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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 435964" data-attributes="member: 6929">It seems that the most important piece of technology is neither physical nor thaumaturgical, but mental. A detailed analysis of economy is easy to do today, but how many medieval rulers could do that calculation in their head? Even if they could, the commoners couldn't. Education has changed society so that it can make use of technical advances; before widespread education, even if you gave someone the means and plans to produce plasma rifles, you wouldn't change the world because that person would make them all himself and take six months a piece.A medieval society isn't very effective at educating its populace. Wizards are probably rich nobles who can afford to support their habits. And what do rich nobles fear? People coming to kill them. So they build the perfect guards: Golems. And then when nobody comes to kill them, they decide they want an extension to their mansion and set the golem to build it. Alright, so this isn't an assured outcome, but it could account for the presence of golems in labour roles; after all, if you have this thing, why do you need to pay for labourers?But that's neither here nor there. Of more interest to me is this idea of draining the populace of energy to power item creation. Most importantly, How many people are available as plebians? How much XP can you gather? It seems that one Nexus Tower provides a mimimum of 10,000XP per annum, which is a fair quantity; even the most expensive magic items I can find are not in excess of 100,000gp, and at 1/25th base cost in XP, that's only 4000 - enough for two items of near-artifact power per year, or literally hundreds of little +1 magic weapons or armours.Over a period of ten years, therefore, a Nexus Tower running at minimal settings will be able to crank out perhaps 800 sets of magic weapon+armour, none of which will need upkeep. The military applications of this are stunning. The question is, Is the will to do this there? Has someone sat down and thought about it? Or is it just lost potential like so many uneducated societies?</blockquote>

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