Review: The Marketplace by Phalanx Games Design

I spent 2600 words last week trying to explain the basic principles underpinning the medieval feudal system. One big area that I did not really tackle was the existence of trade in the medieval world. The short version: there certainly was trade, but far less than the massive, globalized trade that allows us to get coffee (a tropical good originating in Africa and the Middle East) into the Dunkin by my apartment in New York in the middle of winter. This trade was centered on the market, which was one of those things granted by royal charter to specific cities or towns – go back to last week's post if you don't remember what a royal charter for a city meant.

For the long answer, or if you want a realistic medieval price list for your RPG, you're going to want to check out The Marketplace by Phillip McGregor of Phalanx Games Design, a part of his larger Orbis Mundi 2 project dedicated to exploring realistic medieval life for TTRPGs. The Marketplace is available for purchase on the DMsGuild.

This article includes affiliate links, giving me a small cut of the sale at no extra cost to you or the creator. This has not influenced my review.

Utility

The Marketplace supplement is a painstakingly detailed accounting of various goods, their production and production methods, and their prices in Western Europe primarily during the 1400s. It clocks in at right around 300 pages–when I say that it is painstaking in its detail, I do mean painstaking.

On this front, I cannot recommend this as fun, light reading, or even as an enjoyable academic history. It is a pretty dry historical explainer with a lot of depth. Just to give you an example from the section on "Economic Management":

Also note the English legal prohibitions of Forestalling (aka ‘Forestel’), Regrating and Engrossing … all intended to stop market manipulation of various sorts, especially in the victualling trades. These were criminal offences and subject to heavy fines. The laws were notably ineffective, due largely to the lack of any actual enforcement authority (remember, no Police Force) – and they were repeatedly re-issued and/or the civic authorities (who were often the very people acting against their intent, or who were influenced by the wealthy people who were actually doing so) in Market Towns admonished to enforce them when things started to get too obviously out of hand.

This is not a book to read straight through, cover-to-cover. It would feel a bit like reading an encyclopedia.

The 9-page, very detailed table of conflicts is useful in hunting down which specific topic you want to read about. McGregor covers everything from urban development around the market, medieval taxation (including tariffs, property taxes, sales taxes, taxes on vices, and "other taxes"), the role of gold and silver bullion and coin minting, banking & early commerce & insurance, and the price of different forms of trade, all amongst many other topics. Again, this is incredibly detailed.

So, as a book to read for fun, even for educational purposes? 1 star. As a resource, like an encyclopedia, that has abundant sections that you can refer back to? 5 stars. This supplement does have an article about pretty much any medieval marketplace question that you might have.

History

Generally speaking, I found McGregor's history to be mostly accurate when compared to academic sources. He includes primary sources for laws to back up places where legal statutes were relevant, such as with laws concerning which different fabrics people were allowed to wear according to their social class (called sumptuary laws). In comparing McGregor's numbers to those produced by a member of the University of California Davis's Medieval Studies Department, everything is approximately the same. There are certainly some variations, but that variability falls within what I'd expect from drawing from different sources and then taking averages. There is no single, universally accurate medieval price list and records can be spotty, so if these sources are off from one another by a couple of coins, that's to be expected from variation in the historical record.

However, fact-checking McGregor is hard for one simple reason: he did not include a list of his sources. All McGregor writes is that "prices have been gleaned from an extremely wide variety of sources, mainly from the 13th and 14th centuries," but he does not include a full list of what those sources are. This is technically an RPG book and not an academic one, so this oversight is somewhat excusable, but it does cast doubt on his claims of historical reliability as there is no way to check his underlying data.

So while I think his data checks out, for the most part, that is a trickier process that would be made much easier with transparently included sources. Some sections, such as laws, do have sources, but the vast bulk of the price lists do not and I really wish that they did.

Comparison to Other Works

In terms of utility and historical accuracy (or at least presumable accuracy), The Marketplace is unmatched by other supplements in the same genre.

Grain into Gold is the other classic recommendation for a resource about developing a more historically accurate fantasy world economy. While Grain into Gold is shorter and in some ways more accessible, it makes some big historical jumps for the sake of that accessibility. My own experience with Grain into Gold is that it dedicated far too much ink to building out the math behind something like a single loaf of bread, without focusing enough on explanations of variation. The Marketplace has this in abundance, focusing on explanations just as much as prices. And not to mention, the price lists of The Marketplace put those in Grain into Gold to shame in their scale and detail.

Additionally, Grain into Gold has some historicity issues. The author of The Marketplace critiques his main competitor on the following grounds:

Right at the start it accepts the copper-silver-gold coinage system that dominates Fantasy RPGs which is, historically speaking, absolute rubbish for medieval europe....

Their information on cereal crop yields is more or less correct... but their understanding of how crops were grown (a *single* ox pulling a plough? ...), crop rotation and where it was and wasn't adopted (and why), the yield differences (around 20-25%), and taxation (*only* 50%! serfs are estimated to have paid around 60-65% of their crops, all crops, not just cereal crops as GiG claims, in taxes) .... well, let's say that the information provided is dubious at best.

All in all, when comparing these two products that are classically recommended for those interested in medieval economies for worldbuilding, there is no comparison for those interested in historical accuracy: the Marketplace wins.

Conclusion

The Marketplace is not a perfect product. It is detailed to the extent of being unwieldy and overwhelming. It does not transparently list out its sources, making its claims of historical accuracy difficult to assess. It does not provide support for altering any base assumptions (such as the impact of magic or messing with the levels of trade from their historical baseline, as might exist in a fantasy setting).

However, it is significantly better than its main rival. The Marketplace works as a supplement because of its massive scale; if I have not gone through and tried to think out the impact on the grain industry caused by a particular spell effect, The Marketplace will give me a quick-and-dirty list of prices to take (even breaking down bread by different types of grain), and it will give me a sizable explanation of medieval baking. It is this added context that elevates the product for anyone interested in more historical economics for their world. It may not directly have support for making significant alterations to the economy, but it does explain why bread prices are what they are, and so a careful GM might be able to use it to build out their own price lists.

As for me? Well, a functioning economy is my white whale for my home game's world. I have tried many supplements and put in the hours to alter them according to my world lore, I've tried making my econ major friend help me build out a model, and I've tried making up numbers at random that feel like they'll fit the game balance. None of these have left me happy. The Marketplace's price lists feel comparatively good to me, even if I have difficulty using them on the fly and certainly with adapting them in any productive or useful form.

My real advice is this: find a product you like with price lists (D&D's broken economy, The Marketplace, Grain into Gold, or anything else!) and just use that. And if you have a historically grounded Excel sheet that lets you mess with trade relationships and technology and substitution goods and magic and multiple currencies and whatever else I've done to ruin all my work on fantasy economic systems, send it to me.

I hope this review does not send me spiraling back down the economy spreadsheet rabbit hole; I've thrown a lot of hours into that hole multiple times in the past with nothing usable to show for it.