Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4144035" data-attributes="member: 62992">The heavily armed merchant caravan doesn't have to pay the soldiers if they are a VITAL part of the surivival of a PoL and the way it connects with its hinterland (the area it draws resources from); merchants would be instruments of the state and paid by the PoL leader from taxes. Let's be clear here; Raw materials are no longer something that can be taken for granted. Lumber, stone, salt, spices, fish, herbs, gems, even food are now MUCH more valuable than they might previously have been. Caravans would also be the SOLE means of cummunication between the large settlement and the small, outlying ones. Thus, caravans would take messages between settlements, might transport passengers in both directions, and would pick up valuable items such as salt, might repair roads along the way, might be mobile points of control for suppressing bandits, would carry legal authorities around (the judge travels around so the courts are only held every two moons), would collect taxes, would move experts around like tilers, and craftsmen who are too specialised to operate at village scale (knife sharpeners, tinkers, even blacksmiths). They would also help people get their goods to market and also to get home again. Thus the caravan becomes a mobile PoL and as such would probably be protected by the might of the PoL itself; trained soldiers.Thus caravans would spend some of their time wending their way through the lands around the PoL to pick up cargoes and then would move out to deeper destinations and there might be several out at any one time. I could also envisage that caravans could be centers of intrigue as the thieves guild uses it to spread its net and the state uses it to spy on rival PoLs and collect intelligence about their military and resource capability.</blockquote>

Verification