Clan resources spreadsheet

[Lordabdul]

It was a slow afternoon, so I spent some time making a Google Spreadsheet that tries to put together various stats about an Orlanthi clan in order to figure out how magic is spent for various things from season to season. You can't edit it, but you should be able to make a copy in your own Google Drive, and play with it from there.

Get it >> here <<

1. How it works

Before you play with it, here's how it works:

• All of the light green cells are the one you can (and should!) edit. The other ones are driven by formulas.
• The first section ("Variables") has a whole bunch of general variables.
• The "People & Cults" section is meant to be filled up manually, HQG style, and the formulas will figure out the RQG numbers (this is mostly because I started the spreadsheet by entering the Red Cow clan stats).
  • Punch in numbers in the various cults until you're happy. Note that the total number of cult initiates/devotees can exceed the number of adults reported a few rows below, because you can, and will, have clan people with multiple cult memberships. This isn't negligible: Red Cow clan for instance seems to have more than a hundred people with multiple cult memberships (under HQG rules).
• Next, scroll down to the "Rune Magic" section and you should be able to see how much Rune Points are spent or "saved" every season for various things.
  • Things are Lands (farming/herding), Families (blessing pregnancies and healing people), War (raiding and such), Ceremonies (holy days, sacred time, and the occasional adulthood rites), and Miscellaneous (for various little things like dealing with occasional monsters).
  • You can adjust how much magic each cult dedicates to each "thing" (for instance, Ernalda spends a lot on Lands, obviously), but you probably shouldn't deviate too much from what I set there. Still, little adjustments to big cults can make a big difference.
  • The next couple tables show how much Rune Magic a clan has, and how much they're spending. The "Magic Willing to Spend" is, by default, 90% of the total magic available, because the clan won't want to spend all its magic every season. This is just informative, to warn you about when you're eating into that last bit of magic, which is probably dangerous.
  • Some things, like adulthood rites (which Jeff said only happen every 4 years or so) are, as a result of the seasonal aspect of this spreadsheet, "amortized" over seasons, where the Rune Magic is taken into account as if you were saving it somewhere so that you have enough of it to spend every 4 years.
• Below that are sections for each "thing", with various settings for adjusting how you think they deplete a clan's magic.
  • This is where I expect to have made the most mistakes, and where I hope people will point out corrections.

2. Preliminary conclusions

Based on the Red Cow clan stats, and on my own modeling of what happens in a year, here are some conclusions, using the first version of the spreadsheet. Feel free to point out things that seem out of place -- they probably indicate either a mathematical error, or a modeling error.

• Lands are by far the biggest spender for Rune Magic (assuming I've got the right math for the number of hides of land and number of animals... I'm not even counting any other animals beside cattle and sheep)
  • I'm blessing crops for a 60% bonus, but only 3/4 of the fields (not all of them).
  • It's pretty even between magic required for blessing crops and for taking care of animals.
• Far behind, magic spent on War and Ceremonies are pretty much equivalent.
  • Of course that will vary a lot based on your clan. The spreadsheet allows you to do more raids per year, send more or less fighters, with more or less offensive/defensive magic. Of course you also need to heal them, but you can adjust that too.
  • Different clans might also have different number of small and big ceremonies, and that will probably change the magic spending quite a lot. I think the participation ratio of people spending Rune Points during ceremonies are quite low, to be honest.
• Miscellaneous things are, again, far behind War and Ceremonies. Family stuff isn't far behind -- it's pretty cheap to bless pregnancies, really.

One of the most important settings to play with is the percentage of lay members vs. initiates. It's set to 30% here (totally an arbitrary number), but bumping it to, say, 50% puts you in the red for magic spending, so that gives you an idea of how many less fields you need to bless, or fighters you need to support magically.

3. Changelog

I'll edit this post with what I changed, if I do change the spreadsheet.

1. First version (2019/12/27)

 

[Akhôrahil]

Remember that you have p. 406 of RQG to work with as well - your Thane numbers in particular seem overwhelmingly high in comparison (basically, each Thane household is supported by five Cottar households, so that places a pretty serious restriction on your number of Thanes, and RQG suggests something like 16 Thane households in a 1000-person clan). You can also pick up a bunch of maths from it when it comes to wealth and demographics.

