The last installment of the third Chapter of the series looks as worker productivity and how race and other factors influence it.

It’s been an interesting 2025 so far, characterized by things going wrong in unexpected and unusual ways and recovering from those problems.

It actually started on New Year’s Eve, when I rebooted my laptop after a clean-up, just as I’ve done twice a week or more for the last 12 or so years – and it refused to boot up. Eventually I was forced to reset the Windows installation, only to find that it couldn’t complete, either.

Fortunately, two things came to my rescue: My brother, who’s done a lot more laptop installs than I have, and a Christmas gift of 16Gb of RAM instead of the paltry 2GB it’s been living with for all that time. With the new RAM installed, the windows reset did everything it was supposed to do, and all I had to do then was to reinstall all my software (that part of the recovery process is still ongoing).

At least it happened in a global holiday period, so email was smaller than usual and I had no difficulty catching back up.

But the recovery process led me directly into event #2: the photo-editing software that I installed was a later version of what I had been using, and somewhere in between version 3.3 and version 5.whatever, it had lost the intuitiveness that had always been its hallmark. I could figure out how to do most things, but there were always extra steps involved – and not everything seemed to work properly. It didn’t matter what setting I chose, for example, the brushes all delivered a somewhat transparent color. And it had real problems saving any work done.

So I had to go back to their download site and ferret around until I found their archive of past versions. I tried regressing just one step, to an earlier version of 5 – problems persisted. So I went back to a sub-version of 4 – some of the problems went away, but not the big one (save dialogue wouldn’t open). So it was back to the old 3.3.3 version – the last in that development cycle – and wonder of wonders, everything went back to normal! I was back in business!

In the middle of this process, the wing screw in my glasses broke. In fact, it sheared in two partway along the shaft of the screw – something I’ve never seen happen before, and I’ve been wearing glasses for something like 55 years!

I have a glasses repair kit for such problems, so there was no panic; until I tried to remove the embedded shaft end of the broken screw. Tweezers could not furnish an adequate grip on it, and needle-nosed pliers were too big and bulky to grasp it and turn it.

Fortunately, enough of the shaft remained that I could fit it back into the part of the frame that it had come from and then hold everything together with a small strip of insulation tape. Last week, after a doppler ultrasound on my legs (all clear), I had time to stop in at an eyeware shop for some emergency repairs. They had never seen anything like this happen before, either! But by clamping the frame down, they were able to extract the broken screw and replace it – and they were good enough not to charge me (they kept the screw as a souvenir). Big shout-out to the helpful staff at Owndays in Westfield Burwood!

So, if things come in threes, hopefully that’s an end to the surprise breakdowns! Some people disagree with my occasional assertion that the greatest disruptions occur when something we take for granted stops working – but these three situations are all examples of that, and each was – until patched or repaired – totally disruptive to my life and routines.

Table Of Contents: In part 1 of Chapter 3: Routine Personnel

3.1 A Choice Of Four Trade Unit Standards (actually, 8)

3.1.0 Principles of Comparative Modes Of Transport
3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden

3.1.1.1 Lift from STR
3.1.1.2 Average isn’t Average
3.1.1.3 4d6 keep 3 vs 3d6
3.1.1.4 Career Paths & STR

     3.1.1.4.1 Linear vs Non-Linear

3.1.1.5 Lift, at last
3.1.1.6 Encumbrance

     Sidebar: Behind The Curtain

3.1.1.7 Load & Load Capacity
3.1.1.8 Load Balance

     3.1.1.8.1 Adding a Staff to the equation
     3.1.1.8.2 Relating Load to Encumbrance (D&D)
     3.1.1.8.3 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Superhero)
     3.1.1.8.4 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Adventurer’s Club)

3.1.1.9 Load Distribution
3.1.1.10 Humanoids

     3.1.1.10.1 The Size Factor
     3.1.1.10.2 The Proportions Factor
     3.1.1.10.3 The Racial Factor
     3.1.1.10.4 The Human Advantage
     3.1.1.10.5 The Iconic Reference
     3.1.1.10.6 Elves
     3.1.1.10.7 Dwarves
     3.1.1.10.8 Halflings
     3.1.1.10.9 Orcs
     3.1.1.10.10 Ogres
     3.1.1.10.11 Bugbears
     3.1.1.10.12 Trolls
     3.1.1.10.13 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.10.14 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.10.15 Other Giants
     3.1.1.10.16 Others

In Part 2:

3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden (cont)

3.1.1.11 Time: 8, 12, 16, 24
3.1.1.12 Speed
     3.1.1.12.1 Non-D&D Scales

3.1.1.13 Provisions: Food
3.1.1.14 Provisions; Water
3.1.1.15 Replenishment: Foraging / Hunting / Buying
3.1.1.16 Distance
3.1.1.17 The humanoid bottom line

     3.1.1.17.1 Elves
     3.1.1.17.2 Dwarves
     3.1.1.17.3 Halflings
     3.1.1.17.4 Orcs
     3.1.1.17.5 Ogres
     3.1.1.17.6 Bugbears
     3.1.1.17.7 Trolls
     3.1.1.17.8 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.17.9 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.17.10 Other Giants
     3.1.1.17.11 Other Humanoids

3.1.2 Horses as a beast of burden
3.1.3 Burros as a beast of burden
3.1.4 Carts as a ‘beast of burden’

3.1.4.1 Strength of the Axles
     3.1.4.1.1 Cart & Wagon Stats: High-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.2 Cart & Wagon Stats: Low-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.3 Cart & Wagon Axle Reinforcement

3.1.4.2 Strength of the Wheels
     3.1.4.2.1 Spoke Thickness
     3.1.4.2.2 Number Of Spokes
     3.1.4.2.3 Solid Wheels

3.1.4.3 Strength of the Connection
3.1.4.4 Strength of the Bed
3.1.4.5 Rolling Resistance
     3.1.4.5.1 Slope (aka Grade, Gradient, Stepth, Incline, Mainfall, Pitch, and Rise)

3.1.4.6 Gravity Vector

In Part 3:

3.1.4.7 Pulling the Cart or Wagon
3.1.4.8 Simplification
3.1.4.9 Storytelling

3.1.5 Choosing Your Unit
3.1.6 Ramifications

3.1.6.1 Freight Management
3.1.6.2 Base Loading Time
3.1.6.3 On The Road: Drivers, Guards, Cargo-masters, & Handlers
3.1.6.4 Base Unloading Time
3.1.6.5 Sales Prep
3.1.6.6 Sales and Customers

3.2 Recruiter / Personnel Manager

3.2.1 Assumption #1: The best available gets hired

3.2.1.1 Any Relevant Skill
3.2.1.2 INT + WIS
3.2.1.3 Substituting CHAR
3.2.1.4 Supplemental Magic

3.2.2 Assumption #2: They Hire The Best
3.2.3 The Principle Of Labor Unmanagement

3.3 The Labor Unit

3.3.1 Eight man-hour Labor Units
3.3.2 Twelve man-hour Labor Units
3.3.3 Sixteen man-hour Labor Units
3.3.4 Twenty-four man-hour Labor Units
3.3.5 Choices and Expectations

3.4 The Labor Market
3.5 Basic Pay-scales

3.5.1 Loyalty Index

In today’s post:

3.6 Productivity

3.6.1 Premium & Limited Labor Units

3.6.1.1 Example: Dwarves
3.6.1.2 Example: Halflings
3.6.1.3 Example: A mixed Labor Unit (Humans and a Hill Giant)
3.6.1.4 Loyalty Factors, Premium Labor Units
3.6.1.5 Loyalty Factors, Limited Labor Units

3.6.2 Production Of Labor Units

3.6.2.1 The One-Page standard
3.6.2.2 Reminder: Profit per Trade Unit, not costs or prices

3.7 Pay-scale Variations

3.7.1 Massively Overpaying workers
3.7.2 Overpaying workers / Elite Quality Workforce
3.7.3 Standard Wages
3.7.4 Underpaying workers / Lower Quality Workforce
3.7.5 Oppression through underpayment

3.7.5.1 Sidebar: Adventuring Economics

3.7.5 Oppression through underpayment (cont)
3.7.6 Family as Employees
3.7.7 ‘Friends’ helping ‘Friends’
3.7.8 Slaves
3.7.9 Minor Stakeholders

3.7.9.1 Non-voting shares

3.7.10 Combinations & Complications

3.8 Technological Impact

3.8.1 Major Breakthroughs
3.8.2 Incremental Gains
3.8.3 Trade Secrets & Industrial Spies

3.9 Key Personnel & The Labor Unit
3.10 The Personnel Bottom Line

In future chapters:

4. Mode Of Transport
5. Land Transport
6. Waterborne Transport
7. Spoilage
8. Key Personnel
9. The Journey
10. Arrival
11. Journey’s End
12. Adventures En Route

I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I don’t think that a recap will add that much to today’s post – it would either be extremely long and mostly irrelevant or extremely short and not worth the effort. So let’s dive right in…

3.6 Productivity

So far, the focus has been on defining a standard, generic, labor unit, but – as anyone who has ever worked in the real world knows – there are always some who are more productive than others. The larger the organization, the more closely the overall workforce will come to matching the generic unit defined, overall.

Rather than fuss over detailing each and every specific labor unit, the approach taken by this system is to assume that the overall average accommodates both the occasional ‘lazy unit’ and the more efficient ones, overall. It’s not unreasonable to set aside a small slice of the profits – 5 or 10% – and allocate these to bonuses for productivity, effectively increasing the pay-scale slightly while providing an incentive for hard work.

Given the way the Recruiter has been defined, if left to run the business the way it should be run, such a bonus scheme is extremely likely to be instituted – you would have to be fairly incompetent in management not to thing it was a good idea. We’ve discussed employee loyalty already, and bonus payments are a good way of buying some of that loyalty. I’ll get into that side of things a little deeper in section 3.7, where I’ll look at variations on the basic labor unit.

So, clearly, that’s not what this section is going to focus on. Instead, there’s a ‘reality’ within the concept of a Fantasy (or Sci-Fi for that matter) environment that needs to be taken into account: Non-humans (“Augmented” humans and non-humans will be considered in section 3.8).

To start with, we need some way of distinguishing all these kinds of labor units. Without defined specifics, it’s too easy to get ourselves into a tangle, talking about one thing when we think we’re talking about another.

So, some definitions to get us under way:

• Standard Labor Units – This is what we have defined as the backbone of the workforce, taking the assumption that they were human.
• Elite Labor Units – These are human-based Labor Units that are more productive or effective than the standard. Their contributions in general are assumed to average out with Substandard Labor Units. Labor Units with an Elite rating tend to be preferred hires, but everyone is competing for them. They have to be paid more or their loyalty declines, rapidly – and it becomes easier for some other employer to steal them out from under you.
• Substandard Labor Units – Human-based Labor Units that are lazier or less productive than the standard. This can be the result of social norms – the afternoon Siesta, for example, has to be accommodated where that’s normal, even though it means for 1-2 hours a day, workers are unproductive. As a general rule, these are the least-desirable units to employ, but in some places you have no choice because the entire labor pool qualifies as “substandard”.
• Premium Labor Units – Labor units that are non-human and consequently are more efficient than a human Labor Unit would be. Like Elite Labor Units, they can reasonably expect to be paid more, and that’s a good thing from the human workforce’s point-of-view; it provides a disincentive to discriminate in favor of non-human labor.
• Limited Labor Units – Labor units that are non-human and consequently less efficient than a human labor unit would be. The presumption is that they are local, however, and not hiring them can negatively impact the public’s willingness to trade with the business. While employers would no doubt love to pay these Labor Units less than a standard Labor Unit, and these Labor Units members would generally expect to be paid less, there are limits to how closely economic theory can match social reality. Instead, the expectation is that the Labor Unit consists of enough additional members to off-set any Limitations. A Labor unit of Halflings might have 12 members instead of 8, for example, or 3 instead of 2. That means that the individual members will be paid less per person per hour, but the overall labor cost will remain the same. But this principle can break down in smaller labor-markets, where there simply aren’t enough people available to be hired.
• Combinations: Elite Premium, Substandard Premium, Limited Elite, Limited Substandard – Since the two factors – Elite/Substandard and Premium/Limited – have entirely different derivations, combinations are quite possible. This can get quite confusing it you don’t keep your terminology straight and be extra-careful when using casual speech.

The basic approach to both sets of factors is the same – if a Labor Unit does 2 × X (%) more work than a Standard Labor Unit, it gets paid 1 × X (%) extra. The business saves 1 × X (%) on it’s labor costs, earning it extra profits, and the workers get an equal share of those productivity gains.

Where there is some factor making them less efficient than standard, the pay is still standard, and the assumption is that extra hands will be added to the Labor Unit to make up the deficit, whatever it may be.

Note that if a better Labor Unit does not get paid what they are worth, they will either go work for someone else or they will voluntarily adopt work practices that bring their productivity back into line with the standard. They will get lazier, in other words, until they are earning just what you’re paying them.

3.6.1 Premium & Limited Labor Units

So, how do you determine X%. as describe in the section above? Section 3.1.1.10 holds the key, from all the way back in Part 1 of this chapter. Size, Strength, Physiology, Social Habits – everything I could think of gets taken into account. All you have to do is determine whether the work that they are doing has, as its limiting factor, Distributed, Semi-distributed, or Point loads (and, 99% of the time, the latter will be the correct answer).

3.6.1.1 Example: Dwarves

Load Capacity × 0.7 × 1.41 × 1.43 = × 1.41141 Adjustments for distributed & Semi-distributed loads are not applicable.
So +41.141% relative to human.
2 × X% = +41.141;
X = +20.5705%. Call it +20.6%.

If the normal pay per day was 5sp, this would make it 6sp in a Dwarven port or city – but you can expect loading and unloading to take 1 / 1.41141 = × 0.7085 = only 70.85% as long as usual.

70.85% of 1.206 pay rate = 0.854451 = 85.4451%, so Labor Costs are effectively down to 85.4451% of expected. If your human cost was, say, 5000 SP in a year, this would cost only 4272.255 SP over the same period, producing 727.745 SP in extra profit.

3.6.1.2 Example: Halflings

Load Capacity × 0.3 × 2 = × 0.6. Adjustments for distributed & Semi-distributed loads are not applicable.
So -40% relative to human.

For every human, it takes 1 / 0.6 = 1.667 times as many Halflings to do the equivalent work.

Or, to put it another way, each individual Halfling gets paid 60% of what a human would be paid. Your operating costs don’t go down, but you don’t lose any profitability, either.

3.6.1.3 A mixed Labor Unit (Humans and a Small Hill Giant)

Small Hill Giant:
     Load Capacity × 3.4 × 2 / 1.25 = × 5.44

If a normal Labor Unit is 8 humans, this labor unit needs only 2.56 humans to be as productive as a standard unit.

If a normal Labor Unit is 10 humans, this labor unit needs only 4.56 humans to be as productive as a standard unit.

If a normal Labor Unit is 12 humans, this labor unit needs only 6.56 humans to be as productive as a standard unit.

Let’s take the middle one, and list this labor unit as 1 Small Hill Giant and 5 humans.

5.44 + 5 = 10.44 = 1.044 × standard
So +4.4% relative to human.
2 × X% = +4.4%;
X = +2.2%.

If the normal pay per day was 5 SP × 10 men = 50 SP, this would make it 52.2 SP – but you can expect loading and unloading to take 1 / 1.044 = × 0.95.7854 = only 95.8% as long as usual.

95.8% of 1.022 pay rate = 0.979076 = 97.9076%, so Labor Costs are effectively down to 98% of expected. If your human cost was, say, 5000 SP in a year, this would cost only 4900 SP over the same period, producing 100 SP in extra profit.

Making the presumption that these humans and this Hill Giant are used to working together, they all qualify for the higher pay scale. So the humans would get 1.022 × 5 × 5 = 25.55 SP between them, or 5.11 SP per man per day; while the Hill Giant would get the rest (52.2 – 25.55 = 26.65 SP per day).

3.6.1.4 Loyalty Factors, Premium Labor Units Example: Halflings

Premium Labor Units expect to be paid more than a standard Labor Unit. It follows that it’s harder to buy their loyalty, and easier to lose it by short-paying them.

Take the Dwarves example: they expect to be paid 1.206 times the normal. If you actually pay 1.5 times normal, that earns the same loyalty bonus as paying an all-human Labor Unit 1.5 / 1.206 = 1.244 as much as usual.

On the other hand, if you only paid 0.8 × as much as you would usually pay an all-human Labor Unit, for whatever reason, the effect on the loyalty of this Premium Unit would be as though you only paid 0.8 / 1.206 = 66.335% of normal to an all-human Labor Unit. If you were one of the best employees at a business and everybody knew it, how loyal to the business would you be if the boss told you “I’m cutting your pay by 1/3 next week”? Most people I know would be out of there within the hour!

3.6.1.5 Loyalty Factors, Limited Labor Units

It works the other way, too – Limited Labor Units expect to be paid less per person, so paying them extra has a disproportionate effect. Halflings, as shown, have to throw an extra 0.667 people at a job for every human in a normal Labor Unit. Ten humans or 16.67 Halflings to do the same amount of work in the same amount of time – at the same amount of pay, between them.

5 SP × 10 humans = 50 SP; 50/16.67 = 3 SP per Halfling, per day, or 60% of normal. So paying them extra earns loyalty at the rate of 1 / 0.6 = 1.667 normal, while paying them less also has a × 0.6 effect – the wrong way, because they are already underpaid (in their opinion).

3.6.2 Production Of Labor Units

From the perspective of the GM, the more generic and less individualized he can make the Labor Units, the better. The easiest way of doing so is to view the business or trade as a globalized whole, and balance a more efficient workforce in “A” with less-efficient ones in “B” and “C” – just inefficient enough by virtue of race, conditions, geography, sub-population, and/or social traditions to balance everything out so that you end up with effectively two Standard Labor Units.

And, for a long time, that was the concept that I was working toward in this series. But, as a concept, it can’t coexist with the principle of less-productive units throwing additional manpower at a job for the same overall pay (i.e. less per individual); I had to choose which abstraction was the most useful for the GM and rewrite whole tracts of my notes around that decision.

Nevertheless, some legacies of the alternate approach linger, because I’m doing minimal revision to past posts – once something is published, it stays essentially unchanged and any revisions or amendments happen in a future post.

Clearly, the decision was to have Standard and less-efficient units cost the same per shift and deliver the same level of total man-hours or equivalent, while more efficient units simply cost a little more – and if they don’t get paid that extra, they either slow down to the Standard pace, or get replaced with Standard Units because the good workers get poached and replaced with new hires, all completely invisibly to everyone.

GMs should populate their trading and commerce centers with a workforce that is reasonably representative of the local population, determine their efficiency based on racial and social makeup relative to a ‘standard unit’, determine the size of the available workforce, also measured in standard units, and get to a bottom line of “it costs X per time period to do business here.”

3.6.2.1 The One-Page standard

Most trade operations and businesses won’t have a customer base sufficient to average things out to a daily cost; even a weekly or monthly average is a bit optimistic, especially if seasonal impacts have to be taken into account (harvest time is ‘this month’, for example, and in ‘that month’ the roads take longer to travel because everything’s muddy from rain some of the time, or blocked by snowdrifts, or whatever).

A far better approach is to look at the annual costs – start by figuring out what they will be given reasonable conditions, then just keep adjusting that total for all the different local and seasonal factors until everything is taken into account. Keep notes, because they can be useful if you ever need to provide a narrative description (because the PCs have gone there) – but don’t waste a lot of time on it.

At the end of the day, the ideal would be to be able to spend a whole single page describing the entire business. That should cover everything – and that gives a target level of abstraction vs specificity to aim for.

3.6.2.2 Reminder: Profit per Trade Unit, not costs or prices

It’s also worth reminding readers that the goal is not to detail annual incomes and costs, it’s to combine these into an Annual Profits figure. If you don’t think about costs as such, but as reductions in potential profit, businesses of any sort become far easier to manage.

“The usual profit level of an operation is X GP per year. This business has eight of them. Four deliver higher profits in Autumn when sales and distribution of the summer harvest is complete and pay relatively little the rest of the time; the rest are more consistent performers. What those operations are actually doing may vary from month to month, but the earnings remain about the same. #3 and #5 are more labor-intensive for social and racial reasons but don’t cost more because workers get paid less. #7 costs more but get their work done more efficiently, increasing the profitability of that operation by 22% because it’s shipping ore from a Dwarven mine to a Dwarven city.”

If the average profit level is 5gp / week / operation, × 50 weeks a year, that’s 250 GP / year, × 8 operations = 2,000 GP. Factoring in the extra from #7 means using x8.22 instead of 8, so that’s 2,055 GP / year. Half of the base arrives over a 2 week period at the start of Autumn (1,000 GP), the rest is spread evenly through the year (87.917 GP / month or 21.1 GP / week).

The players and the plotlines include no details unless they operate to improve the narrative. The trade operation is simply “there”.

3.7 Pay-scale Variations

It’s overly moralistic to suggest that some employers look after their employees better than others. It’s more accurate to say that some employers find that doing so makes good business sense. There is an old saying that appears to have gone out of fashion: “Bind not the mouths of the kine that tread the grain”. The saying is a paraphrasing of the bible.

Kine are cattle, and an old way of threshing grain was to let them tread on the harvested crop, separating the kernels of wheat from the stems and chaff. Some miserly farmers would bind the mouths of the cattle to prevent them eating the better (more valuable) gain and then feeding them on poor-quality (cheap) grass. This sometimes led to the cattle falling ill and generally being less efficient, while those who sacrificed a little of the product of the cattle’s labor had healthier beasts which served them better in the long run. The principle could be, and was, extended first to slaves and then paid employees.

There is a well-known manufacturer of chocolates here in Australia whose policy is to permit their workforce to consume as much product as they want, completely free. They find that after a week’s bingeing, most employees stop eating chocolate almost completely, while being more niggardly resulted in ongoing theft and consumption. The alternative would be draconian security measures, and that was tried a time or two – and it led to workers being easily stolen to work in other factories, after the chocolateers had spent money training them up and making them productive.

There are five standards of payment available to PCs who establish or purchase a business operation that is to be worked on their behalf by NPCs:

★ Paying way too much;
★ Paying more than standard
★ Paying standard wages
★ Paying less than standard
★ Paying way less than standard

In addition, we need to examine how unpaid workers fit into reality:

★ Family
★ ‘Friends’ Helping ‘Friends’
★ Slaves

I’ll round out this section by looking at alternative payment schemes and Combinations & Complications.

3.7.1 Massively Overpaying Workers

I’m not talking about one-off bonuses or even seasonal rewards, but regularly paying 50% or more on top of standard.

If you were an office worker making around $80,000 a year ($40,000 in the US, £25,000 in the UK), and someone approached you with a job offer performing the same duties for $120,000 / $60,000 / £37,500, the pay-scale is so significantly above what’s normal that you automatically start looking for the catch. And if you don’t spot one fairly quickly, paranoia sets in.

Is this a scam or a front? Will you be left holding the bag for something? Will you be dealing in stolen property? Are you risking your reputation or even jail time? After all, if it seems too good to be true, “it probably is,” as the saying goes.

It might seem like this is the best way to lure the best workers from other employers – but many of them have a sense of loyalty to their existing employer that has been cultivated, and almost all of them will be wary of such an over-generous offer.

Contrast these reactions with how you would feel if told, “We need to recruit good workers quickly so that we can hit the ground running, so for the first 12 months we will pay 50% over normal wages” – there’s a limiting caveat out in the open and a justification that seems plausible, and an implication that this offer will only be made to a select workforce, which adds an element of flattery – so suddenly, this offer doesn’t seem “too good to be true” even though it probably still is. That’s when people find themselves getting into trouble – when the red flags are muted or at half-mast!

There are occasions when it might be necessary to go to this extreme – for example, if an employer has acquired a bad reputation for mistreating workers, or if unusually arduous conditions are involved – but those tend to get factored into what is ‘standard’ for this role, so those mostly don’t apply.

The other time someone might make such an offer is in a willful attempt to sabotage a competitor. That possibility can’t be ignored if it’s an NPC making such an offer to employees of a PC, and the GM should consider carefully how competitors might react to a PC making such an offer; they would probably assume exactly that. Bidding wars for a workforce are never cost-effective, so they would almost certainly look to other avenues – bribing officials, recruiting ‘specialists’ from the local Thieves’ Guild (if there is such a thing), getting laws passed, etc. The one certainty is that this will immerse the campaign in the local politics and society – right up to the PC’s necks!

3.7.1 Overpaying workers / Elite Quality Workforce

Paying a better-than average wage – especially if the extra is in the form of bonuses that can be and have to be, earned – is a whole different kettle of fish.

As a general rule, one Labor Unit in ten does the work of 1 1/2 (or more) standard Labor Units – if they are rewarded commensurately. If they are not, their productivity declines until it achieves parity with the proffered wage scale, as explained earlier.

Offering Premium Wages is a good way of recruiting people in a competitive market, but puts the business on more of a profitability knife-edge. But it’s also an effective way of rewarding and encouraging loyalty.

From the point of view of the GM simulating the business operation, it’s the owning players who set the policies; the Recruiter / Manager will make the best deals he can within the limits of his abilities, but he can always be overridden by instructions from his ‘bosses’ to be a little more generous (or vice-versa).

Do not let the game bury itself in employment minutia. The modern world has the accumulated baggage of centuries of lawyers and governments carving out rules and regulations and standard employee contracts in changing social and technological conditions, and all of it is too complicated to make for a reasonable and fun game.

If the PCs want to be a little more generous as a way of buying a little loyalty ‘protection’, let them add whatever percentage they like to the bottom-line wages bill and leave it up to the Recruiter / Manager to translate that into actual terms and conditions.

The usual arrangement would be (at best) a small increase over standard, a signing bonus, possibly partially paid after the first week / month, and the balance as bonuses that can be earned.

Let’s say that the PCs suggest a 10% increase (that’s quite a lot, as anyone with any human resources experience will realize). A smart implementation of that might be: +2% over standard wages, +1% in signing bonuses / Christmas bonuses each year, and 7% in earnable bonuses. If only 1 in 10 Labor Units are to get that 7%, that’s a potential 7/(1/10)= +70% bonuses. If only 1 in 20, that’s 7/(1/20)= +140% in bonuses.

A more likely number would be +5% or so to the wages bottom line. That might reflect +1% over standard wages, +1% reserved for emergency employee assistance, +0.5% in annual loyalty bonuses, and +2.5% in earnable bonuses. If 1 in 10 are to earn such bonuses, that’s potentially +25% to their annual earnings as a bonus (which won’t push elite workforces to their maximum potential, but will use some of their capability); if 1 in 20, that’s +50% (which will extract full efficiency from half of the Elite-quality Labor Units in an organization, but will leave half of them under-utilized), and so on.

A still better approach would be for the PCs to mandate, and/or the Recruiter/Manager to advise, setting those percentages independently and seeing where the bottom line comes to as a result.

+2.5% over standard wages, +1% reserved fro emergency employee assistance, +0.5% annual loyalty bonuses, comes to a total of +4%. One in ten units are Elite Quality, who should earn maybe +60% in bonuses; so that adds +6% to the total. And here we are, back at the +10% overall total – but with a far more efficient wage structure. This is the sort of package that could tempt even a reasonably loyal employee – if you lived up to the promises. More importantly, it’s the sort of package that would let a business hold onto good people once they found them – so it’s a business operation that would grow more successful over time.

3.7.3 Standard Wages

There’s not a whole lot to say about Standard Wages. They are neither niggardly nor generous, and they earn no loyalty in and of themselves – but there are other ways of doing so. Another way of looking at the standard wage is leaving yourself vulnerable to other loyalty-affecting impacts and policies, for good or ill.

3.7.4 Underpaying workers / Lower Quality Workforce

Your workforce will always be the best that can be recruited, given the current labor market. Sometimes, that’s not saying much, and sometimes, it’s saying entirely too much; this is a function of local social conditions more than anything else. The presumption is that if there are workers available for temporary hire, warm bodies will be thrown at the workload until a standard Labor Unit’s effectiveness is achieved; this results in lower wages per worker, but no overall change in the wages bill.

The implication of the caveat is that there are times and circumstances under which even mediocre people are hard to find – in feudal societies in times of war or pestilence, for example, or in tiny backwaters.

If the temporary labor needed is simply not available, there are only two solutions, neither of them all that attractive: you can pay workers what they are worth, and live with only having effectively-partial Labor Units available, so that things take longer; or you can pay someone extra to move in to cover the shortfall, buying efficiency at a premium.

A lot of potentially-profitable trade routes are under-developed or unexploited simply because they run through so many back ways and tiny way-stations that they are excessively vulnerable to such problems. This creates an opportunity for canny PCs and other business newcomers to exploit. And it’s also a truism that lying on ANY active trade route spurs local growth, so it can be a serous opportunity that will inevitably lead to a connection between the operators of the business and the local community. That’s plot gold, if it’s not forced on the players!

3.7.5 Oppression through underpayment

The scrooge ‘solution’ – screw maximum profits out of a business in the short-term regardless of any long-term damage that may result.

The greater the available workforce, the more employers can get away with this sort of attitude.

There is a ‘healthy’ level of unemployment within any given society (the specifics will vary from one society to another). In modern Australia it’s about 4.3% – that’s regarded as ‘full employment’, i.e. virtually everyone who wants a job can get one. In the US, it’s generally considered to be about 4.4%. If there is greater reliance on day labor markets, it can be considerably higher, because the day laborers are considered ‘unemployed’. 6%, 8%, 10% or even 12-15% are not out of the question, even in reasonably modern settings.

The unemployment that goes with ‘full employment’ is the result of employees changing jobs, switching from full-time to part-time or casual employment, and so on. There’s always a certain amount of this, and if/when the unemployment rate drops below this level, you have a worker shortage that begins to damage economic growth – which creates more unemployment until you get back to the ‘ideal’ level (and frequently more).

A huge element of modern economic management is about creating business conditions that maintain employment at the ideal level for maximum growth, but so many factors are outside of anyone’s control, and can only be responded to after the fact, that this is almost impossible to get right all the time. The results are, inevitably, cycles of economic growth and recession. Feudal systems tend to be more resilient and less subject to these cycles, but they still exist; the more modern the society, the more these cycles will have an impact.

Increasingly, since (I think) the 1980s, the practice has been to base government decisions not on the current value, but on the trend since the last measurement. This is more reactive but less precise, with a greater risk of not doing enough or of doing too much.

If unemployment exceeds the ideal level, then there are more workers than there are positions for those workers to occupy. Anyone who has a job is less inclined to rock the boat, and workers are easily replaced – so wages tend to get cut at such times, and business push for greater levels of profit per transaction as a result. From the government perspective, that’s the worst possible choice, because it increases the number of people struggling to make ends meet, which increases the number who can’t hold onto a job, which increases the already-too-high unemployment rate. This is why, left to sort themselves out, economic recessions tend to turn into economic Depressions.

What is usually most effective at such times is putting more money in the hands of the lowest-paid workers, because they tend to spend all of it. This feeds into a middle-class, who also tend to spend most of it, eventually trickling up to bolster the wealth of the major businesses. Each individual boost is small, but add enough of them together and you get significant movements of wealth. I remember reading somewhere that the average circulation of dollars at the lowest levels of society is a factor of 6.7, i.e. each dollar passes through 6.7 sets of hands before ending up in the government’s hands or sequestered by the mega-rich. But the memory could be wrong, and I can’t remember exactly what the term is for this currency circulation to look it up – and it might be different in other nations, my memory relates to the Australian economy.

With few positions in-between, feudal and fantasy societies tend to have fewer opportunities for such transfers, so the factor is likely to be smaller – maybe only 3 or 4. That means that to have the same level of impact on the economy, the amount of cash placed into circulation needs to be about twice that of a society with more layers in a middle class.

3.7.5.1 Sidebar: Adventuring Economics

In Sparkle and Clink: Objective-Oriented Loot Placement, way back in 2009, I derived tables of how many D&D adventurers of a given character level can be expected within a general population, based on the number of characters of a given level who will survive to reach their next character level.

In the article, I assumed that 9 in 10 would survive, found that the economics didn’t make sense, tried 1 in 10 and found that it was too extreme, then tried a 1-in-5 which was closer. That then led on to revising the value-of-treasure-per-character-level tables, and then a long list of forms of loot, most of which would soak up excess cash without destabilizing the economy.

Breaking The Bank: controlling treasure in D&D, also from 2009, looks at a different economic problem: how much are monsters worth, and how much of it should be cash – and what are some alternatives?

Understanding the realities of economics within any given world or campaign is not essential – but not doing so leaves the GM vulnerable to various campaign-corrosive problems, like the PCs having too much cash, or even so much wealth that it undermines believability. I once played in a campaign where, at 15th level, the average PC had fifteen Billion GP. So we each hired a dozen 12th-level NPCs to go around doing most of our fighting for us. And they were being payed enough that they each recruited four 8th level clerics to keep them in prime fighting trim. And they were being paid enough that they each bought a litter and eight 1st-level characters to do nothing but cart them around. Plus we had cooks and entertainers and various others hanging-on to the payroll. When the 6 PCs and our entourage of about 3,000 people found a dungeon, we didn’t explore it so much as infest it, and when we went to a village, we quite often outnumbered the locals 5-to-1 or more. We were a band of locusts, moving from place to place, with nothing short of an army able to stop us… needless to say, the campaign began to collapse very quickly.

Now, if the opportunity to invest the loot had been there – with losses – it would not have solved the problem; only delayed and magnified it. The problem was with those ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place. But the GM thought that GP were just a way of keeping score, and had no bearing on economics or behavior…

What should have happened is that our 12th-level surrogates should have seen how much wealth we had, allied together as a bandit army, and taken us down one by one, only for them to then be sucked dry by the clerics, who could then build opulent temples – almost 300 of them, worth around 50 million GP each!

3.7.5 Oppression through underpayment (cont)

So, what actually happens when the PCs decide to boost profits without sharing the wealth?

Every little niggle about the work experience or work environment gets magnified in the eyes of the workers who are being short-payed. Any concept of loyalty quickly goes south, starting with lurid-but-true tales of workers being exploited. These cultivate an atmosphere in which even more extreme-and-untrue tales and rumors circulate freely, until things reach the point where people would rather be tortured on the rack than work for the business. As this attitude pervades the business, it first stops making money at all (because the workers aren’t doing their jobs) and then begins an accelerating decline as the few workers you have start stealing the company blind.

A large workforce availability can buy a temporary cushion, nothing more. It’s easy to literally drive a business into the ground until it’s worthless.

But, usually, long before that point is met, a competitor will spring up offering a better deal – even if it’s only standard wages and a more generous attitude – probably started by someone who used to be in the PCs employ, and who was trained by them, who knows all of their contacts and suppliers – and the business completely collapses virtually overnight.

If the PCs are smart, they might get out having lost nothing more than their initial investment – but if they were smart, they wouldn’t have behaved this way in the first place. The vastly more probable outcome is that someone convinces the PCs that the setbacks are only temporary and can be solved by what is effectively throwing good money after bad. In the worst case scenario, the PCs will be completely beggared, left destitute, and forced to go back to work for a living. And it would be richly deserved, too.

What about the Recruiter / Manager? Why didn’t he sound warning bells, do something to head this doom and destruction off?

