Re: Groundlings and Spelljammers

Follow the attributions if you can....

On Tue, 8 Nov 94 01:15:43 GMT <RJPugh@???.com> said:
>Forwarded message from NSBOS0340@?????.?????.edu (zKharra Dom)
>-R
>
>Michael Sandy brought up some interesting points:
>
>> To really make money off a Spelljammer, you need luxury goods.  To get
>> luxury goods you need an established trade infrastructure, roads, canals,
>> etc...  That way, wheat can be shipped to the Dwarves in huge quantities,
>> enabling more of them to work on finely crafted implements instead of
>farming
>> the low fertility mountain valleys.
>
>Depends on how you define luxury goods.  If you're defining it as "useless"
>goods, such as jewelry, then there may be a problem.

That *is* the traditional definition of luxury goods, isn't it?  France
entered the Great Lakes to get beaver furs for their *hats*.  Europe
entered China for tea and silk.  Switzerland is famous for clocks and
chocolate.  Face it--the world economy is based on "useless goods".

>On the other hand, what about selling steel to non-technological States?
>Wood to swamp kobolds?  Spices, herbs, or anything else that isn't native
>to an area?

This here anthropologist would like to remind everyone that brokering to
low-tech societies *never* works in the long run.  You import a few hundred
metal axes into the outback, and the natives don't need any more, because
they know how to take care of things and make them last forever.  The only
way you keep their attention is by importing...LUXURY GOODS (like trading
glass beads for beaver pelts), which usually leads the natives to overexploit
their own territory (not many beavers left in Ohio, nope, nope, nope) and
then they've got nothing to trade with.

Sorry.  Luxury goods are what got the world moving, and they're usually
what makes it stop again.  Have I depressed everybody enough?

--
    Michael Bauser <mbauser@??????.????.edu or mbauser@??????.bitnet>
"Provide me with ships or proper sails for the celestial atmosphere and
there will be men there, too, who do not fear the appalling distance"
                                                       --Johannes Kepler