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NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)

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Awesome update @Imperial Fister!

Also, following on from this discussion, can I get your take on us buying a lot of Food up in Asvir (or paying people money to deliver Food to us next turn), and then selling this to the Dwarves next Turn at a bulk rate so we'd have enough Forged Iron to make armour for Stigr, Tryggr, and Trausti?

Based on the numbers it seems pretty doable, but I'm aware this might be a case where the system ended up being a bit more prone to arbitrage than intended. Right now based on the figures we have and Econ 101, it seems like the primary constraint on forged iron supply must be who has a connect with the Dwarves, and the Asvir smith must make a hilarious profit margin on his forged iron. But if that's not the intent on your end, then I don't want to assume.

On the one hand I would like to make armour for our friends and sworn warriors. On the other hand, I don't want arbitrage shenanigans to become an issue, although I guess the easiest way to avoid that is just for us to decide not to.
 
Skippy said:
Also, following on from this discussion, can I get your take on us buying a lot of Food up in Asvir (or paying people money to deliver Food to us next turn), and then selling this to the Dwarves next Turn at a bulk rate so we'd have enough Forged Iron to make armour for Stigr, Tryggr, and Trausti?
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For the record, my own impression has been that we could technically do this but it would have severe economic repercussions if we do it with too large an amount or too often. Like, we'd be flooding the dwarven market with surface food and mess up a lot of price points, maybe cause another war. Like, we can do this, but we shouldn't do it all at once, y'know?

I'd personally say that a cap on how much Forged Iron it's 'safe' to buy per year is probably a reasonable way to reflect this without going into too many details. Assuming we can't just buy as much as we'd like, of course.

Going back to the previous discussion (I'd missed this bit):

Skippy said:
Like, 1250 ounces of iron is thirty five kilos, which is a lot for a pre-industrial economy, but keep in mind one bloomery furnace in Iceland apparently made 1000 tonnes over two centuries, or roughly 135 kilos per year. (Cultivators are also definitely wealthier than historical Icelanders and can devote more agricultural surplus to other things.) Gabriel's armour probably weighs about twenty kilos by itself. Like, obviously if Fister does not want this to happen, he can tell us, and we should ask him, but I'm not sure we need to invent reasons why it can't work in order to fit a preconceived idea that it can't?
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Two things:

1. We're using xianxia ounces which don't equate well to real ones. A set of mail is, like 50-60 lbs, so that's how much 250 xianxia oz. is, so 500 oz. is like 100-120 lbs. of 'iron' (remember, Forged Iron is what we would call steel). So that's worth keeping in mind.
2. I'm not worried about the economic issues of us getting metal, but about the dwarves getting food. Which is...potentially problematic.
 
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OneArmedYeti said:
On one hand, This.
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We likely should, yeah.

OneArmedYeti said:
To add to it, if we want him to be an heirloom don't we need to pass him on while we're still alive so that he doesn't get Bad Luck from "Failing" us and letting us die?
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Depends on how we die. Nobody thinks a weapon is unlucky if its owner dies in bed of old age or from an aneurysm. If we die to a cultivation misstep it'd likewise be fine.

I also get the impression that weapons from fallen comrades are okay-ish. It's armor that definitionally failed if its owner is dead, and weapons from fallen enemies are bad as much because they are from enemies as anything.
 
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To be fair with the fallen comrades one, most spirits might not have the brainpower to differentiate between the comrades and enemies. Sagaseeker will however.
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
For the record, my own impression has been that we could technically do this but it would have severe economic repercussions if we do it with too large an amount or too often. Like, we'd be flooding the dwarven market with surface food and mess up a lot of price points, maybe cause a war.

Like, we can do this, but we shouldn't do it all at once, y'know?
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That's possible, but it feels difficult to square that with what we've observed, where selling 40 Food and receiving 350oz or Forged Iron all at once didn't produce these kind of distortions. The fact that arbitrage is possible here at all implies the dwarven and Norse metal economies aren't that closely coupled to begin with and the main constraint is probably the number of humans who know dwarves and can set prices. Obviously this could be wrong as none of this is the intended outcome, in which case fair enough.

So yeah, I hear what you're saying, which is why I wanted to check.