Under this scenario, he is probably the most likely person to set up a rival operation, possibly anonymously – until it’s too late. It follows that the loyalty of the Recruiter / Manager is the single greatest factor in the survival of the business operation. Burn him, and your business operation is doomed. Keep him loyal, and it still might not survive – there will come a point at which bribing him to stay loyal is no longer enough.

This policy can be implemented in harsh economic times for a brief period; anything more, and the rot will set in.

3.7.6 Family as Employees

One of the obvious ways to cut costs and boost profits is to use family members as part of the workforce, assuming they can be trusted. The compromise is that they may not be as productive or skilled as people who actually do this (whatever it is) for a living.

There does come a time when it may become necessary to start paying these family members wages. Generally, a little pocket money is good enough for younger family members, and the transition should start when children are a couple of years short of being considered an adult and be phased in to full wages when that milestone is achieved.

However, some business operators levy a wages ‘discount’ on the basis that the children will one day inherit the business, for good or ill, and profits in the meantime support the family, including the children. This starts to bring into issue a whole range of social values and societal norms – do adult children normally live at home with the family, for example, or is it expected that they begin to establish independent lives, or something in-between? If they are expected to become independent, can they do so while continuing to work in ‘the family business’? What are the general attitudes toward nepotism? Is it allowed for adult children employed by the business be granted privileges, or are they expected to be treated the same as everyone else?

The ‘phased transition’ is good enough if the GM hasn’t put any effort into answering these questions, but actually defining answers and then applying them is a better answer.



Last of the Triptych. See main image for credits.

3.7.7 ‘Friends’ helping ‘Friends’

Aside from the occasional helping hand from another PC or their family connections, one source of assistance that would never be neglected in real life are Chambers Of Commerce and the like. These are associations of business owners operating in the same region as the PCs business.

Membership is sometimes free but usually not, though dues and fees may be waived for the first year or two of a new businesses’ operation, and it’s almost always worth it. Not only does the resulting body have enough clout to negotiate with higher authority with a single voice (which gets attention), but they have all dealt with local issues like laws and zoning and whatever else, and there are often other services available.

Some such bodies may make low-cost business loans available to new start-ups, for example, or may offer a discount to dues-paid-up members. They can usually connect the owner of a business with legal representation and financial advisors and other professional services that would otherwise consume valuable time to run down.

In more modern eras, there may be newsletters or other advertising opportunities.

These are all good, solid, benefits, and it would generally be inadvisable not to take advantage of them. A business is never so vulnerable as when they are first starting out.

But there is a downside, one that the canny GM can exploit. The problems of one member tend to become the problems of all, and the Chamber Of Commerce (it’s not always called that, by the way) can serve to inform players of changing business conditions that they haven’t noticed.

Levies and temple donations to particular deities on behalf of the body collectively may be part of the deal. It’s often the case that existing members are expected to make themselves available to assist new members.

There may even be an offer of a business ‘mentor’ to help smooth the path to prosperity.

No two such bodies are exactly alike. Again, this brings a whole new range of social and world-building questions to the fore – who’s eligible? Who’s not? How much help can you expect if sharp dealing descends into criminal charges? Who runs it, and how did they come to that position? What’s the local group’s reputation? How corrupt are they? Do they actually sanction bribery and corruption, when it’s deemed necessary? Are there religious connections of significance? The list goes on and on.

Racial and religious restrictions are also key questions. Would they accept an Orc-run business? Would they try and force the Orcs to clean up their act?

What’s the position of the local Thieves’ Guild? Can they become members? Are members considered exempt from Thieves’ Guild harassment and ‘protection’ charges? Is the entire Chamber of Commerce a ‘protection’ racket given a respectable public face?

How about jobs and businesses that are often shunned on moral grounds, like Brothels? Can they join, and does doing so afford a level of credibility as valuable parts of society? Or are they anathema?

It’s also sometimes the case = when there are enough potential members to justify it – that a particular religious, social, or racial group have their own bespoke such body, entirely separate from the general one that anyone can join. There may be considerable peer-pressure exerted on members of those groups to join the more specialist group instead of the broader one. Such specialist groups are usually more expensive than the common ones!

If there are any such specialist representative bodies, do they actually send a representative to the common bodies? Or are the two at arm’s length? Are they required to enforce religious or racially-based doctrines or restrictions that others are not – such is often the case with Arab and Jewish -operated businesses, for example.

3.7.8 Slaves

The third way of cutting down labor costs is the use of Slave labor. Personally, I find the slave trade to be abhorrent, but not to the point of myopia on the subject – I’m very well aware that for centuries, this was considered acceptable.

Even if there are no slaves in the society, there may well be caste issues that leave some in the category of second- or third-class citizens.

As a general rule of thumb, it costs as much to feed, house, and maintain 20 slaves as it does one free worker. If wages are depressed, that number may come down to the region of 10-15; if wages are elevated, it may rise as high as 25-30.

But slaves are easily mistreated and don’t need to be fed or accommodated to any reasonable standard – you can cut their rations and crowd them into substandard accommodations and boost that ratio to 40 or 50, if you have enough work for such a large group.

From these numbers, it’s easy to see why – once it has been baked into a culture and an economy – it is so hard for slave cultures to give up the practice. In general, it requires some circumstance that drastically reduces the dependence on slave labor before any such socially-progressive change can even be contemplated. Outside of that, anything that renders the practice economically unviable can trigger social change – but expect slave owners to resist any such measures tooth and nail. And beyond that, there is only force.

One may think that religious enlightenment may offer a third recourse before things get so severe, but in general religions are very good at setting their morality aside when it come to subject populations like slaves. Whether that remains true in a world where the Gods actually turn up and have their own opinions on matters is another question entirely. If the Gods are okay with people owning slaves, the question then has to be asked, do these Gods keep slaves, too? Think about that one for a bit.

Also as a general rule, for every 25 slaves or part thereof, you will need a Slave-master or -Supervisor(the title may vary). These are paid as much as any other employee if not more, because the slaves they command can make or break an operation.

My personal preference is always to make the slave trade something only ‘bad cultures’ do in my games – but that’s my own personal conviction showing through, and I recognize that. So I have no problem with Gnolls keeping slaves, or Orcs – but would not be in favor of Dwarves or Elves or Humans doing so.

Servants and other lower-class types – fine. But not slaves – not in my games. Usually.

3.7.9 Minor Stakeholders

One way to buy loyalty cheaply that the sub-system described earlier doesn’t take into consideration is the idea of offering long-term loyal employees a small stake in the business, either for ‘free’ or to purchase, or a combination of the two. I’m not talking big percentages or frequent offers – 0.5% for 10 years’ service seems about right, and maybe an option to buy another 0.5%..

You have to remember, when assessing this kind of offer, that multiple employees might qualify. If there were 20 such NPCs, that’s potentially 20% of the company every 10 years – after 50 such years, the employees could own 100% of the company.

Avoiding that is the concept of shares. This breaks the business into smaller amounts each time you issue more shares – which you do, every time such loyalty bonuses are about to come due.

Let’s say, instead of 0.5% and 0.5%, the offer is 50 shares and the option of buying another 50. That initially divides the company into 50/0.005=10,000 shares. If, each time, you release another 500 shares, you get the following pattern:

• 10,000 shares initially, all yours = 100%
• 10,500 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 8,500 or 80.9%.
• 11,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 7,000 or 63.63%.
• 11,500 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 5,500 or 50%.
• 12,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 4,000 or 33.3%.
• 12,500 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 2,500 or 20%.

An employee with the maximum ownership would have amassed 500 shares over those 50 years, giving them half the ownership that you have.

But you might not be comfortable with that – any six of the 20 ‘loyal’ employees could overrule you on any given business decision. There are two solutions: more shares, or non-voting stock.

More shares, first – let’s make it 1,000 every 10 years:

• 10,000 shares initially, all yours = 100%
• 11,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 9,000 or 81.8%.
• 12,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 8,000 or 66.67%.
• 13,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 7,000 or 53.85%.
• 14,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 6,000 or 42.86%.
• 15,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 5,000 or 33.33%.

Or, 2000 shares every time:

• 10,000 shares initially, all yours = 100%
• 12,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 10,000 or 83.33%.
• 14,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 10,000 or 71.437%.
• 16,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 10,000 or 62.5%.
• 18,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 10,000 or 55.56%.
• 20,000 shares, (50+50) × 20 = 2,000, leaves 10,000 or 50%.

Or, you could split your existing shares 3 for 2, and offer 1/40th of the additional shares outright and 1/4 for purchase:

• 10,000 shares initially, all yours = 100%
• 10,000 -> 15,000; 1/40 × 5,000 = 125; (125+125) × 20 =5000; leaves 10,000 = 66.67%
• 10,000 -> 15,000+5,000=20,000 total; 1/40 × 5,000 = 125; (125+125) × 20 =5,000; leaves 10,000 = 50%
• 10,000 -> 15,000+10,000=25,000 total; 1/40 × 5,000 = 125; (125+125) × 20 =5,000; leaves 10,000 = 40%
• 10,000 -> 15,000+15,000=30,000 total; 1/40 × 5,000 = 125; (125+125) × 20 =5,000; leaves 10,000 = 33.33%
• 10,000 -> 15,000+20,000=35,000 total; 1/40 × 5,000 = 125; (125+125) × 20 =5,000; leaves 10,000 = 28.57%

Notice how this keeps your holding a steady 10,000 shares.

A dose of realism before moving on to a (brief) discussion of voting vs non-voting shares:

• It’s totally unrealistic for the number of employees who earn the bonus to remain at 20 the whole time. There might initially be 10; then some of them die off or leave the company, so only 5 remain, but the five who are gone are replaced with 10 new people who earn their first chance to buy; then, over the third decade, half of each group die or leave, so there are just 3, and 5, and 10 newcomers earning their first purchase option; and then 1, 3, 5, and 10; and then 1, 1, 3, 5, and 10 (a total of 20) at the end of the 5th decade. Everyone who doesn’t qualify for the bonus leaves additional shares in your possession.
• This makes it much harder to amass the votes needed to overrule your decisions. The people who have stayed the longest have the most power – but if they keep amassing profit because of your management, enough to stay with you all that time, they will also have the least inclination to change.
• Not everyone will have the financial resources to take up the option, in whole or in part. Every share that isn’t bought from you remains yours.
• This also makes it harder for employees to challenge you.
• The purchase option transforms some of your shares into additional cash on top of whatever dividend the shares may pay. There’s no reason why you can’t issue still more shares and buy them all with that cash. Or you might diversify – owning a slice of a key supplier makes an awful lot of sense.
• Regarding the last version of the ‘additional shares’ concept: it would be more normal for the shares held by employees to also split. But that makes it more complicated – so I deliberately simplified the option by excluding that effect.

Non-voting shares
In the end, though, there’s a simpler option: designate the free shares as ‘non-voting’ shares. While both have the same initial purchase price and the same nominal book value, the lack of voting authority does discount the non-voting shares a little. According to stout.com and public.com, there’s a real-world discount of 0-5% in actual value.

But this adds its own layer of complication, one thing more for the GM to keep track of – so, while it’s probably the real-world answer most commonly utilized, it’s not the best game answer. Which is why it’s being tucked away in this sub-sub-sub-section, where it can be profoundly ignored and quickly forgotten.

Ah, but what if your players insist? They know as well as I do that this is the ‘realistic’ answer.

Sod them – they shouldn’t be that close to the business operations, anyway. The whole point of this series / e-book is to put a firewall between entities that play the game and the operation of a business of some kind, and such hands-on control violates that principle.

What they would, in fact, be doing is overriding the authority of their hand-picked Recruiter / Manager. Should they insist, they make it harder for the GM to keep the business at arm’s length from the game play, and the normal human reaction of a manager who supposedly had ‘full authority’ to such professional betrayal would be to walk away, possibly ruthlessly.

The GM should let them get away with proposing something like this – once – and make sure that the protest of the Recruiter / Manager is clearly heard. Then he should draw back the curtains (briefly) to point out the issues of making the game harder to run and other consequences that could result – and be prepared to blizzard the PCs with business decisions both major and trivial as an object lesson. One single game session in which nothing but business operations minutia takes place should be all it takes for the PCs to start the next session in a very different frame of mind. A mea culpa to the estranged Recruiter / Manager is all it will take – the first time – for the status quo ante to be restored.

3.7.10 Combinations & Complications

I’ve canvassed lots of alternatives in the course of section 3.7, and – while I don’t recommend it – the practical reality is likely to be some combination of two or more of the alternatives. From the outside, a business or commercial operation may appear to be a seamless monolith, but the more closely you look, the greater the complexity that becomes possible.

I’ve had four different PCs belonging to four different players operate businesses or commercial enterprises in my superhero campaign – Behemoth, Nebula, Backlash, and Warcry. My handling of all these was based on the way it was done in Marvel Comic’s Iron Man, and while a commercial operation in a fantasy campaign will not be the same as such an operation in a superhero setting, the general principles should translate across and map onto a Fantasy setting fairly readily.

• Behemoth – Started off as a Tony Stark with a tech company to provide resources and funding for his experiments in high-tech. And, as long as he stuck to that, all was well. But then he started to micromanage outside investments, like buying up the entire Brazilian coffee crop. At the same time, he began to engage in research that the rest of the team would find problematic because it broke the peace treaty between them and their biggest enemy. When this research eventually came to light, the character responded to the rebuke, censure, and loss of authority within the team by going completely feral, appearing on a late night talk show to reveal the other character’s secret identities. Somehow, the key moments of that transmission never made it to air. The character was then killed in a confrontation at his main factory – only to wake up back in his secret lab missing the last six months worth of memories, his place having been taken by an ‘evil’ (mentally unstable) clone. But the character’s actions as that clone continued to have repercussions; Nebula decided that he couldn’t be trusted, and launched a hostile takeover of Behemoth’s business, a business that he had invested character points in. At which point a fairness doctrine kicked in: the way the takeover was set up, it was almost certain to succeed, so that was what was going to happen, transforming the business into a pule of cash – which he could then use to create a new business operation, which could utilize new technologies to establish itself as a worthy successor to the old.
   
• Nebula – had the ability to transmute one substance into another, spent a lot of time figuring out how it worked in the early days of the campaign, and then built a business around the mining and production of rare materials. Got heavily into deep-sea mining. The company was actually run by an AI developed by the character, so that the PC had no need of dealing with the boring minutia and could concentrate on high-level plot decisions. Orchestrated the take-down of a major rival (being used to fund an enemy organization), then used the cash that resulted to launch a hostile takeover of Behemoth’s company, as described above. Later discovered to be a parallel-world duplicate of the original Nebula whose memories had been manipulated by an enemy so that she would act as a ‘fifth column’ on their behalf from time to time. Nebula’s player could never resist trying to wring some unfair advantage out of the game system, no matter how many times it caused the character to come a cropper (link included in case anyone is unfamiliar with the term)
   
• Backlash – Had a computer consultancy, a specialized software engineer whose business never actually appeared in-game. He simply specified that it kept him busy 8-10 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, and earned him so much disposable income a month.
   
• Warcry – Started as a weapons engineer. Introduced color television to a parallel world based on the 1950s. Built a factory to assemble the sets using 1980s industrial technology (carefully guarded as a trade secret) – effectively matching or slightly bettering the prices of the existing black and white sets. Gave every TV studio and production house two color-TV cameras, free, with the option to buy more at discounted prices, then continually introduced refinements to the original 1960s / 1970s technology. Used the proceeds to fund his team’s operations. Unless I brought it up as part of a plot (didn’t happen often), the business was never mentioned again – only the resources that he was able to employ as a result of it. On a metagame level, paid character points for a large and successful business and provided the concept as an in-game interpretation.

I’m sure you can see, in the above summations, the seeds upon which this entire supplement has been built. The key principles are the same.

Just keep the bottom line in mind as a guiding principle – PCs can start a business if they want, or buy an existing one if they have the cash. That business is depicted as an abstract entity in the game background that produces a certain level of resources / profits over time. Everything about it that can be firewalled away from actual in-game play has been; it should only appear when the plot demands it.

3.8 Technological Impact

I find myself in two minds when it comes to applying magic on an industrial scale. It can be a wonderful way of making campaign settings unique, on the one hand; and it can have catastrophic effects on the underlying assumptions of campaign economics, on the other.

The first usually wins out in the end – every campaign I’ve run has done something large-scale based on magic, from enchanted street lamps (a whole new industry to be manned that requires low-level mages to make these things) all the way through to impossible bridges and buildings floating in the air. Unfortunately, my Shards Of Divinity campaign ended before the PCs made their way to the Dragon City that is built on a cloud, where they would have learned that the Dragons invented Magic and taught it to Elves, who (in turn) taught humans, and Dwarves, while the Dragons were teaching the Fey, for reasons. At the same time, the Shadow Fey were corrupting the Dragons, giving rise to the Chromatics, and in particular, Tiamat. Tiamat’s brother, Bahamut, siphoned off everything that was good from his Brother before expelling him from the Dragon City, in the process elevating himself from their leader and font of wisdom (think Confucius) into their one and only deity. Which all ties into the campaign mythology, because the Fey were driven to do what they did by the corruption of outside forces.

Anyway, the point is this: there are a great many low-level spells that can be inordinately useful if applied to a work setting, something that becomes possible with the crafting of wands and similar. That, on it’s own, gives Wizard-owned business operations an unfair advantage, but few of them are actually into that sort of thing, so it’s not usually a serious problem.

It’s when Magic becomes available more generally, and becomes the dominant technology of a setting, that things change.

I spent quite a lot of time and effort looking at the logistics of an Empire Of Undead for my Fumanor campaign, “Seeds Of Empire”, and the impact of workers who never tire, never need sleep, and don’t need to eat or drink, is absolutely monstrous. I explored the subject relatively briefly in a sidebar, “Why Is The Golden Empire Such A Threat?” in IInventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5, about half-way through the post. The section of text that follows it describes the origins of the Golden Empire, providing additional insights.

I actually considered excerpting the two passages of text for direct inclusion here, but it’s only semi-relevant, and so decided not to.

Magic can be just as large a force amplifier to the workers within a society where it’s readily available. GMs could so a lot worse during their world-building than to skim through the list of (relatively low-level) spells (both clerical and arcane), looking at how it could be used for business-related purposes.

You don’t have to be exhaustive, and it may be better if you are not, because that leaves room for different ideas the next time you need them. Consider the resulting list to be a guide to the things that could be applied; the next great question is, how many of them have actually be picked up and applied by the citizens. It’s tempting (and probably more realistic) to say ‘all of them’, but the results are too complicated to assess.

If you insist on going down that particular rabbit-hole, I recommend starting small – just two or three – and then adding the others a few at a time.

The other factor that can be relevant is cost-effectiveness. The use of a spell has to earn or save at least as much as it costs to replace the source of the magic. That might be hiring wizards or clerics either periodically or full-time. It might be buying a replacement magic wand. or a crate of potions.

Magical Lanterns work, economically, because the normal function of government is to operate at a loss, i.e. to provide services that are funded through collecting and aggregating taxes. If the ‘service’ these magic items provide is deemed important enough or valuable enough, the government responsible can provide them, even at a loss.

It’s up to you to decide what practices are society-wide, which ones were tried and didn’t catch on, and which ones have (rightly or wrongly) been banned – – but do make sure that you have some justification for such bans, however flimsy!

Beyond that, if the PCs want to be clever, they are more than welcome to show off. But do make sure that they aren’t misreading the spell information even the slightest little bit – tiny nuances multiplied a million-fold can make a huge difference, and at that scale, every technicality matters.

Of course, that’s not the sum total of the story of human ingenuity. The subsections below deal with the more prosaic technological developments and the lessons of history.

3.8.1 Major Breakthroughs

As a general rule, these are a big no-no. There can be exceptions, but by and large, I don’t want and won’t permit players to import twentieth (or twenty-first) century approaches and attitudes and policies and practices and technologies.



This image is copyrighted, it’s use here to represent the film in question is believed to qualify as fair use insofar as the image is being used to refer to and provide commentary on, the film itself, which is the purpose of the image, and that this usage does not greatly expand the availability of the image nor impair its intended purpose. Sourced from Wikipedia, refer to the image’s page on that site for additional information.

Some have tried – everything from Labor Unions to Mass Production / Assembly Lines to Carbon Fiber & Kevlar. Shades of Yahoo Serious, I’ve even had a bard try and invent the electric guitar so that his ‘renditions’ of Beatles songs could sound more ‘legitimate’!

(For the record, I had no problem with him claiming his Bard had written the Lennon-McCartney song catalog. It helped give his Bard a distinctive flavor, and the catalog. of songs is broad enough that he could usually pull out something appropriate to most situations).

The operative rule is that modern processes require infrastructure and understanding of subjects that are beyond the people of the time, and may rest on assumptions that, in this fantasy world, are not applicable.

Probably the biggest one is the concept of the assembly line. It rests on the concept that the same thing done each and every time by the same worker with the same tools and parts will have the same outcome. Nope, doesn’t work – not in this game. The parts will vary within the tolerances of the engineering capabilities of the era, which are nowhere near precise enough for production-line manufacturing. As a result, no two parts will be exactly alike, no two parts will fit together perfectly, and no production line will produce reliable devices. At least, in my book.

Another concept that doesn’t translate very well is the modern approach to science, the scientific method. There’s a hidden assumption at the heart of science called reproducibility – do the same experiment in two different places at two different times, and if the first experiment was valid, you get the same results (within a margin of error) in the second.

Science has now proven that this sort of predictability is far less common than was thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, and well into the 20th as well. Many seemingly stable systems are actually extremely unstable and predictable only in the relatively short term, if at all. Weather is like that; Orbital mechanics is like that; in fact, all sorts of systems are inherently chaotic, in which tiny (possibly immeasurably tiny) differences in the inputs ripple and accumulate until they lead to extremely divergent outcomes.

Magic is another of those systems. It’s not quite at the point of a butterfly flapping it’s wings in China to influence the weather three days later in London, but it’s not far from it – and you don’t have three days of stable predictability, either. In general, spells work, and work reliably – but only because “reliable” has been so broadly defined.

Let’s take D&D’s Fireball, cast by a 6th-level wizard. Since it does 1d6 per caster level, that’s a range of 6-36 points. The average is going to be (6+36) / 2 = 21 points. It will be a bit more predictable than that, due to the concentration of results on a bell curve:



But really, if you proposed a supposedly scientific theory that said there was an 87.84% chance of getting a result somewhere between 15 and 27, you?d be laughed out of the room. That’s not measuring certainty, it’s displaying un-certainty.

There have been a number of attempts by PCs to conduct a ‘scientific analysis’ of magic in my superhero campaigns – some of their most dangerous enemies use magic – and the bottom line is that within it’s own world of cause and effect, there is an internal logic and rationale to what happens, but no predictability about how much of it will happen. Or exactly when. Or even, precisely where. Those answers all come up the same: “Tilt!”

3.8.2 Incremental Gains

Until relatively recently, there’s been a popular consensus that the middle ages, the medieval period, whatever you want to call it, was not a great time for technological advance. “The called it the Dark Ages for a reason” says the wise old fool in a desiccated voice.

That reason was to contrast the historical period past with the “age of enlightenment” that followed, when scientific discoveries were emerging hand over fist. it’s pro-government propaganda, really – “Listen, people, I know times have been difficult, but things are getting better; don’t throw away all the progress that we have made together in frustration at the apparent pace of change. We need no revolutions here, thank you very much!”

Just about any political figure from any regime past or present could make that speech and it wouldn’t seem out-of-place.

The more up-to-date thinking on the subject of technological development in the periods of history upon which Fantasy Game environments are usually based is that there was actually a fair bit of progress made – but it was made in the form of slow and incremental improvements and by trial-and-error, not by new understandings of the theory describing a natural process.

Everything from crop rotation to armor design to stirrups – compare any technology from the end of the time-span to what was around at the start, and you will find measurable, discernible, improvements. In most cases, they didn’t know exactly why they worked – only that they did.

And that’s in a world where there is no serious challenge to the general principle of science. Even religious authority was quite happy to live in a world where the way God worked his miracles was better understood – it was only when people began to take God out of the equation completely that they got their backs up, for the most part.

Each generation is able to do some things just a little better, a little more easily, a little faster, and a little more reliably.

Technology in a Fantasy environment has just such a serious challenge on its hands – the chaotic nature of magic, which demonstrably works, and which undermines one of the chief tenets of scientific research. It’s uncertain whether or not science could even mount a serious defense of its principles when that can be held out as an example of unpredictability.

And, with such a limited understanding of cause-and-effect, speculation on the subject of why things happen in a logical, predictable, manner are seriously undermined. Without that, all you are left with are Incremental gains by trial and error.

Some people (PCs whose players are used to a science-based worldview) may attempt to exclude magic as some sort of ‘override’ of what is natural, placing it in the category of ‘outside intervention that invalidates the inviolability of cause-and-effect’ – that’s fine. But with such a huge caveat, science would be extremely limited in it’s capacity to garner respect and any sort of serious backing for study and research.

Gains in understanding would still be possible – but they would be small and isolated, and always with that huge caveat on the top. Leonardo da Vinci or his cultural analogue can still be fascinated with the idea of flight like a bird – but when a magic carpet really works, it takes a lot of the impetus out of the research.

One final way of looking at the question, then: a natural world in which magic works, and clerics can summon up the power of the Gods, or request their actual presence, is so much vaster and more complicated than the natural world that was perceived in the middle ages, even in the age of enlightenment, that scientific understanding would have been set back centuries. You can’t simplify such a world enough to make progress on rational explanations of natural phenomena – not as quickly, at any rate; there’s just too much to understand.

It follows that if there is to be any sort of progress that improves profitability of a business, it’s going to be small, and it’s likely to be a trade secret, closely held within the confines of that particular operation.

Which brings me to:

3.8.3 Trade Secrets & Industrial Spies

In many ways, the fantasy world is more akin to that of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s than it is the modern world of today. These days, the default assumption is that nothing stays secret for very long, that anything will eventually leak out, and that the way you protect your intellectual property is not with secrecy, camouflage, and misdirection, it’s with legality and restriction.

But, back then, the Trade Secret was still a credible approach; every business had it’s own way of doing things that they believed (rightly or wrongly) gave them an edge over their rivals, and the protection of that secret was an essential part of operating the business.

There are still some legacies of that older world-view in the arena of genetic modification of crops, but – for the most part – it’s assumed that a product can be reverse-engineered within minutes, hours, or at worst, days of it being publicly available.

When secrets are important, spies are a natural and inevitable way of trying to get hold of those secrets. After all, if you have your brilliant innovations and add those of one or two of your rivals, you will be unbeatable – and, unless they penetrate your cloud of secrecy, they will never know.

It’s even possible for two different people to come up with (essentially) the same idea at much the same time. It’s happened through the last 120 years or so on any number of occasions. If neither of them ever has to reveal how they achieved their results, neither would know of the other’s innovation.

As soon as you have an innovative idea, you have something that needs to be protected.

You know, it’s really questionable whether or not the same rate of progress in technological innovation would have resulted without the acceptance of regulations regarding trade marks and copyright and patents. These protect the right to profit from intellectual property while making the underlying idea itself available for others to understand.

While there might be such things in a steampunk setting, most Fantasy campaigns don’t operate in such a political / social space. The world of trade secrets, then, would be well and truly alive.

And under more serious threat than ever they were in our reality. A wizard with a crystal ball can penetrate any business practice, if they know what they are looking for, and describe to a rival, in precise detail, exactly what it is that they do that’s different from your business practices.

This is something that most fantasy worlds don’t pay anywhere near enough attention to. Which generally means that players and PCs won’t pay enough attention to it, either.

The generous GM will make certain that the players understand all this when they first look into starting or investing in a business operation, reasoning that their characters are of the game world and would know about these sort of business environments, having been exposed to them from birth.

The more wary GM will hold the information close to his chest until such time as the whole business operation threatens to take over or derail the campaign – and then hit the PCs with it where it hurts.

Which sort of GM do you want to be? Personally, I think the players in the latter case would have justifiable reason to be upset with the GM. But it’s up to you.

3.9 Key Personnel & The Labor Unit

There are some key individuals with whom, under certain circumstances, the PCs can be more frequently expected to interact. These have a chapter dedicated to them (chapter 8), so I won’t go into too much detail here.

The duties that these individuals perform may or may not contribute to the work undertaken by Labor Units – there are too many variables and too many cultural variations to explicitly rule one way or another. Their ‘official duties’ will always take precedence, and any such contributions are carried out only in any time remaining.

It’s another source of (effectively) free labor, since the PCs would be paying these characters anyway.

Whatever the cultural answer imposed by the society in which the business operates, the answer to this question can go completely out the window if a PC takes on this role – but this is an all-or-nothing situation; either all the PCs adopt relevant roles or none of them can be permitted to.

And that can get tricky, because who is going to tell the player ‘no’ when it saves the rest of the PCs money / reduces their operating expenses to have one of the business owners occupy that key position within the organization. Certainly, the GM can’t do so – not directly, at any rate.

What he can do is make it clear to the PC in question what the consequences are: while the others are off adventuring, earning cash and XP, his opportunities to do so will be limited. The business operation will still be held at arm’s length, unless and until something happens in which the PC could make the difference. That probably means one encounter per dungeon explored by the rest, maximum.

Of course, the reality is not quite that simple. Are you really going to punish the player for exercising character agency? Time for a 1-2 punch, then. Explain that the alternative is to throw additional roadblocks in the way of the business, leading to loss of profits greater than the savings of having a PC take on the critical role – roadblocks in the form of encounters that only exist because there is a PC there, sticking his neck out – and that it means that sometimes the other players will have nothing to do for an hour or more at a time while the focus is on the PC going their own way.

This not only enlists the other PCs against the notion (by way of complete metagaming, I admit), but more importantly, summons peer pressure against the notion on the part of the other players.

But, before your blood gets too het up over this angst-laden proposition, there is an alternative, and it can even be a desirable solution to a completely different problem: you could split this PC off from the main campaign into an occasional side-campaign. Quite obviously, if the player is having trouble with over-commitment or changing real-world circumstances, this is a much better answer than having them drop out of the game completely – and it leaves the door open for them to return, should the restricting circumstances no longer apply.

Fairly early on in my superhero campaign, I had to do something similar, when one of the players joined the Army. He expected to be unavailable for most of the next year, but wanted to be able to bring his PC back when he was again available – so we designed a solution in which a brief solo campaign book-ended his military service, in the course of which the character would pick up skills that would reflect the things the player was likely to learn during his early service – tactics and logistics and the like. As a solution to the problem, it worked perfectly. I have no hesitation in recommending it if you encounter similar circumstances.

3.10 The Personnel Bottom Line

Everything about this implementation of business in a fantasy campaign is designed to abstract the entirety as much as possible while detailing specifics sufficiently sharply that you can dig into them should that prove necessary. Like an iceberg, at least nine tenths of the business should lie hidden from view.

Personnel are no exception to this principle. Except in very rare circumstances, or when the GM can make use of them as plot-hook delivery mechanisms, they should be faceless, nameless, building blocks, black boxes with transform money into (hopefully more) money.

Whenever it seems like you need to provide specific details about an NPC within the business operation who is not a Recruiter / Manager or some other Key Personnel, and the reason is not because this makes plot hook delivery more convenient, take a second, harder, look, specifically seeking an alternative. There might not be any – but that usually means that one or two PCs are poking too deeply into non-adventuring matters, something the systems are intended to reject and resist as much as possible.

You may not always be able to avoid manufacturing specifics about something that’s considered abstract within the system. But the more you let your implementation of the PC’s business operations adhere to these principles, the more everyone can have their cake and eat it, too.

Heck, it’s even possible that starting a business opens the door to even more adventuring, simply by tossing more hooks the way of the players and giving their characters additional motivation to get involved in whatever’s happening. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that you will get to world-build parts of the society, culture, economics, politics, theology, geography, and history that would otherwise never even get mentioned. That’s one heck of a bonus benefit to entice all concerned!

Okay, that’s a wrap for this chapter of Trade In Fantasy. Lots of food for thought and a few bones for you to chew over. Chapter four awaits – again, probably split into two or three parts. I may offer a quick fill-in post to give myself a chance to get ahead of the game in the writing – I’ll probably make a start on it and see how it progresses.

Landscapes are wonderful things, more significant & useful than many GMs realize. This post focuses on using Landscapes, both literal and metaphoric, using the lessons from the first part of the article. This is Part t 2 of 2.

This is the 4th of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series, which I expect to resume next week.

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

Part 1 gave non-artists the tools to analyze landscapes (and other images). Part 2 is all about using landscapes (both real and metaphoric), and picks up right where I left off. Everything below (unlike part 1) is outlined in my original draft of this article – in a way, it is the landscape, and the first part are the discrete elements that have been included.

Landscapes as Generic Symbols

Everything that’s been presented in this article so far doesn’t exist in my half-page outline of this article. It’s all information and understanding that’s going to be relevant, but it has all been added outside of that framework, and for that reason, this section brings about a major shift in focus and direction.

Let’s think for a moment about generic icons and symbols. What symbolizes a campaign, generally (as opposed to specific content relating to a specific campaign).

There are three choices, really – and most people can only think of two.

The first is the hex grid – but that’s less ubiquitous now than it once was. Nevertheless, the association is enough that I employed it as the foundation of Campaign Mastery’s icon:

The second is a die, or set of dice. These could be d6s, or a d20, or even a combination of different dice types. Symbolic of playing a game, the association between polyhedra and RPGs is strong enough to make the connection.

And the third choice is, I would argue, a landscape – a representation of an environment through which the characters can or are traveling.

Just about any landscape works as symbolism for a campaign generally..

Specific Associations

It follows that there has to be at least one “perfect” landscape that is perfectly symbolic of a specific campaign.

It may not contain everything that’s specific to the campaign (in fact, it usually won’t) but it will contain something that can be uniquely associated with that campaign, and no other, by the people who have played in it.

Initially, it may have to be fairly representational, but familiarity will permit abstraction. For example, the big bad from the early days of the campaign may have been an Orc with an eye-patch and one gold earring. As the campaign progressed, it was eventually discovered that he was a pawn of a bigger bad whilst secretly in the service of an enemy worse still. But he remains symbolic of the entire campaign, and eventually, an eye-patch and gold earring are all you need to graphically represent that campaign.

That’s a bad example, in that it’s a portrait and not a landscape, but the contention is that there will be a landscape that is just as iconic and symbolic of that campaign, a location so evocative that it can represent the whole.

Environment

Landscapes have that power because they don’t just depict a location or a setting, they display an environment – a climate, a geography, and possibly a society and an economy, all summed up in the one image that still follows all the rules for a good image.

Those include a clear focus, a good design, internal cohesion, an emotional impact, and prioritized detail.

A Clear Focus

It’s really easy to overload a single image with too many elements that demand to be the focal point. I’ve done it myself, many times – most recently, one of the chapter title graphics for the Trade In Fantasy series (you’ll know it when you see it).

How can you tell? If a clear and prominent element is in the image but not there to support the primary focus, then the image is – as my old art teacher used to say (his name was “Art”, by the way) – ‘confused’.

The problem increases exponentially with every other such element. On top of that, any element that needs to be explained adds to the confusion. Anything that’s not self-evident and self-explanatory is counter-productive.

I wrote once that A Picture Should Be Worth 1,000 Words – that point tends to get lost if you need to use 500 words to explain what’s in the image!

By way of illustration, let me close out this section by analyzing three of the graphics from the Trade In Fantasy series.

