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  1. #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    In a genuinely empty land (as the BR numbers provide) finding people like armorers becomes impossible... How exactly do these guilds make any money at all? Empty lands leave the landscape full of adventures in wilderness where the PC's home castle can be near dragons, giants, goblins, a necromancer, and ancient ruins without peasants running about the place, but they also don't provide the civilization (trade, cities, commerce) that the game takes for granted too.
    To my mind, that's why there are uncontrolled wilderness areas and awnsheghlien. The densely populated plains of Anuire (Alamie included, IMO) provide logistical support for adventurers who travel away from home to wander the Five Peaks and infiltrate Markazor. Wilderness adventures and economic foundations are provided by two different groups of provinces.

    Quote Originally Posted by AndrewTall View Post
    As I read the books BR populations are of taxpayers (or possibly hearths, thanks Ken) not of actual people ... I'm happy to say that 1-2 levels of population are simply disassociated from those around them - but not that 6-7 levels are missing - I think that the local lord would notice that only 1 town in 10 paid their taxes
    My perspective is related to demesne land, subinfeudiation and efficiency of exercise of feudal rights. That is, every town is paying taxes to somebody, but the share of that which actually makes it all the way up the chain to the province ruler, and the amount which he has to pay out again in order to maintain smooth functioning of the system, varies greatly. I have come to believe that province level is primarily a measure of that variation in administrative effectiveness, rather than a direct relation to population density.

    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    Medoere strikes me as oddly low in population (along with some of Roesone) and I think the reason is the recent wars of independence. The new powers are having to establish their governance, being unable to just take over for Diemed.
    I view it as being very high in population, as it must have been in order to have had sufficient resources to successfully break away from Diemed. In my model, the very low province ratings represent that the leaders of the rebellion had to promise all sorts of concessions to the local landowners below the BR scale, thus greatly weakening the powers of the central government to get anything else done now -- issuing Magna Carta, giving the power of the purse to the parliament, etc. In my view, the war reduced the province levels not by *depopulating* those lands, but rather by *decentralizing* them. IMO, the many Rule actions which Suris Enlien should now undertake do not represent attracting vast numbers of new settlers, but rather extending the degree of administrative control she has over the people who are already there.


    Ryan

  2. #42
    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    I view it as being very high in population, as it must have been in order to have had sufficient resources to successfully break away from Diemed. In my model, the very low province ratings represent that the leaders of the rebellion had to promise all sorts of concessions to the local landowners below the BR scale, thus greatly weakening the powers of the central government to get anything else done now -- issuing Magna Carta, giving the power of the purse to the parliament, etc. In my view, the war reduced the province levels not by *depopulating* those lands, but rather by *decentralizing* them. IMO, the many Rule actions which Suris Enlien should now undertake do not represent attracting vast numbers of new settlers, but rather extending the degree of administrative control she has over the people who are already there.
    This is how I understand Medoere too, my expression was confusing since I cluttered my expression with assumptions about what province levels imply in the rulebook about population levels.

  3. #43
    Senior Member Beruin's Avatar
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    Pierden the Peasant

    Sorry for the long silence, RL intruded more than I liked during the past fortnight. Anyway here's what I have so far:

    Pierden the Peasant holds a virgate of 30 acres of arable land at the manor of Sir Norvien the Noble in the province of Maesford/Alamie. His family consists of six persons, three able-bodied adults (he, his wife and his eldest son), two younger children and his elderly mother.

    In addition to his fields he also has a large garden of 1 and a half acres on which his house is built and he has the right to use part of the commons in proportion to his holding. All in all, his holding looks like this:

    30 acres of arable land:
    - 10 planted with winter crops
    - 10 planted with summer crops
    - 10 lying fallow

    8.5 acres of meadow provide the hay to get the livestock over the winter

    17 acres of pasture

    13 acres of forests, shrubs and/or heath provide firewood and additional pasture, especially for his pigs

    1 acre of garden (the remaining space is taken up by a barn, a shed and his cottage)

    16.5 acres are ‘waste’, unusable for cultivation, taken up by roads and buildings, or water.