DeadmanwalkingXI said:
1. We're using xianxia ounces which don't equate well to real ones. A set of mail is, like 50-60 lbs, so that's how much 250 xianxia oz. is, so 500 oz. is like 100-120 lbs. of 'iron' (remember, Forged Iron is what we would call steel). So that's worth keeping in mind.
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I recall reading something about the ounces used in this quest being fictional ounces (I'm not sure why, but fair enough), but I think your conversion factor is wrong here. I'm not sure where you're getting 50-60lbs for a mail shirt? That's way too high even for full-body coverage.

Two hundred and fifty regular ounces equates to about seven kilos, which is roughly the weight of a short mail shirt. So to make it a full-sleved mail shirt at maybe 10kg, this would imply that our ounces are roughly one and a half real world ounces.
 
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It is worth noting that nobody really likes negotiating with dwarves. I mean, drinking poison before any negotiation? That's gotta suck.

Also note that food for the dwarves is more like opium, they'll never stop demanding it.
 
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Skippy said:
That's possible, but it feels difficult to square that with what we've observed, where selling 40 Food and receiving 350oz or Forged Iron all at once didn't produce these kind of distortions. The fact that arbitrage is possible here at all implies the dwarven and Norse metal economies aren't that closely coupled to begin with and the main constraint is probably the number of humans who know dwarves and can set prices. Obviously this could be wrong as none of this is the intended outcome, in which case fair enough.
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I personally just chalked that up to that not being enough that it would trigger problems. Three or four times that much all at once being more problematic does seem to track, at least to me.

Skippy said:
So yeah, I hear what you're saying, which is why I wanted to check.
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Yeah, asking for an official answer is totally fair. I'd certainly like one as well.

Skippy said:
I recall reading something about the ounces used in this quest being fictional ounces (I'm not sure why, but fair enough), but I think your conversion factor is wrong here. I'm not sure where you're getting 50-60lbs for a mail shirt? That's way too high even for full-body coverage.

Two hundred and fifty regular ounces equates to about seven kilos, which is roughly the weight of a short mail shirt. So to make it a full-sleved mail shirt at maybe 10kg, this would imply that our ounces are roughly one and a half real world ounces.
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A mail shirt alone is 'short mail' which is listed at 200 oz. with the 250 oz version being a full hauberk. Still, maybe you're right it should be more like 25-30 lbs. That still makes 500 xianxia oz. 50-60 lbs. and about 10 oz to the lb. as you say.
 
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fearsome hill said:
hey
@DeadmanwalkingXI
how much food does the farm produce and consume?
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We produce 26 per turn. We consume, in the sense of eating, 14 per turn in Summer, 19 in Winter (due to needing to feed the animals during Winter). We also have 3 committed to our ongoing trade deal, which we need to stick with. So, in total, we gain 9 every turn during Summer and 4 every turn during Winter. Or 39 total in a year (27 for Summer, 12 for Winter).

And if we wanted to stock up for a year long siege, we'd need 99 Food in storage for that, 117 if we wanted to maintain our trade deal (which we do). That's not realistic, but 66 for a solid 6 months of stored food is pretty doable.
 
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thank you. i wonder how much food can be bought from the market on any given day before it disrupts the price of food greatly.
 
I guess it depends on how an average dwarf can eat and how well their storage is for materials. Hmm, do we want to see if they can provide us their stylus stuff?
 
fearsome hill said:
thank you. i wonder how much food can be bought from the market on any given day before it disrupts the price of food greatly.
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I mean, a single cow is at least 10 Food based on previous system implementations (they were 12 in the first iteration), and goats more like 4 Food, and that's in at least the ballpark of right, so it'd need to be a whole lot to actually effect food prices materially. Cows are gonna be one of the more expensive foodstuffs, mind you, but goats not so much.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
2. I'm not worried about the economic issues of us getting metal, but about the dwarves getting food. Which is...potentially problematic
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Shard said:
It is worth noting that nobody really likes negotiating with dwarves. I mean, drinking poison before any negotiation? That's gotta suck.

Also note that food for the dwarves is more like opium, they'll never stop demanding it.
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If the concern is that selling the Dwarves a single big bulk order of food would get them hooked and cause disruption when we didn't repeat it, it's easy to envision paying an Asvir trader to send us a wagon train of food per turn, and simply upping our ongoing trade, funding the food by selling a fraction of the iron.

But this is just inching us closer to exploiting the arbitrage to print silver, whereas a bulk deal means we just get enough for mail shirts and promise to never think about this again. So it felt preferable on those grounds.

