Re: Lots of questions

Spelljammer economics were fairly botched from the beginning.  Those who
wrote the original sets expected that only luxury goods would be carried over
such vast distances, but as someone only recently pointed out, merchants
could make much more money by transporting valueable cargoes across merely
planetary distances (imagine carrying loads of pepper in a medieval style
campaign with your voyages lasting only a week or so, including loading
times).  Most spelljamming cultures aren't self-sufficient.  Bral would
require grain and cloth imports just to survive.  Imagine a small metropolis
of only 30,000 mouths.  Assuming you had a few thousand farmers somewhere on
the asteroid, you would still need in excess of 10,000 tons of grain every
year in imports.  Assuming this were done by independent merchants, that
would mean over 20 tradesmen would have to be landing full of grain every
single day.  This type of commerce would have to be heavily subsidized by the
local government.

R.