Looking for fantasy/medieval weapon & equipment lists

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

This stuff is going to need a lot of assumptions I wouldn't feel comfortable making. In the butter vs cream example, if cream spoils more quickly than butter (I think it does because I think butter was traded while cream was local) then cream will have to be bought fresh from farms while the butter can be stored.

But compare fresh butter to fresh cream. You can buy a pint of cream for, say, 3d. Now, if you want butter, you have to make it from cream. If you won't pay at least 3d for as much butter as you get from that pint of cream, then the dairyman has no reason to sell you the cream to make the butter; he can always get more for selling to people who want fresh cream. And then, of course, there's the labor of churning to make the butter; you have to add on a bit to cover that.

Now, if it's not milking season, there's no cream to be had; the price of cream is infinite. But there still may be butter to be had. But as the butter gets used up, its price is going to rise; it will come to cost more than fresh made butter, because of scarcity. Or if you require uniform prices year round, the price of butter will be higher year round.

I think it takes some really arbitrary assumptions about what you're comparing with what to get butter to be cheaper.

Bill Stoddard

[Danukian]

Originally Posted by Fred Bracken

Chemists and nuclear physicists. Which only means that in worlds where this is true there chemistry and nuclear physics are unrecognizable to us.

You can establish such variants but prepared to find that they vary more than you might expect.

I am not sure if you realize I said Platinum not Plutonium, but either way, it will bend science far less than races inter-breeding with unrelated species or magic - both staples of Harn.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you won't pay at least 3d for as much butter as you get from that pint of cream, then the dairyman has no reason to sell you the cream to make the butter; he can always get more for selling to people who want fresh cream.

While your main point is helpful, this statement is, in fact, not accurate.

If cream, as it indeed does, spoils quickly, the dairyman does have a compelling reason to sell all his cream quickly. The fact that it is worth nothing (or very little, at least) once it spoils. So if the people living near the dairyman can consume only a limited amount of cream, he might be forced to sell the rest to butter-makers, simply to avoid throwing it away.

[Novembermike]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But compare fresh butter to fresh cream. You can buy a pint of cream for, say, 3d. Now, if you want butter, you have to make it from cream. If you won't pay at least 3d for as much butter as you get from that pint of cream, then the dairyman has no reason to sell you the cream to make the butter; he can always get more for selling to people who want fresh cream. And then, of course, there's the labor of churning to make the butter; you have to add on a bit to cover that.

Now, if it's not milking season, there's no cream to be had; the price of cream is infinite. But there still may be butter to be had. But as the butter gets used up, its price is going to rise; it will come to cost more than fresh made butter, because of scarcity. Or if you require uniform prices year round, the price of butter will be higher year round.

I think it takes some really arbitrary assumptions about what you're comparing with what to get butter to be cheaper.

Bill Stoddard

Right, and you could model all of this with a decent spreadsheet. Or you can just use a list like this if the game isn't about economics.

A lot of this stuff is fairly specific. Butter is going to be less expensive in a cold climate because it goes longer without spoiling, which means that Romegame and Vikinggame are going to need different economic models. A lot of the time it's just easier to assume a generic fantasy economy that doesn't necessarily bear a great resemblance to reality.

I do agree though that the best thing to do is just buy a copy of Low Tech. It tends to either have an exact answer or a reasonable way to get an answer.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Danukian

I am not sure if you realize I said Platinum not Plutonium, but either way, it will bend science far less than races inter-breeding with unrelated species or magic - both staples of Harn.

The element thing will bend science far more than the genetics just because it's more fundamental. You have to create elements before you can make organisms out of elements.

I did catch platinum instead of plutonium but platinum still has to be produced by nucleosynthesis and a world that makes more platimum than iron has highly variant laws of physics.

Shifting a couple of genes is trivial by comparison. It stlil probably shouldn't happen "naturally" but it's small potatoes. As an example (generally speaking), interbreeding 2 different species is TL9 stuff while mass nucleosynthesis is TL12 with a ^ on top.

Now, magic is hard but it usually seems to fit into a category of an "extra" set of laws superposed with the regular laws of physics. It doesn't _have_ to completely modify the fundamental laws of physics. Wariant nucleosynthesis does.

[Danukian]

Originally Posted by Fred Bracken

The element thing will bend science far more than the genetics just because it's more fundamental. You have to create elements before you can make organisms out of elements.

