GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice

[Kromm]

It will take galleys
And a great deal of money
But we shall be rich

— Signor Ricco Avidelli

GURPS Hot Spots: Renaissance Venice made it clear that Venice was the center of an empire built on intrigue and trade. GURPS Renaissance Venice: Spies of Venice covered the first part. That leaves commerce. For that, we present GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice.

With a title worthy of Shakespeare, this volume is just what you need for a game in the popular "galleys & gold" historical subgenre. Fans of trade-based campaigns get a shipping-and-trade minigame, complete with all the numbers and tables. However, there are also stats for ships (for even more, don't pass up the recent GURPS Vehicles: War Galleys), along with maps and time and distance information so that you can actually go places. And since this is the work of Matt Riggsby, you can expect excellent historical research to support your adventures.

It's just $7.00 in 2023, but who knows what the cost of doing business will be next year?

—

Store Link: https://warehouse23.com/products/gur...ants-of-venice

[RGTraynor]

(claps his hands in glee, having just obtained it and given its original skim)


{EDIT: alright, this is marginally amusing. Sequence of events:


(1) I download the book and read through it, nodding with approval.
(2) My wife gets home from having a manicure.
(3) With that on our mind, we recall that we'd been meaning to shave a particularly intransigent knot of matted fur from her cat's tummy, and set out to do so.
(4) While we're doing that, I tell her about the Merchants of Venice release.
(5) Amanda: "Looks like you just got your pound of floof, then!"}

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Kromm

It's just $7.00 in 2023, but who knows what the cost of doing business will be next year?

Though I think I can guarantee that these merchants of Venice won't cost you a pound of flesh.

[ravenfish]

Purchased, and look forward to a chance to study it at length.

Using the new Warehouse 23 is admittedly easier than navigating the seas and negotiating with the Turks, but it's still incredibly user-hostile given that the people operating it supposedly want me to spend money there.

[RGTraynor]

Did you find it so? Took me all of thirty seconds. Add to cart, click on express PayPal option, confirm, get download link in e-mail, download.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Did you find it so? Took me all of thirty seconds. Add to cart, click on express PayPal option, confirm, get download link in e-mail, download.

Ah, I didn't think to check my email. I navigated the site to get to the download, and that was a minor nuisance- no great tribulation in the grand scheme of things, but more work than I have had to do to on other websites for an equivalent task. (Having to do image identification to log in, by contrast, was a major nuisance, albeit one for which I better understand the reason. Whatever software is behind this seems to have strong disagreements with me regarding what counts as a "bus", among other things.)

[ericthered]

How robust is the "shipping-and-trade minigame"? Will it generalize to space or Yrth? And how abstract is it?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by ericthered

How robust is the "shipping-and-trade minigame"? Will it generalize to space or Yrth? And how abstract is it?

I'm waiting on my complimentary copy and then I will do a review and try to answer that question. I don't really recall from the playtest well enough to answer, plus it may have changed during editing.

[RGTraynor]

Mm. For one thing, I wouldn't at all categorize it as a "shipping-and-trade minigame." It's nothing of the sort. What it does have are extensive guidelines -- not "rules," guidelines -- for GMing a party wanting to get into Mediterranean shipborne mercantile trading. But the GM would still have some work to do, and there's a fair bit of abstraction and reference to other GURPS books. No one should be getting this expecting a board game.

Translating it to Yrth/space would require more work still. There's a lot of data keyed to approximate travel times, distances from Venice to regional ports, the various costs involved, relative prices between Venice and where various commodities are produced/obtained, and so on. What's the relative price of high quality glassware in Megalos vs Venice? Where do you get nutmeg in Yrth? Is warehousing as/more/less costly? And so on.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by ericthered

How robust is the "shipping-and-trade minigame"? Will it generalize to space or Yrth? And how abstract is it?

It is, quite deliberately, not very generic. I mean, yeah, at the core there's five pages of historically accurate prices for a variety of trade goods and final numbers are decided in good GURPS fashion by rolling a contest of Merchant skill. However, the apparatus around it is very specific to the Mediterranean during the Renaissance. All of those prices, for example, as well as the listed costs of doing business apply specifically to that region at that time. They wouldn't make sense in 10th century Arabia, 19th century America, or 23rd century Rigel VII. Similarly, a lot of the procedures and hoops one has to go through are part of the setting and not necessarily generic. Engaging in trade at that time and particularly in the luxuries trade is as much a function of who you are and who you know as it is having the right goods at the right time. The emphasis here on social connections and middlemen is rife with possibilities for role playing, which was my goal here, but that does make it very dependent on the setting because the economic system is deeply embedded in local cultures (I mean, all economies are embedded in culture, but it's more obvious when you look at somebody else's). One can draw inspiration for using similar rules in other settings, and there are a few paragraphs in the final chapter which address relevant concerns, but it's not something you can just pick up and drop elsewhere.