beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2024-10-17 04:52 pm
beccaelizabeth) wrote2024-10-17 04:52 pm
Entry tags:
Supply chains in fantasy lands
As per usual I've been thinking about fantasy world materials and logistics.
Yesterday I was looking up coats. I found a page that said it was by a military guy that kept calling what I'd call a combat jacket a smock, and armed with a new keyword I found many more coats exactly like I was looking for. Including the police version of them. And the sniper one, which appears to have Maximum Pockets, but which the military page had mentioned specifically in the context of non snipers wearing them just makes them look like prats. So, probably do not need maximum pockets. Also, do not see how anyone sits down in some of these clothes.
Smocks were listed as made out of
" Durable 50% Polyester/ 50% Cotton Ripstop fabric - No Drip/ No Melt · Water resistant "
and no melt is certainly a consideration I would have for clothes to be worn in adventures, since people are slinging fire around a Lot and you want clothes that will not become one with your skin, though rules aren't that granular specific.
So I thought about polyester - newish, around for WWII, but if you want to reinvent it in fantasy world what's your manufacturing requirements and supply chain look like?
And then I thought about cotton, because yesterday on tumblr someone explained about the intersection of new technology (cotton gin?) and slavery, and how it made slavery in the US so much more profitable that it persisted for longer. Cotton was hard to make break even without the right tech, apparently. So I was thinking about supply chains for all this cotton canvas stuff I've been looking up, and a very cursory google reckons in the here now like 20% of the world supply of cotton is linked to forced labour, which... makes me not want to read more about that. But also the amount of child labour in the supply chain for anything agricultural is apparently not small.
... research for worldbuilding can lift up some squirmy logs.
On wiki the map of cotton growing countries is a big band around the warmer bits of the middle, ie not near the countries the pathfinder adventure I'm thinking of is set in. So even using cotton implies some stuff about how far people are routinely travelling that we might not want to imply.
So I clicked canvas and sails and wiki says
sails were made from flax or cotton canvas, although Scandinavian, Scottish and Icelandic cultures used wool
and I am British, so I've heard a bit about historical wool production.
Apparently agriculturally speaking there's a lot of these here isles that are good at wool, and only wool. Which I suspect explains a lot about the history of trying to grab a good arable bit from the neighbours.
I need to find books that explain the military and the farming stuff both at once.
I was thinking though that having a lot of sailing ships, and the military capability but also supply chains enabled thereby, means having a really large amount of fabric.
Wiki Sailcloth says sails were viking wool then linen or hemp duck before they were cotton. Mostly linen. "As sail size grew linen was too heavy to be practical so cotton became more popular. Cotton did not substantially replace linen worldwide until the end of the age of sail"
So sailcloth needed a lot of linen, so off to the linen page I go. Wiki says linen takes longer to harvest and is more difficult to weave than cotton.
... it also says linen weave texture is called linen even when made of cotton. so that's handy for searching :eyeroll:
The whole middle ages history section is one paragraph of mentioning countries, including Ireland and Southern England. And saying textiles were produced at home. That seems to lack several detail. Well it is just wiki. ... and some of the cited pages don't exist any more. And I'm going to move on now.
This whole history of fibres is a mix of practicality and availability, usually because of where it grows in what weather conditions and soils, and I'd need different keywords to understand the labour situation but I'm sure it was complicated.
And the raw materials and fabrics moved around the map in really big ways. I mean the Silk Road is a famous one, over a thousand years of a fabric trade route that shaped economies and histories. Wiki for Ilk Road says "Aside from generating substantial wealth for emerging mercantile classes, the proliferation of goods such as paper and gunpowder greatly affected the trajectory of political history in several theatres in Eurasia and beyond."
I hadn't even thought about paper. There's a whole section in the Pathfinder adventure set in not-Egypt that explains one city getting rich on papyrus, I wonder if they've given similar detail to paper?
It's like it's one thing to say the armour is made of leather, but it's quite another to try and figure out who is growing leather producing beasties, and what ones could survive the environment with that much in the way of high CR challenges whenever you step out of town. Is it implying the high CR challenges are supplying the leather? No because they're specific exotic materials.
... wearing dragon skin is kind of rude when you could in theory resurrect a person from a sufficiently large chunk of it.
... what happens if you do a reincarnation hex on someone's dragonscale armour? Does it... not count? Or is it a known hazard, like heat metal vs plate?