    Thus, Pierden the Peasant uses 69.5 acres for agricultural production and all-in-all his holding encompasses 86 acres.

    A few remarks:
    First off, after reviewing my available evidence and sources I decided to stick with the size of the virgate and the acre as is. Pierden is a rather well-off peasant and many of his not-so-fortunate neighbours only possess a holding of half the size.

    Second, land use can of course vary widely depending on the local conditions and customs in agriculture. I came up with the following general formula for the distribution of agricultural land:
    Arable: 25-55% of the total available land (Average: 35%)
    Pasture: 10-40% (Average: 20%)
    Meadow: 5-20% (Average: 10%)
    Heath/Shrubs/Forest: 10-25% (Average: 15%)
    Remaining ‘Waste’: 15-30% (Average: 20%)


    I also aimed for a-bit-of-everything kind of holding, and the numbers above do not take any specialisation into account. The setting of his holding reflects this. For Cerilia, a holding like this is probably most often found in the central heartlands, especially the realms Alamie, Tuornen or Ghoere. Along the south coast, in southern Avanil etc., there is a greater emphasis on vegetables, fruit and wine, leading to an increase of garden land and probably a decrease of pasture.

    Okay, next will be yields and livestock, I hope I can finish that soon.

  4. #44
    Senior Member Beruin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    Their books are fun. I will also heartily second Kenneth's recommendation of Marc Bloch.
    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    Adding more sources will make this problem worse, in that there will be even more bits and pieces and even less coherence, but I find it more entertaining. =)
    Marc Bloch is already beside my desk, the Gies' collection has arrived and my girlfriend is already grumbling that our little son will soon break his neck stumbling over one of the 40-something books currently strewn around my study, so I guess I can't complain over lack of entertainment



    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    I've got both in front of me. What would you like to know?

    It would not be unreasonable to take a single BR domain and divide it up into Lordly Domains fiefs, or to take a single Lordly Domains fief and model it as a collection of Harnmanor manors. However, do not try to go straight from BR to Harnmanor, unless you actually want to decide the exact number of acres farmed by each and every peasant family in the realm. If nearly all your campaign takes place inside one BR realm, by all means use one of the more detailed systems for it, and conventional BR for its neighbors. To run something as big as all of Anuire, however, BR itself is about as low-level as I could imagine going while staying relatively sane.
    Thanks for the write-up. I recently got Fields of Blood and I must say I really like it, though I dislike the large numbers of RP's they're dealing with. That said, I don't want to detail each and every peasant family in Anuire of course, but construct an 'average' peasant holding and an average manor I can extrapolate from.

    On the Province/Domain level I envision something like a modular design, i.e. a basic agricultural backbone determining basic taxes/population with additional resources like minerals or pelts or regional specialties like horse breeding or wine-growing added in, similar to the way Fields of Blood handles mines, but with a bit more detail. Borrowing from Civ III, I also would like to add in strategic resources, i.e. you need horses and iron to build a unit of knights in a province, and if these resources are not available on the spot you have to get them there, probably increasing cost.

    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    Success in this area is not to focus on details, but broad principles. Forays into details are like experiments to confirm that you've settled on the right broad principles. What most simulationists are looking for is elegance. What we really want is a beautiful system that takes us from pages 136-142 in the DMG through individuals using the Profession check to determine income to towns, manors, holdings, provinces, and up to BR realms and domains without many problems.
    This sums it up quite good, I think. I'd be happy if something like Harnmanor d20 results along the way, and it would really be great if you could compare
    my results with Harnmanor. This might really help to spot inconsistencies, errors etc.

  5. #45
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    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    I also aimed for a-bit-of-everything kind of holding
    This looks really good!

