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RPG mechanics (again)
Today we have the Book of Vile Darkness, a D&D 3e splatbook about being evil (ostensibly mostly about detailing evil [1] so the players can smite it, but it's not clear that requires - say - price lists for evil spell components...)
Oh, yes, price lists for evil spell components. There's one of those. An example of an evil spell component is the heart of a chromatic dragon of at least 15 Hit Dice (which, to be fair, is not a lot as dragons go, but it is still a bona-fide dragon and not a tiny hatchling...)
One of those will set you back 6 gold pieces. Now, I hear you cry, you have no idea what 6 GP buys. It's not a lot; it would buy you three backpacks, for example, or a 3/5 share in a tent. No wonder evil is so ubiquitous when evil necessities come at such a whopping markdown!
Indeed, the expected treasure from the minimum acceptable 15 HD dragon is 3,400 GP (probably not just as a pile of cash). Who scores that hoard and then goes "Well, we'd better spend 15 minutes carving the heart out and then carry around a big lump of gory flesh, wouldn't want to miss out on that extra 6 gold"? I can only presume we're in MMO-land where when you kill a monster its one harvestable body part magically pops into your inventory to be sold with the rest of your vendor trash later.
(It's not a tiny sliver of dragon heart, either - but it's "dried and hardened into a gemstone-like object", at least, so the evil spellcaster doesn't have to tote around something leaky...)
A lot of the list is like this, too. A vrock feather ("only one usable per fiend", and a vrock is scarier than a 15 HD dragon) - 1 GP. Once you get down to bits of sentient humanoids (ugh), everything comes in at 0.1 GP or less. "Humanoid eye", 0.02 GP. In other words, if you sell one headsworth you can just afford a pint of ale.
[1] Evil mostly appears to be quite kinky with a lot of leather straps, like piercings and tattoos, and get its tits out at a rate which I rather thought D&D had mostly grown out of. But I digress.
Oh, yes, price lists for evil spell components. There's one of those. An example of an evil spell component is the heart of a chromatic dragon of at least 15 Hit Dice (which, to be fair, is not a lot as dragons go, but it is still a bona-fide dragon and not a tiny hatchling...)
One of those will set you back 6 gold pieces. Now, I hear you cry, you have no idea what 6 GP buys. It's not a lot; it would buy you three backpacks, for example, or a 3/5 share in a tent. No wonder evil is so ubiquitous when evil necessities come at such a whopping markdown!
Indeed, the expected treasure from the minimum acceptable 15 HD dragon is 3,400 GP (probably not just as a pile of cash). Who scores that hoard and then goes "Well, we'd better spend 15 minutes carving the heart out and then carry around a big lump of gory flesh, wouldn't want to miss out on that extra 6 gold"? I can only presume we're in MMO-land where when you kill a monster its one harvestable body part magically pops into your inventory to be sold with the rest of your vendor trash later.
(It's not a tiny sliver of dragon heart, either - but it's "dried and hardened into a gemstone-like object", at least, so the evil spellcaster doesn't have to tote around something leaky...)
A lot of the list is like this, too. A vrock feather ("only one usable per fiend", and a vrock is scarier than a 15 HD dragon) - 1 GP. Once you get down to bits of sentient humanoids (ugh), everything comes in at 0.1 GP or less. "Humanoid eye", 0.02 GP. In other words, if you sell one headsworth you can just afford a pint of ale.
[1] Evil mostly appears to be quite kinky with a lot of leather straps, like piercings and tattoos, and get its tits out at a rate which I rather thought D&D had mostly grown out of. But I digress.
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It does imply that the slaughter-rate of chromatic dragons and vrocks are pretty darned high, though.
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Of course the effects aren't that special. The Chromatic Dragon Heart just gets you a 30% chance of +2d6 damage (and only to a good-aligned target), so about 2.1HP per 6GP. The eye (in the description, "child's eye") gives a 20% chance of doubling spell duration. If I'm going to go to the trouble of blinding children (the noise alone is a good reason to have one's minions do this somewhere else) I want a bit more benefit out of it than that!
BoVD is from 2002. I don't remember when Alderac did their infamous-cover archer splatbook, but I think it would have been around then.
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I don't know about you, but I think I'd rather buy a goose. I guess it must cost about the same and you can eat the goose afterwards.
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(These days my games are more likely to include Saracen the Goose than a Cancer Mage.)