This entry is part 6 in the series The Value Of Material Things

How far can mosaics go? Check out this picture of the Church Of The Redeemer, aka The Church Of Blood (this small-scale image just barely does it justice). Image by Peter H from Pixabay.

Welcome

…to the latest installment of the “Value Of Material Things” series. Today’s article will focus on Tesserae (Mosaic Tiles), Silk, and Moonstones.

It’s sure to have been deduced, I think, that much of the content of this series is being driven by game prep, and that means that I can simply collate my notes for that prep and generalize a bit and get a post with (hopefully) less work involved.

I’m prepping and pre-uploading as many articles as I can because when I move, I don’t know how long it will be before utilities will be connected. And then I face the long task of updating various websites as to the new address – I tried just doing so when I wanted to order something last time around, and that dealt with 90% or so of them (99% eventually) – but there were still some that got missed until 5 or 6 years later, or fell through the cracks completely (one quite important one).

Plus the headaches of worrying about packages in transit, unpacking, and settling in, discovering a new neighborhood… I expect to be a bit distracted for a while. So I’m getting out ahead of the problem as much as I can, so that I can focus on these other tasks.

Enough preamble, let’s look at goodies!

Tesserae and other Mosaics

Before I get into the value of such things, I thought I should make sure everyone was on the same page as to what they were – because they are all around us and hardly ever get noticed..

A brief introduction to mosaics

Any tiled surface is, technically, a mosaic. My bathroom has one set on the walls and another on the floor – and that will be the case in a great many other places, too.

Modern decorative uses can take such things to a whole other level:

To most people, though, they reserve the term for more elaborate works. Like garden pavers?

These, too, are technically a mosaic.

But no, once again, common usage steers away from these more mundane examples and toward something more elaborate.

This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons (image page) by the photographer, Asturio Cantabrio, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The description is in Japanese, which Google Translate renders as “Japanese: Tajimi City Mosaic Tile Museum in Tajimi City, Gifu Prefecture. square mosaic tiles.” I count six colors of tile in use to create this pattern.

Hmm, that’s closer in spirit, but still perhaps a bit modern for what most people mean by the term. “These are tiles, we want to talk about mosaics!

There is a sort of quasi-historic application, too, even when we narrow our definitions a bit. I don’t think that anyone would dispute that this is a mosaic – in fact, two of them, other the feature and the other a decorative panel at the top of the wall:

Wikimedia Commons (Image page) provided a lot of the images used in this post, and this is another of them. It was given to them by “Kidfly182”, the photographer, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The image is of a mosaic title for the 51st St Station within the New York Subway system. In fact, there’s a whole lot of them, but this one shows the structure more clearly than the others without the need to crop the image.

People have been tiling surfaces since the time of the Roman Empire if not longer. I’ve never heard of any, but it would not surprise me in the least to learn of examples from Ancient Egypt or Assyria.

Mosaics are essentially made up of small pieces of stone that have been selected for color and those differences used to create an image or pattern. These small stones are technically referred to as Tesserae, which I think means “small pieces” in Latin (though I might be wrong).

Here’s a group of them from the middle ages, the Byzantine Empire, made of glass, stone, and gold leaf:

This image was donated to Wikimedia Commons (Image Page by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication which placed it permanently in the Public Domain. The Tesserae themselves were a gift to the Museum of Mrs Harry B. Bartling in 1946. The largest is 9/16 × 3/8 × 3/16 inches or 1.4 × 1 × 0.5 cm. The smallest is 1/4 × 3/16 × 1/8 inches (0.6 × 0.5 × 0.3 cm).

The largest ancient example I’ve ever heard of from ancient times is about the size of a thumb – 2.5 × 0.5 × 0-point-something. As a general rule, a mixture of half-an-inch cubes and 1 inch square tiles also half-an-inch thick won’t steer you too far wrong. In comparison to modern tiles (thanks to modern systems of quality control and manufacturing) they were small and clunky and rustic.

Still sticking with the modern for a moment, though, it would be remiss not to mention some of the incredibly detailed mosaics in the middle east and Islamic temples all over the world. They really are things of great beauty and devotion to detail:

And then, of course, there’s the Taj Mahal…

This is a composite of two different sizes of the same source Image by 5350755 from Pixabay

….and the Sydney Opera House.

