Re: Benefits to Agriculture of Gloranthan Rituals & Blessing

From: David Dunham <david_at_a-sharp.com>
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2013 09:21:12 -0400

On 7 Jun 2013, at 21:25, bryan_thx wrote:

> --- "Sean Foster" wrote:

>> 
>> Has anybody ever looked at the this?

>
> Well, they certainly put thought into things a bit in King of Dragon Pass. How much ceremonies you devote to crops in sacred time, and how many blessings you have that help crops (not to mention heroquests) make a big difference in how much crops your clan harvests. I've never sat there and tried to see what the relative min and max were, but I'm guessing more like 40%? (barring heroquests)

When we were doing King of Dragon Pass, Greg Stafford made sure I had access to some distilled research on medieval economics.

The rule of thumb for Glorantha (at least in the northern continent of Genertela) is that everything nets out to the same as it does on Earth. For any Ernaldan crop ritual, there are trollkin to eat an entire field. Counteracting Uraldan cow fertility magic are ice demons. Etc. etc. I think you'll find that anything in print is consistent with what you'd get on Earth, and I can't imagine Guide to Glorantha is going to change that.

It turns out that while you probably want to use actual agrarian economics to portray your world, you do not want to use it in your game because it's not fun. For example, one in seven harvests were bad. But we've all rolled dice to know that you could easily roll that 3 times in a row. So while KoDP is based on realistic values, it may sometimes ignore them in the interests of a better story (especially in version 2.0).

David Dunham
Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html