Worminghall Map Scale

[hal]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, in the first place, that's just under six acres cleared to a depth of a yard, or 18 acres to a depth of a foot. So in terms of simply making the moderately rugged terrain even ("the crooked straight, and the rough places plain"), it's not a huge resource. I think it would be more likely that mages who did that sort of thing would focus on quarrying valuable stone or even on mining. In fact my campaign had a subplot where one of the students went out to spend the summer helping his professor provide services in the nearby lead mines.

But in the second place, I think comparative advantage is at issue. A mage may be able to take the place of several stonecutters or quarrymen. But they can also be trained to heal the sick, or question suspects, or spy on the Welsh armies. And the value gained from such activities may be greater. So mages may be encouraged to do the things that no one else can do, or that the ungifted can do only slowly and at very high cost. Quarrymen may be cheap by comparison. The cost of doing X is the value of the other most desirable things you could do with the same resources if you didn't do X.

And in the third place, the mages who left Oxford weren't looking for a wilderness where they could camp out and cast stoneworking spells. They wanted a place with shelter, and food, and books, and other amenities. And having found one in Worminghall, they moved there, and the place was already fairly built up. There would be some ground that they could clear and level, but you wouldn't get comprehensive urban planning and redevelopment. There were a lot of people with established rights that would get in the way of a big project.

I can agree with many of the points you raise here, so - let's transfer this to Magical life in Worminghall - I think it might be fun to explore your creation in more detail. Note too, that I spoke of only a single mage doing this task over a span of 40 years. Human nature being what it is, one would almost suspect that any mage who intended to "improve land" might very well purchase unusable land not only for the fact that it occupies space per se, but also can be quarried.

By your own guidelines - there are a finite set of mageborn "slots" or people available for such a campaign. Comparative issues aside, we can easily focus only on those mages of a given "Element" and see where they might concentrate their skills to be happy productive people.