Re: Quiet or what?

I don't know about you, but I don't complain about a mailing list being
empty without posting a new subject for discussion.

A couple of new topics:
How are the peasantry, the base of the economy handled in your Spelljammer
universes?  Who grows the food, mines the metals, makes the clothes?  On
the Spelljammer itself it seems that food is magicly produced in the gardens,
but control of the gardens is a major political weapon for the lizard men.


One element I'm introducing in my new campaign is that using magic like
Plant Growth to insure high yields can tend to destroy common every day
agricultural techniques for insuring high yields.  The priests may tend to
discourage the use of fertilizer as a sign of lack of faith in their magic.
Think of the destruction Dow Chemical did in selling fertilizer, they destroyed
the old basis for managing crops as a tool to market their product.


Are metals the basis for intersystem trade?  Is their bulk transport of
produce and clothing?  Can an outpost be sustained entirely by imported
shipments?

Imagine a mining colony which mines an ore used in many magical items.  They'd
love to expand their operations, but the main limitation is a large enough
food supply being shipped to them.  Imagine area where the prices of a day's
meal is really high, a month's groundling's wages.

Can priests create enough food to sustain them?  Can a society exist entirely
on manna?  That is a lot of priests for only a few worshippers.  Do the gods
demand a cut of the mining production?

Michael Sandy