This composites three images by different photographers. The overall-view image is by Squirrel_photos, the picture of the lower part of the sails, showing the pattern of tilework, is by HeungSoon, and the side-view of the main sail (cropped by me) was taken by Dominik Truschner. All three were sourced from Pixabay.

I’m not even going to mention the space shuttle (well, just this once).

This image from Wikimedia Commons (Image Page) is in the public domain in the US because it was solely created by NASA, whose copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted”.

Okay, now that that’s out of my system, we can get back on track.

What these examples show is that mosaics are everywhere. But when you speak of them, this is the sort of thing that comes to mind for most people (me included, to be honest):

And, probably the most famous producers of mosaics in more ancient times, and who still come to mind whenever the subject is raised, were the Roman Empire. It was the thing to do (amongst others) to show off your status by getting one in your villa.

Some of these depicted the Gods, some depicted arousing subjects, some featured action scenes like hunting, some depicted strange animal both real (elephants) and fanciful (pegasi), and some were merely decorative. The designs were intended to assist the viewer into a particular frame of mind or mood – to relax, or be spiritual, or just to enjoy your relaxation.

Typically, a scene would be framed by more abstract decorative patterns, as shown in this example:

This image comes from Wikimedia Commons (Image page). It is one of several elaborate mosaic floors preserved virtually intact at Coninmbriga, site of one of the largest Roman settlements in Portugal. The photographer, Pedro Nuno Casetano, from Maia (Porto), Portugal, made the image available to Flickr under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. I have cropped it slightly and appended a portion of an enlarged version.

Now, when these walls and floor decorations were left alone, what happened to them? Floors got covered over by debris and earth; walls eventually fell down, often shattering the mosaic. Eventually, the land was either built upon anew, or became farmland – at least in England.

The majority experienced the latter fate, because the done thing amongst the rich was to have a country estate. The rate at which soil builds up varies greatly with the terrain and location – it could be 1/10th of an inch a year or 6 inches a year, or more. Most years, it will be slower than this; but some locations will periodically get inundated by flood waters or volcanic ash, which can add significant fractions of a meter or more. One eruption buried a site under 20′ of ash in a day.

Eventually, a farmer comes along with his plough, and over the centuries, disrupts the soil in which the tiled floors now lie, often cutting great swathes through them. The more deeply buried, the better they tended to be preserved; the points of greatest vulnerability tended to be at the top of hills.

But there’s an ironic catch-22 to consider. The more shallow the ruins, the more easily discovered they are. Many archaeological sites have been discovered because a farmer’s plough turned up a number of Roman Coins, or brightly-colored pieces of tile.

The majority of lost tesserae that have been rediscovered are, therefore, suffering from significant plough damage. Or from bombs or whatever.

This image is also from Wikimedia Commons (image page), which was provided the image by the photographer, “Dosseman”, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
license. I have rotated it 90° so that I can show it in more detail. It is of a mosaic dated to the 2nd-3rd century AD, the floor of one room in the House of Oceanus. It was among the first pieces excavated from Zeugma. The mosaic consisted of three panels. To the left was a small bust of Dionysus (here used to give a name to the whole set). Black and white triangles created a focus on the central figure. The middle panel shows a scene of Dionysos and Ariadne meeting in marriage. Ariadne was left on the island of Naxos by the hero Theseus. The panel also shows Pan, god of the shepherds, and Silen. To the right animals and plants are depicted. A pattern of wave and plait surrounds the three panels. It currently resides in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey, the largest such museum in the world.

The way in which such damaged mosaics are handled depends largely on how badly damaged they are and when they were found. There is enough of this one that it has been kept intact after being excavated, but if the side panels were more damaged and the central one more intact, it might well have been cut down in the 19th century to just the central panel.

Mosaic Restoration

Quite often, mosaics are less intact when first discovered than they appear when they are later displayed. Often, they have been broken into fragments by the passage of time and wear and tear.

Putting one back together is one of the greatest jigsaw puzzles one could ever tackle – one in which an unknown number of connected pieces are missing..

There’s a fascinating introduction to the process at TheKidsShouldSeeThis.com:

    Moving and restoring a Greek mosaic.

