Stage one in integrating Codox and Cloverage output
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doc/Population.ods
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doc/economy.md
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doc/economy.md
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# Game world economy
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Broadly this essay extends ideas presented in [Populating a game world](https://blog.journeyman.cc/2013/07/populating-game-world.html), q.v.
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## Primary producers
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### Herdsfolk
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Herdsfolk are nomadic; it's reasonable to think they'll bring their herds to market, rather than selling it lots of tiny markets. So in the spring, shepherds will visit specific towns at the edge of open land, to hold a shearing festival/carnevale; and that both shepherds and cattle herders will visit towns on the edge of open land to sell fatstock in the autumn.
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### Miners
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Miners mine. They're settled, but they're settled usually in specialist settlements at the location where the ore body is accessible, usually in mountenous territory. They'll consume a lot of food, so there will be a local market for foodstuffs encouraging local farming. Different mines obviously mine different ores, but, for example, lead and silver are frequently found together.
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### Foresters
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Foresters are more or less settled at the edge of forests, at locations from which timber can be moved by navigable water; again in specialist settlements. In addition to timber, foresters hunt and produce both meat and furs, so have less need for other food producers locally.
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### Farmers
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Farmers are settled. Farmers occupy standard runrig plots, but because they don't employ journeymen or apprentices, and don't have workshops, the plots are mostly open with little building. Most farmers are 'mixed farmers', producing cereals, meat, eggs and milk. Some will be more specialist. Farm produce, taken broadly to include orchardsfolk, include:
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* meat
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* milk and milk products
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* hides
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* eggs
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* cereals
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* root vegetables, onions, etc
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* peas and beans
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* leaf vegetables
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* fruits
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* fibres: linen, hemp and silk (from silk-moths in mulberry orchards)
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* possibly other stuff I've forgotten.
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Farmers are all basically subsistence farmers, farming first to feed their own household and selling only surplus in the market.
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## Crafts
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Crafts generally process primary goods into secondary goods - whether intermediate stages or final consumer items. Some elite 'crafts' deal with abstract primary goods like law and knowledge, and they may be seen as somewhat separate.
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A master craftsperson occupies a standard runrig plot, much like a farmer's plot. Like a farmer, a poor master crafter household will cultivate part of the plot to produce food for the house - at least grow vegetables and keep hens. However, as the crafter takes on apprentices and journeymen - and gets richer - more buildings will be required as accommodation, workshop space and materials stores.
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Generally, primary goods aren't transported over land - because overland transport is expensive, by the time they've been transported they're no longer low cost goods. So often the craftspeople who process primary produce into at least commodity intermediate forms will live close to the source of the primary goods.
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So, for example, the town(s) where the shepherds hold their shearing fairs will tend to have a lot of weavers. While around mines there will be smelters producing ingots and bar stock to be marketed to smiths all over the place, there will also be smiths close to the mines producing commodity tools and weapons.
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See the table in Populating a game world.
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doc/modelling_trading_cost_and_risk.md
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# Modelling trading cost and risk
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In a dynamic pre-firearms world with many small states and contested regions, trade is not going to be straightforward. Not only will different routes have different physical characteristics - more or less mountainous, more or fewer unbridged river crossings - they will also have different political characteristics: more of less taxed, more or less effectively policed.
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Raids by outlaws are expected to be part of the game economy. News of raids are the sort of things which may propagate through the [[gossip]] system. So are changes in taxation regime. Obviously, knowledge items can affect merchants' trading strategy; in existing prototype code, individual merchants already each keep their own cache of known historical prices, and exchange historical price data with one another; and use this price data to select trades to make.
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So: to what extent is it worth modelling the spread of knowledge of trade cost and risk?
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Obviously the more we model, the more compute power modelling consumes. If the core objective is a Role Playing Games as currently understood, then there is no need to model very complex trade risk assessment behaviour.
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doc/sexual-dimorphism.md
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doc/sexual-dimorphism.md
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# Sexual dimorphism
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This essay is going to upset a lot of people, so let's start with a statement of what it is about: it is an attempt to describe the systematically different behaviours of men and women, in sufficient detail that this can be represented by agents in a game world. It's trying to allow as broad as possible a range of cultures to be represented, so when I'm talking about what I consider to be behaviours of particular cultures, I'll say that.
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Of course, I'm writing this from the view point of an old white male. It's not possible to write about these things from a totally neutral viewpoint, and every one of us will have prejudices.
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OK? Let's start.
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When a man and a woman have sex, there's a non-zero chance that the woman will get pregnant. There's a zero chance that the male will get pregnant.
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A woman can typically give birth to of the order of twelve children in the course of her life, and each childbirth involves a non-zero risk of death. If modelling the sort of bronze-age-to-late-medieval cultures I'm generally considering, there are no available reliable methods of contraception, although their may be, for example, known spermicidal or abortifacient spells or potions. If it's abortifacient, that's pretty unpleasant for the woman, too.
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Children, especially when young, are very vulnerable and need protection. Children with good protection are much more likely to survive to adulthood. Raising children involves a fair amount of work.
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For all sorts of reasons, some of which are clearly cultural but others of which are fundamental, it's much easier for men to walk away from responsibility for their children than it is for women. For example, considering a pre-modern world, women would always know for certain which children were theirs, and men would not.
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For a woman, consequently, the best breeding strategy is to have sex only with men who will be 'good fathers', where there are three essential parameters to "good fathers":
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1. Desirable genetic traits;
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2. Preparedness to stick around and share the work;
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3. Ability to provide and protect.
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The essential trade-off in the traditional western marriage is that the man gets to have sex, and the woman gets to have protection for her progeny.
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Another significant point is that women's ability to bear children ceases at a much younger age than men's ability to father them.
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## Why have sex at all?
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If a character has 'having children' - the **Ancestor** aspiration, in my typology - as their key aim, then they will want to have sex. But to have children in this sense is to have acknowledged children, so while a male character may be motivated to have multiple female partners, he will never the less have some degree of long term committment to them, and will want both to feel confident that the children are his and to be recognised by their father.
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From the point of view of seeking to become an Ancestor, there is little benefit to the woman in having multiple partners, except in very harsh environments. It will be easier to give one partner confidence that all your children are his, and while a man can increase his number of potential progeny by having multiple wives, mistresses or other classes of long-term female sexual partners, a woman cannot.
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## Why have children?
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In modern Scotland, I have met a lot of women with a strong drive to have children for the sake of having children, where the best explanation they could give is that it's instinctual; it may be so. But beyond that, in many cultures children provide their (acknowledged) parents with care and security in their old age, may tend their graves and perform belief-related services after they die, and carry on their name and their stories into the future.
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Not everyone wants to have children; in thinking about the driving aspirations of game characters, I view having children one of six potential key aspirations.
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## Why else have sex?
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Sex, done right, is an extremely pleasant pastime. Sex can also be used to create and maintain bonds of committment, to demonstrate social status, to defuse tense situations, and transactionally in many ways, both formal and informal.
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For women, sex with other women carries with it no risk of pregnancy, so can be enjoyed or used for any of these purposes in very much the same way as it can by men; in other words, particularly for women, homosexual sex can be more lighthearted and carefree than heterosexual sex. To what extend our notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality are cultural I simply don't know. But because no children will result, a woman can afford to be more promiscuous with other women than she can with men.
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## How does this impact on
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