Medieval Economies and D+D

[squirrelloid]

Discussion about adventurer economies is kind of meaningless if we don't know what the background economy looks like before adventurers. Since we all seem to want a pseudo-medieval world, or at least treat that as a base point, let's talk about actual medieval economies. (Note, this is all from memory, I'm not dealing with primary or even secondary sources in a direct way).

Medieval Economic Actors:
-Serfs (work land for nobles)
-Nobles (own lots of land, owe service)
-Freemen / yeomen (own their own land, pay taxes)
-City Folk (City has a royal charter, pay taxes)
-Clergy (Belong to an organization which acts like a noble, but owes no taxes)

The differences between medieval economies typically depend on what the balance between nobles and yeomen are in terms of land ownership. If you're medieval scandinavia, you have very few nobles and a lot of yeomen. (In which I mean noble as 'own lots of land which is worked by serfs' and not 'have a title'). If you're medieval Poland, yeomen are basically unheard of and almost all the land is worked by serfs and owned by nobles.

If you were to make a spectrum from yeomen dominated to serf dominated economies, it might look something like Scandinavia - England - France - Poland/Russia.

Towns and cities are completed separate from this organization for a few reasons. On the one hand, they don't engage in agriculture. (Indeed, the land around a town or city is typically owned by a noble or the church). On the other hand, in order to even function as a town they needed to acquire a charter, which was either achieved by buying off the local landowner or gaining royal sanction, and which made the town itself a distinct legal entity.

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary of the medieval commune (which is the basis of the medieval town): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_commune

Since we typically assume a kingdom of some sort (and therefore not Italy or Germany), as convenient shorthand let us say that cities are directly subordinant to the King rather than local nobility, and thus the city (collectively) is heirarchically equal to a noble.

(A note on terminology: a town and a city are both incorporated entities that differ mainly in size and organization. A city would usually involve multiple communes, and may have incorporated multiple towns within itself. Most importantly, a town is not just a bunch of peasants living near one another. Hamlet, village, or thorp are the appropriate designations for an unincorporated clustering of houses, and these may equally well be yeomen who own the surrounding land or serfs who work the local noble's fields.)

Serfs and yeomen work the land in some way. Serfs then owe the noble much of the product of this labor. Yeomen must find a way to turn some of this product into currency, so they can pay taxes. Similarly, nobles must find a way to turn some of their portion into either currency (to buy out of the service requirement) or other goods (notably armor, weapons, and horses) to fulfill their service obligations. Generally this means trade.

Although trade is possible without towns, for a convenient shorthand we'll assume that universally a town's major function is to enable trade. It gathers together a collection of professionals who couldn't be sustained solely by a noble, and it provides a place for yeomen and agents of nobles to sell and buy, and a destination for merchants to visit and unload wares from far away. Towns are rarely engaged in primary production (the major exception being fishing, where applicable). Serfs might also carry some goods to market when they have excess after relinquishing the noble's share.

There's a definite division of typical production between yeomen and serfs. The growing of crops is predominantly handled by serfs, although some yeomen are also engaged in this manner. Animal husbandry is predominantly handled by yeomen. (Nobles may own pastureland or herds, but these are at least as likely to be worked by yeomen hired for the task as serfs compelled to serve the noble).

Organization for the extraction of mineral resources like metal ores, clay for porcelain, and sand for glassworking is somewhat complicated. Early on these can be regarded as effectively serfs working open pit mines. Low skill and working primarily for food. As mining technology improves, these become increasingly specialized craftsmen capable of moving around to where miners are needed. The minerals themselves remain the property of some controlling landlord, and in many cases the royal estate maintains ownership of all or some minerals regardless of who directly owns or controls the overlying land. Late medieval mines were frequently operated by an agent or a company who would pay royalties to the actual land or mineral rights owner. (It should be noted that metallurgists located themselves near mines early on, and later on took up residence in towns where metals were brought to them, but in all cases remained independent and skilled craftsmen. Similarly, even early mines needed a skilled overseer to direct mining operations).

Short answer: early medieval tech open pit: can treat as peasants with paid specialists. later medieval tech: treat as specialists paid to mine, with a local operator who owes dues to a distant noble or royal owner. ie, not too terribly different from modern mining, except for the nature of land ownership.

