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Difference between revisions of "Lumar"
→Sailing and Piracy: Added the role of Pirates in the economy
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Ships are plentiful on Lumar; typically, they have a crew of around thirty or more, with sixty being considered particularly large.{{book ref|tress|13}}{{book ref|tress|14}} A typical ship will have roughly the same proportion of male and female crew members; as very few people are willing to risk sailing the spores, a culture of gender equality has developed among the sailors.{{book ref|tress|13}} However, not all who sail the seas are there willingly -- on Verdant Sea, and possibly others, people who fall into debt can be pressed into ship labor by the king's collectors.{{book ref|tress|45}}
Piracy is a common and accepted part of sea travel on Lumar. Pirate ships chase down the merchant vessels and shoot only to disable, using water-filled cannonballs to activate the spores and trap the ships in them. A captured merchant ship then surrenders an agreed-upon sum of goods and money -- called a '''ransom price''' -- whereupon both ships part ways somewhat amicably. The king's marshals keep records of what ships prey on others and what was robbed and stolen; in the event that a pirate crew is captured, this avoiding of unnecessary killing ensures that they are imprisoned rather than executed.{{book ref|tress|17}} Pirates are an important part of the economy, taking wealth from the rich, who simply hoard large amounts of wealth gathered from the people through the capitalistic systems in place on Lumar, therefore removing it from the system and keeping it from the people. They then inject it back into the system as a stimulus to help lower class merchants and other peoples.{{book ref|tress|17}}
There is, however, a second type of pirates, called [[deadrunner]]s. Unlike regular pirates, those crews kill those they steal from. Deadrunners are shunned even by other pirate crews, and face death in the event of capture.{{book ref|tress|17}} However, deadrunners can easily never be discovered, should they leave no survivors of their massacres.{{book ref|tress|17}}
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