Clan Economics (or, "Bread and Peas in Times of Hero Wars")

[FungusColombicus]

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

 Kumis

All alcoholic fermented milk drinks of Prax are called Kumis.  The technique for making these drinks are no mystery, but the most common is made with horse milk, even though the Kumis made with Zebra milk is even more potent.  It has been said that Rhino Kumis made from milk taken in the first days after the birth is the very strongest kumis made in Prax, while others say that Unicorn milk is even more potent as Kumis, even though Unicorn riders don’t make Kumis (allegedly unicorn kumis has been made from the milk of captured unicorns by other tribes, as the unicorn riders will seldom put their precious and intelligent unicorn friends through such an indignity).  Thus the conjecture and wild stories persist.  Some even say that the strongest Kumis comes from the unknown mount of Jaldon Toothmaker. The lesson here  is that drunk people love to speculate about things they will likely never experience.

the absolute strongest Kumis that can be found in Glorantha comes from the Lord Ethilrist Black Horses. IF you dare to milk them and survive you will get a rich and potent alcoholic milk with no need of fermentation.

[Darius West]

32 minutes ago, FungusColombicus said:

the absolute strongest Kumis that can be found in Glorantha comes from the Lord Ethilrist Black Horses. IF you dare to milk them and survive you will get a rich and potent alcoholic milk with no need of fermentation.

I have no doubt it would be a heady brew, but I think Jaldon's mount will be more powerful, given that it is likely a concentrated form of the Praxian beast rune turned into a mount, being simultaneously of all tribes and none.  I also don't think Ethilrist would let anyone milk their demon steeds, as that would be a pagan practice out of keeping with the Atroxic Church.  Nevertheless, YGMV, and if someone can capture a demon steed mare, and milk it, why not?

Edited November 4, 2020 by Darius West

[FungusColombicus]

1 minute ago, Darius West said:

I have no doubt it would be a heady brew, but I think Jaldon's mount will be more powerful, given that it is likely a concentrated form of the Praxian beast rune turned into a mount., being simultaneously of all tribes and none.

BUT... Jaldon's mount was male...

[Joerg]

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

Hur, hur hur! Unicorns are all male, so what do they use to make Unicorn Kumis? 😲

Apart from  the already discussed option of using actual unicorn secretions, don't forget that the unicorn tribe has a significant majority of non-virgins riding other beasts, both Praxian herd beasts and (gasp) horses.

For kumiss, you obviously need milk as secretion, but for cheeses, there are endless microbial additives to the curd for ripening a cheese. I was told about experiments where all manners of sweat were used as aging agents, creating quite distinct odors (and presumably flavors). People at the local milk research institute contributed sweat wiped from arm-pits, feet, brows and backs to age test samples of cheese. The results were described as distinctive...

Real world aging agents include ashes, mites, all manner of molds, and other stuff you wouldn't want to know about in a food context.

"Microbial" is of course a no-go in Gloranthan life sciences. Fermentation processes are expressions of the Darkness Rune.

The use of calf stomachs for making curd out of milk is a fairly dark and grisly ingredient already.

In our Real World, rennet is a catalyst, a substance which only undergoes intermediary compounds in the process, reverting to the original state after the reaction partner undergoes the next transformation. In case of curd, the chemical reaction is a polymerisation of proteins, with the observed effect being a "solidification" of the milk, a precipitation of a bit more than half of the protein in the milk. There are other ways to make milk curdle, such as acid (as an additive, or from bacterial activity as in yogurt), but acid is used up in the reaction, whereas catalysts like rennet keep giving, although slower and slower as they get diluted.

I never was able to find solid numbers for the amount of bull calves required in slaughter to produce curd for cheese making.

Modern cheese may use artificial rennet (to alleviate the horror of lacto-vegetarians realizing how slaughter used to be the necessary first step in cheese making). Gloranthans don't have that luxury, but not even Chalana Arroy cultists have an obligation to avoid eating cheese. (But then, they may have surgical techniques to extract rennet and keep the calves alive...)

 

Saliva is a powerful enzyme, too, and is involved in processing starch for alcoholic fermentation, as yeast works better with free sugars than with starch. Hence the trope of rather toothless elderly women chewing some starchy stuff, then spitting it into vessels for alcoholic fermentation. Toothless because continued exposure to starch will further caries...

10 hours ago, Nozbat said:

That would really worry me... and even to be culturally polite... I think I'd invent an allergy to or religious proscription to any fermented products

You would admit to suffering from a curse?

That makes me wonder (in these pandemic times) whether suffering from disease or possibly contagious curses creates an exception from hospitality rules. Such as chaotic features...

Would the revelation of such a curse or a chaotic feature be considered a breach of hospitality, sufficient grounds for aggression against treacherous guests?