Note: the turnip economy is almost entirely the domain of serfs. Yeomen can and do interact with the gold economy, as do towns, although they may choose to use the turnip economy instead. (That is, the yeomen can sell his goods in town, but he may find it convenient and more lucrative to cut out the middleman if he trades some of his product directly for things he needs right then).

Most long-distance trade involves valuable commodities, especially when overland transport is required. It's economical to ship goods like iron and lumber, but you'd never haul large quantities of these significant distances overland, and generally even the use of river or ocean transport for bulky goods will represent local or regional trade. You simply don't ship iron long distance, even by sea. Major long distance trade will include things like spices, silk, wool, gems, precious metals, and works of craftsmanship.

So, if we paint the economy of, say, late medieval england in broad terms, we have a local trade in grains, cheese, meat, iron, copper, lumber, and so on. Nobles originate most of these goods and trade some of them in towns. The major cash good is wool, which is controlled mostly by yeomen, and much of it is shipped out of the country, which generates wealth that draws the import of luxury goods. (And taxes thereby generate much of the wealth which funds the crowns wars).

Disruptions of this economy historically happen in a number of ways.

-Invasive raids: although uncommon in England by the late medieval period, raids by 'vikings' is not uncommon earlier. This does little to disrupt the actual base of the economy, since raids typically happen in winter (because the vikings also have fields to work and don't raid during those times). But it does extract accumulated wealth from the economy, damage capital (burnt buildings, etc..), and kill productive individuals. Livestock may also be taken or killed. (Or may even be the targets of such activity, see cattle raiding in Ireland).

This scales all teh way up to battles and wars, but the absence of professional armies means that even these are fought around the productive cycle of most of the economy, not during it. Armies are less likely to harm capital, but more likely to deplete accumulated wealth, especially food stores.

Note that raids and especially battles tend to happen flat ground, so activities like mining are rarely disrupted in the course of such activities. Yeah, you might take a force and sieze someone's mine, but that doesn't really stop its activity. You simply show up, tell the serfs they're working for you now, and now you're the one giving them food for ore.

-Siege: Sieges are unique in terms of typical armed combat because they tend to last through productive cycles. This goes well beyond any service obligations imposed on nobles or yeomen, which means the crown needs to pay for their continued service. Withstanding a siege frequently involves burning fields to deny the invading army the ability to live off the land, which means the entire agricultural productivity is destroyed for the year (or longer!). Maintaining a siege is extraordinarily expensive.

-Bandits: Bandits typically prey upon trade, usually by watching major roads. While merchants from far away lands will tend to carry more of value, they also tend to have more guards and their goods are harder to use or sell by people interested mostly in subsistence. Thus the weight of banditry usually falls on yeomen or agents of nobles bringing local product to market. Note: 'lawless nobles' are a serious problem in medieval society, which basically involves nobles using their retainers as bandits. These might be sufficiently trained, supplied, and motivated to target long-distance trade or even agents of the king. Piracy is banditry on the water.

-Natural disasters: I don't see much need to elaborate here.

-I'm sure I missed something relevant.

Next post, we'll talk about how D+D is different, and what that means.

[Ancient History]

Ugh, where to start...have you read any books on the history of economics in Europe from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages?

[squirrelloid]

The first way that D+D is different is in the nature of isolation.

By the late medieval period forests were shrinking and civilization was more omnipresent, but even in the early medieval period the reason that long distance travel (and thus trade) were risky was mostly because of other people.

That isn't to say there weren't also disastrous outcomes like getting lost and starving (less likely when roads are maintained), shipwrecks, freak storms, and the like. But the biggest danger in overland trade was banditry - ie, other people. And piracy was a serious concern in areas like the mediterranean, which featured a relatively high volume of long distance trade.

D+D not only imagines that areas of civilization are relatively far from each other, but that the wilderness itself is dangerous. I mean, we still have the 'there are bandits' plot point, but now we also have chimerae, basilisks, wyverns, and all manners of other predators. See, animal predators rarely attack people, but these predators see people as a typical food source. The global economy is perpetually depressed because long-distance trade is so dangerous.

This isn't limited to land either. Many of these predators fly, and will happily take prey off ships on a river, so the risk of river transport is also increased. The ocean has it even worse. Not only do you risk attack by sea monster or kraken, but the Sahaguin also control basically the entire place and could attack your ship at any time. Indeed, the deep seers probably know when and where every ship is going to sail for the next century, even if it wasn't trivial to just *watch the ships themselves* to see when they left port, so they could literally bring oceanic trade to a halt.

