What crops grow where? What wildlife is prevalent where? And to a lesser degree, what gemstones are found where? In MOST games the answer to these questions doesn't matter. Hell, the questions are never asked. All taverns have the same ale. Everyone eats the same Soylent. And gems magically appear in treasure troves. Swords are forged from air and imagination. Salt isn't a consideration. Neither is clay. But that's not how I'm trying to roll, as you know if you've ever read any of the worldbuilding or NTME posts on this blog. Resources exist. They COME from someplace. And their value varies from place to place depending on availability and the presence of craftsmen.
Minerals were pretty “easy” to allocate. So was livestock. But then came more specific variations. “Game” was easy. But there's a difference between muskrats and snow leopards. “Fowl” was easy but ducks and turkeys vary. “Cereals,” “Fruits,” and “textiles” were easy but corn, rye, cotton, apples and oranges each have specific requirements. And then there's gemstones, as mentioned in an earlier post.
So I started with the Koppen-Geiger classification. Can also use the USDA “hardiness scale” but no overarching info exists on this either. Already have the temperature profile, rainfall data and elevation information for every city on the planet. The current location of the party is ALL Cfb or Dfb. But what crops grow in which climate. And what wildlife thrives where? For H in Hexes uses the K-G system overlayed with global production data to determine what crops grow best where. They've provided the data for six crops, but replicating their data is well beyond my ability. I've written to request data use. We'll see. I've done hours of online research and this is the closest thing I've found to compare crops to Koppen.
Next up? Wildlife. So beaver and otter need sufficient water. Wolves need sufficient prey. Snow leopards need … snow. But I want some kind of crunchy system to determine what's hunted where, based on climate and maybe dominant flora. And perhaps altitude. ALL of these searches have been overly cluttered with climate change data. Nice that it's out there but not what I'm looking for <G>. And I'm not finding what I'm looking for. I'd love find a chart wherein I can look up an animal (wolf, ermine, deer) and it'll tell me in what habitat it thrives. But no love.
All the above applies to gems as well, but I'm not NEARLY as worried about it. I've plopped the gems into the dwarven areas, the precious stones (and all black stones!) in the Orc homeland. The Celtic area gets all the green stones. Norse culture gets Scandinavian stones. Halflings get ornamental stones. Pearls found in harbor cities with rivers. Coral found in harbor cities without a river. Rare. Distributed.
How much more time to I spend looking for a panacea before I do it one item at a time.
I started with this data: http://www.earthstat.org/harvested-area-yield-175-crops/
ReplyDeleteYou can get a map for each crop in an image format and then use GIMP or something to overlay a K-G map of earth. Then just do a little manual labor to guess which of the K-G areas have the highest concentration of those crops. You'd have to do that for each animal you want to add to the system as well (wolves might be C & D, for instance). That's a lot of manual legwork.
We are in a unique place where this data is simply not useful to those best suited to collect it (crop scientists, biologists, etc) and yet the gaming community is wholly uninterested in its curation. So we toil alone.
But our efforts will pay off.