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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ximenes088" data-source="post: 4225295" data-attributes="member: 59899">I mean that if you say a 50% profit is good for a magic item merchant, and thus you should get 5,000 gold for selling a 10K-creation-cost sword, then you're assuming that the merchant is dead certain he can sell that sword for 10K without paying anything out of pocket. Once you subtract luxury taxes, bribes, security, and the risk premium, the merchant would've been better off spending 5,000 gold on mining picks.As you request, a brief extract from Charles D'Avenant's "An Essay on the East-India Trade", 1697."I shall therefore only give one instance, and that is pepper, by which some judgment may be made of all the other commodities. Pepper 5000 tuns at 2 d. per lb as it may cost the Dutch in India, amounts to 74,666l. 13 s. 4 d. Add to this 3 d. per lb for freight into Holland, then it costs 5 d. per lb which amounts to 186,666. 13 s. 4 d. Ditto 500 tuns sold in Holland at 12 d. per lb the profit being 7 d. per lb will amount to 261,333. 6 s. 8 d. But this commodity is grown so necessary, and has so obtained, and is of such general use, that it may be sold in Holland at 6 s. per lb which is less than any of the other spices, as cheap in India as pepper. Then 5000 tuns sold in Holland at 6 s. per lb the profit bing 5 s. 7 d. per lb will amount to 2,498,836. 13 s. 4 d."The profit on one pound of pepper after transportation? About fourteen and a half times what it cost to bring it. But spices are notoriously high-profit goods. What of ordinary trade in non-luxuries? D'Avenant's pamphlet is useful, for it is against the inclusion of a sumptuary law that would prohibit the export of many luxury goods to India, and thus cut exports in half. He points out, "If this trade be so restrained, by prohibitions, as that there can be sent to India, not above per ann. 200,000 l. The national profit from thence arising cannot reasonably exceed 600,000 l. The companies charge and expence, to support and carry on their affairs abroad, may be modestly computed at per ann. 100,000 l. Which sum will be a great weight upon per ann. 600,000 l. But will fall lightly upon per ann. 1,200,000 l."...thus making clear that he expects 3:1 profit on the most banal sundries and ordinaries, completely ignoring high-profit luxury trades. But in a larger sense, it's certainly true that the  grain merchant wasn't usually making 3:1 on wheat- albeit in the fourteenth century, English grain prices varied by up to a factor of four- but PCs don't sell magic swords to commodity brokers. They sell them to gentleman adventurers like those of the East India Company.</blockquote>

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