The economics of treasure are a complicated personal and religious question for Dwarves. For example, one might determine the real value of an object by how much someone is willing to pay or sacrifice for it. However, this is susceptible to many problems:
- What if people are really smart and pay less than it’s worth?
- What if they’re REALLY smart and pay MORE than it’s worth in order to get higher quality in the future?
- What if it’s worth a lot but they just can’t afford it so it just sits there?
- Also, what is the conversion rate between
six priceless magical artifacts stolen from Dragons
pawned accidentally by heroes
sold to some people who knew what they were and some didn’t
some of whom were heroes who fought, among other things, Dragons
who sometimes ate them and took back a portion of that treasure
if it hadn’t been spent on drinking and wenching first?
So the Human army had the choice of either surrendering, or being slain down to the last warrior. Their Bards immediately proclaimed that every single Human (including those not actually in the Kingdoms originally involved in the War) would fight to the death and never surrender, and then promptly surrendered.
Alice had decided that it would be the least trouble if she simply let them live, keep their weapons and armor, and go home; they’d been beaten, they’d surrendered, and this would surely generate goodwill.
Alice was very smart about a lot of things. The behavior of humans in large groups was one of them.
Ergo:
The Humans simply went back and proclaimed that they had won.
Or…something close? “Beaten the Dark Lord back into the pits of Hell, trapping her in her dark Citadel”, something like that.
Alice considered putting the army back together and slaughtering everyone, but the Orcs would have been terribly annoyed to have to do the same job twice. Also, there are practical problems to generating that much human meat when you are, in fact, among other things, trying to control a relatively small number of very, very large human-eating magical creatures.
It was all very frustrating.
Sam would not know if what happened next was an attempt to take advantage of his naivete, a lifesaving measure accomplished through his unexpected lack of failure in their court.
Lira practiced a form of magic which she kept attempting to describe to Sam, and which he wished he did not misunderstand as insufficiently as he did. Its erotic components were as comfortable to him as ornamental glass-heeled boots would have been. But he could not help but accept it, as the segment relating to rope and twine and entwinement was not unfamiliar to Sam. “Give me a hard point and a good rope and I will create a dozen uses of leverage without a single knot” had been an extremely relatable idea for Sam. Right, right: fate is difficult and frightening. One of the first tools of any race is some kind of rope; intertwining reeds or other flexible plant matter into something stronger to acquire flexible leverage was a core and immediate ingredient in the development of almost every civilization which had hands.
The Ancients dragged vast stones using mathematics and rope (or are we being redundant?) Rope has far too many qualities which a e far too similar to Fate, and Fate is far too complicated for Sam not to want the comfort of associating it with something he understood, which was rope.
Economics was something else entirely.
But it worked something like this:
Alice’s Kingdom made excellent ale, which no-one drank, because it was well-known that the Dark Lord only served poison.
Nobody except a number of businesspeople who, having been invited on a drinking tour of the kingdom, decided that they wouldn’t mind letting Alice sell them spirits in big, huge barrels and let them market it as their own.
This flooded the kingdom (not, sadly, literally, with alcohol, which became very cheap.
Alice then imposed a Quality Tax upon all liquor sold. It was completely guaranteed that this tax would ensure that all alcohol was of high quality. And the alcohol was STILL cheaper than it had been.
Everyone was happier, but no-one noticed, because Economics is still a forbidden magic.
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