Okay, that's it, I've had enough. Adventurers, STAND UP FOR YOURSELVES!!

[Mark Chance]

You old softy!

Not soft. We liked to live dangerously. We figured having the Duke and Duchess possibly survive being ransomed back to Urnst and thereby becoming political powerful enemies of our characters would make the campaign more interesting.

 

[Capellan]

Nothing against the Story Hour or the character, he's great, but Hextor is not nice, and neither are his priests.

*sniffle* (contact) doesn't wuv me anymore!!



Personally, I'd rather be a live sycohpant to Hextor than a man with a crossbow bolt in his face, but to each their own.

In fact, I'd send a message post haste to the nearest temple of Heironious mentioning his presence, and seeing if I couldn't get some kind of "race to save the town" brotherly competition going.

You'd better hope the first nancy-boy ... sorry, "Priest of Heironeous" ... to turn up can do the job, or your town is going to be in a world of pain by the time the second one arrives

Yeah, I've read The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. The idea presented is that "lawful PCs should jump at the chance to pay the tax". Heh! Riiiiiiight! Like THAT ever happens! Watch that Lawful alignment, now!

To be perfectly honest, Kull (as the only Lawful member of the party) had no problem paying the customs tax. It's a lawful charge. He didn't even have an issue with paying them a share of the salvage: one PC had Profession (Sailor), but the group did need their help with such a large vessel.

What he did have a problem with (apart from the other financial issues that arwink alludes to, above) is that they'd just been warned about a horde of well-armed lizardmen on their doorstep, which their sheriff had completely failed to uncover, and their reaction was "well, go kill them for us". I'll be posting Kull's thoughts on this in the Story Hour some time in the next 12 hours. Suffice it to say that he takes a dim view of such spineless indifference

 

[coyote6]

Untrained laborers (like well-diggers) earn about 1 sp per day (PHB, pg. 72), and as they almost certainly take no holidays, that pans out to almost four gold pieces per year.

Four. Almost.

Almost forty; silver is worth 1/10th gold.

But, yeah, D&D has two economies; presumably, there are nobles or very rich merchants or somebody involved with the "adventurer economy", somewhere; those would be the guys you go to for the big rewards. Your standard village o' peasants is not going to be able to come up with a decent (by adventurer standards) reward.

And the guys that manned the ship, and brought it back to town -- how were they not entitled to a share (I'm assuming it was one share for the group, not a share per person)? Yes, the adventurers did the combat -- that's why they get a share each. But without the crew to get the boat back to dry land, y'all would have got nothing but an introduction to D&D's Swim rules. If the ship is big enough to have hidden cells and hide lizardfolk below decks, it's too large for one guy to handle, no matter what his skills. It's likely too large for a handful of adventurers, period, especially if only one of 'em is a sailor. So them getting a slice of the pie isn't that bad.

Taxes suck, but "death & taxes", right? As far as I know, real life ship salvagers have to pay taxes on the money they get.

If you really want to get back at 'em, don't attack them (that'll just make you the Dire Threat that the next band of adventurers are begged to stop) -- just arrange to be out of town when the bad guys attack, let the villains loot the town, then heroically return to hunt down said villains and avenge the village's suffering. And, of course, loot the villains' corpses. Who knows where they got all their loot?