But! Once you have nobles in silk and commoners in linen and everyone in wool - which wool? I've heard enough fibrecrafters compare wool down to the details that I am reasonably certain that it matters which wool, and that poor choices lead to changing properties in your gear...
ANYways, once you've got this highly diverse set of fabrics and fibres being implied by throwaway comments, your world necessarily involves transport, trade routes, growing seasons, arable land vs sheep mountains, labour - is the peasant supply perchance effected by these forever wars against actual literal demons? Do they have a legal right to wander off to be adventurers? Do they, for that matter, have a legal responsibility, especially once magic gets involved?
All these supplies have to be thought of by someone in the fantasy world if you're trying to keep your adventurers clothed, let alone your actual armies. It's one thing calling a crusade to the Worldwiund, it's another making sure their gear doesn't fall apart entirely. There's a whole set of decisions to make about it in the xbox game.
But like, in fantasy world where they ignore all this except in the most abstract ways, they also ignore the material conditions that lead to conflicts, and can cut them short when things break down.
Which leaves you setting up conflicts based on like, personal opinions, or religious things, or just because Those Guys Are Evil.
I'm not saying the whole Fantasy Racism Problem arises from nobody thinking about where the cloth is coming from, but it's feeling like a defensible position.
Like when you take away so many of the factors that left human civilisation so fundamentally interconnected across large geography for thousands of years, and you make game rules that imply everyone with survival skill could just wander off and Live Off The Land, you end up with people with few incentives to... actually get along?
It's a bit like how I object to zombie stories because they ask like, if you couldn't negotiate or communicate or do anything to divert or slow or for the length of the show or movie cure people, Could You Kill Them? Having taken away all the human conflict resolution tools and most of the animal ones, well, guess that just leaves violence! Which is not an idea I find particular value in.
DnD alikes have extensive rules for violence, some rules for negotiation, and need you to buy extra expansions for actually living somewhere long term or having investment in a community.
And I might be in the wrong genre to be worrying about actual trade goods and supplies, except as a way of keeping score when you do the guarding a caravan between towns bit.
But when they do worry about it that adds so much to the story? Like if you read one set of stories orcs are just a source of random violence, but if you read the Pathfinder sourcebook for their sole surviving homeland, you read about a grim struggle for survival in a land where the water is only sufficient in summer. So they have a summer truce. Implying that orcs are only violent when they're starving and running out of water. Which puts the 'heroes' of Lastwall in a somewhat different light.
I don't know, I started out wondering what coats my army would need, I ended up thinking about how to feed a planet.
BTW, when I was looking for fabrics, I ended up finding some etsy stores specifically for historical fabrics, and the woven wool fabrics there are different than I was finding without Historical in the keywords. I liked the one that listed the color as Sheep. Sheep is of course the color. But also Woad and Madder and so forth, and that's a lot of bright colors.
Once you get magic involved you can prestidigipaint anything any color, though in Pathfinder 1e it takes a detour through the Magic Trick feat and three ranks in Disguise to do it. Any modern wool color you please, then.
The amount an apprentice wizard could make from Prestidigitaion spells seems to me severely underestimated. I mean they use it for laundry and now for fabric colors, that's two industries that now need one person, producing one cubic foot of desired result in six seconds. You either get a very different set of supplies or posit bored wizards juet don't want to do that. But have you met people who get into fibrecrafts? Some wizard somewhere is dedicated to doing magic cloaks Right and has by this point invested in some wool producing animals and started fiddling about with every parameter. Out the other end of the hobby comes more wool than they know what to do with and the ability to teleport it anywhere they know well enough to aim for. Next they'll set up the wizard equivalent of an etsy shop. At some point in the near future they'll realise they have taken on more orders than they know how to handle and either go adventuring to get away from the demand or hire in new apprentices to teach how to wool. Human nature.
... also at some point they'll consider the applications of a Robe of Infinite Twine. Sure it makes hemp now, and a nice side business in hemp can emerge, along with supplying entire navies from one robe, but the truly dedicated development wizard goes down the fibrecraft rabbit hole to try and invent one that does rainbow ombre wool, and probably succeeds before realising it'll take half way to forever to break even.