    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    Pierden the Peasant uses 69.5 acres for agricultural production and all-in-all his holding encompasses 86 acres. Pierden is a rather well-off peasant and many of his not-so-fortunate neighbours only possess a holding of half the size.
    Very true -- this is a rich man, as peasants go. However, poorer families will generally still work a similar amount of land (because land produces nothing without labor) -- it's just that most of the land will belong to someone else.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    Okay, next will be yields and livestock, I hope I can finish that soon.
    I'm going to take a run at this from the Harnmanor perspective, to show you what their numbers look like. Their monetary system is based on the silver penny, so that's what all the numbers below will be reported in. For comparison purposes, one penny will buy a gallon of ale, a hot meal at an inn, or a day's stabling for your horse. A battle axe will run you 100 pence, a warhorse 600, and a full suit of chain mail about 2,000. Expected yearly personal expenditure on standard of living is 120 for a slave, 300 for a basic domestic servant (chambermaids, stablehands, washerwomen...), 1100 for a metalsmith, and 3000 for the lord of the manor. The typical manor is about 300 people on 1500 acres; all this is the necessary economic infrastructure to support *one* heavy cavalryman (the lord) and 3-5 light footsoldiers, since his warhorse alone requires a further 1800 pence per year in upkeep.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    30 acres of arable land (20 planted, 10 fallow), 8.5 acres of meadow, 1 acre of garden
    Harnmanor at the basic level lumps all these together for ease of calculation, but more complicated rules allow you to consider things like the individual yields and weather hardiness of rye vs. oats vs. barley vs. wheat, etc., per acre. The basic level then is an average number, representing a typical mix of different crops. That yields at harvest, per acre, 60 pence (modified by land quality, infrastructure investment, weather, and management skill; maximum variability is a multiplier of 0.33 to 2.32, but usually between 0.8 and 1.2) at a cost of 6 days of labor over the course of the year. By that count, each year Pierden's various crop lands yield on average 2370 pence worth of food output, and require 237 worker-days to till.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    17 acres of pasture
    In a similar manner, this yields on average 1530 pence in return for 170 days of labor. In this model, pasture yields a higher return per acre than crops, but a lower return per day of labor. The average collection of livestock associated with this is two oxen, one milk cow, ten goats, twenty sheep, and 34 pigs.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beruin View Post
    13 acres of forests, shrubs and/or heath provide firewood and additional pasture, especially for his pigs
    This yields on average 234 pence worth of fish, small game, furs, berries, herbs, etc. at a cost of 39 working days. These woods will also expand by a quarter-acre per year unless they are cut back; standard procedure is to let new seedlings sprout, while cutting down the same acreage of 50-year-old trees. This process, called assart, will require 7.5 days of labor and yield 30 pence worth of lumber.

    In total, then, Pierden's lands yield 4164 pence gross income (mostly in food, but also "industrial" products such as hides, wool and timber), and require 453.5 days per year of labor to operate. Any labor deficit will reduce the gross income extracted, but his household has enough workers to make effective use of all his land.

    This brings us to expenditures. He needs to reserve 204 pence to feed his livestock over the winter, and 474 pence to seed the cropland next spring (ideally, he'd keep a 25% extra safety margin on that as a hedge against pests and spoilage). It costs him 339 pence and 169.5 days of labor just to maintain the quality of his lands at average level; if he spends more, yearly return will increase over time, but if he spends less it will slowly decrease. If he is a free tenant, he owes his lord 668 pence in rent and fees; if he's a serf, he'd owe just 92 pence cash but also 344 additional days of labor on the lord's lands. He is expected to tithe 416 pence to the local church. That makes a total of 2101 pence and 623 days of labor as a free man, or 1525 pence and 967 days of labor as a serf.

    Even if he, his wife and his son work as hard as slaves (300 days per year), they can't make the labor requirement of serfdom, especially as raising the two young children will cost his wife another 120 day-equivalents of labor. They would have to spend all the money they would have saved, plus a bit more, to hire some of their poorer neighbors as seasonal help. Given that and his very large (for a peasant) holdings, let's assume he's a free tenant farmer. At a total of 743 days (including his wife's childrearing time allocation), his family is about as fully employed as they'd really like to be (estimated at 250 days of effective field work per adult per year, half that if you force 8-to-12 year olds to work). They have 2063 pence worth of the raw materials for food, clothing and shelter to show for all their labor (much of the remaining 110 days per year is spent turning that into *actual* food, clothing and shelter); again counting pre-teen children as half an adult, that works out to a living standard of just over 400 pence per year per person, or the same as the baker or gardener at the manor house. This is a well-nigh perfect match to your sources! Harnmanor, then, is bedrock we can build on.