Example 1: Composite 9 (Poseidon & Time) from Chapter 3 Part 3



It’s really hard to find Fantasy Images that symbolize or show time. In the end, I had to make my own. In the background, the Posiedon image is by Enrique Meseguer (darksouls1). Dominating the foreground is a gravity-defying hourglass which is actually a combination of this image by gunter (moritz320) and an extract from this image by Alexander Lesnitsky (AlLes), with various color trickery to get the two to match up. The edges of the upper surface of the sand have been treated with a textural extract based on dry lake bed by Dimitrios Savva (Photography), https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Dimitrios%20Savva, https://web.archive.org/web/20230623201912/https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Dimitrios%20SavvaJarod Guest (Processing), https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Jarod%20Guest, https://web.archive.org/web/20230623201919/https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Jarod%20Guest, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons with some additional texture extracted from this dry lake bed
by Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 US, also via Wikimedia Commons. “Floating” in the sand as though it were a liquid are two elephants, one extracted from elephants-1535881, image by Monika (MonikaP), and the other from elephant-5083580, Image by Mansour Obaidi (Msobaidi). Unless stated otherwise, all images were sourced from Pixabay“.

There’s a lot of work gone into this image, and it arguably tries to do too much. The hourglass – that’s actually a composite of several. The blue sand that is liquid in the center. The elephants swimming in that liquid. And the image / statue of Poseidon on the rock in the background. Plus the sea and the sky.

The topic was time, hence the hourglasses. The elephants and textures of ‘sand’ are to imbue a sense of strangeness, of Fantasy, of the incredibly improbable being possible. And its the presence of Gods / Magic that achieves that transformation.

So it all holds together – just barely. Why Poseidon, though? Answer – because I came across the background (with sky and sea) and loved it too much not to use it.

That’s a terrible reason. “I needed a background and it was there”.

Furthermore, it breaks depth of field. The elephants are as sharply in focus as the Poseidon\, while the hourglass itself is not quite as sharp. The rule of thumb is that if the foreground is in focus, the background should be blurred, and vice-versa. I get away with it in this image simply because the whole composite is such a bizarre combination of elements.

As a spot illustration, this is fine; it is in no way good enough to be a Chapter Title graphic and besides, it’s orientation is Portrait – because the dominant element is the hourglass, and that’s more vertical in orientation than it is side-ways.

Example 2: The Watering Hole, also from Chapter 3 Part 3



Image by Pexels from Pixabay. I’ve painted out some rock climbers in obviously modern clothing and extended to the image slightly to the right.

The most interesting part of this image, from a technical standpoint, is this part over to the right. I’ll explain why in a moment; let me start by taking about the rest of the image, to get it out of the way. There are obviously people bathing in this lake – and that in itself is interesting because there’s a risk of contaminating it. It suggests that the water is either (a) unsuitable for drinking already, or (b) reputed to have some magical properties – fountain of youth, anyone?

The setting is lush and green, which adds to the latter impression. There’s a crystal-clear waterfall, which would provide water that’s almost certainly potable, diminishing any concerns regarding the lake.

Critically, the figures of the people are way too small to make out any hint of what they are wearing or not wearing.

One of the things that immediately grabbed me about this image is the composition – there are so many ways for the eye to be drawn, but all roads lead back to the ‘beach’ and the crowd there:



Every time you examine this, new details will be revealed. So it was that the defects (in terms of my purposes) weren’t even noticed for a very long time. Which brings me back to that right-hand-side:



Let me run through the list:

• a. a string of hikers were following a climbing track, heading toward the viewer, obviously in modern clothing.
• b. some of the people had clambered up these rocks and were seated there.
• c. Another hiking trail heading to join a, with more hikers on it.
• d. And a fourth.
• E. A large plastic bag was wrapped around two bushes, rather spoiling the ambiance once it was noticed.
• f1 through f8: climbers seated here and there, some with colorful plastic drink bottles. This is where I think they were located (I’m working from memory). In some of the locations, the merest hint of what was there remains – a hint of legs at f7, a blue shoe at f8, an arm at f6.
• at h (I think it was) (it should have been labeled g but I lost track of where I was up to), there was some spray-painted graffiti.
• And, finally, I have a clear memory of photo-editing the rocks in the right-hand foreground, but no longer remember why I thought it was necessary.

A lot of the work was done with tools that I hadn’t previously done much with, like the pencil shader and the pallet knife, employed in conjunction with copy and paste and other tools with which I was already familiar. I’m quite proud of the results – you simply can’t tell that it’s been so heavily modified.

I want to talk about those hikers, in particular. If they hadn’t been wearing obviously modern clothing – shorts, joggers, t-shirts, and baseball caps, specifically – and if they had been heading toward the bathers and not away from them, they might have been acceptable, because as visual elements, they would have then supported the main focus of the image, which was supposed to be one of those wonderful landmarks all the locals know about and that travelers love to discover.

Third, Composite 7 from Chapter 3 part 2



This composite starts with the ruins background, by Dorothe (Darkmoon_Art), to which I did a quick-and-dirty extension off to the right. The “dragon” image in the sky midground consists of the wings from an eagle (photo uncredited), which I attached to the body of a Seahorse extracted from Hippocampus_coronatus_1.jpg by Leo D’lion from Flikr via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. Finally, in the foreground (minus a bush and some indications of ground) is an image of a heavily-laden Hiker by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, with some 3D toning and shadows added by me. Unless otherwise noted, images were sourced from Pixabay.

The original version of this that I did extended quite a bit further off to the right – there was a second, smaller, tree (you can just see the left edge of its foliage), and a rolling plain sloping down, and a dragon flying between the two and looking toward the guy with the big backpack.

I had made the Dragon by combining the body of a seahorse with the wings of an eagle and a lot of color filtering and scaly textures over the top, and I thought it looked great.

That dragon was the problem. It didn’t seem to matter where I positioned it, it didn’t look right. I tried mirroring it horizontally – same problem. I tried it in front of the cathedral, behind it, to the left of it, to the right of it, you name it. I spent easily two hours moving that dragon around, but the only solution that I found was to have it in the air above the trees, which shrunk both cathedral and hiker – to the point where you could no longer see his spindly little legs.

And that was the whole point of this image, that was the focus: the overloaded character truckin’ right. I was so so busy with the dragon that I didn’t even notice the second building in the distance on the right until the Dragon covered part of it. That was when I decided that the buildings alone were enough to convey the “Fantasy Element” of the environment, and left the dragon out completely, permitting a closer focus on the building and the overburdened traveler (The dragon might yet reappear if I use this in chapter-title format, though – or maybe I’ll use it in a standalone spot image somewhere).

The bottom line: the dragon wasn’t just not supporting the main focus, it was detracting from it. So it had to go.

A Good Design

I’ve touched on this in discussing the examples, above. A good design has good composition – it moves the eye where you want it to go in order to convey a total impression. In particular, it makes sure that the viewer sees all the important elements that add context to the focal point.

A still more advanced technique employs the movement of the eye to tell a sequential narrative (or, at least, to hint at one). That’s really hard to do well – I’ve managed it in comic book form but not in a single image, at least not yet. The “serendipity” image linked to earlier comes close, though.

Internal Cohesion

If you know what you’re doing, the incorporation of one or more visual elements that don’t match the rest of the landscape can be definitive, an outright statement that there is an environmental discontinuity. But even if you do know what you are doing, it’s incredibly easy to mess this up, and hard to get right.

It’s all about the suspension of disbelief; the more strain you put on the viewers sense of this being ‘real’, the more expertly the disconcerting elements have to be integrated.

For the most part, then, internal cohesion is incredibly important. Everything has to feel like it ‘belongs’ in the environment depicted, or the credibility of that environment is compromised.

An Emotional Impact

The best images capture a mood or emotion in addition to depicting the contents of the scene. Take ‘Composite 7’ from the Trade In Fantasy series, shown above. There is a sense of adventure inherent in the landscape – the buildings, the man alone and seemingly equipped to prosper on his own, the pathway receding into the distance, while running past one strange structure and heading in the general direction of a second, and even the fact that the scene seems quite serene, as though the world were holding its breath and waiting for something to happen – it all adds together to have an emotional impact.

Compare that with ‘Composite 9’, also shown above. Here, there were so many fantastic elements that I was so busy ensuring internal cohesion – things like the shadows from the elephants were redone a dozen times before I was satisfied, and I’m not sure they are even noticeable when the image is reduced to “Campaign Mastery Size.” I mean, I notice them because I know they are there, but anyone else? I’m not so sure.

Prioritized Detail

Some elements are going to be more important, more definitive, than others. “An Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage” – that’s fine as a concept. To determine what elements should be, or are, prioritized, insert the word “generic” in front of each of the nouns and see if the overall description still makes sense:

• A generic Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage – nope. The pyramid is a prioritized detail.
• An Aztec-style pyramid in a generic jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage – that works. The jungle is an important component of the setting’s totality, but not a prioritized one.
• An Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of generic threatening eyes in the foliage – “generic eyes In the foliage” would work, but the inclusion of the emotion-laden adjective “threatening” makes this element incompatible with ‘generic’. These are a prioritized detail.

This test can be used even if what you have is a visual, not a description. Just pick out one element after another, give them a label – “Cliff,” “Rock”, “Tree”, “Dragon”, “Castle” – and try the word generic in front of that label, or try imagining the image with some variation on the content actually present.



This is a very rough sketch to give you some idea of what I had in mind when describing the assessments below. As an exercise in everything that has been discussed, there is a deliberate error in the image, made twice. See if you can spot the problem – I’ll tell you what it is at the end of this section.

• A different Cliff? (I’ll come back to this one).
• A different rock? Yep, no problem.
• A different tree? Again, no problem.
• A different Dragon? Not really – see the discussion on ‘cliffs’ below.
• A different Castle? Maybe in theory, but the architecture is far more suggestive and informative than most people realize, so using a different castle would probably change the overall impression of the image. So that’s a (qualified) ‘no’.

It doesn’t matter how specific the element, as rendered in the image is – what matters is whether or not it could be replaced with something similar without subtracting from the total sum of the content and what it tells you about the location, and that’s what this tests. I spent quite a lot of time on the cliff (and thought about doing more). The castle and dragon, by comparison, took no time at all.

So, a different cliff, yes or no? To some extent, one cliff is exactly the same as another. So that would argue for a ‘yes’ answer. But there are subtle details that matter – perspective, and the nature of the cliff face, and the underlying geology – and they say ‘no’. But the trump point in this discussion is that the cliff is a key design / composition element, drawing the eye back to the left from the bottom right corner, where the sequence clouds -> sky -> leaves -> tree leads it. And to do that job properly, it has to have the right shape.

That, incidentally, is why the rock is important – without something to interrupt the eye’s passage from right to left along the cliff edge, it would simple exit the image on the left. The rocks pull the eye up, and the castle then grabs attention.

What about the dragon? located where it is, the eye can be drawn to it from the rocks, or from the castle, and the natural inclination is to follow it’s line of sight – up into the clouds and leaves, for another loop around the composition.

But if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter too much, because the image is adequately framed by its content. Arguably, it would be more effective if the Dragon was on the opposite side of the Castle – enough so that if I were trying to create anything more than a quick sketch, I would try that. But that’s not important enough to distract from the main point – which is that the posture and positioning of the Dragon then becomes critical. Where is it going? What is it looking at? These provide the eye with the cues that it needs to move on from that element of the image.

So, to the deliberate mistakes – readers have had ample opportunity by now. Answer: In both the castle and the dragon, the shadows are on the wrong side. The tree, cliff, rocks, and clouds, are all highlighted on the right and shadowed on the left. The castle’s highlight is on the right, and shadows on the left. And it’s the same with the Dragon, though that’s a bit less obvious. How did you go?

The GMing Trap

It’s very common for GMs to fall into the trap of focusing on specific elements of their metaphoric landscape and overlooking the bigger picture, simply because the latter seems to be a lot more work.

This encounter, this town, this road, this river, this villain. It’s easy to do, But each and every one of these has some context that needs to be defined, and that context provides the connections that join it to the bigger picture.

I thought it might be useful to run through the above list and look at what the relevant context is likely to be. And then I thought of another category, and another, and another. This might take a while….

This Encounter

Even the most mundane encounter has the context of the environment in which it transpires.

Some encounters involve creatures that are definitively magic-based, which therefore have an additional context of Magic in nature, and the nature of Magic.

Some are (literally) spiritual – fiendish. demonic, devilish, Undead, Divine, Good vs Evil, Law Vs Chaos – and have a moral / moralistic context. the latter usually demand that the players define where their characters are going to stand on specific moral issues, and accept the consequences of those choices.

All encounters will reveal at least part of a “natural” ecology – the mere existence of a particular kind of creature forcibly creates an environmental niche for them to occupy, usually by force and at the inconvenience of whatever is already in that niche. The mere fact of properly defining the encountered creatures and specifying how they exist and how they propagate creates an ecology around them that can then be assembled like Lego.

This Town

It’s a similar story when it comes to population centers. The larger they are, the more self-defining they tend to be – they grow so large simply because they can and inevitably will do so. The resulting concentration of population is sufficient to create demand for services and that fuels further growth in what seems like a never-ending spiral of growth.

Things are different when it comes to smaller population centers; they need a reason to continue to exist in their current location. The more amenable the location is to a settlement, the more self-explanatory that reason is. So the more difficult the location, the stronger the external justification needs to be.

Every population center is defined in part by its relationship with its’ neighboring populations and with the nearest larger community and with the seat of administrative power each step up the social ladder. It’s leaders will have relationships with each of these and those relationships will, in part, define the circumstances and existence of the community.

One of the key aspects of those relationships, and one that probably deserves separate consideration, is the economic relationship. In particular, what do they need in the community that they cannot supply (even if the supplied item is a local substitute) and where do they get it from?

You simply can’t make up a town out of whole cloth without defining these things (even if they are also to be made up complete) – which defines the surrounding region and the neighbors.

I would still consider this community to be sand-boxed if there was no reciprocal creation – make a town, define its relationships with its neighbors, but don’t create any of those neighbors until it becomes clear that the PCs are actually going to go to one.

This Road

Roads don’t just exist, they connect one place to another. If it’s a small rural road or pathway, that might be all it does; if it’s larger or more important, then it will need to do more, probably connecting a series of small towns to a larger hub, which will usually be the regional administrative power. And, if it’s larger and more important again, then it might well connect a regional authority to the national authority center.

Roads are hard and expensive to build well, and even more expensive to maintain. Using the best modern technology, roads built in the 1930s and not maintained are close to undrivable now, less than a century later – and they were reasonably well maintained for about half of that time.

Roads built in medieval and fantasy environments will be even more expensive (in relative terms, per mile / km) and of far lower quality and resistance to wear and tear – which is to say they will have higher and more expensive maintenance demands and will deteriorate even more quickly if those demands are not met.

To justify that maintenance, there needs to be one or both of two reasons: the rapid movement of goods and supplies, i.e. commerce & economics, or the rapid movement of troops, i.e. a military response / purpose. If the latter, there will be various barracks and staging points along the way, plus a string of forts to maintain control over the road. If the former, there will be less such.

How is the maintenance paid for, and by whom? What is the economic and social impact of the road on the communities through which it passes? Where is it considered to begin, and where does it end? And what is the terrain through which it travels?

Most sci-fi campaigns will have access to 1930s road-building techniques or better. But the economic realities are such that maintenance is begrudging at best, impacting the condition of the road. And it might be that the campaign conditions impact on the need for maintenance; at best, there will be no such impact.

Every alternative transportation method increases the reluctance to maintain the road while diminishing its criticality – a double whammy that more than compensates for any reduced wear-and-tear. It doesn’t matter if that’s a-dragonback, teleport booths, interstellar gates, flying cars, or dirigibles.

This River

Unlike roads, rivers don’t need a lot of maintenance; leave them alone, and they will keep on doing what they are doing for as long as the climate is stable. Egypt may have been swallowed by desert, but the Nile still flows.

Depending on winds and other prevailing conditions, it’s a lot easier to float things downriver than carry them upriver, and that impacts on availability and price. But I’m not going to go into that too deeply in this post, I’ll save that for the appropriate chapter of Trade In Fantasy.

Erecting Dams for irrigation can, however, have a major influence on the quality and size of a river – to the point where it may need to be replaced by a road running alongside it.

Absent such interference, a river has one other property of great interest to authority figures – it’s just as easy to ship troops downriver (or up-river) as it is cargo. Furthermore, rivers join other rivers to become bigger rivers, and the points of such joining have such natural advantages that communities naturally super-size over time, which magnifies the relevance of such troop movements. And. on top of that, because of irrigation, rivers also run alongside the most productive farmland, on which those larger communities rely. So every cent that isn’t spent on maintenance, and then some, would logically be spent on forts to monitor and control river traffic.

The other critical thing that rivers posses are bridges and fords and the like. These are a lot less common than most fantasy mapmakers would have you believe – and everywhere that one is needed but not available, a ferry of some sort will spring up to act as a substitute. But these imply the presence of other communities and roads.

A river is therefore surrounded by the regional context and a vital component of it.

It’s only when sci-fi or steampunk technologies provide cost-effective alternatives that rivers begin to diminish in significance.

This Villain

I hate creating villains in isolation. Heroes can wander, so their context can be at arm’s length, but villains are rarely vagabonds (unless and until they have fallen from grace). Villains therefore have a power base, and their authority over it not only affects that power base but also their actions and capabilities beyond personal combat.

In a dungeon, a power base might be confined to a single room. It may or may not be under constant threat from the inhabitants of neighboring rooms – but either way, the context matters to the condition of the room and the trappings and appointments within.

What’s more, with rare exceptions, even villains need to eat. Where does their food come from, and if that creates a point of vulnerability, what have they done about that?

What additional resources can the villain command by virtue of the domain that they claim power over?

The most richly-detailed villain is a cardboard cutout if the context and its implications aren’t spelt out. And remember, the PCs will almost certainly encounter that context and/or ripples of it, long before they actually get to confront the villain himself (there are circumstantial exceptions).

This Vista



This image of an Italian Sunrise is by Ida (IdaT) from Pixabay

My, but that’s a pretty picture. It ticks all the boxes in terms of eye-catching scenery. One look at that and you can tell exactly how a PC traveling through it is going to react.

But there are parts of the picture that you can’t see – what’s the rest of the story?

There are parts where objects within the landscape are hiding what’s on the far side – forests and mountains and deserts and oceans are all pretty good at this. But so are plains, if they are vast enough. What’s beyond?

Most, of not all, of the wildlife are not especially visible – what lurks, and where?

Land always has a history, often told through remnants and ruins (especially in a D&D campaign). Where are they, how have they not been pillaged, and what abides within?

These places never exist in isolation – they are always found en route from one place to another. What and where are these places? If there’s no road or path, why not?

What secrets are hidden in this pretty little landscape? That’s the context that a GM needs to answer – before he can put this pretty image in front of the players.

This Administration

No matter what the politics of the region – even in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship – there will be political factions, alliances, and disagreements. If one side has the authority, they may seek to suppress / persecute the other, but that doesn’t mean the other has gone away, just that it’s more secretive and furtive. Many a dictator has been surprised by the vehemence displayed during their overthrow.

Whenever you create a government – be it local, civic, regional, state, national, global, para-dimensional, multidimensional, interstellar, or galactic empire – always determine who the major factions are, what they disagree on, and how much protection / authority members of the non-dominant faction have.

Why? Well, when PCs encounter the ruling authority, one of two things will happen:

1. They will get along fine with the current administration and so become enemies of the opposition; or,
2. They will confront the current administration about something, maybe try and make them do something they don’t want to do, in which case the opposition will see them as potential friends and allies.

This Faith

Religion and religious issues are some of the biggest headaches a GM will encounter when world-building, because Clerics have genuine powers that have to come from somewhere and those automatically give their beliefs – whatever they may be – credibility.

Is there one pantheon in the world? Or are there multiple pantheons? And if the latter, what are the relationships between them? And what is tolerated, what is forbidden, and what exists in a gray zone in between?

There are multiple levels of the pious hierarchy to consider.

• The gods themselves. Are they friends, rivals, allies, enemies?
• The religious doctrines and higher leadership – what are the official policies?
• The rank-and-file priesthood, who have to live in the real world and try to guide it.
• The ultra-zealots.
• The ordinary citizens.

Throw in official links between a faith and a government, internal politics, corruption, factions, schisms….

And, once you’ve done all this work, one of two things will almost certainly happen:

• Religious issues will rise to dominate the game; or
• Everyone will find them boring, and do their very best to ignore everything that you’ve created, most of which will be wasted effort.

Striking a happy balance between these extremes is one of the hardest things to do successfully. But if you don’t find either of those choices palatable (I generally don’t), you have no choice.

This Beginning

Some lyrics from Semi-sonic’s “Closing Time” are relevant:

So, gather up your jackets, move out to the exits,
I hope you have found a friend.
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah

Nothing ever starts in complete isolation; it is always surrounded by, shaped by, whatever was there before this new beginning. This is absolutely essential to showing the contrast between old and new.

Of course, this immediately begs the question, where did the old situation come from? And, it you aren’t careful, you can find yourself writing centuries of history of only limited relevance.



What’s needed is to Temporally Sandbox the campaign history. That means that recent history is well-known and easily accessible, and most of the last century’s history can be found out (incompletely and in broad) just about everywhere – but there will be, as the illustration puts it, “Pointers, Hints, & Isolated Details” – signposts to the past, offering tantalizing glimpses into what once was, but completely without context. And if you ask a local about one, at best you’ll get folklore and myth that has a very small kernel of truth buried somewhere deep inside.

For a while, it was my habit to make those myths up out of whole cloth and decide as I went what the kernel of truth was – then to make everything else the complete opposite of the true story. If there was a Necromancer involved, for example, he might be recorded in myth as the Darkest Evil (true fact) or as a misunderstood hero (myth). His foe might be an arrogant righteous knight (true fact) or a despotic fallen knight (myth). Who won and who lost? Complete opposite of the true story – and so on. But then my players at the time began to cotton on to this simplistic approach, as the underlying reality got exposed a time or two, and I had to develop more sophisticated tools for the creation of myths.

Another point was that I paid no attention at all in the construction of these myths to internal consistency, and that also became recognized as an immediate tip-off.

These days, I create half-truths, exaggerations, and romanticized superstructures around those kernels of truth. Sometimes, history gets it mostly right, sometimes it is breathtakingly wide of the mark. But it’s no longer as predictable.

Getting back to the main point: there’s an immediate payoff for wrapping your history in a temporal sandbox: every pointer to the past holds the potential for a plotline. It may be short, or long, conclusive or inconclusive, but there can be an adventure or sub-plot that results from the difference between myth and truth.

Quite often, the idols that a (romanticized) history places on pedestals turn out to have feet of clay – and, in some cases, be not very nice people at all.

Temporal Sandboxing is one of the primary purposes of a simple tool that I provided here at Campaign Mastery some time ago – Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool. The purpose is to divide history up into first-hand experiences, second-hand experiences related by an elder, and third-hand experiences that can only be derived from books, museums, artifacts, and other leftovers.

This Plot Development

So something has happened in-game that has advanced a plot or sub-plot – that’s all very well and good, but there is a context that has to be considered.

Every plot development links what’s already known to something new – it might be a new source of information, a new political perspective or force, a new location where the event happens. It may introduce a new antagonist or a new ally.

So that’s part of the ‘landscape’ thereafter. The other detail in the landscape, aside from the development itself and logical consequences thereof, is the person who is behind the plot development, and their motivations.

That’s either a PC who has done something, or an NPC. But, even if the act was performed by a PC, the ripples that spread from the event will do so through NPCs. Every time someone does something, the first thing that a GM should ask themselves is “what will the locals think of that, and how will that affect the PCs?”

This Location

Everywhere that something happens in a game should have a landscape comprising a history, and/or an atmosphere. That could be as simple as stumbling over an old lost coin, hinting that a former empire’s reach was vaster than previously thought, or it could be as complicated as an old rotting library in the bowels of a Lich’s mansion or tower.

In the second-ever RPG game session in which I played, in a particular room in a dungeon, the treasure included a (magical) book. I pointed out that either this was not the only book present, and the GM simply wasn’t mentioning the others for some reason, or there was something noteworthy about this particular book that it was the only one present. Either way, there was a story that wasn’t being told.

The reason for this was, obviously, because the GM hadn’t thought about the landscape surrounding that particular treasure; the random tables said the book was there, so the book was there. To cover this gap, he hurried us right along before too many difficult questions could be asked – his usual technique was to have a wandering monster appear out of nowhere, posing a distraction.

This then became part of the landscape, the background, when I was creating the Legacy Items for Assassins’ Amulet. These were all about the history that each one carried. Sometimes, that history was the creation of the item, and sometimes it was about the price to be paid for access to such powerful magic. But there was always a context.

It’s the same with locations. This is your first time in the Great Library of Domasticus The Cruel? Why does someone with that name even have a library? What can the contents of said library tell you about the ruler? Was he as bad as the name suggests, or was there a softer side that no-one pays attention to?

If it’s a more typical location – an overnight camping site on a trail from A to B – what is the scenery like? Did anything interesting ever happen here? Did anyone interesting ever pass this way? Are there any traces of the history of the place?

This Dungeon

And, if ever there was a place where that holds more true than any other, it’s a dungeon. What’s the history of the place and how does that impact what the PCs will see and find? Has anyone attempted to loot it before, and how does that impact the current day? Even if you construct it as nothing more than a few little vignettes of history – “a party once looted this room, disabling the traps and routing the inhabitants. They came to a sticky end in room XYZ, so the loot from this room will be found there, not here. The former inhabitants crept back, reset the traps, and reinforced their position – so the fight with them this time around will be much harder, with not as much to show for it”.

That gives a history to the creatures that lurk in this room, to the room itself, to the contents of the room and their context, and to room XYZ, which (logically) should not be that far away and on a direct line from here.

What’s more, it implies context to every location, every room, in between.

And, when compiling a historical context like this, don’t neglect whatever loot those in-over-their-heads adventurers were carrying!

Playing Catch-up

Once you get behind in construction of these contextual landscapes, catching up is that much harder to do, but that’s not the biggest problem – in a moment, I’ll show you how to take a lot of the work out of playing catch-up. But first, the far bigger problem is when the context that you eventually create should have had a noticeable impact on the scene or location, and didn’t.

There are only three ways of handling this, and two are not all that satisfactory – and you can’t use the third all the time.

1. The PCs simply didn’t notice the blindingly obvious except now, in hindsight.
2. The PCs did observe the blindingly obvious but didn’t appreciate the importance until now, in hindsight.
3. The PCs didn’t see anything of the context because someone has undertaken active measures to hide it.

The first two are unlikely to be more than thinly tolerated by players. This isn’t being determined by die roll or by referencing the history and abilities of the PCs – it’s being declared by GM Fiat to cover his own failures in an in-game context.

The third can be extremely useful but only on rare occasions; it’s very easy to over-use it. That said, I did once hear of a party whose mentor was a high-level wizard that had gone a bit strange in the mental department; he had an Unseen Servant roam ahead of the party and “tidy up” locations before the PCs got to them, muddling and even erasing the historical clues to what they were actually finding. (I wish I could tell you more about the campaign and what happened, but that’s all I know of it!)

Left without reasonable in-game answers, the wise GM looks beyond the game parameters to find a metagame solution:

4. The GM admits that he messed up and got behind and that the PCs should have found X, and then enlists the players and their creativity to help explain it in-game.

Obviously, this too is a card that can’t be played frequently (and certainly not regularly) – it covers the occasional lapse, which everyone has every now and then, nothing more.

Clearly, the best answer is not to get behind in the first place. But, as I said, everyone has the occasional lapse, but there is a technique that can help when that happens:

Coalescing Historical Landscapes

This works from looking at the bigger picture (mentally) and applying selected parts of it to multiple areas that should have been detailed but weren’t. Traces of a past great empire, for example, in the form of portions of giant marble statues that dot the land here and there. The next time one then gets encountered (and it can be useful to deliberately seed one into the next session of play for this very purpose), simply mention as part of your descriptive narrative that the new one encountered reminds the PCs of something that they saw in Room A of dungeon B, and the town square at C, and outside the High Priest of D’s Temple. In other words, the PCs have been seeing these things regularly, but paying no attention to them because they didn’t seem important.

A Plague Upon Historians

Things can go even more rapidly downhill if one of the PCs happens to have a History skill at a reasonably high level. Presumably, this is then a subject that interests the character, and one that he would therefore notice things about. Those little lapses and omissions become far more significant when they are things the player is trying to hang his characterization ‘hat’ upon.

That brings me to a useful game tip:

Do this at your next game session: Get each PC to list, on a single sheet of paper, their top three skills. Not the scores, but the number of ranks they have bought in that skill. The player gets to break any ties.

These are the things that the PC will particularly notice about each and every person, place, or thing. Use them to guide what you spend prep time creating.

If this is revealed as a problem, it’s definitely time to wheel out solution #4 – and to resolve to do better from this point out. And mean it.

Searching For Landscapes

Discussing metaphoric landscapes has taken us a long way from the original point of the article, about iconic representations of a specific campaign. It’s time to start looping back around in that direction so that the whole article can dovetail with a satisfactory conclusion (gee, someone might think that I actually plan this stuff).

There are a myriad of sites that you can search for landscape images. Google has a page for image search (see Finding Your Way: Unlocking the secrets of Google Image Search) and so do Bing and DuckDuckGo, and a few specialist operations like Tineye and Yandex. On top of that, you have image curators like Pinterest and Wikimedia Commons, and clip art sites like my #1 go-to for article illustrations, Pixabay.

So, if you’re diligent about it, you could probably spend hundreds of hours looking for the perfect image.

Don’t.

By all means, search for landscape images to fill particular campaign needs; and, if you’re lucky enough to stumble over the perfect representation, by all means appropriate it. You could also pay attention to the articles that I have posted on image editing and compositing, and learn how to make your own. But that’s not necessarily necessary; there is an alternative to consider.

Using AI

While you could use AI image generation to create what might seem to be the perfect representation, there are a number of problems with doing so.

First, the technology isn’t there yet. It leaves things our, has problems comprehending relationships between objects, and fares poorly sometimes if you ask for something that doesn’t get photographed very often – like a crashed UFO.

Second, as a general rule, it only includes things that you have told it to include or some of the logically implied content – with maddening omissions.

Thirdly, AI-generated images that don’t require some hands-on editing afterwards are as rare as hen’s teeth.

So, while it is a theoretical solution to the problem, it’s not an alternative to consider – yet.

Keywords

The heart of any image search are the keywords that you search for. With some search engines, the sequence in which these appear is also critically important. But the biggest factor in success is understanding the image search itself – they don’t pull up images that match the keyword criteria in most cases, they bring up images from pages that use those keywords in their text. Understanding this is critical to choosing the right keywords for an image search.

Things are a little different if you’re searching Pinterest, or Wikimedia Commons, or DeviantArt. They rely on tags – which, as everyone should know, are little labels that the uploader has used to describe the content of the image. There is little or no AI assistance in this search – it won’t generally look for synonyms of your search term, for example, which would be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it finds more images for you to consider; and a curse in that it would make it much harder to drill down to find the exact thing that you’re looking for.

So either way, you end up with pages of images to wade through in search of the perfect result. And that can take considerable time. A search for “Mountains” offers up:

• hundreds of thousands of results on Google Images
• hundreds of results on DuckDuckGo
• 1,201,398 results on Wikimedia Commons
• uncountable thousands of results on Pinterest
• 1,480 pages of results on Pixabay…

You get the idea. I have found that a great shortcut is to select an analogous country, geology, or location, especially one with a matching climate, and inject that as a keyword – “Bolivian Mountains”, for example, or “Tropical Mountains”, or “Volcanic Mountains” – or even “Lunar Mountains”.

The Benefits of a Landscape Search

Let’s talk for a minute about the benefits that you reap from a landscape search, even if you don’t find an image that matches what you are looking for. You still get hundreds of results, for example, if you search Google Images for “Antimatter Mountain” – and it’s a near-certainty that none of them are even remotely what you’re looking for. So, why bother? There are three good reasons:

1. Inspiration

Take a look at each image result, and understand the relevance it holds toward your search target (even if that’s “none”). You will find additional ideas that enhance the specificity of what you’re looking for and any associated details.

This is a great way of taking a vague idea and pinning it down.

2. Language

If you’re having trouble describing something to a search engine, how evocative do you think your language will be when describing it to your players? Taking the time to winnow through the search results, and refining the search keywords and parameters a time or two, can yield priceless dividends in terms of giving you something to describe, which then forms a starting point. Even if successive editing passes replaces each and every line of description from that starting point with something more specifically appropriate, that can still have been a worthwhile exercise.

3. Representative Scenery

And, finally, you might get lucky and uncover a scene that’s the perfect illustration for what you want.

The Perfect Landscape

Ultimately, it’s not up to you to decide what is the perfect landscape or the perfect representation of your campaign. As soon as you show the image to a player, they will either (a) disagree with your choice, or (b), start reading things into your choice, or (c) both of the above. And the moment one of those things is not something that you meant to imply, either your vision of the campaign has to expand, or the chosen image falls off the peak of \perfection.

That doesn’t mean that the quest itself is not worthwhile – it often is, refining mental images, suggesting new things, and depicting even a small part of the game world are all worthy outcomes of your efforts.

Growing your narrative and grounding events in context is always worthwhile. Even if the results are not perfect. And that’s true whether the landscape in question is visual or metaphoric.

Before you can use a landscape, you have to understand them. Have no fear, this post will equip you with everything you need to know. Pt 1 of 2.

This is the third of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series.

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

Artists have been painting landscapes for a very long time, and there’s a good reason for that – nothing captures the total essence of a view or a location in quite the same way. Today’s post will give you the tools and knowledge to analyze a landscape image. Part 2, next week, will link campaigns and landscapes (both real and metaphoric) to show just what can be done with them – and what should be done, and why you might want to do so.

Orientation

Let’s start here: in art and documents, there are two basic orientations: Portrait and Landscape. Understanding the difference and why they are used the way that they are can be very helpful. Most art classes from 7th grade up (if not sooner) will cover this, but a lot of people won’t have paid attention or recognized the relevance, so starting with something fundamental seems like a good idea. Gets everyone on the same page, if nothing else (pun intended).

Most paper / images are rectangular in shape, with one longer axis and one shorter. In the US, the two most common page sizes are Letter and Legal, while in many other places, A4 is the go, and Foolscap is a legacy measurement from pre-metric times that still pops up here and there. Here are scale representations of all four, side-by-side:

If you look very closely, you’ll be able to see that the first three are all the same width (where that standard came from, I have no idea) but different lengths, obviously, while A4 is a little narrower and a little longer than letter size.

The exact measurements are:

• Legal (US) = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 14″ (35.56 cm)
• Foolscap = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 13.5″ (34.3 cm)
• Letter (US) = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 11″ (27.94 cm)
• A4 = 21 cm (8.27″) × 29.7 cm (11.67″)

A4 is defined by an international standard, ISO-216. The length of the long side is 2^0.5 × the length of the short side, for reasons that are far too technical to go into at the moment. The key point is that if you fold a sheet of A-sized paper in half along the long side, you get two sheets of the next A-size. A0 is defined as being 1 square meter in size (within rounding limits), so A1 is 1/2 m^2 and so on. You can also sometimes get larger sizes, such as “A-1” and “A-2” (read as “A minus 1” and “A minus 2”.

