On Prices & Power
Most people interact with money as discrete volumes that are received & spent. You are paid so much silver per day; you spend it on discrete objects. This behavior makes sense if & only if you are not receiving a continual influx of income. The traditional model of PC economic activity in an OSR game is that they don’t have a regular source of income and instead rely primarily on excavated wealth from delves into dangerous adventure locations.
But Glass Empires is primarily a game about large-scale human organizations (Factions). It can be played as a traditional dungeon-crawler with a strong focus on discrete volumes (using the silver dollar $ as a denominator of value), but the expectation is that players, through their PCs, will be deriving much of their wealth & power from the process of managing a hierarchy of humans. And when your treasury is your friends & their willingness to contribute to your cause, it becomes difficult to put a finite number on your wealth.
For this reason, it is an expectation that at some point in the game, once you are ruling villages or leading armies, the notion of tracking discrete wealth will fade from significance. You will measure Faction relationships & immeasurable Debts as both more entertaining and more valuable than the precise silver dollar value of any given commodity.
Even still, it is important to have a means of tracking the value of goods & services for a number of reasons:
- The relative value of goods & services, while dependent upon the structure of the underlying economy (good luck buying plate armor from a caveman tribe), can be assessed in a given time & place as specific to that time & place.
- Having a grasp on the structure of the economy is important for low-Level characters who have heavy exposure to the risks & problems that 99% of the human population have historically suffered under — even though the primary focus of the game is the 1%.
- The activities of those 1% rulers is predicated upon the status of the rest of humanity. You cannot derive an idea of the inflows or outflows of a ruler of a region without knowing or estimating the productivity of the labor that ruler commands.
In 301 A.D., the Roman emperor Diocletian issued the Edict on Maximum Prices whose purpose was to fix the maximum price of all economically significant goods & services across the Roman Empire. The consequences — widespread inflation & bloodshed — eventually put a de facto end to the Edict’s influence.
Every RPG price list is in essence an attempt to fix prices. We assume an economic baseline that might not reflect the real pressures of an economy. Bread might be three times as expensive in a given city as the table says. Or half the cost. Does the city produce bread?
But given that Glass Empires is focused on a single island — Glass — and that this island has a relatively known economic structure, we can make assumptions that are good enough to support useful economic projections; questions such as, “How many suits of plate armor can I buy from my village smith?” We don’t need to know the exact number. In truth, there is no exact number; we aren’t simulating every atom of the world. But we can give a good-enough answer that prohibits the most destabilizing of all possible answers, and that is the purpose of a price list & availability formula.
Use this chapter to determine prices for large bulk purchases or for low-level play where characters manage only a couple hundred silver dollars each. Don’t use it to bicker over exact pricing for small purchases, especially when a character rules a Faction of such scale that obtaining small items is a trivial act. Nothing in this chapter should be taken as literal gospel, moreso than any other chapter. Nobody can write rules that can perfectly encapsulate human behavior. Absurdities will crop up. It is the GM’s job, as with every other chapter in this book, to comprehend the structure of their world well enough to know when these rules need to be overruled.