Output of an adamantine mine?

[Norfleet]

now, i haven't been playing very long but when i DM, i love to mess with my " pawns' " heads. first off, obviously, it would take a long time to get any of the adamentine out. so maybe in the process, they inadvertently wake something (cough . . dragon . . cough . .cough) or maybe the local dwarven miners get word of this and a little war breaks out.

I find it useful to make the mine haunted, or contain radioactive materials that cause the miners to contract radiation sickness and die. All of these will guarantee that the players have mysteries on their hands while absolutely nothing productive comes out out of those mines. If you feel really mean, you can even have them uncover a Tarrasque swarm.

 

[Bob5th]

Well for the "haunted mine" approach you could always pull something like what happened in Tremors 4: The Legend Begins.

 

[MerakSpielman]

You could make it a moral dilemma - every day, mysteriously, one of the workers dies in a freak accident that should almost never happen. A different accident every day.

On the other hand, the mine is producing an incredible level of wealth.

Are the players willing to let workers die to get rich?

 

[Stalker0]

Slap some greater magic weapons on some pickaxes. Then planar bind some tough dudes and latern archons. You pay the dudes a set amount to mine... and the latern archons can teleport the stuff to where you need. Now you have yourself an operation!!

 

[Orius]

doesn't the second edition Colplete Guide to Dwarves have mining rules in it?

Yeah, but not for adamantine. The highest the tables go is mithril. I suppose one could adapt the rules to include it.

FWIW, IIRC, the chance of finding mithril on those tables was something like 1% of 1%. Since adamantine is even supposed to be even rarer, that should give you an idea of how rare it should be.

 

[green slime]

And while we are discussing "Real World" imposing in on the Mining rules, I just thought I'd mention that Alexander the Great had to employ 3000 camels to freight the enormous plunder from the city (summer palace, actually) of Persepolis. The value of the plunder was an estimated 120,000 silver talents.

And in DnD, high level characters are decked out with equipment totalling 760,000 gp!

 

[orangefruitbat]

A greek talent is about 57 pds. In DnD terms, there are 50 coins to a pound. So 120,000 silver talents translates into:

57*50*120,000/10=34,200,000 gp. So, if we assume that Alexander the Great was a 20th level fighter, he clearly had a monty haul GM!

And while we are discussing "Real World" imposing in on the Mining rules, I just thought I'd mention that Alexander the Great had to employ 3000 camels to freight the enormous plunder from the city (summer palace, actually) of Persepolis. The value of the plunder was an estimated 120,000 silver talents.

And in DnD, high level characters are decked out with equipment totalling 760,000 gp!

 

[Orius]

And while we are discussing "Real World" imposing in on the Mining rules, I just thought I'd mention that Alexander the Great had to employ 3000 camels to freight the enormous plunder from the city (summer palace, actually) of Persepolis. The value of the plunder was an estimated 120,000 silver talents.

And in DnD, high level characters are decked out with equipment totalling 760,000 gp!

That equipment is assumed to be magical, though. Magical equipment is often worth as much as or more than valuable art objects.

 

[vortex]

I’ve just had my group discover several veins of adamantine on their lands.
Thoughts?

Doesn't ademantite come from meteorites? ie it falls from the heavens rather than mined from veins

 

[Agback]

Step1: Hire lots of people with the 'Profession(Miner)' skill.
->Assuming each miner performs a 'Take 10' each week, they'll
mine (5 + 1/2 Skill Bonus) GP worth of adamantine ore each week.

But they will have to be paid (5 + 1/2 skill bonus) GP per week (or no-one would learn Profession (Miner). Leaving no rent at all for the mine-owner, and no profit for teh entrepreneur.

This has the side-effect of making mining realistically slow, painful and low-profit-margin.

Mining is indeed often slow. And marginal mines by definition produce small rents. But there have historically been, and to this day remain, mineral deposits that have made their owners astonishingly rich. Look at Brunei, and try to tell me with a straight face that a mineral is worth in exchange no more than the cost of its extraction. Even Marx (who felt that the value of a mineral was by definition equal to the labour cost of its extraction) acknowledged that a mineral's value in exchange could be a lot higher than its cost.

Regards,


Agback