There is also a B-series and C-series of sizes, the latter defined by a different standard, but they are comparatively rare. In fact, there are two VB-series – Japan uses one different to the rest of the world.

While I’m on the subject of sizes, there are a couple of elephants in the room that need to be addressed.

Exotic Sizes

These are emphatically not the only sizes that can be encountered. In fact, they probably even the most common when you look at the totality of images to be considered. So I need to mention a few of the others that will commonly be encountered.

Screen Size

And the most common one is this – the standard screen aspect ratio, and the series of sizes, measured in screen pixels, that derive from it. 1024 × 768 and 1920 × 1080 are probably the most common sizes, but there are many more.

Of course, there is a difference between Image Size and Paper Size – but an image has to fit into the space provided by the display medium. That could be a screen (which is where these sizes come from) or it could be a sheet of paper (for a hardcopy image).

It must also be mentioned that paper printing requires a much higher resolution (pixels per inch or dots per inch) than any sort of monitor that you can point at. Standard screen resolution is 72 dpi, better is 96 dpi, and the minimum for full photographic quality is generally regarded as 300 dpi (though 120 dpi is sometimes used for low-resolution diagrams and 1200 dpi for extremely high-resolution images).

Artists and editors have to be continually concerned with how an image is to be displayed and what compromises are necessary for optimum usage.

If I have a 3000-pixel wide image, at 300dpi, that would be 10 inches across. If it’s a mere 1024-wide, that’s only 3.4133 inches across – at photo resolution. If I were to print that 1024-pixel-wide image 10.24 inches across, that’s a resolution of just 100 pixels per inch – and the printed image will be a little blurry, having only 1/3 the ideal print resolution.

The downside to high resolution images is file size. A 1024 × 768 image is 786,432 pixels in size, and there generally are three color values for each pixel, so that’s 2,359,296 pieces of information, each 24-bits long for full color = 56,623,104 bits; divide by 8 to get bytes, divide by 1024 to get K, divide by 1024 again to get Megs = 6.75 Mb.

Displayed at 72 pixels per inch, that’s an image 14.222 inches across and 10.667 inches high; if printed at 300 dpi, the image shrinks to 3.4133 inches × 2.56 inches high. If, on the other hand, the image is designed for printing, the file size will be × 300^2 / 72^2 = × 17.3611 file size, and without zooming in so that you can’t see the whole image, there will be details too small for you to see on a standard monitor.

It’s a constant juggling act.

But screen size is a natural size for digital artists to work at.

The other screen size to mention is the ratio of 16:9, which are the relative dimensions size of widescreen TVs. Most photographic and digital art won’t use this unless the image was always intended to be displayed that way, and it’s quite common to photo/draw larger and crop to the needed dimension.



This image compares the proportions of A4 and Widescreen.

1024 × 748 or 1200 × 760?

Like most computer users, part of my screen real estate is taken up with a toolbar – I keep mine two rows tall and at the bottom of the screen. When I am preparing an image for reference / display in a gaming session, I need to subtract the size of that toolbar from the height permitted for the image, if I want it to appear full-screen.

Technically, it’s roughly 1024 × 748 – but I have found that 1200 × 760 is close enough with the software that I use. So an awful lot of the images that I create for my own use have those dimensions.

Square

When it comes to art, there are all sorts of alternative sizes, and square images are not uncommon, because these canvasses are comparatively easy to make. I’ll get into some of the consequences in an aside a little later, but for now, I’ll simply mention them and move on.

Panoramic Sizes

Panoramic sizes are image sizes that are deliberately wider than the display can show IF the image is full-sized vertically. This permits scrolling from one side to another, a manually-controlled “pan” across the image. This can be extremely useful in a game because it presents a general impression and then elements within the landscape that would have distracted from that general impression.

Where it falls down is when you have to show it to multiple people – unless they can all see the screen at the same time.

You can get around that by actually turning it into a gif or a movie, if you know what you’re doing and have the tools required for the job. These used to be phenomenally expensive, but there are freeware / open-source alternatives for almost everything these days. I can’t vouch for how easy they are to use, though.

I have made a few using online tools, and especially to morph between multiple still images or variations. Unfortunately, these are all based on copyrighted images, so I can’t really offer any examples to show readers.

Tower Proportions

The final size to mention is any image that is designed to be taller than the available display at whatever width is intended – it could be full screen width, or it could be something smaller. Like the Panoramic pan, this permits a vertical scroll to reveal new details and the occasional surprise. This is an effect that I have used a couple of times here at Campaign Mastery.

There’s the image that goes with Fuzzy Plastic Memories III – Application, which depicts a man digging for Free Worms. But as you scroll down, you discover that he is about to discover a Treasure Chest. And, if he keeps going, a Pyramid. And, if he keeps digging below that, Dinosaur Bones. This, of course, is symbolic of serendipity.

Or, there is 2012’s Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats – at first, it’s hard to even recognize what you’re looking at, but as you scroll down, you realize that it’s cliff being defied by a bare-chested climber. Scroll down a little further and you get a hint of how far he’s already come.

And then there’s Godzilla’s Eye, from Creating ecology-based random encounters: This Eats That… the unrelieved blackness above and below give the subconscious impression that the image size (relative to the eye) is representative of the head size (relative to the eye). You get the sense that the creature is too large to be contained within the panel, and since the eye is much larger than a human eye, that the creature it belongs to is both huge and right in front of you. The blackness above and below magnify the menace, many-fold.

Portrait Orientation

Okay, so we have our paper sizes – and a plentiful array of them, there are. For the rest of this post, though, I’m going to stick with the original four.

There are two basic ways to orient one of these pieces of paper when they contain an image. The one that’s less relevant in terms of the subject of today’s post is Portrait Orientation, so it marks a relatively simple place to start.

Portrait orientation gets its name from the fact that it is dimensionally-suited to focusing on an individual, and therefore is suitable for Portraits, as I’m sure most people will either know or be able to deduce (that said, I’ve had to explain it to some in the past!)

Eye-line

If you draw a line from an upper corner of a sheet of paper in portrait orientation at a perfect 45 degrees, and note where it crosses the mid-line of the page, you will find the eye-line of the sheet. This is a line across the page that represents where the viewer subconsciously places their perspective.

Like this:



The first thing to note is that because the first three all have the same width, the eye-line is in the same place relative to the top of the page for all three. The difference to the eye-line of the A4 page is barely visible, but it’s there – I’ve put an enlargement underneath to make it clearer.

If a horizon line is above this line, those viewing the image will feel like they are looking down. If the horizon line is below it, those viewing the image will feel like they are looking up. This effect can be reinforced with 3D perspective, or contradicted by it; in the latter case, viewers will feel there’s something wrong with what they are seeing but most won’t be able to identify what the problem is. This can be very useful – if you don’t have an artist among your players!

More importantly, if the image is a portrait, and the eyes are above the Eye-line, it creates an impression of height greater than that of the viewer, while below it, the viewer gets the impression that the subject is shorter than they are (potentially quite a lot shorter). This, in turn, is generally used to interpret visually the broadness of the image – a narrow character is thin, even emaciated, if they are tall, and even smaller if they are short, while a broad character is huge if tall and just wide if short.

The other major difference lies in how much of the image lies below the eye-line. This dictates how much space there is for the visible part of the image – if the head is 1/3 of the width of the page, you may see the subject’s chest except with legal or foolscap, which might take you down far enough to see their belt. If the head is smaller, so will the rest of the body be – so you’ll get to see more of it at a larger size using a larger sheet of paper.

Landscape Orientation

Things abruptly grow more complicated when we’re talking about Landscape orientation, because all these paper sizes are of different widths when they are rotated 90 degrees.



 

Eye-line

Readers should start by observing that our 45-degree line is now coming from the bottom of the page, not the top.

With Legal and Foolscap sizes, there’s not a whole lot of room to put a horizon line above the eye-line. Even putting one anywhere close to the eye-line is still going to focus attention on the land and not the sky. Which is fine if that’s what you want – but trouble if there’s something in the sky of interest.

Letter and A4 sizes offer greater flexibility – there’s a bigger gap between the top of the page and the eye-line.

Horizon Line

Because it’s important, let’s now show three more sets of images: One set with a horizon above the eye-line, one at the eye-line, and one below the eye-line:




These sets of layouts are Horizon above eye-line, Horizon at eye-line, horizon below eye-line, and horizon well below eye-line. There are three things to notice about them: the relative importance of ground-content vs sky-content, the emphasis on the horizon itself, and the impression of viewer’s height above ground..

The shorter the page width, the more importance can be attached to the sky (because it takes up more space on the page). The closer to the mid-way point of the page, the more importance is placed on the shape of the horizon itself – i.e. the more the image is about context and where the ground-content is located and the less about what that ground-content is.

These are fairly subtle effects, but they can make a big difference. Or, to put it another way, consider the Letter and A4 ‘well below the eye-line’ examples – with that much sky being shown, there had darned well better be something important in that sky to justify it!

Natural Eye Movement

With that all explained, it’s time to add another complication – one that I’ve discussed before (in Image Compositing Project No 3, a Blue Monkey, I think it was), but which bears a little recap: If you are used to reading left-to-right, then when you see an image, your eyes enter about 1/3 of the way down from the top and on the left-hand side, and travel to the right until they encounter something that redirects that motion.

If your training is to read from right-to-left, your eyes enter an image from the right and track left.

A lot of planning and design goes into manipulating the passage of the observer’s eye. Put something with strong contrast that extends down the page at some point, and the eye will follow it until it encounters something else. You can, through the careful structuring of image content, either induce the viewer’s eye to traverse the four corners of the image and land, repeatedly, at the point of central focus – the middle half of the image in the top 2/3, and centered there.

At least, that’s what happens with Portrait Orientation.

With Landscape Orientation, that central focus is a region almost as wide as the image itself. And that permits greater structural flexibility – the focal point of the image doesn’t have to be near the center, it can be off to one side (as it was in the Blue Monkey example linked to above), and the rest of the image is there to give that focal point context.

It’s when you consider these effects in relation to the 16 diagrams above that the importance becomes clearer, and the reasons for the impact on the relative importance of ground vs sky. This also explains the “horizon effect” – if the horizon lies sufficiently above or below this initial line of passage, then it is deemed less important by the viewer (all completely subconsciously).

Unusual Orientations

Of course, artists love to break the rules and see what happens. Let’s take an A4 sheet and tilt it so that the horizon line runs more or less corner-to-corner. It’s what happens when we straighten it back again that gets interesting:



With the angled image, we pay attention to the top right corner and not much more – at least without some very clever design, such as using the space at the sides as negative space and ‘bouncing’ the eye off it. But straightening it back, the eye naturally follows the horizon down and to the right, giving a sense that we are banking to the right and therefore turning in that direction.

In the third image, I’ve added something else flying – I did a simple aircraft shape, but it could be anything – and positioned it parallel to the top of the page. As a result, not only is there a sense that we are in motion, there is a sense that the other object is in independent motion, because it appears to be banking in the opposite direction to us.

The wider the sheet of paper, the less extreme the bank angle that results from corner-to-corner horizons, and the less intense and more subtle the sense of movement – and perhaps, more realistic, as well. But we can achieve the same effect by applying a smaller angle to the horizon line, completely controlling it.

And that’s with an absolutely flat horizon; manipulating it by adding in peaks and valleys can heighten the effect, and making the horizon a curve further increases it.

To some extent, even without tilting the page, a similar effect can be achieved by greater variation in horizon. Here’s an A4 with a large mountain range to one side:



But mostly, what an asymmetric image does is focus attention on the Asymmetry itself. In the example above, it’s the ruggedly steep mountain on the right – It’s green from bottom to top, so it’s not that tall, but in every other way, it presents as exceptional. And there’s just a hint of a second one behind it and to the right. Everything else in the image is there to provide context to that mountain – the dead-looking forest maze in the foreground, and the distant snow-covered peaks, both tell you something more about the mountain.

It didn’t have to be a mountain; it could have been a tropical scene with one palm tree much closer to the viewer (and hence rising above the treeline). That would use the palm as a representation of the climate and a matching lifestyle and culture.

Depth Of Field

The other thing that this example does is present depth of field. You have something close up that is camera-blurred so much that it’s hard to make out – a hedge maze of very narrow passages with a lot of vertical rise and fall; you have the dominant element in focus, and behind the maze, making it further away and hence of greater size and importance; you have the snowy mountains behind the focal point, so they are farther away, and hence much bigger even though they take up less space in the mage; and you have a lot of wind-swept sky behind that, suggesting that wind might complicate any attempt to conquer the dominant mountain.

Without depth, a place feels like a superficial impression. We are so used to depth of field being present that the mind takes any opportunity to accept its existence. Take another look at the ground texture in the earlier examples – it’s very simple one but perspective has been employed to once again present depth of field; the horizon is further away and the landscape feels ‘lumpier’, more 3-dimensional, as a result – and that tells you something more about the content even though it’s just areas of light and shadow, bereft of significant detail.

Unusual Shapes

There are other things that can be done. Unusual shapes, for example, can imply all sorts of things going on, using the visual shorthand of comic books – sometimes so subtly that you aren’t even aware of it happening, for example by thickening the borders in a fluid way, or introducing distortions and rotations in 3D

Going any deeper into that subject is not something to be done casually; there’s very limited information available and it would demand weeks or months of experimentation to even begin work.

The Impact of Ovals

There’s one exception to that, and that’s an Oval shape. I don’t have to delve into this at all, because I’ve already done so, in my article on All about Frames ? Merry Christmas!.

In a nutshell: the corners of an image are generally where the least important or immediate content is located. In some images, we’re only really aware of them subconsciously. A round frame strips them away and surrounds them with negative (empty) space – which suggests one of three things: either there’s nothing of importance in those corners, or there’s something there that would distract from the focus of the image, or there’s something there that for some other reason, the artist wants to hide from the viewer. It’s a literal expression of tunnel vision.

Remember the tilted-frame demonstration? The eye gets repelled by that negative space, so an oval or round edge induces a natural trend for the eye to follow the edge of that negative space, circling the image over and over, and never actually paying much attention to the focal point of the image:



This illustrates a hard oval edge or frame. What this does is de-emphasize whatever is at the focal point, underplaying it. If it’s not something of great importance or significance, the framing only adds to that impression; but if it were a T-Rex or an oncoming train or a Gothic castle, it’s suggestive that these things are so ubiquitous that they are almost un-noteworthy. That’s a profound implication.

But there is a price to pay – all in the visual information that would have been present in the shaded corners has been excised, and that’s a lot – it totals about 1/3 of the total image space.



The same thing happens where a soft border has been used. To illustrate it, here’s another Foolscap landscape, one created by stretching the Asymmetric A4 example from earlier. Aside from a central panel, I have successive blurred and faded the edges to create a soft oval.

This has a completely different effect – the focus shifts completely to the spot indicated in the center. Our eye tracking starts above this line and tracks to the right until it hits the edge of the green mountain, when it gets pulled down and left toward the focal point. And suddenly, an almost-insignificant detail, only one or two pixels wide, becomes the most important element in the whole image: what appears to be a very distant path or trail between the mountains. It’s just below our focal point, but the eye gets led to it naturally. Suddenly all the context isn’t about the green mountain, it’s about that mountain pass – and the green mountain itself is just another addition to that context. What’s more, what looked like a forest maze now looks a bit more like what I intended it to be in the first place, a rocky cliff or range of hills between the viewer and the green mountain.

As Mr Spock might have said, “Fascinating.”

Application in Illustration

Photographers have a limited set of options to work with. They generally have to accept whatever nature offers them, within the limits of camera angles, lighting, content, and natural framing. But they can take 1000 photos a fraction of a second apart and throw 999 of them away, if they have to (in practice, 3-5 would be more common, and usually with different cameras just in case there’s something wrong with one of them – like having left the lens-cap on. Even pro’s occasionally make that mistake!)

Artists and illustrators have no such excuse. If there’s something visible in an artwork, you more-or-less have to assume that it’s been put there deliberately, at least until informed otherwise – which is the artist wearing his limitations on his sleeve.

The artist is under an entirely different set of constraints, instead. Constraints of ability, of rendering, of design, of purpose, of tools, of techniques, and of time. It takes a fraction of a second for a photographer to capture an image; it can take hours – minimum – for an artist to render an image. Days and weeks are more common.

The time restriction is probably the biggest one, in many respects. It means that you can’t adopt anything close to the shotgun approach possible to a photographer; you might only have time to execute three or four rough designs and one finished artwork a week – or a month.

But there are some advantages to compensate. A pencil can depict anything that the artist can think of. It’s only a question of whether or not the artist has the ability and the techniques to transfer what he’s thinking of from the imagination to the page.

Entering the story at this point and complicating everything are digital art softwares. They make things possible that were almost impossible previously, and do it in a fraction of the time. But they can also create some absolutely appalling messes, and there’s a steep learning curve (at least at first) – actually, there are probably several that have to mostly be tackled all at the same time. I’ve touched on a few of them in this article – resolution and file formats and so on. Infinitely-adjustable page sizes can be both a blessing and a curse, requiring an entirely new skill: the ability to match a particular image size to a desired image design.

And, just starting to make it’s presence felt, the latest tool is AI. I’ve played around with the technology to know that:

• It’s a whole new skill-set.
• Getting one to cough up anything even vaguely related to what you want is difficult-to-impossible.
• When it works, the results can be incredible.
• When it doesn’t, they can be appalling.
• The state of the art has severe and usually unstated limitations – some of which you may be able to dance around.
• Almost inevitably, manual ‘tweaking’ of the results are necessary to achieve a satisfactory result. Sometimes a little, often a lot.

Some of those limitations bear mentioning. AIs have great difficulty with counting and normality – four fingers on one hand and six on the other. AIs have difficulty separating requirements into depth layers – “in the background,” is something they struggle with. In fact, any sort of relationship between objects and scene is often difficult. Action shots are frequently not possible – ask for a crashed flying saucer and it will just give you a flying saucer over a crater or burn mark. Distances are something they don’t really understand, either – we think of images as depicting objects located in a three-dimensional space; it doesn’t think of them as objects in space at all. There are more, but that’s quite enough to be getting on with.

One of my favorite tests is “a Kzin tourist in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.” The best I’ve gotten has been an orange-haired house-cat. Sometimes with a human-skinned torso.

Right now, at best, it’s a tool for a specialist artist. Often, it’s not even that.

And that’s where I’m going to draw the curtain closed for this article, which has grown immensely in the course of its development. Nothing that you have read today is part of the original 11-line outline that defined this article; today has been all about giving the non-artist the tools to analyze landscapes. In part 2, we’ll put those tools to good use as I move on to how non-artists can USE landscapes!

The 3rd of 4 posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade focuses on the Labor Unit and how to use it to make GMing a business easier.

Today’s post starts with a couple of short sections that were inadvertently left out of last week’s examination of carts. They had been written, but not where they were supposed to be, and I had failed to add them to the table of contents, which serves as a reminder of what’s supposed to be there – so that when I went through my checklist, it looked ready to post. It’s an error that’s not likely to recur, but it means that there’s just a little bit of crossing T’s and dotting i’s to be done.

Table Of Contents: In part 1 of Chapter 3: Routine Personnel

3.1 A Choice Of Four Trade Unit Standards (actually, 8)

3.1.0 Principles of Comparative Modes Of Transport
3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden

3.1.1.1 Lift from STR
3.1.1.2 Average isn’t Average
3.1.1.3 4d6 keep 3 vs 3d6
3.1.1.4 Career Paths & STR

     3.1.1.4.1 Linear vs Non-Linear

3.1.1.5 Lift, at last
3.1.1.6 Encumbrance

     Sidebar: Behind The Curtain

3.1.1.7 Load & Load Capacity
3.1.1.8 Load Balance

     3.1.1.8.1 Adding a Staff to the equation
     3.1.1.8.2 Relating Load to Encumbrance (D&D)
     3.1.1.8.3 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Superhero)
     3.1.1.8.4 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Adventurer’s Club)

3.1.1.9 Load Distribution
3.1.1.10 Humanoids

     3.1.1.10.1 The Size Factor
     3.1.1.10.2 The Proportions Factor
     3.1.1.10.3 The Racial Factor
     3.1.1.10.4 The Human Advantage
     3.1.1.10.5 The Iconic Reference
     3.1.1.10.6 Elves
     3.1.1.10.7 Dwarves
     3.1.1.10.8 Halflings
     3.1.1.10.9 Orcs
     3.1.1.10.10 Ogres
     3.1.1.10.11 Bugbears
     3.1.1.10.12 Trolls
     3.1.1.10.13 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.10.14 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.10.15 Other Giants
     3.1.1.10.16 Others

And, in Part 2:

3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden (cont)

3.1.1.11 Time: 8, 12, 16, 24
3.1.1.12 Speed
     3.1.1.12.1 Non-D&D Scales

3.1.1.13 Provisions: Food
3.1.1.14 Provisions; Water
3.1.1.15 Replenishment: Foraging / Hunting / Buying
3.1.1.16 Distance
3.1.1.17 The humanoid bottom line

     3.1.1.17.1 Elves
     3.1.1.17.2 Dwarves
     3.1.1.17.3 Halflings
     3.1.1.17.4 Orcs
     3.1.1.17.5 Ogres
     3.1.1.17.6 Bugbears
     3.1.1.17.7 Trolls
     3.1.1.17.8 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.17.9 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.17.10 Other Giants
     3.1.1.17.11 Other Humanoids

3.1.2 Horses as a beast of burden
3.1.3 Burros as a beast of burden
3.1.4 Carts as a ‘beast of burden’

3.1.4.1 Strength of the Axles
     3.1.4.1.1 Cart & Wagon Stats: High-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.2 Cart & Wagon Stats: Low-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.3 Cart & Wagon Axle Reinforcement

3.1.4.2 Strength of the Wheels
     3.1.4.2.1 Spoke Thickness
     3.1.4.2.2 Number Of Spokes
     3.1.4.2.3 Solid Wheels

3.1.4.3 Strength of the Connection
3.1.4.4 Strength of the Bed
3.1.4.5 Rolling Resistance
     3.1.4.5.1 Slope (aka Grade, Gradient, Stepth, Incline, Mainfall, Pitch, and Rise)

3.1.4.6 Gravity Vector

In today’s post:

3.1.4.7 Pulling the Cart or Wagon
3.1.4.8 Simplification
3.1.4.9 Storytelling

3.1.5 Choosing Your Unit
3.1.6 Ramifications

3.1.6.1 Freight Management
3.1.6.2 Base Loading Time
3.1.6.3 On The Road: Drivers, Guards, Cargo-masters, & Handlers
3.1.6.4 Base Unloading Time
3.1.6.5 Sales Prep
3.1.6.6 Sales and Customers

3.2 Recruiter / Personnel Manager

3.2.1 Assumption #1: The best available gets hired

3.2.1.1 Any Relevant Skill
3.2.1.2 INT + WIS
3.2.1.3 Substituting CHAR
3.2.1.4 Supplemental Magic

3.2.2 Assumption #2: They Hire The Best
3.2.3 The Principle Of Labor Unmanagement

3.3 The Labor Unit

3.3.1 Eight man-hour Labor Units
3.3.2 Twelve man-hour Labor Units
3.3.3 Sixteen man-hour Labor Units
3.3.4 Twenty-four man-hour Labor Units
3.3.5 Choices and Expectations

3.4 The Labor Market
3.5 Basic Pay-scales

3.5.1 Loyalty Index

Which will be followed by:

3.6 Productivity

3.6.1 Premium Labor Units
3.6.2 Reminder: Profit per Trade Unit, not costs or prices

3.7 Pay-scale Variations

3.7.1 Overpaying workers / Elite Quality Workforce
3.7.2 Underpaying workers / Lower Quality Workforce
3.7.3 Slaves
3.7.4 Minor Stakeholders
3.7.5 Combinations & Complications

3.8 Technological Impact

3.8.1 Major Breakthroughs
3.8.2 Incremental Gains
3.8.3 Trade Secrets & Industrial Spies

3.9 Key Personnel & The Labor Unit
3.10 The Personnel Bottom Line

In future parts after that:

4. Mode Of Transport
5. Land Transport
6. Waterborne Transport
7. Spoilage
8. Key Personnel
9. The Journey
10. Arrival
11. Journey’s End
12. Adventures En Route

Recap:

In the last post, I showed how to determine an answer to the question “How much can one carry”, not only for humans but for all humanoids.

The solution offered takes into account every variable that could be thought of, from STR to Stamina to size and proportions (when it comes to non-humans).

It also presented a couple of key equations that will really come into relevance in today’s post:

Work Effort = Bulk × Distance / Labor Unit Standard.

where,

Bulk is as defined in Chapter Two: Volume × Weight, measured in Cargo Units;
Distance is how far the chosen Trade Unit Standard Transport can move a Cargo Unit in a certain period of time; and
“Labor Unit Standard” defines that period of time.

In other words,

Work Effort = Bulk × Speed.

It was then determined that the average STR for a human who uses STR for a living should be 11 (D&D/Pathfinder scale) or 10 (Hero System scale). This was based on Lift values of 225.54 lb and 102.28 kg, respectively.

There was also discussion of the fact that the normal STR maximums in both systems gave Lift values roughly triple the actual current world records). Nothing was done about that in terms of corrections to stat progression – it was left to individual GMs to determine what to do about the fact.

Carrying capacity is used differently depending on how the load is balanced and distributed, but the bottom line is that any given humanoid has a capacity which determines how much the loads that can be considered “cargo” can weigh.

Load is the effective weight being carried by the character.

Load Capacity is the character’s capacity to carry a Load.

Loads can be Distributed, Supported, or Point.. Distributed loads are worn, supported loads are carried on the back and/or shoulders, and point loads are just carried.

Unused Capacity is the Character’s adjusted Load Capacity (size, shape, racial adjustments) minus adjusted Distributed and Supported Load totals.

Therefore, Unused Capacity can be used to carry Cargo. The weight that produces this amount of Load (maximum) can be determined by multiplying the Unused Capacity by various factors (Balance, character size, shape, and race) – in reality, the actual Cargo Weight is being multiplied by the inverse of these factors, but this is is the easiest way to get a maximum.

There were also modifiers for teams of characters carrying a single load, and for the use of walking sticks and staffs.

Once a maximum has been determined, actual Cargo weights can be adjusted to determine the actual Load, and therefore the Encumbrance affecting the character, which limits the characters Speed of Movement (amongst other effects).

Unfortunately, there’s no clear and consistent way of doing so, it varies from one game system to another.

It must be emphasized that while the systems can be employed for individuals, the goal was actually to define a racial “average”.

Next, something I’ve described as “The Human Advantage” was defined:

• 5 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 2 hours.
• -10 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 4 hours or CON hours, whichever is lower.
• -15 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 8 hours or CON hours, whichever is lower.
• -20 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for one hour per point of CON or for 1 day, whichever is lower.

Some races have an even greater serving of this ability, others less, and many don’t have it at all. When this is factored in, it becomes clear that while other humanoids can have advantages over humans in one way or another, overall, humans are the standard against which they should all be measured.

Still paving the ground around the Labor Unit, time and speed were then looked at, which in turn defined distance that could be traveled with a cargo. Approximate terrain values were provided in a prelude to Chapter 5 that will look into the subject in more detail. Anatomical differences between humanoids were again relevant.

That was followed by the human requirements for food, and how these impacted Cargo carrying capacity. Options including purchasing food, hunting, and foraging were canvassed – there are three ways to pay for sustenance: Time, Carrying Capacity, or Coin.

Water needs were a more difficult proposition, and led us into some simple logistics. In a nutshell, unless you are completely sure of being able to replenish your supplies with potable water, you have to carry it with you – and you should always have twice as much as you need to get from one potential replenishment point to the next, just in case. A means of calculating how much water needed to be carried, taking all these considerations into account, was then offered.

Horses were then examined, and a combination of shortcomings – high food requirements for example – showed them to be less efficient than humans at carrying cargo. The need to graze ate significantly into the time they could spend at speed, but the quality and quantity of the available feed was a significant factor.

Burros – Mules & Donkeys – proved to have significant advantages over horses.

Finally, a close examination of carts was begun. These can carry huge loads. A system of breaking down the limitations of such vehicles was detailed which breaks the overall STR of a cart or wagon- used to determine the carrying capacity – into four sub-items – the STR of the bed (which actually carries the load), the STR of the axles, the STR of the wheels (and how it is reflected in or dictated by the wheel structure), and the STR of the connection between wheels and axles. Each of these was detailed and the limitations they imposed were determined – in a lot more detail than was originally intended. Finally, two specific limitations – Rolling Resistance and the potential to overturn because of Gravity and mismanagement of loads – were defined and determined.

Horses and other pack animals were specified as being able to pull (in general) 4 × as much as they could carry, 6 × with exertion. Horses are 6 × and 8 x, respectively. Some pack animals like Oxen can haul 8 × and 10 x, respectively, but tend to be slow. Each additional animal adds 75% to the total (not 100%). in general terms, if there are no significant inclines, using the lower of these leaves capacity for overcoming rolling resistance, the reluctance of a load to start moving – provided that the driver is canny about where he stops for the night.

So that’s where we’re at.

3.1.4.7 Pulling the Cart or Wagon

Let’s work up some quick examples of Animal Teams as a prelude to this section:

1 × Burro
     80 kg carry, 320 kg max load
     Haul 4 x80=320 kg (light load) – 6 x320=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity; no additional animals
     Recommendation: leave 20% capacity in reserve
     80% × 1920 (heavy load) = 1536 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 480 kg load & 960 kg load (Encumbrance)

2 × Burros
     80 kg carry, 320 kg max load
     Haul 4 x80=320 kg (light load) – 6 x320=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional animal × 75% = additional 75%
     A team of 2 =1755% of a single animal
     175% × 320 (light load) = 560 kg
     175% × 1920 (heavy load) = 3360 kg
     Recommendation: keep 20% capacity one in reserve
     80% × 3360 (heavy load) = 2688 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 840 kg load & 1680 kg load (Encumbrance)

1 × Horse
     160 kg carry, 720 kg max load
     Haul 6 x160=320 kg (light load) – 8 × 720=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional three animals × 75% = additional 225%
     A team of 4 =325% of a single animal
     325% × 320 (light load) = 1040 kg
     325% × 1920 (heavy load) = 6240 kg
     Recommendation: keep one in reserve
     250% × 1920 (heavy load) = 4800 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 1200 kg load & 2400 kg load (Encumbrance)

4 × Burros
     80 kg carry, 320 kg max load
     Haul 4 x80=320 kg (light load) – 6 x320=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional three animals × 75% = additional 225%
     A team of 4 =325% of a single animal
     325% × 320 (light load) = 1040 kg
     325% × 1920 (heavy load) = 6240 kg
     Recommendation: keep one in reserve
     250% × 1920 (heavy load) = 4800 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 1200 kg load & 2400 kg load (Encumbrance)

6 × Burros
     80 kg carry, 320 kg max load
     Haul 4 x80=320 kg (light load) – 6 x320=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional five animals × 75% = additional 375%
     A team of 6 =475% of a single animal
     475% × 320 (light load) = 1520 kg
     475% × 1920 (heavy load) = 9120 kg
     Recommendation: keep one in reserve
     300% × 1920 (heavy load) = 5760 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 2280 kg load & 4560 kg load (Encumbrance)

2 × Horses
     160 kg carry, 720 kg max load
     Haul 6 × 160=960 kg (light load) – 8 × 720=5760 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional animal × 75% = additional 75%
     A team of 2 =175% of a single animal
     175% × 960 (light load) = 1680 kg
     175% × 5760 (heavy load) = 10,080 kg
     Recommendation: keep 25% reserve
     75% × 10,080 (heavy load) = 7560 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 2520 kg load & 5040 kg load (Encumbrance)

8 × Burros
     80 kg carry, 320 kg max load
     Haul 4 x80=320 kg (light load) – 6 x320=1920 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional seven animals × 75% = additional 525%
     A team of 8 =625% of a single animal
     625% × 320 (light load) = 2000 kg
     625% × 1920 (heavy load) = 12,000 kg
     Recommendation: keep two in reserve
     475% × 1920 (heavy load) = 9120 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 3000 kg load & 6000 kg load (Encumbrance)

4 × Horses
     160 kg carry, 720 kg max load
     Haul 6 × 160=960 kg (light load) – 8 × 720=5760 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional animals 3 × 75% = additional 225%
     A team of 4 =325% of a single animal
     325% × 960 (light load) = 3120 kg
     325% × 5760 (heavy load) = 18,720 kg
     Recommendation: keep 1 in reserve, 75% load on others
     250% × 75% × 5760 (heavy load) = 10,800 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 4580 kg load & 9360 kg load (Encumbrance)

6 × Horses
     160 kg carry, 720 kg max load
     Haul 6 × 160=960 kg (light load) – 8 × 720=5760 kg (heavy load) each
     First animal: 100% capacity
     Additional animal 5 × 75% = additional 375%
     A team of 6 =475% of a single animal
     475% × 960 (light load) = 4560 kg
     475% × 5760 (heavy load) = 27,360 kg
     Recommendation: keep 2 in reserve, 80% load on the rest
     375% × 80% × 5760 (heavy load) = 17,280 kg recommended max load
     Speed diminished at 6,840 kg load & 13,680 kg load (Encumbrance)

That’s probably enough to be getting on with. I have very carefully arranged these in sequence of increasing maximum load.

Deducting from that load is the weight of the cart, of the driver, of any passengers, and of food and water for all concerned.

Team of 6 horses:
     49 kg food & water / day each = 294 kg
     reserves 25% = approx 76 kg; subtotal 370kg.
     for a week? = 2590kg.
     recommended capacity 17,280 – 2590 = 14,690
     wagon weight? 1000 kg, maybe 2,000. remaining capacity = (conservatively) 12,690 kg.
     driver & guard & gear, maybe 210kg. Remaining capacity = 12,480 kg.
     food for 2 people for 7 days = 3 × 2 × 7 = 42kg.
     +25% reserve = approx 11 kg = 53 kg.
     water for 2 people for 7 days = 2.5 × 2 × 7 + 5 = 40 kg.
     +50% reserve = + 20kg = 60kg.
     Remaining capacity = 12480 – 53 – 60 = 12,367 kg.
     Let’s add 6 guards, walking / marching alongside the wagon. That increases the food and water needs x4.
     Remaining capacity = 12480 – 4 × (53+60) = 12480 – 452 = 12028.
     Lose another 28 kg for incidentals like tents, cooking gear, etc. And carry 200kg of firewood.
     Remaining capacity = 11,800 kg.

That’s a viable proposition. Well protected, moving steadily, mounts well within capacity, with spares in case one comes up lame or needs to carry an injured guard.

3.1.4.8 Simplification

There is a simpler option to getting all detailed and specific about wagon components. Simply buy STR for the total at 3x the quoted price, and assume that all components (wheels, axles, etc) are specced up to match. If “something” comes up as broken in a random check by the GM, he or she simply rolls a d6 to decide what – if necessary:

     1-3 Wheel / Connection
     4-5 Axle
     6 Bed / Other

If the roll indicates a wheel / connection failure, the GM should consider the load, terrain, & road conditions to see if one of the two can be ruled out. If not, a second roll (50-50) makes the choice. For each extra step above 3 spokes, add 5% to the chance that a spoke has broken.

If the roll indicates a “cart-bed / other” failure, then either the cart body has failed / collapsed somehow (1 in 6), or the cart / wagon has tipped over (2 in 6) or there’s some problem with the health of an animal pulling the cart / wagon (3 in 6).

