The Black Elf Follies ...

My apologies for being quiet the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been plowed under with rehearsal and concert schedules for both the ensemble I’ve been in and my college chorus’ alumni reunion concert, celebrating the conductor’s 40th year at the helm.  (NUCS forever!)  But since you’re not here to hear about my singing ...

One of the hoary old standbys of gaming discussions is the player who bucks the campaign’s premise.  I've editorialized on what many call “special snowflakes,” a term often applied to the resulting PC, but more along the lines of my distaste for the term being used as a code slur for “Anything I don’t like.”

But that doesn’t touch the original syndrome.  Allow me to quote from a post in one of these debates, which illustrates one side of things.

Whether this is a problem and who’s [sic] problem it is all depends on who's being the asshole. If the players wants to interject something cool or unusual into his character because he has a fun idea and it's going to get him into the game more and the GM pulls some sort of "No, in my world elves aren't black!" or "there are no female dwarves!" bullshit? That's the GM being a dick. That stuff is just another way for GMs to take the often reasonable "this is mostly my world and ideas" and throttle the players with it. This is also where a lot of GM horror stories come from, especially if people push their own pet peeves, control issues, or even racism and sexism through this crap.

No, screw that noise.

In joining my game, you're joining a campaign.  It has a defined game system, a defined setting and a defined milieu.  Someone agreeing to play in my campaign agrees to all of these elements. It is not "mostly" my world; it is entirely my world. Characters are created within that setting, as natives to that setting, and exist within that setting. If you don't like that setting, if you don't want to engage with it, then what are you doing at my table in the first place, instead of seeking out a campaign better suited to your needs and preferences? 

For my part, I miss where insistence on rejecting the setting helps someone "get into the game more" -- it sounds like, by so doing, the player would be getting into the game LESS -- and I definitely miss the part where (say) Being A Black Elf is the sort of make-or-break character creation decision which makes the difference between a Fun PC or an Unfun PC.  (As to that, I also miss the part where a GM is a dick for refusing to permit a character that doesn't fit with his setting, but a player isn't a dick for refusing to play a character which does.  Come again?)

Are black elves part of my gameworld?  No.  Would I prevent you from playing a black-skinned elf? No. But, by definition, you'd be playing someone wildly abnormal.  Most people would presume your PC to be accursed in some fashion ... and very likely they'd be right.  Cityfolk would more often than otherwise recoil from you, villagers would grab the torches and pitchforks, and any ghastly crime committed within a week of your arrival OR departure would be presumed to be your doing.

That's the point where most Special Snowflake players throw a tantrum. See, they're usually fine with playing their bizarre I Must Be Different Than You Peons characters ... but they're not nearly as sanguine, in my experience, with facing the fallout of their choices, and often throw out accusations that they’re being unfairly targeted or “punished” in some way.

I reject, contemptuously, this concept.  If you decide that you're going to play an assassin, you run the risk of the law and heroic types hunting you down.  If you decide that you're going to play an orc, you run the risk of prejudice and fear in areas where orcs aren't well loved.  If you decide to run a priest, you'll run into people opposed to your faith.  These are all your choices to make: I am not going to force you to play an orc, an assassin or a practitioner of an unpopular faith.  If you want to play a character that twigs as few knee-jerk prejudices as possible, you can.

There are prejudices in my campaign.  Some make sense; many don't.  People are down on one another for the many reasons this happens in real life: racial, economic, class, home town, profession, nationality, ethnic group, hair color, speaking voice, what have you.  I quite understand people who don't want to encounter prejudice in their gaming, the same way there are people out there who don't want to encounter violence, who don't want to encounter fantasy ... what have you.  You've every right to seek a campaign that meets your requirements, and I wish people the best of luck in finding one.

Let me reiterate: the players don't get to decide what is or is not true in my game setting.  I do.  The details aren't up for voting.  If I wanted a Generic Fantasy World where anything goes, I'd play one, and no doubt that campaign would attract those who prefer such settings.  I don't want one, and I don't play one, and my campaign has attracted a couple hundred players who prefer those settings.  I am no more about to change fixed details for every newbie who can't stand coloring inside the lines than I'm going to stop running GURPS because that newbie prefers to play D&D, or that I'm going to stop running sandboxes because that newbie really prefers a nice, straight railroad track.

Here’s another quote from one of those debates: "Is the consistency of the world really that important compared to all you having fun at the table and being friendly?"

Why is it that some presume that "consistency" and "fun" are mutually exclusive values? My players like the consistency just fine, and they not only have fun, but they've been having fun for many years. Three of my current players have been gaming with me for over twenty years; a fourth has been doing so eleven years.

But hang on, let's turn the question around. Let's say you've just joined my main group. There you are, with the aforementioned four players. You're the newbie at the table. Why is being inconsistent really that important to you, compared to everyone having fun at the table and being friendly?  Don't you think it's UNfriendly to decide that the setting doesn't apply to you, and that you don't want to follow the guidelines that every other player's not only followed, but have done so for many years?  Wouldn't, in fact, YOU be the disruptive one here?  Why should the fun of other people be spoiled for your benefit?

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT (Pt II)

1)    Location

Any urban area, whether village, town or city, arises out of the need for trade.  While a small town can coalesce in a prosperous inland farming district or gather around a castle (indeed, skilled labor is necessary for a castle to be built), larger towns or cities locate on navigable rivers or natural harbors.  Just as an example, how many cities in the United States before the railroad era were NOT founded on a navigable waterway?  (Answer below. †)  One of the reasons in colonial America that Boston took off as a major port and Plymouth didn't was that Plymouth's harbor is quite shallow and silts up readily.

Consider also access to building materials, wood for fuel, fresh water, and nearby arable land.  The more negative factors there are that deter growth – the site's on an invasion route, a lack of forests for fuel, mountainous or swampy terrain – there must be counterbalancing benefits that make people want to live there (there’s a large gold mine, the location is unusually defensible, the kingdom’s northern border army needs a base, it's the birthplace of the Goddess of Winter and a pilgrimage site) and/or mitigating factors (less need for fuel because the town's on the equator, the local lichen is magically nutritious, the river going through is the only decent water source within 500 miles).  Another reason Boston took off and Plymouth didn't was that the soil of Plymouth's latifundia was sandy and not hugely fertile, and Boston's wasn't.

