GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

King and general
Still desire meat, drink, and robe
And roof overhead

— Some hack

The latest from e23 is GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics, by Matt Riggsby and Bill Stoddard. It completes the GURPS Low-Tech series, bringing you the pillars that hold up any empire, large or small. It covers hunting, gathering, raising, and preparing food; crafting everything from fine metalwork up to huge buildings; the trade that generates the money that pays for everything; and the craftsmen and other professional who do all the work. All very mundane, one could say . . . but heroes must come from somewhere, and ignore these things at their peril. And let's face it: Those cool swords come from somewhere, too, and it's rarely Sword-Mart.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

At last! (Goes to check it).

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Seems like an excellent book. But what machines predate humanity?

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Earlier hominids appear to have used wedges and levers.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Sword-Mart is driving Mom-and-Pop corner sword smithies out of business with all their imported swords made with cheap dwarf labor. Please don't shop there.

Also: nice work completing (so far?) the LTC series.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Picked it up yesterday and it seems great -- my congratulations to Matt and Bill. The Jobs listing is especially useful; the only thing that struck me as odd is that while there is a listing for 'judge' there is no corresponding entry for 'lawyer,' a specialization which grew out of 'orator' in classical times.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

HAAAAAAA!

I am low of money... I am moving to another city... I WANT IT!!!

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Sweet. This now means that GURPS Low-Tech is effectively 288 pages. Has something like these been considered for GURPS High-Tech?

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Many apes and some birds use simple tools. Apes even work on tools to better use them (e.g., they clean branches to make sticks).

IIRC, High Tech is already 240 or 256 pages in itself!

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

And got volumes of Pulp Guns allready

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

And besides there is the upcoming GURPS Tactical Shooting, which maybe is especially related to GURPS High Tech, too, because its stress and specialization in firearms (I guess that this is open to nuances, though).

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Plus Loadouts: Monster Hunters, something of a worked example using the stuff in High-Tech.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

So do Caledonian Crows, the current leading bird-brains (for tool use anyways) - and they seem to beat out the apes by deliberately teaching other adults their new tool-making tricks, not just teaching their own young.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Excellent book.

So far, and that's after having read over 98% of the material, my only complaints are the absence of endurance hunting, that there's no entry for non-legume vegetables in the agriculture section, and some problems with pigs and fowl (how and where to feed them, and how well they can or can't survive on kitchen scraps like dogs).

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Yes, of pure gear, like Low-Tech is. There are no PDFs focusing on life and technology of TLs 5-8, as opposed to the adventuring gear for those times, like these three PDFs for TLs 0-4 do.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Under manufacturing, where it says Production (lbs/day) (p.22) it is talking about per worker, right?

If it is talking per worker, then it assumes a human with 10 in every stat?

If that is so, then could you scale the production with BL, similar to how mining does it?

"How much wood could an ogre lumberjack jack, if an ogre lumberjack could jack wood?"

... god, that is terrible. But I hope my train of though comes across clearly.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I would say no for most of it, as most of the items are worked. I don't see how BL can affect things like making glass, smelting metal or cutting wood. They have other limiting factors. However, any of the raw materials could justify BL as their limiter, so you could apply a scaling there if you wanted.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

The resources, field size or wahtnot will be a limiting factor. I would say easier to make do with less workers then to get more output from better workers.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

IIRC nuclear power plants.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

On composite weapon materials, it mentions that, for example, a spear is 3/4 wood... but on the materials it's not clear (to me) which size of wood should be used for hafts... 4" poles seem too thick, and planks seem simply inappropriate... any tips?

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

And I'm an idiot. Sees 'human', thinks 'hominid'. Most embarassing.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Ah you are right.