The page will be slow to load because it’s looking for a video that it claims “does not exist”, but once it does load, scroll past the blank video window to the text. But it’s more concerned with conserving an existing mosaic.

A more comprehensive write-up of a smaller-scale project (with in-progress photos to illustrate it!) can be found at blog.mosaicartsupply.com:

    Marble Mosaic Restoration Project

There are many other fascinating stories and videos to explore on the subject, brought up by a simple Google search for “How are mosaics restored”, but these two will tell you enough for gaming purposes.

Considerations Of Value

The basic methodology used for the valuing of tapestries in Part III of this series will also work fairly well for Mosaics, with a little tinkering,

First of all, material cost per square foot is minuscule compared to that of a tapestry – until you start importing tesserae to get that one particular color just right.

But, second, the sizes can be considerably larger. Mosaics can be 10 million tesserae or more, in total. Even if they only cost 1/10th of a cent each, that’s still a big price-tag at the end of the day.

A third major factor that wasn’t needed with a tapestry is completeness. A mosaic can have a great swathe ripped from it at top and bottom and still be priceless – see for example, The Gypsy Girl, preserved by the Gaziantep Museum of Archaeology, and one of the most recognizable mosaics in the world:

As you might expect, Wikimedia Commons (Image Page) supplied this image. It is an edited version (a derivative work) of another image which was released to the public domain by the photographer, Nevil Dillmen, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Gaps practically beg the viewer to imagine what might have been within the void, and that can actually enhance the value.

To accommodate this factor, several simple steps are needed:

  1. We start with the % of the composition that is actually complete.
  2. If there’s a single gap through the middle of the work, divide this by 1.3.
  3. If there are two or more, divide by 2.5.
  4. If any voids are on an edge, multiply by 1.3 if they do not damage much more than the border.
  5. Consult the following table, and apply the indicated multiplier to the result:
    • 10% or less: × 0.5.
    • 11%-20%: × 0.75.
    • 21%-40%: × 1
    • 41%-70%: × 1.25
    • 71%-85%: × 1.5
    • 86%-95%: × 1.75
    • 96% or more: × 2
  6. Divide by 100.

This translates the % complete into a value multiplication factor.

19th century archaeology

There’s an article on Grunge that I think everyone with any interest in antiquities and history should read: “What being an archaeologist in the 1800s was really like”. I’ll give the link at the moment, but here are the headlines and a side-note or two from myself for those who can’t read the whole thing.

  • Archaeologists traveled the world
  • For many, it was a childhood dream
  • Some Archaeologists were amateurs

    …actually I would say they all were amateurs, but some were better-prepared or more methodological than others.

  • Archaeologists had their own scholarly societies

    …because some felt that no-one who wasn’t in the field was qualified to judge those who were. A not completely unwarranted perspective, to be honest, but an elitism crept in and dogma began to be entrenched, completely against the scientific method.

  • Some brought food from home – but shouldn’t have
  • It was difficult for women to get respect as Archaeologists

    or in any other learned profession, for that matter.

  • Some Archaeologists were a husband and wife team
  • It was expensive

    It was actually quite common in Europe for Archaeologists to have to sell off the finds from their last expedition to fund their next one. Because that attracted patronage and funding from institutions of learning such as universities and museums, the return could be 200% or 300% of the value of the item. But this encouraged the faking of results and finds when times grew hard. Amongst other faults.

  • There was often conflict
  • They weren’t always careful

    …just the opposite, much of the time, thanks to the expense and the demand for results. But even worse than this, they were often sloppy record-keepers, completely ignoring finds that would be considered historically valuable or even trashing them in the hunt for “treasures” and “relics”.

  • They had to develop new methods, which often included a lot of guesswork

    …which is at least a partial excuse for the criticism leveled in the previous section, but which only makes the failure all the more inexcusable at the same time. When you don’t know what you are doing, and you know that you don’t know, surely the process has to be to document everything and sort out what mattered later? But here, again, I think that the crushing expenses of self-financing expeditions overrode a lot of what good sense there was.

    and, finally,

  • Sometimes, they were looters.