3.1.4.9 Storytelling

It should be remembered at all times while reading / referencing any of the above that the details and specifics are intended to be an aid to storytelling, and there is no story if a PC is not involved directly. If that’s not the case, hand-wave copious amounts of detail.

EG: A PC is waiting on something that they have ordered from a specialist in another town to be carried to him by the fantasy equivalent of a postal service. It’s late, and every time he asks whether or not it’s arrived, the GM indicates a “no”, so he is starting to worry. Finally, the wagon turns up, traveling slowly because it’s using temporary jury-rigged spokes, and because the guards are a bloodied mess and close to death. The wagon driver, when asked, describes a trip in which just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong: First,they broke a spoke, second the driver tried to make up time and overturned the wagon, and third, while setting it upright, they were attacked by Bandits led by a Bugbear wearing an eye-patch. The guards were no match for the band of thugs, outnumbered four t one. “Funny thing was, they only wanted one thing from the back – once they had it, they were off and running for the treeline.” adds the Driver. With a sinking feeling, the player has the PC check the inventory, and sure enough, his order is the one thing missing. Suddenly he’s deeply enmeshed in a plot he didn’t see coming – but note that there’s no details of how the spoke got broken, or how the wagon overturned (though the coincidence of timing is striking), or how the battle with the guards unfolded, or how strong various parts were, or what they were made of. All irrelevancies that would get in the way of the real plot – someone knew that his cargo was on-board and arranged for it to be stolen.

If, on the other hand, a PC not only owned the wagon / freight company, but was driving the wagon, and another was the leader of the guards, all those details suddenly become very much relevant and none of the action should be hand-waved. It suddenly matters that an earth-slide created an unexpected bank to the road at the critical spot – which was either chosen by the bandits because of the earth-slide because it would force the wagon to slow, or it was created by the bandits to achieve that very end.

And, in the latter case, remember that the PCs don’t know what information is relevant and what is not – so as little as possible of it should be glossed over.



I can never look at a cloud (or a photo of clouds) without remembering two facts. (1) To be visible to human eyes, a cloud (no matter how small) is actually made up of at least 10,000 smaller clouds; and (2) they contain so much water vapor that the smallest cloud you can actually see from ground level weighs as much as a bull elephant or more. It’s the latter fact that makes this a relevant illustration for this article. The base image is by M Fahad Noor from Pixabay.

3.1.5 Choosing Your Unit

Your definition of a Labor Unit standard should be derived from the normal activities that you expect to comprise the bulk of the activity of the trade operation.

If the core of the business is retail – loading and unloading, selling in a commercial space, etc – then an eight-hour working day and human(oid) capacity is the basis of your standard.

If the core of the business is transport – buying, moving, and wholesaling – then the transportation of cargo is the dominant activity. In a (relatively) safe area, that means a 12-hour working day and the dominant means of transportation will form the other part of the equation. The extra time allows for hunting, foraging, and letting beasts graze.

In a less-civilized area, the potential for profit can be greater, but so are the risks. To allow for those risks, you will need guards, and they will have to work 12-hour or 16-hour days, depending on the length of their watches. Shorter times mean more people are needed.

In the wilds, or at sea, trouble is no less likely to arrive at any hour of the day than any other, and all hands will need to be ready to respond. If you are hiring cargo vessels, the crew are ‘on’ all the time (even when resting below decks) – and that usually means a 24-hour day, and since a vessel doesn’t care how much it’s carrying (so long as it isn’t overloaded), it’s loading and unloading at docks that’s the dominant activity. The actual transport all happens in the background, unless a PC happens to be on board.

These principles are so straightforward that they are almost anticlimactic – but that’s the virtue of having paved all the surrounding ground. But closer examination reveals a lot of hidden nuance that can complicate things.

What if your business is a mixed one? What if you have different humanoid types at each end of a basic model – Halfling “gardeners” at one end and humans unloading and wholesaling at the other?

In such cases, look for the highest common denominator, or the one that yields the simplest fractions. If you have a race at one end that does 2/3 as much in an hour as the one at the other (smaller size, lower strengths, better unions?) then you have two obvious choices: the higher and the lower. If the higher, then the lower will be “2/3 of a labor unit” – that’s messy. If the lower, then the higher will be “1.5 labor units” – that’s a lot easier to work with. So that’s your choice.

Similarly, if the labor they are employed for is of differing lengths of time, you have two choices: you can subdivide a standard time unit to get the shorter span, or look for a common multiple.

Obvious choices for subdivision are 4 hours, 2 hours, and 1 hour. It’s no coincidence that the standard time intervals for Labor Units are all multiples of 4 hours. Whatever your standards, all activities have to get rounded up to the next highest multiple of that time – so the smaller the unit, the greater the accuracy but the more fiddling the details, the larger the unit, the more generalized and abstracted everything is – and as a general rule of thumb, that’s better.

3.1.6 Ramifications

These are not idle choices, there will be ramifications throughout the operation. As a general rule of thumb, even if you only employ people for three hours of the day, they won’t find any other paid work after they’ve finished – so if you insist on only paying for three hours work, you’ll save money for a couple of days, and then find that only the desperate and the dregs are willing to work for you. At best, and depending on how labor market customs have evolved in a given culture and location, you might be able to get away with employing people for a half-day. But more likely, you will have to pay for a full day’s labor from each Labor Unit – which means that if the main activity is only going to take three hours, then you may want some secondary activity to make them productive for the rest of their ‘shifts”.

Of course, those are all relevant only in terms of an 8-hour basis. If your basis is 12 hours, then your local hires will only need to be employed for 2/3 of a “standard” to be fully employed, or maybe 1/3 for a half-day.

Don’t expect to save money by changing the scale of a Labor Unit – basic wages will be specified per day and will mean 8 hours, so the price of a Labor Unit goes up with increasing length. And note that some activities may require a premium – two, three, four, or even five times basic pay. Guards in a dangerous environment, for example, may be paid 5 times normal, while Drivers in that environment (who are only ‘on’ 12 hours a day) may still need to get paid twice the normal rate.

Any loot that guards etc liberate along the way – if legally acquired – gets shared 50-50 between themselves and the business owner. No ifs, buts, maybes, or exceptions. Anything else either encourages guards to be watching for opportunities more than dangers to the Cargo, or discourages guards from working for you.

But these are just the beginning.

3.1.6.1 Freight Management

The obvious way to load a cargo – well there are three choices.

The first is to load in sequential order – whatever is bought / delivered first gets loaded first. This has the big advantage of speed – but it risks Gravity Vector problems, and problems if the entire load is not destined for a single destination.

The second is to load in reverse sequential order – whatever is to be delivered or unloaded first gets loaded last, so that it is most readily at hand when the time comes. If making a series of deliveries along the way, anything else can mean having to unload the whole cargo and then reloading it – to get to something that’s at the bottom of the stack. Once again, Gravity Vectors can be a serious problem.

The third is to be inefficient at all stops, and to pack the wagon for maximum stability. In other words, Gravity Vector problems take priority, and if that makes for convenience or inconvenience along the way, that’s just the way it is.

Nice and neat. Reality is more messy.

Many cargoes will have limited lifespans. These are measured in days, unless some preservation method is preserved, changing the nature of the commodity. These can be measured in days – seafood, for example, has a lifespan of just 2 days.

As a rule of thumb:

     1/2 life (round down) = fresh = × 2 base price
     1/2 × 1/2 life (round down) = good quality = × 1.25 base price
     1/2 × 1/2 × 1/2 (round down) life = fair quality = base price
     remaining life = poor quality = 1/2 base price
     1 to 1.5 × life = very poor quality (1/5th base price), 50% spoiled
     1.5 to 2 × life = abysmal quality (1/10th base price), 95% spoiled
     > 2 × life = unsalable, 100% spoiled (1/20th base price if suited for animal fodder)

Preservation methods – mentioned earlier – extend the lifetime, so they don’t change this set of parameters.

Let’s select something with a reasonably short lifespan, but not as catastrophically so as seafood: Fruit.

There’s a fairly wide range within this category – apples can last months, peaches less so. For the sake of example, I’m going to select something with a 2-week lifespan. Who cares what it actually is, that’s not important. Let’s further specify 100 fruits to a barrel, at a base price (retail) of 1 copper each. Wholesale price will be 1/2 this, so 100 × 1/2 = 50 coppers per barrel = 5 SP per barrel. Twenty barrels = 100 SP = 10 GP (D&D monetary scale).

     1 week = ‘fresh’ = 20 GP
     3 days = good quality = 15 GP
     1 day = fair quality = 10 GP
     3 days = poor quality = 5 GP
     1 week = very poor quality = 2 GP, less 50% spoilage = 1 GP
     1 week = abysmal quality = 1 GP, less 95% spoilage = 5 CP.

Shipping these takes 3 days from farm to market. Loading them takes 1/2 a day, as does unloading them. That leaves:

     3 days = ‘fresh’ = 20 GP
     3 days = good quality = 15 GP
     1 day = fair quality = 10 GP
     3 days = poor quality = 5 GP
     1 week = very poor quality = 2 GP, less 50% spoilage = 1 GP
     1 week = abysmal quality = 1 GP, less 95% spoilage = 5 CP.

Lose a day to a wagon breakdown:

     2 days = ‘fresh’ = 20 GP
     otherwise as above

Stop 2 days out to sell 1/2 of the load – gets you the best prices – but at the cost of another 1/2 day spend unloading:

     4 days = ‘fresh’ = 10 GP; remaining cargo base value 5 GP.

     1.5 days = ‘fresh’ = 10 GP
     3 days = good quality = 7 GP 5 SP
     1 day = fair quality = 5 GP
     3 days = poor quality = 2 GP 5 SP
     1 week = very poor quality = 1 GP, less 50% spoilage = 5 SP
     1 week = abysmal quality = 5 SP, less 95% spoilage = 2 CP.

How many barrels of fruit can you sell in 1.5 days? Two or three pieces at a time? Retailers won’t pay the full price quoted, because they know that they will be selling some of the produce at lower quality. A compromise of 7-8 GP is more likely – and that’s in a large city with a substantial demand. In a smaller city, 5-6 GP is the likely compromise. In a large town, you’re unlikely to sell the entire half-load, and what you do sell is likely to have a price of 4-5 GP.

So this approach earns about 17.5 GP. Let’s assume the farmer gets half the base price – that’s 2.5 GP – and the transportation costs another 5 GP. That means that the entire profit of the venture comes from that initial sale, with everything else just covering costs.

There are things that can be done to boost profits. Best solution: stop in every town (however small) along the way and sell 1 single barrel, even if the size means getting less than full price for it.

     1/2 day: loading = 1/2 day.
     1/2 day: transport = 1 day.
     1/2 day: small town, 1 barrel ‘fresh’ = 1 GP. 19 remain. 1.5 days used.
     1 day: reach city #1. 2.5 days used.
     1/2 day unloading, sell 10 barrels = 10 GP. 9 remain. 3 days used.
     1/2 day: divert to small town, 1 barrel ‘fresh’, discounted 25% = 7.5 SP. 8 remain. 3.5 days used.
     1/2 day, small town, 1 barrel ‘fresh’, discounted 25% = 7.5 SP. 7 remain. 4 days used.
     1 day, reach city #2. 5 days used.
     1/2 day unloading, sell 2 barrels ‘fresh’ = 4 GP. leaves 5.
     5 barrels, discounted to 8 SP each = 4 GP. 5.5 days used.

     Total: 1+10+0.75+0.75+4+4 = 20.5 GP.
     1/2 extra day, so +0.5 GP expenses. = 8 GP.
     Profit: 12.5 GP instead of 10.

Multiply that by 50 weeks in a year, and 6 wagons going to different places, and you get profits of 3,750 GP (up from 3,000). Do that for 20 years and you have a substantial net worth from this source alone of 75,000 GP.

Of course, you’re likely to start smaller and grow, which will eat into that profit total. And there will be bad years along the way. The reality is that you might only have half of that 75 grand – or you could have substantially more, if you invested it. The bigger the risk, the bigger the payout – but risks have a habit of failing, now and then. But if you got lucky, you could increase that 37,500 a thousand-fold.

37.5 million GP. That’s serious money.

More likely, nine in 10 of those ventures won’t pay off. So that 1,000 fold becomes 100 fold. That’s still 3.75 million GP.

How much of this should be left to the PCs to think about?

None of it.

How much of this should the GM worry about?

Almost none of it.

Work up one typical trip, the same way I have. Then scale that as necessary, and accumulate. One wagon, 50 trips a year – that’s an income of 12.5 GP per week after expenses. That won’t break anyone’s game system.

Every 40 weeks, offer the PC a chance to add another cart and team, potentially doubling their income. Assume that maybe 1 in 5 of these additions doesn’t work out for whatever reason. Roll a die, adjust the PC’s income accordingly.

Some might be more lucrative than others; for those that succeed, roll d10-5 and multiply by 10 to get the profitability. Every now and then, deal the business a setback (a one-off loss of income) or a windfall (a one-off extra of 2-3 week’s worth of extra income). And in the meantime, use the existence of the business as a way to lay adventure potential at the feet of the PC.

That’s a big difference between Trade In Fantasy and Trade in a Fantasy RPG. Don’t forget it!

3.1.6.2 Base Loading Time

To be honest, 1/2 a day to load a cart is quite a long time. 20 barrels at 5 mins a barrel is just 100 minutes – less than 2 hours. Throw in a little extra time paying the farmers and checking the barrels (to make sure they are secure and full and of good quality cargo) and you should be underway in 2, maybe 2 1/2 hours.

A lot depends on how many Labor Units you can dedicate to the task. Twice as many units = half the loading time – up to a point. And the sooner you get a load on the road, the sooner it gets sold, and the better the price, and the bigger the profits – up to a point.

This is where the manpower availability determined earlier comes into play – you can’t hire people that aren’t there to be hired. Guards won’t do the work – aside from risking injury, it’s beneath them.

If your business is using ships, the entire equation can change. You might be looking at several days to load, and 60+ workers. Your labor units should scale up appropriately – 6 workers for an 8-hour day might be a labor unit.

Divide the cargo capacity by the STR per worker (average), by the number of workers in a Labor Unit, by the number of hours in a Labor Unit to get the number of days it takes to load or unload the vessel. Or simply define a labor unit as so much loading capacity (Ave STR × Hours × Workers × Factor).

Factor? What’s that, and where did it come from?

The cargo capacity per person is not how much they can load in an hour, it’s how much they can load at a time. They might be able to make 4-5 loading ‘trips’ in an hour – which would give a Factor of 4.5. Or it might be 3. Decide on an average and define a Labor Unit accordingly.

3.1.6.3 On The Road: Drivers, Guards, Cargo-masters, & Handlers

To transport cargo overland, or up / downriver, you may need some or all of these occupations. The driver can usually substitute for a cargo-master, or you can have somebody local do it as a side-gig. Handlers can (and usually are) hired locally. So drivers and guards are the main personnel needed.

But you don’t care what their job is – all you want to know is how many labor units working for how long for payment of X. So, having defined the Labor Unit, determine how many Labor Units are required for each Cargo Unit of capacity, and you’re done.

At first, you might need to break it down as I did in the previous section. It won’t be long before you’re able to say “It’s X days travel, the conditions are such-and-such, so that’s going to be X times Y people Labor Units plus loading and unloading × Z labor units, so the total per Cargo unit is about ##.” – with no need to actually count up individuals.

And if you make a mistake in this guesstimation, what of it? Sometimes, you might be under, sometimes over – the more frequently you do this, the more mistakes will tend to average out.

No GM or PC should ever know the names or races of these faceless entities – they are cogs in a machine, nothing more, unless and until the GM makes one more important for some specific plot reason, or a PC decides to ride along with one for whatever reason. Until then, they are not just sand-boxed, they are embargoed.

And if you ever do need to flesh one out more fully, create only a Partial NPC – do nothing that you don’t need. Just make sure that for every decision that gets made, or that has been made in the past but is only now being narrated, that you have a good reason. “We need to hire extra guards in Foxton,” says the Driver. We don’t need them for Foxton to Mercy, but we do for Mercy to Shadytown – and the people we can hire in Mercy for the job aren’t reliable.”

3.1.6.4 Base Unloading Time

Once you’ve moved the Cargo from loading point to destination, it needs to be unloaded. The example earlier said that this was just as slow (or just as fast) as loading it, but we all know that’s not the case – in general, it takes 30 minutes to unload what it took 3 hours to load, in my experience – unless you also have to unpack and distribute the contents. Stacking crates and barrels, not so much.

I’ve already indicated that the base loading time used in the example was inaccurate; this makes it clear that the unloading time used is also going to be way off. That’s fine, the example served its purpose.

But, one simple tweak is all it takes to make it accurate again (or equally inaccurate both ways) – just specify that you have 6 labor units loading for every one unloading and you get equal time on both sides.

To me, though, six seems an awful lot. I personally would mandate a ratio of three labor units to one and that unloading takes half the time of loading. But that’s up to you.



There are many types of loading arm, mostly based around the Crane. The first such was devised in Mesopotamia in roughly 3000 BC, and the technology reached Ancient Egypt about 1000 years later. The Greeks realized that splitting the load amongst many load-bearing cables / ropes divided the strain amongst them, and also invented pulleys. So the basic principles should be well known in any fantasy society. Image by Michael Kauer (emkanicepic) from Pixabay

It might seem like this would change when larger vessels are concerned. The larger the group, the more scope there is for people to get in each other’s way – but that only happens if they are a disorganized rabble. Any foreman or cargo-master worth his pay will quickly organize a system that leaves no scope for such incompetence. It would work something like this:

A loading arm picks up a pallet of goods from the wharf (to load) or from the hold (to unload). If loading, he sets it down with a single team having carefully maneuvered it into position; they then lash it in place while he is getting the next one. If unloading, a crew descends on the pallet immediately; their job is to release the loading arm. Once that is done, as many Labor Units as necessary begin a procession – each one picks up one crate or barrel, then turns away and delivers it to wherever it’s supposed to go. That might be a wagon, it might be a warehouse. The number of Labor Units engaged in this activity should be just enough that the space can be cleared by the time the Cargo Arm has unloaded N more pallets. That means that there are only ever N pallets of goods on the wharf at any point.

N might be 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5. If you figure that it takes 5-10 minutes to move a pallet from ship to shore, all you need do is decide how big a pallet is (in Cargo units) and divide the number of cargo units carried by the vessel by that number to get the number of pallets; once you know that, decide the total allowable unloading time (12, 8, 6, 4, 2, or 1 hour) to get the number of pallets per hour to be managed. Once you know that, the standard definition of a labor unit that you have chosen does the rest, telling you how many of them you need to achieve that level of efficiency..

3.1.6.5 Sales Prep

One of the most common things to get work crews to do once unloading is complete would be to set up a sales display of some kind – be it a market stall for direct sales or a sample booth to woo prospective retailers.

As a general rule, this is a completely different skillset that they are unlikely to possess, but so long as they are following the directions of someone who knows what they are doing, that should not normally be a problem.

But it does raise the question of who in the organization actually has those specific skills? Who is the salesman?

There are two options: either there is someone in place at the point of sale who handles this (and probably several other loads from other producers as well). This is how the produce Markets here at Flemington basically operate.



This diagram combines five photos. For the producers / suppliers, we have Apples (I actually wanted corn or carrots but couldn’t resist this after my earlier example), image by Jill Wellington; for the Markets, we have potatos-carrots-vegetables-fruit, image by Yerson Retamal; for the general customer, we have Tomatos in a shopping cart, image by Erwin; for restaurants, I had limited choices but this kitchen fits the bill, image by StockSnap; and for the fruit & veg retailer (whose operation will vary from one nation / culture to another), we have a market with a greater variety of items in smaller quantities, image by Michal Jarmoluk, all sourced from Pixabay.

The alternative is for one transporter to accumulate wares from all over in a warehouse, from which orders are then dispatched to local vendors. This system is only preferable if spoilage is not an issue – brass cannons, nails, horseshoes, even wheat and flour (which last a very long time if properly cared for and if vermin are kept away) – these are all better suited to the warehouse system.

That does not mean that you don’t need a salesman, however. Someone has to convince all those retailers that you have what they need at a price they can afford!

In a lot of campaign settings, the sales rep is called the Factor, which generally means that he’s entitled to make decisions and agreements on behalf of his employer. That’s an important point because it once again removes the day-to-day operation of a business from the horizons of PCs. They may be the investors and owners – but they aren’t professionals in Trade, and should they try to pretend otherwise, they should lose their shirts in the process. And they should be smart enough to figure this out pretty quickly.

But what, you may ask, if they don’t trust the best choice of Factor – or any choice other than themselves, if it comes to that?

Once again, a dilemma best solved by another GM-players compact.

★ The GM will refrain from doing permanent or long-term damage to the business interests of the PCs without providing a means for those interests to recover.

★ The players will trust that the GM will not damage their business interests maliciously, and that any harm that comes to them is either (1) temporary, (2) the result of social changes / forces that the PCs can choose to oppose or have failed to oppose; or (3), both.

There are a couple of important bones in that pair of agreements. First, the GM is quite at liberty to change market conditions to the detriment of the PCs business so long as they will be given a chance to recover at some reasonable later time. But the GM can only do harm if the society changes, or is under pressure to change, or is a way to deliver a plot hook to the players. In particular, Realism is not a justification – unless the GM promises a way out.

If the PCs own a business whose profit requires slave labor, using prisoners captured in a recent war, and the King repatriates those prisoners after a deal is struck with the former enemy, that’s a social change and the GM is not forced to make up for the sudden lack of profitability of the PCs business venture.

But he might, anyway – by sending the PCs as official envoys to the other Kingdom to negotiate some sort of trade deal. That puts them in the ground seat to wind up their old (now unprofitable) business and replace it with something else that will directly connect them to the politics of both Kingdoms.

3.1.6.6 Sales and Customers

Unless its for something worth hundreds or thousands of GP, like a ship, neither the GM nor the players should ever get informed of, never mind getting involved in, individual sales. There may be rare exceptions, but that’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Business happens in the background.

That’s not to say they won’t get recognized – they might. Or that some people develop strong feelings – pro- or anti- – toward the PCs because of their business. It’s not just an exercise in book-keeping; it’s part of the social and economic landscape, and that makes it part of the political and possibly religious landscapes as well.

This can sometimes be a tricky balance to get right, at least until you have a little practice at it. Until then, err on the side of generality and abstraction.

And, if an idea for a fun encounter comes along, like a disgruntled customer, run with it. And expect the PCs to treat such individuals the same way any other CEO / owner would – if it’s our fault, give us a chance to fix it, but if it’s your mistake, that’s tough.

3.2 Recruiter / Personnel Manager

There’s one individual who the GM should think about “fully” prepping, because he or she is the key to everything else: the Recruiter / Personnel Manager, the person who takes that burden off the shoulders of the PCs (and out of game play).

Can you seriously imagine a game session – or two, or three – in which PCs do nothing but interview prospective staff? Talk about boring! And all the GM creativity required to create these individuals knowing that they will never again exist as discrete in-game individuals? Talk about wasted efforts!!

The Recruiter’s competence and reliability are what will establish the baseline for competence and reliability amongst every faceless entity that toils in the business to make it happen. While there can be, and occasionally probably will be, aberrations and anomalies, they set the standards. Get a good one, and things will function as smoothly as they possibly can; get a bad one and nightmares lurk in the undergrowth.

The Personnel Manager’s competence solves most problems before a PC even has to be made aware of them. At most, there may need to be an allowance for temporary setbacks, teething problems, and the fact that life never runs entirely according to script.

But neither role can be successful if the PCs don’t trust the individual that is put forward to function in this capacity. That trust has to be earned in some fashion, and the best way to do that is with an in-game role as an NPC. Rather than creating someone who they hope to ‘sell’ to the PCs as the right fit for this role, the GM should aim to create someone they will choose to place in the role(s).

In large organizations, these functions are normally separate, but in any operation on the scale of what should be able to be created by a PC, the organization should be small enough (at least initially) for them to function under the one hat.

We also need a fallback position in case the PCs don’t’ take up the recruitment of the potential Recruiter / Personnel Manager. This fallback should permit the players to simply announce, “We are hiring someone to recruit and manage the workers for us.” Which brings me to Assumption #1.

3.2.1 Assumption #1: The best available gets hired

The GM has to make it clear to the players that he expects the PCs to be using their Intelligence and Wisdom and Judgment and anything else that they can bring to the table in order to hire the very best person in their judgment that they can find for the position, given any parameters that the players choose to define.

Those parameters are usually financial and character in nature – “Hire the best we can get for under XX gold a day / week / month / year. And give them a slice of the business, a half-share, so that if it grows, so does their wealth. And prioritize honesty and reliability over competence.”

Or, “We’ll hire the most competent person we can find, even if we don’t fully trust them, then do whatever deal we have to in order to buy their loyalty. We’ll make it clear that we’ll be keeping a close eye on things from the shadows. And we’ll hire an accountant from a different city to check the books every few months, at least at first.”

Note that you can’t have it both ways – the players have to decide what they assess as most important. But, by presenting an NPC who the GM portrays as one or the other within an adventure, one of two things will happen: either the players will anoint him to the position, prioritizing whatever the GM portrayed as their hallmark, or the players will not, effectively selecting a default position of the other option.

If the GM portrays the individual as honest and trustworthy, and the PCs reject him, they are effectively valuing competence over those qualities. If the GM portrays the individual as an expert recruiter, and the PCs reject him, they are valuing trustworthiness over competence. Again, you can’t have it both ways – and the GM should ensure that the players know it.

This, of course, brings up an extremely important point: what exactly constitutes “the best available”? How should the GM design a character and assess their capabilities in this respect?

3.2.1.1 Any Relevant Skill

The recruiter has to be ‘competent’ in an interpersonal skill of some kind. ANY interpersonal skill will do – whatever this skill is will define their usual modus operandi.

Bribery, for example, means that they use money to persuade others to do what they want. Bargaining would describe them as a negotiator first and foremost. Blackmail uses threats and intimidation to keep staff in line. And so on down the list it goes (Bluff, Seduction, or Romance might make things tricky, though). Heck, even Animal Handling or Riding could be considered appropriate in this context, when you think about it.

What does ‘competent’ mean? Take the highest skill (ranks) of each PC and average them. Round up, and add 1. That’s Competent.

It means that low-level characters won’t be able to attract the same kind of high-voltage recruits that medium-to-high level characters can – but the business operations that such characters can mount would be similarly restricted.

What’s more, every time the average party level goes up a point (or so), the GM should reassess this and let the NPC improve his abilities commensurately. This is, after all, a skill that they are using day in and day out, to solve all kinds of business problems. They will be as capable of making a mistake as a PC would be – but also as capable of correcting those mistakes.

3.2.1.2 INT + WIS

The primary stats that the NPC uses in the performance of his duties are going to be the SUM of INT and WIS (or their equivalents), minus 10, unless the game system has a dedicated relevant stat other than Charisma.

If you stop and think about what these stats represent, you’ll see why. INT uses Intellect and book learning and theory to derive a solution to a problem. WIS uses real world experience either in place of, as a supplement to, or in conjunction with, that theory.

In theory, characters should start off using INT and should, over time, transition to using WIS. But that’s too much work, and involves questions that require wasted effort to answer, like how quickly the transition takes place.

So, instead, we total them – but then take off five from the sum (i.e. an average score) to get a value that is comparable to any other stat.

Again, every time the PCs go up two or three levels, the NPCs stats should likewise rise. This probably happens slowly enough that it’s not a big deal.

3.2.1.3 Substituting CHAR

Of course, most interpersonal skills are normally Charisma-based. And it’s entirely acceptable for a character to substitute charisma either for the combined score derived above or for just the INT part of it.

This essentially replaces theoretical understanding and logic with likability. It can mean that the solutions the character comes up with aren’t entirely sensible all of the time, but because they like him or her, the workers will do their best to make them work, anyway.

There is, therefore, a good and obvious reason why this is not the default stat for this particular application of the skill in question – because it represents a fundamentally different approach to solving the business problems with which the NPC will be presented. It’s not necessarily a worse approach, or a better one, but it is different, and it’s often not the sort of thing that people hiring managers go looking for, perhaps because it’s hard to assess and relatively easy to fake.

But there are consequences, that can be either good or bad – the use of Charisma also creates Loyalty, not to the job or the owners (not directly, anyway), but to the Manager. Should the PCs ever fire or otherwise lose him or her, or his or her services, a lot of their workers can follow them out the door. And if the workers are getting exploited, the manager is as likely to lead them out on strike as they are to represent ‘management’ in resolving the issue.

Substituting Charisma puts the ethics of the Recruiter front and center in a way that doesn’t occur with a heartless, soulless, manager. That binds the PCs to live up to those ethical standards, whether the PCs realize that or not. For some groups, this won’t be a problem; for others, it may be an insurmountable hurdle.

Any such conflicts should be obvious going in, or at least anticipated by the GM, and used to refine the definition of ‘competent’ employed.

Murder Hobos thus either attract competent but equally-unscrupulous types to represent them, or someone who will (eventually) use the business as a weapon to try to reform them. How that plays out will be up to the GM and the players.

3.2.1.4 Supplemental Magic

Another consideration that should not be overlooked by anyone concerned is the use of Magic, especially permanent magic items, to enhance or buff the NPC. This can get out of hand very easily if the GM isn’t careful, but it can also be a two-edged sword in a similar way to Charisma.

Without trawling through various game references looking for specific items, this is going to be up to the GM to resolve on a case-by-case basis.

One way of looking at such is an attempt by the PCs to secure the loyalty of the Recruiter through bribery – the more unscrupulous the Recruiter, the more successful this is likely to be (at least temporarily). But some will be offended by the very suggestion because of their morality, or the implied insult that they need the help.

This is another example of why this is an important NPC that the GM needs to have a pretty good handle on – how is he going to react?

Even if the offer / gift is accepted, that may not actually buy the loyalty of the NPC. It simply enhances his ability to do his job, amplifying any capacity for dissension with the bosses and the impact that it will have.

The relationship between the NPC and the PCs is the most important thing in assessing such situations. The GM needs to know exactly what that relationship is – an if the players are smart, they will want to be fairly certain of their footing before even considering this option.

Under some circumstances, it can all work out to everyone’s satisfaction – instead of using their accrued wealth to buff themselves, the PCs are using it to enhance the security of their business operation, which the GM has already undertaken not to threaten capriciously, anyway. In effect, then, this is wealth that the PCs are giving away, because they get nothing for it that they don’t already have. Most GMs are fine with that, especially if the players are also happy with the arrangement.

As a general policy, a GM should NEVER deliberately emplace a treasure to be used to Buff the NPC unless the PCs (i.e. the players) are feeling insecure about their choice – in which case, such a placement can be viewed as positive reinforcement by the GM. But if the PCs capture something and decide that this is a more useful thing to use it for, I’d be fine with that.

3.2.2 Assumption #2: They Hire The Best

So, one way or another, the NPC is going to be competent to do the job to a reasonable standard. Assuming that they have not been emplaced to deliberately sabotage the operation – which would be a violation of the tacit agreement between the GM and players unless it was somehow revealed before significant damage could take place.

Which means that it is implied that they will use their abilities to the best of those abilities to deliver the outcome that presumably the PCs want, i.e. a profitable and reputable business operation (or something else if that’s what they have specified).

Which means that they will use their full capabilities to hire the best people they can find – or, at least, the the best they can find who will work for an acceptable (normal) pay rate. Bear in mind that we’re not talking about the Recruiter themselves any more, we’re talking about their Work Product – which is a satisfied and satisfactory workforce, to the social standards that are applicable.

This is the hidden backbone of the entire concept of a Labor Unit. It’s actually a foundational principle of Australian Society – “A fair days work for a fair day’s pay”. Sadly, the principle has been undermined through governments prioritizing business interests over workers – either on general principle or “doing favors for political friends” or outright corruption and vested interests, here just as everywhere else. But, unlike some other places I could name, it hasn’t been killed entirely and still gets revived from time to time.

Here’s another way to phrase it that will work in just about any in-game situation: You get what you pay for.

I’ll take a closer look at pay scales, how they can be manipulated, and the consequences of doing so, in section 3.5.

But, before I move on, I should amplify the caveat offered, just a little: “a satisfied and satisfactory workforce, to the social standards that are applicable.”

If the society is a Victorian Nightmare, don’t expect to be able to hire blindingly loyal workers that are distinctly better than those everyone else recruits. If the society is a reasonable one, but for whatever reason the recruiter is required to hire from the dirty end of the work pool, don’t expect sunshine and lollipops and perfect employees.

And if the players want these things, they are going to have to work to create a society in which these become potential outcomes. That’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to put a lot of noses out of joint – in particular, anyone waxing fat off the existing system – and is sure to get the PCs involved in the game society right up to their necks. All of which should make for interesting plotlines.

One particular practice that has to be singled out is Slave Labor and the Serf system. If this is the accepted normal, then the PCs have no choice but to follow it or their business will not be competitive. This can cause distress on the part of some players. It’s the age-old conflict of modern standards and ideals Vs historical accuracy.

Every GM will have their own take on this question (even if it’s not to have noticed it, or to do their level best to avoid the question) – but as soon as the PCs begin operating a business of any kind, they become a part of that society and its economy, whether they – or the GM – likes it or not, and these issues become much harder to ignore.

There are only two answers: either one side or the other has to compromise, or their needs to be a social revolution of some kind. Which goes back to my earlier point – if the players want a kinder, gentler, fairer society, they will need to make that happen. In the process, making enemies and risking the shirts off their backs.

I think that’s enough said on that particular subject.

3.2.3 The Principle Of Labor Unmanagement

But it does bring me to the subject of another compact between Players and GM. Well, actually, it’s an implied extension of the one described earlier in this chapter:

From 3.1.6.5 Sales Prep:

★ The GM will refrain from doing permanent or long-term damage to the business interests of the PCs without providing a means for those interests to recover.

★ The players will trust that the GM will not damage their business interests maliciously, and that any harm that comes to them is either (1) temporary, (2) the result of social changes / forces that the PCs can choose to oppose or have failed to oppose; or (3), both.

The principle of Labor Unmanagement is that the Players will keep their hands off the day-to-day management of the business and its workers, and in return, the GM will assume that these workers are as diligent and honest as can be recruited and permit the business to function as well as any other in the game setting.

This, after all, is the whole purpose behind hiring a competent “recruiter” – to keep mundanity out of the way of adventure and Fantasy, and not mire the game in trivialities and personnel problems and management issues. To keep everything big-picture, abstract, and at arm’s length, in other words, except where it enhances or delivers those adventures and Fantasy Elements to the game.

3.3 The Labor Unit

Ultimately, the labor unit is a standard measure of how much work gets done in a standard working shift by a standard crew for a standard wage. So it’s

★ Time × Labor × Crew

Time is a standard length, already chosen, based on the most common activity;
Labor is measured in kg carried, i.e. Strength used;
and Crew is the number of individuals in a standard group.

The objective is to have a labor unit defined in such a way that any task or phase of the business operation can be reduced to a small and manageable number that tells you how many shifts it will take to complete. Multiply that by the standard wage, and you have your base expense.

Because this permits the Labor Unit to be defined as ‘a cost of X’, all other expenses can be converted into a ‘Labor Unit equivalent’ and simply tacked on to the total.

This total is not going to change much from day to day, week to week, month to month, or year to year. So once it is determined by the GM, it’s a relatively fixed quantity. This simplifies the account-keeping required enormously, which is the whole point of the abstraction.

