A good Potter will be able to fabricate many needed products. The rules listed on this page will give detailed information about how this can be accomplished. Like developing any industry, pottery requires a bit of investment and hard work to produce goods in great quantity or of any sophistication. Any potter can sit down with a wad of clay and make an ash tray like school children do. Works of greater innovation however require some special preparation.

A facility

The first thing a potter or group of potters need is a place to work. Technically pottery work can be done outside, but precipitation such as rain will generally prevent any work from being done 50% of the days. In cold winter months no clay working outdoors can be done at all. If you want your potters to work most efficiently, I recommend building them a building. Any kind is really ok, but a fire place will be necessary for winter. In addition a couple chairs and tables can't hurt either.

Tools

The next things your Potters will need are tools. Fortunately the basic tools a potter needs are very simple and the average potter can make from sticks with a sharp rock. Thanks to this, personal tools are of little or no concern. There are however two important pieces of equipment that require more effort to build. The first and most necessary is a Kiln. Kilns bake clay products and turn them from soft mud to hard pottery. All clay products need to be baked in a Kiln, often times twice. A second device is a Potters Wheel, and it is much more complicated. Fortunately not all goods require a Potters Wheel to make. A detailed description of how to make each of these items will follow. A kilns can be built as described below. A Potter's Wheel can only be made by a tinker.

How Much Pottery can be produced?

There are three primary factors that limit how much pottery a potter can make in a given time. The first is availability of materials such as workable clay and fuel to heat the kiln. Secondly is of course the limitation of how much sculpting and shaping a potter can do over that time. Thirdly is the capacity of the kilns, to bake pottery.

Any potter can produce a particular quantity of work in a month. We will represent these as PLU or Pottery Labor Units. Better skilled potters are more efficient and produce more PLUs. Any pottery gods you wish produced will have a PLU value associated with it so you know how many a potter can manage to physically form a month. This is completely different however from the kiln's capacity to bake those products.

A kiln in needed to bake pottery. Often times pottery needs to be baked twice to add a glaze making it water tight. Burning fuel for a kiln is also a major expense of the pottery industry. All these things in mind, the running and capacity of Kilns available are as important as the ability of the potter to form the products. A score we will call KCS or Kiln Capacity Units will represent the amount of work a kiln can do.

First, there are 2 general types of kiln that can be built, and you must decide upon which you want. These are referred to as a "Simple kiln" or a "Professional kiln", and each can be made by potters or mortar makers of at least adept level. Identical kilns are used by mortar makers and potters. The amount of material they can bake in a given time period is represented in KCUs, or Kiln Capacity Units. Standard kilns can hold about 2 cubic foot worth of material at any give time. Professional Kilns can bake about 4 cubic feet worth of material at a single time. Think of a KCU as roughly equal to 1 cubic foot of space in a kiln for roughly one hour of time.

Simple Kiln- Simple Kilns can be fabricated from very simple materials that can generally be obtained for free as part of the construction time for the kiln. Generally there made from flagstone, clay brick, adobe and mud. Building one requires about 50 General Labor Units (GLUs). A simple Kiln can bake 50 KCUs per day ( up to 1400 per month). It generally burns 1/2 unit of coal or charcoal (1.5 units of fire wood) for each KCUs worth of material it bakes.

Professional Kiln- Unlike a simple kiln, a professional one is much more demanding and costly to make. It requires a full 75 units of stone or brick as well as 20 units of mortar. Additionally it requires 25 hours of labor from a professional stonemason. Though it has a larger capacity than a simple kiln, it makes up for its cost over the long run over several simple kilns due to the efficiency of fuel consumed to product fired. A profesional Kiln can bake 100 KCUs per day ( up to 2800 per month). It generally burns 1/2 unit of coal or charcoal (1 unit of fire wood) for each KCUs worth of material it bakes.

A potters efficiency at shaping pottery is very much a function of his skill. The table below tells how much work a potter can do based on his rank, and is expressed in PLUs.

Examples of a pottery operation

• We have an adept potter who has a simple Kiln
• She wants to spend here month making a lot of Domestic Pottery.
• She has 336 PLUs this month
• Domestic Pottery requires 2 PLUs each
• She can make 168 Domestic Pottery pieces.
• This requires only 168 KCUs from the kiln, well within this months 1400 limit
• It uses up only 42 units of workable clay. (1/4 unit per piece)
• She burns 98 units of firewood in her kiln over the 4 days baking (50 KCUs a day)

• We have a Grand Master Potter with a professional kiln
• She wants to make a lot of Clay Bricks.
• She has 560 PLUs this month.
• Bricks require 1 PLU, so she makes 560
• This uses 560 units of Workable Clay.
• It will require 560 KCUs, well under it's 2800 limit.
• The Kiln can do 100 KCUs at a time, so 6 uses will be needed.
• Each use costs 24 units of firewood each time, so 144 units of fire wood are burnt.