Here’s that promised link:

    What being an archaeologist in the 1800s was really like

Cutting The Damage Out

All this goes to the explanation for the practice of ‘cutting away’ the worse damage to a Mosaic, even though in modern attitudes, this would be anathema..

In terms of value, what does it mean? Well, the overall size goes down – way down – but the % complete goes up.

Critical to deciding where to draw the line was the premise that some content was more valuable than the rest. If you had to lose the border, it was not seen as being as important as the central panels. Often, these were subdivided into three in a row, four in a square, six in a rectangle, or even nine.

If these were connected thematically, it was less important to keep them together as a set than if they combined to tell a narrative, like the labors of Hercules.

And then, you had to take into account what was considered acceptable and what was not by the culture of the time, in terms of damage.

All of which makes it hard to devise any sort of systemic method of appraising the damage.

Frankly, I think that any such system would be so convoluted that it would not be functional; I am fully aware that the tapestry system is riding very close to the limits of utility, and this – I think – would be a step too far.

Instead, using everything discussed through this entire subject, the GM should come up with a gross valuer multiplier based on the damage that he imagines or describes as taking place, and all the contextual considerations I’ve discussed. Do the math for the rest of the process, and use it as the basis for a gut instinct.

Silk

Image by timothy green from Pixabay. Scaled and rotated by Mike.

You may be thinking, wait a minute – wasn’t this covered under Tapestries? Well, the answer is both yes and no…

Raw Silk (undyed), in 1939, was surging in price, month-on-month. Today, the price might be $2.66 per pound, but it could be $3.25 i just a month or so.

The high point, historically, was in January 1920, when it hit $17.46 / lb. No-one thought that the boom in the late 30s would get anywhere near that; a peak of $5, $6, or $7 was forecast depending on who you asked.

In the 1860s, Silk was even more expensive – $5.80 a lb.

That’s the impact of technology, right there. But it also underlines an inherent volatility in the price of raw silk, the fundamental upon which all valuations have to be based. And the dying process complicates things considerably.

Since WW2, the price has stabilized considerably, at around the $4-5 / lb mark.

A Bolt of died silk

All this came up because I needed to value a bolt of died silk. No patterns, no fancy embroidery, nothing like that.

To value such a bolt, ignoring such niceties as the popularity of certain colors in certain cultures we need to know a couple of things.

  • The price of raw silk at the time of purchase, suitably adjusted, will give the purchase price. The price at the time of sale / usage, with those same adjustments applied, will state whether or not the deal was a profitable one.
  • We need to know how much silk there is in a pound of the stuff.
  • That will be determined, in part, by the quality of the silk. So we need to take that into account.
  • We need to adjust for the complexity of the dying process.
  • We need to know the dimensions of a bolt of silk, so that we can turn those density values into a total weight for the bolt. And we need to know how quality impacts those numbers.
  • We need some sort of adjustment for the quality of the dying process – is it patchy or uniform?
  • And that will let us derive the wholesale price of the silk. On top of that, there will be transport costs and profit margins and demand to factor in.

If the silk is embroidered at all,or it depicts a scene or story, take the end result as being the base value of a silk tapestry. This is all about the times when that doesn’t come into play.

The price of raw silk

We’ve already covered this. Historically, prior to WW2, there was a usual price of around $4-$6 and a lot of volatility – most of it coming from transport costs and politics. I’ll come back to this in due course, then.

Size and the dying process

Multiply the unit price by the 1/4 of the square of the width of the bolt in feet (or inches/12)..

Complexity of dying process

If there are multiple colors (usually the case with Chinese silk, less so elsewhere) then multiply this by the number of colors +1.

In effect: 2 colors triples the price, 3 quadruples it, and so on.

If the silk holds more than an abstract pattern, if it has depictions of scenery or whatever, multiply all of the above by 1.25.

At some points, historically, monochrome silk was preferred over patterned silk by western markets. If that applies, calculate the 2-color value as above and divide it by 2 – just to complicate the picture.

The Momme

Silk prices are scaled on the Momme, abbreviated mm despite the inevitable confusion with Millimeters. I’ve reworked the base formula into something that’s a bit easier to use:

    Momme = 375 × Wt (lb) / Area (ft^2).