The revelation of being in a blood feud with the host is usually not considered sufficient grounds to revoke hospitality. But that's stuff for a different thread.

[soltakss]

12 hours ago, coffeemancer said:

as promised: 

sheep cheese

Boo!

 

[coffeemancer]

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Boo!

 

Typical englishmen...

EDIT: I think I got the wrong episode anyways, but the sheep cheese episode is in that show somewhere. A very good watch for anyone who is into history.

maybe this link works better

Edited November 5, 2020 by coffeemancer
SHEEP! CHEESE!!!!

[David Scott]

19 hours ago, coffeemancer said:

But more on economics, do we have any hints as to main export and import for sartar?

The Guide has Important Trade Goods for al regions covered on page 470. Sartar isn't broken out specifically from DRagon Pass: Imports: Cloth, Herbs, Iron, Spices, Wine, Exports: Artifacts, Bronze, Copper, Horses, Metalworking, Wool.

[coffeemancer]

Interesting. One would think that with the Horsespawn being so close the Sartarites couldn't compete, but I suppose they dont share their horses with "walking" people. 
As for artifacts... what does that mean? Items of magic? Treasure, in the good old KODP sense?
 

[David Scott]

2 minutes ago, coffeemancer said:

Interesting. One would think that with the Horsespawn being so close the Sartarites couldn't compete, but I suppose they dont share their horses with "walking" people.

By Horsespawn, I assume you mean the Grazelanders, I'm sure their merchant's trade horses when there is a surplus, as would be usual amongst all animal traders - you keep your best. It's going to be regional so I imagine the horse clans of the Colymar export horses too when there's a surplus. The Grazelanders would export south to Esrolia then west as per the trade route map, the Colymar would export north as per the map. They also have different types of horses.

FYI, the Guide defines Dragon Pass as Sartar, (Lunar) Tarsh and the Grazelands.

2 minutes ago, coffeemancer said:

As for artifacts... what does that mean? Items of magic? Treasure, in the good old KODP sense?

The table is a subsection of the Types of Trade Goods section, which defines all the types.

Artifacts: Gods Blood crystals, enchanted items, relics of the Gods Age, Truestone, and other magical artifacts are in high demand in every region of Glorantha.

[coffeemancer]

3 minutes ago, David Scott said:

 

FYI, the Guide defines Dragon Pass as Sartar, (Lunar) Tarsh and the Grazelands.

 

Ah, of course.

 

[Stephen L]

6 hours ago, David Scott said:

Guide defines Dragon Pass as Sartar, (Lunar) Tarsh and the Grazelands

I don't know whether it's something that I just assumed, but I've always thought that Dragon Pass was marked by the Crossline in the south and the Deathline in the north  (Fitting with Sartar, Tarsh, Exiles and Grazelands).  They are a series of standing stones in the shape of the death rune.

However, looking at recent maps, I can't find either marked. 

[Brootse]

8 hours ago, David Scott said:

The Guide has Important Trade Goods for al regions covered on page 470. Sartar isn't broken out specifically from DRagon Pass: Imports: Cloth, Herbs, Iron, Spices, Wine, Exports: Artifacts, Bronze, Copper, Horses, Metalworking, Wool.

So Colymar wine is an outlier.

[David Scott]

27 minutes ago, Brootse said:

So Colymar wine is an outlier.

Like a lot of (good) small wine producers - I suspect little if any leaves home.

[John Biles]

3 hours ago, Brootse said:

So Colymar wine is an outlier.

Produced on too small a scale.

 

[Darius West]

On 11/5/2020 at 6:44 AM, FungusColombicus said:

BUT... Jaldon's mount was male...

Shut up and drink it, this will put hair on your chest...

[coffeemancer]

On 11/1/2020 at 5:08 PM, Eff said:

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. 

what is meant by a "bushel" here? because traditionally, I believe, it is the amount of food it takes to feed one person for a year.

[David Scott]

23 minutes ago, coffeemancer said:

what is meant by a "bushel" here? because traditionally, I believe, it is the amount of food it takes to feed one person for a year.

It's not even as simple as that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel... I'd go for a metric bushel, in keeping with RQG, just round it up to 40 litres.

[soltakss]

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

It's not even as simple as that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel... I'd go for a metric bushel, in keeping with RQG, just round it up to 40 litres.

I love the bit that says "The old bushel is equal to 2 kennings (obsolete), 4 pecks, or 8 dry gallons". Imperial units are great!

 

[Hteph]

On 11/10/2020 at 6:58 PM, soltakss said:

I love the bit that says "The old bushel is equal to 2 kennings (obsolete), 4 pecks, or 8 dry gallons". Imperial units are great!

 

I did a dive into agricultural yields while working on a “better medieval agricultural boardgame than Agricola” and I went totally bonkers on the units alone 🙂