This isn't just a problem with trade, either, because most of the predators involved will attack small settlements. An animal, when starving, might attack a person, but people scare it. A wyvern has no fucks to give, and you look tasty.

Monsters also don't respect the productive cycle. 'Vikings' might show up in the winter to rape your women and steal some of your grain stores. A pack of chimera will attack you during the harvest season and put a halt to establishing any grain stores in the first place.

The impact of other races is a little more complicated. If orcs are like viking raiders, they make matters worse insofar as they *don't have fields to tend during the productive cycle*. So they might just raid you during the harvest. (Of course, if the leader of the orcs has any brains, he might wait until after the harvest because then you have more food to steal, but orcs are not renowned for brains). If the other race is willing to exploit human labor (ie, hobgoblins), then they just become the new overlords and work pretty much like nobles and their retainers. But if the kobolds want to work the mine themselves (or insert appropriate race), they'll just put all the human miners to the sword when they take the mine, which means mining is hugely disrupted and now you have to bring back more humans to work the mine when you drive the kobolds out, or compel the kobolds to work for you rather than killing them.

Not only is long-distance trade seriously depressed, but local economies are seriously depressed *all the time* because of constant attacks by wild creatures and increased disruption by various other races.

It also really matters what the motivations of the other races are and how they deal with conquered humans. If kobolds simply enslave humans and make them work, they're really just another faction that's playing the dominance game. If they kill humans instead, they're a serious liability because they destroy human capital, and become 'kill on sight' and 'hunt to exterminate' rather than 'can be negotiated with' and 'tolerable so long as they don't mess with us'. (Expect racist rhetoric in world regardless, but actually acting against them becomes a lot lower of a priority if they are playing the same game).

We haven't even talked about crazy powers, spellcasters, and the like yet. But first we should talk about adventurers, which will be the next post.

[squirrelloid]

Ugh, where to start...have you read any books on the history of economics in Europe from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages?

Mostly late medieval, and mostly northern europe. Yes, I realize antiquity had a larger and farther metal trade because *tin was rare* (actually, trade in tin persists because of that, but it really is a special case). I'm assuming a post-iron economy rather than a bronze economy. Also, the medieval economy seriously curtailed most distance trade in foodstuffs. I'm assuming a feudal economy rather than the roman empire, because that's what most people seem to want. (Nobles as conceived here don't even make sense from a 'roman' perspective).

Rivers certainly made regional trade of lumber and industrial metals cover a larger region, but you still wouldn't cart it overland very far, and you wouldn't send it long distance. When I say long distance, I mean like London -> Prague, ie, crossing several economic regional boundaries. So Scotland trading with England for coal is actually rather local from that scale. And you'll note that as English demand for industrial metals increased over the middle ages, they primarily increased local production instead of increasing trade (although some did happen from the continent, for a first order approximation you could call the production local). Tin remains rare and a valuable export commodity, but would of course mostly be transported by ships.

When i say transport of these would be limited, I mean the distance would be limited, not the utilization of the rivers/oceans for this purpose. I'll correct that.

And lets be honest, in the grand scheme of things the English channel is not particularly large.

So, a quick glance at wikipedia shows that the long-distance products available for trade in London were "spices, incense, palm oil, gems, silks, furs and foreign weapons", which is pretty much what I claimed (lacking wool because that was a local product and an export). You also have a large metalworking industry using local metals (iron and pewter smithing using local iron, tin, and lead).

It is entirely my intention that things like wine are included in 'works of craftsmanship' xP

I'm also cutting out a lot of complicated to keep this simple, because we're about to seriously permute it with D+D assumptions, which means that the complicated is going to disappear in the mess. I mean, the exact local system of exploitation of peasants by nobles or the church isn't particularly relevant, just that they did it.

Edit: I suppose it would be productive to use 'local', 'regional', and 'long-distance' rather than just 'local' and 'long-distance'. I'll look at reformulating.

Edit2: I realize my treatment of mining is perfunctory and pertains mostly to early medieval mining, before miners became specialized and effectively craftsmen.

[hyzmarca]

I think that your main premise is flawed. No one wants a medieval economy in D&D. No one. People want a storybook economy in D&D with medieval trappings. There is a difference.

