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Old 12-21-2015, 08:56 AM   #21
jason taylor
 
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If you're willing to creep out of the Middle Ages a bit, how about novelist (like Cervantes) or essayist (like Montaigne)? An adventurer should have tales to tell.
Cervantes was an adventurer too in his day.

Come to think of it several swashbucklers of the Swashbuckler era also had literary or intellectual in some fashion pretentions. Sidney and Raleigh wrote English literature for instance. Jon Sobieski patronized scientists and got a star named after him(If a King says you name a star after him, you name a star after him!).
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Old 12-21-2015, 12:03 PM   #22
Peter Knutsen
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If you're willing to creep out of the Middle Ages a bit, how about novelist (like Cervantes) or essayist (like Montaigne)? An adventurer should have tales to tell.
In the Ars Magica supplement "A Medieval Tapestry", one of the character writeups is a clerk who is seeking to get a noblewoman to become his financial patron, that is getting her to support him (pay for his Cost-of-Living, as well as his writing materials expenses) while he writes (more or less) scholarly works. So apparently that was a thing, at least in the early 13th century, which isn't at all late unless your baseline is something like GURPS Vikings.

The thing to keep in mind is that there's no market for selling books.

You produce one book, and then you let it lose into the world, and copies get made, and copies of those copies get made (which in itself is an interesting game of "telephone" or whatever it's called in English - try taking a photocopy of a photo, then a photocopy of the photocopy, then a photocopy of that; after some iterations the picture ceases to look like anything). You can't demand a fee whenever someone makes a copy of the book you wrote.

Rather, people sponsor you during the writing process, either because they have a political agenda (usually to glorify some important figure - or if course you can write a biography on your own time and then hope the subject of the biography will be grateful towards you), or because they want to be known as a sponsor of scholarship so that they'll be held in esteem, either by other nobles and by scholars or clergy, or by one or more divine entities (e.g. the Christian god) who might be assumed to see and hear everything. So in that sense it's like work-for-hire, where you get paid a lump sum upon acceptance of your manuscript, and then no royalties from sales.

The "Tapestry" example has the veneer of a long con, in that the target noblewoman is a bit dim and as I recall it she is also rather less than Fluent in written Latin, the language the clerk will be writing in, so she isn't able to evaluate whether the scholarship he perpetrates, in his tome, is of quality, as opposed to being mere hackery.

An adventurer with tales to tell would usually recite (or Sing, since prose narrative wasn't usually too popular) them in drink houses or other places of social gathering (not really in taverns, since those are places that medieval people go to to eat and get hydrated, not to party and have fun), perhaps at a fair, or in the town market (a town almost by definition has a permanent market place, but there'll still be market days where people from the surrounding villages come to visit, knowing that that's the time to buy or sell more unusual items, or if you want to see new faces, perhaps because you're single and desire to marry), but a longer tale might benefit from being written down, although again, there needs to be an angle for the sponsor. What's he getting out of it?

The printing press changes that drastically.

For that matter, the TL2 Romans could have mass-produced scrolls (or primitive books) had they wanted to, via literate slaves (those are rather less marketable at TL3), although as far as I know they didn't do that.

But any ability to turn one text into multiple copies means that there might actually begin to be a market to sell to. A medieval Bible, complete with lots of elaborate illustrations, took a highly trained monk 15 months to make (or rather 15 monk-months, since it might have been one monk scribing for 5 months and another monk "illuminating" the pages with drawings for 9 months, and 1 month to produce the parchment and bind the book), so any attempt to produce books to sell needs to take into account the labour cost of copying them, even if it's just an ascetic (although perhaps unwillingly ascetic) Status -1 CoL monastic, as well as the cost for parchment and coloured inks.

