Everybody's a Merchant

A companion piece to our Cartage edition

Funny thing about caravans - Everybody on the caravan thinks he’s a merchant.  Some teamster arrives in a foreign city and sees a silver dagger for sale.  It only costs 25sc, when he saw a similar one back home that was going for 50sc.  He scratches together his pay and buys the thing, hiding it away in his gear.

Now, when he returns home, he will try to sell it.  This is probably when he starts to understand that merchants deal entirely on mark-up.  Does a store owner want to pay him more than 25sc for the dagger?  Does the store owner believe it is real silver?  Is it?  What exactly can the teamster get?  Let’s assume he gets 32sc and the store owner says bring me more.  Does the caravan master care?

The answer to all of these questions is the standard one:  It depends!  Does the caravan master care?  No, not if we’re talking about one to three daggers.  That gets lost in the teamster’s gear.  If the teamster is trying to bring a large crate of something back, a crate that will take up space on the wagon, now the caravan master cares.  How much does he care?  Probably enough to tell the teamster to walk the rest of the way.  The caravan master is desperately trying to balance the logistics of a cross-country trek including space, weight, feed, etc. and this moron thinks he can just throw a huge crate on one of the wagons - for free?  Yeah, no.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t try.  In fact, they all try.  What can the caravaneers buy in foreign lands and bring home that they can then sell.  Sure gemstones would work nicely, but teamsters don’t have the kind of money necessary to buy gemstones.  Spices?  Maybe, but will they keep?  Are they properly packaged for long transport?  And honestly, what does a teamster know about gems and spices?  They could be giving him colored glass and saying it’s an emerald.  He has no idea.  So the teamsters are all smart enough not to get conned in foreign lands!  Yeah, again, no.

Everybody wants to hit the lottery, but you have to play to win.  Many of these guys are willing to risk most (or all) of their pay in hopes of making more money back home.  But the guys selling to the teamsters aren’t the only dishonest ones.  Back at home, the merchants are likely going to try and cheat them too.  They are absolutely caught in a dangerous loop - a circle that can make them broke.

Most of these guys learn while they are young.  They get caught a couple of times and learn their lessons - hopefully before they have a wife and children counting on them not to get conned.  At that point, they might still buy things for themselves that they can find cheaper in foreign lands.  That way if it looks like an emerald but isn’t, maybe their wife won’t know either.  Even if they do get conned, they can be happy in their ignorance.  Then again, there are those guys who are constantly chasing that dream of riches.  Might even be the player characters.


This post was written as part of the recently released The Miscellaneous Anniversary Edition aka All About Everything Else, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Every other Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing small items that didn’t make it into earlier editions, mainly due to size.
We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 60 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.