Dungeon Fantasy 8 Treasure Tables

[hal]

Hi All,
This is a question for the PDF version of Treasure Table generation from before there was a DUNGEON FANTASY boxed set...

I'm a lazy sod of sorts where I hate rolling a lot of treasure (a lot being a group of, rather than a plentitude of). So I thought "how hard can it be - computerize the whole thing!"

Bet you're all groaning right about now thinking "poor mortal fool" right?

In the end, I got to analyzing the whole thing and realized that there are exactly 216 elements to the random table. If I treat all "rolls" as being equal to

100 x 1d6

plus

10 x 1d6

Plus 1d6

I get a number that can cross reference with ANY given result on the table, even if the table says something like 1-2, 2,4 - that is a lazy way of saying :

124
224

So - that's not the issue I'm facing. On table FIBERS AND FABRICS TABLE page 12, I started to blindly input the data into my program until I got to the part where it says Fibers on page 13. There, the author talks about Bales, and when he mentions it, one rolls 2d6 x 3 for the weight of bales. Where I am running into "issues" is for example, a bale of wool at that weighs a whopping total of 36 lbs, is not even a cubic foot of wool (where it is weighed in at 82 lbs per cubic foot. Modern day bales of wool are set to be 260 lbs in weight, or just under 2 cubic feet.

Now, modern measurements vs old time measurements don't always agree, and I don't have an issue with that - it just seems odd that on average, 2d6 x 3 will result in about 21 lbs of wool for a bale. That's a pretty small bale - no?

In any event, thought I'd throw this out here and see what responses people give. I've got two players in what amounts to a Dungeon Fantasy LIKE campaign in a TL 2 era. I plan on using the rules as written to build the app (For windows only - sorry) and then find a way to put a TL limit on weapons decidedly TL 3 or worse. This way, I won't generate TL 3 weapons as treasure for a TL 2 campaign.

Thoughts?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by hal

I'm a lazy sod of sorts where I hate rolling a lot of treasure (a lot being a group of, rather than a plentitude of). So I thought "how hard can it be - computerize the whole thing!"

Been there, done that. And I think somebody else has done it as well (going to look, I'm finding DF8-based generators in these two places: https://df-treasure-generator.herokuapp.com/ and http://www.gurpscalculator.com/Generators/Treasure). Coding is the easy part; compiling all the data is a pain.

That said, you'll need to add TL yourself. DF doesn't do TL.

Originally Posted by hal

it just seems odd that on average, 2d6 x 3 will result in about 21 lbs of wool for a bale. That's a pretty small bale - no?

No.

I mean, it's small for an historical bale of fibers. A semi-standardized staple of British wool in the early modern era, for example, weighed about 360 lbs. But this is Dungeon Fantasy. This is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT a reflection of any kind of historical economy or economic practice. It's not supposed to give you an historical bale of cotton. It's supposed to give you treasure.

You absolutely must leave any expectations you may draw from historical sources behind. The DF series is fantasy. It's romantic verging on garish, and it's the product of generations of games written to be flashy and cool-sounding rather than historically responsible. It's a game about the profoundly ahistorical practice of going into holes in the ground, killing monsters, and bringing back treasure. DF8 is about treasures which serve first and foremost as markers of success for dungeon delvers. In the case of a bunch of bulk goods, that means they can't be too heavy. If delvers are regularly running across bags of cotton or wool or whatever which weigh more than they do, they'll never get them out of the dungeon, which means they're useless as treasure. But a twenty or thirty pound bale of fibers? That's something which might be light enough to carry around while maybe being valuable enough to be worth the effort.

If you want historically accurate prices, weights, and so on, go look at the books which make an effort to be historically responsible. More specifically, go get GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice, which has a bunch of prices converted (approximately; there's always guesswork in currency conversion) from primary sources but takes pains to point out that those prices are valid only within their particular historical context. Don't expect DF to give you anything other than "these are the values we're more or less arbitrarily attributing to these items so that they're more or less attractive to delvers as loot."