Another possibility again is mass-producing a book without movable type. That should be easily doable at TL2, probably TL1 too. Although as far as I know, it wasn't done, even with the Christian Bible, or the Moslem Quran, both books which would have been in high demand each with a target audience numbering in the millions (ignoring the fact that many medieval Christians and - at least - a lot of medieval Moslems couldn't read). That method, carving the text into material and the pressing it onto parchment or (or paper if in China) or perhaps papyrus, was used, of course, but AFAIK only for quite short texts, not for books of many dozens of pages, let alone hundreds of pages.
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Old 12-21-2015, 12:22 PM   #23
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Yeah, a lot of artists and scientists were hired basically as status symbols or by those interested in their works.

If you wanted a book, you hired a writer to write one for you, as the price of writing a new book was only marginally higher than copying an existing one.

Same for painters, sculptors, engineers, scientists and such. Think Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Tycho Brahe,, etc.
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Old 12-21-2015, 12:28 PM   #24
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Another possibility again is mass-producing a book without movable type. That should be easily doable at TL2, probably TL1 too. ... carving the text into material and the pressing it onto parchment or (or paper if in China) or perhaps papyrus, was used, of course, but AFAIK only for quite short texts, not for books of many dozens of pages, let alone hundreds of pages.
I strongly suspect that parchment is too expensive for this kind of mass production to make economic sense. There was a pretty limited supply of people who had motive and money to buy hand-scribed books, and the parchment was a major part of the cost: cutting the price of a book by, say, 25% may not create enough demand to make use of the increased printing capacity.

We're used to thinking of labour costs as being high compared to materials, but that was much less true at low TLs for workers with low standards of living.
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Old 12-21-2015, 01:13 PM   #25
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The fighter-types might find work as men-at-arms for a local lord, or a member of the town constabulary.

If a knight gets his own fief, though, his adventuring days are over. That's not a job, that consumes an entire life.
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From what I've read, many knights appointed bailiffs to manage their property for them, or had their wives do the job if they were called away. Though having a bailiff was classier.
Well, if the knight in question does get his own fief, then you need to break out a copy of Harn Manor and have at it.
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Old 12-21-2015, 02:05 PM   #26
Peter Knutsen
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I strongly suspect that parchment is too expensive for this kind of mass production to make economic sense. There was a pretty limited supply of people who had motive and money to buy hand-scribed books, and the parchment was a major part of the cost: cutting the price of a book by, say, 25% may not create enough demand to make use of the increased printing capacity.

We're used to thinking of labour costs as being high compared to materials, but that was much less true at low TLs for workers with low standards of living.
Well, that certainly agrees with what various Ars Magica supplements have taught me about medieval economics. Labour was quite cheap, even for fairly skilled labour such as a scribe capable of doing very good caligraphy.

You did need to be able to feed, cloth and roof someone, in order to get work done, and that was a non-trivial expense given the non-abundance of food (which is one of the the phenomena to most characterize a proper high-historicity medieval setting), but often the brake was the cost of the materials needed. Not just parchment, the raw materials which come from common farm animals, but also a lot of funky dyes needed to produce brilliantly colourful illuminations (a book without those wouldn't be taken seriously to begin with, and Ars Magica goes further and says that books that aren't illuminated, or even are illuminated but poorly, give fewer XP when you study from them, than do properly made books - I haven't yet read GURPS: Back to School, but given that William Stoddard is a fan of Ars Magica, that tome might very well touch upon that subject).

Most smiths capable of making mail armour, or making Fine swords, didn't spend all their time doing that, simply because iron and charcoal was expensive relative to demand. Those who did get close to maximum "throughput" would be in the employ of great lords: Kings, Dukes, High Priests.

Another thing was that many medieval cultures, including (as far as I understand it) medieval Catholics, were disinclined towards mass production, at least of most goods. They'd rather take their time, produce better-looking items (although not usually, I think, enough to count as what GURPS refers to as "Styling" or indeed something that exceeds the threshold of simulative resolution for any other RPG system, except a percentage-bonus-based one), but then again maybe that was because of the relative scarcity of materials. If you couldn't get enough iron to churn out your maximum throughput of, say, 18 swords per year, you might as well just make 10 or 12 instead but take your time doing so, make them nice-looking.

