Looking For Historical Pricing Product Recomendations

[SiderisAnon]

I hope I have put this in the correct forum ...

I have just started a campaign that is quickly going to need a more detailed pricing list for various goods and supplies than I generally use. The characters are ship based. They are going to be acquiring cargoes from pirates (and maybe some legitimate merchants if they get the privateer license they're already after), but they are also planning on doing buying and selling of goods themselves.

Most of the pricing lists I've seen for goods in D20 products are ... historically broken to say the least. The pricing seems to be based more on modern availability of goods than anything with a real world historical consideration. (For instance, pepper was a valued commodity that needed to be imported from far off areas, as was silk. Whole trading empires were built around such goods. Yet they're often priced like salt and cotton.)

So, what I am looking for is a product that has some realistic pricing guidelines. I would love to find something that had real pricing lists from European history. I don't need it to be a gaming product; a solid and accurate non-fiction book from the history section would be fine by me.

Can anyone out there recommend some good books/products for me to pick up to help with this campaign? Web based resources would be great as well.

Thank you.

 

[Umbran]

So, what I am looking for is a product that has some realistic pricing guidelines. I would love to find something that had real pricing lists from European history. I don't need it to be a gaming product; a solid and accurate non-fiction book from the history section would be fine by me.

You'll find that pricing of various things will vary wildly among various places and times - "historical" is hardly a well-defined thing. How things were priced in Arthurian England will bear little resemblance to early-Renaissance Rome, for example.

In addition, the real-world economics will have little or nothing to do with the needs of the game.

 

[S'mon]

I think you should be thinking more about bulk and profit margins - how much pepper you can fit in the ship and how much money you think the PCs should make from transporting and selling it, then work back from there to the sale price and the buy price, which might only be 1/6 or less of the sale price if it's a long trip to market. Probably wages will eat up around 1/2 the profit.

Eg: I think my merchant captain should clear 200 gp from his month-long trip, with another 200 gp going on crew wages. Total income 400 gp. Say the ship holds 10 tons of cargo, that's a sale profit of 40 gp/ton, maybe buy at 20 gp, sell at 60 gp. Sounds about right for mid-range goods; lumber would be less, pepper more.

 

[Wombat]

Even the authors of this article will admit to this being an oversimplification of the topic, but this is as good of a place to start as any for medieval pricings:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html

 

[S'mon]

Even the authors of this article will admit to this being an oversimplification of the topic, but this is as good of a place to start as any for medieval pricings:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html

Great stuff.

>> 1 pound (L) = 20 shillings (s)
1 crown = 5 shillings
1 shilling = 12 pence (d)
1 penny = 4 farthings
1 mark = 13s 4d<<

Going by the prices, ca 1314 it looks like 1 penny roughly equates to 1 silver piece in D&D, being a low daily wage (thatcher's mate) , the cheapest soldier costs 2 d/day = 2 sp/day (Welsh infantry), 6 gp/month.

Which then makes a shilling roughly 1 gp, a mercenary man-at-arms gets 1 shilling/day, which would be 30 gp/month, presumably on a short term contract, while a regular army captain 8s/day, which would be 240 gp/month.

Seems about right, maybe a bit higher than we're used to.

 

[SiderisAnon]

Found A System

Thank you for your responses.

The Medieval Price List looks like a good source for helping me balance some of the price lists.

For trade goods, I've found a system that seems quite elegant. I can't guarantee it's 100% historically accurate, but it's both detailed enough and simple enough to solve most of my problems.

It's "A Magical Society: Silk Road" from Expeditious Retreat Press. There's a lot of historical information on trade, plus they have a system for pricing trade goods, the costs of shipment, and how much the value goes up over distance. There's about 1,000 starting trade goods, which should keep my players busy for some time to come. They describe most of the goods.

I've been very pleased with their other two Magical Society books, though "Silk Road" doesn't seem to have gotten the attention/press that the first two did. I have a certain fondness for a gaming book that uses enough reference material to require a bibliography section.


Now, I just have to figure out where some of these items come from. Toward that end, I've found a great web resource I thought I'd let people know about. It's a web site with a listing of over 100 spices. There is information on what they look and smell like, what they're used for, and where they originate. There is also information on etymology and what appears to be a chemical breakdown. This person is VERY into spices. It's already helped me place a number of the common spices to their production locations in my campaign world.

http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/index.html



Thanks again for the responses.