Edited December 28, 2019 by Akhôrahil

[Akhôrahil]

Oh, and since you have Worship numbers, you could even calculate what the flow of Magic Points to the gods looks like. 🙂

[Lordabdul]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Remember that you have p. 406 of RQG to work with as well - your Thane numbers in particular seem overwhelmingly high in comparison

Ah yeah nice -- p 406 actually confirms that typical clan would have around 200 hides of land, which is in the ballpark of what I have for the Red Cow clan in the spreadsheet.

I'm not sure what you mean about the thanes, though. That boxed text is only related to the Orlanth & Ernalda temples, so the "five priests and thanes" is just the thanes for the temple. I took my percentage of thanes from the Red Cow (The Coming Storm, p11, indicates 120 thanes for a 1500 people clan).

[Akhôrahil]

30 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

I’m not sure what you mean about the thanes, though. That boxed text is only related to the Orlanth & Ernalda temples, so the "five priests and thanes" is just the thanes for the temple. I took my percentage of thanes from the Red Cow (The Coming Storm, p11, indicates 120 thanes for a 1500 people clan).

RQG places a lot more emphasis on the role of the temple in Clan economy, essentially making temple and chief into the same thing. But more crucially, the number of thanes are limited by the number of cottars, and the 80 cottar households seem to be all the cottars in the clan, limiting the number of thane households to 16 or so. Ratio of Thane/Carl/Cottar (or at least those Households - family size might differ) would be 16/120/80 going by RQG (using up those 200 hides).

However, it makes a huge difference on whether we talk about thanes or thane households - everyone belonging to the thane’s immediate family will count as thanes as far as wergild and social status goes, without actually functioning professionally as thanes.

Edited December 28, 2019 by Akhôrahil

[Lordabdul]

In the spreadsheet it's all about the number of individuals, since I then multiple that by the number of average Rune Points for a typical thane, militia warrior, carl, cottar, etc.

Ultimately, even bringing down the number of thanes by a lot (down to less than 20) doesn't affect the economy too much. I had to redistribute a bit from War back into Land, but that was pretty much it. It might be because I'm not using these numbers much -- the Rune Point budget is based on how many initiates/rune lords/rune priests/god talkers each cult has.

Edited December 28, 2019 by lordabdul

[Akhôrahil]

I would also say that average Rune points per initiate is likely higher than 1, as 1 is the very minimum possible and most competent adults should have at least 2 to 3. Anyone with multiple initiations must by definition have at least 2.

Even 2 would seem like a fairly low average to me. But I could also see them used at a somewhat lower rate - your Orlanth worshiper will frequently save them for troubles and emergencies, which will not always occur (Ernaldans might be better at spending them as there’s always room for some blessing).

Edited December 28, 2019 by Akhôrahil

[Lordabdul]

It really depends how you picture your Orlanthi society -- which is the point of this spreadsheet

• If you picture people just getting 1 Rune Point at initiation, and then they just carry on with their lives, then that works if you have a low rate of lay members (<30%). That maps fairly well with how you might imagine real world religions, IMHO.
• If you picture people actually getting involved with their worship, gaining additional Rune Points, you obviously get a big surplus of Rune Points. This means you can (if you want) make these people be the minority (>60% lay members, who just "go to church on sundays" but don't do much else). This also maps well with another interpretation of real world religions IMHO.
• If however you punch in the numbers for both low lay membership, and high dedication to the cult (2 or 3 Rune Points for the average initiate), then you realize the clan has a shitload of excess magic points every season (hundreds in various categories). Assuming I didn't forget something.... in this case, you either figure that they keep a lot of points on the side "just in case" (wayyyy more than the 10% I set aside by default), or it means you can start bumping up a lot more things: you can bless 100% of the pregnancies... you can bump the crop blessing to a +80% or +100% bonus, and you can bless all the crops instead of just some of them... you can do one or two more raids per year, and you can boost almost all of of your fighters with offensive and defensive magic, instead of less than half of them.... and you can of course organize a couple more festival ceremonies per year.

 

Edited December 28, 2019 by lordabdul