We’ve looked at Labor and at various peripheral issues – let’s break down Time in a more detailed fashion.

3.3.1 Eight man-hour Labor Units

In an urban environment where people can go home at the end of their shift (or perhaps get recruited for another one-off job that afternoon or evening, even with the same employer), eight man-hour Labor Units are generally the way to go.

The eight-hour day is generally something we’re all familiar with, but this is a little different – it’s an eight man-hour day. If the Crew Number is 2, then it represents 4 hours of working time; if the Crew Number is 4, then it’s just an hour’s work for an hour’s pay. Only if it’s one individual is the time full employment.

The interesting thing is that this integrates a standard labor practice into the fundamental assumptions about the business and its operations – ‘Hire in pairs’ or ‘groups of 4’. Attack problems with enough man-power to resolve them quickly.

As a general rule, with eight man-hour units, Crew numbers of 1, 2, 4, 5, or 8 are the only numbers that are convenient enough to make sense, and 4, 5, and 8 are various degrees of ‘marginal’.

3.3.2 Twelve man-hour Labor Units

Twelve man-hour Labor Units are sometimes more practical, because 12 can easily be factored by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 12. You can also do 9 but it’s a little bit messier.

That gives you a lot of flexibility in return for the more frequent decimals / fractions that will result.

Twelve man-hour days are typical in situations where an individual has to work for eight hours AND forage around or hunt for food / water at the end of that period. It’s best suited for life on the road.

Twelve hours is also a convenient number when it comes to watches and rest – it means that everyone can serve one four-hour watch and still get 8 hours of rest. The normal practice would be to rotate these assignments so that no one’s sleep is broken night after night.

But such considerations grow more complex if your standard Crew Number is anything but a 1. Two-person teams make a Labor Unit that is 6 hours in duration at this scale, indicating four of them in a 24-hour period and that doesn’t work as well for allowing an 8-hour rest period.

For this reason, it can be more convenient to use a Crew Number of 3. That makes a ‘shift’ four hours in length; people can be employed for 8 hours as workers, four hours as hunter-gatherers, and work a four-hour watch, quite conveniently. The downside is that the Labor Cost for a shift goes up by 50% to cover the extra person.

3.3.3 Sixteen man-hour Labor Units

This does the same thing as a Crew of 3 working a 12 man-hour Labor Unit, but with greater flexibility because the Crew Number is now one or two.

The ‘1’ is fairly self-explanatory, but the ‘2’ deserves a little thought. That gives a shift duration of 8 hours.

3.3.4 Twenty-four man-hour Labor Units

The most expensive kind of labor is the labor that has to be on-call at all hours of the night and day. Overland, it’s relatively easy to throw enough warm bodies at any given task that this is not necessary, and you can cover any ‘unusual’ situations with a bonus – for example, caravan guards get paid to stand watch, but if something hostile shows up when someone is off-watch, you still want them to be pitching in, aiding in the common defense of your profits.

Out at sea, it’s often a different story. It takes a certain number of crew to run a ship efficiently, and inefficiency is corrosive to profit margins. Yes, in a pinch, you could get by with a fraction of the total – so long as you didn’t encounter anyone or anything hostile – but you only have to lose one ship every three or four years to be completely out of business – those things are expensive.

Stinting on crew numbers is a false economy, therefore, and the optimum configuration of a Labor Unit is the one that affords the greatest flexibility.

One of the reasons for this is that you will generally hire or own the ship – but the Captain will command it, and be in charge of hiring and firing of crew, and the setting of wages for those crew.

Even if you have a dedicated and expert recruiter, this will be true. Captains will argue that they are hiring for specialist roles which require specific expertise, and that’s true – but mostly it’s because the Captains have traditionally had the authority and refuse to give it up.

It’s actually often the case that the crew are completely independent of the ship’s current master – you hire the ship, the captain ensures that sufficient crew are provided to complete that task, and he takes their wages out of the hiring fee (and keeps the rest for himself).

If the ship has an outside owner, that simply means that the captain has to deduct part of whatever he gets paid for the hiring of the ship and arranges for that to (eventually) get paid to said owner – but it’s generally far more common in a fantasy milieu for the Captain to own the ship (even if he stole it from a previous owner). Don’t look to hard or ask too many fool questions or you might share in his grisly fate — unfortunate accident.

Labor Units that total 24 working hours suit crews of 12, 10, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1. Of those, the most common would be 4 or 6.

Crew numbers of 4 divide 24 into 6-hour ‘shifts’, of which two would be worked each day (for a total of 12 hours). This can be convenient because there would be 4 such 6-hour shifts in a day, meaning that you can allocate one member of the crew-group of 4 to each shift for primary duty and have a second shift from each to be ‘general service’ (i.e. whatever needs doing most urgently). The other 12 hours, the crewmen are ‘off-duty’ and are expected to spend part of that time sleeping, part of it eating, and part of it doing whatever the hell they want – so long as they don’t disrupt the running of the ship. Again, any ship’s crew treat themselves as an elite workforce (whether they are or not) – and note that there can be different grades of ‘elite’ in this context.

Crew numbers of 6 divide 24 man-hours into shifts that are 4 hours long. This is an even more flexible arrangement, because the normal sleeping allocation is eight hours long. So, work 3 shifts, sleep 2 shifts, and have 1 shift for private activities – if not called upon for extra duties. The downside is that this is a far stricter and more disciplined protocol that crews used to the 4-man division will tend to resent. So, while you might find it in formal navies, it’s uncommon outside of that context.

3.3.5 Choices and Expectations

On the surface, it may seem like a fairly innocuous – even trivial – decision to make, but GMs have to be warned at this point to take the choice of Labor Unit very seriously, because it will carry social expectations and implications far beyond anything that appears on the surface. Sooner or later, those ramifications will manifest, in the form of NPC expectations of what is ‘fair’ and what they are being paid to do.

You can try to avoid this, but that will just leave the system open to abuse by PCs and their owning players, who – like bosses everywhere – want to get as much sweat out of their workers as they can for a given wage.

You might be lucky, and have a reasonably ‘enlightened’ group of players in your game, and so think that you can get away with not putting a lot of thought into this. It only takes one new player who looks to exploit his workers for the whole thing to then collapse – there are no labor laws worth mentioning, remember, only customs, traditions, and a sense of what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘tolerable’.

That’s what your extra effort is buying you – protection against the occasional bad apple. This system is set up in such a way that those who don’t need such treatment won’t even notice it – but when it becomes necessary, it’s generally too late to implement it. That gets seen by players in question as the GM ‘picking on them’ and the whole situation quickly degenerates.

So take a bit of time, think about the society and culture within your game and what expectations on the part of hired workers would be reasonable, and use that – and the type of activity that is the focal point of the business operation – to set a standard that holds hidden meaning. Then put that hidden meaning in your back pocket until you need it.

3.4 The Labor Market

A labor market is defined as so many standard Labor Units available for hire. Obviously, if you hire all of them, any thoughts of quality go out the window – they will average bog-standard, perhaps worse. Labor markets replenish by the day, less any given multiple days’ employment previously.

If there are 5 labor units for hire, and the business recruits three of them for two days, then on the second day, there will only be two labor units available. GMs shouldn’t track hiring by other business concerns; simply shrink the size of the labor market, accordingly.

Labor markets can be classified into six grades:

Grade 1: poor, small
Grade 2: average, small
Grade 3: good, small
Grade 4: average, average
Grade 5: average, large
Grade 6: good, large

Poor = 50% low quality
Average = 25% low quality, 20% high quality, 5% elite quality
Good = 25% low quality, 25% typical quality, 40% high quality, 10% elite quality

Small = 3% Labor available
Average = 5% Labor available
Large = 8% Labor available

Populations <2500: mostly Small, occasional Average
Populations 2500 – 5000: mostly Average, occasional Small or Large
Populations 5000 – 50,000: mostly Average, occasional Large
Populations 50,000 – 250,000: evenly split Average and Large
Population 250,000+ mostly Large, occasional Average

1. Take the total population of the community (to the nearest 100 or 2 decimal places)
2. Find the logarithm (to one decimal place)
3. Square the result
4. Multiply by 50
5. Divide by the standard Labor Unit
6. Multiply by the size indicated by the grade. Round to the nearest 1/4.

The result is roughly the size of the Labor Market, measured in Labor Units.

Let’s work a number of examples.

EG1: Hamlet Pop 800, Small Labor Market, Grade 2, 8 man-hour Labor Units:

1. Pop 800.
2. Log(800) = 2.9.
3. 2.9 × 2.9 = 8.41
4. 50 × 8.41 = 420.5
5. 420.5 / 8 = 52.5625
6. Small = 3%; 3% × 52.5625 = 1.576
Labor Market is 1.5 Labor Units.

EG2: Hamlet 1200, Small Labor Market, Grade 2, 12 man-hour Labor Units:

1. Pop 1200
2. Log (1200) = 3.1
3. 3.1 × 3.1 = 9.61
4. 50 × 9.61 = 480.5
5. 480.5 / 12 = 40.0
6. Small = 3%; 3% × 40 = 1.2
Labor Market is 1.25 Labor Units.

EG3: Town of 2800, Small Labor Market, Grade 3, 8 man-hour Labor Units:

1. Pop 2800
2. Log 2800 = 3.4
3. 3.4 × 3.4 = 11.56
4. 50 × 11.56 = 578
5. 578 / 8 = 72.25
6. Small = 3%; 3% × 72.25 = 2.1675
Labor Market is 2.25 Labor Units

EG4: Town of 3500, Average Labor Market, Grade 3, 12 man-hour Labor Units:

1. Pop 3500
2. Log (3500) = 3.5
3. 3.5 × 3.5 = 12.25
4. 50 × 12.25 = 612.5
5. 612.5 / 12 = 51.0
6. Average = 5%; 5% × 51 = 2.55
Labor Market is 2.5 Labor Units

EG5: City of 50,000, Average Labor Market, Grade 4, 8 man-hour Labor Units

1. Pop 50,000
2. Log (50,000) = 4.7
3. 4.7 × 4.7 = 22.1
4. 50 × 22.1 = 1105
5. 1105 / 8 = 138.125
6. Average = 5%; 5% × 138.125 = 6.9
Labor Market is 7 Labor Units

EG6: City of 200,000; Large Labor Market, Grade 5, 16 man-hour Labor Units

1. Pop 200,000
2. Log (200,000) = 5.3
3. 5.3 × 5.3 = 28.1
4. 50 × 28.1 = 1404.5
5. 1404.5 / 16 = 87.78125
6. Large = 8%; 8% × 87.78125 = 7.0225
Labor Market is 7 Labor Units

EG7: City of 1,500,000; Average Labor Market, Grade 4, 8 man-hour Labor Units

1. Pop 1,500,000
2. Log (1,500,000) = 6.2
3. 6.2 × 6.2 =. .38.4
4. 50 × 38.4 = 1920
5. 1920 / 8 = 240
6. Average = 5%; 5% × 240 = 12
Labor Market is 12 Labor Units

It should be immediately clear that the Labor Markets do not represent the sum total of available Labor, because that is scattered throughout the community.

If there is a centralized labor market of some sort (there sometimes was), then you can triple the percentages shown – small to 9%, average to 15%, and large to 24%.

These percentages are the percentage of the available workforce that can be hired through whatever labor market there is. A significant number will find work through friends and former colleagues, others will simply show up at places of work and offer themselves up for employment.

In addition, in any larger population base, there may be several labor markets, some specializing in particular industries; that was often the case when it came to mining, or shipbuilding, for example. Dock-hands and Farmhands are usually not quite interchangeable, and will frequently recruit from different locations to get different workers with specific skills.

I have very deliberately avoided making any allowance for the reputation of the employer. The GM is free to adjust these numbers on the basis of a reputation. Just remember that people have long memories.

3.5 Basic Pay-scales

Common laborers generally earn a base pay rate of 2 SP per 4-hour half-shift, adjusted as follows:

× 1.5 hard labor
× 2.5 very hard labor

× 1.5 specific skills required
× 2.5 unusual / rare skills required
× 2.5 unusually high levels of a common skill required
× 4 unusually high levels of an uncommon skill required

× 0.5 low danger
× 1 moderate danger
× 2 expected to combat danger
× 4 near-certain danger / extreme danger
× 8 near-certain extreme danger

× 0.75 medium-term commitment (at least 1 week’s employment)
× 1.25 long-term commitment (at least 1 month’s employment)

But it’s normal to apply all of the above to the base rate and factor in Crew Number and Labor Unit duration to get a cost per Labor Unit. Once you have a few of these worked out, most GMs can directly estimate how much each Labor Unit will cost, with no need to actually work it out.

An example:

2-person crews, 8 man-hour labor units, wagon drivers (specific skills), one week’s employment, moderate danger:

2 SP × (8 man-hours / 4 hrs) × 2 crew = 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 SP / day.
Expected to work 2 shifts/day = 8 × 2 = 16 SP / day.
16 × 1.5 specific skills × 1 moderate danger = 18 SP / day.
18 × 0.75 (medium-term commitment) = 13.5 SP / day.
13.5 SP × 7 days = 94.5 SP, total.

But it’s more common to divide this price into units of Cargo so that the cost can be directly deducted from the profits.

If a Cargo Unit is defined as 5 GP, that’s 50 SP, and the 94.5 becomes 1.89 Cargo Units.

Let’s imagine a more valuable cargo (25 GP / unit), and a sea voyage of 6-8 weeks’ duration through hostile waters:

1-person crews, 24 man-hour labor units, sailor (specific skills), several weeks employment, expected to fight off dangers:

2 SP × (24 / 4) × 1 = 2 × 6 × 1 = 12 SP / day.
Expected to work 1 shift / day: 12 SP / day.
12 × 1.5 specific skills × 2 fight off dangers = 36 SP / day.
36 × 1.25 Long-term commitment = 45 SP / day.
45 × 7 = 315 SP / week = 31.5 GP / week.
31.5 / 25 = 1.26 Cargo Units / Week
× 6 – 8 weeks = 7.56 – 10.08 Cargo Units

A mistake that is commonly made is to use the purchase price of a cargo unit. The sale price, however, is what matters; while it’s not uncommon to pay 10% or so of an expected wage up front, the bulk of it gets paid on completion.

3.5.1 Loyalty Index

Below is a typical bell curve, based on 4d6, generated using Anydice, but modified extensively.



You can also download a much larger hi-resolution version (3476 × 1532 pixels, 4 Mb) by clicking the image.

There’s a lot going on in this image, which contains an entire employee loyalty game mechanic.

Base Loyalty is +0, in the middle of the graph. The background color gives an indication of how good or bad things are – yellow and orange are warnings of increasing severity, red is bad, and green is good.

Employees start at Base Loyalty, in the middle of the curve. They have no particular reason to defend the company, but have no particular reason to commit acts of disloyalty or malice, either. They can be swayed by bribes and blackmail, but on the whole, they are reasonably loyal until confronted with such ‘opportunities’ / demands.

Every act of fairness or generosity toward employees personally experienced adds +2 to the loyalty index – those are the black numbers next to the curve. Every such act personally witnessed adds +1. Every such act that is merely heard about adds +1/2.

Increased pay buys greater loyalty. The first +10% adds +1, +15% adds another +1 for a total of +2, then +30% = +3, +50% = +4, +80% = +5, +150% = +6, +250% = +7, +400% = +8, +700% = +9, and +1100% = +10 (so, if base pay is 5, paying 7.5 gets you +7 loyalty). This bonus lasts as long as the pay does, and then declines at -1 per week.

Every act of unfairness or ‘slave-driving’ experienced is -3. Every such act witnessed is -2. Every such act only heard of or rumored is -1.

Reduced pay erodes loyalty. If the pay is above 95% of what it should have been (in the employee’s opinion) that’s -1. 93-95% is -2, 88-93% is -3, 82-88% is -4, 75-82% is -5, 63-75% is -6, 54-63% is -7, 45-54% is -8, 35-45% is -9, and 28-35% is -10. At anything less than 28%, you lose employees immediately – as in, they drop whatever they are doing, wherever they happen to be, and go into business for themselves. If they were transporting cargo, they will sell it for whatever they can get at the next opportunity and keep it. If they were using a wagon, they might sell that too, or simply take possession of it.

These losses are per week. They can be delayed by a week with sincere-sounding promises, and if you make up the deficit the following week then any loss is halved.

One-off events can happen and the impact is only temporary – normal pay restores these losses at the rate of 1 a month. Apply the extra pay for the month to increase this monthly recovery.

Each result on the loyalty index is matched to one of two % scores by a white line – some are off to the left (the bad ones), some to the right. These represent the likelihood that an individual will commit acts of vandalism against the company, steal from it, etc, of their own volition, or will oppose such acts if they witness them, potentially putting themselves at risk for the sake of the company.

For example, a business may know of a hidden pass through a mountain range that enables them to get products to market two days before any competitor. As a result, their produce is always the freshest – and most expensive. Tick an employee off by enough, and they may be motivated to sell that information to a rival – or, worse yet, give it away out of sheer malice and ill-will.

You will note that the scales don’t match – the white lines from the Loyalty Index don’t line up exactly with the boundaries of the percentages most of the time. The GM should interpret the position of the line relative to the % above and below it. For example, loyalty -2 is midway between 3% and 5% – so that is considered 4%. Loyalty -4 is between 12 and 20%, but considerably closer to the 20% – that would be around 18%. Similarly, -6 is about 65%.

The bars on the extreme outside are a graphic representation of the % scores. They show that loyalty of up to -4 can probably be tolerated, at least in the short-term, and loyalty -1 or -2 is generally fine. It’s below those that things get sticky.

Under this model, one incident is not likely to cause great drama; a pattern of abuse is required. But if such a pattern emerges, previously-earned goodwill goes south in a hurry, and if you don’t have any of that to fall back on, so does the business..

Buying loyalty is an expensive game, but it’s a good way to make up for occasional lapses in judgment – usually by some other employee. However, it’s so expensive that you can easily run your entire business into the ground. In the long run, it’s cheaper to be fair and honest with your workers, and build up goodwill to protect your business against the occasional slave-driver / greedy bastard / arrogant S. O. B.

On the other hand, a relatively small amount of generosity can go a long way; the system is also designed so that each point of loyalty is progressively harder to buy without earning it. Setting your base pay scale at 7.5 instead of 5 – the example offered earlier – will eat into your profit margin a little, but the resulting goodwill is disproportionately high.

That’s it for this post. One more should bring this epic chapter to a close.

When I finally start to edit all this into a single reference, I think I’ll break most of this chapter out into a separate one entitled “The Labor Unit” – and that I’ll position it after the chapters dealing with specific types of transportation, because I’ve stolen a lot of their thunder.

In other words, I intend to re-sequence the chapters to make for a smoother, more useful process.

As I write this, it’s only two days until Christmas. There may not be a post next week because of the Holidays. My intent is to use (some) of the time available to get a head-start on finishing this chapter, but the next post to be published will be a Time Out, i.e. something short and stand-alone.

Until I write to you all again, then, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Image by Betidraws from Pixabay

It’s my contention that with every encounter, the canny GM will expand on the lore surrounding the creatures encountered.

I’ve been plugging away steadily at the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, in which a lot of the elements discussed start to come together into a coherent picture of the processes, but it’s not quite ready for prime-time yet. Since it was 50-50 whether or not I would get there before deadline, I’ve chosen instead to put together this relatively short piece to buy more time.

About the title: I was trying for a play on words based on “The Hounds Of Hell Let Loose” – but I don’t think it quite comes across until that gets pointed out (I hate it when that happens).

Lately, I’ve been reading “Dr Who: The Key To Time”, which is a 21st-anniversary behind-the-scenes of Dr Who (which, of course, has now been around a lot longer than 21 years), and one of the comments made by a new producer struck me: “I hope to be able to show something new about them” – who the ‘them’ were that was being referred to doesn’t matter.

I suddenly realized that there was an iron-clad meta-law in my Dr Who campaign that I had put in place subconsciously without ever making a deliberate decision:

No established creature / race shall appear without their canon being expanded.

Some Examples

The current adventure, for example, has included:

• More information on the Dalek Replication problem and Dalek Xaol’s attempts to solve it.
• Information the Dalek concept of Racial Purity which explains their behavior in a later appearance.
• How it can be manipulated by them to create variations and specialist Dalek types.
• That, when on their own with (they think) only their own kind around them, Dalek foot-soldiers bitch, moan, and gossip just like any other soldiers.
• The Skaro Degradations – mentioned by name but not described. And how it ends up in the Black Archive.
• The Secret Origin of Ogrons.
• The Secret Theology of the Dalek Asylum, where surviving Daleks bested by the Doctor and unable to cope with their failure go to scream out their insanities.
• The fact that the Daleks even have a Theology.

All this while advancing the main plotline, which explains why the Doctor chose to become The War Doctor – taking the character’s psychological state from the playful state of Paul McGann in the telemovie to the point of being willing to end everything if he had to to stop the Dalek Time War against Gallifrey.

Don’t worry if you lack the context to extract full meaning from the examples, enough of it is obvious from what I’ve written.

Applying the principle more widely

Just what is the Monster Manual, anyway? Is it a collection of hard facts that have been rigorously translated into game mechanics, ready for use? Is it religious writ, not to be altered, changed, or amended in any way?

That last one is easy to dispose of – absolutely not. GMs are encouraged to treat individual representatives of a given species as unique individuals. That means that at best, the ‘official’ content is a generalized overview.

This gives the GM great latitude for creativity, and they usually respond by tweaking the individual in terms of the game mechanics, so as to make an encounter more challenging, more distinct, and/or more appropriate to the environmental setting.

Every GM that I know assumes that players have read the Monster Manual cover to cover, and know the contents at least as well as they do.

What if the Monster Manual is a generalized summation of what is commonly known or believed by the PC Races (and appropriate experts) about the creatures described therein? Half of it is myth (but with some resemblance to reality), half of what’s left is outright wrong or taken out of context.

Under this interpretation, the GM not only has the right to customize every creature that appears, but the obligation to do so.

How accurate would it be?

Creatures that are frequently encountered would at least have the basics right. The more exotic the creature, the further from the mark it potentially is.

So Orcs remain Orcs, and Goblins, Goblins – more or less. Bugbears? Trolls? The entries are probably no more than half the story, and half of what’s there is a fictionalized invention by the Society in-game to explain the rest – within the limited boundaries of their own culture, knowledge, prejudices, and beliefs.

On top of that, there would be inherent cultural distortions. If the only source of information on a creature that you have is Dwarven, that information will have a Dwarven perspective – right or wrong. This is certain to introduce gaps and errors.

This sort of thing goes on in the real world all the time – the source of information has to be taken into account when assessing the reliability of intelligence.

Look beyond the mechanics

The greatest impact of this change of perceptions is that it opens the creatures up to inspection and variation in ways other than game mechanics. Social and cultural differences become more important, and those can challenge players in ways that replacing fire-breathing for a thunderbolt never can.

But more importantly, it makes the creatures encountered inherently more interesting and more plausible. And it drives plotlines beyond the simple dungeon-bash.

A process

The process of implementing all this is extraordinarily simple. Every time a creature appears – whether it be by plotline or random table – the GM needs to answer four questions:

1. How reliable are the primary sources?
    
2. What can I add to what is known about these creatures?
    
3. How can I enable the PCs to discover this information?
    
4. How does this impact the encounter?

This should only take seconds, but as usual, the more that is done in advance, the more depth you can create.

How reliable are the primary sources?

You might think I’ve covered this already, because I have, but it’s an important point to be specific about.

The more reliable the information provided, the closer the GM should adhere to it, and the more the emphasis should be on social / cultural surprises.

What can I add to what is known about these creatures?

Once you know the scope available for rearranging things, the constraints, it’s time to get creative within the limits of those restrictions.

• “Some Gargoyles breathe fire.”
    – Okay.
• “Some Orcs paint to relax.”
    – Not Bad.
• “Ogres always look for any excuse to go to war with Bugbears.”
    – Interesting.
• “There’s a variety of Troll who lives in and around Volcanoes and only regenerate when exposed to heat/flame.”
    – A traditional but still fun variation that turns a weakness into an asset. Make sure the PCs know there’s a Troll around in advance.

How can I enable the PCs to discover this information?

Sometimes, the answer is going to be self-evident – the Gargoyle and Troll examples are of this type.

Other times, you will need the PCs to see or overhear something before the actual encounter begins. These cases open the door to a non-combat resolution, and can even be footsteps along a path to alliance – or, at least, peace.

You hear muttering and vile deprecations about the light coming from somewhere up ahead. The voice is guttural and promises mayhem if the owner could only get his hands on whoever’s responsible. The language is Common, and the accent sounds almost Orcish. A different voice replies, “Shut up, Grumsh. The light is the same for all of us.”

Two voices = at least two present. “…all of us” implies more. Caution is warranted.

You cautiously move a branch out of the way and behold something you would never have expected to see – an Orcish landscape painting class, being taken by the largest, ugliest, most brutish, most unkempt, most homicidal Orcs that you’ve ever seen.

The GM is warning the players, these guys will be tougher than regular Orcs while offering a tantalizing glimpse of Civilized Orcish behavior.

Most of the paintings are crude, but there is one that takes your breath away. It captures the very essence of the valley and the mountains and how big they are, and how humbling it is to be so small in comparison, and evokes an air of the beauty and wonder of nature. One of the other Orcs also complains about the light, he can’t quite get the colors of his paint to match it. The second voice replies, “That’s all right Brajj. If you can’t capture the image of what you see, try to capture the feeling, and let it relax you. You’re all here because Chief Duargg is tired of your hot tempers sparking trouble within the tribe. The process is what matters, not the result.”

Orcs, practicing Anger Management?! By Landscape Painting? The boundaries of Orcish Culture have just enlarged, enormously. Suddenly, these are a people, not a statistic.

There are broader implications. Attack these Orcs and the whole principle of non-violent resolution of issues amongst their population might die with them. That principle lays the groundwork for cultural exchanges and the possibility of finding common ground, leading to peaceful relations. That presents the PCs with a choice, and a profound one. But, just in case the point is lost:

From the far side of the clearing comes an angry shout, and four humans ride into the clearing, firing short-bows at the Orcs before dropping the bows and drawing swords. You can take sides, or leave the Orcs to be potentially wiped out. What are you doing?

Regardless of how it pans out, this encounter is a darned sight more interesting than a simple “You find a band of Orcs in a clearing – bigger and meaner-looking than usual.”

How does this impact the encounter?

Sometimes, it won’t. But sometimes, the impact will be profound.

But even when there is no immediate impact on the encounter, there is a larger, more subtle, impact. What the GM is telling the players is “There is more to life in this world than what’s written in the Monster Manual. It’s richer and more complicated and more interesting than you may have thought.”

And that’s a shift in mind-set that will impact the PCs in every encounter. It immediately raises expectations and enriches story-telling. It engages more than the PCs testosterone. And that’s a very good thing.

Long-term Implications

Most of these revelations will carry long-term implications.

Take that Orcish encounter. If the PCs intervene against the Humans (who are attacking just because the targets are ‘filthy Orcs’), that could be a second step toward peace. If the PCs then buy the fabulous painting for what it’s actually worth, that could be a third step. But there will be those who oppose peace with the Orcs, quite vehemently – if it becomes known that the PCs are involved, they will be the targets of secondary prejudice.

If the PCs let their own prejudices speak, not only will the chance for peace be squandered, the Tribe might swear a blood feud against them (blaming them for the whole encounter), or may raise war banners and send 1,000 Orcs to raze the village to the ground in revenge. Everywhere that the PCs go, they find the consequences of Orcish attacks – men and women slaughtered, children orphaned, simply because they might offer aid to the PCs.

Either way, the PCs are now a part of the game world – and in it, up to their necks. This might be just one of many pivotal moments in this campaign – but it’s certain to be a memorable one.

The 2nd of likely four posts looking at everyday personnel in Trade. In this part, Beasts of Burden, Provisions, Carts, and Wagons.

For anyone wondering at the cause of the delay, just look at the number of tables that I’ve ended up using in this post – then remember that each of them has to be hand-coded as well as having the data generated and checked.

Add to that the custom diagrams – six of them, art last count – which can take hours to generate, and it should be clear that I have not been idle!

I thought about splitting the post, but the logical division point comes relatively early; it would not have been a post up to Campaign Mastery’s normal standards. Furthermore, each time I do that, I have to source a new chapter title graphic – sometimes easy to do, sometimes hard and taking more hours.

Sometimes, it just takes longer. All you can do is hope that it was worth the wait!

Credit where it’s due:

The series title graphic combines three images: The Clipper Ship Image is by Brigitte Werner (ArtTower); Dragon #1 is by Parker_West; and Dragon #2 is by JL G. All three images were sourced from Pixabay.

Table Of Contents: In part 1 of Chapter 3: Routine Personnel (last time)

3.1 A Choice Of Four Trade Unit Standards (actually, 8)

3.1.0 Principles of Comparative Modes Of Transport
3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden

3.1.1.1 Lift from STR
3.1.1.2 Average isn’t Average
3.1.1.3 4d6 keep 3 vs 3d6
3.1.1.4 Career Paths & STR

     3.1.1.4.1 Linear vs Non-Linear

3.1.1.5 Lift, at last
3.1.1.6 Encumbrance

     Sidebar: Behind The Curtain

3.1.1.7 Load & Load Capacity
3.1.1.8 Load Balance

     3.1.1.8.1 Adding a Staff to the equation
     3.1.1.8.2 Relating Load to Encumbrance (D&D)
     3.1.1.8.3 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Superhero)
     3.1.1.8.4 Relating Load to Encumbrance (Hero / Adventurer’s Club)

3.1.1.9 Load Distribution
3.1.1.10 Humanoids

     3.1.1.10.1 The Size Factor
     3.1.1.10.2 The Proportions Factor
     3.1.1.10.3 The Racial Factor
     3.1.1.10.4 The Human Advantage
     3.1.1.10.5 The Iconic Reference
     3.1.1.10.6 Elves
     3.1.1.10.7 Dwarves
     3.1.1.10.8 Halflings
     3.1.1.10.9 Orcs
     3.1.1.10.10 Ogres
     3.1.1.10.11 Bugbears
     3.1.1.10.12 Trolls
     3.1.1.10.13 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.10.14 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.10.15 Other Giants
     3.1.1.10.16 Others

In This post:

3.1.1 Humans as a beast of burden (cont)

3.1.1.11 Time: 8, 12, 16, 24
3.1.1.12 Speed
     3.1.1.12.1 Non-D&D Scales

3.1.1.13 Provisions: Food
3.1.1.14 Provisions; Water
3.1.1.15 Replenishment: Foraging / Hunting / Buying
3.1.1.16 Distance
3.1.1.17 The humanoid bottom line

     3.1.1.17.1 Elves
     3.1.1.17.2 Dwarves
     3.1.1.17.3 Halflings
     3.1.1.17.4 Orcs
     3.1.1.17.5 Ogres
     3.1.1.17.6 Bugbears
     3.1.1.17.7 Trolls
     3.1.1.17.8 Hill Giants
     3.1.1.17.9 Stone Giants
     3.1.1.17.10 Other Giants
     3.1.1.17.11 Other Humanoids

3.1.2 Horses as a beast of burden
3.1.3 Burros as a beast of burden
3.1.4 Carts as a ‘beast of burden’

3.1.4.1 Strength of the Axles
     3.1.4.1.1 Cart & Wagon Stats: High-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.2 Cart & Wagon Stats: Low-Score Option
     3.1.4.1.3 Cart & Wagon Axle Reinforcement

3.1.4.2 Strength of the Wheels
     3.1.4.2.1 Spoke Thickness
     3.1.4.2.2 Number Of Spokes
     3.1.4.2.3 Solid Wheels

3.1.4.3 Strength of the Connection
3.1.4.4 Strength of the Bed
3.1.4.5 Rolling Resistance
     3.1.4.5.1 Slope (aka Grade, Gradient, Stepth, Incline, Mainfall, Pitch, and Rise)

3.1.4.6 Gravity Vector

And, Further down the track (1-2 more posts):

3.1.5 Choosing Your Unit
3.1.6 Ramifications

3.1.6.1 Freight Management
3.1.6.2 Base Loading Time
3.1.6.3 On The Road: Drivers, Guards, Cargo-masters, & Handlers
3.1.6.4 Base Unloading Time
3.1.6.5 Sales Prep
3.1.6.6 Sales and Customers

3.2 Recruiter / Personnel Manager

3.2.1 Assumption #1: The best available gets hired

3.2.1.1 Any Relevant Skill
3.2.1.2 INT + WIS
3.2.1.3 Substituting CHAR

3.2.2 Assumption #2: They Hire The Best
3.2.3 The Principle Of Labor Unmanagement

3.3 The Labor Unit

3.3.1 Eight man-hour Labor Units
3.3.2 Twelve man-hour Labor Units
3.3.3 Sixteen man-hour Labor Units
3.3.4 Twenty-four man-hour Labor Units
3.3.5 Choices and Expectations

3.4 The Labor Market
3.5 Basic Pay-scales

3.5.1 Pick An Index

Which will be followed by:

3.6 Productivity

3.6.1 Premium Labor Units
3.6.2 Reminder: Profit per Trade Unit, not costs or prices

3.7 Pay-scale Variations

3.7.1 Overpaying workers / Elite Quality Workforce
3.7.2 Underpaying workers / Lower Quality Workforce
3.7.3 Slaves
3.7.4 Minor Stakeholders
3.7.5 Combinations & Complications

3.8 Technological Impact

3.8.1 Major Breakthroughs
3.8.2 Incremental Gains
3.8.3 Trade Secrets & Industrial Spies

3.9 Key Personnel & The Labor Unit
3.10 The Personnel Bottom Line

In future parts after that:

4. Mode Of Transport
5. Land Transport
6. Waterborne Transport
7. Spoilage
8. Key Personnel
9. The Journey
10. Arrival
11. Journey’s End
12. Adventures En Route

Recap:

In the last post, I showed how to determine an answer to the question “How much can one carry”, not only for humans but for all humanoids.

The solution offered takes into account every variable that could be thought of, from STR to Stamina to size and proportions (when it comes to non-humans).

It also presented a couple of key equations that will really come into relevance in today’s post:

Work Effort = Bulk × Distance / Labor Unit Standard.

where,

Bulk is as defined in Chapter Two: Volume × Weight, measured in Cargo Units;
Distance is how far the chosen Trade Unit Standard Transport can move a Cargo Unit in a certain period of time; and
“Labor Unit Standard” defines that period of time.

In other words,

Work Effort = Bulk × Speed.

It was then determined that the average STR for a human who uses STR for a living should be 11 (D&D/Pathfinder scale) or 10 (Hero System scale). This was based on Lift values of 225.54 lb and 102.28 kg, respectively.

There was also discussion of the fact that the normal STR maximums in both systems gave Lift values roughly triple the actual current world records). Nothing was done about that in terms of corrections to stat progression – it was left to individual GMs to determine what to do about the fact.

This would be considered a balanced load. Image by Juda M from Pixabay.

Carrying capacity is used differently depending on how the load is balanced and distributed, but the bottom line is that any given humanoid has a capacity which determines how much the loads that can be considered “cargo” can weigh.

Load is the effective weight being carried by the character.

Load Capacity is the character’s capacity to carry a Load.

Loads can be Distributed, Supported, or Point.. Distributed loads are worn, supported loads are carried on the back and/or shoulders, and point loads are just carried.

