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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6484377" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>If this is a concession that indeed it is actually campaign specific, then I don't see anything to argue about.   In so far as campaigns can and usually do differ in an almost infinite variety of ways, there is no way we can affirm anything about the abundance of gold in a 'typical' D&D world (assuming such a thing in fact exists).   While elemental mining is I agree possible, I don't think we can say with any confidence whether it effects the abundance of gold in a 'typical' D&D world.   I don't think we can say with any confidence what the  relative abundance of minerals in the crust of a typical campaign world is, or how they arrived there, or how plate tectonics or vulcanism or speology work in such settings.  I think we can say with confidence that the abundance of gold is driven by Gygax's decision to 'keep score' as it were by how much treasure a player could pull out of the dungeon, by the use of 'gold' as the measure of treasure largely driven by literary reasons (gold being archetypal of treasure), and by the relatively large score required to attain 'high level'.   Those things imply gold is common, but even to the extent that we can say that trope is commonly adhered to (at least 2 in this thread don't), we can't say anything about the origin of that gold which I would guess in the 'typical' campaign is never really considered.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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