People don't want to adventure in Londinium they want adventure in Camelot. Camelot's economy makes no fucking sense, but it doesn't have to. People will suspend their disbelief about such things.

[Chamomile]

I think that your main premise is flawed. No one wants a medieval economy in D&D. No one. People want a storybook economy in D&D with medieval trappings.

This is lies. Plenty of people like to play Logistics and Dragons, and these people need an economy sensible enough to be interacted with. Those of us who like L&D might be outnumbered by those who don't care, but we aren't "no one."

[Voss]

But a sensible economy explodes at the first touch of D&D assumptions. A single swag bag of just gold is something that a medieval city is going to choke on. Any towns or villages are going to be unable to handle it. If you want to buy an entire herd of horses, businesses, buildings, that gold will do you good. If you just want day to day stuff, people are just going to stare at you, feeling fairly helpless.

Edit: I suppose it would be productive to use 'local', 'regional', and 'long-distance' rather than just 'local' and 'long-distance'. I'll look at reformulating.

You really should, as your assumptions really show modern conceptions of distance and time. Scotland to London is long distance (and a fairly big deal), it isn't local.

Long distance travel and trade weren't risky because of people, it was hard and risky because of weather, and shit infrastructure (if any at all). Rain could wash out what passed for roads for days, and there is a pretty rough limit on supplies.

[Chamomile]

Okay, sure, but then why don't we just switch up a few base assumptions? Treasure hordes can be immediately useful things like food and weapons and stuff.

[sabs]

The problem is that on a normal Adventuring day a group of adventurers makes more money than the combined income of an entire village. If they show up to said village, trying to buy swag with their electrum pieces, you run into the problem that the local Innkeeper can't make change. Or, you go and pay for a room for a week with an Electrum piece, and literally he could stop working for the next 10 years at his current standard of living.

An adventuring group goes to a local serf and says, "What will you give us for the loose change in our Monk's purse." And you can buy /anything/ and everything.

It's like people who go to bumfucknowhere India. You whip out your $50 bill, and the locals just stare at you with no comprehension of how you could just whip out 3 months of wages like it was nothing.

A village that is the home base of a single adventuring group is quickly going to become "Las Vegas for Murder Hobos"

300 gold is the year's effective wages (on the bread standard) for the entire village, for the entire year. You just made that clearing out 1/8th of the nearest dungeon. You literally can live like a King, which causes issues with the local Nobility.

[violence in the media]

I think that your main premise is flawed. No one wants a medieval economy in D&D. No one. People want a storybook economy in D&D with medieval trappings. There is a difference.

People don't want to adventure in Londinium they want adventure in Camelot. Camelot's economy makes no fucking sense, but it doesn't have to. People will suspend their disbelief about such things.

As an added advantage, if you can come up with a more sensible economy you might be able to get further away from WBL bullshit.

As an anecdotal advantage, you'd also get people on the same page with regards to reward expectations. Assuming the cart remains the same, what's an appropriate reward for a merchant to offer if his cart of goods was taken by ogres? By a hill giant? By an adult green dragon?
What are you expecting the peasants you're helping at the altruistic paladin's urging to be able to reward you with? Sure, their children might have been kidnapped by a vampire, but they're not going to pull 1000 gp for each PC out of their asses.

Personally, I'd like to get away from the idea that the bounty is determined more by the opposition than by the person offering it or the value of what was taken.

[sabs]

Well, and I can totally see Adventuring Guilds offering "Travel Insurance" for Merchants to buy.

You pay a flat insurance fee on your cart for travelling between City X and City Y. If your cart gets taken, than the adventuring guild contracts out for a portion of the fee to an adventuring group to go take it out.

So say you have a cart that's worth 2000 gold. You paid an insurance fee of 200 gold to go from WaterDeep to Ahnk City.

Your cart gets taken, and the guild figures out who took it (scry magic, yawn). Then they start looking at cost vs reward. So, idealy, they want to pay someone less than 200 gold to retreive it. If it's taken by goblins, orcs, etc.. that's easy. You send some newbie guild members to go get it. If it's taken by an Ogre.. you might have to offer the full 200 gold. Well, that's sad.. if this happens too often, perhaps you need to reconsider your rates for going from waterdeep to Ahnk City. If it's a green dragon, then you start trying to decide.. can you get a party to get it for 1500 gold? That's still less money than you'll have to give the Merchant if you can't get it back. But hey.. noone wants to go up against a Green Dragon for 1500 gold, plus treasure. So you write it off. Have a day.