You’re also not going to get a town of any size far in the outback, away from trade routes or transportation infrastructure, no matter the benefits.  When all is said and done, the main reason people live in towns -- dirty, smelly, crowded, verminous, disease-ridden, dangerous places at medieval tech -- is to find work.  If work isn't to be had, folks aren't going to stick around.  If there are no resources and no trade, a ruler would have to be mad (and filthy rich) to subsidize a city out in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason whatsoever.  It's expensive enough, and hard enough on the soldiers, to subsidize a strictly military outpost in a forsaken outback: ask the Romans, the French, the British, or the mid- to late-19th century Americans, for that matter.

If your realm tries anyway to maintain a sizable town away from key natural resources (see below), that means you need an equally-sizable logistics train to support it.  This is easily disruptible by the realm's enemies.  (This, of course, can form the basis for plots.)

2)     Resources

A town of a thousand people will consume roughly twenty bushels of grain, around 800 gallons of wine, tea or beer, about three cattle, and about a hundred smaller livestock ... daily.  Throw in the vast amounts of vegetables common to the low-tech peasant diet, fruit, cooking oil, herbs ... Coming back to water.  A human needs about two liters of fresh water a day (or liquid equivalent) in order to survive, more to offset strenuous activity or high temperatures.  Cooking and washing use up a good deal more.  The various industries of a large medieval town or city uses roughly ten times that much fresh water per capita – for tanners, laundries, fullers, foundries, smiths, numerous others.  

(Never mind agriculture.  It takes four tons of water to grow enough cotton for a pair of trousers.  The amount of water livestock sucks up as a percentage of their food value is far more than grain or vegetables need.)

You’ll have to have market squares to hawk that food.  That means wagonloads of food and drink (the twenty-five bushels of grain alone takes up not quite two wagons) each and every day, and if your roads are impassible in winter, you need many more wagons coming through before then.  Storage?  Well ... if you keep your civic food stores dry, protected from vermin, and secure, they’ll keep two to four years without magic.  Maybe.  Say, does your gamesystem have a food preservation enchantment?  Because without that, food goes bad fast.  You don't have refrigerators, so the tomato that gets picked or the fish that gets caught needs to be eaten today.  By tomorrow it'll be iffy, and the day thereafter it'll be compost.  Those vegetables and fish -- obviously -- are NOT coming from the next province over.  They're coming from 5-10 miles away at the outside ... or, well, before they get to market, they become compost.

Also consider the stability of the countryside.  If you have continual plagues, invasions, bandit hordes and wars trucking through your lands, you’re not going to have prosperous cities, because there won’t be enough peasants left to grow enough food to feed them, nor enough traders surviving the gauntlet to provide raw materials and needful goods at economically feasible prices.  (That thousand-person town will need a minimum of five square miles of dedicated farmland, exclusive of the aforementioned peasant farmers needed to grow that food ... presuming the soil is good and the land is well watered and flat, there are no droughts, famines or civil disruptions, that the farmers employ sound agricultural practices, and that the harvest isn't whisked away to support a far-off royal capital or the realm's own marauding army.  For anyone who knows anything about medieval life -- or, indeed, low-tech agricultural travails generally -- that is a very tall order, and most medieval towns were food-importers.) You’ll also need a surplus enough to support non-productive elements, such as religious centers, universities, the aforementioned army or the bureaucracy of a capitol city.

3)    Trades

The absolute basic tradesmen without which a village doesn’t exist are a smith and a miller.  Next in importance (not necessarily in that order) comes potters, carpenters, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, coopers, and at least one tavern/alehouse. 

A small town will have multiples of the more important trades, and specialization will start to occur: extra blacksmiths turn into farriers, silversmiths and armorers; weavers into tailors, dyers and fullers; leatherworkers into saddlers and cobblers; carpenters into coopers, cartwrights, cabinet and furniture makers.  Specialized businesses appear: scribe/notaries, brokers, herbalists, shipwrights, healers, various food occupations such as brewers, bakers and butchers.  

(Psst: this doesn't mean that a bog-standard carpenter has no idea how to fashion a new wheel for a wagon, or that the country smith can't figure out how to make a broadsword.  They're just not specialists, may well not have access to specialist tools or the best possible materials, and aren't particularly practiced at making swords or shaping wheels.  Those goods may well be "Cheap", in GURPS terms: something that doesn't work as well as a specialist's creation, which will malfunction more often and break more readily.)

As a town gets larger, more specialization will be the rule.  Some towns concentrate on particular trades – the center of a wool-producing district will have a preponderance of cloth manufacturing trades (as much as two-thirds of all merchants), as well as wool merchants and factors for outside trade.  A grape-producing district will not only need vintners and distillers, but coopers and glassblowers as well.  Two-thirds nautical trades is pretty standard for any port city – chandlers, shipfitters, boatwrights, brokers, warehouses, sail lofts, ropewalks, salters, longshoremen, and the several elements of a fishing industry.  And so on.

Below is a rough outline of what businesses will be found in your population:

Village up to 500 people:

1 church (with one, maybe two clergy, and appropriate acolytes; also possibly lay-led)
1 healer/herbalist/physician (in some cultures, this would be one of the priests)
1 scribe/notary
1 inn/tavern
1 mill
1 smith

2-3 miscellaneous businesses, depending on prevailing local industries.  A seaport village might have a boatwright and a chandler, a farming village might have a tanner, a mountain village might have a mining concern, anyone might have a cartwright – especially if the village is on a highroad.

The village wouldn’t have much in the way of bureaucracy:  the mayor/reeve/headman, who’d be a respected farmer or businessman, and perhaps a single representative from the local overlord or central government.  If the village is on a significant trade route, there may be a tax/toll collector, perhaps a small barracks of a sergeant and three or so soldiers. 

In addition, most other residents will do various jobs – carpentry, pottery, basketweaving, brewing, weaving, masonry – on a part time basis.  There wouldn't be storefronts or colorful shop signs much beloved of Hollywood and Ren Faires – why, when everyone knows what everyone does? – but be more along the lines of "Eh, ma'am, if'n ye want some good jars, Goodwife Adrienne's a dab hand with the pottery.  That there's her cottage, the one wi'the gate missin' a hinge.  The smith promised he'd get t'that next week." 

Neither Goodwife Adrienne nor much of any craftsman the village has will have a plethora of off-the-shelf wares, but this is dependent on the time of year.  Low-tech villagers/farmers spent a lot of time in the winter doing up various crafts for future sale, mostly to itinerant peddlers and merchants coming around when the weather clears. The adventurers swinging by the village in March may well find those good sealed pint pottery jars they forgot to buy before leaving the city.

General merchant?  Not in anything this small.  Small town "general merchants" such as you see on TV shows or in 18-19th century reenactment museums are anachronistic to the medieval period.  Such wares that aren't made locally come from two sources: a local taking orders from his neighbors before taking his cart to the Big City to trade, or traveling peddlers coming through the area from time to time. 

Speaking of itinerant peddlers and merchants ... depending on the area, you might not have a local cobbler -- for instance -- but one riding a circuit.  Fellow's usually in town the first two weeks of May, the locals bring him cured hides, he churns out fitted good quality boots.  Probably would have no problem putting the adventurers on his list, if they didn't mind hanging out.  If the adventurers plod on through any time between June and April, no luck.

Locals also take on minor posts on a part-time basis – a village will have a constable, a handful of aldermen, and other more minor posts: a hayward, a woodward, depending on how stratified your culture is.  The village may have a one-room schoolhouse -- well, the dwelling of the teacher, anyway -- and classes might be taught by the scribe, a priest, or an educated villager.

Town up to 1500 people:

1 bank
3-5 scribes/notaries/lawyers (some working for the others)
2 churches (with 4-5 clergy between them and appropriate acolytes)
3 healer/herbalists/apothecaries
2 butchers
1 baker
1-2 fishers or trappers (depending on location)
1 full scale inn, 2-3 taverns, 1 brothel
3 blacksmiths (one a specialist, such as a farrier), 1 silver/tinsmith
3 cloth shops, one which is likely to be a rug or tapestry maker; 1 tailor
4-5 general merchants, one which is likely to be a specialist (outfitters, say)
2-3 mills
1 large-scale pottery
1-2 masons
1-2 carpenters, 1 cart/wheelwright
1-2 leatherworkers
7-8 miscellaneous businesses

Now we have a prosperous town, and the center of its district.  When the local farmers say "I'm walkin' t' town, be back tomorra," this is where they're headed.  The 500-person village might be in the middle of nowhere.  This town wouldn't have gotten this big if it was.

Other than general merchants and chandlers, they still aren't likely to have much in the way of off-the-shelf wares.  But ... I was struck when visiting the silversmith's shop in Historic Deerfield (replicating a mid-17th century New England frontier town).  It didn't have off-the-shelf either.  What it *did* have was a row of silver and pewter spoons, and a row of pewter plates and bowls.  They were all presentation pieces, done up with various borders, decorations and styles.  Pick a pattern, that's what the silversmith would make up for you.  This is how things were done low-tech.

A number of businesses have a DIY element.  Take a bakery, for instance.  Many a low-tech bakery was less about churning out loaves themselves than in providing oven space for the neighborhood housewives to bring their own loaves for baking, being rather more economical that way.  (This was also a sideline of neighborhood taverns, by the bye.)

This is the point where a small bureaucracy would arise.  The town would have a mayor/reeve, a captain for the local militia and who’d also be responsible for maintenance of any defenses, a tax collector and a dedicated scribe.  The mayor might double as the magistrate, if there wasn't a feudal ruler close to hand.  If a regional center of any sort, the town would attract central government staff – a district governor or noble and his staff, a couple dozen soldiers and officers – and there'd be an appropriate building housing the same: a manor house, a small keep.

For towns of over 1500 people, use the following percentages:

* Bakery: 1 per 750.
* Brewers: 1 per 1500, at a ratio of 3:1 between brewers and distilleries/wineries; obviously variable depending on what booze-producing crops you have.  Inns and taverns often brewed their own tipple.
* Butcher: 1 per 800.
* Carpenters: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between "rough" carpenters and specialty crafts such as wheel/cartwrights, cabinetmakers, coopers and carvers.
* Churches: 1 per 750.
* Clergy: 1 per 200, obviously hugely variable depending on how religious your town is.
* Dyers: 1 per 3000.  This signifies a large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Financial: 1 per 1000, at a ratio of 1:2 between banks and moneychangers/lenders.
* Fishmongers: 1 per 400 (selling fresh) in a port, 1 per 1200 (selling dried or salted) inland.
* Foundries: 1 per 5000.  Again, a large-scale industrial operation.
* General Merchants: 1 per 350, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between “country stores,” salters/spice merchants and brokers/factors/large-scale shippers.
* Inn/Tavern: 1 per 200, at a ratio of 1:5 between inns and taverns.  These neighborhood taverns are not your stereotype Giant Common Room places; a period neighborhood tavern seated about 30 with a bar about the size of a kitchen counter, and the clientele was exclusively from that block. (This aside from that a number of shopkeepers would end the business day by setting out a few stools and a barrel of brew, turning into impromptu barkeeps.)
* Leatherworkers: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between generic leatherworkers and cobblers/saddlers/etc.
* Masons: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:2:4 between sculptors, masons and stonecutters.
* Mills: 1 per 600, at a rough ratio of 3:1 between grist mills and sawmills, fulling mills and the like.
* Potteries: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:4 between glaziers/glassblowers and potteries.
* Scribes: 1 per 150, at a ratio of 1:2:5 between lawyers, notaries and scribes.
* Smith: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 3-4:1 between blacksmiths and silver/tin/goldsmiths/armorers.
* Tanners: 1 per 3500.  Another large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Teachers: 1 per 200, of which 1 in 4-5 are non-teaching scholars and scientists, who might nonetheless do part-time teaching and tutoring to raise some coin.  Small neighborhood schools and academies were far more common in medieval and Renaissance times than many folks imagine, and literacy rates in urban communities were 50% or better above the blue-collar classes.
* Textile trades: 1 per 100, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between weavers/spinners/carders, tailors/carpet/tapestry makers and furriers.  A town of this size probably has at least one large-scale cloth manufactory.
* Universities: These come around one to a city.  Starting at about 10,000 people, you’ll get at least an advanced institute of learning of some sort.  Capitals of any size, as well as major regional cities, will have a full-blown university.

Miscellaneous Shops: 1 per 200.  Possibilities for these:

* Common: stables, brothels, ropemakers, herbalist/apothecaries, barbers, lampmakers, painters, bathhouses, sharpeners, thatchers.

* Less common: bowyers/fletchers, ship’s chandlers, candlemakers, horse trainers, jewelers, outfitters, pawnshops, soapmakers, undertakers, messengers/heralds.