Unused Capacity is the Character’s adjusted Load Capacity (size, shape, racial adjustments) minus adjusted Distributed and Supported Load totals.

Therefore, Unused Capacity can be used to carry Cargo. The weight that produces this amount of Load (maximum) can be determined by multiplying the Unused Capacity by various factors (Balance, character size, shape, and race) – in reality, the actual Cargo Weight is being multiplied by the inverse of these factors, but this is is the easiest way to get a maximum.

There were also modifiers for teams of characters carrying a single load, and for the use of walking sticks and staffs.

You want a heavy load? I got your heavy load, right here! The maximum size of a cannonball is as much weight as one person can lift to the cannon’s bore. How much do you reckon this lot weighs, then? Image by Hans from Pixabay

Once a maximum has been determined, actual Cargo weights can be adjusted to determine the actual Load, and therefore the Encumbrance affecting the character, which limits the characters Speed of Movement (amongst other effects).

Unfortunately, there’s no clear and consistent way of doing so, it varies from one game system to another.

It must be emphasized that while the systems can be employed for individuals, the goal was actually to define a racial “average”.

Finally, something I’ve described as “The Human Advantage” was defined:

• 5 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 2 hours.
• -10 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 4 hours or CON hours, whichever is lower.
• -15 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for 8 hours or CON hours, whichever is lower.
• -20 movement rate (“), after adjusting for Load Encumbrance, can be sustained for one hour per point of CON or for 1 day, whichever is lower.

Some races have an even greater serving of this ability, others less, and many don’t have it at all. But those other races, generally, don’t have it in as broadly applicable form as Humans – it might advantage them with loads carried a certain way, or only when balanced, or are otherwise compromised.

Al caught up? Good, then let’s dive right in…

3.1.1.11 Time: 8, 12, 16, 24

For reasons that I’ll get into in section 3.3, time in this system is measured in lumps of 8, 12, 16, or 24 hours, depending on circumstances. The time element of a labor unit therefore has to operate with all these intervals. We also want it to be as large as possible to keep the number of Labor Units involved down to a manageable number, and reasonably small to minimize pesky decimal places.

With those requirements, defining the labor unit in terms of 4 man-hours per person is the obvious best choice.

We are closing in on an answer to the question, “How far can the typical human porter carry a load in a single Labor Unit’s worth of time?”

3.1.1.12 Speed

Speed × Time = Distance, that should be obvious. The base human speed – D&D Scale – is 30 feet in a round. How long is a round?

In Combat, it’s 6 seconds – so 10 of them in a minute, 600 of them in an hour, and 2400 of them in four hours.

So the base movement – D&D scale – is 2400 × 30 = 72,000 feet, or 13.64 miles (21.95 km).

The immediate question is, what does this have to do with the price of barley in outer woop-woop?

A long time ago, I did some basic research on movement rates:

     ★ Normal Walking Pace = 2.5 to 4* mph, usually 3 mph.
     ★ Fast Walking Pace = 3.5 to 5* mph.
     ★ March = 100 yards / minute = 3.4 mph
     ★ Fast March = 160 / 116 × above = 4.7 mph
     ★ Forced March: 4.16 – 4.785 mph
     ★ Jog = 4 to 6* mph
     ★ Distance Running, Male: 80% of Run = 8-9.6 mph
     ★ Distance Running, Female: 80% of Run = 6.4-8 mph
     ★ Normal Run, Male: 10-12 mph
     ★ Normal Run, Female: 8-10 mph
     ★ Fast Run, Male: 12-15 mph
     ★ Fast Run, Female: 10-13 mph

Records:
     ★ Fastest non-professional individual 200km run**: 29 hs 42 min = 6.73 mph
     ★ Marathon Record Pace = 42.2 km / 2 h = 21.1 km/h = 13.111 mph
     ★ Fastest 200m run, Male: 19.19 sec = 37.52 kph = 23.3 mph
     ★ Fastest 200m run, Female: 19.3 sec = 37.3 kph = 23.18 mph
     ★ Fastest 100m run, Male: 9.58 sec = 37.56 kph = 23.34 mph
     ★ Fastest 100m run, Female: 10.49 sec = 34.3 kph = 21.31 mph

     * Top speed is only possible to humans in very good health & fitness
     ** Athletes can run 200-270 km in 24 hrs = 8.33 – 11.25 mph

Age Effect:
     ★ Child <9: × 0.525, Encumbrance × 2
     ★ Male Adult: × 0.958, Encumbrance × 1
     ★ Female Adult: x0.967, Encumbrance × 0.905
     ★ Male Senior Fit: x0.967, Encumbrance × 1.16
     ★ Female Senior, Fit: x0.817, Encumbrance × 1.10
     ★ Over 70***: x0.725, Encumbrance × 2.5

     *** if possible at all

To that, we need to allow for terrain, but that gets complicated. As rules of thumb:

     ★ Good Road, Level: x1
     ★ Bad Road, Level: x0.8
     ★ Broken Ground, Level: x0.6

       (Working Average: x0.75)

     ★ Undergrowth, thick: As above, x0.8
     ★ Undergrowth, very thick, As above × 0.5
     ★ Swamp / Marsh / Mud: As above × 0.3

     ★ Downhill: As above, × 1.2
     ★ Downhill, Steep: As above, × 1.05
     ★ Rolling hills: As Above, × 0.8
     ★ Steep Hills: As Above × 0.6
     ★ Mountain Pass: As Above, × 0.3
     ★ Mountains Otherwise: As above, × 0.1

       Working Average: = 0.75 × 0.9 = × 0.675

I have to emphasize that these are approximate values; Chapter 5 will go into a lot more detail on the subject. For that reason, don’t be afraid to round off more savagely than I’ve done; for the purposes of this chapter, 2 significant digits is almost certainly accurate enough. I generally use 2-4 decimal places out of force of habit, but it really is overkill – but not worth going back through what I’ve already written (both above and below) to correct..

Stride length is proportionate to leg length, which – for human anatomical purposes – is proportional to overall height. More or less.

     ★ So, for non-humans / unusual humans: × Ht(‘) / 5’ or × Leg Length(‘) / 2.4’
     ★ Multiply everything × the basic pace, multiply by the Encumbered movement rate / 30′, and multiply × 4.
     ★ Then, all you have to factor in any rest requirements, as described earlier.

3.1.1.12.1 Non-D&D Scales

The Hero System is a bit more complicated, but it’s all simply a matter of making the adjustments necessary, one at a time.

Base Movement rate is 2″ = 4m per round. A round is 12 segments divided by the character’s Speed, which is usually 1, 2, or 3 – nothing faster qualifies as ‘normal human’. 2 is the normal human standard, so that’s 12/2=6 rounds in a 12-segment turn, or 6x6x60 = 2160 in an hour.

There are 2160 segments in an hour, so that’s 8.64 km an hour, or 5.37 mph. But that’s for a normal walk – even if we assume the default character falls into the ‘high fitness’ category (which we shouldn’t do), that’s just a little faster than it should be.

Never mind, take the character’s movement rate and multiply by 0.9311 to correct for this. Hours, minutes, and seconds remain the same in both systems, so all we need from there is to be able to convert the movement rate is to go from mph to km/h and back:

     ★ 1 mph = 1.61 km/h
     ★ 1 km/h = 0.621 mph
     ★ 1 mile = 1.61 km
     ★ 1 km = 0.621 miles

3.1.1.13 Provisions: Food

Humans need between 1 and 2 kg (2.2 – 4.4 lb) of food each day, on average. All sorts of factors can influence this value – the weight of the individual being one of them, and the volume occupied by the individual being another. These come to matter a great deal when considering non-humans with different body shapes.

Exercise or heavy work increases the need as well, by up to 50%.

Another major factor is the nutrition factor of the food – the above is based on modern nutrition, which means that you could potentially slice 25% out simply by consuming a more balanced diet; some of it is empty calories. Back in medieval times, they had far less knowledge, and since that’s the time period most fantasy is based on, the same will be true of most Fantasy Games, and that means a slight increase in the size of the recommended dietary intake – up maybe 20%.

The preservation methods that they used were not the best at preserving nutritional value. That’s maybe another 25% on top.

Taking everything into account, then, we get × 1.5 × 1.2 × 1.25 = × 2.25.

That’s 2.25 – 4.5 kg of food per day (5 – 10lb).

There are three ways to get that food: either you gather it / hunt for it yourself as you go, trading time for it; or you buy it as you go, trading money for it; or you carry it with you, sacrificing cargo capacity for it. There is no fourth option.

Humans can go several weeks without food if they have to – but they will become weak in 30-50 days and die in 43-70 days. But if you expect your employees to do without for long periods, you won’t have employees for very long.

3.1.1.14 Provisions; Water

Humans need 2 to 3 liters of water (4.227 – 6.34 pints) every day. This also goes up with exertion – to the upper value stated. And one liter of water is roughly 1 kg, or 2.2 pounds.

Humans can only go 2-5 days without water, with 3 being the usual guideline. As usual, many factors come into this estimate; exertion shortens it, as do high external temperatures. Altitude is thought by some to have a similar effect to rising temperature, based on equating heart rates to the level of exertion.

Having too much water is usually a self-correcting problem. A bigger question, always, is how much of it you need to carry? The answer is not straightforward.

As an abstract thought experiment, let’s define the probability of finding potable water in a given terrain type as the “Terrain Factor”.

     ★ 1. 100 / Terrain Factor gives Miles to 100% chance of replenishment.
     ★ 2. Divide by Speed, allowing for rest breaks, to get hours to probable replenishment.
     ★ 3. Divide by the number of working hours in the day to get the number of replenishments per day.
     ★ 4. Multiply by Daily requirements, allowing for workload to get the amount needed to reach the next replenishment point..
     ★ 5. Finally, allow a safety margin – some think this should be +50%, some think it should be +100%. Personally, I set the safety margin based on the confidence in the initial terrain factor – if it’s nearly certain to be accurate, you can get away with a smaller margin. If it’s nearly certain to be inaccurate, you need more margin.

Let’s run one or two quick examples:
     Terrain Factor = 5% per mile
     100 / 5 = 20 miles to 100%.
     20 miles / 4 mph = 5 hours.
     5 / 8 = 0.625.
     3 liters × 0.625 = 1.875 liters.
     +75% safety margin (fairly high uncertainty) = 3.75 liters.
     That’s a little more than your daily needs. Even with high uncertainty, the high Terrain Factor compensates.

     Terrain Factor = 8% per mile (Mountains).
     100 / 8 = 12.5 miles to 100%.
     12.5 miles / 1.5 mph (slow) = 8.333 hrs.
     8.333 / 8 = 1..0417
     3 liters × 1.0417 = 3.1251 liters.
     +100% safety margin (very high uncertainty) = 6.25 liters.
     That’s 6.25 kg of water, or more than 2 days supply.
     The increase in terrain factor might not seem much, but it’s plenty to compensate for the slow speed..

     Terrain Factor = 0.05% per mile (arid).
     100 / 0.05 = 2000 miles to 100%.
     2000 / 2 mph = 1000 hours.
     1000 / 12 = 83.33 days.
     5 liters × 83.33 days = 416.65 liters.
     +100% safety margin (more than needed, but given the needs and environment, it’s justified) = 833.3 liters.
     That’s 833.3 kg. Only the strongest will have any sort of Cargo capacity remaining.

The last result is VERY sensitive to the speed value. Even an additional 0.5 mph makes a significant difference:

     2000 / 2.5 mph = 800 hours.
     800 / 12 = 66.7 days.
     5 liters × 66.7 days = 333.3 liters.
     +100% safety margin (more than needed, but given the needs and environment, it’s justified) = 666.7 liters.
     That’s 166.67 kg less water that has to be carried.

On top of that, water has to be contained in something, and that something has to be strong enough to hold it – when there’s a lot of it, that’s a lot of extra weight. Let’s call 1 barrel as equal to a 44-gallon drum (simply because most people will know how big the latter is) – 666.7 liters is Four of them (plus 2 cups, i.e. a small wine-skin). Per person. And the only compensation for evaporation is the safety margin.

An empty barrel of 50-gallon size weighs in at 50lb, empty. So that’s roughly another 200 lb on top of the weight of the water.

I always measure water requirements in liters, because 1 liter of water is almost exactly 1 kg, and that’s incredibly convenient. But for the non-metric game systems, you will then need some conversions.

     ★ 1 liter = 2.1135 pints.
     ★ 1 pint = 0.473 liters.

     ★ 1 kg = 2.2 lb
     ★ 1 lb = 0.454 kg.

There is also a truism that anyone who fails to completely replenish their water supply every time they have the opportunity deserves to be without. I think that’s a little harsh but contains more truth than fiction. Remember, too much water is a self-correcting problem.

3.1.1.15 Replenishment: Foraging / Hunting / Buying

These requirements add up quite quickly. If you have to cover 100 miles to reach your destination, at 3 mph, and traveling only 8 hours a day, that’s 4.17 days of food and water.

Sure, you can take it all with you – call it 3.5 × 4.167 = 14.6 kg (32 lb) of food, plus 3 × 4.167 = 12.5 kg (27.5 lb) of water, plus 5 lb or so in containers, or 29.32 kg (64.5 lb) in total, and that’s a journey under fairly favorable conditions.

And that’s for a human – the requirements increase with volume and weight. A creature 4 × human height would need between 16 and 32 times the food and water of a human. Call it 25x for convenience.

The Rocky Mountains are between 70 and 300 miles wide. At 1.5 mph, it would take 46.7 – 200 hours to cross them. At 8 working hours a day, that’s 5.8375 – 25 days. The lower number isn’t that much worse than the favorable conditions example discussed above – 41 kg (90.3 lb) will see you through. The same can’t be said of the other extreme – 175.6 kg (386.3 lb) is a significant total.

The mountains nearest to me are Australia’s Great Dividing Range, and they are between 100 and 190 miles wide. Not as extreme as the Rockies but a much more consistent width.

The Andes vary from 124 to 435 miles wide. The Alps are a very consistent 200-210 miles wide. The Pyrenees has an average width of 120 miles, but at one end they are only 6 miles wide and in the middle, 80 miles wide. The Himalayas are 125-250 miles wide, and extremely variable in width throughout their length. What’s more, they are so steep that the 1.5 mph average used above would be much lower – 0.15 mph in places! – so they are the equivalent of 100 times their width in terms of crossing them.

If you’re lucky enough, there may be villages and inns along the way where you can replenish supplies – this not only reduces the amount that you need to carry, but reduces the uncertainty massively.

But it’s nearly certain that in areas with unfavorable conditions, there will be no such convenience available – and that means foraging and hunting for resources as you go, simply to reduce the amount that you have to carry.

If you aren’t fussy, there’s almost certainly plenty of food out there – Orcs have a huge advantage in that respect – but almost every other species has less tolerance. Hunting or Foraging reduces travel speed 25%, doing both drops it to 56%.

One alternative is to dedicate 1/4 or more of the working day to these pursuits instead of using them to travel. 1/3 is a convenient number because the typical day can then be broken down as follows:

     ★ 1 hr eat, break camp
     ★ 8 hours travel
     ★ 4 hours hunting / foraging
     ★ 1 hr eat, set up camp
     ★ total = 14 hours

Why is that convenient? Except at or near the equator, you can count on roughly 14 hours of sunlight in summer. Today, for example, is going to be 14 hrs 16 minutes long, here in Sydney. In New York City, it’s currently Winter, so there will be only 9 hrs 25 minutes of daylight – and hunting / foraging would arguably take longer because of the season, maybe as much as 5-6 hours. So the time available for travel goes down 14-9.5=4.5 hrs for daylight and 1-2 hrs for slower hunting to just 1.5-2.5 hrs. You could possibly cut the top-and-tail of the day to 30 minutes or so, restoring another hour of travel – but even before any environmental impacts on progress, it has been slowed by more than half. Instead of average 3-4 mph, 2.5 would seem more likely – and for less than half the time, so that’s under 1.25 mph over the entire working day. The only good news is that snow becomes water fairly easily, all you need is a fire and something to put the water in until it melts.

For comparison:

     Stockholm: 6 hrs 37 min of daylight
     Berlin: 8 hrs of daylight
     Madrid: 9 hrs 31 minutes of daylight
     London: 9 hrs 34 minutes of daylight
     Orlando Florida: About 10.5 hrs of sunshine
     Cairo: 11 hrs 21 min of daylight
     Johannesburg, South Africa: 13h 40m daylight
     Auckland, New Zealand: 14 hrs 30 min daylight
     Hobart, Tasmania (Australia): 15 hrs 15 min daylight.

3.1.1.16 Distance

At long last, we’ve pruned the time down to what’s really available, and adjusted the speed to what’s possible. As stated, Speed × Time gives distance, and that defines time.

More precisely, the distance from A to B defines how many working days it takes to cross that distance, and that determines spoilage and expenses and therefore profits.

Outside of using it to translate one of those into the other, Speed is actually irrelevant.

3.1.1.17 The humanoid bottom line

Let’s start with the human bottom line, and work outwards. The human advantage means that if Cargo Weight doesn’t incur an Encumbrance penalty, they can be the most efficient form of delivery service (with exceptions that I’ll cover in subsequent sections).

As soon as a human needs to spend time hunting / foraging, especially for water, their efficiency declines massively. In summer months, extended daylight hours can compensate for this to some extent.

Significant armor of any sort compromises Cargo Carrying Capacity, however. If there are significant dangers on the road (and it wouldn’t be a real Fantasy campaign if there were not, at least in some parts), that rules humans out as an efficient mechanism for freight transport.

In fact, if anything compromises the ideal situation, some other solution is almost certain to be more efficient. But, under the most perfect of circumstances, they can be hard to beat.

3.1.1.17.1 Elves

Elves are just a little less efficient under most circumstances than humans. Working in their advantage is their nimbleness of foot, which can more than compensate under certain circumstances – sandy deserts and deep snow being the most obvious, because these conditions greatly compromise human movement. An ideal situation might seem to be using humans in Warmer months and Elves in Colder months, but to retain each workforce with any certainty, they would have to be employed year-round – and that is even more compromising than either race’s shortcomings as beasts of burden.

With a lot of finesse and planning, that can perhaps be overcome. It would mean stationing the humans in designated locations to assist in loading and unloading, sales, etc, during the winter months, and replacing them with the Elves in the warmer months. But doubling any workforce when you don’t double your income is not a recipe for business security, so even this might be problematic.

On top of all that, there’s the personality factor: unless forced to it, I can’t imagine many elves who would be happy carrying Cargo from one place to another. Again, there might be rare exceptions for certain Cargoes, but overall – no.

3.1.1.17.2 Dwarves

Dwarves have advantages even over humans – but they are limited by their habit of wearing heavy armor, especially anytime they have to leave the relative security of their tunnels. In that environment, where their smaller size provides an added advantage, they can’t be beat; which generally means that trading with Dwarves tends to take place at the entrances to their domains.

On top of that, Dwarves tend to be as stiff-necked about menial labor as Elves. Note that they don’t consider mining and related activities to be “Menial”.

3.1.1.17.3 Halflings

Halflings are compromised by size and speed. But they can be workhorses if used in the right way – and they are willing. One big advantage is that they need less food and water than a human – but good luck ever getting one to admit that.

3.1.1.17.4 Orcs

Larger Orcs are genuine rivals to humans. Their size counts against them (greater food requirement for little gain in STR), but their capacities are higher, and they are generally more willing to undertake “menial” tasks – for the right rewards. As noted above, though, their biggest asset is their tolerance for tainted / rotten meat; food that would be intolerable to a human is perfectly acceptable to an Orc.

The combination tends to mean that Orcs are naturally valuable as slaves, and if this is not to be a feature of a campaign, the GM needs to explicitly consider why it is not the case. My go-to explanation has always been that Orcs will swear blood feuds against those who enslave their kind – eternal enmity, even if the captives are liberated / freed. Just another brick to be emplaced in the world-building wall…

3.1.1.17.5 Ogres

Ogres have a large Cargo Capacity and relatively high STR for their size. Compromising this is their food requirements, which will be about eight times human – by the time that is taken into account, they are actually less efficient than Humans. On top of that they do NOT get the Human Advantage, even in watered-down form.

3.1.1.17.6 Bugbears

Bugbears can make great Forklifts – if they are civilized enough, or can be forced into it. Especially if you use my modification (STR 15-23) instead of the standard STR 15. They are close enough to human size that their food requirements are relatively easily met (about × 3.5 human), and their musculature particularly favors point loads. Comparing with a STR 11 human:- 115 lb base Carrying Capacity, × 3.5 = 403 lb, / 1.25 = 322 lb, /2/1.5 (Size, Proportions) = 107lb, gives STR 13. so a Bugbear of STR 13 is as efficient as a human – if the Human Advantage isn’t taken into account. STR 15+, and the point-load advantage, more than compensates for that advantage in the eyes of some.

Acting to restore the balance is willfulness and laziness. So they can be more effective than humans – but won’t be.

3.1.1.17.7 Trolls

Size counts heavily against them, but they tend to be very strong. With a balanced load, they can more than hold their own – at least until that is taken into account. Tipping the balance one way is their natural regenerative abilities, tipping it the other way is the Human Advantage (which trolls don’t share). If large game is plentiful, Trolls may make effective beasts of burden – but they won’t be much better in the long run than a human.

3.1.1.17.8 Hill Giants

Size is an even worse factor here – a small Hill Giant probably consumes 5-6 × a normal human diet, a large one 75-85 × a normal human. Both varieties have large Capacity adjustments in their favor but in the case of the larger Hill Giants, that’s not enough to compensate for these needs.
.
3.1.1.17.9 Stone Giants

Stronger than a Large Hill Giant but with the load capacity adjustment of a small one, these are not as Efficient (when all is said and done) as a Hill Giant. Throw in some significant armor (are you going to take it off him?) and there’s no real contest.

3.1.1.17.10 Other Giants

Size goes up faster than STR. And food requirements go up geometrically with size. Sure, they can carry a lot – but not enough, except in very specific circumstances. The ability to pick up a heavy load and wade across a bay or shallow sea would make them competitive with humans loading and then unloading a ship, for example. But there might need to be several such loads a day to justify employing one for the purpose.

3.1.1.17.11 Other Humanoids

The same is generally true of most other humanoids. They are either small-size-and-STR compromised, or they are large-size, incurring a disproportionate dietary burden as a result. While there may be specific circumstances in which they can compete with a human, overall, ordinary humans remain the standard to measure against.



This image of heavily-laden horses in the Peruvian Andes is by Bill Kasman from Pixabay

3.1.2 Horses as a beast of burden

The following has been excerpted from Adventurer’s Club #32, “The Hidden City”:

★ Horse bodyweight = 1800lb
★ Carry 360 lb = 160 kg safely, carry 360 × 2= 720kg max load
★ 7.5 gallons per day fresh water= 28.4 kg + containers = 35 kg/day
★ The average 1000 pound horse must eat approximately 10 to 20 pounds of hay or forage every day, or about 1-2% of their body weight. The usual recommended amount is 1.7%.
★ 1.7% of 1000 pounds = 17 lb = 7.72kg.
★ They will naturally supplement this with forage. They have a greater tolerance for lush greenery than mules but can develop cholic if they overindulge.
★ Horses can go only 2 days without water but can go almost a month without food. This only saves 14kg a day, but every 2½ days without food adds 1 day’s water (28+7=35) to their capacity. Safety suggests no more than 2 weeks on this regimen. This can be extended if suitable forage is available.
★ Assume 2 kg dead weight
★ Consumables total 49 kg / day

★ (2 × horses carry 1440 kg, but will need additional supplies for the second animal).

Horses are superbly optimized for what they do well – which does not include carrying a rider, believe it or not. The weight of the rider is located at the middle of their back, and while Horses have strong spines, there are limits, which a ride bouncing up and down when the horse is at speed can sometimes exceed.

In fact, part of the purpose of a saddle is t o spread the rider’s weight over a larger area on the horse’s back.

In some ways, horses are very intelligent, and in others, they are as dumb as posts. Quite often, for example they learn to defer to the judgment of their rider, even if the horse considers a situation risky. As a general rule, they are reluctant to exceed the speed they consider safe, given the terrain – but they never look ahead or anticipate by very much; they live entirely in the ‘now’. They will keep going in their direction of travel until the good ground gives out, even if they could clearly see that the ground a short distance ahead is unstable. “I’ll worry about that when I get there, it may have changed by then,” seems to be the thought in their heads. For the same reason, they will approach a jump with total confidence – only to lose their nerve at the last second.

They can (and do) learn human voice commands – the tone of voice is very important, as is familiarity with the rider. Put the two together, and the rider isn’t just instructing the horse what to do, they are telling the horse, “I’m in charge, you can trust me.”

I was watching the Olympics Show-jumping or Dressage or some such (not something I usually do, but it was the most interesting thing available), while at the same time working on something else. The commentary started to discuss how each gait had a different leg movement pattern, and how most horses couldn’t go from one to another without taking at least one step in an intermediate gait, and the intelligence of horses, and how the secret to getting a horse to perform a difficult jump was to convince it that it could succeed – a psychological question. A horse and rider who were in sync on the day could outperform another pair who may have been the strongest – on paper – for that reason.

If confronted with a danger, a horse’s first reaction is to run away from it. Finally, horses do not naturally back up – they are more likely to rear up and twist during the descent to start to turn away, or simply turn to one side. Some clever work with block and tackle is therefore needed when using them to belay a load down a steep incline.

Horses can move very quickly at full gallop, but can’t carry very much weight when doing so. Their speed declines faster than their carrying capacity increases – especially if they are also carrying a rider. If led, they can carry a fair amount, because they are not required to deliver speed – but for the amount of food and water they require, this is not a very efficient approach.

Horses that graze in pastures typically eat in 30 to 180-minute bouts, and may eat for 10 to 12 hours a day. They may eat 112.5 grams per hour on poor grazing, 225 grams per hour on average grazing, 337.5 grams per hour on good grazing, and 450 grams per hour on excellent grazing.

Let’s put those numbers in terms of hours needed to reach the 7.72 kg for a day’s hard work: Poor grazing: 68.6 hours/day. Average grazing: 34.3 hours/day. Good grazing: 22.9 hours/day. Excellent grazing: 17.16 hours / day.

But those are misleading. The 7.72 kg is based on the horse doing something profoundly against its’ nature – working hard all day. Simply resting requires far less energy. Unfortunately, I was never able to find specific numbers.

Nevertheless, let’s see how far logic can get us.

If there are 8 working hours in a day, then 7.72 kg gets us 8 hours of work, so 1 hour of work requires 7.72 / 8 kg of fodder = 0.965 kg. There are 60 minutes in an hour, so that 0.965 kg gets us 60 minutes of work; which means that 1 minute of work requires 0.016083 kg of fodder. There are 1000 grams in a kg, so that’s 16.083 grams per minute of work – or, in other words, 0.06218 minutes of work per gram of fodder.

Now, that’s a useful number. If we multiply by the amount grazed in an hour, we get the number of minutes of work that can be sustained after that hour.

• Poor Grazing: 112.5 g × 0.06218 = 6.99525 = 7 minutes work.
• Average Grazing: 225 g × 0.06218 = 13.9905 = 14 minutes work.
• Good Grazing: 337.5 g × 0.06218 = 20.98575 = 21 minutes work.
• Excellent Grazing: 450 g × 0.06218 = 27.981 = 28 minutes work.

We can also reformulate these results to get the amount of work permitted every hour by that level of grazing.

• Poor Grazing: 60 + 7 = 67 minutes so
  60 × 60 / 67 of an hour lets the horse work for the rest of the hour = 53.7 minutes.
  Call it 54 minutes grazing for 6 minutes work.

• Average Grazing: 60 + 14 minutes = 74;
  60 / 74 × 60 = 48.65 minutes.
  48.65 minutes grazing for 11.35 minutes work.

• Good Grazing: 60 + 21 minutes = 81;
  60 / 81 × 60 = 44.44 minutes.
  44.44 minutes grazing for 15.56 minutes work.

• Excellent Grazing: 60 + 28 minutes = 88;
  60 / 88 × 60 = 40.91 minutes.
  40.91 minutes grazing for 19.09 minutes work.

Puts things into an entirely new perspective, doesn’t it?

And that smoothly segues into the primary freight operation at which they are undoubtedly the most efficient conventional solution: One rider rides a horse, hell for leather, until it can go no further – then swaps it out for a fresh mount. Changing mounts every 2-4 hours gets whatever is being carried – usually documents or information – where it’s going in the absolutely fastest time possible.

Unfortunately, there are creatures that can steal the horse’s thunder in this respect, if they are minded to. Anything with a flying speed of 30 ft or more will usually leave the pony express in the shade. The Eagles from the Hobbit come to mind, for example. And that’s before wizards start apporting things!

The bottom line for Horses is, then, that there are other creatures who are even better at their best claim to being a transport solution – but those creatures are far harder to come by and likely to charge a stiff fee for their services. Which puts horses back in the frame.



Image by GattolicLady from Pixabay

3.1.3 Burros as a beast of burden

Excerpted from the same adventure:

★ Mule bodyweight = 370-460 kg = 400 kg ave
★ Carry 80 kg safely, carry 80 × 4 = 320 kg max load
★ 4.5% bodyweight per day fresh water = 18kg / day + containers = 24kg / day
★ 1.5% bodyweight per day fodder (eating food that is too lush makes them sick (laminitis)) = 6 kg / day
★ mules have a greater tolerance for low feed levels than horses, and can work for up to 2 weeks on virtually no feed. Their digestive processes actually grow more efficient under such conditions to better utilize the available feed.
★ Assume 1 kg dead weight.
★ Consumables total 30 kg / day

★ 2x mules carry 640 kg, will need additional supplies for the second animal).

Donkeys and Mules are very different from Horses. Far more stubborn, and intelligent in ways that horses never are, they are adept at finding the safest course through difficult terrain if there is one. That said, they value their own skins far more highly than they value anything they happen to be carrying. I have heard stories (possibly apocryphal) of Burros refusing to cross particular terrain they they distrust on steep mountain passes, throwing off their rider, staring at him as he hangs off the edge of a cliff by the reins as if to say, “I told you it wasn’t safe,” and then biting through the reins to send said rider plummeting ground-ward.

If presented with uncertain footing, and not forced onto it, Donkeys and Mules will search around for an alternative route in a systematic way, skirting the edge of the unsafe terrain until they find a way forwards.

If confronted with a danger, the Mule / Donkey’s first instinct is to kick at it or stomp on it. An entire team will eagerly attempt to do this to whatever the threat is. Only if they don’t think this is going to be enough will they flee – usually turning to deliver a parting kick along the way, just to buy themselves time.

In other ways, Mules and Donkeys are less intelligent than horses – they show no regard for voice commands from any source and seem to have a limited capacity to recognize others. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Burros of all types have two absolutely huge advantages when it comes to freight: the eat things that horses won’t, and they require far less food per kg of cargo carried. They are stubborn and pig-headed and that can be turned to the advantage of a trader who is breaking new trails.

Their big drawback is that they are small and have comparatively low capacities as a result.



You can get truly astonishing loads on a wagon or cart – provided the roads are relatively level and even. Image by Peter Vogler (cloudbird) from Pixabay

3.1.4 Carts as a ‘beast of burden’

There are many creatures that can pull a cart or wagon. Buffalo, Elephants, Burros, Horses, Camels – and that’s before we get exotic.

Most of these suffer from the problem of being slow. Horses and Camels (which can be thought of as Desert Horses in this context) storm back into significance in this context.

That’s because their pulling power is not impacted the way their Carrying capabilities are. So how much weight can a Cart carry?

Well, aside from the physical limitation of how much will fit, there are six major restrictions, any one of which can be the limiting factor.

3.1.4.1 Strength of the Axles
Most cart axles are made of wood – steel is too heavy and too brittle, to be honest – at least in most fantasy campaigns. The thicker the axle, the stronger it will be – but the more rolling resistance it will offer. So there is a constant desire to slim the axle down to the absolute minimum.

On smooth roads, you can get away with this – but as soon as the going gets rough, the axle risks collapse.

Consider a pothole, of depth h. It takes the wheels time t to descend to the bottom of the pothole. Inertia makes the load reluctant for an instant to fall – but gravity will not be denied. So, an instant after the wheels get to the bottom of the pothole, the full load comes crashing down on the cart-bed. And this sudden distress – many times the static load being carried by the wagon – can break things.

It doesn’t have to be a pothole, either – any roughness to the surface has the same effect. A stone that lifts the wheels only for them to come crashing back down, for example.

There’s a very technical way of calculating how much the force is going to be, i.e. the effective weight of the Cargo in that instant. But it’s too complicated, too much palaver to be practical.

Instead, I use a standard measure for the roughness of the road, which defines a range of heights that will be encountered at some point along that road.

In theory, the roughness also dictates the frequency that the checks have to be made. Nah, too much die rolling. Instead, the roughness imposes a second modifier to reflect the increased chance of failing just one of the checks. By a convenient coincidence, this modifier just happens to be exactly the same as the first.

     ★ Grade 1: <1mm roughness: Modifier = 20 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 2: 1-2mm roughness: Modifier = 28 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 3: 2-4mm roughness: Modifier = 40 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 4: 4-8mm roughness: Modifier = 56 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 5: 8-16mm roughness: Modifier = 80 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 6: 16-32mm roughness: Modifier = 112 × Load Wt / Capacity
     ★ Grade 7: 32-64mm roughness: Modifier = 160 × Load Wt / Capacity

     ★ Grade 1: < 1/12 " roughness      ★ Grade 2: 1/12" - 1/6" roughness      ★ Grade 3: 1/6" - 1/3" roughness      ★ Grade 4: 1/3" - 2/3" roughness      ★ Grade 5: 2/3" - 1 1/3" roughness      ★ Grade 6: 4/3" - 2 2/3" roughness      ★ Grade 7: 8/3" - 5 1/3" roughness      Modifiers as above The roughness measures high point to low point within a horizontal distance of an inch or so. Which means that has drops of half an inch would be Grade 4, while the example below - carefully scaled to 100% - has drops of an inch, and is Grade 5.

So, if a cart weighs 350 lb, and the Cargo weighs 250 lb: Grade 1 = 5000 lb; Grade 2 = 7000 lb; Grade 3 = 10,000 lb; Grade 4 = 14,000 lb; Grade 5 = 20,000 lb; Grade 6 = 28,000 lb; Grade 7 = 40,000 lb. If the Cart has a capacity of 800 lb, those are modifiers of: -6, -9, -12, -18, -24, -36, -and 48 respectively.

The wagon driver gets to roll a skill check against DC 0 (or system equivalent), i,e, add his skill, INT modifier, and a d20 roll, to the cart’s CON Modifier. This represents the driver being aware of the danger and trying to smooth the passage / steer the cart around the worst of it. Let’s say that these are 4, 4, 12, and 10, respectively, for a total of 30. Grade 1: needs 24 or less. Grade 2: needs 21 or less (on that d20 roll). Grade 3: needs 18 /-, so for the first time there is a chance of something breaking. Grade 4: needs 12 /- so approaching 50-50. Grade 5: needs 6/-, so about 75% chance of something breaking. Grade 6: cannot succeed (on this d20 roll), something breaks. Grade 7: cannot succeed (on this d20 roll), something breaks.

That something might be the axle, or a wheel, or something else – it’s up to the GM to decide where the weak point is. Depending on how it was repaired the last time something broke, it may be the same thing, or it may absolutely not be the same thing.

