SangoProduction
2017-01-19, 11:24 AM
As well all know, dragon body parts are rather valuable. And we also know that dragons are incredibly greedy individuals. You see where I'm going with this? (True) Resurrection doesn't care about the state of the body, really, and returns the creature whole...if lacking a bit of experience.
We'll use Draconomicon for basically everything.
Problem being that most beings don't tend to want to die... for some reason... perhaps because it hurts? Well, we'll get painkillers. Kill the pain with fire! And even further, even if it knew someone could (true) resurrect it, there is the issue of trust. Then again, Good dragons get to go an experience "an appropriate afterlife" for however much time it takes for the body to be harvested, and the spell cast, so perhaps trust isn't all that necessary?
Also "My hoard, you will steal my hoard when you kill me!" So trust (or a very well-hidden and -guarded hoard is necessary)
But regardless! Let's assume for the purpose of this thought experiment that the dragon and a cohort that has access to (true) resurrection, and can requisition exceptional (ie. masterwork) crafting jobs...or maybe is a crafter themselves to maximize profits. Doesn't matter much, since mundane work is so cheap. Also, this cohort is the vendor, or at least owns a wide-reaching company, allowing them to sell the equipment they make at full price.
Let's assume a Young Adult Gold dragon, because it's Huge size with 20 HD, fairly early in life. The XP drain from a level loss could be hard to recover. But, if we were to price that as GP value = XP*5. So, dropping from 20 to 19 would be of 19,000 XP, which is...an absolute ton more than the difference between the cost of Resurrection and True Resurrection. But, we're talking about a dragon so lazy and impatient for treasure that it'd kill itself in some ellaborate scheme for more money. Do you think he'd be patient enough to wait for a mortal to learn how to cast True Resurrection?
Of course, if Leadership feat just makes it so an appropriate level cohort shows up, then they'd have access to True Resurrection by means of a having a cleric cohort (17th level), if HD = character level. Could do fancy prestige shenanigans, some of which remove the cost of the spell entirely, but that's not the point of this post.
We're 25,000 gold in the hole to start off with for True Resurrection.
So, first off, since we're a Young Adult Gold Dragon, we are huge size, which means our hide can be turned in to one Medium size (or 2 small size) suit of Banded Mail armor. What the hell even is Banded Mail armor? I thought it was some special armor introduced in Draconomicon. No. It's just a heavy armor introduced in Player's Handbook. Who knew?
So, yeah, we can make 2 small-sized Dragoncraft Banded Mail armor. It would take a while to sell, because...well, it's heavy armor that's not Full Plate, and is sized for small people, but it may eventually sell. So that's 22,500 gp from the hide alone. Not bad.
Total debt: 2,500 gp
Then, we get to the blood. For a Blood Elixir of Gold Dragon Blood, it costs 1,700 gp. Not all that much, to be honest...but you can make one elixir per gallon of blood.
We don't have much of a way to estimate a dragon's blood levels, but a we know a horse is large size. And an average horse has about 12 gallons of blood in its body. So, let's say as a base that a large dragon has 14 gallons of blood. It's probably a lot more, but I don't think we'll be able to get a perfect extraction of all the blood. (Then again...magic, but screw it.)
If we're to assume the dragon maintains the blood-to-mass ratio as it increases in size, then a huge dragon would have 112 gallons of blood. (One size increase = 8x mass increase.)
Thus, we come to 190,400 gold worth of Blood Elixirs of the Gold Dragon...which contain Polymorph, and are one-use items. So they would probably sell relatively easily. But holy crab. That's a lot of gold....a Dragon could probably just safely extract its own blood to make its own elixirs without this whole mess, and use Heal/Restorations/etc. But...
Total profit now is 187,900 gold.
