Because I couldn't find good sources for how much various things weighed in the viking age, so, in order to remain somewhat credible (and retain my sanity), I decided to go with fictional ounces in order to handwave away any discrepancies between real life and the setting.
If you look at the better sites selling reproductions for reenactors and hobbyists, those generally tend to be based on finds in museums or experimental archaeological research, and are close enough for government work. It's not like there isn't a great degree of variance in practice anyway, there was no universal sizing for any of this stuff, so I think you can do what you want. Places like
reddit or
writing advice sites can also be good if you approach them with a grain of salt, you can also generally use medieval weights for comparable items, as the evidence base is a bit better for medieval stuff and human bodies stay consistent.
Or make a thread in SV's very own subforum for historical research aimed at helping writers!
I guess one thing we haven't discussed before is that everyone is superhuman, so I suppose in principle Nose cultivators could wear thicker, heavier protection than historical examples without much discomfort. Although it would probably get a bit silly to picture mentally if everyone started looking like the Michelin Man lol
If you got the dwarves 'hooked' to surface food, there wouldn't be enough food in the entire Valley to sustain the dwarves' greed. A war would inevitably start over it, because the dwarves would assume that you were keeping it from them in order to wring as much money and valuables as possible, as that is what they would do.
As fearsome hill says, there's not exactly a lot of food available to purchase in the first place, at least not enough to satisfy the dwarves if you're trading in bulk. Enough to keep someone from starving, not enough for meaningful trading.
Thanks for the answer, that's cool; I keep forgetting that Asvir is quite a small community and not a larger market down, and farming here is mostly for subsistence given every farmer spends half their time training to be a sword wizard. Although, and I'm not pulling on this thread for the Quest or in terms of something I'd want for Halla, but if we're talking about it from a worldbuilding perspective...
What's the reason why the Asvir smith or someone like him with contracts with the Dwarves do not start like, importing food from further away and also setting up large estates worked by thralls to grow bulk foodstuffs for export underground? It seems like pretty quickly you'd become richer than god; based on the margins we've seen it would be even more lucrative than trading in spices or slavery. It's not as if land around here is particularly scarce (maybe that's less true elsewhere), and generally in an early medieval milieu like this there's a lot of marginal land which can be brought under the plough. You could in principle import from as far away as the Mediterranean and still make a profit.
Obviously we probably don't want proto-capitalism and plantations in our Norse Xianxia LMAO. But it might be worth thinking about this on a setting level and what countervailing economic and social pressures exist to stop this from happening. Or maybe this does happen occasionally and then it causes the Norse equivalent of the Opium Wars, up to you based on what you find more compelling.
So single big purchases from the dwarves would be fine as long as they aren't too frequent, but there's probably not all that much food for sale for us to buy and use in this way? Does that sound right? @Imperial Fister
It might be useful to know roughly what quantity of food we can buy without violating social custom and being seen as taking too much and not leaving enough for any families who've had a hard winter. If our local economy is at least partly a gift/favour economy from what you're saying, that kinda thing is probably important, especially since our farm is producing a surplus right now.
