Temple of the Fiscally Irresponsible Elves: IC

[Avoraciopoctules]

After a while, Drovak follows Hocus back into the room. He is now wearing a turban made of some kind of metal foil, and a zombie shambles after him. It has standing orders to smack anyone trying to eat his brains.

[Username17]

Glorg scratchs his nose and puts some bones on a plate. Then he takes another empty plate and puts it next to it. He says "Imagine these bones are the actual currency we have in our warchest." He moves a bone dramatically to the empty plate. "Now we've just paid workers to make something on our behalf." He gestures over the table emphatically.

Then he looks at you. "Eh? Eh?" He says as if he has just made some stupendous point.

When none of you leap to explain his metaphor, he continues. "If the workers buy our stuff, all they can do is pay us back what we paid them." He triumphantly moves a bone from the newer plate to the old. "This is what Shug doesn't seem to get. It doesn't matter how much or how little we pay workers, because the money all comes back. What's important is that we can't make any profit at all as long as we don't get other markets." He moves a bone back and forth between the two plates a couple of times. Then he moves bones a handful at a time back and forth. "Eh?"

He piles some more bones on the plate and then moves them back and forth to dramatic effect. "I understand that you have a big warchest and you could probably hire people to do more work. But that doesn't really matter, because actual profits still have to come from outside The Korbahl. We already have enough and more than enough capacity to satisfy the anemic demands of our current trading partners. Right now all we really need is to get new ships running new routes to open up new markets so we can get new sources of currency."

[Avoraciopoctules]

Drovak smiles under his veil, and some of that carries into his voice.

"For my day job, I'm an adventurer. And we have a saying, 'the more times you can get paid for a single job, the better.' We learn to look for all the places that our work adds value to the world, then use that.

Let's say your spiders go a little out of control. Now you have a pile of humanoid corpses. They're poor-quality meat, maybe material for tools and leather if you're lucky. But if you pay a necromancer or someone who knows where to find a Bane Mire, those bodies can be turned into tireless thralls. Value added.

Work has value. The more skilled the work, the more value. And if we approach this the right way, workers could end up paying Duraweb for the privilege of using their materials. A flat fee for materials, then a cut of the end production.

There's things to be said for owning labor. But if you simply want to extract value, there's something to be said for getting paid twice."

[Grek]

"Precisely, Drovak. To put it a bit more directly, the economy is like the durian pie I'm getting for desert. It has a circumference and a radius..." he gestures with his hands appropriately, "...and everyone has a slice. Right now the pie is very small, but soon it will grow bigger. And it doesn't just get bigger in one way. If we play our cards right, the whole pie will grow and we'll get a bigger slice of it too. Paid twice for the same job. The key is making sure that we control all the skilled weavers by the time the economy is back to normal."

[flare22]

Hocus waits patiently for a pause in the conversationn while he munches on his boar
Then says

"That's great guys but I noticed glorg neatley side stepped my question now I'm trying to be rude but I believe as investers we should know if duraweb is a safe investment or a spider that will suck us dry because if we decide to join up with the duraweb were going to be stuck with them so I want to know what was the first sign of trouble for you? What went wrong and just how bad is it now?"

[Username17]

The Question of Money

The question had arisen what money was used in different places, and thus what Glorg is talking about when he says that profits must necessarily come from elsewhere.

Llanaden uses the "Ash", which is simply a number on an ensorcelled leaf. It is backed by nothing at all. Right now, the Llanaden Ash is in free-fall, and people don't want to trade their goods and services for Llanaden Ash.

Thorigram uses actual metal coins, whose values are theoretically backed by their weight of metal components. In addition, there is an official exchange rate between the types of coins, which does not change as quickly as the supply and demand for the metals in question. Right now, the official exchange rate of gold coins to silver coins is 1:10, but the actual market value of gold is only nine times greater than silver. This means that people would rather take your silver coins than your gold ones, and also that people are taking silver coins out of circulation by melting them for their silver contents.

Zundun has bank issued notes that are backed by each bank's assets (such as land or partial ownership of business ventures). A note is called a "zloty", and roughly speaking a zloty issued by one bank is interchangeable with a zloty issued by another. Recently, with the prospect of bank failures being raised, the zlotys issued by some banks have been discounted in some transactions as people apply ad hoc risk premiums to more stressed seeming banks.

In Lolthwyr, they use the "tal", which is a ceramic chip with a piece of silver in it. The government keeps a bunch of silver in bars in a large vault in the middle of the Spider Fortress, and tals of different denominations have a percentage of their silver value embedded in them. Ideally, a tal can be redeemed for its silver value, though in practice that's kind of a pain in the ass and almost never done. The ceramic is lighter than the equivalent value of silver, and the different sizes, colors, and styles easily distinguish different denominations.

In Sweland, it is customary for individuals to write personal IOUs when they accept goods or services on credit. These IOUs can be transfered to others and the debts traded around as a form of currency. Each IOU is discounted based on the perceived relative difficulty of getting it redeemed, which means that the IOUs have almost no value outside of Sweland.

The Korbahl does not have its own currency, and until recently used Llanaden Ash, Thorigram Gold, Zundunian Zlotys, and Lolthwyran Tals pretty much interchangeably. With the collapse of the Llanaden Ash, a large amount of circulating currency has gone out of fashion entirely. And a number of businesses are retreating to Thorigram Gold exclusively as a means of exchange for fear that the Zlotys and Tals will follow suit.

When Glorg says that money has to come from abroad, he's alluding in part to the fact that there truly isn't a local currency, and for the total currency wealth to increase, the country must run a trade surplus.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Drovak seems to be conveying the opinion that there is no reason the party and Duraweb can't both progress each other's stated goals at the same time.

Duraweb wants money and ships who can find new markets.

The party wants to train up a skilled workforce who can stabilize the economy with a new source of demand.

If the party buys up large quantities of silk and pays to use Duraweb buildings in the process of their training program, Duraweb gets the first thing they want.

If, as an exchange of favors, the party use their contacts to find ships interested in market exploration and Duraweb use their contacts to find silkworking trainers, the second desire progresses as well.

Unless there is something else Duraweb wants, the matter seems pretty clear-cut.