22 momme is typical. I couldn’t find anything reliable on the range of values, so I’m going to just make some numbers up:

Minimum Momme = 18; Maximum Momme = 26. Very rare exceptions may push the maximum to 30.

The higher the Momme, the higher the price, and the higher the thread density, i.e. the weight per square foot.

While the Momme sounded promising, I couldn’t get a practical approach out of it; instead, I recommend NOT setting the Momme. Instead, at the end of the process, you can calculate the Momme and use that to index the quality of the silk for use in labeling whatever it is that the PCs have (or might have) gotten their hands on.

The density of silk

This proved a more fruitful line of inquiry.

Silk has a density of 120-150 g / m^2.

    1 lb = 453.592 g.

    At 120-150g / m^2, 453.592 = 3.023947 – 3.77993 m^2.

    There are 1550 sqr inches in a square meter.

    So those values for 1lb of silk equal 4687.11785 – 5858.8915 sqr inches.

Silk Quality – impact on density

The higher the quality, the higher the GSM value.

A common ‘base number’ is 135 GSM.

    We can do that by add 11.11% to the lower # of sqr inches:

    111.11/100 × 4687.11785 = 5207.8566 sqr inches.

Bolt width

Bolts of silk are usually 45 or 60 inches wide, though they can be 35 or 36 inches, 39 inches, 41 inches, 52 inches, 54 inches, 58 inches, 66 inches, 72 inches or 80 inches in unusual cases.

Silk Quality – impact on width

Quality is again a factor – the higher the quality, the wider the bolt (usually). So values of less than 50 inches will tend to be closer to the 120 GSM value, while bolts of >50 inches will be closer to 150.

Length of enough of this silk in a pound

To do this, we need to decide on the width of this bolt of silk. Then it’s simply area divided by width to get length.

    If I’m using the middle-of-the-road 135 GSM value as an example, a middle-of-the-road width is appropriate as a first guess. So let’s call this particular example bolt 52″ wide.

    Area / width = length.

    5207.8566 / 52 = 100.15 inches length, or 8.346 feet.

Total bolt length

A bolt is a standard 40 yards (120 feet, 1440 inches) long. As they wind it, small pieces of card or paper are placed at each length; these can be counted without unrolling the entire bolt.

I assume that non-standard lengths are also possible. but that’s a simple adjustment.

Total bolt mass

Divide the total length by the length of 1 lb to get the total mass of silk. Make sure not to mix your units up.

    1lb = 100 inches long (@ 52″ wide)

    so the whole bolt is 120/8.346 = 14.378 lb. That’s 14 lb 5.5 oz.

Base price

Let’s pick a basic price of $5 / lb for raw silk.

    That means that the wholesale price of our died bolt is USD $71.89.

Quality of dying process

You can choose to skip this step and figure that this is already taken into account in earlier steps. Nothing wrong with that.

But, if you want to get your hands a little dirtier:

The more colors, the harder it is to do everything perfectly. That, in turn, has two effects: it makes small errors more tolerable, in terms of value; and it makes the value impact of a high quality job greater.

I could do that by multiplying an error scale by a number-of-colors factor, but… nah, sounds too much like work.

Instead, let’s do this:

    Low Quality process (lots of imperfections):

      1-color = × 0.1
      2-colors = × 0.3
      3-colors = × 0.6
      4-colors+ = × 0.8

    Medium Quality process (the occasional imperfection but you have to look for them):

      1-color = × 0.9
      2-colors = × 1
      3-colors = × 1.05
      4-colors+ = × 1.25

    High Quality process (very few noticeable flaws, even using a loupe)

      1-color = × 1.1
      2-colors = × 1.25
      3-colors = × 1.75
      4-colors+ = × 2.5

There is a general sense that if the bolt itself is of high-quality silk, it would be died by someone with better skills and equipment. There is also a sense that manufacturers would not shoot themselves in the foot with complex color patterns that were beyond the range of their equipment. Those mean that a ‘typical’ outcome can be chosen as the base circumstance, and then varied as needed.

    With a mid-range value for both width and GSM, and therefore for raw silk quality, and making this a monochrome bolt, we get a likely range of results of 0.9 – 1.1, i.e. plus-or-minus 10%.

