Do you know what goes into producing gunpowder at scale?
Yes. Which is to say that the Empire can manage it considering how much powder they can chew up per battle. Expensive, but bot beyond the usage rate of elite units.
Its like preindustrial rifles. They were made and quite accurate.
They just weren't economical to use as more than pieces for elites or nobles.
In canon Brettonian merchants don't actually pay taxes. Brettonian law only considers producing stuff to be taxable, so only farmers (and probably craftsmen, but that's not directly stated) are taxed. As a work-around, merchants will instead give 'gifts' to their local lords, and occasionally quietly buy them back the next day if the lord needs cash.
...that sounds extremely ridiculous and I wish the Handrich followers Ranald's luck with that scam.
Isn't "expansive" meant to represent, like, ten books? That's not exactly excessive - the only reason it's so expensive is because it's pre-printing press so it's all scribed by hand.
Theres a bunch of cost factors:
-Paper was expensive to make. Parchment has to be hand scraped. Vellum has to be hand scraped with fine tools and fine raw materials. Rag paper was expensively made from recycled cloth or fabric plants(which is cheap until you consider how many shirts it'd take to make a hundred pages). Wood pulp paper had to be mechanically milled from wood scrap and bleached.
-If you were making less than a few dozen copies, it was going to be hand scribed as a skilled labor.
-if you were making hundreds of copies your throughput is limited by the number of hand etched printing plates you have, which each took a a skilled scribe much much longer than it takes to copy to paper.
-Sod diagrams and illustrations. You could draw dicks dancing along the border and nobody would notice anyway...
I wanna see what happens when we teach the spiders Reikspiel and then include them into Mathilde's book club.
The spiders we have are all one person. They mainly mate with themselves and need no romance.
If that's the case, then the underground romance novel trade of Karak Eight Peaks is dealing in units of value greater than bars of gold.
Which, I mean, it would be in-theme with the dwarves, but something tells me that that might be a bit unreasonable
Not at all! Thats why its a select group consisting of a princess, a priestess and a wizard doing much swapping.
To have a reading hobby at all requires either cheaply accessible literature or a high status
So basically, we want the Grey Journeyman equivalent of Julia of if Johann doesn't work out? Colored me sold in this scenario, if we can somehow acquire a competent Grey Journeywoman or man we can mentor, work with and who can assist us to manage the information gathering activities in Karak Eight Peaks and it's surrounding regions we plan on establishing to get badly needed eyes and ears down there for the Grey College. The more I think about it, one of the things we are badly missing here is another Julia, in our new role in Karak Eight Peaks.
Not so good as you'd think.
Ideally we want a minion for each Wind. Minions with overlapping Winds of magic will only be available for overlapping tasks.
Which left us with the present situation where our two Chamon minions are only usable for material research and writing stuff, difficult to use on Belegar's tasks!
A Grey Journeyman is relatively low value for the AP because they'd mostly be for easier jobs that don't warrant Mathilde herself showing up. Anything important they're eclipsed by her in person.
Better off hiring a Grey Pepetual or getting an actual apprentice
.
