Tolls

My players are fixing up a Keep that acts as a chokepoint along an important river trade route.  The Core book section on mercantile exchange addresses tolls at the market destination, but not along the way.  What would be a reasonable amount for them to charge boats as tolls to pass?

Personally, I would think this would be covered by the abstracted land value.

The ability to collect tolls usefully is a feature of the terrain, after all.

I think it's wrapped into tax revenue if you're the domain ruler, and market tolls if you're the merchant. This is a little abstract, so I suppose it depends on the scale and detail of your players' operation. Also, if they are not the ruler(s) of the domain they may find themselves in a bit of trouble when they start charging tolls! That rather sounds like banditry. :)

Well, they’re not collecting land revenue yet . . .

You could use the tolls listed by market class to assess what they could charge, and you can use the number of merchants available each month in the nearest market as an assessment of how many tolls they'll be able to chare.

Does the mention to "charge PCs a minimum toll of 1 GP per load" apply to merchants as well, or do they pay the flat rate (1d6+15 gp on 6d8 loads, Class I)

I mainly ask because that average toll charge is less than the average number of loads. (and theoretically might make a difference if one starts abstracting a PC-controlled "merchant guild" as an independent agency in such that it changes the modeling) 

 

 

Seems like setting up a keep like that might cause some heartburn with the settlements connected via that trade route...

Yeah, setting up tolls where you’re not the domain ruler is something entirely different from what I had first envisioned!

In addition to Alex’s suggestion, I would think that it would have two major effects; it would reduce trade in the settlements connected (by increasing cost). You could abstract this by seeing what the trade would look like if they were farther apart or otherwise harder to reach. And it would get, at minimum, an emissary sent from the domain ruler. (Depending on the domain ruler, the emissary might range from a polite reminder to an immediate attack.)

[quote="Aryxymaraki"] Yeah, setting up tolls where you're not the domain ruler is something entirely different from what I had first envisioned! In addition to Alex's suggestion, I would think that it would have two major effects; it would reduce trade in the settlements connected (by increasing cost). You could abstract this by seeing what the trade would look like if they were farther apart or otherwise harder to reach. And it would get, at minimum, an emissary sent from the domain ruler. (Depending on the domain ruler, the emissary might range from a polite reminder to an immediate attack.) [/quote]

The Keep they're rehabilitating is actually not in a domain; they're in the process of trying to establish their own domain in the wilderness.  And the route it is on is actually much shorter and easier than the existing route, so in theory it will make it *less* expensive to go this new way, even if there is a toll applied.

I'm going to disagree somewhat with the idea of this being taken for banditry, at least depending on the era you're riffing off of.  In a Roman model, maybe, but European medieval feudalism for instance was tolls all the way down.  Build a castle on a hill or bluff on a river, keep the very immediate environs plausibly clear of [competing] bandits, and you're a real lord.  That the lords up and down river of you are doing the same thing is just one of the operating expenses of not living in a market economy, not actually anything anyone's going to do something about.

Actual bandits were even worse.  They'd take your whole cargo, burn what they couldn't carry, roast your oxen or mules for food, hold men of wealth or station for ransom and sell the rest into slavery.  Tolls would have been getting off easy.