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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1897040" data-attributes="member: 15470">From the GM*blink* I opened this thread without noting the original poster on the grounds that, as a (former) home mead-brewer, I was interested in it... only to discover that the original poster is one of my players!So, reacting to it as the GM in question, my first thought was to blink in bemusement... my second was to laugh uproariously... and my third was 'Okay, how do I work this in?'--------------------------I think the most obvious solution to practically address Fergus' dilemna would be to declare the prices incorrect on both ends. Prices in a dynamic world should reflect both supply-and-demand and cost-to-produce; 'by the book' prices of course cannot; they're listed for the convenience of a player who just wants to buy a pint of ale, or some such, rather than introducing the concept of different prices in different regions, etc. But, as observed earlier, that's 'out of character' for Fergus, here.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />If the cost-to-produce really were about 8 times the listed price for a pint of mead, then I'd expect the seller to price his mead about 8 times above that, thus limiting his mead to a higher-class patron, but that may be sensible, if we're assuming ales as the peasantry drink.Looking up beekeeping info (<a href="http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/busmgmt/budgets/budget_pdf/specialized_ls/honey_production_summer2001.pdf" target="_blank">Here's a nice spreadsheet</a> on starting a for-profit beekeeping business), however, I see that the MODERN retail price of honey is about 3.5 times as much as the bulk price of honey. If we assume the same ratio historically, and assume that your one data point was as retail price, then our price-to-buy-honey is much too high. So that's dropped our failure margin to about 2.3 : 1, which helps dramatically but doesn't solve the problem.More useful might be the following observation (from <a href="http://www.honeyshow.co.uk/files/nhspub2.pdf" target="_blank">S.W. Andrews' 'Mead and Meadmaking'</a>):Amusing - his latter observation dovetails with Fergus' economic model.So it appears that, though I as a modern home-brewer would start with 100% pure honey, it might be reasonable to assume that your dark ages mead brewer starts with honey byproducts, and thus avoids the economic problems you've outlined entirely on the grounds that they are based on an incorrect assumption (that he needs buy honey rather than honey byproduct).-------------------------------At any rate, be forwarned: your character, though s/he may be able to save towards, earn, and purchase mead-making facilities, will not be starting with sufficient starting-gold to go into business in the first session, or to pre-suppose ownership of same as part of his 'background story'.</blockquote>

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