... I did start out wondering how the fantasy army gets coats. A Wizard Did It is a viable answer. An application of Fabricate can make so many coats, if you have 10 cu ft of the relevant quality of raw materials. I wonder how far down the chain you can start from though, and if this could sort the copying modern synthetics problem. I mean could you start from oil and apply Fabricate a few times and end up with coats? "You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship." So that includes Craft (alchemy), right? And to Craft you "Pay 1/3 of the item’s price for the raw material cost", so every time you apply Fab you get materials x3? So Craft (alchemy) to get thread, Craft (cloth) to weave it, and Craft (clothing) to fashion it, and you have a 3 5th level spell chain that makes goo into clothes worth your initial investment x3 x3.
Yes wizards can charge a lot for a 5th level spell if asked to cast it, I'm just saying, one person factory right there.
Also, if you apply a knowledge of actual chemistry, all you need to get started is some carbon and water, or air. You could only x3 the value of it, but, *waves vaguely at everything*. Carbon chemistry.
Fabricate says "If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet." but Skills Craft also points out "A successful Craft check related to woodworking in conjunction with the casting of the ironwood spell enables you to make wooden items that have the strength of steel." So start with... it's 10 cubes of 1 foot on a side not a 10 foot cube, misread it for a bit there... start with like a 10 foot long minecraft log of wood, and you can turn it into... anything Craft (carpentry) or Craft (baskets) can imagine, and then make it ironwood?
https://www.aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Ironwood hmm, it's a druid spell that lasts 1 day per level, that limits the utility a lot. Ironwood is there as a work around for druids not wearing metal armour, but now I'm thinking ways to get all artistic with it...
Anyway, vegetable oil is easier to work than mineral oil with Fabricate, apparently.
In the Wrath of the Righteous game you get a few questions asked about how to supply the troops, a regular steady income that keeps going up as you conquer lands, and people willingly turning up to get hired. You probably spend a lot of your adventurer treasure on hiring and building. And as long as you do it right there's a solid chance it doesn't get knocked down again, because enough troops to defend everything you build. So that's nice.
But now I have poked wiki until I want to bolt the whole campaign on the end of an entirely different sort of game, like civilisation and farming sims, like remembering there's more than one Stardew Valley dude for every bit of harvest. Different zoom levels, different stories.
Stardew Valley would need the challenge rating turned right up to be much like Golarion though.
... not sure I've acquired any answers on this wiki wander. Am sure I'm still wondering how farmers even work on Golarion...
Yesterday I was looking up coats. I found a page that said it was by a military guy that kept calling what I'd call a combat jacket a smock, and armed with a new keyword I found many more coats exactly like I was looking for. Including the police version of them. And the sniper one, which appears to have Maximum Pockets, but which the military page had mentioned specifically in the context of non snipers wearing them just makes them look like prats. So, probably do not need maximum pockets. Also, do not see how anyone sits down in some of these clothes.
Smocks were listed as made out of
" Durable 50% Polyester/ 50% Cotton Ripstop fabric - No Drip/ No Melt · Water resistant "
and no melt is certainly a consideration I would have for clothes to be worn in adventures, since people are slinging fire around a Lot and you want clothes that will not become one with your skin, though rules aren't that granular specific.
So I thought about polyester - newish, around for WWII, but if you want to reinvent it in fantasy world what's your manufacturing requirements and supply chain look like?
And then I thought about cotton, because yesterday on tumblr someone explained about the intersection of new technology (cotton gin?) and slavery, and how it made slavery in the US so much more profitable that it persisted for longer. Cotton was hard to make break even without the right tech, apparently. So I was thinking about supply chains for all this cotton canvas stuff I've been looking up, and a very cursory google reckons in the here now like 20% of the world supply of cotton is linked to forced labour, which... makes me not want to read more about that. But also the amount of child labour in the supply chain for anything agricultural is apparently not small.
... research for worldbuilding can lift up some squirmy logs.
On wiki the map of cotton growing countries is a big band around the warmer bits of the middle, ie not near the countries the pathfinder adventure I'm thinking of is set in. So even using cotton implies some stuff about how far people are routinely travelling that we might not want to imply.
So I clicked canvas and sails and wiki says
sails were made from flax or cotton canvas, although Scandinavian, Scottish and Icelandic cultures used wool
and I am British, so I've heard a bit about historical wool production.
Apparently agriculturally speaking there's a lot of these here isles that are good at wool, and only wool. Which I suspect explains a lot about the history of trying to grab a good arable bit from the neighbours.
