Comment on “Worldbuilding 5a: Location, Location, Location”

My new players (2 sessions so far in the campaign, my first in years) are effing marvelous. They have exactly the right entrepreneurial spirit to become fantastically good at the game and they are down with gritty rules. (2 of the 3 have never gamed before, and another girl wants in who has never played either.)

They are already chattering about opening a bakery, or starting a farm, or building a "home base." So I am pleased to see you return to this topic on your blog! I'm now carefully rereading your series of posts on Higher Path laying out the bread/hammer/coin system as of 2019 and intend to apply it to, at least, the 2-mile hex mapped-out island on which I started the players.

Also revising my economy system, the program for which is very VERY long in the tooth after ~four more years of building my coding skills. Changing up the program to be smaller and more performant.

As for the prices the program returns, the core mechanics (stolen from you) by which distance and rarity increase prices are as sound as ever; I just need a wider base of references on which to build more and more recipes (= trade goods), and I need to add enough areas from the game continent I'm now running (inspired by your Campaign Forge series) so the prices stabilize to something reasonable for where the players are.

I've gone through and added all the world references and production totals from some tables you made a few years back -- "top 99 references" and "world production totals." Now it is time to add the references produced by this and that place.

Taking X, the total references for, say, timber; assigning a total of Y timber references to the appropriate towns I've already mapped; and then assigning (X minus Y) references to a far-away region representing all the places I haven't mapped in more detail means that the price numbers based on the system will at least approximate their ultimate value when I've expanded the map.