Dragonbone Bows are actually really hard to price. Not only because we aren't given how many DBBs can be harvested from a dragon corpse, but because Composite Bows have variable prices. So we'll just consider the +100 gp part of the equation. We also get a picture of a skeleton of a dragon. We won't complicate it by considering the size. So, there seem to be 3 separate bones per "wing finger" with 4 fingers per wing, meaning 24 DBBs from both wings. I counted 10 ribs. We'll consider both sides of the ribs to be just 1 DBB. And we can probably get at least 2 or 3 DBBs from each of the legs.A (Str +3) Composite Longbow probably isn't an outrageous thing to sell. It would sell for 900 gp each. A +1 Composite Longbow would sell for 500 gp each.
So, we can get, fairly reasonably, 46 (or 2,944 if scaling 1:1 with mass, not sure it would since bone isn't uniform, so carving it down might have its limits) DBBs. This nets 4,600 gold from the dragonbone property, ignoring that it also effectively doubles the cost of the composite bow. It will take a while to sell, because they aren't that useful.
If we're assuming a Str+3 Composite Longbow, then you could reasonably get 41,400 gp. For Str+1 Composite Longbow, which is probably more likely, if at all (unless you're selling to giants), you could get 23,000 gp. If we average that, we get 32,200 gp from a full set of bones. It's a pretty shoddy estimate, honestly. The bones might just be kept so that the composite bows can be made on demand.
Total profit: 220,100 gp
Dragonfang Weapons actually have a defined number you can make from a dragon. 12. For some reason. It says it only takes a single fang or claw to make one, and there are 4 claws per leg on the dragon in their anatomy pictures, and the teeth... but...whatever. So no speculation. We can either make a Medium Falchion (75 gp, martial weapon, max non-exotic profit in core), Greatsword (50 gp, martial weapon. Best mundane weapon in core) , or Sword, two-bladed (100 gp, exotic weapon, maximum profit in core).
I'll assume selling each weapon for 75 gp + 300 (dragoncraft modifier), as an average. So, that's 4,500...I kinda feel cheated here, but...whatever. :smallmad:
Total Profit: 224,600 gp.
So it works, most definitely especially considering PC wealth by level at level 20 is 760,000 gp, and NPC wealth by level at 20 is a whole 220,000 gp. Is it more efficient, and take less work around than just draining your own blood? No. But, you can just keep doing it again and again, if you find some people to buy all this junk you've got. Or just sit on your manufactured corpses contently, since it's already a mass of wealth.
We'll use Draconomicon for basically everything.
Problem being that most beings don't tend to want to die... for some reason... perhaps because it hurts? Well, we'll get painkillers. Kill the pain with fire! And even further, even if it knew someone could (true) resurrect it, there is the issue of trust. Then again, Good dragons get to go an experience "an appropriate afterlife" for however much time it takes for the body to be harvested, and the spell cast, so perhaps trust isn't all that necessary?
Also "My hoard, you will steal my hoard when you kill me!" So trust (or a very well-hidden and -guarded hoard is necessary)
But regardless! Let's assume for the purpose of this thought experiment that the dragon and a cohort that has access to (true) resurrection, and can requisition exceptional (ie. masterwork) crafting jobs...or maybe is a crafter themselves to maximize profits. Doesn't matter much, since mundane work is so cheap. Also, this cohort is the vendor, or at least owns a wide-reaching company, allowing them to sell the equipment they make at full price.
Let's assume a Young Adult Gold dragon, because it's Huge size with 20 HD, fairly early in life. The XP drain from a level loss could be hard to recover. But, if we were to price that as GP value = XP*5. So, dropping from 20 to 19 would be of 19,000 XP, which is...an absolute ton more than the difference between the cost of Resurrection and True Resurrection. But, we're talking about a dragon so lazy and impatient for treasure that it'd kill itself in some ellaborate scheme for more money. Do you think he'd be patient enough to wait for a mortal to learn how to cast True Resurrection?
Of course, if Leadership feat just makes it so an appropriate level cohort shows up, then they'd have access to True Resurrection by means of a having a cleric cohort (17th level), if HD = character level. Could do fancy prestige shenanigans, some of which remove the cost of the spell entirely, but that's not the point of this post.
We're 25,000 gold in the hole to start off with for True Resurrection.