I did catch platinum instead of plutonium but platinum still has to be produced by nucleus and a world that makes more platinum than iron has highly variant laws of physics.

Shifting a couple of genes is trivial by comparison. It still probably shouldn't happen "naturally" but it's small potatoes. As an example (generally speaking), inter breeding 2 different species is TL9 stuff while mass nucleus is TL12 with a ^ on top.

Now, magic is hard but it usually seems to fit into a category of an "extra" set of laws super posed with the regular laws of physics. It doesn't _have_ to completely modify the fundamental laws of physics. Warrant nucleus does.

I am no expert, but the recent geochemical map by India has it very abundant on the moon - and by "world" I mean more of game world than planet - 80% of Earths Platinum comes from Africa, 11% from Russia, but it would have been unkown to Iriquois. Like jade is comparatively common is South/Central America and Asia, but (unless you count connammara, which is actually a type of green marble) an import only item in the UK.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I did catch platinum instead of plutonium but platinum still has to be produced by nucleosynthesis and a world that makes more platimum than iron has highly variant laws of physics.

Or was formed in an environment that was unusually rich in the substance(s required) for whatever reason. It is not impossible, and it doesn't require a variation in the laws of physics. Abundance is a local trait.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

While your main point is helpful, this statement is, in fact, not accurate.

If cream, as it indeed does, spoils quickly, the dairyman does have a compelling reason to sell all his cream quickly. The fact that it is worth nothing (or very little, at least) once it spoils. So if the people living near the dairyman can consume only a limited amount of cream, he might be forced to sell the rest to butter-makers, simply to avoid throwing it away.

In an equilibrium situation, market forces will work to prevent such an outcome as you envision.

* If a normal cream buyer will pay 3d a pint, but a butter maker will pay 1/2d a pint, the dairyman would obviously much rather sell to the cream buyer. He might occasionally have cream left over that he has to sell cheap, but that won't be his goal, and a buttermaker won't want to rely on it for his raw material. If selling at 3d a pint means that one-third of the output goes unsold, routinely, then the average price is (2/3)3d + (1/3)1/2d = 2 1/6d; the dairyman can cut his price to 2 3/4d, 2 1/2d, or even 2 1/4d and come out ahead . . . so the market price of cream will be a bit lower and nearly all of it will sell.

* In saying "3d" we must assume that this process has already happened, and 3d is the price at which nearly all the cream sells.

* Alternatively, the dairyman can adjust his output of cream to avoid unsold cream. He can produce less cream and less skim milk (or, in the real world, less butter and less buttermilk) and more whole milk. Doing the labor of separating the cream is a waste if you don't make a profit from it.

* The quantity of cream that the locals can consume is also not fixed. If the price drops to 2 1/2 d, they can find more uses for it, having more cream in their diets.

* The greater the disparity between the price of cream-used-to-make-butter and cream-used-otherwise, the stronger these market forces are. If butter makers will pay 2 1/d for cream, then the dairyman has much less reason for reluctance to sell to them; he doesn't lose much, and may even find a guaranteed sale worth the slight cut in income. But this will also mean that butter must be a lot more expensive than cream by weight.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Or was formed in an environment that was unusually rich in the substance(s required) for whatever reason. It is not impossible, and it doesn't require a variation in the laws of physics. Abundance is a local trait.

If you look at the terrestrial elemental abundances, Fe is more than 100x as abundant as Pt. And that seems to allow for an intense preconcentration already; it looks as if the ratio is closer to 1,000,000x in the solar system as a whole. You're going to need a pretty impressive elemental assortment process to reverse that final 100:1 ratio.

Bill Stoddard

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

A "standard" High Fantasy game would be paring down the Low Tech lists. There's all sorts of stuff in there that you wouldn't find in a "standard" game (whatever that is).

What is it that you want that you don't think is in LT? If it's some sort of weapon it's almost certainly identical to an existing Gurps weapon for Gurps purposes.

In fact, I find myself starting with a small subset of what is in LT, and then making slight variations of those (I recently did this in MS-Excel) to 'fill out' the list of available weapons in the campaigns, sometimes tweaking weapons to fit specialized needs. I recently cranked out a list of Flintlock Weapons, for example, with some 'fantasy tech' assumptions about reload times and included Goblinoid, Orcish, and Dwarven versions of Flintlock pistol or shotguns... Since, a fantasy world at TL4 might have a Heavy Orcish Pistol.

-P