    Just because we can, let’s pick a +5% value – somewhere in between Medium and High Quality dying.

Bolt value

    $71.89 + 5% = $75.48.

Transport costs, or the history of Silk

The earliest known PROVEN example of Silk dates to China 3630 BC. Legend takes it back further, to about 6000 BC.

Said legend has it that Chinese empress Xi Ling Shi discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her tea cup, and the heat from the tea softened the cocoon’s fibers, making them easy to unravel.

During the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) silk production was greatly expanded, and it became a status symbol often used as a diplomatic gift.

State Secret

The secrets of silk production were a state secret for Centuries and it was illegal to export silkworms or silk eggs. Eventually, the secret leaked, first to India, then Persia and into the Mediterranean region.

One legend states that the secret escaped China when a Chinese princess smuggled cocoons overseas with her foreign prince. Another says the secret was leaked by a monk who hid a cocoon in his staff.

By the middle ages, it was popular throughout Europe, used for clothing, tapestries, and other decorative items.

Challenges & Set-backs

The first significant threat to Chinese silk dominance, despite it having the reputation of being the best quality, came when the industrial revolution made finely-woven cotton a far more affordable product. A second blow to the industry took the form of a silkworm epidemic contributed to the collapse of the silk market.

That market was starting to recover when restrictions on Chinese trade emplaced during the Opium Wars threatened that market resurgence in the period 1839-1842. In essence, the Chinese authorities tried to fight back by banning the sale of silk to Britain or anyone who traded with them.

Mercantile Response

Since Chinese silk is generally regarded as having the highest quality, this measure was successful for a few months, but as stockpiles mounted and black market prices began to mount, a few brave Chinese merchants became desperate enough to go around the government, which was punishable by death of you got caught.

They sold their silk to “Cousins” who were living in Singapore, which had no such ban on resale to interested parties. When the bans were lifted, Singapore had become the accepted gateway to the Chinese markets.

Modern Times

All of this explains much of the price volatility. Throw in a couple of world wars to disrupt trade and increase shipping risks, and the balance makes sense. These days, the US is the world’s #1 importer of Silk, direct from China for the most part (though some still passes through the Singapore docks). The Silk trade is a mere 0.2% of the world textiles trade, but that is enough for the annual movement to generate billions of dollars, due to the comparatively high value of silk – approximately twenty times that of cotton.

Not even COVID and associated supply-chain disruptions seem to have made much of a difference – nor the trade war between Trump and China. The silk market has finally matured, it seems, and the silk road has been paved over with gold (leaf).

The bottom line

So, with all that history now water under the bridge: the biggest price disruptors over the value of silk has been demand and restriction. The post-WW1 boom caused demand to skyrocket, and that produced that short, sharp peak of $17.50 or so per pound. Before that, silk had gone out of style, pushed aside by cotton; hence a market value around the $3-$4 range. The period of anarchy in the silk trade, and the Singapore Black Market, pushed supply down and supply risks up; both made silk more expensive, around the $5-$8 range.

(If you factor in Inflation, that’s quite a lot). These days, silk is once again a fashionable choice and the price reflects that – it’s back in the $6-$7 range.

Transport costs, and increased transport risks, add as much as 20% to the price if they are high, but silk is no longer a commodity worth risking anyone’s life over. If times are particularly peaceful, you might cut the price by 20%.

Simply decide what the scale of risk is and apply a factor reflective of that to the price.

    Since there’s no mention of anything that would affect the value of our example, I’ll leave it where it was, at $75.50.

Profit Margins

Greedy little merchants, how big a markup would they want this time?

100%?

50%?

The fact is that there is very little profit margin when it comes to silk. Typically, 4-15%, with the .difference being the ability to sell the product at a premium because of its quality. This contrasts sharply with the other textiles, who have risen to dominate the market; the average retail markup on such is in the 53-54% range – on top of the price with shipping costs included.

China is considered the best source, followed by India, and then one of the Stans in eastern Europe (I forget which). The Netherlands was right up there at one point, but have faded back to the pack. Middle-eastern silk is still growing in popularity and value.

    Our example is middle-quality silk with middle-to-good quality dying, so it won’t support premium prices but it won’t be at the bottom of the retail rung, either. Expect a markup of about 10% on the top.