[Grek]

300 gold is the year's effective wages (on the bread standard) for the entire village, for the entire year. You just made that clearing out 1/8th of the nearest dungeon. You literally can live like a King, which causes issues with the local Nobility.

If you have enough money to pay a year's wages to the entire village and the military power to successfully assault and then sack a military complex on a whim and a fundamental disconnect from the peasant economy, you ARE the local nobility.

[sabs]

Except in D&D, you aren't. You could be, although you also have to make some detente with the ACTUAL Nobility. Or they will hire adventurers to root out the tyrants who have taken over the village of bumblefuck.

[Grek]

And then you, the Good Local Nobles have a combat encounter where the Evil Other Nobles have hired assassins to kill you and you have to kick their asses in your pajamas and nightcap.

[Chamomile]

It's true the prices in D&D Land are insane and nonsensical, so...Why don't we rewrite them? Probably we should keep the prices on weapons and armor the same and raise the prices of everything else to be less nonsensical, because people are more likely to be familiar with the price on weapons and armor and seriously might not even notice an increase on the price of barrels and bread.

Also, one thing I've loved about Saga Edition so far is being able to hand out large credit bounties and not worry about the party's capabilities going through the roof because this is Star Wars and you can't buy a +5 blaster or something. Now, granted, in D&D you get sweet magic loot and that's part of the fun, but moving as much of the magic item economy as possible into being acquired with some kind of currency that doesn't have to interact with the stuff you use to buy bread and carts and other things that peasants like to buy would probably be beneficial.

[shadzar]

a flaw in this sense in regards to D&D is that serfs really dont exist and the "freeman" doesnt own the land. anyone working a kings land is probably indebted or a slave.

this of course depends on the people playing the game. most times people sadly ignore this as MSOT D&D players dont think the economy matters thus we get 4th edition where towns jsut always have enough of everything for you to play the game like a CRPG, or 3rd edition where a city of 10,00 people has 3.? million chickens for that population rate. (someone tell me where that is in a 3.x book or posted on this forum about population density in 3.x?)

the fact that most people dont see the tracking of coins as important means that economy hasnt really been developed or explained much except in settings specific material because the unwashed masses lowest common denominator, finds accounting in an action game to be boring.

you want real economy based idea in early societies a good anime exists that touches all on the realms of economy called Wolf & Spice where Lawrence the protagonist explains as a merchant who travels between kingdoms and towns he has to keep apprised of the local currencies or different realms and such.

that is the closest economies in fantasy are ever touched on and is a subplot to the series' over-arching plot, but is one of the best explanations of economies be it right or wrong.

also there really wasnt much economy for the lower classes/castes as they jsut traded labor or goods for other goods as they didnt work for anyone to EARN money in the first place. money would come from travelers. the pig farmer jsut traded a pig for a years worth of corn or something for his family and the barter system was the economy of the lowest classes and unskilled laborers. even skilled laborers like blacksmiths could have been paid in grain or pigs or goats or whatever for the repair of farm implements, horse shoeing, etc.

not everywhere was a bustling metropolis, and those who had money were considered the wealthy, and usually ended up with the most of the money as they were the ones that wanted money as the rest wanted the food or stoneware or whatever to live their daily lives.

having no money didnt make you impoverished in those times except some bean-counter basing things on money solely. land, animals, etc had more value such that taxes could be paid in grain, pigs, children, etc.

D&D can also work that way where there really is NO default economy and as such not even attempt in earlier editions to be represented at all.

However, remember that not all wealth is measured by coins. Wealth can take many forms--land, livestock, the right to collect taxes or customs, and jewelry are all measures of wealth. Coins have no guaranteed value. A gold piece can buy a lot in a small village but won't go very far in a large city. This makes other forms of wealth, land for instance, all the more valuable. Indeed, many a piece of jewelry is actually a way of carrying one's wealth. Silver armbands can be traded for goods, a golden brooch can buy a cow, etc. In your adventures, wealth and riches may take many different forms.

Copyright 1999 TSR Inc.

this is about as close as you get to explaining an economy in ANY edition of D&D.

[squirrelloid]

Edit: I suppose it would be productive to use 'local', 'regional', and 'long-distance' rather than just 'local' and 'long-distance'. I'll look at reformulating.

