Fantasy books

[farik]

So how many of you include books in your fantasy campaigns and if you do how much are they worth?

 

I've decided the prices of paper, parchment, and vellum in the FH book must be a typo and I'm treating the listed price as being the cost of 1 kg of paper rather than the cost of 1 sheet. At a rate of 1 sp per double page (using a nonmovable type press or 2 SP per page if hand written) and a cost of 10 SP for binding. Books are still worth 100's of SP each (I'm completely ignoring the prices listed for reference libraries since I can't seem to resolve them at all). While as gamemaster this means I will use books as a very compact form of treasure only really appreciated by the educated it would also mean traditional fantasy concepts of wizards learning spells from books could become very expensive (even more so if magical texts are considered more valuable than other reference or literary texts)

 

Thoughts?

[Vanguard00]

Re: Fantasy books

 

Originally posted by farik

So how many of you include books in your fantasy campaigns and if you do how much are they worth?

 

Someone on the boards once posted something about a library, but I can't find the reference (Killer Shrike, perhaps?).

 

In any case, I use books all the time. Books are a mark of wealth and/or nobility in my game world. Historical tomes, military accounts, medicinal treatises...they all have a place. There is a Bible equivelant that many people try and get copies of, and they come in all shapes and sizes.

 

The average cost of a book is approximately three times what it would cost in materials, and that's for something fairly basic. For example, if a piece of parchment cost 1sp in your world, and one particular libram on King Azaran's lineage (a whopping 52 pages!) used parchment pages, sharkskin-over-wood covers and silverwire binding, it would likely cost a minimum of 500 sp. Since I use the silver standard and 500 sp is more than most commoners will ever see in a lifetime. However, the same book using vellum pages, plain wood covers and catgut binding might only cost 100 sp.

 

Books in my campaign provide status, clues, plot points, reference points, and plain ol' fashioned flavor for the characters. A man with a library of over 20 books is wealthy indeed, while the commoner family with a single copy of "The Light And The Way" might view that book as their single most prized possession, passed down from generation to generation until it falls apart. Thieves steal books and sell the pages to scribes and sages for hard currency.

 

Well, you get the idea.

[Bartman]

Nice flavor Vanguard.

 

If paper is at all expensive it may be common to bleach and reuse the parchment and vellum. This historically wasn't at all uncommon. Likewise even a dozen books were a notable library prior to presses. The occasional monastary or university may have a few hundred books. But such a hoard might take ceturies or a king's ransom to create.

[Solomon]

Also consider that parchement production was a fairly "high-tech" activity during the middle ages. To start with, you could usually only get a single sheet from a sheep.

 

Turning sheep skin to parchment was time-consuming and required a specific set of skills, so I don't think the price listed in FH is a typo.

 

Of course, acquiring massive quantities of parchment would entail you to a large discount - this is basic economy and it did work in the middle ages too.

 

"Book" also might as well refer to what we would call today an "unbound scroll". Even a scroll, however, usually needs protection of sorts, like a scroll tube. Actually, I think the weight listed for a "reference library" would be in no small part made up by covers (no trade paperbacks! ) and tubes.

 

Most bound books are custom made. Mass production should not kick in until well after workable presses are available.

[L. Marcus]

Originally posted by Bartman

If paper is at all expensive it may be common to bleach and reuse the parchment and vellum. This historically wasn't at all uncommon.

 

Too true. Saw a documentary a while back about a handwritten mathematical treatise by Pythagoras (the greek guy with the orthagonal triangles and stuff . . . ?), a third- or even a secondhand copy, that survived antiquity only to be bleached and reworked into a prayerbook by orthodox monks in the Dark Ages. The underlying writing was discovered in the twenties, and modern imaging and computing techniques has given us unprecedented insights in the thought processes of one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world . . .

 

Is it just me, or did that look like it came from Discovery channel . . . ?

[Markdoc]

The costs originally posted don't seem too out of line. Books were expensive, and only rich people would have large libraries.

 

However, rich people could have very large libraries indeed. In 10-11th century Cordoba the university and some 70 other libraries contained hundreds of thousands of volumes. Al-Hakim II's library alone contained some 400,000 books, making it probably the largest library in Europe (by comparison, the celebrated university libraries in Paris probably contained less than 50,000 volumes at the time).

 

So as general rule of thumb, a landed knight or guildmember might only own 3 or 4 manuscripts, unless he was a bookworm, with more than a few dozen being exceptional. A wealthy noble or master of a trading house might own a few hundred books to a thousand or more (the Duc de Berry, for example owned a famous library with several thousand books), while a masterful ruler might have anywhere from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand volumes.

 

That makes books valuable treasure, a source of plot hooks and information. Famous libraries have featured in my game as advenure locations, whether the players travel to one to gain information or try and enter to steal a valuable manuscript.

 

cheers, Mark

[farik]

I think we all agree books were expensive and a worthy treasure. What I'm really asking though is:

 

Has the expensive nature of books ever had a negative effect on your Fantasy Campaign?

 

I mean have you ever had a player get upset when you tell them the blank book they want to write spells in will cost them 1000 SP (200 blank pages at 5 SP per page) before the expense of binding the book?

[Gary Ciaramella]

Here is a link you guys might want to check out... it gives modern prices for various types of vellum.

 

Bookmakers Vellum Link

[Vondy]

Originally posted by farik

I think we all agree books were expensive and a worthy treasure. What I'm really asking though is:

 

Has the expensive nature of books ever had a negative effect on your Fantasy Campaign?

 

I mean have you ever had a player get upset when you tell them the blank book they want to write spells in will cost them 1000 SP (200 blank pages at 5 SP per page) before the expense of binding the book?

 

My players never freaked when I did this (I ran a pretty accurate sumerian low fantasy game once). They thought the realism added to the game.

 

The GM and the players need to understand going in whether this is 20th Century Western Amalgam with midieval arms and armor, or whether its fairly realistic dark ages simulation (plus monsters and magic of some sort).

 

Different groups enjoy different things

[Killer Shrike]

I posted a long list of sample book names here: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8070&highlight=Book

 

but i didnt provide prices.

[Markdoc]

Nope, my players have never freaked when confronted with book prices. They understand that books are uncommon and valuable, just as (say) manticore quills are.

 

Sure books are cheap today, but that's a whole 'nother thing.

 

I've never had them complain that cars are unavailable either, even though they are readily avaialable today (at least to us).

 

cheers, Mark