Eff

 Amalgam

an-metal

Amalgam is an alloy produced by combining quicksilver and true silver. It is relatively easy to make and occurs naturally in Fonrit, God Forgot, Trowjang, and a few other areas in the world, many associated with the Zaranistangi migrations or Artmali. 

Amalgam is generally understood to be the metal of the Blue Moon or Blue Streak, and it has been suggested to be an important metal for Waertagi, Vadeli, Sofali, Dormali sorcerers, etc. However, it apparently only has two particular magical properties:

1. A needle of amalgam in a liquid under the open sky turns to point at the Blue Moon. 

2. Amalgam in water will rise and fall with the tides, taking the water with it. 

As such, amalgam "compasses" are kept either in deep bowls or use oil or vinegar instead of water as the liquid, to minimize spilling. 

Amalgam also sees some use as a decorative metal- it is solid but experienced greensmiths can produce a variety of green shades with it, along with reds and pinks by partial transmutation to aluminum. 

Amalgam has generated over three hundred scrolls of learned argumentation on whether its existence proves that silver is the metal of the Moon Rune or not.

We know that the common tendency for some members of the the Three Fifths families of Lunar nobility is to go by an abbreviated form of their family name. The Eel-ariash shorten theirs down to -eel. Thus, Hon-eel, Sor-eel, Jar-eel. 

However, given the frequency of multisyllabic personal names elsewhere in the Empire (Tatius, Appius, etc.) it seems entirely probable that these monosyllabic personal names are also abbreviated forms of longer personal names. 

Jar-eel's entire life and prelife has been carefully shepherded to make her the living avatar of Sedenya. It seems entirely likely her personal name was chosen for this purpose as well, to give her a deep and abiding connection with the Lunar Way and reinforce her mission. 

Her mission thus far: expand the Lunar Way outwards, curtail incorrect forms of the Lunar Way within. There is one particular Lunar hero who expanded it outwards and then fought against deviations from the Way, who has a prominent "Jar" syllable in their name...

Thus, I propose that Jar-eel's full name is "Aronius Jaranthir Eel-ariash" (possibly feminized slightly) and she goes by "Jar-eel" as a spark of personality. 

Post-Dragonrise, of course, there are major political disruptions that would also call tributary relationships between mines and tribes and kingdoms into question, leaving room for missions to reestablish those relationships, or find cash reserves, or renegotiate the terms. And of course one of the simplest ways to make good is to defend the little mining town from bandits, or perhaps to orchestrate the downfall of the corrupt, greedy nobles and the brutal gang that war for control of the mine by strategically switching sides, or clearing out some krarshtkids...

8 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Have you considered making this a blog post? and then cross referencing here for comment.

That would probably be better! These are of course very rough thoughts. 

A quick addendum: we can probably assume based on the sidebar on page 404 of RQG noting that "much, even most" of the Ernalda temple's 80 hides of production "may" be in livestock that there's at least 30 hides of milk/wool livestock in a typical clan. If we assume that these are evenly split between sheep and cows, and that cattle hides have about 1 calf for each cow (as multiple births are rarer in bovines than in sheep), we have about 600 head of cattle and 3750 head of sheep. To this we would need to add "personal" animal hides and of course the incidental work oxen. 

49 minutes ago, David Scott said:

You're right. RQG, page 404,

There's a good equivalency of 1 hide = 20 cows = 100 sheep gives 64L surplus after tithe. Ignoring acres is a good idea. I'd like to see other equivalencies for this (geese, goats, fish, etc). Ignoring acres means you don't need to deal with yield per hide, all yields are the same. 

This method does fall apart if we take straightforward interpretations like 1L = 1 bushel of grain, since we end up with an average caloric allotment from barley of 1500 kilocalories per person per day, which is insufficient for modern humans living mostly sedentary lives. Unless we assume most of the people in a clan are starving, or that Gloranthan barley is wildly more nutritive than real-world barley... 

But let's diverge from diet and talk about pastoral life. 

Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes (sidebar on page 32) indicates that by law a 20L cow is a milch cow that has successfully given birth to two calves (thus has undergone two lactation cycles). We can assume that Sartarites follow the practices of most dairy farmers in having herds of many cows and few bulls, so we might well take this definition as given for Runequest Glorantha too- the 20 cows of a herder's hide are 20 milch cows in their prime (in modern times, most milch cows are culled after their third lactation cycle) and the overall herd may include younger and older cows alongside, possibly, the plow team's oxen, if we take that as a specific reference to steer or bullock cattle, a bull (or a fraction of a bull, as a particular prize bull is rotated between herds for impregnation, or this is done perhaps via simple artificial insemination) and calves.

