More Catholic Aspirations

Grad school has me busy, far busier than I expected, which has dramatically cut down on the work I am able to do on my world.  However, one of my classes focuses upon medieval liturgical life, with an emphasis on monasteries - it's where I found the source for my previous post.  I have no idea how much work I'll be able to get done, but as I come across these kinds of gems, I'll post them - when I have more time, I'll collate them into a different idea of the 'cleric,' perhaps called the 'cantor' or something similar.

Today's insights come from Susan Boynton's article, "Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of the Office Hymns."  It's a fascinating text on the relationship between oral and written traditions in the 11th c.  While rather technical and detail-oriented, the scholarship is phenomenal.

The monks of Cluny, a Burgundian abbey, attracted widespread renown for their wholesomeness and purity, inspiring many other monasteries to follow their customs (at least, in theory).  Consequently, the Clunaic monks produced dozens of texts called 'customaries' which listed the ways they practiced their faith, "including its liturgy, the duties of monastic officials, and the routine of daily life in the community" (135).

The reason for this admiration, and the purpose of this post, is that the purity of these monks was believed to grant divine power: "the abbey's fabled way of life... in addition to its salvific power through intercessory prayer for the dead, was thought by some to transform monks into angels.  The training of oblates at Cluny... aimed to instill in them the purity that would enable them to lead a celestial life on [sic] earth..." (136).

The parallel between this and becoming a Buddha by reaching Enlightenment are striking.

I guess the takeaway is that the reward for a character who's powers come from a divine authority (at least within some sort of Christian-ish tradition) is becoming an angel and still dwelling on Earth.  Do with that what you will.

Trade Equations

I have, potentially, my first game on Monday.  It's at a local gaming store, but since it's during the weekday, it should be relatively quiet.  Because of this, I have been frantically working at the trade tables to get them into a useable state - it also keeps me distracted from the schoolwork that needs to be done this weekend as well.

I was completing the second step in the process, aggregating all of my world's references into thematic groups with some rudimentary determination of goods that require no processing, when I ran into two problems.

Before I get into this, if you are not familiar with Alexis' trade tables, I suggest you fix that - the following discussion will make no sense if you don't.

The first problem was with the valuation of gold.  This is the first calculation on the sheet, and it's important because it determines the price, in copper pieces, of 1 reference's worth of goods.  For the sake of simplicity, I am calling that quantity a crop.  Right now, a resource's crop size is determined by dividing the global production of that resource by all of the references for it (on a global scale).

It struck me as a little odd that the gold crop had no direct bearing on the local value of gold.  Then I started digging a little further and it appeared that the price of gold would only fluctuate based upon .002*local/global, where local is the number of local references of gold and global is the total number of gold references.  This seemed strange to me, but I continued forward.

What convinced me that this was a problem, though, was the double-conversion to coinage seen whenever the price of a good was to be generated.  The formula for an arbitrary good looked something like this,

Where refVal is the value in copper pieces of 1 reference, calculated as above and production is the global quantity of a good produced.

This simplifies to

Which means that the local amount of a reference has no significant bearing upon its price.  Additionally, since refVal has already converted from oz. gold to copper coins, the additional coin conversion at the end of the equation is extraneous.

Which means that I needed a new way to value gold and a new way to assign a coin value to 1 unit of a resource.  I called in my roommate and we spent half the night yesterday/this morning fighting through this to find a solution.  And find one we did.

The challenge of this problem is that there are so few actual variables that depend upon location - every meaningful combination of them resulted in their cancellation, which defeated the purpose of the proposed improvement.  We eventually hit upon the idea of incorporating a new variable: the power of the market in question, determined by the sum of all the local references (i.e. all the references in the world altered by their distance from the market in question).  With this in hand, we returned to the problem.

For gold, we have

I'll walk you through this equation.  The product/global term gives us the crop size - how many units of a good are worth 1 reference.  We then multiply our crop size by the power of our market which tells us how many oz. of gold our economy is worth (since 1 reference is equal in value to any other reference, we have product/global*power value in our system as a whole).  We divide this number by how many references of gold we actually possess, local, and this gives us a ratio of the total value of our system in gold by how many references for gold we actually have.  We convert this to copper coins and are done.

Now to tackle valuing goods.  Working this morning, I constructed the following expression:

The first term calculates the value of the goods on hand in copper pieces.  The second term scales that price by how powerful our market is and how abundant the resource is - a resource with fewer references will have a higher price than one with many, and a more powerful market (drawing more things from more places) will command lower prices overall.

Alexis' explanations of his own steps are as good, if not better than mine.  But the units of all of these expressions work out, and now each good's price is influenced by the market's power and the global and local reference values, increasing site-specific prices.

