SolitonMan
Explorer
NOTICE: THIS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!!
Hi everyone!
I recently began DMing the Age of Worms adventure path for a group of five players, and they have reached the portion of the Whispering Cairn where they encounter Alastor Land and agree to help him by burying his bones, after they managed to find and disable the iron sphere trap. (room 23)
This has lead to a situation in which the players, all of whom are intelligent, realized that the iron spheres are worth money. Geek with me for a moment if you will - iron has a density of 7.874 g/cm3, which works out to about (correct me if I've miscalculated) 497 lbs./ft3. The room is filled with iron spheres that, while not taking up the entire space, could roughly be approximated to fill an area that is 20 ft x 50 ft x 10 ft which is 10000 ft3. Using this rough approximation yields a total amount of iron of around five million pounds, which, using the PHB definition of wealth, is of 5,000,000 sp value. A half million gp of value for characters at level 2.
I'm just curious if anyone else running the campaign has encountered this situation, and if so, how you handled it. I don't want to rule that, "It's magic iron, it evaporates if you take it from the cairn," because that seems artificial to me. The description of the cairn talks about how it resets itself every month, and at that time it replaces any lanterns that were removed from the place, for example. I didn't see anything in the module that would prevent the players from removing the iron spheres for profit, but it seems like substantial profit could be made. I haven't figured out the costs involved in retrieving the spheres, but it seems likely to me that such activity would attract unwanted attention (which may be how I handle the action so that the PCs don't make TOO much money for their level, which is 2). To their credit, the PCs realize that drawing attention is the last thing they want, as well as the fact that flooding the market with iron will drive down the price (and thus their profits). The last thing they discussed at the end of the most recent session was how it might be useful to extract about 100 gp a week worth of iron, and only ramp up production if they really need the cash for a specific purpose.
I'm not really worried about this, but the whole conversation got me thinking and I just wondered how others who have encountered this situation have handled it. Thanks in advance for any of your insights!
Hi everyone!
I recently began DMing the Age of Worms adventure path for a group of five players, and they have reached the portion of the Whispering Cairn where they encounter Alastor Land and agree to help him by burying his bones, after they managed to find and disable the iron sphere trap. (room 23)
This has lead to a situation in which the players, all of whom are intelligent, realized that the iron spheres are worth money. Geek with me for a moment if you will - iron has a density of 7.874 g/cm3, which works out to about (correct me if I've miscalculated) 497 lbs./ft3. The room is filled with iron spheres that, while not taking up the entire space, could roughly be approximated to fill an area that is 20 ft x 50 ft x 10 ft which is 10000 ft3. Using this rough approximation yields a total amount of iron of around five million pounds, which, using the PHB definition of wealth, is of 5,000,000 sp value. A half million gp of value for characters at level 2.
I'm just curious if anyone else running the campaign has encountered this situation, and if so, how you handled it. I don't want to rule that, "It's magic iron, it evaporates if you take it from the cairn," because that seems artificial to me. The description of the cairn talks about how it resets itself every month, and at that time it replaces any lanterns that were removed from the place, for example. I didn't see anything in the module that would prevent the players from removing the iron spheres for profit, but it seems like substantial profit could be made. I haven't figured out the costs involved in retrieving the spheres, but it seems likely to me that such activity would attract unwanted attention (which may be how I handle the action so that the PCs don't make TOO much money for their level, which is 2). To their credit, the PCs realize that drawing attention is the last thing they want, as well as the fact that flooding the market with iron will drive down the price (and thus their profits). The last thing they discussed at the end of the most recent session was how it might be useful to extract about 100 gp a week worth of iron, and only ramp up production if they really need the cash for a specific purpose.
I'm not really worried about this, but the whole conversation got me thinking and I just wondered how others who have encountered this situation have handled it. Thanks in advance for any of your insights!
