Some quick replies:
Storminator said:
I'll note that clerics and bards can also make magic items, and I would certainly expect clerics to make magic arms and armor.
Of course. My first 3.x character was a dwarven cleric who put as many ranks as he could into weaponsmith and armorsmith so he could do just that. I haven't gotten to clerics yet really. I'll figure them in as soon as I can and then adjust previous statements to fit everything together.
RangerWicket said:
Where do the monsters get the treasure? Why aren't they already dead from having hundreds of people hunt them down and take their stuff?
I touch on that in one of my posts. I think that the GP value for CRs is a little too high, at least at lower levels. This is the medieval age, all the wealth is accumilated at the top. One solution is that they simply aren't that common. Every village doesn't have a tomb waiting for adventurers to clear out for generations. Why isn't everyone clamoring to clear out the one that is there and why hasn't it been clreaed out years ago. Easiest solution that somebody else touched on is that is that the PCs are the lucky ones that find out about it. They get the secret treasure map to follow and probably have to keep it quiet of the village will get their own group together. The party may have to keep it quiet or the village might see them as a CR1 encounter. Watch _The Seven Samurai_ for a look inside the peasant's mind and life. It may be fuedal Japan but it carries over into Europe fairly well. The peasants may be poor but they all have hidden drink and food because life is so hard, it is required to survive. They are not above preforming coup de grace on a lone sleeping knight to take his stuff which they keep hidden. So far, the peasant's life I've laid out is for a serf. Such serfs aren't allowed to wander away from their land and adventure by law. They are tied to the land. The lord not only doesn't want them adventuring because if they die, his income drops, but also because he wants to adventure to gain that money (and XP). If they do, and its discovered, they'll have everything taken away and be punished because the system is there to keep them in check. Another excuse is that the money is there but typically the DM makes it too easy for the adventures. An extended peasant family, father with sons and families, would probably be a CR 1 encounter. They may have 300 GP worth of "treasure" but it's 100 GP worth of food (probably over 10 pounds per GP value), 100 gp of rusty farm tools, 10 GP in patched clothing, 10 GP for the instrument the father plays at the festivals, 40 GP in peasant furnature in their houses, 30 Gp for the rusty sword and daggers they had, and 10 GP in silver that is buried under the floor boards in the house a foot deep in the ground. Similarly, most wealth of a CR1 humanoid group is going to be in the form or food, arms, and armor.
PJ-mason said:
But how big would the surrounding kingdoms need to be to get that many mercenaries? 15,150 is a lot of people to find in kingdoms like these, isn't it?
Ya, just paying out for 15,150 mercenaries isn't something that could actually be done easily. But then again, the example was to show that raising such an army is not cheap nor easy enough for even an epic adventuring party to simply pay out of pocket and have done. That is the the scale that countries work on and while an epic party could easily work on that level, it would require a different mindset and preparation that the low level dungeon crawl with a few hirelings. That model just doesn't scale up very well.
Of course, even in RL you encounter stories of small trained groups (adventuring parties) defeating much larger groups or at least preforming heroicly against them. There were several instances in Greek history where small groups of several hundred men fougth off thousands because they could fight them in mountain passes where only a few could fight at a time and the well trained Greeks slaughtered soldier after soldier in one on one combat.