We can thus analogize and say that a herd of 100 sheep is 100 adult ewes, a ram, and additional lambs. Typically, the assumed ratio in modern sheep farming is 15 lambs for every 10 ewes, so this herd has 251 animals in it. 

The most important element here is that these animals are not primarily meat animals, they're providing dairy and wool. So we don't have any convenient ratios for pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, etc. But those animals can also be fed on browsing in areas that are being used for other purposes. 

Sartar is nice and clustered around the Quivin mountains, with the fringes of the kingdom adjoining more mountainous country, so we can assume that most pastoralism in Sartar is via transhumance- there are multiple pastures at different heights, and the animals are rotated between them as the seasons change. The simplest would be summer and winter pastures- an elevated pasture in the mountains for late Sea to early Earth season, a valley pasture down low for Earth and Storm, and presumably they're fed on hay and kept in barns during Dark season. 

We can probably assume that, with the exception of large horses like the Goldeneye, most grazing animals in Sartar are grass-fed and don't get grain or concentrated high-protein feed. (It's entirely possible that grain feeding of cattle is practiced elsewhere, though!) 

How much milk does a cow produce? Modern milch cows can range from 450-600 kg and produce between 6800 and 17000 kg of milk per year. To contrast, High Medieval cattle appear to have weighed between 200 and 250 kg, and if we assume the following: 
1. Milk production is a linear function of body weight, on average across cattle
2. High Medieval cattle are similar to Sartarite cattle- the ones of antiquity were bigger, comparable to the size of cattle in the 17th and 18th centuries, but those were Roman cattle from coordinated practices of selective breeding on large ranches. Sartar is perhaps most comparable to the High Middle Ages- getting sources of cattle from the more improved Esrolian and Pelorian cattle, but needing to compromise on breeding and with poorer feed. 
3. Variations in milk production between breeds can be averaged out to produce an ideal cow. 

Thus, with a normalized set of values (Sartarite cattle, on average, are 3/7th the weight of modern cattle and produce 3/7th the amount of milk), our Sartarite cows produce about 5100 kg of milk per year per milch cow in her prime. This is roughly 5000 liters of milk annually. (There is additional milk from cows not in their prime, but I will fold that into the averages/cattle herds that are valued at 400L like a 20-cow herd but have more, less productive animals). 

20 such cattle "produce 80L in value", and thus we could presume that 1L is worth 1250 liters of milk internally. The majority of this milk is going to be converted into other dairy products, primarily cheeses, which keep better. On average, 1 liter of milk produces 180 grams of cheese, so we have about 900kg of cheese per cow per year, or in other words, 1L is worth 225 kg of cheese. Except that this still isn't the case, because the herd is going to produce meat as calves and young bulls are culled and used for veal or beef as part of sacrifices, cattle that have stopped being productive in milk are culled for meat too (though this meat will be extremely tough), and then of course there's the value of the bull, or more precisely its semen, and then you have to take into account labor for cattle trained as oxen, and the small additional value of horn from slaughtered or dead cattle, etc. etc. etc.

So perhaps we cannot drill down too deeply into the value of dairy. It is also worth noting that Praxian riding animals will produce milk too, as will the sheep and pigs. But thankfully, the hide system allows us to assume that bison and sables and impala and high llamas are grouped together in units that will produce that "hide value" every year, or some useful fraction of it. And we can treat the sheep milk's value as incorporated into the "hide value" of a herd of 100 sheep, and assume the pig milk, if it's exploited, is incorporated in the overall value. (Perhaps criticals on your Manage Household roll involve producing pig-milk cheese for the market?) 

Next up: either wool or digging into the Sartarite meat industry via the price of roast pig. 

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

A very quick google search yielded 2 to 2.5 bushels of seed per acre required, drilled into the ground, which would have to be added to the 7 bushels you want to take away as yield beyond reproduction. That would mean a fourfold crop return for each bushel of seed, and effective pest control to avoid crows feeding on the seed before the plant can start growing and all grazing beasts kept away from the young plants.

While that looks sub-par for modern cultivates, it is actually a very optimistic estimate for say mediaeval farming. You need an acre of excellent soil and very favorable climatic conditions.

I have numbers of yield per amount sowed for one of the climatically most marginal farming areas imaginable - Norway beyond the Arctic Circle. (Soil conditions can be fairly good up there.)

I'll need access to the physical book and check the sources they quote, but from memory, a 300% yield was considered top notch in mediaeval times, whereas the fisherfolk that far up north had yields of 75% to 150% of the amount sowed - planting grain was at worst a storage method to prevent vermin reducing the stocks, and at best a small surplus which didn't need to be traded for dried cod in that year. (With the cod harvest falling into the middle of winter, the labor for agriculture was readily available for planting and harvesting.)

