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sundries & services


dgraz

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Seems like there are some pretty obvious things that should be on the table but aren't. I got a Haberdasher and a Seamstress (because every fated needs nice clothes)....and a Milliner (didn't even know what the hell that was.....yeah, I guess that's important).......but;

 

How much is a meal? (cheap side and high side)

 

How much is a room for the night? Or a long term rental? Or a blanket and a piece of floor in the common room?

 

How about a bath? Or a shave?

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For wages I've mostly tried to match what a person does with one of the listed services as a close approximation.

For meals I would look to the bulk costs of food, figure how much it would take to make a meal, then maybe add 0.01 minimum for labor fees.

A night's rest varies from place to place. I've kept things cheap and simple so far with costs of 0.06 being about the middle ground.

But my game has also involved a lot of little out-of-city locations so far, so I've varied prices greatly to reflect economies.

You could also just start using booze as currency...

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I'm still curious to see booze rules. We have the INtoxicated condition, we know that Alchemistry lets you make the stuff, we have a bunch of different drinks, but...

 

I need to see the path! Might wind up making my own (Oh Alchemistry, you continue to haunt me), but something semi-official would be nice!

 

Also ... it -does- rain in Malifaux, right? Or do people have to boil water constantly?

 

(Personally, I'm thinking water starts out fresh and potable around Angel Falls, slowly gets worse as it passes through settlements along the river, is drinkable-ish at Malifaux's entrance, quickly sours as it travels, and by teh time it hits the Little Kingdom, nobody should drink it (Yet they do, and fish in it, and people are VERY curious how they manage that!), and after them, it's -completely- ruined as it spills out of the city and starts flowing swamp-wards. Which might be one reason the Gremlins are so danged MAD.)

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I'm not sure the swamplands would be a living ecosystem if it only every got horrendously polluted water.  All those dead gators, silurids, birds, insects, pigs, gremlins,...

 

As for drinking, we have the Carousel skill for resisting getting drunk.  Smashed?  Kersnookered?

 

I figured out another water source besides booze:  tears of orphans.  Just apply the same distillation process to remove the salt.

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Oh, swamps are actually *fantastic* at filtering that kind of thing out. After a mile or three, the water'd be potable(ish) again, as much as swampwater ever gets, but there'd be this deadzone between the city of Malifaux and the gremlin zone, which'd just be -nasty-. Probably a few Gremlin bands which had to move out of their traditional home and smashed up against rival villages who didn't take too well to it, causing strife, skirmishes, and feudin' ... until the pollution went further and moved THEM out, too.

 

There's going to be a few crazed mutant critters in the mix as well, tough enough to survive but not be unscathed, lashing out at anything that comes near. Pretty much, imagine a huge angry croc, then give it a throbbing toothache that it doesn't know why it has. But if anything moves nearby, it *has* to be the cause, so you murder it and the pain dulls for a while thanks to adrenaline, but after a while, it comes back, so you have to mrder something else.

 

And thus the Bayou gets a rep as a dangerous place full of things that want to kill you, so nobody has any problem with dumping industrial runoff into the river.

 

Lather, rinse (sorta), and repeat.

 

On the plus side, the Aranists have to make a *killing* by renting out official Water Witches, who can use their dowsing rods to find fresh water out in the badlands.

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Right! Sorry. Alright, official Malifaux's set in 1901, with teh Breach somewhere in the UNited States, so, grabbing some US Census data, let's have a look.

 

Average hourly wages for selected jobs!

 

Manufacturing: $0.23

Mining: $.026

Construction: $0.28

Transportation: $0.24

Communication: $0.24

Trade: $0.25

Finance/Insurance/Real Estate: $0.50

Services: $0.17

Government: $0.28

 

So, that gives you a baseline of pay for peoplke, from which you can start to extrapolate. Buuut, there's more data. Food prices, for instance:

 

5lb bag of flour: $0.13

1lb round steak: $0.14

1lb pork chop: $0.13

1 lb bacon: $0.16

1 lb butter: $0.27

Dozen eggs: $0.22

half-gal of milk: $0.14

 

Median age was 22.9 years old: 23.3 for men, 22.4 for women. There were 104.4 men to every 100 women and the country was 87.9% white.

 

The average family size was 4.9 people, with 80% of adult men working and 20.6% of adult women. (The unemployment rate was 4%)

 

Teh average household made $750 a year, before taxes, with 95.9% of all households making money from working husbands, 8.5% from working wives, 22.2% from working children, and 23.3% from boarders or lodgers.

