Magical Economy
This page details a collaborative project by /tg/ to create a complex, comprehensive system to simulate a medieval economy in magic settings like D&D, after the fashion of Spice and Wolf or 3E's Magical Society: The Silk Road sourcebook, including a workable list of commodities and their values and the ability to take into account various factors such as supply and demand, transportation, economic bubbles, political and socioeconomic changes, and so on. The eventual aim is to have a system that can simulate medieval economy on the DM's side behind-the-scenes with reasonable accuracy, if not efficiency.
"A program that could generate a random map, populate it, give weather patterns, provide trade, and a 'seed' that DMs could send around the world as an example of their game world."
System Reference Document
A condensed HTML document that contains not only the master table of goods/values/bulk, but also an overview of the rules that Silk Road uses to manage trade, supply and demand, as well as haggling. The rule about "20 days travel" has been replaced with "400 miles travel" as a day is a very transient unit to use, and the Buy/Sell system, which was originally a 3E-style DC system, has been directly converted to a percentage system to make it more accessible for other systems. To convert for other systems, you will only need to replace the part referencing 2e's reaction adjustment and come up with a mechanic to reflect merchant skill based on the system's own skill framework.
This item is a useful reference and "DM Cheat Sheet" for the SR economy system, as it contains all of the most important rules as well as the master list of all goods, including an expanded list of arms and armor.
Obsolete's SphereGen
The Sphere Generator is designed to generate a so-called "Sphere of Trade"; a list of items that are in high and low demand, as well as a list of items that are not locally produced in the sphere (and are thus more valuable) and the corresponding perceived quality of these items.
The different types of spheres of trade are named after settlement types, though they are generic sizes of spheres and could apply to larger areas. The categories which you may select are: village, small town, large town, and city. The settlement that you choose determines how many items are generated and also applies a flat modifier to perceived quality of items, as larger settlements have more refined and picky tastes.
Items Generated per Settlement Size:
- Village - 20
- Small Town - 40
- Large Town - 60
- City - 80
- Metropolis - 100
The items are randomly assigned to the three categories of high demand, low demand, and low supply. Some spheres may have many items in high demand and few in other categories, while others may have an even proportion of each.
You are then given the option to choose types of goods from three categories: high demand, low demand, and low supply. As high supply goods (goods produced within a short distance of the sphere) bear no modifiers to prices, they are irrelevant. Each category you choose adds another sub-list of goods to the pool that will be chosen from for items of that type.
High Demand
Categories checked under high demand will contribute to the pool of high demand items selected. A high demand item will be worth either +10% or +25% of its original value, depending on whether the demand is moderate or high. Exceptional demand as per Silk Road is not generated by the program due to its extremity as it is the opinion of the programmer that such a high bonus only occurs from "special circumstances", i.e. a plague or war.
Low Demand
Categories checked under low demand will contribute to the pool of low demand items selected. A low demand item is always worth -10% of its original value.
Low Supply
Categories checked under low supply will contribute to the pool of low supply items selected. Several factors determine the composition of a low supply item. First of all, the distance of the nearest production center of a low supply item - between 100 and 1200 miles - will be determined. Once this is done, the "perceived quality" will be determined; this refers to the fact that settlements treat some items of higher or lower quality than they actually are, depending on how much of it they encounter. A flat +1 bonus to perceived quality of all low-supply items is given in a village, a flat -1 for a city and a flat -2 for a metropolis. In addition, the perceived quality of an individual item is modified by the distance to the nearest production center; for each 400 miles away that it is, the perceived quality increases by 1.
Program Downloads
The Windows version of SphereGen can be downloaded here: Sphere Generator for Windows
The ZIP file contains three items:
- A Goods folder which contains a text document for each category with a list of items
- A .EXE file used to run the program
- The source code in a .CS file in case you want to compile it yourself or modify it.
The program is free and so on; do with it as you please.
There is also a Linux version: it's still an .EXE since it's written in C#, but it's written for the Linux file structure (Goods/XXX rather than Goods\XXX) and so you should be able to run it with mono: