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Home Economics in RuneQuest

Posted on January 15, 2025

In the rules, an ordinary free person needs about 80 L to maintain their status. This assumes a free household (person, one or two adult family members, a few children).80 L a year or 2 L a week (5 seasons of 8 weeks, with Sacred Time being a jubilee)

Rent: A ordinary free person can afford about 1 L week a rent, which means that the average free person needs to share a tenement room with another household (which seems right to me). A tenement is 15 to 30 L a season, so most tenements have 2 to 4 households sharing a room.

Everything else: It means they have 10 C a week for food, sacrifices, and everything else.

  • Food: Flatbread, sausages, and eggs for a big breakfast is 1C, and a bowl of Barley Beer is 1/2 C, so that just works. Most people get their meat and drink at holy day rituals.
  • Sacrifices: Most people don’t have money for much. It costs about 3 clacks for a worship ceremony to maintain lay membership in Orlanth. An initiate needs to come up with about 2 L a season for sacrifices.

The average free household in New Pavis – like most free people in the ancient world – struggles to make sure they have enough food, can offer sacrifices. Most people look to their temple or their patron to make up the difference. Serving someone like Argrath, the Garhounds, the Ingilli, or the Indagos family can mean extra food, and the difference between a full belly and going hungry. In exchange, these patrons expect loyalty.

Note that a tenement aka multifamily dwelling appears in many forms. I find it easier than saying insula or rentable pueblo, or other rental apartment in which several households share a common eating area, etc.

Does having a full-time homemaker stretch a single urban income to support multiple consumers or are the kids a labor center as well as a cost center, thus trading their time for a seat at that breakfast table? Until the 20th century “industrial revolution” in home appliances, having the wife be a fulltime homemaker was the only way for middle and upper class families to have a decent home life, and children of the poor became labor centers at age 4 and rarely went to school except in particularly prosperous countries like the USA or late 19th century England, where wage levels of white non immigrants were often high enough for a single income father to pay the bills. In families where the mother had to work for survival, the homes were dirty unhealthy hovels.

On Glorantha, magic spells substitute for vacuum cleaners and fridges nicely. There are plenty of humble cults adventurers would have no interest in that have spirit magics to take care of house cleaning, dishwashing, clotheswashing etc.

So the working assumption for Game Mechanics is that in a place like New Pavis a “household monad” has a “working adult”, one or two other adults (a parent, a spouse, a sibling, whatever), plus some kids. So in play, that means a player character, a couple of family members, and maybe some kids. And the player character is responsible for bringing enough money in for things to work.

And why? Because it gives a reason for adventuring! Because the player character would rather not share a dirt floor with several other households! They’d much rather have a room at Gimpy’s or some other inn, have people prepare food for them, get drunk off something better than a bowl of barley beer, and live the adventurer life! But that means, take that contract from the greybeard, go into the Rubble, and take some loot!

Now in some cities, all the citizens get a food allotment, which makes this all much easier. That 10C a week goes a lot further if you get your daily bread from the city, plus some meat! Yeah – uncle Benny and Pretty Petunia aren’t going starve even if you run away from the first ogres you encounter!

Now the purpose of having an economic system in a game like RQ is NOT to play “Sim Gloratha” – you are welcome to do that, but these models aren’t going to cut it for that. Rather, they are to give some hooks for the players for roleplaying, to give them motivation for obtaining loot, and to give them something to do with said loot. In short, it exists to support play.

You are welcome to ignore it entirely, although I think it adds to the roleplaying experience. I think worrying about where the next meal comes from is often a key part of the sword and sorcery genre and helps explain why my character adventures – and it explains why those guys with clubs in the Big Rubble tried to ambush me and my companions as we emerged from the ruins bloodied and dazed.

So letting the players know that unless they come up with something more, they live in a hovel, drinking barley beer out of a bowl and dependent on the free grain the city gives out. They share their hovel with several other families, maybe some chickens, and a pig. So sell your sword to Argrath, and eat meat every day and drink wine every night! Get lucky in the Big Rubble and maybe you can have your own room in Gimpy’s with wine and women and hazia parties at the Uleria temple! At least until the silver runs out!

Jeff Richard

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Economics, New Pavis (small city), RQG

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