Mundane Costs

In the playtesting I’ve done so far, because I want to get across the economics of the game I find I am often needing to figure out how much mundane stuff costs - for example, a week at an inn, or having a blacksmith hammer a crest into a breastplate.
This stuff is, no doubt, derivable from other parts of the system, but in play it’d be awesome to have a big list of examples, up to and including ‘how much does it cost to build a village that could house 30 or 300 people" and “how much would it cost to supply such a village.” If folks want to start compiling stuff like this - both requests for costs that would be useful in play, and approximations of what they should be - I made a Google document at https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0An7IQrnAKr7rdFA4WlIzRHBfeHM5M3JEdGVMc0tDV1E&hl=en_US that you can add to.
A related point is the workshop for magic items. Following up on the comment at http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?585515-Adventurer-Conqueror-King&p=14207240#post14207240 I like the idea that the workshop has two tiers: journeymen whose labor is part of the basic functionality of the workshop (you need bottle-washers and crucible-tenders just to get anything done), and apprentices who can make items on their own.
If we agree that this makes sense - given what we know about medieval craft workshops, the assumption that mages’ laboratories are in civilized areas that could support many workers, and the idea that being a journeyman is part of the training a mage receives to reach first level - let’s quantify how many workers are part of the workshop for every 2,000 gp invested into it, and also think about how much the upkeep of these workers would be.
I always find the economy more concrete when it’s translated into flesh and blood - if an elemental gets loose and kills three journeymen in your workshop, that’s both more exiting than having it do X gp worth of damage, and is also a gameable way to figure out how much damage the elemental does (because keeping journeymen alive is a clear goal).

‘if an elemental gets loose and kills three journeymen in your workshop, that’s both more exiting than having it do X gp worth of damage, and is also a gameable way to figure out how much damage the elemental does’
…and as they may have relatives, dependents and creditors, it helps seed further complications for the PCs.

Not sure I would consider the death of three journeyman mage employees as a “mundane cost” :slight_smile:
Remind me NOT to ask for a job with the Autarch gang :slight_smile:

Judging from his PC’s behavior in the White Sandbox campaign, our intern is quite likely to have been the one to cause the elemental to go berserk in the first place.