If you take a look at the ancestral grasses from which our grain cultivates come, you cannot help but admire the first neolithic farmers systematically selecting for more fruit-bearing strains. Grain goddesses indeed.

But then, Glorantha is not a young world - it is a post-apocalyptic world about 10,000 to 60,000 years after the first cultivation of grain as the mainstay for sedentary human society. Maybe it does make sense to use modern yield numbers for the more primitive strains of wheat (einkorn, emmer, dinkel) rather than reducing those yields back to Bronze Age or Neolithic cultivates.

Still, you have to account for spoilage. That leads me back to the abysmally low return of 75% of the seeded amount in bad years on the Vesterålen islands. Apparently, mice and weevils would take similar amounts away from your stored grain, despite doing your best to avoid other spoilage like e.g. mould.

Concerning the latter: in humid conditions, you need to aerate stored (or transported) grain to prevent the growth of mould. At least that was the case for Hanseatic League ships transporting grain in bulk - on a deck of wooden planks, with a roof above to avoid direct contact with sea water. These ships would have more crew members than necessary for simple ship handling, and would take shifts to shovel the grain around to ventilate the cargo. (No doubt supervised by a supercargo whose job it was to avoid bottom side from inequally stored cargo...)

If you are planting summer grain, you need to get your seed grain through half a year of adverse conditions, alongside any grain you plan on consuming before and after the sowing season. If you plant winter grain which will survive the winter as a form of meadow, your seed spoilage is negligible.

 

But then, all of this only pertains to grain cultivation as a means to feed your clan. Realistically, I would assign about 60% of the caloric intake of a rural clan to grain, maybe 25 % to domesticated animals, dairy and eggs, maybe 7.5% to gardening (including wine, orchards) and 7.5% to hunting, fishing, and gathering, especially the latter with potential to chime in up to 30% of rather unpleasant but rich caloric stuff in hard times (though not during the Windstop. Afterwards, however, I think that is what happened in 1623 and 1624 while the stores of seed grain were replenished).

 

I've been using High Middle Ages English numbers for barley, towards the low end of such numbers. On the one hand, these cultivars would be more productive than Bronze Age ones, but on the other hand, Dragon Pass is adjacent to the Mediterranean/subtropical climates of Kethaela and so the barley would probably grow better than medieval English barley. Contemporary rates for barley are 45-100 (!) bushels per acre, but that's with intensive agriculture, mechanical harvesting, etc. 

I think that spoilage is a good reason to cull numbers down to assuming low surpluses every year, because high numbers mean the grain rots somewhere- in the field or in the amphora.

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

And don't forget the other reason to grow flax - linseed, probably the best source for plant fat available to Dragon Pass farmers alongside nuts. Unfortunately, you cannot harvest both the seed and the fiber from any given plant, as you need to harvest green flax for fiber production. But you need to leave some flax standing for next year's seed anyway.

 

Skipping some excellent calculations:

Flax is not the only cash crop planted, though. I think that up to six hides of linen make sense if you harvest the seed for oil or as addition to your daily gruel or bread. There may be clans operating an oil mill, which would increase the amount of linseed harvested significantly, with the crushed seed being used as winter fodder.

Orchards aren't usually planted on easily arable land (unless that is all that you have in your tula), and neither are vinyards. Orchards can double as part-time pasture for sheep, or for the making of (admittedly sub-par) hay. (I'm currently in Tübingen, studying computational methods of geography, also in regard to land use, and I am surrounded with so called "Streuobstwiesen" forming bands on the middle slopes of the surrounding rocky hills. Streuobstwiesen are basically somewhat wider spaced orchards with meadow that is used for hay-making to provide the beasts with material to stand or lie on while stabled.)

Other cash or utility crops include woad and similar plants cultivated for dyes, spices (mustard, peppers, hops) or herbs for herbal teas or cosmetic applications. If you are a carl class Orlanthi or higher, you put great effort into your appearance, and some of that effort will be agricultural.

Major non-cereal or non-pseudo-cereal side crops for food may include beans/lentils/peas, cabbage/cale/turnips, or pumpkin/squash/cucumbers/tomatoes - remember that for all its cattle-and-plow agriculture, the plant life of Genertela resembles that of North America (today, post-Columbian transfer) more than it does the Old World in the Bronze Age. With the possible exception of potatoes and yams.

Iron Age western/central/northern European diet apparently included as much non-cultivated grass seed as it did cultivated grain seed, at least judging from the gruel that was given to the Tollund Man before his sacrifice. But then, the fact that a human sacrifice was required may point to a situation of acute shortage, like the post-Windstop years of 1623 or 1624 would have seen.

@Jeff appears to insist that there are regional main cereal crops that make up significantly more than half of the cereal harvest, due to the most favorable return from the regional grain goddess. Still, the wise farmer would not bet everything on a single crop, which could fall prey to some rather minor mishap, or at least stretch this crop out to both winter and summer planting.