3.1.4.1.1 Cart & Wagon Stats: High-Score Option

A cart starts with a STR of 23, enough to carry three people of 200 lb weight, drawn by a single animal of appropriate type (usually a horse or a burro), and a CON of 16.

Every +1 STR increases the capacity and also increases the CON by +1. At STR 28, 2 horses or 4 burros are needed, and the Cart has become a 4-wheeled wagon; at STR 31, this doubles again.

Each +1 STR adds 1 GP to the base price of 15 GP (D&D / Pathfinder).

Here’s the catch: Axles, Wheels, Connections, and the Carrying capacity of the cart or wagon, all have to be bought up separately. Or, to put it another way, the basic small Wagon, at 25 GP, has +10 STR and CON to distribute amongst the various attributes.

3.1.4.1.2 Cart & Wagon Stats: Low-Score Option

It’s usually more useful to do as is done for humanoids, and divide the load by the number of wheels. A Cart of 600 lb capacity (the minimum) therefore has a base of STR 18.

The smallest wagon (4 wheels) has a base capacity of 1200 lb / 4 wheels = 300 lbs, resetting the STR to 18, at a cost of 25 GP.

A Large wagon has a base capacity of 1800 lb / 4 wheels = 450 lbs, a STR of 21. So that’s +3 STR, costing 1+2+3=6 GP more; to get to the “Book Price” of 35 GP, there are 4 points of STR left over, distributed amongst the Axle)s, Wheels, and Connection. (In theory, it should be 36 GP, by these rules, but we’ll give the buyer a 1GP discount).

There are all sorts of things that can be done to increase STR. These either contribute to the carrying capacity or to the ability of the Wagon to withstand rough terrain – i.e. one of the three other Wagon STR stats.

Some of these add significantly to the weight of the wagon. I’ll deal with those individually as I come to them.

3.1.4.1.3 Cart & Wagon Axle Reinforcement

Every increase of 2″ diameter of the axles adds 1 STR, cumulative. The base width is 1.5″ radius, i.e. 3″ diameter. So adding 8″ to this gives a diameter of 11″, a radius of 5.5″, a cross-sectional area of 95 square inches or 13.4 times as much as the base, and a STR increase of 1+2+3+4=+10.

However, this increases weight proportionate to the increase in area (5.5^2 / 1.5^2), which shows up as +13 rolling resistance. In essence, there’s more friction and inertia to overcome.

Another option is to go with iron axles. These are a lot more expensive, about twice the weight for a given STR, but a lot smaller – 1/6 the size. So the base thickness of an iron axle is 0.25″ radius, or 0.5″ diameter, and every 1/3 of an inch diameter increase adds +1 STR.

The big advantage is that the area is a lot smaller, and so is the rolling resistance, therefore – even if the increased weight undoes some of that gain:

1.5^2 – 0.25^2 = -2.19 – so the base adjustment is -2 rolling resistance, and the 0.19 is considered lost to the added weight.

3.1.4.1.4 Extended STR table (D&D)

While the rules specify the effect of STR higher than the entries shown, some people don’t know how to interpret them.

Let’s say you need the Encumbrance levels for STR 34. Subtract 10 until you get to an entry on the existing table, then multiply the Encumbrance values shown by 4 for each subtraction of 10.

STR 24: 233 lb, 466lb, 700lb.

Therefore, STR 34: 233 × 4=932lb; 466 × 4=1864 lb; and 700 × 4=2800lb.

STR 44: 932 × 4=3728 lb; 1864 × 4=7456lb; and 2800 × 4=11200 lb.

For convenience, though, here’s an extended STR table (which picks up where the official one ends):

STR	Light Load	Medium Load	Heavy Load
30	532 lb or less	533 – 1064 lb	1065 – 1600 lb
31	612 lb or less	613 – 1224 lb	1225 – 1840 lb
32	692 lb or less	693 – 1384 lb	1385 – 2080 lb
33	800 lb or less	801 – 1600 lb	1601 – 2400 lb
34	932 lb or less	933 – 1864 lb	1865 – 2800 lb
35	1064 lb or less	1065 – 2132 lb	2133 – 3200 lb
36	1224 lb or less	1225 – 2452 lb	2453 – 3680 lb
37	1384 lb or less	1385 – 2772 lb	2773 – 4160 lb
38	1600 lb or less	1601 – 3200 lb	3201 – 4800 lb
39	1864 lb or less	1865 – 3732 lb	3733 – 5600 lb
40	2128 lb or less	2129 – 42564 lb	4257 – 6400 lb
41	2496 lb or less (I’d use 2500 for convenience)	2497 – 4896 lb (I’d use 2501-4900 for convenience)	4897 – 7360 lb
42	2768 lb or less	2769 – 5536 lb	5537 – 8320 lb
43	3200 lb or less	3201 – 6400 lb	6401 – 9600 lb
44	3728 lb or less	3729 – 7456 lb	7457 – 11200 lb
45	4256 lb or less	4257 – 8528 lb	8529 – 12800 lb
46	4896 lb or less (I’d use 4900 for convenience)	4897 – 8208 lb	8209 – 14720 lb
47	5536 lb or less	5537 – 11088 lb (I’d consider 11100 for convenience)	11089 – 16640 lb
48	6400 lb or less	6401 – 12800 lb	12801 – 19200 lb
49	7456 lb or less	7457 – 14928 lb	14929 – 22400 lb
+10	x4	x4	x40

3.1.4.2 Strength of the Wheels

Most of what you need to know about wheels is covered in the preceding sections.

Wheels come in two types of three types, with multiple subtypes.

★ Spoked, Wood
★ Spoked, Metal
★ Solid, Wood
★ Solid, Metal

3.1.4.2.1 Spoke Thickness

Spoked wheels start with 3 spokes. You can get +1 STR by thickening those spokes:

★ T = (t+X)^2 / t^2
+1 STR per X

Wooden spokes:
★ base t = 1 inch thickness
★ X = +0.5 inches

Remember, these are spoke diameters, but arranging things this way also accommodates spokes of different shapes.

You can double one axis by halving another – so instead of spokes 2″ radius, you could have spokes 1″ thick and 4″ wide. Spokes have an upper limit of 4.5″ – 5″ wide, so there are limits. Also, any spoke less than 0.25″ thick is likely to break heavy loads with fairly routine shock. In fact, that’s a risk with anything less than an inch thick; you can get away with it in the case of vehicles designed to carry minimal weight, like a chariot (no cargo capacity to put the spokes under extreme stress).

Metal spokes:
★ base t = 0.5″
★ X = 0.2″

Metal spokes are less likely to break, but are prone to bend. This introduces a weakness into the metal even if the problem is repaired; it will eventually fail again under heavy load. Cast Iron is usually the exception; it fractures instead.

Bronze spokes are +4 STR relative to wood. (Cast) Iron spokes are +4 STR relative to Bronze. Steel spokes are +4 STR relative to Iron. Adamantine spokes or other exotic alloys may be +4 STR relative to Steel, that’s up to the GM.

Spokes start at 1/2 GP each (wood) and each material improvement costs more than the equivalent STR in the previous material. They increase in price as they get better, of course, and the rate of increase also accelerates.

Let’s put all that in a set of tables:

#X	Wooden Wheels
	Size (round) (” radius)	Alternative Sizes	STR	Price (ea) (GP)
0	0.5	1″ × 0.25″	10	0.5
1	0.75	1.5″ × 0.38″ 1.25″ × 0.45″ 1.13″ × 0.5″ 1″ × 0.57″	11	1
2	1	4″ × 0.25″ 3″ × 0.333″ 2″ × 0.5″	12	1.5
3	1.25	1.57″ × 1″ 1.5″ × 1.05″	13	2
4	1.5	4.5″ × 0.5″ 3″ × 0.75″ 2.25″ × 1″	14	2.5
5	1.75	4.1″ × 0.75″ 3.1″ × 1″ 2.45″ × 1.25″ 2.05″ × 1.5″	15	3.5
6	2	4″ × 1″ 3.2″ × 1.25″ 2.7″ × 1.5″ 2.3″ × 1.75″	16	4.5
7	2.25	4.5″ × 1.13″ 3.38″ × 1.5″	17	6
8	2.5	4.5″ × 1.4″ 3″ × 2.1″	18	7.5
9	2.75	4.5″ × 1.7″ 3″ × 2.54″	19	9.5
10	3	4.5″ × 2″ 3.6″ × 2.5″	20	12

 

#X	Bronze Wheels
	Size (round) (” radius)	Alternative Sizes	STR	Price (ea) (GP)
0	0.25	0.5″ × 0.125″ 0.42″ × 0.15″ 0.32″ × 0.2″	14	7.5
1	0.45	0.81″ × 0.25″ 0.68″ × 0.3″ 0.41″ × 0.5″	15	9.5
2	0.65	1.69″ × 0.25″ 1.41″ × 0.3″ 1.06″ × 0.4″ 0.85″ × 0.5″	16	11.5
3	0.85	1.7″ × 0.43″ 1.81″ × 0.4″ 1.45″ × 0.5″ 1″ × 0.75″	17	13.5
4	1.05	2.8″ × 0.4″ 2.21″ × 0.5″ 1.84″ × 0.6″ 1.47″ × 0.75″ 1.4″ × 0.8″	18	15.5
5	1.25	1.57″ × 1″ 1.5″ × 1.05″	19	18
6	1.45	4.21″ × 0.5″ 3.51″ × 0.6″ 3″ x 0.71″ 2.81″ × 0.75″ 2.11 × 1″ 1.7″ z 1.25″	20	20.5
7	1.65	5.45″ × 0.5″ 4.54″ × 0.6″ 3.9″ × 0.7″ 3″ × 0.91″ 2.75″ × 1″ 2.5″ × 1.09″ 2.18″ × 1.25″ 1.5″ × 1.82″	21	23.5
8	1.85	4.9″ × 0.7″ 4.3″ × 0.8″ 3.81″ × 0.9″ 3.5″ × 1″ 3″ × 1.15″ 2.75″ × 1.25″ 2.5″ × 1.37″ 2.3″ × 1.5″ 2″ × 1.75″	22	26.5
9	2.05	4.21″ × 1″ 4″ × 1.1″ 3.4″ × 1.25″ 3″ × 1.41″ 2.81″ × 1.5″ 2.5″ × 1.7″ 2.11″ × 2″	23	30
10	2.25	4.5″ × 1.13″ 3.4″ × 1.5″	24	34

 

#X	Cast Iron Wheels
	Size (round) (” radius)	Alternative Sizes	STR	Price (ea) (GP)
0	0.25	As Bronze	18	46.5
1	0.45	As Bronze	19	49.5
2	0.65	As Bronze	20	53
3	0.85	As Bronze	21	56
4	1.05	As Bronze	22	60
5	1.25	As Bronze	23	64
6	1.45	As Bronze	24	68
7	1.65	As Bronze	25	73
8	1.85	As Bronze	26	78
9	2.05	As Bronze	27	84
10	2.25	As Bronze	28	90

 

#X	Steel Wheels
	Size (round) (” radius)	Alternative Sizes	STR	Price (ea) (GP)
0	0.25	As Bronze	22	180
1	0.45	As Bronze	23	184
2	0.65	As Bronze	24	188
3	0.85	As Bronze	25	192
4	1.05	As Bronze	26	197
5	1.25	As Bronze	27	202
6	1.45	As Bronze	28	208
7	1.65	As Bronze	29	214
8	1.85	As Bronze	30	220
9	2.05	As Bronze	31	227
10	2.25	As Bronze	32	234

 

#X	Adamantine / Exotic Alloy Wheels
	Size (round) (” radius)	Alternative Sizes	STR	Price (ea) (GP)
0	0.25	As Bronze	26	1085
1	0.45	As Bronze	27	1091
2	0.65	As Bronze	28	1097
3	0.85	As Bronze	29	1103
4	1.05	As Bronze	30	1110
5	1.25	As Bronze	31	1117
6	1.45	As Bronze	32	1125
7	1.65	As Bronze	33	1135
8	1.85	As Bronze	34	1145
9	2.05	As Bronze	35	1165
10	2.25	As Bronze	36	1200

You may be wondering why anyone would bother not going up to the more expensive materials. The top wooden spokes confer a STR of 20 and cost 12 GP each. The same STR in Bronze spokes costs 20.5gp. In Cast Iron, just 53 GP each. So the cost is part of the reason.

Another part is that they are heavier, increasing the rolling resistance by the increase in Strength, and part of the answer is that replacements become progressively harder to obtain and repairs more expensive the further down the list of materials you go. It’s relatively easy to get a broken wooden spoke replaced; it’s rare to find anyone competent to make a steel one. The tools available in a pre-industrialized society simply don’t have the accuracy needed, and the people (in general) don’t have the necessary skill, and there are always more profitable things to do with the resources (like armor).

3.1.4.2.2 Additional Spokes

Increasing the size of the spokes is not the only way to increase the strength of a wheel. You can also increase the number of spokes – if there’s room on the hub.

★ Hub Radius = Axle Radius = Spoke Width × N / (2 π)

I had designed another table to show the effect on STR and Cost respectively but it became unwieldy because of the number of entries that were going to be required. So, instead, I’ve distilled it down to a cheat-sheet table.

★ 1. Write the Price of the spokes you’re using on a line.
★ 2. Underneath, write the number of spokes in square brackets like this [6].
★ 3. Draw a horizontal line under the square brackets the width of the first number.
★ 4. For each digit, look up the corresponding number on the table and write the result underneath the digit.
★ 5. Draw another horizontal line.
★ 6. Add up the digits in between the horizontal lines.
★ 7. This is the price per spoke, so multiply by the number of spokes to get the total for the whole wheel.

★ STR = +2 per step across the Number Of Spokes table, below.
★ Rolling Resistance penalty = -1 per step across the Number Of Spokes table, below.

Base	Number of Spokes
	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	12	16
1	1.33	1.67	2	2.33	2.67	3	3.33	4	5.33
2	2.67	3.33	4	4.67	5.33	6	6.67	8	10.67
3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	12	16
4	5.33	6.67	8	9.33	10.67	12	13.33	16	21.33
5	6.67	8.33	10	11.67	13.33	15	16.67	20	26.67
6	8	10	12	14.33	16	18	20	24	32
7	9.33	11.16	14	16.33	18.67	21	23.33	28	37.33
8	10.67	13.33	16	18.67	21.33	24	26.67	32	42.67
9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30	36	48

Let’s do a quick example:

     STR 24 Iron Spokes, 1.45″ radius, cost / spoke 68. Replacing the base 3-spoke design with a 6-spoke arrangement.

     Hub Radius = Axle Radius = Spoke Width × N / 2 π) = 1.45 × 6 / (2 × 3.1415927) = 1.38465″ or greater. Call it 1.4″ radius.

     3 additional spokes = +6 STR, -6 Rolling Resistance.

     1. Write the price: 68
     2. Write the number of spokes in square brackets: [6]
     3. Draw a line: —————————-
     4a. Look up “8” and “6 spokes” on the table.
     4b. Write the result, “16”, on a line with the “6” under the “8”.
     4c. The next digit is a 6. Look up “6” and “6 spokes”.
     4d. Write the result, “12”, with the 2 under the 6..
     5. Draw another line.
     6. Add up the columns of numbers. I get 136 GP per spoke.

NB: Keep the decimal point position under where it was in the original price.

     That’s 816 GP per wheel.

Achieving that +6 STR could be done by going to slightly thicker spokes made of steel – at a cost of 220 GP per spoke, or 660 GP per wheel.

Of course, the biggest advantage of multiple spokes is that even if one breaks and the wheel deforms, bends, or breaks, it’s more likely to still be usable – at least for a while.



★ 3 spokes, -1, is trouble and going nowhere.
★ 4 spokes, -1 isn’t a whole lot better – crippling at best.

★ 5 spokes, -1, would not be a comfortable ride, but you might manage – for a while.
★ 5 spokes, -2 adjacent, would be going nowhere.

★ 6 spokes, -1, would be similar to 5-1.
★ 6 spokes, -2 adjacent, is the same as 4-1.
 

★ 7 spokes, -1, would also not be dissimilar to 5-1.
★ 7 spokes, -2 adjacent, would be similar to 5-1 or 6-1.
★ 7 spokes, -3 adjacent, would be as disastrous as 3-1.

★ 8 spokes, -1, would produce a little side-to-side rocking.
★ 8 spokes, -2 adjacent, would also not be dissimilar to 5-1.
★ 8 spokes, -3 adjacent, is the same as 4-1.

★ 9 spokes, -1, would be barely noticeable.
★ 9 spokes, -2, would be similar to 7-1 if the missing spokes were adjacent.
★ 9 spokes, -3 adjacent, would also not be dissimilar to 5-1.
★ 9 spokes, -4 adjacent, would be as crippling as 4-1.
★ 9 spokes, -5 adjacent, would be as disastrous as 3-1.

★ 10 spokes, -1, would be barely noticeable.
★ 10 spokes, -2, would be similar to 9-1 if the missing spokes were adjacent.
★ 10 spokes, -3, is the same as 4-1 if the missing spokes were adjacent.
★ 10 spokes, -4 adjacent, would be as bad as 3-1.

★ 12 spokes, -1, would be barely noticeable.
★ 12 spokes, -2 adjacent, would be the same as 6-1.
★ 12 spokes, -3 adjacent, would be the same as 4-1.
★ 12 spokes, -4 adjacent, would be as bad as 3-1.

★ 16 spokes (not shown), -1, would not be noticeable.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -2 adjacent, would be about the same as 12-1.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -3 adjacent, would be the same as 9-1 or 10-1.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -4 adjacent, would be the same as 8-1.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -5 adjacent, would be about the same as 5-1.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -6 adjacent, would be as bad as 4-1.
★ 16 spokes (not shown), -7 adjacent is what it takes to cripple this most expensive design.

3.1.4.2.3 Solid Wheels

Solid wheels are easier to make than spoked wheels. But they weigh a lot more.

It’s possible to work out how much more – the formula is T × (r-a) / (N × spoke width) to get a multiplier which can applied to the weight of a spoked wheel – but who cares about that?

     (r-a) / (N × spoke width)
     where
          T = the thickness of the wheel (NOT the rims);
          r = radius of the wheel;
          a = radius of the axle / hub;
          N is the number of spokes; and
          spoke width should be obvious.

What we actually care about is the impact on Rolling Resistance – and for that, we can take a shortcut.

Assuming Base T = 1/2 spoke width, subtract 2 from the STR of the spoked wheel per spoke after the first, and add 50% to the result to get the rolling resistance effect. If the thickness is less than this (and it will almost certainly be so), multiply the result by the actual thickness and divide by the base thickness. Round down.

Example: Let’s use the 6-spoked wheel we just worked out: Spokes = radius 1.45″, so base T = 0.725″; STR 24+6=30. Rolling resistance 30-(2 × 5)=20; 20 × 1.5 = 30 – at 0.725″ thickness. Actual thickness – let’s say 2/5th of an inch (0.4″). 30 × 0.4 / 0.725 = 16.55. So a solid wheel of this thickness, instead of rolling resistance -6, would have -16.

Note that 2/5 of an inch is a solid plate of steel. It’s not likely to bend, and should have no problem supporting the wagon. Even 1/5th would be enough unless badly-treated by rough roads – but those are conditions it might very well be exposed to.

3.1.4.3 Strength of the Connection

This is often the weak point of the whole thing – whatever joins the wheel to the axle, usually some kind of hub secured to the wheel with bolts or pegs.

Three things put these connections under greater strain than usual – roads and paths that are angled from one side to the other, turning corners, and the shearing force caused by bumps in the surface being traversed.

Combinations of two or more of these are worse still, and the triple-whammy of all three creates the most likely failure of these connections. The wheel comes off, and the cart or wagon suddenly assumes a very steep angle with reference to the horizontal; cargo will often spill out, and (depending on what it is) can be damaged or lost.

Slippery, muddy conditions and overloads make all of the above worse. Essentially, any sideways movement has to be completely contained by the connection, or one or both wheels will sheer off.

Consider the diagram below:



The top image shows the basic components of a wheel assembly. Specifics may vary – for example, the bolts might be on the inside with the thread protruding out. I’ve deliberately exaggerated the thickness so that the components are more easily seen and understood.

The second image shows what happens on a slope; the force of gravity pulls the wagon and load to one side. The same thing happens in the opposite direction to a fast turn, but wagon drivers know that and (generally) slow to reduce the effect – unless being pursued!

The third diagram shows the effect on the wheels, which try to twist on their hubs. The only thing holding the wheels to the wagon at this point is the strength of the thread in the connecting bolts.

Typically, this will be STR 10, at a cost of 1gp per bolt. This can be increased at a cost per bolt of 0.2 GP per bolt to a maximum of STR 25. Divide by 1.5 for Cast Iron, Divide by 3 for Bronze, divide by 5 for wooden pegs. (This applies to both STR and cost per bolt).

A wheel will normally be secured by at least three and up to ten of them – usually, one per spoke, but you can double or triple that. Each additional bolt on a wheel adds 1 to the STR of the connection.



.

This shows the force that the STR of the bolts has to be equal to or greater than. Obviously, without knowing the weight of both cart / wagon and load, I can’t make it much simpler.

But I can work it in the other direction: Twisting Force by angle, giving the total STR that your connections can (usually) handle for a given sideways slope.

Slope (°)	STR
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
1	58	115	172	230	287	344	402	459
1.5	39	77	115	153	192	230	268	306
2	29	58	86	115	144	172	201	230
2.5	23	46	69	92	115	138	161	184
3	20	39	58	77	96	115	134	153
3.5	17	33	50	66	82	99	115	132
4	15	29	44	58	72	87	101	115
4.5	13	26	39	51	64	77	90	102
5	12	23	35	46	58	69	81	92
6	10	20	29	39	48	58	67	77
7	9	17	25	33	42	50	58	66
8	8	15	22	29	36	44	51	58
9	7	13	20	26	32	39	45	52
10	6	12	18	24	29	35	41	47
11	6	11	16	21	27	32	37	42
12	5	10	15	20	25	29	34	39
13	5	9	14	18	23	27	32	36
14	5	9	13	17	21	25	29	34
15	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	31
16	4	8	11	15	19	22	26	30
18	4	7	10	13	17	20	23	26
20	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24
22	3	6	9	11	14	17	19	22
24	3	5	8	10	13	15	18	20
26	3	5	7	10	12	14	16	19
28	3	5	7	9	11	13	15	18
30	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16

 

Slope (°)	STR
	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
1	516	573	631	688	745	803	860	917
1.5	344	383	421	459	497	535	574	612
2	258	287	316	344	373	402	430	459
2.5	207	230	253	276	299	321	344	367
3	172	192	211	230	249	268	287	306
3.5	148	164	181	197	213	230	246	263
4	130	144	158	173	187	201	216	230
4.5	115	128	141	153	166	179	192	204
5	104	115	127	138	150	161	173	184
6	87	96	106	115	125	134	144	154
7	74	83	91	99	107	115	124	132
8	65	72	80	87	94	101	108	115
9	58	64	71	77	84	90	96	103
10	52	58	64	70	75	81	87	93
11	48	53	58	63	69	74	79	84
12	44	49	53	58	63	68	73	77
13	41	45	49	54	58	63	67	72
14	38	42	46	50	54	58	63	67
15	35	39	43	47	51	55	58	62
16	33	37	40	44	48	51	55	59
18	30	33	36	39	43	46	49	52
20	27	30	33	36	39	41	44	47
22	25	27	30	33	35	38	41	43
24	23	25	28	30	32	35	37	40
26	21	23	26	28	30	32	35	37
28	20	22	24	26	28	30	32	35
30	18	20	22	24	26	28	30	32

 

Slope (°)	STR
	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
1	975	1032	1089	1146	1204	1261	1318	1376
1.5	650	688	726	765	803	841	879	917
2	488	516	545	574	602	631	660	688
2.5	390	413	436	459	482	505	528	551
3	325	344	364	383	402	421	440	459
3.5	279	295	312	328	344	361	377	394
4	244	259	273	287	302	316	330	345
4.5	217	230	243	255	268	281	294	306
5	196	207	218	230	241	253	264	276
6	163	173	182	192	201	211	221	230
7	140	148	156	165	173	181	189	197
8	123	130	137	144	151	159	166	173
9	109	116	122	128	135	141	148	154
10	98	104	110	116	121	127	133	139
11	90	95	100	105	111	116	121	126
12	82	87	92	97	102	106	111	116
13	76	81	85	89	94	98	103	107
14	71	75	79	83	87	91	96	100
15	66	70	74	78	82	86	89	93
16	62	66	69	73	77	80	84	88
18	56	59	62	65	68	72	75	78
20	50	53	56	59	62	65	68	71
22	46	49	51	54	57	59	62	65
24	42	45	47	50	52	55	57	60
26	39	42	44	46	48	51	53	55
28	37	39	41	43	45	47	49	52
30	34	36	38	40	42	44	46	48

 

Slope (°)	STR	Slope Comparison
	25	Drop 1″ every…	Inches Drop every 5′
1	1433	4′ 9.5″	1.05″
1.5	956	3′ 2.5″	1.57″
2	717	2′ 5″	2.1″
2.5	574	1′ 11″	2.62″
3	478	1′ 7.5″	3.14″
3.5	410	1′ 4.5″	3.67″
4	359	1′ 2.5″	4.2″
4.5	319	1′ 0.75″	4.72″
5	287	11.43″	5.25″
6	240	9.51″	6.31″
7	206	8.14″	7.37″
8	180	7.12″	8.43″
9	160	6.31″	9.5″
10	144	5.67″	10.58″
11	132	5.14″	11.66″
12	121	4.7″	12.75″
13	112	4.33″	13.85″
14	104	4.01″	14.96″
15	97	3.73″	16.08″
16	91	3.49″	17.2″
18	81	3.08″	19.5″
20	74	2.75″	21.84″
22	67	2.48″	24.24″
24	62	2.25″	26.71″
26	58	2.05″	29.26″
28	54	1.88″	31.9″
30	50	1.73″	34.64″

3.1.4.4 Strength of the Bed

Since the cart-bed is what actually holds the Cargo up, this is what we initially looked at – how much the cart can “carry”.

Most carts and wagons will have four sides as well as a platform for the driver to sit on. In fancy examples, one might curve so that it forms two or more of these surfaces. The other attribute that the “bed” might have is a roof, but this tends to be fairly unusual, because it can’t be lifted to accommodate taller loads.

Another refinement would be to provide a semi-enclosed cabin for the driver, at least keeping sun and some rain off him or her.

These are all components of what people generally think of when they think “wagon” – and any of them can fail. This may or may not constitute a threat to the cargo.

3.1.4.5 Rolling Resistance

Rolling resistance is the reluctance of a wagon or cart to start moving from a state of rest.

A significant portion of the rolling resistance comes from inertia, which is the reluctance of a mass to accelerate, ie to acquire speed; but that’s far from the only consideration.

The wheels have to turn. The more massive they are, the more they will be reluctant to do so. Hence, there is a contribution to rolling resistance from the wheels.

That said, the larger the radius of the wheels, the more readily they will roll, so that’s also a consideration – one that potentially outweighs the weight contribution.

Still, every little bit helps, so solid wheels are often thinner than expected and structurally reinforced by ‘ribs’ that look for all the world like spokes. These are usually only found on one side of the wheel, though.

For a wheel to turn, it needs some friction with the ground. Marshy, muddy, and ice terrains can be especially challenging in this respect (in the latter case, before ‘parking’ the cart, the driver may scatter a little bit of salt and some sand or gravel on the ice; it will melt a little and then refreeze, with a texture that makes getting underway again a little easier.

The weight of the wagon can also cause the wheels to sink into a depression if the surface is soft. This effectively adds a slope to even level ground.

For that matter, when the wagon came to a stop the previous night, there must have come a point at which the friction of the surface could not be overcome by the wagon’s remaining momentum, so there will always always be a small contributing up-slope to contend with, anyway.

The axles have to be turned by the wheels. That means overcoming the friction they have with the cart body (grease helps – even animal fat).. The thicker the axle, the greater this resistance; so there’s a contribution to rolling resistance from this source, too.



I did this graphic well in advance of writing the section on solid wheels and spokes, so the top panel is a little bit redundant, but is still correct.

The main panels are concerned with slopes. In very rare circumstances, a slope can be very helpful in overcoming rolling resistance. In fact, you can even think of Rolling Resistance as a temporary steepening of the slope in the forwards direction (that’s also important!)

Panel 3 shows a simplified view of rolling resistance as a pair of additional slopes on “virtual” ground. There’s an initial phase, when the virtual incline is steepest, and then a second phase, about twice as long, in which the resistance has been partially overcome and the vehicle is gaining momentum.

I then look at four different “real” slopes (exaggerated for the visual distinction – in reality, the “slight downslope” would generally be thought of as a steep downslope if it was at the angle shown.

First, a slight downhill – the downhill slope moderates the rolling resistance at first and then leaves the second phase effectively flat. Once full motion is achieved, it’s downhill all the way, though rolling resistance will lessen the effective gradient somewhat. With caution, no special action needs to be taken.

Second, a steeper downhill – the initial phase of the motion is effectively on flat ground, and the second phase (1/2 resistance) is slightly downhill. Once up to speed, it’s dangerously steep; wagons and carts being drawn along by animal power effectively have no brakes.



This often requires splitting an animal team up, looping a rope around a tree, and using the bulk of the team to resist the descent while only 25% of the total animal team pull the vehicle forwards. The very quick-and-dirty illustration to the left displays this procedure. Of course, the main driver is controlling the three animals – but he’s probably standing a little close to that rope. If it snaps it will whip around and could cause serious injury.

Third, I turned my attention to inclines, starting with an extremely uphill. As you can see, ‘steeply uphill’. becomes ‘extremely steeply uphill’ at first, and then moderates to different flavors of ‘Steeply Uphill’ as you get underway.

Finally, there is the more probable slightly uphill. The initial phase is effectively steeply uphill but once you get moving the steepness moderates.

This is the force that your animals have to overcome. In general, they can pull 4 × as much as they can carry, 6 × with exertion. Horses are better at it than most options, they manage 6 × quite easily. Oxen and other heavy creatures can go 8-10 times, but they tend to be slow. Each extra animal pulling adds 75% to the total (not 100%). Teams of more than 8 tend to be impractical to manage and control, and even numbers are generally preferred.

3.1.4.5.1 Slope (aka Grade, Gradient, Stepth, Incline, Mainfall, Pitch, and Rise)

All inclines are measured (technically) as the difference in altitudes divided by the horizontal distance, called the ‘run’. But you can’t see the run, what you see is the distance up or down the slope; fortunately, the difference is small enough to be negligible unless the slope is catastrophically severe.

Railways can employ slopes of up to 60° – that’s catastrophically severe, in my book.

In Australia, 16.9° or more is extremely steep; 11.3°-16.8° is a steep road; 5.71°-11.2° is an uphill slope; 3°-5.7° or less is a moderate slope. In the US, 3% is considered the maximum for a high-speed highway, 6% the maximum for a main arterial road, and 7%-8% is tolerated in the mountains.

Cyclists have to use their own muscle power to deal with slopes, so their categories tend to be a bit more nuanced – but also probably more applicable in terms of how a team of animals pulling a cart or wagon will respond.

★ 0% (0°) is a flat road.
★ 1-3% (0.573°-1.718°) is slightly up or downhill.
★ 4-6% (2.29°-3.434°) is manageable but will cause added fatigue
★ 7-9% (4°-5.143°) is uncomfortable even for an experienced climber, and challenging for new rides.
★ 10-15% (5.71°-8.531°) is painful, even for strong, experienced, riders.
★ 16%+ (9.09°+) is very challenging even for the strongest riders.

Uphill grades of 6% increase the risk of an accident by a factor of 2.6.
Downhill grades of 6% increase the risk of an accident by a factor of 5.6!

The risks are exponential relative to the slope.

★ R = B ^ (1+S%/6)

★ where,
     S is the slope (%);
     B is either 2.6 or 5.6; and
     R is the risk factor.

So the risk uphill doubles to 5.2 at 10.35%, and doubles again to 10.4 at 14.7%.

A 4-5% gradient is the maximum considered safe in Australia for anything but private roads, which aren’t regulated to government specifications.

The steepest road in the world is officially Baldwin St in Dunedin, New Zealand, at 34.8% (19.19°), but a number of streets elsewhere have steeper grades (they may be shorter, though).

To calculate Degrees from % gradient, use D = Arctan(% slope / 100)..
To calculate Degrees from a “1 in n” rise / fall, use D = Arctan (1/n).

Or consult the graph below:



Source: Wikipedia Commons, where it is available in far higher resolution. Image by BW95, CC BY-SA 3.0. I’ve added the more detailed enlargement at the bottom.

Use these facts as and when they seem appropriate!

Sources:

1. A PDF Webinar by Austroads.com.au

2. The Climbing Cyclist dot com

3. Grade (Slope) | Wikipedia

4. Steepness | NSW Government

5. Civil Engineering dot com

3.1.4.6 Gravity Vector
Tall loads and other stacks of things have a tendency to want to, well, tip over. Especially on slopes or going around corners. It’s as though there were part of the force of gravity trying to pull the top of the load sideways – and you saw what effect that had on the wagon / cart wheels earlier.

Instead of a lot of calculations, I’ve found a graphical way of not only illustrating this, but of determining the degree of danger of the vehicle overturning.



     1. Drawing a line from the top of the load to the ground, gives a distance to the base of the wagon or cart.
     2. Double it because of potential swaying from side to side.
     3. And then increase that to triple the original to allow for a margin of safety.
     4. If the results are clearly less than 1/2 the total width of the cart, all is well (green).
     5. If the results are about 1/2 the width, it’s a dangerous situation but slow down and you should be OK (yellow-orange).
     6. If the results are clearly more than 1/2, then there is a danger of overturning (red).
     7. If the results are more than the width of the cart / wagon, you WILL overturn at the slightest provocation (dark red).
     8. If the swaying allowance is more than the width of the cart, any speed other than dead slow will overturn the vehicle (also dark red).
     9. If the original is more than width of the vehicle, it HAS overturned. No question. Refer to the rightmost 15° image for an example.

This assumes more or less uniform density of the load. But everyone knows (or should know) that you put the lightest stuff on top, if you are sensible.

The last two panels show the impact of doing so and how to take this into account, and of doing it all wrong and how to handle that.

     1. Divide the load into three.
     2. The bottom part is always 1. The other two have their weights compared to that bottom part.
     3. Do the ‘gravity arrow’ not all the way to the ground, but to the line of the next part down.
     4. Multiply the length by the relative weight.
     5. Add up the shortened (or lengthened) gravity vectors.
     6. (If necessary) extend the line of the side of the cart/load vertically.
     7. position your gravity arrow where it is the length determined above.
     8. Measure the vector to the base of the cart as usual.
     9. Go to Step 2 of the previous procedure and continue from there.

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. In fact, it takes only seconds – plus the time it takes to draw a line representing the slope and a box representing the cart and load.

Compare these to the rightmost images for their respective angles with uniform loads – the lightening in the left has clearly helped, but not quite gone far enough, while the mismanagement of the load in the right has definitely made things much worse.

And that’s where I’m calling a halt to this very lengthy post! Next time: putting all of the above together, and using it all to assign a base unit for productivity, the Labor Unit. And then, I can get back to what this chapter was supposed to be all about – the faceless workers that keep a business operating!