[malloyd]

While it is true that prices vary a lot, and salt is often heavily taxed (for practical reasons, it's easier to find and tax a limited number of salt producers that it is to keep track of everyone to collect a head tax, and will produce the same result, you're basically using the salt merchants as tax collectors), $15 per ounce is ridiculous. That comes to something like $300 a year for enough salt just to keep a person *alive*. Charge everybody that and in a setting where Average starting income is $1000, anybody Struggling or poorer would be dead.

Spice prices have a tendency to be ridiculously exaggerated in games because "everybody knows" they were valuable in the past. Which they were, but valuable in the sense that a *shipload* of them was worth a fortune, not a belt pouch full. If it sells for more than silver, it's overpriced, though there are moments when a specific spice did manage to cost more than its weight in silver (including right now - saffron, which still has to be hand picked from flowers with a very low yield per plant, and hence hasn't fallen from its low tech price nearly as much as silver has, runs about $100/ounce wholesale).