It depends who is buying! Finding a buyer for a 10,000 year old book is going to be an undertaking. I don't think it's unreasonable to sell the most expensive book for 1000+ gp if they work for it. Just as long as you don't let them wildly exceed Wealth by Level.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If they can find a collector of Thassalonian memorabilia, or a well to do researcher, they could probably make quite a bit on the venture, but both of those are likely to involve role-playing out alot of searching and networking. The fact that the books will be replica volumes does lower the price though. I'd say around 200 sounds right to me, depending on the scarcity of the information. Maybe 300 if they negotiate well, or really talk up the buyer.
Without finding an interested buyer first, I'd say the books are mostly useful for their private collections.
|
Assuming that these are close to unique in rarity based on the age, the value might be quite high to the right buyer, more so in their original language, where translation error might change meaning. Given that individual masterwork tools exist that these would seem to super cede in content, that alone is a reason for that 50gp price to be insufficient.
In a more forefront game, rather than the AP, these are great lead ins to additional content. Without that, and merely looking at value, best pricing should accompany an extensive look for the best buyer.
Not as much as you would think. While the books in the library are rare and old, the copies you are making are not old, and won't be rare for very long.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree that they would be more valuable than 50gp, but not incredibly high. 200 - 500 gp at most seems about right.
Firstly, you are making copies not originals. Secondly, since they are being translated that makes them less valuable (though not incredibly so, closer to 200 rather than 500). Thirdly, once you start making copies other will make copies of your copies. Fourthly, they would only be valuable to the right people, and this should be more of a role play searching for the right buyer than a strole into town to sell it. Also, the type of information contained would really play into its value more than anything else (except that none are originals). A book about daily life in Thassalonia would be interesting to the right people and they would love to have it, but a book on how to make magical items that were lost over time, or spells lost over time would be much more valuable than anything else.
You could treat them as equivalent to a spell book full of spells. So, the prices could range from 2050 gold pieces to 9050 gold pieces (netting 1025 or 4525 gold pieces, respectively, for a quick sale - closer to maximum price if they are willing to find the "right" buyers).
[These numbers are just quick, very rough estimates.]
-Doomn
You could treat them as equivalent to a spell book full of spells. So, the prices could range from 2050 gold pieces to 9050 gold pieces (netting 1025 or 4525 gold pieces, respectively, for a quick sale - closer to maximum price if they are willing to find the "right" buyers).
[These numbers are just quick, very rough estimates.]
-Doomn
They're not nearly so valuable unless they actually contain spells or similar information about poweful magic/items. Texts about nonmagical things would be valuable to researchers interested in those topics, but largley useless to anyone else.
To the OP: enough so that the publisher can stay in business and support themselves off of it, but not so much that they lack customers.
Oh! Oh. Right. This was an in-game question. Right. Carry on. :)
|
|
First the golem appraise is keyed to the Thassilonian era. He will chose what was more valuable at the time, not what is more valuable in modern Golarion. That can make a difference.
The blueprint of a gauss gun would be very valuable, if you know how to make the components, but if have late XIX century technology the blueprint of a internal combustion engine would be worth more, as you can make it.
Second, translating and copying the books is a long, slow work. The library is worth a lot of money, but 20.000 books is something like 500 meters of shelves, probably something like 2.000.000 pages of written material.
Copying a book by hand take time and a quality copy would be illuminated and decorated, making the production even slower.
So I would make it a standard profession (scribe) check made to generate income, with the result being multiplied by a modifier generated by the appraise check. So it would be from some ten to some hundred of gp for each week spent copying the books, but the income would last for a very long time.
Note that selling the books for full price would require convincing the buyer that they are not a hoax. If someone was selling a copy of the sermons of Jesus as recorded by Saint Paul, you would buy it o you would thing that the seller is attempting a scam?
All included the library probably is worth millions of gp, but getting them would require a lot of work.
It might be more effective to coat each book in uguent of timelessness.
Each 150 gp vial would do at least 8 books.
Then you would have the original books for sale.
10,000 years would become 10,000 days and most of the book should survive.
I have GMed RotRL (great AP) and i know of which library you speak of and as someone else have said it's artifact level worth of material (especially in a post-RotRL Golarion), i could very easily see the contents of the entire library going for hundreds of thousands of gp.... and frankly that might upset your game (your players getting SO much wealth).
I am not saying to not let them copy and sell the books, just not for money, they can sell them for favors such as not paying the spellcasting services fee in the church of Abadar in Magnimar, not paying the "take a look" fee for copying spells into your spellbook (thus paying only scribing costs) from the Acadamae in Korvosa, manor(s), nobility titles, celebrity level fame, free lodging and food in the best inns of a specific city etc.
I believe the best answer will be determined by how you as a GM run your economy in your gaming setting. Are the sales of goods depreciated due to the ability to use magical means to increase supply, to meet a given demand?
This is usually an area where real life economics doesn't always translate well into fantasy role-playing.
Think back to 3rd edition DnD when the price to purchase the stone for a stone castle was several times more than the hireling spell cost of hiring a druid to use her daily allotment of "Transmute Mud to Rock" and "wall of stone" spells.
Point being, that the ability to magically create something (or in this case, copy something," should greatly effect and undercut the supply of goods in an otherwise mundane economy.
So, in our present modern-world economy, the value of a copy of a rare book is greatly depreciated because of an endless supply, that more than meets the demand. Take "The Art of War" for example: An early edition copy is priceless, but because of modern (cheap, quick) printing I can go to Barnes and Noble and buy a cheaply-bound copy of this 2400 year-old book for $14.99.
So, just having a way to make cheap, quick copies of a product in your game world, should greatly effect supply to the point that the value of many goods and services should be depressed. The copies shouldn't really be worth much, assuming other NPC's in your world have also thought up magical means to cheaply meet the demand of book-buying.
If it were me, I'd tempt to the players to try and sell the books to a collector as if they were originals, and treat them as forgeries, or have them sell the books for a very cheap price. Could be an interesting sub-quest.
For a good example of how magical economies should more-likely look, take a look at the Ptolus campaign setting by Monty Cook. He takes into account the hyper-present presence of magic into the prices of goods, instead of just trying to come up with real-world equivalent prices.
The only other way I have found to remedy the collapsible economy syndrome in fantasy roleplaying is to run a low-magic campaign setting, where the prices of goods could rarely be undercut by magical means. In this case, the copies that your PC's make would indeed be quite valuable.
TL;DR
Always reward you players for coming up w creative ideas.
In this case however, the copies probably shouldn't be worth much... at all.
One way to handle this would be to treat some of the books as worth tens of thousands of gold...but don't let proper buyers appear before the party would be finding random treasure worth that much.
Over all, if the party keeps a hold of these items and sells them bit by bit to the proper buyers... you could turn this into a long term source of income that could replace selling random treasure they could find.
Of course, I have never played RotRL, so I do not know how practical this idea could be.
Oh, one way to solve ones of the problems of how the books get devalued in translation would be to double up- have both an original language and translation copy of the text (maybe in the same book depending on page count and such). That would allow scholars to check up on whether the translation is accurate... and heck, it could also serve another role in teaching Thassilon since it kind of works as a Rossetta stone.
Again, never played RotRL...but I somewhat doubt there is a 'Thassilon for Dummies' book out there. Texts that properly teach the langauge are likely rare, particularly with the nature of medieval/renaissance style education, so this kind of thing could be surprisingly valuable. Heck, a 'Thassilon to Draconic' book (which could totally be a thing, since draconic is an ancient language) would serve perfectly in this role since Draconic is basically the scholastic Latin of this setting, and it might require only minimal translation.