling, Lingerie, Linseed, Linseed oil, Liqueur, Lithographic stone, Livestock, Lobsters, Locks, Looms, Loquats, Lotus, Lowestoft ware, Lungen, Lye, Lynx furs, Mackerel, Madder, Madiera wine, Magnesite, Mahogany, Maize, Majolica, Malachite, Malaga wine, Malt, Malvoisie wine, Mandarin oranges, Manganese, Mangoes, Mangrove wood, Manuscript illumination, Manzanilla wine, Maraschino cherries, Marble, Marbles, Marigolds, Markets, Marsala wine, Masonry, Mats, Mavasia wine, Meat, Medicinal plants, Meerschaum, Mees wine, Melanite, Melons, Mercury, Metalsmithing, Milk, Milk of Magnesia, Millet, Mineral water, Minting, Mirrors, Mistletoe, Mithril, Mlombwa, Mninga, Mohair, Mohair cloth, Molybdenum, Montona wine, Moonstone, Morganite, Moroccan leathercraft, Mosaics, Moss agate, Mother-of-pearl, Mother-of-pearl inlay, Mules, Mullet, Murex, Muscatel, Mushrooms, Music scripting, Musical instruments, Musk, Muskmelons, Muslin, Muslin goods, Mussels, Mustard & sauces, Mustard seed, Mutton, Myrrh, Nails, Narcissi, Navagu, Necklaces, Nectarines, Needles, Nets, Nickel, Nickelsmelting, Niter, Noodles, Nutgall, Nutmeg, Oak, Oatmeal, Oats, Obsidian, Ocher, Oilseed, Olive oil, Olives, Onions, Onyx, Opium, Oranges, Organs, Ornaments, Ostrich feathers, Ostriches, Otter furs, Ovens, Oysters, Ozocerite, Paint, Palm nuts, Palm oil, Palms, Pans, Papayas, Paper, Paper lanterns, Paper products, Papier-mache, Paprika, Papyrus, Parasols, Parchment, Parmagiano, Parquet stone, Patchouli, Pates, Pates de foie gras, Peaches, Peanut oil, Pearl, Pears, Peas, Peat, Pepper, Peppermint, Peppers, Perch, Percheron horses, Perfume, Peridot, Perigord truffles, Perilla seed, Perry, Persimmons, Petrified wood, Pewter, Pewterware, Phosphorus, Piassava, Pig iron, Pike, Pilchard, Pilsener beer, Pimentos, Pine, Pineapples, Pistachios, Pitch, Plantains, Plaster, Platinum, Playing cards, Ploughs, Plum brandy, Plums, Plush, Podo, Podocarpus, Poison, Pollan, Pomegranates, Pongee, Ponies, Pont l'eveque cheese, Poppies, Poppyseed, Population, Porcelain, Pork, Porphyry, Port, Posts, Potatoes, Pots, Pottery, Poultry & eggs, Prase, Prayer carpets, Precious opal, Precision tools, Presses, Prickly Pears, Prunes, Pulses, Pumice, Pumpkins, Pumps, Pyrope, Qat, Quality swords, Quartz, Quicklime, Quinine, Rabbits, Racehorses, Radishes, Raffia, Raisins, Ramie, Rapeseed, Rapeseed oil, Raspberries, Rattan, Red Leicester cheese, Red pepper, Red sandstone, Red-stamp ink, Redwood, Refined sugar, Reindeer, Resin, Rhodochrosite, Rhodolite, Rhodonite, Rhubarb, Ribbon, Rice, Roach, Robes, Rope, Rosaries, Rose quartz, Roses, Rosewood, Rosin, Rough fiber cloth, Rough fibers, Ruby, Rum, Rye, Sable, Sacks, Saddles, Safflower seed, Saffron, Sago, Sailcloth, Sake, Sal, Sal ammoniac, Salmon, Salon, Salt, Salted duck, Samovars, Sandalwood, Sandles & slippers, Sandstone, Santonin, Sapphire, Saragoca, Sardine oil, Sardines, Satin, Satinwood, Sauerkraut, Sausage, Saws, Scissors, Sculpture, Sea ivory, Sea slugs, Sealskin, Seaweed, Seed oil, Senna, Serge, Sesame seed, Sesame seed oil, Shad, Shark, Shark fins, Shark-liver oil, Shawls, Shea butter, Shea nuts, Sheep, Sheepskin, Sheepskin coats, Shellac, Shellfish, Sherry, Ship rigging, Shipbuilding, Shrimp, Siege Engines, Siliphium, Silk, Silk cloth, Silk goods, Silver, Silver filigree, Silver inlay, Silversmithing, Sisal, Skins, Slate, Slaves, Smelting, Smoked ham, Smoking pipes, Snakeskin, Snow leopard furs, Snuff, Soap, Soda ash, Sorghum, Soybean oil, Soybeans, Spessartite, Spices, Spinel, Sponges, Spruce, Squeeze boxes, Stained glass, Starch, Stilton cheese, Stonecarving, Straw goods, Straw hats, Strawberries, Strega, Sturgeon, Sugarbeets, Sugarcane, Sugared almonds, Sulphur, Sunflower seed, Sunflower seed oil, Sweet potatoes, Swine, Swords, Syenite, Tablecloths, Talc, Tamarind seed, Tamarisk, Tangerines, Tapestries, Tapioca, Taro root, Tartans, Tea, Teak, Teak oil, Teff & tucusso, Tents, Terra cotta, Thatch, Tiger eye, Tigerskin, Tilapia, Tiles, Timber, Tin, Tinsmelting, Tinsmithing, Tobacco, Tokay wine, Tomatoes, Tonic, Tools, Topaz, Topazolite, Tortoise shell, Tortoise shell carving, Tourmaline, Toys, Trachyte, Treacle, Treenuts, Trout, Truffles, Tubers, Tufa, Tuff, Tulips, Tulle, Tuna, Tunbridge ware, Tung nuts, Tung oil, Tungsten, Turkeys, Turmeric, Turnips, Turquoise, Turtles, Tweed, Twine, Umber, Uvarovite, Valtellina wine, Vanadium, Vanilla, Vegetable oil, Vegetable tallow, Vegetables, Velour, Velour goods, Velvet, Velvet goods, Veneer, Vermouth, Vestments, Vetch, Vignettes, Vinegar, Violets, Violins, Vitriol, Vogla, Wagons, Walnuts, Water opal, Watermelons, Watermills, Waterpipe, Weapons, Welsh ponies, Whale oil, Wheat, Whiskey, White marble, Whitefish, Whortleberries, Willow wands, Windmills, Windows, Wine, Wire, Witherite, Wolf furs, Wood alcohol, Wood oil, Woodcarving, Woodcraft, Wooden shoes, Wooden tools, Wool, Wool Cloth, Woolens, Worsted cloth, Worsted goods, Yak tail, Yaks, Yams, Yeast, Yellow marble, Zinc, Zincsmelting, Zircon, Zsolnay


If you can think of something that's made in the world that isn't on that list, it's probably from South America or the East Indies. And it's very unusual.