A book about life and technology of TLs 5-8 looks terribly more complex than about TLs 0-4, though... it would have to encompass the whole Modern Age, including industrial revolution, computers and everything.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

It doesn't assume anything, so far as stats are concerned. Those are, as best as I can reconstruct them (which admittedly is not particularly well), based on historically documented working times. So the stats in question are "whatever real people had." Scaling for unusual skill levels can be handled by clever application of the labor cost rules on p. 23. Scaling for populations with unusual attributes (relevant for construction, which requires lots of strong backs) is out of scope for this book and could be the subject of a section of another Fantasy Tech volume. I'd probably base the scaling on BL rather than directly on ST.

The tips are stone, bronze, or iron...oh, sorry. Pay attention to the size rather than the shape. Like the note says, "When buying wood, calculate price per pound by its thinnest dimension." The two-inch is probably about right.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Depends on the worker. I have the feeling the "average human worker" in a manual labor job has a higher than ST 10. I can say at my work where lifting and carrying more than 100 pounds is a routine task and where you're expected to lift up to that every 3 seconds for hours on end there are lots of people with ST11 and 12 and we use lots of machines to help with it.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Could you imagine a template for the typical lawyer? Sadistic, Cold-Blooded, Bloodlust, Compulsive Lying, Hamfisted, Oblivious, Overconfidence, Paranoid, Megalomania, Compulsive Suing... Sounds like a good start for a Dungeon Fantasy villain.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I'd make that Stereotypical lawyer. There's a difference.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

LTC3, p. 22, "MATERIAL COSTS", says:
So the table is meant to be very generic... what other raw materials had a significantly higher cost in, say, Middle Age or the Roman Empire?
Or, is the cost table meant to be representative of at least one particular time and place?

If the answer to those question is "varied wildly" and "no", respectively, it is quite hard to use the cost table in actual play...
(note that I would be fully satisfied by approximate and vague answers, such as "in Europe, porcelain costed at least 10 times as much")

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Specifics of what materials are scarce where and when really ARE the kinds of things for world books (for fictional settings) or the historical resource books (for... historical settings :P). Just like saying "Nobody in the Roman Empire uses straw or wooden armor" is a matter for a Roman sourcebook, not the generic GURPS Low Tech.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Both the case, I'm afraid. Indeed, everything's that way. Just as it's left to the GM to set the values of gold and silver, we're leaving it up to the GM to determine local prices of lead, tin, and copper. And everything else, while we're at it. The prices here are a baseline based on the labor necessary to produce the material in question, from which the GM can come up with his own actual prices based on factors relevant to the specific campaign.

Having said that, most prices (save for wood and the softer metals) aren't wildly implausible for most places in history, and the classical prices for copper and tin presented as an example of price variability are, if you run the numbers, fairly close to Low Tech's suggestion that bronze have a +3 CF over iron (almost as if that example was chosen on purpose...).

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I generally assume that a professional of Race A with be proportional to the same type of professional of Race B, so if a human blacksmith has ST 12 (44% above an ST 10 average), then an ogre blacksmith will have an ST of 24 (44% above a ST 20 average). That way I don't have to think about how strong each profession is, just racial averages. So if humans are base 1, ogres would be 4, and just multiply all ST related stuff by 4 for what equivalent ogres can do.

I agree, more ST seems to only help some of the manufacturing processes. Lumberjacking and smelting look like they might be helped by having stronger workers, while glassblowing and pottery, not so much. Those might require more exotic advantages than more ST.

P.S.: Outside combat, I consider ST and Basic Lift to be pretty interchangeable.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Not even that. "Ham-fisted", for example, according to Characters, means, "You have unusually poor motor skills... You are also a messy eater, can’t tie a necktie properly, and so on. At the GM’s option, you get -1 per level of this trait on any Influence or reaction roll where being tidy or well-groomed would matter." "Cold-Blooded" means "Your body temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the environment."

I know several lawyers (including two or three who are gamers), several dozen lawyer jokes, and have seen several hundred (at least) portrayed in fiction. I am trying to recollect any notion of them being categorically clumsy, being sloppy eaters, being poorly dressed, or stiffening up below room temperature. Perhaps elsewhere these are traits associated with the study of law.