 

How much land is left fallow in Orlanthi agriculture? Crop rotation is a rather recent invention in our world, at least where farming with the plough is concerned - American plains farming had "crop rotation" on the same fields, with rows of beans alternating with rows of corn or pumpkin/squash.

The most recent maps for Sartar do indicate areas predominantly under the plow. Arable land won't be limited to those areas, but those areas certainly will be intensively used.

Yeah. For my purposes I'm treating all of these quantities as operating in discrete "hides", but agricultural land will be used more evenly- a single hide will have multiple fields devoted to different crops, along with a garden. 

I think that most arboriculture in Dragon Pass is built on selection/recovery of pre-Dragonkill orchards, so you'd have people producing their orchards via culling versus planting, primarily. Perhaps by now there's more deliberate cultivation going on. And of course it may be interspersed with whatever silviculture Sartarites practice. 

Pulses are historically as essential to people's survival as cereal grains, but they have been somewhat neglected, perhaps because of the lack of iconography. But we can probably assume that peas, lentils, or various bean cultivars make up a substantial chunk of cultivation, along with necessary fruits and vegetables. I think my next post will talk about essential nutrients in the real world and assuming that they're analogized in Gloranthan dietary needs. 

I think that there has to be some kind of fallowing going on, because Sartar is not so urbanized and populous we can assume that clan farmers can all get their crops heavily manured enough to practice intensive agriculture, or that they practice "permaculture with a plowed field". I'm hypothetically assuming long-lay/two-field, because that seems to date back to antiquity as opposed to the three-field/four-field system of the late medieval/early modern period. 

3 minutes ago, soltakss said:

I am not sure that a Hide in Glorantha is 100 acres. That seems to really inflate your figures. Also, not all the land in a hide is going to be productive. 

"Farmland is measured in very practical terms by people
in Dragon Pass—areas are measured in terms of how
long it takes to work with a plow and a team of oxen.
Most agricultural lands also include small fruit orchards
and vineyards.

An acre is the amount of land tillable by one
ox-team in one day.

A hide is an amount of land that one ox-team
can cultivate in a year and is considered sufficient to
support a free household. It is between 80 and 120
acres and there are approximately two hides to the
square kilometer. The Lunars value a hide at 25 W for
census purposes.

Five hides is the amount of land considered sufficient
to support a noble household. This much land
typically requires four or five tenant families to work;
the tenants are semi-free clients of the noble. Five hides
are approximately two square kilometers of land. The
Lunars value five hides at 125 W for census purposes."

Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, page 404 of the English edition, sidebar. 

(The numbers will get more reasonable once we start incorporating herding, fishing, and hunting into those 200 hides of land, along with incorporating key vegetables.) 

Let's digress for another moment and talk about metal prices. The jewelry price list in RQG helpfully indicates values for various metal objects that are mostly metal. 

We can derive, from this list, the following prices per kilogram for gold:
1200L
1500L
3000L
5000L
6000L
7500L (for a necklace with a gemstone pendant.)

For bronze:
100L
1000L

For silver:
200L
1000L

Obviously, labor and machining costs are the primary driver of jewelry prices. But we can take the lower end of these prices as representative: bullion gold is worth six times silver, and twelve times that of bronze or copper. These probably do not represent material abundances so much, but a combination of abundance and ease of extraction- if bronze and copper are primarily found as godbone and gold is primarily found as small shards, then that will make it more expensive even if it's equal in abundance. 

But at some point in this journey we will have the ability to convert calories into cash directly, and indicate just how much metal could be extracted by a given clan. And then some of @lordabdul's questions will have answers. 

Before we get into that, let's digress about linen and flax. Modern flax varieties yield 2000-3000 kg of fiber per acre planted. Let's very conservatively assume that Gloranthan varieties grown in Dragon Pass yield 500 kg per acre planted. 

Middleweight linen weighs about 3.5 square meters to the kg. For our purposes, we'll say that 3.5 square meters is enough cloth to produce a single set of clothes. (A maxi dress takes about 2.66667 square meters of stretchy-knit cloth). As such, one kg is equal to one set of clothes, and one hide produces 50,000 kg of fiber, or 50,000 clothing set equivalents. (Or 0.175 square kilometers of linen cloth.) Of course, there are many more things that need to be made of cloth besides clothes, some of them of heavyweight linens that take only produce about 1.75 square meters to the kg. 

But for our purposes, one hide of flax produces enough linen cloth for 100,000 lunars worth of clothing all by itself. As such, we can say that most clans don't plant anything near to a full hide's worth of land with flax for linen, and presumably each stead maintains a small plot for its own purposes, with a larger plot for whatever thanes work with spinning cloth for sale or ritual use. 

