Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pentius" data-source="post: 5682289" data-attributes="member: 6676736">True, I was more pointing out that anyone thinking it was a troll has a basis for doing so, and isn't just misremembering.Still, the real disconnect with the magic items in LotR, to me, is that the Fellowship consists of an elven prince, a highborn dwarf, a lost king, the prince(basically) of Gondor, an angel/wizard, and 4 nobodies from the backwater.  Frodo, chief of the nobodies, got no less than three exceptionally valuable artifacts as hand-me-downs.  Everyone else got maybe one.  And of those hand-me-downs, Bilbo got one as a gift, and found the other two in random dark holes.  If there was any mithril in Gondor, be it helmets, a bracelet, a codpiece, it should have gone with Boromir.  But Bilbo was able to better arm Frodo than an established kingdom was able to arm its next-in-line for a vitally important mission.  Heck, Gandalf himself, a wizard and fellow adventurer, got less loot than Bilbo did in one brief campaign!  And Gandalf was in that campaign, too!Welcome to Tangent Hour.  I'm your host, Pentius.Anyway.  I think it would be lower cost, because you could get some adamantine cutters and go to town.  The shears are a costly initial investment(3,000gp if you price them as a weapon), but you have to compare that to the cost of opening a mine, which depending on location, can entail starting your own small village.  Once the investment is made, though, you just need to pay one or two guys to cut the iron and put it on a cart.  The lower cost of wages will eventually pay off the higher investment.Breakdown(I am not a Math Guy, feel free to check this for glaring inaccuracies):-According to the SRD, <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfIron.htm" target="_blank">Wall of Iron</a> requires an 11th level caster(spell level 6), and for said caster, yields 11 squares of wall(1/caster level), 2 inches thick(1/4 caster levels).  This can also be 22 squares at 1 inch thick, at caster's preference.-2 inches thick by 5 feet(1 square) tall and 5 feet(1 square) wide makes (1/6)x5x5=4.166666666666667 cubic feet per square of wall.-Multiplied by 11 squares of wall is 45.83~ cubic feet of iron per casting.-Googling how much that would weigh produced different results, but the low end was 450 pounds per cubic foot, so I'll use that.  -According to the SRD, <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/wealthAndMoney.htm" target="_blank">each pound of iron is worth 1sp</a>.  That means 10 pounds would be worth 1 gp, and thus each cubic foot would be worth 45gp.-45.83~ x 45gp = 2062.5gp worth of iron produced with each casting.-50gp for the material component of the spell makes 2012.5gp.  You could pay your workers pretty good wages(for commoners), pay 20% in taxes or what have you, and still come out looking pretty good.</blockquote>

Verification