But this is why I wanted to check, and maybe the whole thing is better left alone.
 
wouldnt the buying of food from asvir cause problems for the less wealthy people living there? like if we bought 10 food per turn. thats a whole familys worth of food not going towards feeding people already living in asvir. and the norse practice subsistence farming so its not like theres a whole lot of extra that could absorb the impact from our purchase.

how big was asvir btw. i remember it having less than a thousand inhabitants but im not sure. the amount of extra food that could be bought from there without affecting the local economy greatly changes drastically depending on size.
 
[X] Go shopping!
-[X] Start with looking for things to decorate Abjorn's armor with

KreenWarrior said:
Hmm, the whole thing about stasis makes me come back to the idea of a sun in the soulscape. Though apparently it's night that's the issue, not day. 🤔 Regardless, it seems Halla is eyeing the stasis as something unnatural that might need to be fixed to fully realize the soulscape. And sunlight is what powers a real-world ecosystem - it creates wind, the water-cycle and so on. Maybe both a sun spirit and moon spirit, to give day/night cycles?
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That feels like the Core Formation/Golden Core equivalent
 
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Skippy said:
(I'm not sure why, but fair enough)
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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.
Skippy said:
Also, following on from this discussion, can I get your take on us buying a lot of Food up in Asvir (or paying people money to deliver Food to us next turn), and then selling this to the Dwarves next Turn at a bulk rate so we'd have enough Forged Iron to make armour for Stigr, Tryggr, and Trausti?
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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.
fearsome hill said:
how big was asvir btw. i remember it having less than a thousand inhabitants but im not sure. the amount of extra food that could be bought from there without affecting the local economy greatly changes drastically depending on size.
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Asvir itself has around 120-ish inhabitants, with the surrounding homesteads bringing that number to roughly 300–450 people
 
fearsome hill said:
wouldnt the buying of food from asvir cause problems for the less wealthy people living there? like if we bought 10 food per turn. thats a whole familys worth of food not going towards feeding people already living in asvir. and the norse practice subsistence farming so its not like theres a whole lot of extra that could absorb the impact from our purchase.
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Nobody is selling food they need to eat to survive, since you can't eat gold. The Norse are subsistence farmers but they're independent ones, so there's nobody extorting their crops out of them and then selling them on. There are taxes, but they're not all that bad. Any food being sold is being sold by people like us who have some excess food.

Imperial Fister said:
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.
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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
 
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It might be worthwhile to make a second brewery pocket and make the mix we talked about a while ago with the firebird, Earth-blood, and liquid sunlight. Just if it grows stronger with age we want to get started on the good stuff early.

Also how weird can we go with ingredients for the brewery pockets? Could we take bone marrow from a Draugr and use that as an ingredient? Crack an iron egg and use its yolk which doesn't exist? Borrow one of the Seeress's eyes for a couple of months?
 
Grytorm said:
It might be worthwhile to make a second brewery pocket and make the mix we talked about a while ago with the firebird, Earth-blood, and liquid sunlight. Just if it grows stronger with age we want to get started on the good stuff early.
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I don't think it's worth the Odr per turn a second brewery pocket might cost us. Especially since we want to know more before we try and use the Earthblood, I think. I'd definitely like to see what the fireberries alone brew up before experimenting too much.

Grytorm said:
Also how weird can we go with ingredients for the brewery pockets? Could we take bone marrow from a Draugr and use that as an ingredient? Crack an iron egg and use its yolk which doesn't exist? Borrow one of the Seeress's eyes for a couple of months?
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Cannibalism is generally nid, so several of these ideas seem like a bad call (particularly the draugr one).
 
Oh agreed that those were very inadvisable ingredients. I just find the idea of mixing inadvisable ingredients in the brewery pocket to be amusing. Maybe we can find magic wasp nest and use that as an ingredient.

Also the main reason I thought a second brewery pocket might be useful is because depending on the exact mechanics figuring out how brewing works might take quite a while. My thought is that with a second brewery we could either start a second test batch or take the time to properly age something really strong.
 
By the way, IF, will, talking with Audrikr not 'count' as one of the Asvir timeslots? Since there's obviously a lot we (or at least, me) want to do in our time at Asvir.

Shame this means there's no time to talk with Folkmarr. Sorry, Jarl-friend, your relevancy to the story diminishes with every plot point that comes up that doesn't involve you.
 
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