You really should, as your assumptions really show modern conceptions of distance and time. Scotland to London is long distance (and a fairly big deal), it isn't local.

Well, when i say 'scotland trading for coal from england' as being pretty local, I'm not talking London. That shit comes from Newcastle-on-Tyne, which is not that far away by boat.

Similarly, hopping across the english channel may not be quite local, but it's pretty damn close. So if you're selling salted cod in Calais from Dover, it really is a basically local transaction. (I mean, Calais isn't really much farther from home then you probably went to catch the fish in the first place!)

One of the things you ultimately have to deal with in medieval economies is that transportation, even by water, is really inefficient. We don't even have real sailing ships yet, we have cogs. Since raw materials like metal, lumber, and coal are heavy and therefore expensive to transport, you don't want to ship them especially far, which means local and at best regional trade, and even in the latter case you're going to tend towards smaller distances. Most bigger region and truly long-distance trade is going to be luxury goods.

River transport is the only fairly efficient mode, so rivers dramatically expand the distance you can comfortably trade. Oceans aren't nearly so effective, and roads are worse still.

Long distance travel and trade weren't risky because of people, it was hard and risky because of weather, and shit infrastructure (if any at all). Rain could wash out what passed for roads for days, and there is a pretty rough limit on supplies.

Well, we should talk about different types of risk. A road washing out adds time, which cuts into profit. The degree to which a delay of time matters depends partially on how time-sensitive your goods are, and partially on what your ability to resupply is. Yes, if you're in the middle of nowhere and find the road washed out that's pretty major. But if there's a village just back a little ways, it can be not disastrous. (Especially if you can find alternate ways of getting to your ultimate destination, or even choose alternate destinations).

Getting ambushed by bandits puts you at risk of life and limb, and also risk total loss of goods. And banditry was reasonably common. You really can't write this off as a major factor in how risky trade was. Remember, the ability of the crown to enforce laws was pretty limited, and you had a serious problem not only with 'common' bandits but also 'lawless nobles'.

None of this really changes the fact that the stress on increased isolation in a D+D setting really changes how viable trade is.

[Vebyast]

I think there's a more fundamental problem. The turnip economy has no solution to a rampaging owlbear, dragon, or tendriculous. It simply can't happen; there is no extant turnip-economy item which a serf can trade to an adventurer to get her to save the village's crops.

The solution to this is, funnily enough, exactly what Chamomile suggests: food, lumber, and similar basic raw materials are gold economy items, if only because the only primary producers that survive are the ones that can sell their output high enough to hire adventurers. Some places do this with a landowner-serf dynamic, where the landowner takes most of the food and sell high using political connections and in in return uses the money to defend the serfs. Some places are mostly yeoman, with farmers being mostly independent and interacting with the market and adventurers directly. The outcome is basically the same either way. Random muck farmers have enough money laying around that they can interact directly with low-level adventurers because the ones that can't interact directly couldn't hire adventurers and died horribly.

[virgil]

Random muck farmers have enough money laying around that they can interact directly with low-level adventurers because the ones that can't interact directly couldn't hire adventurers and died horribly.

One would imagine that there's actually some mobility between the turnip-gold-wish economies. It's not that there isn't any amount of gold that could buy the favor of an 11th level wizard, it's that it's so large that there's a good chance the cost isn't worth it; like enough adamantine armor/shield/weapons to outfit half a dozen soldiers.

[Wrathzog]

I love these sorts of discussions because people will start with a base assumption of [economics/warfare/stuff] from our history and then try to work magic into that system afterwards when you actually want to start with how Magic would influence everything from the very beginning. And it's not really their fault because the core books present these types of paradigms as being legit, even though they fall apart if you think about them for more than a minute.

Similiarly, the presence of power structures based off of things like Nobility and Lineage that don't inherently provide the real, ultimate power that you would need to actually be able to rule a territory of any significant size (birthright almost did this right, and certain creatures, like dragons, may be able to get away with it).
So, the idea that the people in charge aren't more bad ass than the people they're bossing around is simply not going to work.

Warfare is the one that tickles me most because most people don't understand the purpose of a military (it's a political tool) so they don't realize how unnecessary tens of thousands of level 1 warriors are when you have things like Super Combatants (a la Dom3) or anything that can cast Teleport.