    $75.50 + 10% = $83.05.

Demand Factors

There are three considerations when it comes to demand, and they multiply together.

  1. The demand for silk vs other textiles;
  2. The demand for the base color of this silk;
  3. The demand for the pattern of dyes on this silk.

The default for all of these is 1.

    Silk vs other textiles
    • Demand outstrips supply: × 1.9
    • Demand is noticeably higher than supply: × 1.42
    • Adequate supplies to meet demand: × 1
    • Some oversupply: × 0.75
    • Massive oversupply: × 0.53
    • Silk is viewed as a premium product restricted to the wealthy: × 1.9
    • Silk is viewed as a premium product, affordable for Sunday best: × 1.42
    • Silk is viewed as a top-of-the-line product, but affordable for ‘good clothes’: x1
    • Silk is viewed as indulgent: × 0.9
    • Silk is viewed as pretentious or over-priced: × 0.7
    • Silk is viewed as pretentious to the point of being vulgar: × 0.53

    Only one value from each category is possible, but all 30 combinations can occur. Select the correct values and multiply them together.

      I know nothing about the market conditions for the example bolt, having plucked its values from thin air. So let’s say there’s some over-supply (× 0.75) and it is viewed as affordable by ordinary citizens but not routinely (× 1), for a net multiplier of × 0.75.

    Base Color

    Some colors are more popular than others, but this is very much a cultural thing. White is popular in the west for wedding dresses – the sort of garment where expense is a secondary concern and indulgence is tolerated. In China, white is the color of mourning, and you can’t sell it without massive discounting. Some colors are favored in both cultures – Greens and Reds, for example. Blue varies from one to the other depending on the shade of the color – the brighter and richer color is more popular in Asian markets, while a slightly more subdued color is better favored in the west.

    But all of these assessments change over time, too. White wedding dresses appear to have been gaining in popularity in china, while there’s a whole Goth movement in the west that glorified black – but seems to have waned lately.

    And none of that might mean beans in your campaign world. Green might be the color of Elves, Reds and Browns the color of Dwarves, and Purple the favored tone amongst Halflings – for all I know!

    And, on top of that, fashion trends come and go all the time – depending on the cultural context, only the wealthy might be able to indulge in them, but if that’s the case, they will do so all the more fastidiously because it’s a way to display that wealth.

    So you have to make the call.

    • Base color is in great demand / extreme popularity: × 1.9
    • Base color is a staple of the culture: × 1.42
    • Base color is a common choice: × 1
    • Base color is viewed as cliched: × 0.75
    • Base color is traditionally unpopular: × 0.53
    • Base color is extremely unpopular at the current time: × 0.28

    Unlike the comparisons with regular textiles, it’s possible for more than one of these to be true at the same time when considering an entire market. Multiply all the ones that are applicable together, and then multiply by the results of the silk vs other textiles result.

    If the factor only applies to half the market, use half the indicated value and add half of the appropriate value for the other half.

      Did I specify a base color? I was thinking forest green, which is a slightly darker tone of the color. It’s good for highlighting buttons and gold embroidery, but I might have picked something else earlier.

      Never mind, forest green it is. That’s associated with luck in Asia and both luck and wealth in the west, but it’s more of a staple there than here. But, at any given time, it might be unpopular or cliched, or in extreme demand. Let’s say that it’s somewhat cliched at the moment.

      Pinning some actual values to those:

      Staple of the culture = 1/2 × 1.42
      + common choice = 1/2 × 1 = × 1.21.
      Cliched = × 0.75

      Combination: × 1.21 × 0.75 = × 0.9075.

      Multiply by the overall factor: 0.75 × 0.9075 = × 0.680625.

    Pattern popularity

    This is rarely a factor, to be honest. But when it does matter, it tends to matter a great deal – Double or half.

      Just to have something in every category, I’m going to say that the bolt has a pattern in its monochrome dye job – in some areas, the die is intentionally more pale than others – and the understatement is incredibly hip in the campaign world at the moment.

      × 2 × 0.680625 = × 1.36125.

    Final value

    The final step is, obviously, to combine these values with our retail price to get a final value. This is a simple multiplication.