 

42.5% of all income wnet to food on average, with 23.3% for housing and  14% for clothing the majority spent.

 

19% of the population owned homes, while 89% were renters.

 

Nearly 10% of the country lived in New York State, with 46.6% of THOSE 7.3 million living in New York CIty itself. (3.4 million)

 

In New York, 98% of the city was white, 30.6% were under teh age of 15, 2.9% was over the age of 65.

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting notes: While only one in twelve adult women had a job (usually part-time, as a teacher, a music teacher, seamstress, etc, but some did factory work), almost one in four children (under the age of 15) had jobs, usualy in factories or in mine,s but also often in trades... it was common for a child to get a job at 8, learning a trade as an apprentice, living in the attic while spending ten years working to learn the trade. Since th efamily business would normally go to the master's own son, the apprentice, once he earned enough skill to be named a journeyman by the guild, pay off his debt to his master, and managed to save enough to buy his own tools, would be sent off to find himself a town where his skills would be needed. Trade unions -viciously- defended their territory, putting limits on how many, for example, haberdashers could be working in New York. If that number was filled, an apprentice's graduation could be held off for years, creating quite a bit of friction. The master's son had priority, even if the apprentice was better, and when teh master retired, his child would get the slot, not the apprentice. This, as you might guess, often caused resentment.

 

Gas, for those rare few who needed it, was $0.04 per gallon, by the by.

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Wow. Okay, that's pretty impressive.

But.....

How much is a meal? (cheap side and high side)
 
How much is a room for the night? Or a long term rental? Or a blanket and a piece of floor in the common room?
 
How about a bath? Or a shave?

If no one cares to do the math for my lazy butt (I hate math)...then I'll work it out.....I guess I could compare wages from today and how much those things cost today and back track it to the info you gave for the time period.  Thanks, I very much appreciate the effort thus far.

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As a rule of thumb, your inflationary rate is circa 50X, , so divide any price by 50 and you'll get close.

 

(Bad at math? Divide by 100 by moving the decimal two places, so 100.00 becomes 1.00), then double it (1.00 becomes 2.00) and you'll be there. ($100.00 today = $2.00 in 1901.)

 

It's not *exactly* there (something like 46.73), but close enough to count.

 

After that, fiddle a bit ... jack up the cost of rare stuff or thing sthat are contraband, drop the cost of locally-made stuff, call it a day. Figure the average person gets about $15 a week (50 weeks @ $15 = 750, so two weeks off for holidays-ish.) and you can start figuring out how big or small certain prices are. A gun's a week's pay, for instance, while a $100 bounty on somebody's head is a HUGE sum.

 

Heck, you can toss out bounties like "$.25 a Gremlin head" and NPCs will JUMP on it even while PCs go, "What, for a quarter? Are you kidding me?"

 

Modern perception's fun. :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

So a shave at a skilled barber here in UK is £15. Not the most expensive as I look for bargains. Assume $ are double £, that makes $30.

Using the maths above:

30÷100= 0.30 × 2 = $0.60

Decent meal for 1 is around £25

So $0.50

Average bed n breakfast is around £50 per night.

So $1 per night B&B

Recap

Shave = $0.60

Meal = $0.50

B&B = $1

So expect to pay $2.10 for basics.

Bath normally comes with the room at a B&B, either communal or en suite. But you can be extortionate and throw in an extra $0.10 for the privilege.

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  • 2 weeks later...

[Edit: Wyrd Chronicles 14 sets economy ticket cost to Malifaux at 20ss, so if we're going with the Guild Are Jerks school of economics then economy from Malifaux to earth is 35ss and Emissary class at around 315ss..]

I chucked up some train ticket pricing, which I think is a little on the cheap side, here:
http://wyrd-games.net/community/topic/108125-ticket-pricing-through-the-breach/

 

So, per day:
Emmissary Class = 315 SS = £105

Economy to Malifaux = 20 SS = £7

Economy to Earth = 35 SS = £15

I was working off 1897 as the year, for some reason, so you could prolly chuck an extra 5 SS onto each of the prices and nobody would blink.


 

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  • 3 weeks later...

As of Saturday my group found another missing item:  bread.  It does contain all of the materials you need to make bread though...  I think whoever made the sundries list must have been a theoretical mathematician who doesn't believe in providing formulas as long as the formulas used to derive them are present :P

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