[Nath]

-Invasive raids: although uncommon in England by the late medieval period, raids by 'vikings' is not uncommon earlier. This does little to disrupt the actual base of the economy, since raids typically happen in winter (because the vikings also have fields to work and don't raid during those times). But it does extract accumulated wealth from the economy, damage capital (burnt buildings, etc..), and kill productive individuals. Livestock may also be taken or killed. (Or may even be the targets of such activity, see cattle raiding in Ireland).

Some historical sources actually suggest the opposite. The 841 raids on Lillebonne, Caudebec, Rouen, Jumièges et Saint Wandrille in Neustria (soon-to-be Normandy) took place in May and June. Vikings would have been favoring summer for practical reason regarding long-range navigation and camping on-board or outdoors. Winter raids weren't common before 843 in France and 852 in England, after the vikings settled and established permanent bases of operations.

[shadzar]

but then who really sells makes or buys magical crap? wouldnt magic most often fit into the economy as services either arcane or divine?

Oracle at Delphi didnt sell charms at a Shinto Shrine. the summoned earth elemental disappears after building the city walls.

also we cant base anything from the real world on magic in the economy as we dont have it in the real world. it jsut breaks down to goods or services and with a form of figuring out other goods and services, then you can adapt magic to that system...

[squirrelloid]

-Invasive raids: although uncommon in England by the late medieval period, raids by 'vikings' is not uncommon earlier. This does little to disrupt the actual base of the economy, since raids typically happen in winter (because the vikings also have fields to work and don't raid during those times). But it does extract accumulated wealth from the economy, damage capital (burnt buildings, etc..), and kill productive individuals. Livestock may also be taken or killed. (Or may even be the targets of such activity, see cattle raiding in Ireland).

Some historical sources actually suggest the opposite. The 841 raids on Lillebonne, Caudebec, Rouen, Jumièges et Saint Wandrille in Neustria (soon-to-be Normandy) took place in May and June. Vikings would have been favoring summer for practical reason regarding long-range navigation and camping on-board or outdoors. Winter raids weren't common before 843 in France and 852 in England, after the vikings settled and established permanent bases of operations.

You realize that when most people say 'late medieval period' for northern europe, we're talking ~1100 at the earliest, right? (And possibly not even that early. The renaissance doesn't start till almost 1600 here).

Working fields really happens in spring and fall, so summer is legitimate, but depending on climate it can be a seriously bad time to fight. Anywhere that gets significant rain is going to be a muddy disaster. Winter means the ground is frozen, and thus easier to fight on.

But regardless, summer still respects the productive seasons.

[sabs]

You do realize that by the 1100's the Vikings are basically done as a real threat? The Viking Age is basically 850-1050.
By the 1100's the Europeans are so over that whole Viking thing. They're busy concentrating on fighting Muslims in the Near and Middle East.


By the Late Medeival Period, no shits are given about Vikings. They're just another Christian Kingdom.

[squirrelloid]

Random muck farmers have enough money laying around that they can interact directly with low-level adventurers because the ones that can't interact directly couldn't hire adventurers and died horribly.

One would imagine that there's actually some mobility between the turnip-gold-wish economies. It's not that there isn't any amount of gold that could buy the favor of an 11th level wizard, it's that it's so large that there's a good chance the cost isn't worth it; like enough adamantine armor/shield/weapons to outfit half a dozen soldiers.

So historical serfdom, at least in England, was a lot more complicated than just 'these peasants are bound to work this land'. I mean, Poland was a pretty shitty place to be a peasant, and it more or less devolved to that, but in England the manorial lord only had specific rights over the peasants residing on his land that he could extract, and otherwise their time was their own. So they could and did participate in the gold economy, and by the late medieval period they were encouraged to *buy their way out of extractive labor* so the lord could hire people to do it instead. (Because people getting paid to work were vastly more efficient than people compelled to work). Basically, England developed a system whereby everyone could buy their way out of compulsory service, from the noble military service to the crown all the way down to the peasantry laboring on the noble's fields.

Any simplification is going to obscure all sorts of idiosyncratic institutional variation, but a peasant economy totally disjunct from the gold economy probably requires a severely repressive system and almost no free peasantry (yeomen) to compete with the serfs. Which doesn't mean peasants won't choose to operate in the turnip economy when it's convenient, but they will have some access to the gold economy in most cases.