* Rare: gaming houses, perfumers, papermakers, seers, engravers, clockmakers, animal trainers, architects, cartographers, engineers, instrument makers. 

Keep in mind regional trades – for instance, a seaport would have sailmakers, at least one ropewalk, fishdryers, nautical carvers, chandlers, warehouses, specialty ship’s carpenters and smiths, navigators, steersmen, boatmakers, tattoo artists, shipwrights, and if large enough marine underwriters and freight shippers.  A mountain mining town would have specialty manufacturing shops producing mining tools and equipment, sawmills, assayers, alchemists (to produce certain chemicals necessary for mining and assaying certain ores), trappers and the like.

This is the population level where guilds will start to exist; around 4-5 similar businesses is the minimum number to form a sustainable guild.  Those aren’t the only support groups, of course; churches will have at least one sodality (and usually more than that) each.

The market square of a town this size now only sees the local farmers selling vegetables, but itinerant traders peddling just about everything else.  These are often heavily regulated and taxed, and crackdowns from town guilds are frequent.  Entertainers also exist, largely performing in the market, in front of any civic building or church, or available to play in an inn.

Towns and cities of this level have sizable bureaucracies, operating out of a civic hall.  Areas such as tax collection, records, justice and civic defense spawn whole departments.  A seaport would have a harbormaster, his staff, and naval units; any trading town would have an official in charge of weights and measures ... and probably in possession of the "standard" weights and weighbeams!  Formal military companies almost certainly exist. 

4)    Design

Cities aren’t particularly logical – the odds of having a nice grid layout, if you’re mapping it, are poor.  Consider that your city started out as a village.  It’ll have a relatively primitive tangle of streets in the center, haphazardly radiating out of the original village, which will center around the river/harbor/major road running through the middle, or perhaps around a religious center, castle or other fortification.

Planned towns did exist, but it took certain situations: a government seeking to settle an unpeopled area, a feudal lord wanting the profits and trade a town could provide.  Even so, most of them quickly spread organically from its original planned center ... those that survived.  (Many planned towns quickly failed.)  Plans were sometimes imposed upon extant towns and cities by new rulers or by the growing unsuitability of the original town; numerous cities in Europe had "oldtowns" and "newtowns" pressed together.  Another factor would be in the aftermath of a war or a major fire -- the latter being the chief danger to a medieval town -- where entire city blocks and neighborhoods might be redesigned after being razed.

Obviously, waterborne businesses (mills, shipwrights) will cluster around said river.  It was common for a river town to expand to the other bank, which necessitated at least one bridge.  Oftentimes the rich and poor parts of town were differentiated by which bank of the river they were on.

Low-class and odoriferous trades (tanneries, dyers, soapmakers, slaughterhouses) will cluster downwind in the “poor” part of town.  Beyond that, certain trades required a lot of space -- metalworkers, cartwrights, potters, animal trades -- and gravitated to the peripheries where land was more available and cheaper.

As towns grow larger, civic areas and buildings emerge: courts, wells and aqueducts, town halls, theaters, multiple market squares, caravanserais, jails, belltowers, stadia.

Buildings would also grow taller.  As the town got increasingly cramped, the only way to grow was up.  Townhouses gained a second story, and sometimes a third, and a fourth.  Seldom designed to take the load, with oft-mediocre building materials, and where no one had ever heard of building codes, structural collapses were all too frequent.

Psst ... don't forget canals.  Something you see in a lot of maps of low-tech cities that you do not see on maps of RPG cities are canals.  A lot of low-tech cities had a lot of canals.  It is vastly easier to haul large cargoes on water than it is on land -- much less congestion, many fewer horses, much greater carrying capacity.  (Even today, something like 95% of the world's trade by tonnage is water-borne.)  Canals also help the defensibility of a city ... and speaking of which:
 
5)    Defense

If the town is walled -- and unless your town is in a strong, powerful realm with secure borders and no internal threats (not a hallmark of RPG settings), it absolutely will be -- it may have been gotten its walls quite some time before.  If so, chances are the town’s grown beyond the perimeter.  Medieval towns were almost invariably horribly overcrowded, disease-ridden places, and while it took extreme population pressure to abandon the protection of the walls, sooner or later it happened.

Some medieval cities had several separate walls, built haphazardly over centuries, all attempts to maintain some manner of defensible perimeter.  Consider also that such construction is expensive – building a castle in just a few years took so much money few nobles managed it. The local nobles and magnates were generally taxed to pay for improving city defenses, and generally did so grudgingly, intermittently, and often only under duress.  Defenses were also expensive to maintain (it didn't help that they were often poorly built, with mediocre materials, by the aforementioned strongarmed magnates), and it's entirely possible that broad sections of the walls are in disrepair.  Indeed, the reason why so many Roman-era buildings were in ruins or disappeared entirely is that they were often cannibalized for the stone necessary to build or repair walls, in addition to other buildings. 

Beyond that, walls are inconvenient.  They make carrying goods to and fro a pain in the ass, and they're an impediment to growth and renovation.  (This didn't make the magnates any happier about coughing up the gold to build them.)  Wharves, docks, shipyards and mills are going to be on the wrong side of walls.  Gates built in sufficient number to relieve the pressure compromise the defensibility of the place.

Speaking of which, soldiers.  Standing forces, in medieval western Europe, were by our standards astonishingly small.  Take medieval Southampton, one of England's chief ports and the entrepot for the wool and wine trade between England and France in the Middle Ages, with an estimated population within the walls between 2500-2800.  Even after a catastrophic raid by the French in 1338, with the financial support of major nobles the King directed them to provide, the town struggled to maintain a permanent garrison of as much as a hundred soldiers.  Organized civic police forces just did not exist (at the time, Southampton maintained just six night watchmen), and a castle garrison might well be a couple dozen soldiers or less.

6) Personalities

A theme that keeps repeating throughout medieval annals is that towns and cities are firmly in the grasp of an oligarchy.  A small handful of families and personalities dominate local politics, commerce and social life, often for generations.  They own the guilds that matter, public posts are filled by their patronage, civic amusements are graced by their money and presence.  The laws and rules are rigged in their favor, and the culture is nowhere close to being a meritocracy.  Fail to be very, very polite to the Astirians or the Riannels, and suddenly merchants are very slow to take your orders, and the city's bureaucrats are all "out in meetings" when you show up ...

