>Hey folks! I am preparing for the next adventure in my Heroquest game
>which will follow the heroes as they participate in the last Lunar
>caravan to Kralorela. Does anyone know of a good book regarding large
>scale trade caravans? I see a few books out there on the Silk Routes but
>they seem focused on the places rather than the caravans themselves.
That's because there's very (very) little known about the caravans themselves -- there just doesn't seem to be much in the way of surviving materials or evidence about them.
What might be useful is something from the early 20th century -- Owen Lattimore's books about Central Asia. It's been a really long time, but there's one of them that's basically "participant observation" on a camel trade caravan working in Xinjiang in the 1920s. Great stuff, I thought, and I'm pretty sure it's shaped all the caravans in my own RPG'ing. Obviously this is a smaller company, with a different political/economic setting, but without exaggeration I'd say quite a lot of it can be used to represent "medieval" style caravan travel in Central Asia too. However, I can't remember the title of it now! (For other accounts of the same area and time, check out travelogues and expedition accounts by Sven Hedin -- not as good, but possibly atmospheric.)
The Silk Road industry is a big one in modern Japanese media circles, and with a little digging you can probably find all kinds of NHK documentaries and made-for-TV movies; there was one fairly big-budget costume drama for theatrical release set on the Silk Road in the late Tang dynasty, gorgeous stuff; again I can't remember the name of it. It did get released in the States, at least fleetingly, however.
Sorry I can't help more! My brain's not at its best these days.
Kim
End of Glorantha Digest, Vol 11, Issue 285
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