(TFT) Various musings on theivery and Mending

[raito@raito.com]

In my own campaign, I have a real PC. His name is Grabitan Run. If this wree
D&D, he'd be a thief, but it's TFT, so he's not. He's pretty useless in combat,
except that he has Sha-ken and Thrown Weapons. It's not what he does. Well, what
does he do? He has Recognize Value, Assess Value, and Business Sense. He also
spent the 3 points for the Mend spell. 

How does he use these? Basically, he steals from the party, and they smile for
it. Because he has the Talents, he's the guy always telling them what such and
such is worth, and the guy who sells it off and brngs back the money. You'd
think someone else would have learned by now, but they haven't, mostly because
he doesn't take TOO much off the top. 

The party thinks that he just has a thing for gems. He'll take them as his share
most any time, at the correct assessed value, no cheating ro anything. Why would
he do that? Because the Mend spell will repair 1 carat's worth of flaw in a gem. 
If you recall, my gems have a value equal to the product of the gem type's
intrinsic worth in gold per carat and the number of carats, with flaws
subtracted. Each flaw has a size in carats, and the amount that each carat of
flaw reduces the value of the gem. So a flawed gem (and most are) can be
practically worthless. But a repaired gem can be worth a lot. Wizards into
things like magicked gems like Mend. 

Say there's a white diamond out there, 2 carats. It would have a value of 800
gold (not silver), but for the flaws. Let's say it has 2 flaws, both 2 carats,
that reduce the value to, say 50 gold. Only 4 Mend spells gets you another 750
gold. Not bad, huh? And none of that goes to the party. Strange that they don't
catch on... He tends to cast the Mend spell before going to bed. He usually
fails, because he's not that good. But sometimes it works, and that's good
enough. 

Did you know that an awful lot of Dwarves know Mend? Why might that be?.... (it
makes welding pretty easy, if only on a small scale. I enforce the small scale
for things like that, where it's not so much mending a broken object [the
pieces having some magic memory of each other], but putting together like items
that weren't attached before. Imagine armies of Dwarves casting Mend in order to
make some of the metal and stone structures you see around you. Now imagine a
castle that is one single piece of stone. Expensive, but possible.)

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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