A not-so brief hiatus and a few changes.

Well, the blog will continue, but I need to change its form.

The point of the blog, for me, was to develop some skills with this sort of software, and I can see that one question a day, at this length, is cutting into my Ars Magica writing time. I've also chosen to do it at the worst time of the year, and the subject I've picked is already thoroughly covered by the Atlas Forums. So, I learned a lot, but the idea crashed, for me, after about a week.

I'd like to keep the blog going, but wind it back to one question a week. I'll open it up so that it can be any Ars topic, and will keep the question that have been sent to me in the list.

The new version will kick off this weekend.

Thanks, for the few people who read, or commented.

A brief hiatus

It has been repeatedly pointed out to me that my running the Bills of Lading project from the moment of release, I've excluded people outside the United States. Also, it's been pointed out to me that Christmas / New Year is the very worst time to attempt to get community participation in blogs. Bowing to the inevitable, there will be the following chnages to the project:

* a hiatus in Bills of Lading until 1 January 2007, Australian time.
* Questions regarding "Ancient Magic" will be accepted after 9 January 2007.

The Serene Republic

Venice is one of the great cities of Europe. It has a name to conjure with, and, unlike Paris, which has been transformed by modernity, or Constantinople, which fell to the sword, it still looks much as we, the players who like our cities panoramic, hope that it might. It is still a city of canals and gondolas, bridges and carnivals, even if, in the game period, it was never quite what we hope and expect it was. Venice is one of those bits of Mythic Europe you can still get postcards of.

Like virtually all of this blog's readers, I have never been there, and am faintly ashamed of my worry that the real Venice, and the real Cairo, and the real Athens, will not stand comparison to the cities I've imagined. Then, of course, I realise that there's no way to really imagine the textures of a place. How it smells, how the light looks over a day. This, of course, makes writing about Venice, or anywhere, a bit presumptuous. Calvino has a character who knows less about every city that he describes, and perhaps this is true of those of us who write from a distance. I keep hoping Ars will take off in Europe and that our colleagues there will guide us through their cities and mythologies, because all I could offer is convicts and bushrangers.

The Serene Republic is one of those sites where you hope there will one day be a setting book. Next time, how about we not do yet another Tribunal? Well, maybe Greece, and then, let's just settle down and do Venice instead. Home to chapter houses from a dozen of the most powerful covenants in the world. A global power just grasping the possibility of its empire. This is a setting that's laden with stories: the sorts of easy obvious stories that don't require player to really know much history.

Venice is too large, too full of stories to be dealt with in a single blog entry, but I'd advocate it as an excellent place to set stories based on the new rules in "City and Guild". It has a developed financial system, is ruled by a merchant class, and wages wart to support its trade interests. It is a colonial power, and is willing to give financial aid to allies in distant places in exchange for trade concessions. As such, its presence can loom large in any part of Mythic Europe, as either an aide or rival for magi.

Forestalling

RARodger asked a question over on the Atlas Forum that ended much like this:

So even in off years (or in years where we're hiding from cruisaders) we have a truly unnatural amount of produce safely stored. Our wizards are fairly pious. Is this close enough to 'forebarance' or some other slight that (had we known better) our characters may have been uncomfortable with it?

Forestalling is holding material until the price rises: that is, it is commodity speculation. It's considered sinful in general in some period texts of theology, but in daily life it is considered sinful when it causes harm. For example, if it lets you gouge your neighbours, or damage their businesses by witholding raw materials.

For your wine lake to not be forestalling, you need to follow a couple of basic steps:

1. The entire contents of the lake should be for sale. That is, if a king passed through with enough money, you should have no qualms at all about just selling the whole lot. That you can't find enough buyers to actually sell the lot is not your problem, theologically speaking.
2. Your price for sale should not gouge your neighbours. That is, you can forestall by saying "I will not sell my flour until the famine gets so bad that people will pay me the weight of bread in gold." Now, a complication here is that the just priuce for a Hermetic wine lake may be far lower than that for a mundane producer, because its a lot easier and chaper to create Hermetic wine lakes. That being noted, selling at a far cheaper rate, and driving conventional producers out of businss, is likely to break the Oath, and its a sin to break the law.
3. You are not required to produce as much as you can, and you are not required to sell it locally.

