Post originally by Spike at 2005-06-17 09:49:59
Converted from Phorums BB System

Hmmm... Maybe it's the fault of the authors, but I failed to get the impression that any given clan limited itself to on primary industry.
One thing I did see was that almost every clan had agricultural assets, essentially growing their own food. This would mean purely agricultural clans would be very hard pressed to trade anything, even for the implements, plows and that sort of thing.
I suppose the real problem starts when you realize that since no one has to pay for anything, you have a society of parasites drawing upon the clans, providing services for free, consuming for free...
I don't really have a huge amount of information on the economic system of Tekumel, so I can only go by what I was presented in the GoO book.

Hmmm... maybe I am just evil, but if I was in a high status clan, I'd make some money by sending out foolish members of my clan to get killed, so I could collect serious Shamtla. Get rid of those worthless fools that cause more harm than good, and get paid to do it. Works even better when you can cause a rival clan to do the killing, hurt their pocket books, giving you an edge. Of course proper planning for this would have to begin decades in advance, getting the clan women to breed like rabbits so you have a good supply of idiots on hand.
Not going to happen, you say?
Sure, right. We are talking a culture where it is perfectly viable to worship Gods that demand human sacrifice. A clan head (patricarch? the book didn't really discuss clan structure in any depth here... again, clans are weakly portrayed...) that is a solid follower of a chaos god would have no problem with this.
But since no one earns money, or pays for anything, where are the clans getting their money?

Hmm... maybe with all the insistance I keep hearing from fans I'll have to actually lay out some money for the 'other' books to see if my impression is simply due to a bad translation. I'd hate to have to do that, but hey, it's only money.