I need to find books that explain the military and the farming stuff both at once.
I was thinking though that having a lot of sailing ships, and the military capability but also supply chains enabled thereby, means having a really large amount of fabric.
Wiki Sailcloth says sails were viking wool then linen or hemp duck before they were cotton. Mostly linen. "As sail size grew linen was too heavy to be practical so cotton became more popular. Cotton did not substantially replace linen worldwide until the end of the age of sail"
So sailcloth needed a lot of linen, so off to the linen page I go. Wiki says linen takes longer to harvest and is more difficult to weave than cotton.
... it also says linen weave texture is called linen even when made of cotton. so that's handy for searching :eyeroll:
The whole middle ages history section is one paragraph of mentioning countries, including Ireland and Southern England. And saying textiles were produced at home. That seems to lack several detail. Well it is just wiki. ... and some of the cited pages don't exist any more. And I'm going to move on now.
This whole history of fibres is a mix of practicality and availability, usually because of where it grows in what weather conditions and soils, and I'd need different keywords to understand the labour situation but I'm sure it was complicated.
And the raw materials and fabrics moved around the map in really big ways. I mean the Silk Road is a famous one, over a thousand years of a fabric trade route that shaped economies and histories. Wiki for Ilk Road says "Aside from generating substantial wealth for emerging mercantile classes, the proliferation of goods such as paper and gunpowder greatly affected the trajectory of political history in several theatres in Eurasia and beyond."
I hadn't even thought about paper. There's a whole section in the Pathfinder adventure set in not-Egypt that explains one city getting rich on papyrus, I wonder if they've given similar detail to paper?
It's like it's one thing to say the armour is made of leather, but it's quite another to try and figure out who is growing leather producing beasties, and what ones could survive the environment with that much in the way of high CR challenges whenever you step out of town. Is it implying the high CR challenges are supplying the leather? No because they're specific exotic materials.
... wearing dragon skin is kind of rude when you could in theory resurrect a person from a sufficiently large chunk of it.
... what happens if you do a reincarnation hex on someone's dragonscale armour? Does it... not count? Or is it a known hazard, like heat metal vs plate?
But! Once you have nobles in silk and commoners in linen and everyone in wool - which wool? I've heard enough fibrecrafters compare wool down to the details that I am reasonably certain that it matters which wool, and that poor choices lead to changing properties in your gear...
ANYways, once you've got this highly diverse set of fabrics and fibres being implied by throwaway comments, your world necessarily involves transport, trade routes, growing seasons, arable land vs sheep mountains, labour - is the peasant supply perchance effected by these forever wars against actual literal demons? Do they have a legal right to wander off to be adventurers? Do they, for that matter, have a legal responsibility, especially once magic gets involved?
All these supplies have to be thought of by someone in the fantasy world if you're trying to keep your adventurers clothed, let alone your actual armies. It's one thing calling a crusade to the Worldwiund, it's another making sure their gear doesn't fall apart entirely. There's a whole set of decisions to make about it in the xbox game.
But like, in fantasy world where they ignore all this except in the most abstract ways, they also ignore the material conditions that lead to conflicts, and can cut them short when things break down.
Which leaves you setting up conflicts based on like, personal opinions, or religious things, or just because Those Guys Are Evil.
I'm not saying the whole Fantasy Racism Problem arises from nobody thinking about where the cloth is coming from, but it's feeling like a defensible position.
Like when you take away so many of the factors that left human civilisation so fundamentally interconnected across large geography for thousands of years, and you make game rules that imply everyone with survival skill could just wander off and Live Off The Land, you end up with people with few incentives to... actually get along?
It's a bit like how I object to zombie stories because they ask like, if you couldn't negotiate or communicate or do anything to divert or slow or for the length of the show or movie cure people, Could You Kill Them? Having taken away all the human conflict resolution tools and most of the animal ones, well, guess that just leaves violence! Which is not an idea I find particular value in.
DnD alikes have extensive rules for violence, some rules for negotiation, and need you to buy extra expansions for actually living somewhere long term or having investment in a community.
And I might be in the wrong genre to be worrying about actual trade goods and supplies, except as a way of keeping score when you do the guarding a caravan between towns bit.
But when they do worry about it that adds so much to the story? Like if you read one set of stories orcs are just a source of random violence, but if you read the Pathfinder sourcebook for their sole surviving homeland, you read about a grim struggle for survival in a land where the water is only sufficient in summer. So they have a summer truce. Implying that orcs are only violent when they're starving and running out of water. Which puts the 'heroes' of Lastwall in a somewhat different light.
