Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett
Some of those prices look pretty queer. Grease is four times the price of butter, for instance, and butter costs less than the cream you would need to make it of. Bacon and ham are no dearer than pork. Cedar is less than half the price of oak. "House,mid-class,poor" costs as much as "manor-house,stone,small".
Moreover, the information in the "salesman" column is a joke, suggesting for instance that one buys bread and pies from a miller rather than a baker, and using a lot of made-up words such as "weaponcrafter" and "mercantyler".
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On the presumption that the ratio of butter to Cream is about 1:2, and that a gallon of cream is about 8 lbs, then you should be able to get about 4 lbs of butter per gallon of cream. Net result, butter should probably cost about 1 silver penny per pound instead of 1/2 silver penny per pound. As for the made up names? <shrug> How made up are we talking about here? One COULD have given the names of every single type of weapon crafter from boyer/fletcher down to polisher, down to what ever names they were called - or you could have a single name for weapon crafter. As for baked bread and the like - Harn makes the presumption that this is the domain of the miller on the farm rather than the domain of the baker in a village per se. In addition, Harnworld does not have a job description of "Baker" within its list of vocations. Is this an oversight? Possibly <g>. On the other hand, it may very well be that the author didn't bother to include every possibility - either for sake of brevity, or because he didn't have access to the information in the pre-internet days.
As for the value of wood - I have to agree, that the prices are a bit disconnected from reality. Is it the most accurate simulation of medieval prices you will ever find? I'd guess probably not <g>. On the other hand, GURPS isn't all that good at simulating accurate prices either...