Magical Economy
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This page details a collaborative project by /tg/ to create a complex, comprehensive system to simulate a medieval economy in magic settings like D&D after the fashion of Spice and Wolf or 3E's Magical Society:The Silk Road sourcebook, including a workable list of commodities and their values and the ability to take into account various factors such as supply and demand, transportation, economic bubbles, political and socioeconomic changes, and so on. The eventual aim is to have a system that can simulate medieval economy on the DM's side behind-the-scenes with reasonable accuracy.
"A program that could generate a random map, populate it, give weather patterns, provide trade, and a 'seed' that DMs could send around the world as an example of their game world."
I hope you're creaming your pants, because we need someone to work making this a reality.
System Reference Document
A condensed HTML document that contains not only the master table of goods/values/bulk, but also an overview of the rules that Silk Road uses to manage trade, supply and demand, as well as haggling. The rule about "20 days travel" has been replaced with "400 miles travel" as a day is a very transient unit to use, and the Buy/Sell system, which was originally a 3E-style DC system, has been directly converted to a percentage system to make it more accessible for other systems. To convert for other systems, you will only need to replace the part referencing 2e's reaction adjustment and come up with a mechanic to reflect merchant skill based on the system's own skill framework. This will make creation of a simulator much more convienient, as all the data needed is contained in this document.
Program
So, the idea of the program is that it's a kind of DM's tool / simulator that automatically generates trade within a geographic area (a "sphere of trade").
The basic idea is that you generate a sphere of trade. Before generating, you can choose the size of the sphere (i.e. village vs. city vs. kingdom), and this will affect the range of stuff within it. You can also choose from a couple templates - for example, "city" will cause for perceived value to be lower as they're used to high-quality goods, "seaside" will increase the supply of fish, and so on.
The actual process of generation generates the following aspects of this sphere of trade:
- Perceived Quality - which goods are considered to be higher or lower quality than they are in this sphere; for example, City X has a strong silk trade and thus Average Silk elsewhere might be seen as Poor Silk there, as they are more discerning. Generally, high supply should cause perceived quality for
goods to be lower.
- Demand - modified by the size of the sphere and by the type of sphere, between 5 and 50 goods from the master goods list will be selected, which can range between being in low demand or being in high demand. The template may also affect demand - if the settlement is a city, demand for luxuries will be higher.
- Supply - randomly generated, determines a list of commodities that are produced within the Sphere of Trade. According to the silk road rules, every 400 miles away from the point of production doubles value, so commodities not included in this list may well be more valuable.
And here it is: Sphere Generator
The ZIP file contains three items:
- A Goods folder which contains a text document for each category with a list of items
- A .EXE file used to run the program
- The source code in a .CS file in case you want to compile it yourself or modify it.
The program is free, I don't give a shit what you do with it, etc. etc. I may update it with a couple new versions, so watch this space.
Here's the Linux version: it's still an .EXE since it's written in C#, but it's written for the Linux file structure and so you should be able to run it with mono: