Finally ready to submit a finance report on covenant expenditures, using the rules from chapter 5 of Covenants! Hooray, you can stop holding your breath now. All feedback and corrections welcome. Since some of these numbers change over time, the calculations below are based on the year 1223.
The first step is to calculate "points of inhabitants". We're living large like a Summer covenant (bonus of 2 to our aging rolls), as are all the covenfolk, so we're using the last two columns of the table on page 63.
7 magi: 70
2 companions: 10
10 specialists: 30
12 craftsmen: 36
47 grogs: 94
41 horses: 31
3 dependents (age 5 and over, not working): 6
58 servants*: 116
41 teamsters*: 82
Total points of inhabitants: 485
- minimums according to Covenants rules
With this number in hand, we can calculate annual expenditures (in pounds of silver per year). While the rules might say to round everything to the nearest whole number, it's precisely as easy for my spreadsheet to round to the nearest tenth (which is to say, keeping all divisions by 2 or 5 or 10 exact).
Buildings: 48.5
Consumables: 97.0; reductions from candlemaker -3.0, cooper -3.5
Provisions: 242.5; reductions from beekeeper -3.0, stablemaster -3.5, vintner -5.0
Wages: 97.0; additional wages (penny per day) for each grog and Gunnar +48.0
Writing materials: 10.0; reduction from percamenarius: -5.0
Laboratories[sup]1[/sup]: 7.5; reductions from Chastity -20%, glassblower -20%, toolsmith -20%
Weapons and armor[sup]2[/sup]: 13.8
Sundries[sup]3[/sup]: 1.0
Tithe to the bishop: 500.0
Total annual expenditures: 1037.3
[sup]1[/sup] This is a tedious calculation based on the Upkeep of each lab and the number of seasons in use; the figure given is for 1223.
[sup]2[/sup] To make things simple, I said that there are 50 expensive weapons, 50 standard weapons, 50 standard shields, and 50 full suits of expensive armor at Mons Electi.
[sup]3[/sup] I didn't list any expenses (or income) from stories. For example, don't Fiona and Marcus gather some gold in 1223.4? I also didn't list any special purchases (gems for enchanted items, for example).
Also, one counterintuitive note to those who have bothered to build an intuition on these rules in the first place. Often we think "hey let's hire a bunch of craftsmen" for reducing expenditures. But because our craftsmen have such a high standard of living, this is not nearly as effective as one might think. If we were to acquire a "common" craftsman with Craft Ability score 6, we essentially break even; if their craft score is less than 6, it even costs us money overall! For "rare" craftsmen, they will save us about 1 pound per year at Craft Ability score 5, or 2 pounds per year at 6, and so on. (The "common" and "rare" categories of craftsmen are defined, vaguely, on page 66 of Covenants.)
Questions that still remain to be answered:
- What is the covenant's annual income - exactly 1000 pounds, or something else? Do we want to incorporate inflation as recommended by Covenants? Do we want this income to fluctuate over the years, randomly or otherwise?
- What are the covenant's silver stocks at the end of 1223?
- Have we yet implemented any magical expenditure reductions or income enhancements?