So, there may be a moral problem, in the sense that the return on your wine sold, is either far higher than your cost of production plus a just return, or breaks Hermetic law. That aside, though, provided you are willing to sell the lot, and you don't fix your prices artifically high, then this isn't forestalling.

The Trade Map

In response to a query over on the Ars list, I'd just like it to be clear that the map of trade routes is for land and river trade routes in the region dominated by the Order of Hermes. This means that it does not contain routes which cross seas. You'll notice, for example, that London is marked, but no route goes to it. So, similarly, virtually everything east of Constantinople trades through its ports, and so the trade map stops there.

There is a really simple method given for expanding the trade tables, and I'll help people who ask with the calculations, as my time allows. I'll edit them into this post so that we have a single place where all of the new points are accessible.

Daqin: China Views the West.

Medieval Europeans knew that China existed...well, they knew there was a place out there that silk came from, and they called it "Seres" or "Serica", both meaning "silk". There are records of several groups attempting to make contact between the two empires. It might be said fairly that the Chinese had better information about the Romans than the converse, although their information was still derived through intermediaries. In this post we see what the Chinese thought was in the far west. In a later post, we'll look from the perspective of the west, toward the east. It must be noted that being the state that lies between Constantinople and China is a valuable role, and that those who had it took pains to ensure that ambassadors going from one to the other were prevented for achieving success. A Chinese army reached the Caspian Sea in 97 AD, and one of its officers was sent as an ambassador to Daqin (Rome), but turned back at the shore of the Black Sea, due to stories that he had been told about the length of the journey. Excerpts from his report can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Ying The son of the general also wrote a book called "The Records of the Western Regions". The Chinese general who had marched to the Caspian set up a series of fortresses which remained in Chinese hands for some time. The armies of Trajan, in their westernmost march into Parthian, came within a day of these garrisons. There are also stories, which lack archaeological evidence that is broadly accepted, that Romans were taken prisoner by Parthians at the Battle of Caharre, and were shipped east as warrior-slaves to man the Chinese border. These men are said to have founded a city, called Lijen ("Alexandria"). Note that this is not the same as any of the the cities of the same name founded by Alexander. Alexander did create a city Alexandria Eschate "Alexandria the Furthest", in Ferghana. The descendants of Alexander's army are found all over northern India, in ancient times, and some even seem to have settled as far away as Sri Lanka. In Homer H Dubs's History of the Former Han Dynasty we find this story: Between 110 and 100 B.C., there arrived at the Chinese capital an embassy from the King of Parthia. Among the presents to the Chinese Emperor are stated to have been fine jugglers from Li-jien. The jugglers and dancers, male and female, from Alexandria in Egypt were famous and were exported to foreign countries. Since the King of Parthia obviously esteemed highly the Emperor of China, he naturally sent the best jugglers he could secure. When these persons were asked whence they came, they of course replied “from Alexandria,” which word the Chinese who disliked polysyllables and initial vowels and could not pronounce certain Greek sounds, shortened into “Li-jien.”. When they also learned that this place was different from Parthia, the Chinese naturally used its name for the country of these jugglers. No Chinese had been to the Roman empire, so they had no reason to distinguish a prominent place in it from the country itself. The Romans moreover had no name for their empire other than orbis terrarum, i.e., “the world,” so that these jugglers would have found it difficult to explain the name of the Roman empire! In such a fashion there probably arose the Chinese name Li-jien which, for them, denoted the Roman empire in general.” Dubs (1957). In 166, a group claiming to be ambassadors from Rome appears in the Chinese court. They came by sea, from the south, which is technically possible because at this time Rome had Egyptian and Red Sea ports which linked to the Indian trade network, which linked to the Chinese one. The goods they offered the Emperor seems southeast Asian, so there is some question as to their credentials. The Liangshu notes: “During the 5th year of the Huangwu period of the reign of Sun Quan [= CE 226] a merchant of Da Qin, whose name was Qin Lun came to Jiaozhi [Tongking]; the prefect [taishou] of Jiaozhi, Wu Miao, sent him to Sun Quan [the Wu emperor], who asked him for a report on his native country and its people. Qinlun prepared a statement and replied. At the time Zhuke [nephew to Zhuke Liang, alias Kun Ming] chastised Dan Yang [= Jiang Nan] and they had caught blackish coloured dwarfs. When Qin Lun saw them he said that in Da Qin these men were rarely seen. Sun Quan then sent male and female dwarfs, ten of each, in charge of an officer, Liu Xian of Huiji [a district in Zhejiang], to accompany Qin Lun. Liu Xian died on the road, whereupon Qin Lun returned direct to his native country.” This is sourced from the link in the next paragraph. The author notes that Qin Lun means "Leon of Rome". In the Third Century, there's a book in China about the products that can be found in western countries. A translation is here. Before researching this for the blog I had not heard of this source, and commend it to those interested in such things. http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html There are at least two embassies that claim to be from Rome that arrive in the Imperial court in the Third Century. Rome collapses in the 5th century, and Chinese power wanes after the seventh. This creates a power vacuum, and the Silk Road declines, which in turn cuts communication ties between each side. As the Mongol Empire expands, it stabilizes the Silk Road, which permits Chinese people to reach back out, toward Rome, to see what is there. They are remarkably well informed. For example, look at the Kandigo Map. It's from the 14th century, so its a far later stage of development, but it indicates that before European explorers reached China by sea, there was a great depth of knowledge of Europe in Korea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangnido

Maintanence schedules as rewards for espionage

I hope people will pardon, again, a shorter post this evening. My notes on the Great Chinese Gold Sponge are on my desk at work, following a moment of foolishness. Strictly speaking, the rules say I should average 500 words a night, and so far, I have had two posts, and they total over 3000 words, so I could just spout banalities for the next few days and still obey my rules…but let us move on.

Tonight I watched the new Bond film. I liked it a great deal. It has me thinking, now, what forms of espionage would be effective in the environment of medieval trade. We consider this in the book in some depth, in the sense that we allow you to purchase supporters who are agents that supply information concerning your rivals, but what, really, do they tell you? We provide a few story hooks. I note also that remittance shipments are meant to have you thinking about the advisability of buying a parrot, raising the black flag, and slitting throats.

That being said, what else can you know, about the business affairs of others, that is of value? Ships usually make port during the winter to repair. Let's look at maintenance schedules. These look boring, but really, if you spin them the right way, they are a great prize for a character.

Sabotage: A limited number of sites that can perform repairs. This means that if you have any sort of interest in sabotage, it is possible to try to get an agent into a dockyard many months before the target enters for refit.

Scalping workers: Knowing the maintenance schedule also means you know when the crew is being paid off. Many merchants assume they will be able to just buy their crew back when the weather improves. If you were sufficiently deep pocketed, and if your rival paid off several crews at once in different ports you could, if you knew in advance, soak up their skilled crews and force them to hire green crews.

Damage noted: To speed repairs, clients often tell dockyards what is likely to be necessary. This allows the dockyard to store up the material needed for the repair, before the ship arrives in dock. If you know the dockyard is stocking up on braces that are shaped to fit the ship's port bow, then you might assume that the ship was damaged in the port bow. This is useful for three reasons:

1. If you hear any rumours of naval engagements in which as ship was damaged in the port bow, you can identify the movements of your rivals.
2. If you have shipboard artillery, knowing the damaged parts of the enemy ship can allow you to do far greater damage.
3. Damaged ships do not sail as sweetly. This means you can predict that the ship will sail better or worse at various approaches to the wind. This makes chasing down the vessel far easier.