Of course, due to the probabilistic process through which I generated my references, I may have some correcting to do (I needed to add a bunch of iron references, for example), and that may necessitate either adding more references or modifying the production totals in order for the economy to work in the way that I need, but I am much happier with these expressions.

Also, as a side note, VLOOKUP is a godsend in this work.  No more hunting for appropriate references!

Speaking of Sacred (Catholic) Music...

Reading for a class and I come across a section from Chris Page's book, The Christian West:

"Some time before 1123, Peter the abbot of Cava in Campania found that the local seigneur was sporadically emerging from his castrum of San Severino and harassing the workers on the rural estates of the monastery.  He even drove them from one of the fields as they were in the midst of sowing.  The lord's motives are unlikely to have been very complex; the archives of the abbey of Cava are extensive and they leave no doubt that the monastery owned a considerable amount of land.  Lord Roger of San Severino had every reason to enlarge the scope of his tenantry by threatening its rural serfs as a prelude to appropriating its good arable land, and it would not have taken much for his group of armed and mounted men, the garrison of the castellum, to see off the abbey's peasants in the field.  Instead of raising a militia or appealing to a diocesan, however, Abbot Peter decided to defend the furrows with plainsong.  He went out to the field with the serfs and a few monks and 'instantly began to sing chant'.  Lord Roger appeared with his men, but at the sound of the plainsong his mood was softened to the point where he became penitent, even lacrimose, and prostrated himself at the abbot's feet. 'Thus', says Peter's biographer, 'we know that psalmody softens the ferocity of evil spirits and puts them to flight.' (394)

Furthermore, we also get these gems:

"plainsong was a means of healing... it was also, as the miraculous appearance of saints during worship occasionally revealed, a form of conjuration." (394).

Some things to think about when considering how music might play a role in your worlds, especially your sacred music.

On the Humanist and Anti-Humanist Aesthetics of Ruin

So, I wrote the last post and then realized that I wasn't done thinking about ruins and how they function in games.  This is about aesthetics and draws a lot from the 19th century.  You have been warned.

Ruin porn in art is exploitative and harmful to the communities from which the images/artifacts are taken.  Ruins in fiction/games cannot be harmful because no real persons are involved in the ruin - playing a game in a ruin or ruined setting does not pull attention away from actual real people living in actual Detroit who could really use some support or, even better, some empathy.

Ruin settings are about decay - things that were once larger than anything that have broken and/or been corrupted into incoherency.  Now, I use ruins as well, as do many DMs and many games, but my ruins look and feel very different from the ones Joseph Manola discusses in his essay.  Now, I'm sure one could chalk that up to my adventures not being as 'good' as Red and Pleasant Land or Deep Carbon Observatory, but that discussion is ultimately pointless.  What I want to talk about are the aesthetics that I perceive underlie some of those differences - what I'm calling humanist and anti-humanist aesthetics of ruin.

I'll talk about anti-humanist aesthetics first - they are primarily the subject of Manola's essay.  In an anti-humanist ruin, or an anti-humanist conception of ruin, the ruined thing is a corruptive agent: it taints those around it with ruin and entropy, meaning that anything encountered nearby the ruin has been transmuted.  The idea is an inversion of the Arthurian connection between citizens and their home - that a ruined environment perpetuates ruin in the people who dwell near it.  It is an explanation for all of the madness and horror that often comes out of such a setting: not only is the ruin itself inscrutable, but it is impossible to understand and/or empathize with the inhabitants of the ruin, either.  That is not to say the party cannot ally with the inhabitants, communicate in some way, but the ruin's denizens are fundamentally inhuman.  Furthermore, the descent into ruin is inevitable - the ruin cannot be repurposed, its inhabitants are doomed to their vices and depravity.  Order is ultimately meaningless in the face of such a profound, sublime ruin.  To borrow from Berlioz, darkness leads to deeper darkness.

The humanist ruin puts a different spin on the same setting.  It takes the same setting but makes two critical changes.  The first is that many or most of the inhabitants of the ruin are understandable; they follow Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or have some other set of goals to which the players might relate, even if only slightly (or can be persuaded to temporarily cease their holy war against the butter-side-ups to ensure that the demon of the deeps stays put, since everyone dies if it comes out).  If we want to draw from romance fantasy, the relatable nature of the creatures involved with such a ruin can be even more horrifying than those of the anti-humanist aesthetic - it can become more personal to the players (not the characters but the players) very quickly.  Often in this case, the only tools available to the players to have a meaningful impact upon the space are their empathy and communication skills, borrowing from the idea of romance fantasy.  The second change is that it is possible to impose order upon the ruin, to find (or assign) a meaning to the ruin that gives it some understandable function and a purpose to which it can now be used - it rewrites the ruined nature of the setting and 'normalizes' it, aligning it with the rest of the setting.  To borrow from Beethoven, darkness leads to light.