So, first off, since we're a Young Adult Gold Dragon, we are huge size, which means our hide can be turned in to one Medium size (or 2 small size) suit of Banded Mail armor. What the hell even is Banded Mail armor? I thought it was some special armor introduced in Draconomicon. No. It's just a heavy armor introduced in Player's Handbook. Who knew?
So, yeah, we can make 2 small-sized Dragoncraft Banded Mail armor. It would take a while to sell, because...well, it's heavy armor that's not Full Plate, and is sized for small people, but it may eventually sell. So that's 22,500 gp from the hide alone. Not bad.
Total debt: 2,500 gp
Then, we get to the blood. For a Blood Elixir of Gold Dragon Blood, it costs 1,700 gp. Not all that much, to be honest...but you can make one elixir per gallon of blood.
We don't have much of a way to estimate a dragon's blood levels, but a we know a horse is large size. And an average horse has about 12 gallons of blood in its body. So, let's say as a base that a large dragon has 14 gallons of blood. It's probably a lot more, but I don't think we'll be able to get a perfect extraction of all the blood. (Then again...magic, but screw it.)
If we're to assume the dragon maintains the blood-to-mass ratio as it increases in size, then a huge dragon would have 112 gallons of blood. (One size increase = 8x mass increase.)
Thus, we come to 190,400 gold worth of Blood Elixirs of the Gold Dragon...which contain Polymorph, and are one-use items. So they would probably sell relatively easily. But holy crab. That's a lot of gold....a Dragon could probably just safely extract its own blood to make its own elixirs without this whole mess, and use Heal/Restorations/etc. But...
Total profit now is 187,900 gold.
Dragonbone Bows are actually really hard to price. Not only because we aren't given how many DBBs can be harvested from a dragon corpse, but because Composite Bows have variable prices. So we'll just consider the +100 gp part of the equation. We also get a picture of a skeleton of a dragon. We won't complicate it by considering the size. So, there seem to be 3 separate bones per "wing finger" with 4 fingers per wing, meaning 24 DBBs from both wings. I counted 10 ribs. We'll consider both sides of the ribs to be just 1 DBB. And we can probably get at least 2 or 3 DBBs from each of the legs.A (Str +3) Composite Longbow probably isn't an outrageous thing to sell. It would sell for 900 gp each. A +1 Composite Longbow would sell for 500 gp each.
So, we can get, fairly reasonably, 46 (or 2,944 if scaling 1:1 with mass, not sure it would since bone isn't uniform, so carving it down might have its limits) DBBs. This nets 4,600 gold from the dragonbone property, ignoring that it also effectively doubles the cost of the composite bow. It will take a while to sell, because they aren't that useful.
If we're assuming a Str+3 Composite Longbow, then you could reasonably get 41,400 gp. For Str+1 Composite Longbow, which is probably more likely, if at all (unless you're selling to giants), you could get 23,000 gp. If we average that, we get 32,200 gp from a full set of bones. It's a pretty shoddy estimate, honestly. The bones might just be kept so that the composite bows can be made on demand.
Total profit: 220,100 gp
Dragonfang Weapons actually have a defined number you can make from a dragon. 12. For some reason. It says it only takes a single fang or claw to make one, and there are 4 claws per leg on the dragon in their anatomy pictures, and the teeth... but...whatever. So no speculation. We can either make a Medium Falchion (75 gp, martial weapon, max non-exotic profit in core), Greatsword (50 gp, martial weapon. Best mundane weapon in core) , or Sword, two-bladed (100 gp, exotic weapon, maximum profit in core).
I'll assume selling each weapon for 75 gp + 300 (dragoncraft modifier), as an average. So, that's 4,500...I kinda feel cheated here, but...whatever. :smallmad:
Total Profit: 224,600 gp.
So it works, most definitely especially considering PC wealth by level at level 20 is 760,000 gp, and NPC wealth by level at 20 is a whole 220,000 gp. Is it more efficient, and take less work around than just draining your own blood? No. But, you can just keep doing it again and again, if you find some people to buy all this junk you've got. Or just sit on your manufactured corpses contently, since it's already a mass of wealth.