GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by Kromm

... and it's rarely Sword-Mart.

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.

[Evil Roy Slade]

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.

[Mateus]

HAAAAAAA!

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

[Rasputin]

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

[panton41]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

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.

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.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

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.

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

[Lupo]

LTC3, p. 22, "MATERIAL COSTS", says:

All prices on the table assume ready access to the natural resources from which the materials are processed. In practice, scarcity and transport costs can drive up prices. For example (...) in the Classical Mediterranean (...) tin was [nearly 30 times the generic cost of "soft metal" listed in the table]

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")

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

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

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

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).

[Tyneras]

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.