Now, these are theories about gaming aesthetics, which means that rather than applying them to adventures or settings or whatever, they have to be applied to actual games being run (just as dramatic theory can only be fully applied to recorded performances or live performances, not to scripts).  However, I can pull a couple hypotheticals from Zak S.'s Red and Pleasant Land to show how both aesthetics can manifest within the setting.

The world of R&PL is a ruin on every level - a war has been fought for an unknown amount of time for reasons that make little logical sense.  The topology of the region is non-Euclidean, the denizens are range from apathetic to inimical to human life, and so on.  However, the Jabberwocky is a symptom of the thwarted space-time continuum: by killing the Jabberwocky, the time frame of the war is established and many of the spatial anomalies clear up.  Knowing, definitively, how long the war has been waged gives players the ability to affect the war, presumably to stop it, which allows order to come back into the region.  A humanist DM lets the players know this information and, if they desire this outcome, will enable them to do so (at least eventually.  It should be quite challenging).  The anti-humanist DM doesn't particularly care about the Jabberwocky, and the only problem results if the party wishes to impose order and the anti-humanist DM doesn't wish them to do so (but that problem has less to do with the aesthetic position and more to do with this particular DM being an asshole).

One of the more interesting insights from Manola's post was his linking the LotFP/OSR ruin aesthetic with the Sublime, an aesthetic phenomena associated with the Long 19th century, and it bears a strong resemblance to the kinds of settings run under the anti-humanist aesthetic of ruin.

Of course, one of the other strong themes from the Long 19th century was that of the triumphant hero who struggles against dark forces and ultimately triumphs, which is certainly one of the potential outcomes from this humanist aesthetic of ruin.

Ruin porn

One of the blogs that I read, and was instrumental in working towards a minimal but highly functional design framework, is Roles, Rules, and Rolls, by Roger G-S.  He just linked to Joseph Manola's post on the LotFP circle, as well as a number of other, linked writers, game designers, and thinkers, and one of the common aesthetics they share - the idea of ruin.  The essay is absolutely worth reading and connects to a number of much older artistic models for this fascination with ruins (Zdzislaw Beksinski and Hubert Robert, for example).

However, there is also a modern fascination with ruins beyond 18th and 20th c. artists, namely that of ruin porn.  I first came into contact with the concept at a presentation on the birth of techno, which happened toward the end of the 20th c. in Detroit, which opened discussing this art installation.  In photography and sculpture, ruin porn can be highly exploitative - because such works are intimately linked with a geographic area, the images of ruin come to represent the whole area, regardless of whatever action is being taken to remedy the lives and communities actually damaged by the ruin.

I think that it is highly interesting that in this post-Soviet era, where the myth of American Exceptionalism is no longer taken as literal truth by many, where small groups of individuals can wield tremendous power in global geopolitics, and democratic governments stagnate and fail to govern while the electorate that could drive positive change simply sits and simmers we find not only ruin porn, but also people choosing to create and inhabit fantasy worlds filled with dead and decaying things, through whose remains they pick.

Refining the Trade System

I'm hard at work with classes as well as implementing Alexis' trade system right now and I wanted to document some of the ways I've needed to change the process in order to create the outcome I want.

The trade system depends upon references of goods bound to specific commercial locations (markets) where goods of that type are either produced or gathered from nearby, noncommercial areas (outlying farms, smaller towns, shipped downriver, etc.).  Following Alexis' suggestions, I plotted out regions of influence for each city, ranging in size from 4ish hexes for the smaller cities to 15 or 20 for the larger ones.  I initially used Welshpiper's medieval settlements calculator to determine how many cities I ought to have in regions of a given size and population density, which lead to more cities than I had reasonable room to place.  I did what I could - and I think the map has benefited from the density of locations in both the Southern Kingdoms and Confederacy (I scaled back the city counts intentionally for Arein because of its relatively young age (60 years)).  Obviously, the more closely packed the cities are, the fewer hexes each controls within a given area.

Each hex controlled by a market might produce resources, based upon its hydrology, elevation, and level of civilization.  While I haven't implemented Alexis' idea of infrastructure numbers yet, it is a future project.  As a rule of thumb, I decided that any hex more than two hexes away from the closest city was undeveloped and thus (for my two heavily-treed areas) still jungle/forest.  Hexes only 40 miles (2 hexes) from the closest city were also undeveloped, but if there was another city within 2 hexes from the are in question, the hex is settled instead.

It may be helpful to take a gander at the map I uploaded recently.