Let's reason backwards now. 

Let's assume that the clan needs a 15% surplus- a 10% tithe or tribute or tax, and a 5% reserve. Effectively, everyone would need 4025 kilocalories per day. This works out to a total harvest of 1,154,500 kg (1.2 kilotonnes), or 42,750 bushels. Thus, the clan would need 61 hides to be occupied with growing barley to achieve this goal. 139 hides could be used for other purposes. 

Let us then assume that the clan plans to have a 10% surplus in a bad year, and anything extra is just gravy. 3850 kcal per day per person, 1.1 kilotonnes of harvest, 40,900 bushels. 490 bushels are grown per hide in this situation, so 83 hides would be needed to cultivate barley, and the remaining 117 could be used for other purposes. 

In this situation, in an ordinary year, the clan would grow about 160% of its needs from its cultivated hides, leaving to a 45% or so "market surplus" which could be traded away. 

The price situation, going back to the first scenario, is that one lunar is worth (assuming that the total GCP of 16,000 lunars represents a total harvest) 2.7 bushels of grain, or 72 kg, so one clack supports 2.5 people per day. 

Against this, we have a fairly clear statement in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes that one lunar buys one bushel of grain. What causes this disparity? 

It's important to distinguish between the internal price of grain, which is not traded on a cash basis within the clan as such, and the market price of grain, buying it from an Issaries trader. The trader is working with a smaller supply of grain. We might well take a crude mathematical approach and suggest that they are working with approximately 40% of the overall grain supply for an identical cash pool, but the cash pool is for multiple clans, of course, and there are almost certainly traditional proscriptions on prices. It is simply worth noting that the market price of a good is not identical to the raw value of that good to a clan. 

So we have a clan that has 117 hides lying fallow, or being used to grown flax or other purely economically useful goods. (Or, potentially, 166 of the hides are being grown in a two-field/long-lay agricultural system, where half of their acreage is fallow at a given time, and 34 are being used for production of non-food goods, etc.) But this clan is still eating a diet of only barley, which is certainly not realistic. What does a more credible Sartarite diet look like, or need to look like? 

@lordabdul commented recently on the lack of background economics, especially around trade, for Dragon Pass and for Glorantha more generally. This... is not that. What this is is an examination of Sartarite clans to see what we can determine about their land use, productivity, and so on, and from there potentially construct a kind of grain-and-meat-and-flax economy that can be extended further. 

Let us begin with an archetypal Sartarite clan, of 1200 people. 600 are children, 500 are adults participating in agricultural production, and 100 are adults outside of production (elderly, disabled, ritually proscribed). This clan has 200 hides of land. This clan, for the demands of thought experiments, grows nothing but barley on that land. We will assume that the hides are placed and sized so that, ranging in size from 80-120 acres of cropland, they manage to produce a consistent crop for a given hide size. We will also assume that the median productivity of the barley, beyond pure reproduction, is seven bushels per acre. So a hide will produce 700 bushels of barley in a year, all else being equal. 

Let us now incorporate the Harvest roll from Runequest Glorantha. In a famine year, production is 40% of normal, while a bad harvest is 70%, a good harvest is 130%, and a superlative harvest is 175% of normal. So production per hide ranges from 280 bushels to 1225 bushels per year. I will ignore the Income roll for the moment, but if we interpreted it as representing the direct efforts of the PC to produce more grain , then we could have a production ranging from 0 to 2450 bushels of barley per hide! Which is why I am ignoring it, this will already be swingy enough. 

A bushel is 27 kilograms. So this amounts to between 7560 kg and 30,375 kg of barley per hide per year. The clan as a whole, with 200 hides, will produce between 1,512,000 and 6,075,000 kg of barley annually, or between 1.5 and 6.1 kilotonnes of barley per year. 

How many calories do people need per day? The typical daily recommended value is 2000-2500 kilocalories (or Calories), if you're in the United States. But that is for people who are overwhelmingly not engaged in heavier physical activity, which can demand up to 4000+ calories per day. Let us set the median as 3500 kilocalories per day, which applies to all 1200 inhabitants. Thus, the clan requires 4,200,000 kilocalories per day for everyone to be nourished. 

Barley has a caloric value of 1230 kilocalories per kilogram. So we have between 1.9 billion kilocalories (1.9 teracalories) and 7.5 billion kilocalories (7.5 teracalories) produced annually in barley. Let us divide this by the 294-day year. There are thus between 6,500,000 and 25,510,000 kilocalories available per day to the clan. There are 1200 people in the clan. Every day, they have between 5400 and 21250 kilocalories available per person to eat. Thus, there is a caloric surplus per person between 1900 kilocalories and 17750 kilocalories, every day. 

