Re: Roads in Sartar

From: bethexton <bethexton_at_...>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 18:12:04 -0000

This is only a problem if you think of tolls are something like a modern toll booth, or else as something designed to bring wealth to the central authority (king, lunars, whatever).

I would imagine it working closer to a protection racket. You arrive at the boundary of the Green Creak clan, and there is a few lads lolling by the boundary stone, all clad in though leather and carrying various types of pointy bronze things. You perform the greeting, and the greet you effusively.

Then they mention that you are so wonderful that you really must come say hi to the clan chief, and off you are escorted, like it or not (unless you are willing to start violence, at which point they melt into the woods but you'd best not try to pass through their tula).

You meet the chief and are fed and beered, and he mentions that it is good his men happened upon you, because the Telmori, or bandits, or walking corpses, or whatever has been stalking the woods. In fact, if he hadn't pulled so many men away from the fields to protect the roads no doubt you would have been set upon. The sacrifices his clan makes to protect the roads....

This of course is your cue to make generous with presents. If you don't cough up enough, the chief might pointedly admire some of your possesions. Eventually you pay up, or somehow wiggle out of it. Oddly enough, those who wiggle out of it seem to often get ambushed on the road on the way out of the tula, with no survivors to say who attacked them....

Of course, all of that is only if you don't have some established relationship with the clan in question. Tribe mates don't go through that. Retainers of the King don't go through it when the king is strong. Lunars may or may not go through that. Members of the same trade ring don't go through that, but other traders would, although they no doubt give minor gifts as a matter of course.

Lacking anything else, I'd roll a simple test of your relationship to the clan in question, or the authority that should let your travel there, modified by how desperate or greedy they are, and how they are getting along with the authority that you are leaning on.

In other words, of course there aren't tolls on the royal roads, but that doesn't mean that you won't find travel expensive, thanks to the heortlings all emcompassing and wonderfully flexible rules of hospitality.

All just IMO, of course.

--Bryan

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