I don't know, I started out wondering what coats my army would need, I ended up thinking about how to feed a planet.
BTW, when I was looking for fabrics, I ended up finding some etsy stores specifically for historical fabrics, and the woven wool fabrics there are different than I was finding without Historical in the keywords. I liked the one that listed the color as Sheep. Sheep is of course the color. But also Woad and Madder and so forth, and that's a lot of bright colors.
Once you get magic involved you can prestidigipaint anything any color, though in Pathfinder 1e it takes a detour through the Magic Trick feat and three ranks in Disguise to do it. Any modern wool color you please, then.
The amount an apprentice wizard could make from Prestidigitaion spells seems to me severely underestimated. I mean they use it for laundry and now for fabric colors, that's two industries that now need one person, producing one cubic foot of desired result in six seconds. You either get a very different set of supplies or posit bored wizards juet don't want to do that. But have you met people who get into fibrecrafts? Some wizard somewhere is dedicated to doing magic cloaks Right and has by this point invested in some wool producing animals and started fiddling about with every parameter. Out the other end of the hobby comes more wool than they know what to do with and the ability to teleport it anywhere they know well enough to aim for. Next they'll set up the wizard equivalent of an etsy shop. At some point in the near future they'll realise they have taken on more orders than they know how to handle and either go adventuring to get away from the demand or hire in new apprentices to teach how to wool. Human nature.
... also at some point they'll consider the applications of a Robe of Infinite Twine. Sure it makes hemp now, and a nice side business in hemp can emerge, along with supplying entire navies from one robe, but the truly dedicated development wizard goes down the fibrecraft rabbit hole to try and invent one that does rainbow ombre wool, and probably succeeds before realising it'll take half way to forever to break even.
... I did start out wondering how the fantasy army gets coats. A Wizard Did It is a viable answer. An application of Fabricate can make so many coats, if you have 10 cu ft of the relevant quality of raw materials. I wonder how far down the chain you can start from though, and if this could sort the copying modern synthetics problem. I mean could you start from oil and apply Fabricate a few times and end up with coats? "You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship." So that includes Craft (alchemy), right? And to Craft you "Pay 1/3 of the item’s price for the raw material cost", so every time you apply Fab you get materials x3? So Craft (alchemy) to get thread, Craft (cloth) to weave it, and Craft (clothing) to fashion it, and you have a 3 5th level spell chain that makes goo into clothes worth your initial investment x3 x3.
Yes wizards can charge a lot for a 5th level spell if asked to cast it, I'm just saying, one person factory right there.
Also, if you apply a knowledge of actual chemistry, all you need to get started is some carbon and water, or air. You could only x3 the value of it, but, *waves vaguely at everything*. Carbon chemistry.
Fabricate says "If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet." but Skills Craft also points out "A successful Craft check related to woodworking in conjunction with the casting of the ironwood spell enables you to make wooden items that have the strength of steel." So start with... it's 10 cubes of 1 foot on a side not a 10 foot cube, misread it for a bit there... start with like a 10 foot long minecraft log of wood, and you can turn it into... anything Craft (carpentry) or Craft (baskets) can imagine, and then make it ironwood?
https://www.aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Ironwood hmm, it's a druid spell that lasts 1 day per level, that limits the utility a lot. Ironwood is there as a work around for druids not wearing metal armour, but now I'm thinking ways to get all artistic with it...
Anyway, vegetable oil is easier to work than mineral oil with Fabricate, apparently.
In the Wrath of the Righteous game you get a few questions asked about how to supply the troops, a regular steady income that keeps going up as you conquer lands, and people willingly turning up to get hired. You probably spend a lot of your adventurer treasure on hiring and building. And as long as you do it right there's a solid chance it doesn't get knocked down again, because enough troops to defend everything you build. So that's nice.
But now I have poked wiki until I want to bolt the whole campaign on the end of an entirely different sort of game, like civilisation and farming sims, like remembering there's more than one Stardew Valley dude for every bit of harvest. Different zoom levels, different stories.
Stardew Valley would need the challenge rating turned right up to be much like Golarion though.
... not sure I've acquired any answers on this wiki wander. Am sure I'm still wondering how farmers even work on Golarion...