Another thing again was the ritualism in many advanced crafts. Certainly smithing. Metallurgy wasn't fully understood in the early medieval period. According to GURPS Middle Ages 1 that started to change at around 1000 AD (and I've taken that and made it a thing in my Ärth setting, which is late 10th century), but even then such knowledge wouldn't have spread quickly, with the secretiveness of most craftsmen (also a thing in my Ärth setting, one of the alternate history elements - the still pagan Kelts aren't always so secretive, meaning if you were to do that setting with GURPS, ill advised as that would be for other reasons, generous use of the Anachronistic Skill Perk could be justified) even before the whole craftsman's guild thing started to get traction, and so you'd still have craftsmen doing difficult work, with poorly understood processes, while engaged in a lot of ritualism (possibly in some cases enough to warrant the Disciplines of Faith (Ritualism) disad) while working, further slowing their output down (GURPS Fantasy also has some suggestions about how to make that kind of craftsman's ritualism be actual magic).

So what caused what? I don't know. It might not matter, unless you have an NPC or a PC who wants to change things, or a world in which some of the above doesn't apply
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Old 12-21-2015, 02:26 PM   #27
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One thing to consider: in historical Western European society most workers stayed for years where hired. Journeyman craftsmen would move every few years to learn under a new Master but everyone else would tend to stay in place as stranger were suspect and often blamed for any crimes that happened while they were around. Stone masons would move from job to job and beg in-between but they were in demand enough that they almost always had a job waiting for them. Merchants, great or small, normally had fixed routes that they travelled or specific places that they attended such as the Great Fairs. Diplomats were sent from one specific place to another specific place for a specific reason and rarely went on adventures - Brother Eadulf in the Sister Fidelma series notwithstanding. Adventurers are anti-establishment in the sense that they have no fixed abode and are not members of a respected profession.

So, if you want your adventurers to have jobs I suggest that they have good stay-at-home jobs and get called out for adventures only sporadically such as Bilbo Baggins or Frodo Baggins or Sam Gamgee.

So, anything you come up with is going to be ahistorical which leaves you free to invent your own cultural rules for adventurers.
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:05 PM   #28
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You produce one book, and then you let it lose into the world, and copies get made, and copies of those copies get made (which in itself is an interesting game of "telephone" or whatever it's called in English - try taking a photocopy of a photo, then a photocopy of the photocopy, then a photocopy of that; after some iterations the picture ceases to look like anything). You can't demand a fee whenever someone makes a copy of the book you wrote.
It's not as inaccurate as telephone, though. Most copyists made a serious effort to get things right. Errors were few enough that it's possible to trace the exact lineage of translations of Euclid into, say, Syriac by identifying specific single errors. In rather the same way, Homer's epics survived for centuries and still had coherent stories, after the Athenians decided to write down standard versions for use in judging bardic contests.
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:15 PM   #29
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It's not as inaccurate as telephone, though. Most copyists made a serious effort to get things right. Errors were few enough that it's possible to trace the exact lineage of translations of Euclid into, say, Syriac by identifying specific single errors. In rather the same way, Homer's epics survived for centuries and still had coherent stories, after the Athenians decided to write down standard versions for use in judging bardic contests.
That depends a lot on the scribes, though. Early Christianity mostly spread around the poor, and so the scribal quality wasn't very good. There are more discrepancies in the New Testament records than there are words in the New Testament. Most of them are errors of spelling or word order (which doesn't alter the meaning in Greek), but some are more interesting. In this season of joy, do the angels bring peace and good will towards men or do they bring peace to the men with whom God is pleased? Both variants exist.
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Old 12-21-2015, 03:46 PM   #30
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It's not as inaccurate as telephone, though.
True. 6-7 iterations using a typical 1990's (or whatever) era photocopier is probably enough to achieve a very noticable effect. Or a dozen word-to-mouth iterations of "telephone". Whereas with the scribed word, it probably takes rather more iterations than that for problems to occur, unless the work was done by the imperfectly skilled, or was done rushed.
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