Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereidalbel
The stories of higher wages can even lure in craftsmen from neighboring kingdoms/countries/etc to improve your work force, while reducing the work force of your enemies. Sometimes, it just pays to pay your craftsmen extra!
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It does, especially if you aim to establish a new polity on the ruins of an old one and want to attract scholars, innovators, educated people, good craftsmen, engineers, etc.
The PCs, while starting out as merely competent adventurers, are very much movers and shakers by now, with some of them having Administration, Economics, Politics, Propaganda, Finance, Leadership, Merchant and other such skills over 20. Add fabulous wealth and command over a massive multinational merchant house and mercenary company and they have real potential for nation building.
Since they can't match the awesome wealth, magic and divine power of their foes, they've had to search for alternate means to atttain local superiority. Allegiances with all sorts of powers, new technology, new uses for old technology, innovate use of magic and alchemy, it's all grist for their mill. Happily, their foes are hampered by an ossified bureaucracy, a dysfunctional political system that runs on intrigue and rivalries and an intensely xenophobic conservative national culture.
Ironically, the supreme despot of the enemy nation, the Pharoah himself, is fairly liberal, open to new ideas and with far more sympathy for most of their political goals than most of their doubtful alllies. But even a supreme autocrat worshipped as a god is powerless in the face of institutional culture, it seems.