Quarrying Stone

General ACKS Forums General Discussion
1

I'm getting ready to run a game somewhat inspired by the colonization of Australia--something like the Roanoke game mentioned here. I'm imagining raw resource acquisition to be an important part of at least the early game, until some land gets cleared of lairs and/or a proper urban settlement is established, and we can assume NPCs will handle this all on their own.

I've seen rules about clearing forests and mining, but I haven't come across any for quarrying and stonecutting--does anyone have something already made up? If not, would it be worth it to work something up?

I don't know enough about early colonial structures to decide the latter. Are rocky outcroppings common enough that any sufficiently large band of yahoos can figure out how to make stone structures? Or is there enough scarcity that if I'm in a resource-strapped group of 400 marines, 100 civil servants, and 1000 convicts that this has fun potential?

I see fun coming for the PCs in the form of this being a great early quest--find a good quarry site and secure it, then secure and blaze a trail leading through several 1.5mi hexes of wilderness.

Thoughts from y'all?

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It's generally accepted that the costs in construction projects include the cost to mine and work the stone needed to build a structure.  Therefore, if stone is present at normal levels in the region, you should assume that construction projects for stone buildings can proceed at the normal pace for the normal cost.

If stone is more scarce, I think "Domains at War" mentions that materials represent something like 25% of the total cost of a construction project, so if stone in your region is twice as expensive/rare, then you could reasonably expect a stone structure to cost 125% as much as what's in the book and, therefore, take slightly longer to construct.

I'm assuming you've had a chance to look at Domains at War: Campaigns, but if you haven't you'll absolutely want to check out the "Construction Projects" section for more ideas on how the costs of making structures is broken up.  Of course, all the rules describe "the default", but there should be enough guidance that if you, for example, decide that stone is much rarer in the region, you'll know what to do.

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I have taken a look at Domains at War and it’s the foundation of what I’m planning. My question is more about assuming there isn’t an established market for stone yet–like the mining rules do for metal. I think “quest for the quarry” might be fun, and I’m curious if anyone else has set up rules to place quarriable stone in here-- the mining rules.

Thanks for your suggestions!

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The mining rules could be adjusted for stone or other non-metal things you can mine, at whatever frequency you want them to occur. (I am assuming you’re talking about the mining rules I wrote in the downloads section; if not, the rest of this post will not make very much sense!)

The things you would want to adjust, to start with, would be the Mineral Veins Per Hex; if you want metal and stone to be rare, you don’t have to change this at all, but if you want metal to remain equally common you would need to increase the number of veins per hex. The amount that you would need to increase them depends on the next step; you’d want to make yourself a quick binary table, just two results on it. Whenever a vein is found, it’s either metal or stone. If metal, use the existing rules from there on; if stone, go further down this post.

To maintain the same level of metal, you’d need to divide the amount of veins found per hex by the chance of being metal. For example, if 50% of veins found are metal, you’d need to divide by 1/2 (that is, doubling the number of veins found) to make sure that the average amount of metal is still found. If, however, you just want metal and stone to be less common, maybe there’s just half as much metal!

If you have decided you have found a vein of stone, for the purpose of abstraction and not needing to write any more rules right now, I would then reflavor the existing rules to figure out how much stone you actually extract in a week of work. One mining team gets you a base of 40 gp of work per week. Roll for quality of the vein of stone as normal, and multiply the quality as a percentage by the base work to find out how much GP value of stone can be extracted per week. Stone doesn’t need to be smelted, so this is really the only thing you need to do for it.

If you want to, however, you could reflavor the common/precious metals table to be different kinds of stone, and use that as a base to get further customization in your veins of stone. If you do this, consider the amount of stone of ore mined per week as a percentage of the weight of the load of trade item as a modifier to the amount of stone mined. (That is, for common metals, 100 stone/week [tin] is baseline, 200 stone/week [iron] is double normal productivity; while for precious metals, 4 stone/week [electrum] is baseline, while 32 stone/week [mithril] is 8x normal productivity).

(PS - I wrote this reflavoring addition in the text box and not a spreadsheet like I would normally do, so there is a possibility of a math error somewhere!)