If Ciaran felt the need to write an unfunny vitriolic post unrelated to the topic at hand, he might have been further ahead to make a post saying, "Lawyers are bad people, hurf durf, amirite?"

In any event, courtrooms have been staples of drama for many centuries, including in some of the time period covered by Low-Tech (although admittedly adversarial courts come towards the end of that period). It seemed odd to have judges but not lawyers or their TL 2 predecessors, orators.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I think he may have been trying to describe these guys. At least that's the closest thing I can come up with (I think there's something closer than Ham-Fisted to no arms, but maybe he's just assuming they use their tongues...).

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Oh, we are.

Personally, I'm a horrible person. Ham-Fisted too, especially if I'm wearing mittens.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

This is the kind of thing ill buy for sure!

<3

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

<MOD>

Let's all drop the "lawyers are evil" thing. Tagging broad categories of people with negative traits isn't smurfy, and neither is the serious thread divergence that occurs because of it. I've addressed this with Ciaran separately.

(Otherwise, the thread is great. Please continue.)

</MOD>

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I'm not sure how always-true this is. For instance, the felinoids of my space opera setting are really low ST, to the point were it probably makes the most sense for them to never have gotten into medieval-style iron working. With fur, claws, fast reflexes and so forth making them the apex predators of their home planet (in a rather starker way than we humans have been apex predators of our planet since the mid or late stone age), they'd probably make do with minimal bronze, silver and gold working, until they got to the point where they could smelt steel and use machines.

My mental model is that a blacksmith needs to be this strong to hammer the iron as a full-time job, at best scaled slightly for SM, but there's no need to assume that an average-ST ogre isn't plenty strong enough to work as a blacksmith full-time, so over half of ogres are eligible for the job, and the work does not noticably "challenge" their musculature to stimulate strength development.

What I'm most interested in is labour, especially construction labour. It has got to involve a lot of moving stones, brick or rubble around, and so if the labourers are higher ST, that ought to make a big difference.

Also stone cutting. How much does ST help there? I'm inclined to assume the shaping of the stones isn't particularly ST-intensive. Maybe all masons are minimum ST 11, but being stronger shouldn't enable them to work more than a few percent faster, because the chisel-hammering doesnt have to be - as far as I know - full force.

Oh, and farming. Harvesting in particular. How ST-intensive is that?

And how does high HT, and Fit or Very Fit, interact with laobur?

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

There's only 4'' and 8'' posts though, 2'' only has planks, would that be appropriate?

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

I have a minor question about LTC:3, actually. Since LT seems to hint that it contains guidelines for among other things producing and more importantly repairing armor, does this mean it contains some sort of system for tracking armor damage and degradation? So far I'm on the fence as far as getting any of the companions, but if it does have such a thing I might end up getting it.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

LTC 2 contains it.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Yes, LT 2 has the extended armor and weapon damage and customization rules - on the very reasonable assumption that people who don't give a fig about building houses (or rafts ;) may be VERY interested in anything to do with killing NPCs or not getting killed in return.

It's got a couple of pages of DR and HP ratings for weapons, and a page on armor damage, repairing armor, and armor maintenance.

The repairs section does refer to LTC 3 for detailed information, but offers a "quick assumption" for people who don't have it or don't need the detail from LTC 3.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Ignore the shape. Just use the dimension.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Sold, now I just have to wait until the first of the month for my misc budget to reset...

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Yes, it's thread necromancy, but it's about something long-dead. LTC3, p. 14, dates the domestication of dogs possibly as far back as 30,000 BC. That was an extreme date at the time, based on the morphology of a very small set of skeletal remains. But a genetic study published this week also indicates a very early date, as much as 32,000 years ago rather than the more common estimate of 15,000 years. Blind chance, surely, but nevertheless it looks like we got this one right. My dogs were unimpressed when I told them, but people around here may be more interested.

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

That is interesting. And nice work, GURPS!

Re: GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics
 

Very interesting indeed. I love this kind of stuff. :)