This ethos doesn't sit well with the average gamer, raised in a Western democracy relatively free of corruption and bearing at least the appearance of a meritocracy, and bringing to the gaming table the paradigm that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth before whom lesser mortals (read, "NPCs") all kowtow.  And it's okay if that's one of the aspects of medieval life -- along pervasive filth, disease, slavery, racism, fanaticism and sexual abuse -- you don't want to play.  YMMV ("your mileage may vary," code on many a gaming forum for "Whatever works for you is okay, it doesn't bother me if you have different preferences") is one of the more useful aphorisms to keep in mind when doing tabletop RPG setting creation. 

7) Giant Cities

Yes, I know.  A lot of gamers love giant, million-man cities.  A lot of gamewriters love them, too.  They just don't work.  A city of half a million people or more on medieval tech -- a Rome, a Constantinople, a Baghdad, a Chang'an -- requires a continent-spanning empire and awesome transportation infrastructure to survive.  Once the raiders/pirates have free run of things, once the empire falls, those cities collapse overnight.  In the course of just one century, the population of Rome fell twentyfold, and it didn't get back over a million for over 1500 years, until the 1930s.  And why bother?  A city of 10,000 will have several hundred businesses, more than all but the craziest gamers are ever going to create.  

Heck, take medieval England, the land gamewriters and settings creators love to emulate.  Only two cities in England -- London and York -- are known with a certainty to have broken 20,000 residents at any point in the medieval era.  (London topped out at around 50,000.)  Bristol and Norwich topped out at just over 10,000, and even counting the suburbs, Southampton couldn't have had as much as 5000. 

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POSTSCRIPT:  A kind reader commented on MDDR Pt I, and made a remark that provoked this postscript: that he'd read Ross' numbers, as many gamers have, but that the numbers didn't work for him.

This is important.  Let's take those 52 scabbardmakers, shall we?  That seems ludicrous, but presuming the number is accurate, there are a few possible explanations.  One is simply that there were a honking lot of swords and daggers in 13th century Paris.  (Not the rapiers and main-gauches most people think of when they think of Parisian swordsmen – those weren't invented for over 200 more years.  We don't actually know what kinds of sword for certain; the earliest known combat manual, the so-called "Tower manuscript," dates from no earlier than 1300.)

So, okay: now what happens if you envision Paris with severe weapon restrictions?

Answer: you probably don't have many scabbardmakers.

And that's the notion to have in mind when assigning numbers.  If you have an illiterate populace, there'll be far fewer booksellers, papermakers and the like.  (The number of scribes and teachers might not change – business still needs to be transacted, and those teachers might be working on rote memorization!)  If there's no native clay, there'll be more basketmakers, more turners and more leatherworkers churning out substitutes, and buildings will be made of wood, not brick.  If the Word of the Gods is that anyone who sails out of sight of land is accursed and damned, a "port" town might have a few coast-hugging vessels for bulk transport and a modest fishing fleet, and that's it.  If half the population of your town are 400-lb rock trolls, you'll need a lot more food coming in to support it.  And so on.

One last factor to keep in mind, not just for demographics but for anyone trying to tell you How Things Were In Medieval Times: we're talking about a few hundred years.  The notion that "medieval" was some monolithic state of being where everything everywhere was exactly the same for 400 years is nonsense.  Poor, chilly, backwards, thinly populated Scotland was a far different place than the rich, densely populated, glittering city-states of Northern Italy (and, as to that, both were far different places than China, India, Persia, Africa, Japan, Mesoamerica ... lands our Eurocentric myopia usually leave out of "medieval" equations).  The 11th century was a far different time than the 14th.

Heck, think of our own era, and how quickly things change.  What kind of businesses exist in our cities, and in what numbers?  In 1954, computers were giant installations that cost millions of dollars and filled large rooms; you could no more obtain them retail than you could walk into Filene's and buy an armored regiment.  In 1984, indy computer stores were popping up all over the place: I bought my first one from a dedicated Atari ST store in Boston.  In 2014, those computer stores are now mostly gone – computers are ubiquitous consumer appliances you can get in your average department store.  I doubt it'll take until 2044 for "personal computers" to be museum pieces, and everyone's using smartphones and tablets ... or their successors.

So – YMMV.

 

POSTSCRIPT II:  If you've read this article before, you might have found it changed.  I first published it over ten years ago.  I've expanded it, tossed in a few more things, tweaked the numbers here and there, cited a book or two I've read in the meantime.  I mention this for a reason: medieval demographics and economics is a still-evolving field.  Our scholarship is better.  Our sources have improved.  New facts, new materials come to light.  Old shibboleths are found wanting and slough away.  The bias of the field in favor of western Europe fades.  Scholars of a previous era, their partisan axegrinding and feuds forgotten, are supplanted by newer ones.

And I keep reading and finding new information myself.  So why not?  Anyone writing a blog does so at least in part out of a healthy ego, but the goal, after all, is to open eyes and make it easier for you to run games.  If I point fingers at others and claim that their numbers aren't good enough, then I need to cowboy up and make my own as good as I can manage.  So drop in on this article if you have a mind, every rare once in a while.  I might have gotten a clue between now and then.

 

† - Indianapolis, and the founders thought the White River was navigable.

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT

(January 2022:  Well, people are very interested in this information; this two-part post is responsible for nearly half of the page views for the entire blog.  It's long since gone viral, to the point that some serious researchers have taken notice, and to my enduring wonder, it makes the top page of Google Search.  This warms the cockles of my heart, but listen -- this is the product of many years' research and trying to get it right.  Please feel free to comment below if you don't think I did!)

Medieval demographics and economics have long been an interest of mine.  I minored in the subject in college (seriously), largely because I wanted to become as expert as possible in the field for gaming purposes.  Between a divorce and what’s available on the Internet, I’ve trimmed down my library on the subject to a few dozen books, but I certainly have my opinions.

My opinion is that what you’ve been taught from gaming sources about low-tech cities is almost certainly wrong.

The most influential RPGer on the topic is S. John Ross, whose Medieval Demographics Made Easy article is widely cited and quoted as to what businesses existed in medieval cities and in what numbers.  Now S. John is a smart guy.  We were once on the same GURPS APA together, and we’ve corresponded; I respect the fellow.  But his article has some critical flaws, and I’d like to present this rebuttal both as a rant and for Wednesday’s Stuff.