Specialised fit outs: If the ship is being refitted with stalls, you know the rival are getting into cattle. If the ship is refitted with a hatch on the side, you know they are carrying livestock, or horses for a military campaign. If they have rich trappings placed in one cabin, they have a special passenger.

Secret spaces: Many ships have small spaces hidden in them that allow crews to stash documents or small pieces of valuable cargo, like gemstones, if boarded. An agent of sufficient skill in shipbuilding, with advance notice of where the ship will winter, could establish cover and then find ways to inspect the ship, discovering these hiding spaces. It might even be possible to create a new space, of which only the player character's agents are aware, so that the rival ship acted as a mule for risky cargoes.

The Great Chinese Gold Sponge

One of the great puzzles of medieval economics is why it works at all. Essentially the European economy, if you are standing at the border of China and looking westward, is an elaborate method of shipping gold and silver to China in exchange for spices. Medieval European understood this. What they did not understand was that the price of Gold remained stable over hundreds of years. That, frankly, makes no sense at all.

Gold is not consumable: that is, you do not use it up so that you need more. Therefore, once you have it, you should want it less. Therefore, after the Europeans first send ten tons of gold eastward, the price should drop, so that you need more gold to pay for the same amount of spices. It does not. If anything gold gets slightly more expensive over time. The other possibility, that there is a limitless demand for gold, makes no sense either, because that just means the price should start very high and fall as Europe meets it. Steady prices and insatiable demand, coupled, make very little sense, and so, the European economy makes very little sense.
Now, there are ways of making this make sense, and we discuss them as plot hooks in the book. We don't however, say what was really happening: what the real source of the gold sponge is.

The gold sponge effect occurs for two reasons, in China and India, which are not modelled in Europe. Gold is used as a commodity, and gold is used as a method of storing value. In Europe, neither of these is really true.

Gold in Europe is used as a commodity: it is consumed to make things, and these things are used by people. In China, in period, however, the link between gold and the idea of a medium, for exchange is far weaker than in Europe. Gold is not money. Gold is the stuff you make jewelry and furniture out of. This means that gold is consumed, in the sense that it is turned into jewelry, rather than staying in circulation. That is, gold sinks into the ruling class of China and vanishes, because its function is to demonstrate capacity for conspicuous consumption. Unless there is a sudden sacking of a city, to liberate its gold, then there's no reason for this gold to circulate, and the gold does not make you want less gold, or the same gold at a lower price. The ability to get more gold, and give gold as presents, affirm the character's status far beyond gold's actual usefulness. Remember that what is being traded for the gold are spices and silks which are surplus to that which is required by the noble class off China. That is, there's no real opportunity cost to the ruling class of China to get all this gold, and no real opportunity lost to refuse to get it. It's precious, and reserved for certain nobles, but it's not "money" in the western sense.

In both China, and more especially India, having gold is one way of storing your money. Money that is stored goes out of physical circulation. Although it continues to circulate as credit, the gold itself just gets put away in storage. Its function is to wait for disaster, and provided disaster does not strike, it stays out of the economy, in some cases, for hundreds of years. That is, gold flees the economy as a form of insurance.

Now, C&G offers some more mythic reasons for the Asian Gold Sponge, but it is important to recognise that Hermetic magi both know how the European economy operates and, likewise, know that it shouldn't work. There's an incongruity in Asia that should make it crash. If Marco Polo goes to China in Mythic Europe, he will make matters worse.

Polo says there is gold -everywhere- in China. Given that gold is valuable because it is scarce, it makes even less sense. He also notes that gold is never used as a currency in China. When you turn up, the Khan makes you hand over all of your treasure, and gives you pieces of paper which merchants will treat as money because he says so, and he's willing to kill anyone who refuses his scrip. So, gold is everywhere and actually, there's only -one- customer. After Polo, the gold price makes even less sense than before.