One of the early difficulties I encountered with the random determination is that Alexis' regions are based upon the kinds of terrain found in, say, Hexographer, rather than rooted in any kind of elevation or topological scheme, which is how I built my world.  While I absolutely understand the desire to be accessible, I had a little bit of work to do to adjust it.  My first approach was to classify any hex adjacent to another hex with an elevation difference of 400 or more counted as a hill (which graduated to mountain as soon as the hex's height breached 2000' above sea level).  This gave me no hills because the elevation change was smoother than I had anticipated.  My second approach banded hexes by color: hexes over 500' but under 2000' were hills, hexes over 2000' were mountains, and hexes between sea level and 500' were flat, either plains or scrublands (hexes between -50' and 0', found only at the coast, became marshes).  Alexis' plains designation really applies to land used for large-scale farming, whereas scrubland does not.  Thus, hexes 1 hex or closer to a city are plains, while those that I've ruled undeveloped are either scrub or forest/jungle.  Now, deciding between the two choices was tricky.  They are entirely different vegetation systems, and it was important that I get the resources from both.  I still don't have a satisfactory answer, but the answer I used had to do with distance from the forest's center, something for which I had a rough location.

The biggest change I needed to make was further differentiating the very generic labels of building stone, cereals, fruits (which replace grapes, since I'm in a tropical environment), gems, and vegetables.

My world's central distinguishing characteristic is the differences in both outlook and material culture between each of my societies.  Therefore, I need to be able to distinguish between the kinds of resources available to each people, as well as what specific foods is grown to determine diet and food culture.  I have a sedimentary ridge that separates the Confederacy and Southern Kingdoms, and so I used that to distinguish between the kinds of stone found: south of the ridge is sandstone, compressed sediment from the sea, while north of the ridge is limestone because of the karst topology (a choice I made to provide sinkholes to the area).  Across the Sea of Shadows to the south, I have granite mountains.

However, karst topology includes important things like dolomite and gypsum, which I wanted to produce as well, and this led me to the solution I employed for my other reference specifications.  I assigned probabilities to each type and rolled a die: 1 dolomite, 2 gypsum, 3-4 limestone.  The important thing is that I get different numbers for each resource, scattered throughout the regions.

I then specified different cereal categories, millet, rice, and wheat, fruit categories, bananas, coconuts, mangos, and pineapples, gem categories, ornamental, fancy, semiprecious, lesser precious, and greater precious, and vegetables, cassava, cotton, edibles (tubers and the like), jute, palm oil, and soybeans.  I determined these the same way, giving each a probability and then rolling for each individual reference - I tried applying a strict percentage on the overall reference to give me numbers, but the results were too clean.

The last way I've changed the references is adding a new one: warcraft, which governs the making of arms and armor for a given culture.  The Tarluskani use a khanda while the Southerners use a longsword.  While they are similar in many ways, the techniques to use it are different, as are the concerns and problems when forging it.  This also lets me price weapons and armor from different cultures like the exotic or commonplace items they are, even though the skills involved are the same.  I get my Warcraft value for each market from the sum of the leathercraft, metalcraft, and woodcraft references, since they are highly related industries.

My last change to the overall system was in using the reference numbers to populate information about the cities themselves.  It follows that cities with higher references are more economically powerful than those with a lower count -  they have more resources and can bring more to bear to any economic dispute.  So, since the urban population of the late Middle Ages was something like 25% of the total population, I have calculated the total population for each area based on population density (usually between 10-20 people per square mile), multiplied it by .25 and the multiplied it by the ratio of the market's reference total compared with the region's reference total to get the final population.

For example, Reyjadin is the capital city of the Southern Kingdoms.  Being a capital city, I've doubled its population because of that added importance.  The total population for the Southern Kingdoms is approximately 683,000 people.  Reyjadin controls 6 references while the Southern Kingdoms as a whole controls 291 references.  So, Reyjadin's popullation is 683,000*.25*2*(6/291)=7,041 people.  Population then defines a city's physical size (population/38850 square miles) and the strength of its guard (population/150 employed guards).  While obviously these latter two measures are adjustable, it gives me a systematic way to approach any city.

While there's a lot to refine about this process (like using the total local references rather than references controlled by the market), it's definitely progress.

Also, a helpful resource to intrepid worldbuilders.

Trade Tables

Week two of graduate school, and I already foresee my free time dwindling from what I had this summer.  However, I've still been working on my world - I finished calculating the distances between all 69 cities as well as calculating the references governed by each city.  With that step finished, I am now adapting Alexis' trade tables for my own purposes.  Because I am one of his Patreon backers, I have access to his most recent full table, which I am unabashedly plundering.

The process, which I have but barely begun, makes me aware of the massive size of the trade tables as well as the work that has gone into them.  I will be pleased to get my much reduced version off of the ground for my players to enjoy.