Quote:
Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company
DF2 (p. 13) has guidelines on taking apart monster corpses for valuable parts, and DF8 (also p. 13) has guidelines on how much those parts sell for, with use by alchemists being one possibility. Based on that, human parts would typically go for $0.5/lb.
I imagine this sort of thing would just be par for the course for magical worlds. And societies have dealt with grave robbers before. See the "resurrection men" of 18th and 19th century England for an illustration of how that might go.
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If going by those guidelines, you're better off using beef hearts than human hearts for your elixirs. Cow parts are worth $1.5 per pound ($2 for 2d+1 for their strongest attack, +$1 for Four Legs, halved for mundane) but you get twice as much per carcass, and you don't have to deal with any pesky legal issues. Looking at the domestic animals listed in LTC3, horses are probably your best bet, being worth $3/lb ($2 for damage, +$1 for each of Enhanced Move, Four Legs, Hooves, and Peripheral Vision, halved for mundane) and getting twice as much per carcass as for a human, although you can probably sell the carcass of a cow to a butcher for more than you can get out of a horse. Of course, butchers are probably going to make more money than those harvesting organs for elixirs. In a month (25 workdays of 8 hours each, for 200 workhours), a Surgery-12 organ-harvester can process 400 cows, getting on average $2500 (assuming it was killed in a manner that didn't damage the harvestable organs at all), which is somewhere between Comfortable and Wealthy at DF's ~ TL3, but doesn't account for the cost of purchasing those 400 cow carcasses. A Butcher-12, well, butcher can only process between 20 and 25 cows in that time (depending on weight), but will harvest a little shy of 8000 lbs of meat, enough to feed around 88 people for the month. If the meat were only $1/lb, he'd still be grossing over 3x as much as the organ harvester. Now, if organ-harvesting leaves behind a carcass that can readily be processed by a butcher, organ-harvesting can be a more profitable profession (the butcher needs to pay for those 20-25 cow carcasses to turn into edible meat to sell; the organ-harvester pays for a carcass, gets what he needs, then turns around and sells it for only a touch less to the butcher), although you'd need 16 to 20 butchers for every organ harvester.
So, long story short, the DF guidelines don't work if you want human corpses to be viable alchemical ingredients, because there's no real profit in it and you get better results with beef anyway. Or pork, mutton, etc (the only LTC3 animal that would be worth less than human is, humorously, the chicken; its organs are actually worth more - $1/lb - but you only get 1/8th as many lbs from each carcass).