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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 305270" data-attributes="member: 1645">You really can start off a poor shepherd and rise to the top of colonial society:Phips is one of the most remarkable figures in colonial history.  Born one of 26 children by the same woman, he was reared in poverty at a rude settlement on the banks of the Kennebec, tending sheep until the age of 18.  Then he took up carpentry.  Next he came to Boston to marry a widow, better born, better-off and better along in years than himself.  In Boston he learned to read and write and to aspire to the command of a king's ship and possession of "a fair brick house in the Green Lane of North Boston."Phips achieved far more than both dreams combined.  Like countless Americans to follow him, he went hunting for sunken treasure.  After one fruitless expedition during which Phips, a tall and powerful man, quelled two mutinies, he persuaded the British Admiralty to subsidize a second quest.  This time Phips found the wreck of a Spanish galleon in the West Indies and took from it treasure valued at £300,000, and he came home a rich man and a knight.That's one difference between D&D treasure-hunting and historical (or fictional) treasure hunting.  In D&D, an amazing haul like that would be "unbalancing", but you could earn bits and pieces of it off monsters who shouldn't necessarily have any treasure per se...</blockquote>