    Ryan
    Last edited by ryancaveney; 06-05-2007 at 01:35 PM.

  6. #46
    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    I sent away for Harn Manor last night, so I should have a copy in a week or two. Magical Medieval Society starts with the manor as the smallest unit.

    As far as average peasant holdings go, averages are great, because they allow us to think about bigger scales without troubles about what individual holdings look like, but its important to remember that a holdling this size could vary in yields considerably. It could be so unproductive that after a few years the family begins to starve slowly. (Almost any land can be productive for a few years.) Or it could be so well situated that it grows double or better yields.

    So one of the questions to consider is what variation looks like. Within a manor its fine to stick with the average, because the manorial system would divide up the best and worst lands to everyone, so everyone got some good, average, and bad lands to work. But between manors, or between provinces, variation could be substantial. Erosion, soil fertility, the kind of soil (sand, clay, &c), moisture, seasonality of moisture can have a huge impact. The DM doesn't have to work any of this out, he can just cut back incomes by as much as half, or increase them as much as doubling them, and just use these kinds of explanations.

    Why is this province a 2, and the province next to it a 4? Both are listed a plains? Attribute it to differences in soil, rainfall, and variation in elevation. It can mean all the difference.

  7. #47
    Senior Member Jaleela's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    I sent away for Harn Manor last night, so I should have a copy in a week or two. Magical Medieval Society starts with the manor as the smallest unit.

    As far as average peasant holdings go, averages are great, because they allow us to think about bigger scales without troubles about what individual holdings look like, but its important to remember that a holdling this size could vary in yields considerably. It could be so unproductive that after a few years the family begins to starve slowly. (Almost any land can be productive for a few years.) Or it could be so well situated that it grows double or better yields.
    You can say that again. Not only does soil conditions impact crop yields, social conditions impact them as well. My husbands family was from Northumberland, allegedly at one point owning 10,000 hectacers - farther North into the Cheviots than Southwestern Scotland by a large bit. My husband jokingly describes a lot of the landscape as being 'like the moon, but with grass'.

    While the soil was potentially very productive, it was largely unproductive from the end of the Scottish Wars of Independance, until into the reign of James I of England, due to social conditions. The border between England and Scotland was kept as a nearly lawless demilitarised zone, with constant raiding and counter-raiding back and forth between the local families on either side of the border.

    As a result, the locals would not invest much effort into growing crops, and kept their valuables as movable chattles, and pretty much everyone lived in as burn-proof a stone building, usually a hall over an undercroft, with as strong a door and as few and small windows as possible. Anybody with any money at all lived in a crude peel tower, and had a walled enclosure called a 'barmkin' to put cattle in during a raid. Lawlessness was rampant, and took a very long time to stamp out, and didn't finally end until the worst troublemakers were deported to Ireland or sent off to the army in Flanders.

    This is pretty much how I envision the border between Boeruine and Taeghas - Taeghas described as being a constant battleground between Avanil and Boeruine.

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    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    between manors, or between provinces, variation could be substantial
    Yes, definitely. Harnmanor's approach involves several multiplicative modifiers. All of them are constant within a single manor, but vary from manor to manor. Land Quality ranges from 0.75 to 1.25; it is an unchanging feature of the local geography. Fief Index also ranges from 0.75 to 1.25; it reflects infrastructure improvement, so substantial upkeep must be paid, and paying more or less can produce small changes over time. Weather Index is rolled randomly every year, and produces another multiplier from 0.65 to 1.35. A skill success roll for the managing official (separate for woods, crops and pasture) is another 0.9 to 1.1. Combining all these multipliers gives the overall factor of 0.33 to 2.32 I mentioned yesterday. If the optional detailed crop or herd rules are in effect, an additional skill roll modified by environment and crop hardiness provides another 0.9 to 1.1 (to each separately), which further increases the range of variation to 0.30 to 2.55; only the first two (land quality and fief index, which stay basically constant from year to year) gives multiplicative variation from 0.56 to 1.56, which is reasonably close to "half to double".