Or, to convert things back into bushels, between 20,286 and 188,454 bushels of barley are available for storage or export each year. Thus, in a famine year, this clan eats 64% of its total production, leaving 36% for export or storage, and in a good year, this clan eats 23% of its total production, leaving 77% for export or storage. 

Or, to put it more simply, in a famine year, this clan supports itself, and provides food for 650 other people. In a bumper crop year, this clan supports itself and provides food for 6100 other people. 

On average, such a clan will produce 3.8 kilotonnes of barley every year, equivalent to 4.7 teracalories, which works out to 15.8 gigacalories per day, which works out to 13,100 kilocalories per person per day, which works out to 9600 kilocalories of surplus per person per day, 7.9 kg of barley per person per day, 2,313 kg per person per year, 2.8 kilotonnes of barley in surplus per year. 102,800 bushels of barley in surplus, per year. 73% of the crop is surplus. 

What, then, is the value of barley in this scenario? We know that the annual income from a hide is, on average, 80 lunars. As such, with 700 bushels of barley, each lunar buys 8.75 bushels of barley. Each clack buys 0.875 bushels, or 23.5 kg, and each bolg buys 2.4 kg of barley. You could support 8 people on a clack a day. 

Obviously, this clan does not exist, because it boggles the mind to imagine. But after exploring this alley, we have discovered the possibility of a new route- now that we know how much the clan eats, we can reason backwards. Which will be the subject of the next post, as this one is already long enough. 

I did work a little bit recently on some of the economics of an Orlanthi clan in Sartar, but it's fairly dry (starts with "assume a clan that grows nothing but barley across its 200 hides of land" and then goes into assumed kilocalorie needs per day) and very unfinished even in dealing with an ideal clan, let alone dealing with tribes, cities, confederations, kingdoms, and empires. 

3 hours ago, Arcadiagt5 said:

Sure, but I'm looking for some logical limits on how that can be done, especially without breaking an enchantment. An enchanted cuirass is fairly rigidly sized after all, to what extent does make sense for someone with a different SIZ to the original owner to be able to wear it effectively, even with an armourer adjusting it? 

Cuirasses don't cover that much of the body, though. They have about the same coverage as a men's tank top does (if that! If you look at the positioning of the shoulder straps on triple-disc cuirasses, many of them covered only the center of the chest.), and are generally split into front and back plates joined by adjustable ties. And metal armor was thin, historically. Bronze armor of antiquity tended towards an average thickness of 1 mm (0.04 in). It wouldn't be trivial to reshape the curve of the cuirass or weld additional bronze on, but it wouldn't be impossible, either. 

There are armors that are more rigid and less resizable- the linothorax, leather armors- but those armors are significantly less likely to be looted or enchanted. 

I suspect most Gloranthan mines worked by non-Mostali are shallow open-pit mines worked until the godbone runs out and then abandoned or run on a small scale. 

Historically, mining was brutal, deadly work that generally required either compelled labor or desperate people, so it's not surprising that our sources tend to not center it, compared to the relatively pleasant grinding struggle of subsistence agriculture. 

On 10/26/2020 at 9:34 AM, Sir_Godspeed said:

First off - joke or not, this is cool.

Secondly, while far from as interesting as the above, I wonder what the implications of Electrum is. The original Metal of the White Queen? A symbolic metal of a hypothetial marriage between Yelm and the Lunar Goddess? Something else entirely? An abomination?

Well, historically electrum (as a naturally occurring ore that had its silver content enhanced) was the metal used for the first coins. In Glorantha, of course, we all know that the first coins were the bodies of the Gold Wheel Dancers, and that is why a golden coin is a wheel. Silver coins, meanwhile, have historically been so uncommon that the recent innovations of the lunar and the guilder have been able to cement themselves as common terms. 

So we might well assume that "historical" (read: any coins from the Imperial Age or earlier) coinage of intermediate values between the clack and the wheel was actually made from electrum rather than the purer silver of the modern Lunar, extending the duration of the gold's flame by adding in "useless" silver filler. 

----------------------------

Zinc
lu-metal

In Dragon Pass, and more or less everywhere that you go, the metal that you use in a sword or a knife is, generally, bronze, and the metal that you long to have a sword or a knife made out of is, barring particular cultic requirements, iron. In Peloria, the former is brass and the latter is steel. Why is this the case?

The philosopher Lucianus offered, in his satire "On the Barbarian Goddess", an explanation- wherever the light of Sedenya reaches, there we find that an invisible, intangible, inaudible, ingustable, and inolfactable metal, called zinc, descends and hovers in the air, and whenever metal is worked, it is transmuted, refined, and blossoms to its truest form with the addition of the zinc that is present, producing brass and steel. Some have considered this a metaphor. 

