Timeline for Aftermath of a Midas-weapon war - what to do with all that gold?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 8, 2018 at 8:01 | comment | added | Ruadhan | I guess that depends on how much cultural stigma there is against grave-robbing and corpse-tampering in this world. How far are people willing to go to protect the bodies vs how far people are willing to go to steal them for the gold. This in a world where undoubtedly there will be plenty of gold floating around that isn't blood-gold, say for example, made by slaughtering sick animals, or condemned prisoners. The value of gold may not actually be high enough to justify grave-robbing in this world anymore. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 21:31 | comment | added | wedstrom | @Ruadhan2300 Perhaps, but that would only slow things down. How long the sentimental reasons for burying the gold can hold off against literal armies coming to raid the gold is just not that long. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 8:19 | comment | added | Ruadhan | Very true, I would certainly expect a certain amount of grave robbery like that, but not nearly as much as some of the other answers seem to posit. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 5:28 | comment | added | ShadowRanger | @Ruadhan2300: If anyone knew, sure. But elemental gold has no distinguishing characteristics; if gold remains valuable, someone will chop off a limb and melt it down and pass it off as regular gold. Eventually that will happen enough that gold becomes cheap, but that cheap gold will have a whole lot of unidentified (and unidentifiable) bodies floating around in it. Grave robbing is already a thing for the petty amount of jewelry real people are buried with; if the bodies themselves were thousands of pounds of gold? | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 20:21 | comment | added | Ray | @CodeswithHammer Threatening to murder any envoys your adversaries send isn't necessarily the best way to encourage people to show up for peace talks. | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 16:18 | comment | added | Codes with Hammer | You raise some valid concerns. I do not intend to resolve the concerns, only point out that depending on how the Midas-corpses are returned would be a critical factor in the story. My main point is that when the next war brews, there are a number of ways (both nice and nasty) to use the "Midasification" weapons as leverage to prevent bloodshed. | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 14:34 | comment | added | Ruadhan | My belief is that such "blood gold" midas-corpses would definitely not be treated like any regular old gold statuary. Using the bodies for raw materials would be something similar to Nazi Gold derived from the smelted wedding-bands of Holocaust Victims. Corpse-Gold. Nobody with any sense of decency would want to go anywhere near it, there'd be public protest in the extreme, it might even lead to a new war! | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 13:55 | comment | added | Ruadhan | that..wasn't really the path I was thinking, but sure :P permanent markers of how badly they got defeated last time have a lot of staying power in arguments for not fighting anymore. | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 13:32 | comment | added | Codes with Hammer | This answer has a lot of promise. After the first war, negotiate the return of the adversary's fallen soldiers, now all solid gold statues. When the second war threatens, offer to skip the bloodshed step and go directly to turning people into statues. "Good envoys, do you want to volunteer to become the first statues? Or would you prefer that we find a peaceful solution to this issue?" (Whether this approach is used as coercion or as logic is an exercise left to the author.) | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 12:51 | history | answered | Ruadhan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |