Price for land

[Cernunnos]

Hi everyone!

I have tried to find a price in GURPS$ for 1 acre of land (in TL0-4). I have access to LowTech and all the LowTech-Companions, but I cannot find any references to land price. I have also scanned Matt Riggsbys excellent articles in Pyramid, but i can not find the info. I am looking for. I assume that the price depends on terrain and fertility and so on.

Any ideas?

Best regards,
C

[Dustin]

My best idea is to take a modern price for comparable land (taking into account fertility, water access, distance from the nearest city, etc) and divide it by the difference in Starting Wealth for that TL.

This assumes a market for freely alienable land, of course, which is very often not the case at TL0-4. Sometimes land is free for the clearing, sometimes you can only get it in fief (although a cash 'donation' might still be very persuasive). Anywhere that land is seen as the source of political power, the answer to 'how much?' will be much more a political question than an economic one.

[DanHoward]

In most low-tech societies you can't buy land. In a feudal system it all belongs to the ruler and he gives you permission to use it. In other cultures the land belongs to the entire community. In a frontier society you use force to displace the previous inhabitants and you use force to try and hold it. In a war, any territory is taken by the commander/ruler and he uses it to reward service and to bribe influential people. Land is valued for the income one can derive from it, but it seems rare for piece of land to actually have a sale price attached to it.

Personally I wouldn't let PCs buy land. I'd tell them to find the local ruler and do a series of impressive favors for him or to go to the frontier and carve out a domain from the wilderness.

[Cernunnos]

Hi again!

After having read your posts I totally agree with you: No buying of land for the PC. But if a person wants to buy land with xp at the beginning of character creation, do you recommend that I translate the xp into “Independent Income” (rents from land)?

Please help me to control the math here:
1xp in Independent Income translates to 10$/month in a TL3 setting. Let’s say that 33% of Cost of Living for a peasant household (social level -1) goes to rents to their lord. That is 300*0,33=99$ a month. If a PC spends 10xp at beginning of Character Creation he gets an Independent income similar to the rent that one household gives each month. And if a SocialLevel-1 household may live on 3acre of land (?), 10xp may equal rental income from 3acre of land. And if 10xp may be traded for money (B.25 1xp=10% of the starting wealth), then 3acre of land may equal 1000$ in a TL3 setting? I have not given this any deeper thought, and I don’t know if I am totally wrong in my assumptions.

However I agree with you that buying lands seems like a bad idea.

Best regards,
C.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Cernunnos

After having read your posts I totally agree with you: No buying of land for the PC.

I'll disagree with that. It's not that land purchases didn't happen. It's that land purchases and land rights were complicated in a number of ways, and on a large scale, they were a political transaction as much as an economic one. And, of course, the specifics vary a lot between different places and times.

Originally Posted by Cernunnos

But if a person wants to buy land with xp at the beginning of character creation, do you recommend that I translate the xp into “Independent Income” (rents from land)?

Depends on how you want it to work in-game. If the character has to actively oversee his land, that's part of a job (say, "feudal landlord" or "plantation-owning aristocrat") enabled by his Wealth. If the money just rolls in, that's Independent Income. Either way, if you want to know how much land that translates into, you start with the amount of income he gets and work backwards from there. Pyramid #52 provides guidelines for figuring out how land translates into income for an overlord based on how much control the overlord has, land quality, TL, and so on.

[dcarson]

In a feudal setting will almost always come with a Duty as well.