About a Wane later, Hwarinas Taran-il proposed that as the Moon Cosmos reveals itself more fully, zinc becomes more and more tangible, and refined forms of other common metals will become apparent, until finally the physical substance will fall like winter snow on a daily basis, in the truest light of the Goddess. As this read somewhat differently before the advent of the Kalikos Expeditions, the riots that ensued in Vanch, with redsmiths being forced at knifepoint to let their forges go cold and manufacture everything purely by hammering without heat to "keep the red snow out", aqueducts being sabotaged, and put-upon administrators who didn't read much philosophy being baffled by the whole thing as they sent in the cavalry squadrons, prompted some serious discussion about the importance of letting ideas be presented to people in ways that don't prompt immediate panic. 

As a result, discussion of Zinc Theory is largely discouraged in the modern Empire. 

There remains no evidence that zinc exists in a literal sense, and as such, no description of its properties is possible. 

https://eightarmsandthemask.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-axe-and-sealed-jar-babeester-gor.html?m=1

There are four short Babeester Gor myths in this blogpost of mine, written to provide an alternate perspective on the cult and goddess. They are not entirely canon-compliant (the biggest variation is in having distilled liquor in Glorantha), but hopefully the worldview they present is helpful for providing the internal perspective of an initiate. 

I think it's also worth noting that many, if not most, This World Heroquests are ritual reenactments where you're in less personal danger because the participants are mostly people playing a role. And this distancing from the myth is what makes such quests generally less fruitful, too. 

Sodium

(ta-metal, tan-metal)

Sodium is an exceptionally rare metal, generally agreed to be made from the bones of gods of Sky Water or Firey Water, which are most notably Tanian and his few descendants. As such, godbone sodium has never been recorded. It is generally agreed that it is also possible, like how bronze can be created by combining tin and copper, to create sodium via combining aluminum or quicksilver with gold. The precise process remains unknown to the world at large. 

The most salient reason for this, as the philosopher Humphrys da Velan notes in his "de Re Foedi", is that sodium has a natural desire to embrace its true nature as burning water and become a tiny little fireberg before it uses itself up as fuel. The process of combination, the alloying secret, prevents the sodium from embracing this nature- but the slightest contact of Fire or Water will prompt an explosion and and an unquenchable flame. Sodium has thus been discovered hundreds of times in Glorantha, but for ninety-nine of each hundred, the discoverer died before passing on his miraculous discovery. 

It is thought that the Middle Sea Empire learned some of the secrets of this metal, and made some use of it in their machines and rituals. It is certainly known that in their ruins it is possible to find amphorae of solid aluminum, which are filled with oil and a little ingot of sodium. The sodium is kept in such luxury by the oil bath it does not burn or explode, but as soon as the oil is taken away, the sodium once again ignites. It has also been attributed to Mostali, and at times thought to be a component of those Mostali artifacts marked with the Disorder Rune. Further information has not been forthcoming from Mostali themselves. 

Alois Clarapigny, a zzaburi in the early days of the Rokari school, at great expense assembled a vessel of glass and aluminum which allowed him to observe sodium's appearance safely while it was immersed in oil. He concluded that in appearance it is a pale yellow, with a slight luster reminiscent of silver. 

Sodium is without price in a fairly literal sense- most don't know what it is, most who do know have no desire to have any, and so the people willing to buy are so few and far between that no price can be assumed in advance. (The restitution needed after selling some and having it burn down an entire market or villa probably outweights what it could sell for on the open market, anyways.)

(The premise/game of this thread: if tin (Sky) and copper (Earth) can alloy to make bronze (air), what other metals might be creatable via alloying, and why are they so rare/unusual they haven't been observed in published material? This one is mostly a joke, of course. )

1 hour ago, Scorus said:

Thanks for these numbers. The reason I asked is that the published sources don't seem consistent. The Ulerian Temple and Temple to All Dieties in Apple Lane are each supported by only 5 hides, so 200L/year on average. But a holy site costs 125-1000L/year?! I don't deny that is possible, but I have no context as to why that is the case.

A recently resurrected noble PC wants to establish a Chalana Arroy shrine as his 'payment' for their services. He is able to build the structure and is working to find a God-Talker or Priest to maintain the shrine and accompanying one-room hospital, but we are not sure how much land/cattle he needs to gift for it's annual upkeep. Is it twice as much as the 125-1000L holy site cost or half as much as the 200L temple cost, for instance?

Bear in mind that the amount of land necessary to support a temple is dependent on how often that temple is in use, since a great proportion of that land's income is used to provide for sacrifices and rituals, and will also be dependent on the extent to which that temple is commercialized. A clan temple is not very commercialized and is in constant use, so it requires maybe 1500 lunars per year in agricultural income to support its direct operations, while a temple to Uleria or the Temple to All Deities, which are highly commercialized and/or in infrequent use, require substantially less agricultural income to support them. 