* For starters, let's take his number on universities: "There will be one University for every 27.3 million people. This should be computed by continent, not by town!" Heck, by 1500 Italy alone had twenty universities which survive to the present day, let alone ephemeral ones in existence back in the medieval era. France, Spain and Germany each had over a dozen in medieval times ... even tiny Scotland (est. population in the Middle Ages, between 500,000 and a million) had three.  I've no idea from where he got that number ... it's bizarrely specific for being so desperately wrong.

* His break point on the population of town vs city is 8,000, but the true figure is around 5,000; if we're going by the legal definition of a city, most cities were chartered in England at between 4,500-5,000 population.  In Europe generally, the numbers and definitions were wildly skewed: in much of Germany and eastern Europe, for instance, the great majority of so-called "Free Cities" had a population of 1,000 or less.

* He asserts that a square mile of land will feed 180 people on medieval tech.  This is, in fact, a hugely variable number.  Under ideal conditions, after the invention of the horse collar and crop rotation, on table-flat completely cleared land, in multi-crop areas like the Nile Delta and northern Italy, presuming the land's at peace, you can manage over twice that.  The presence of forests, orchards, pasture land, hamlets, buildings, roads?  A tidal wave of smallholders tilling just a few acres and not hugely efficiently?  Oxen instead of horses?  Poor soil, swampland or inadequate water?  Cold climes like Scotland or Scandinavia?  Hill country?  Your farmers haven't invented crop rotation, horse collars or heavy ploughs?  (And, oh, let's not discount politics, war, droughts, locust plagues, untimely frosts ...)  If you can manage half that number for much of Europe, you're doing alright, and you'll survive getting less.

(By the bye, there's a conceptual thing you need to get out of your head.  Most cinematic sources, many fictional sources and a whole lot of gaming products depict what I call "vast cities in a sea of empty."  Gandalf rides up to Minas Tirith, Middle-Earth's largest flipping city by a LOT, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Shift the panorama to King's Landing, the capital of a nation the size of India, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Now this nonsense might appeal to directors and set designers, for whom heroic charges against the walls are a lot cleaner to film than house-to-house battles through the suburbs, but why exactly would anyone sane want to import tons upon tons of grain -- never mind the vegetables, which would all rot en route -- from hundreds of miles away in preference to growing it right there?  Seriously.  Cities are at the center of vast webs of agriculture, not lonely bleak outposts, whatever the likes of Jackson, Benioff and Weiss care to depict.)

* The real killer are the totals for businesses, which are way, way, way out of kilter.

See, what Ross -- and many a gamer who doesn’t know any better -- uses for a guide is a single source: the so-called “1292 Parisian tax roll” cited in the end notes of Joseph and Frances Gies’ well-known work, Life In A Medieval City, which purports to give a comprehensive list of the 51 types of business in Paris in that time, and produces some oddities like there being 58 scabbardmakers in Paris in that year.

Yeah, but.

For openers, Paris was a very atypical place.  For most of the medieval period through to the 18th century, it was the most populous city in Europe, the national capital of Europe’s greatest kingdom.  Your average good-sized low-tech city is a tenth the size, much less likely to have baroque luxury trades, and much more likely to be near or on the seacoast and have the nautical trades Paris lacked.

For a second thing, the Gieses heavily truncated that list.  The real list didn’t have 51 entries; it had several hundred.  (As to that, the Gieses made some errors.  The list didn't cite 58 “scabbardmakers,” there were 52. Aside from anything else, in the eyes of a number of medievalists, the Gieses' scholarship has not aged well.) 

For a third, what they were working with was itself an edited list: one a mid-19th century historian named Hercule Géraud edited from the original manuscript.

For a fourth, the accuracy of the list is in dispute.  Géraud lists 116 goldsmiths, more than the combined number of inn- and tavernkeepers, half again as many as there were coopers ... indeed more than any other profession except for barbers, cobblers and leatherworkers.  In the words of medievalist Dr. Norman Pounds, "it is difficult to explain [their] presence, unless we can assume that their market covered much of France."  It's far from the only inexplicable result: only two lawyers?  Two lacemakers?  ONE roofer?  ONE fletcher?  Huh?

Most importantly, it wasn’t what the Gieses thought it was.  Géraud wasn’t attempting to present a comprehensive occupational list.  He was presenting a list of occupations with matching surnames – the French equivalent of “Joe Smith the blacksmith,” “Karen Cooper the cooper,” and suchlike.  If you went by (say) “Bob Traynor the notary,” then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you were a Jew that went by a patronymic ("Robert ben James") – a large percentage of them – then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you went by a placename ("Bob of Quincy") or a byname ("Ravenswing"), then Géraud didn’t include you.

(If that sounds like the 19th-century equivalent of a Wikipedia-style "List of African-American jazz players from Texas," I don't blame you.  The guy researched what he wanted to research, and there must have been some reason which made sense to Géraud as to why he put it together that way.  One wonders whether late 13th century Parisian goldsmiths just weren't in the habit of going by patronymics or placenames, and contemporary lawyers, lacemakers and fletchers were.)

You can see why I wouldn’t trust that list even if I hadn’t stared at it and immediately gawked at the notion that there are twice as many scabbardmakers as blacksmiths -- the fundamental business of the medieval world, and which was underestimated on Ross’ list by a factor of six.  Certain businesses are omitted entirely; potters, for instance, and most of the nautical trades.  (These do appear on Géraud's original, but in startlingly low numbers.  Just twelve sailors?  Seriously?  For a city the size of Paris, bisected by a great river, a thousand involved in the water-carriage trade would be a bewildering underestimate.)  It's hard to look at that list without wondering what the heck the Gieses were thinking presenting that as a credible business list, even as a footnote in an appendix.

Relying on a single source – never mind a single source far out of context – is poor scholarship. For example, I own a 1945 telephone directory for the city of my birth, Boston's immediate southern suburb.  It has listings for only five barbers; by contrast, it has four pages of listings for beauty salons.  Now I'm sure there are those who'd swallow that factoid whole and infer that in a city of 75,000 men wore their hair to their ankles ... or – in an era of close cropped haircuts – it might have been that neighborhood barbers had plenty of walk-up business, didn't do appointments and didn't feel the need for the expense of telephone service.  (Or, for that matter, that a telephone directory wasn't any more intended to be a complete record of every business in the city of Quincy, than Géraud's list of occupational surnames was intended to be a complete record of every business in Paris.  Go figure.)