    Quote Originally Posted by kgauck View Post
    Why is this province a 2, and the province next to it a 4? Both are listed a plains? Attribute it to differences in soil, rainfall, and variation in elevation. It can mean all the difference.
    Another thing one can do is simply vary the amount of arable land. That is, in some provinces, 70% of the total acres are clearable (usable to grow crops or graze herds), but in others only 30% are. On the other hand, that degree of variation is probably best left as the way to implement differences between, rather than within, terrain types. On the other other hand, the assart rules give an easy way to calculate how long it will take the guilds to turn Talinie into plains provinces, and how much money they will make in the process.


    Ryan

  9. #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jaleela View Post
    While the soil was potentially very productive, it was largely unproductive... due to social conditions. The border between England and Scotland was kept as a nearly lawless demilitarised zone, with constant raiding and counter-raiding back and forth between the local families on either side of the border.
    This is one of only two ways that, in my "all the people are already there" province level model, rulers can affect the actual population level: too much pillaging in too short a time reduces the population level, as well as the control level. Recovery time is affected by how much pillaging continues, but is generally quite slow. Even slower is recovery from the other method -- the Death Plague realm spell -- because fewer people are driven away rather than killed outright, and because people who do escape (or come from outside) are even less likely to want to move back.


    Ryan

  10. #50
    Senior Member Beruin's Avatar
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    Thanks a lot, Ryan, great post. You really gave me something to work with.

    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    I'm going to take a run at this from the Harnmanor perspective, to show you what their numbers look like. Their monetary system is based on the silver penny, so that's what all the numbers below will be reported in. For comparison purposes, one penny will buy a gallon of ale, a hot meal at an inn, or a day's stabling for your horse. A battle axe will run you 100 pence, a warhorse 600, and a full suit of chain mail about 2,000.
    Establishing what the produce or the holding will be worth in D&D will be a real headache I fear, given that the prices in the PHB do not really make much sense. I assembled quite a lot of historical data on prices and seriously think on completely reworking the price lists, but this is of course a whole lot of rather tedious work and it also makes the results not very usable by others. For now, I'm undecided what to do...

    As a sidenote, I believe Harnmaster is more early medieval than generic D&D or BR, and the comparatively high price of chain mail suggests this.

    Quote Originally Posted by ryancaveney View Post
    The typical manor is about 300 people on 1500 acres; all this is the necessary economic infrastructure to support *one* heavy cavalryman (the lord) and 3-5 light footsoldiers, since his warhorse alone requires a further 1800 pence per year to support.
    These numbers seem a bit high to me for an ‘average’ holding. Manors of this size surely exist, but I will go with a smaller one I guess. For Eastern Europe I found data varying from 3 to 13.5 households per manor, for Westphalia in Western Germany the vary from 9 to 60 households, some manorial accounts from the English Hundred Rolls I came across have between 20 and 50 households.
    For the ‘average’ manor I picture the following numbers at the moment:

    The manorial demesne holds 120 acres of arable land and a proportionate amount of other land, i.e. is four times the size of Pierden’s holding. The manorial household consist of 12 people in all, of which 8 are able-bodied adults, including the manor holder, man-at-arms and servants.

    There are 3 peasants holding a full virgate similar to Pierden.

    4 peasants hold a half-virgate.

    8 Cotters only hold small amounts of land, which sum up to another virgate.

    Assuming 6 people per peasant family, and 3 per cotter family, this gives 78 people in all. The overall area of the manor comprises 860 acres, of which 695 acres are used for agricultural production. This keeps the manor in the DMG’s thorp category, which is a good thing I think. Larger manors can be described as the sum of smaller manors. For a larger scale, it might also be useful if we round this off to about a square mile of agricultural land for a manor, and about 1.5 square miles of total area, assuming stretches of no-man’s-land or wilderness between manors (or ducal forests, or land to wet or dry for agriculture or whatever). This would give us a population density of 52 people/sq mile or about 20 people per square kilometre.

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