      $83.05 × 1.36125 = $113.05.

    I’ve never thought to point it out before, but anytime I get a Net $ value (not a $ per unit value), I automatically round it. Below about $250, to the cent; between $251 and $1000, to the dollar; between $1000 and $2000 to $5, $2000 to $5,000 to $10, and keeping to the three significant digits thereafter.

    Momme Revisited

    We’re now in a position to calculate the Momme rating for any bolt of silk that we’ve defined.

    this is useful because we can then apply the result / 22 as a factor for the price of outfits, which takes the quality of the silk, dyes, etc into account.

    The formula was

      Momme = 375 × Wt (lb) / Area (ft^2).

    Applying the values from our example bolt – BTW, always use the biggest ones, so the weight of the whole bolt, the length of the whole bolt, etc (it reduces rounding errors) – we get:

      375 × 14.378 lb / (120 ft × 52/12 inches->ft) =
      375 × 14.378 / (10 × 52) =
      375 × 14.378 / 520 =
      375 × 0.02765 = 10.36875

      — which makes no sense, it should be somewhere close to the middle-of-the road value of 22. And that confusion is why I gave up on using the Momme as the basis of my valuations.

    So, here’s the definition of the Momme scale, according to Google:

    The weight in pounds of a piece of silk 45 inches × 100 yards. Except that the definition quote that I was working from defined 22 momme, not 1 momme, and it did so in a much more vague manner.

    I hate mixed units. better by far to convert everything into inches or feet. But going smaller introduces the scope for rounding errors. That’s probably where the confusion has entered the picture.

    A little further searching finds 1 momme = 4.34 grams per square meter. That’s a far more satisfactory definition.

      135 g / m^2 = Momme 135 / 4.34 = Momme 31.1.

    That seems high to me, but it’s such a straightforward calculation, I’m inclined to accept it.

      So any outfit made from this silk should be priced at 31.1 / 22 = base price × 1.41.

      Let’s apply that: Wizard’s Robes: Base Price 15 GP (again plucking a number from thin air because all my references are packed).

      15 × 1.41 = 21.15 GP = (assuming 10:1 currency ratios) 21 GP 1 silver 5 copper.

Moonstones

Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

I didn’t notice that Moonstones weren’t on the list of semiprecious stones back in part whatever. When I needed to value a couple of them, I therefore needed to do some additional research.

Basic Information

I learned that once they are cut and polished, moonstones are easily chipped and scratched, which can take 90% off the value, so they have to be stored and worn with some care.

Quality

Cats-eye silvery or white Moonstones are worth (2023) $75 per carat if undamaged. Rarity and quality can lift their value as high as (2023) $1200 per carat. 4-pointed stars × 2.5; rarer effects × 4, gray, or brown × 2; red, peach or green, × 3; clear, rainbow, and blue are worth × 4. Damaged white moonstones are the least valuable at about (2023) $4 per carat.

Size

The latter varieties rarely occur in sizes larger than 15-20 carats, while those of lesser value per carat can be found in sizes measured in hundreds of carats. The largest found to date was discovered at Mount Kilimanjaro in 1918 and supposedly weighs in at 300-450 carats (depending on the source being cited).

Density

Specific Gravity 2.56-2.59 = density / density water

    2.56 = X / 1000 / m^3

    so, X = 1000 × 2.56 /m^3
    = 2560 kg/m^3
    = 2,560,000 g/m3
    = 2.56 g/cm^3.

    Carats = / 0.2 g
    so 12.8 ct / cm3.

The effect of size on value

The usual rule (square the carat size) only applies to the rare gems. The white, gray and brown are a linear progression. Those in between – red, peach, green – use the average of the two.

Source

Note that the best source of high-quality blue moonstones were the mines in Myanmar and these played out in the 1950s. What is found there now is of substandard quality. India and Pakistan now view for the title but neither can hold a candle to the old stones from Myanmar; these are beginning to recirculate, old stones being reused rather than new ones being bought.

That’s a wrap

In the next one of these: Ivory and Jade! After that, I’m not sure what there is left to cover in any part VI, but you can be sure that if anything presents itself, I’ll be right on it.

Actually – now that I think about it – high-tech and magic goodies still aren’t covered…



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