My own take on the numbers comes from a basket of sources: Medieval Southampton by Colin Platt, Medieval Trade In The Mediterranean World by Lopez and Raymond, the renowned 14th century The Practice of Commerce by Francesco Pegolotti (Evans' translation), Streider's translation of the 14th century Palaelogus by Georgios Pachymeres, the Milanese and Genoese 12th century reductions published some years ago in the Journal of Economic and Business History,  the 13th century Florentine business list I copied from a lovely text in the BPL, The Merchants of Cahors by Denholm-Young, The Medieval City by Norman Pounds (part of the superb Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World published by Greenwood Press, which I strongly recommend), A Day In A Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni, and the magnificent corpus of work of Fernand Braudel.  And since this is rambling on a bit, I’ll save the actual chart for the next post.

Magic-as-technology, take II.

The noble paced for several moments, back and forth, before whirling on the wizard. "I have told you I need a Wand of Fireballs now, Sana!  Obey me at once, and no more shillyshallying!"

The wizard just sighed, slowly, quietly.  "Your Venerance, I have explained the problem on several occasions now.  When you commissioned me to craft a Coronet of Awesome and Tumescent Rulership, that locked me in to ten months solid of enchanting.  That effort cannot be passed on to another enchanter, even were one available.  Which there is not.  If I shift now to create so much as an enchanted tomato planter, that wastes seven months of work and the vast -- and unrecoverable -- sum of gold you have already invested."  She paused, for a long moment, before continuing. "That would of course, Venerance, be your decision to make."

* * * * * * * * *

Knobgobbler, my first kind commenter, gave me the notion to elaborate on the theme, something I would've done sooner or later anyway.

Caveat: we're talking realism here.  If you insist on million-person cities, Spelljammer-level ubiquity of powerful magics and all the trappings of High Fantasy, terrific ... just handwave what you want and have done with it.  YMMV.

Let's say you have a respectable sized city of 10,000 people.  (This really is a respectable sized city; it'd make the top five in England at most points in the medieval era.)  If wizards are as common as blacksmiths, you've got about 20.  Terrific, right?  Plenty of enchanting muscle!

Well, now, hold on.  Are all those folks practicing enchanters?  Of course not.  There are two major factors.  For one thing, most fantasy game systems require wizards to be of a certain power level to be a successful enchanter, excluding some -- or many -- wizards from ever doing it at all.

For another, why would every wizard be a professional enchanter?  Take Master Elaina, the water wizard -- sure, she’s the city’s most powerful mage, but she’s a full-time adventurer; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Mistress Syrielle is a legend, but she’s mostly retired now, and spends her time puttering in her garden from her wheelchair.  Master Ravenswing works for the Duke, mostly in divination; he’s not enchanting -- at least not commercially -- for a living.  “Whisper” is the hired mage of the richest fellow in town, and they say her telepathy and anti-thief magics are why he’s so rich; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Master Nightflame is the professor of thaumatology at the local academy; he’s not enchanting for a living.  Neither is his sister Arathena, who got stuck with the Guildmaster job of the local wizards’ chantry after Syrielle retired, and is hip deep in paperwork and disciplinary hearings.  No one trusts Master Halar the Pervert any more since he fell into the bottle; he’s sure as hell not enchanting for a living.  Whether anyone trusts Master Pando after the magical accident (he's yet to be able to cope with enclosed spaces, precious metals and the color red), he doesn't seem to be enchanting these days.  And Master Detheril is the new Knight Marshal of the city, and on the short list for a coronet the next barony that opens up; he’s too busy drilling the troops to be enchanting for a living.

So you might have ten enchanters; you might have half as many.  Just remember, though, if everyone else is an enchanter, you don’t have spare wizards for anything else.  Need someone to cast a divination spell for you?  No one available; they're all enchanting, remember?.  Want a wizard to teach your party’s wizard a spell?  Sure, spend three months in Nightflame’s next class (it’s about necromancy, by the way), and you can; otherwise, not.  Need that magical scroll written?  You’re SOL; they're all enchanting, remember?

Well, alright, half of what’s left.  Six enchanters, then.  How liberal is your game’s enchanting rules?  I use GURPS, myself (and let’s ignore that published material suggesting that only one wizard in ten be of a power level high enough to enchant at all, shall we?).  Purify Water sounds like a good, basic spell; an item that is self-powering takes 550 mage-days to enchant.  Which means that all six of those wizards, working together, can reasonably bang out an item in three months; it can purify nearly 3000 gallons of fresh water per day.  In a year’s work, they can enchant enough to handle all the fresh water needs of the city for drinking.  (Unfortunately, the cooking, bathing and industrial needs for fresh water are about TEN TIMES as much.)

But sure, they stick with it for a decade.  Now the city has plenty of fresh water, magically created!

Fair enough.  But it doesn’t have magical streetlights.  It doesn’t have magical weapons.  It doesn’t have magically created food. It doesn’t have anything else enchanted.  And even that much rests on a few very flimsy premises:

* Every enchanter is a skilled water enchanter.  Why would they be?  Is every wizard you run?  Mightn’t they just as likely be earth enchanters, or fire enchanters, or temporalists, or communications specialists?

* None of them have any better gigs going on than creating fresh water for the city.  What happens when agents for Countess Silvermist come and ask a couple of the enchanters exactly how long they plan on playing Third String Waterboy for the Duke, when they could come work for the Countess for double the pay and their own private towers?

* As I mentioned in the pertinent GGF post, nothing ever goes wrong.  The Purification items don’t get stolen and sold on the black market, the city’s enemies never decide to ruin them, the wizards never strike for more money, the city always pays on time and in full, none of the wizards ever gets sick, the Duke never concludes that the city has plenty of water already and the money’s better spent refitting his cavalry troop after they got pasted in the last battle, the fire that torched a fifth of the city miraculously missed the Water Works, or the Duke’s never an egotistical snot pissed off that Countess Silvermist’s water purification items are made of gold, so his ought to be too, ditch the old ivory ones?

So sure; there are some ways wizards can have a material impact on life in a city.  If your system has a Predict Weather spell, one forecasting mage can save the lives of a lot of fishermen.  One wizard with long distance telepathy ... well, we know what instant communications can do.  A battery of wizards, as a long term civic project, well funded, might be able to implement ONE change - pure water, magical street lights - as long as that change is simple, and nothing goes wrong.