So the basic question here is, is this shrine intended to be a perpetual charity clinic, or is it intended to operate like a conventional Chalana Arroy shrine does? My quick-and-dirty solution would be that a 5-hide gift would work for the former, and a 2.5-hide gift would work for the latter. Or you could double these, perhaps, to 10 hides and 5 hides. 

A more general-purpose solution would probably require classifying particular temples based on how commercially they operate, how often their services are in demand, etc. and then working out the necessary incomes for support. 

Congratulations to the winners, who both deserve it very strongly!

Are the halls on the Nochet map for Houses and Enfranchised Houses which live primarily in Nochet? 

There are 20 Enfranchised Houses that I count on the Nochet map, which is 10% of the total for Esrolia, which certainly seems to suggest to me that these are "headquarters" halls and country nobility/embassies from the other major cities aren't marked as such on the map. To contrast, about 6% of the population of Esrolia as a whole lives in Nochet, which certainly (and reasonably) suggests that Esrolia's nobility is more urbanized than the population as a whole. 

Blue Moon Brothers

The player characters are secret operatives for the Blue Moon Assassins/Blue Army in disguise as a group of traveling musicians, or they were, until they ended up involuntarily joining the Danfive Xaron cult to protect the secrets of the Blue Moon cult. Released from prison into a world that's rapidly changed, they learn that in their absence the Blue Army has lost so much ground to the Unspoken Word, Great Sister, etc. that the Blue Army secret training center where they were raised as orphans to be musician-spies is in imminent danger of having the Tax Demons unleashed against it!

Can they put the (hero) band back together and save their beloved brainwashing center, that is, orphanage, and figure out just who keeps trying to kill them? 

(One campaign where Drive Chariot will rarely, if ever, go unused...)

How does mining work in Glorantha, anyways? Is there any ore processing that humans do apart from very limited iron mining and smelting, or does metal mining consist of digging out solid nuggets or chunks of godbone with minimal processing? Is the majority of mining open pit or is shaft mining used sometimes? 

If we're looking at shaft mining (which historically dates back to the Neolithic for valuable minerals) then some of the most important things are fresh air and a low water table. Mining was, historically, a deadly occupation that was frequently the province of slaves or debt peons, and one which only the most desperate people took up willingly. So in that sense, perhaps there aren't any positive gods of mining to pray to, but only terrible ones to propitiate. Molanni, of course, to keep her from stilling the air, and some of her minor siblings, who provide actively poisonous or explosive air if neglected. Then, too, we would probably have a god of underground water to propitiate for avoiding floods and keeping shafts pumped dry. 

For an open-pit mine, the emphasis would be less on the danger and more on the shared drudgery, the need for strength and endurance. Lodril, possibly Barntar, local hero-cults. 

If metals are frequently processed from ores, then of course an Asrelia god-talker is necessary (perhaps with an Issaries one alongside) to sort and grade the ore, and Gustbran becomes relevant here as the ore gets roasted, alongside local river-gods if the ore gets washed. Perhaps, (for MGF) one needs to invoke a strong Disorder-associated god in order to make sure ore crushing and spalling goes off properly, which means that you need a Maran or Zorak Zoran or Eurmal god-talker on the site at all times. Fun for the whole family!

If metals are almost always dug out as solid chunks, then many of these processes become less important at the mine itself and it's all about clearing away the gangue that's clinging to the surface of the metal. 

Granted, smelting was almost always done on-site, so the process of purifying a metal chunk to Runic quality would probably be performed there. This is probably the area where Mostal is most likely to be directly worshipped, as Stasis is associated with alchemy and transmutation and this would include purifying the metal. 

Yaupon/cassina (a holly plant native to the southeastern US) was used, possibly since the Late Archaic period, to make a highly caffeinated family of hot drinks used for ritual purposes. This is generally called "black drink" and is perhaps more known for the common reports of vomiting shortly after drinking it (Some variants have emetic herbs added to the blend to deliberately induce vomiting, but the vomiting reported outside of those known variants may come from the caffeine content likely being equivalent to 3-6 cups of black coffee in a single serving).

Yaupon appears to have been prepared like coffee traditionally, with the leaves and branches being parched to roast them, and then the roasted yaupon being soaked in boiling water until it turned a dark brown or black and then allowed to cool slightly. 

Cassina was also used to make a tea by drying and charring the leaves, more or less continuously from the arrival of Spanish colonists in Florida down to the present day, though decreasing significantly in consumption through the 20th century. 

So there we have another potential source for coffee and tea in areas they wouldn't normally seem likely to be in.