So do the math for your own systems.  How many people get to be journeyman wizards?  How many wizards are capable of enchanting?  How many wizards do you want to task to do other things: battlemages, teachers, researchers, detectives, adventurers, court wizards, mages-for-hire and fussy old coots who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered.  Does your magic system encourage/require specialization?  How long does enchanting take?  Can just anyone use an enchanted item?  Can an item work without supervision?  How fragile are magical items?  Do they have charges, after which they expire?

This is why you don’t have “magical” economies.

NPC of the Day: Kardo

I've been at this, as I've mentioned, for a long time.  I can't readily count how many significant NPCs I've created: hundreds, I expect.  I'm minded to present a new one from time to time.  They'll be posted under the GURPS system, but the numbers ought not be too tough to parse out for those of you unfamiliar with the system.

Something in which I believe is what I call the "viewpoint NPC."  Being a player, IMHO, isn't always easy.  You're not really standing in Swordpoint Ravine, looking up at the ruined tower occupied by orcs, ankle deep in the late spring mountain snow.  You're in my living room, balancing dice and your laptop with a plate of pizza and a can of DC.  You're not going to recall, instinctively, that your character has a loop of rope over your shoulder and is carrying a heavy packload.  You're not in a position to perceive, instinctively, that it's getting pretty damn cold, you're above treeline and you've only got two hours of light left.  You may have forgotten that your pal over there (excuse me, your pal's character), in the fall that happened an hour ago game time -- but, in real life, happened at the last gaming session two weeks ago -- has a wrenched shoulder.

I like, therefore, to have a viewpoint NPC.  He or she's almost always a grunt fighter, without unusual or arcane skills, and has a background consonant with the party's theme.  The V-NPC's generally self-effacing, and doesn't take a lead role in much; they're not brains or problem solvers, and don't aspire to be.  I'm pleased if the V-NPC is a bodyguard or sidekick to one of the PCs.  What the V-NPC is for, more than anything else, is to contribute editorial comment of things that I believe would be painfully obvious to adventurers on the ground, and less so to gamers lounging on my living room couch ... and so I don't need to go into third-person omniscient, which I prefer to avoid.  "Sorry, boss, but I don't like it.  Arkis can't put his full weight on his shoulder, it'll be full dark before we'll be more than halfway up that wall, and the wind's picking up something fierce.  Want me to start pitching camp?"

Kardo -- the disreputable fellow lounging above -- is the longest-running V-NPC I've ever had: he's been around a full decade now, the Ally of my original Quincy group's wizard, and following her around from just-out-of-the-academy to being the greatest PC mage of my campaign's history.  He's undergone a lot of changes over the years, but this is more or less what he looked like in 2003:

ST: 12     DX: 13     IQ: 11     HT: 12     Per: 11     Speed: 6.25     Move:  6  

Advantages: Combat Reflexes, High Pain Threshold, Night Vision+4, Rapid Healing+1, Reputation (+2, as badass pirate, among other pirates, wharf rats and lowlifes)

Perks:  Improvised Weapons, Naval Training, Weapon Bond / favorite cutlass

Disadvantages:  Code of Honor (Pirate); MMA/Rheumatism; One Hand; Sense of Duty: the "crew"; Social Stigma: Second-class citizen; Struggling; Stubbornness, Trademark

Languages:  Avanari (is illiterate) 

Skills: Area Knowledge (Warwik City)-12; Area Knowledge (Eastern Avanari coast)-12; Artist (scrimshaw)-10; Boating-13; Brawling-14; Cooper-10; First Aid-11; Gambling-10; Thrown Weapon: Knife-14; Leadership-11; Scrounging-12; Seamanship-14; Shield-14; Shortsword-15; Smuggling-12; Streetwise-12; Weather Sense-12; Singing-12 

Quirks:  "I am a tattoo artist," "Old Salt," Scrimshaw connoisseur

Raised a cooper's son in the stereotypical Small Outlying Village On The Coast, he ran off to sea at an early age.  Many years of vicissitudes aren't pertinent, but he eventually became a pirate, and a successful one.  Unfortunately, he lost his (off-)hand in a foray, and feeling he couldn't keep up any more, retired to the waterfront of the capital city, where he befriended the family of an inn catering to pirates and rogues.  Their elder daughter became a wizard, and he promised her (now-deceased) parents he'd look after her.  He's done that ever since.

Kardo's a stereotypical, sardonic Old Salt Pirate, and social graces aren't his mug of grog.  (He prefers tea to grog, as it happens.)  Even deep into middle age, he's still respected by other pirates and those who know who he is, and he can still bring it in a fight.  He's a sword-and-board fighter, preferring his favorite cutlass above all.  (It does take him a long time to get his shield settled and on, at least a minute unassisted; any sudden fight, and he won't bother.  It's also rigged to accommodate his stump, and he likewise won't bother with an unfamiliar shield.)  If you're in his "crew," so to speak, he's very loyal to you.  If you're not, well ... He's not well off, and doesn't own more than he can carry.  He has some underworld contacts, which he uses when the wizard reminds him of them.

About his oddest quirk is that he fancies himself a tattoo artist, and carries a comprehensive tattoo kit, complete with several colors of inks.  (His tattoo skill, in GURPS terms, is 7 by default, which is quite poor.)  If he has the time or opportunity, he'll tattoo prisoners with insults taken from prepared stencils, which are about as legible as you'd expect.

There you have it.

For those of you unfamiliar with GURPS, a few explanations: that Night Vision level is "pretty decent night vision," as opposed to "sees like a cat."  High Pain Threshold means that he doesn't suffer particularly from shock, and wounds don't slow him down unless he's unconscious.  Rapid Healing gives him big bonuses to health for day-to-day natural recovery.  Weapon Bond gives him +1 for *that* particular cutlass, and no others.  Naval Training gives him surefootedness on a swaying, bloody deck where others would take heavy DX penalties.  Struggling means he's a bit on the impoverished side; in Kardo's particular case, at this stage in his career, he doesn't own more than he can put in his sea bag.  The rheumatism?  Give him a HT daily, bonuses on hot dry days, penalties on cold wet ones.  If he blows it, he's -2 to everything.  Ow.  Also, never mind the picture: just about the first thing Elaina did when she accumulated enough gold to do so was pay to have his hand regenerated.

For further explanation of system stats, check out this link.