Evil Land devours wealth as it devours men. Its wars may rage across volcanic plains and fungal forests, but beneath every campaign lies the question of resources. Who feeds the armies? Who digs the ores? Who profits from the ruins? To understand Evil Land, one must understand not its kings nor its sorcerers, but the broken markets that sustain them.
This codex gathers scattered reports of tribal barter, feudal tithes, corporate monopolies, and the desperate economies of survivors. These are not theories, but practices: the crooked arteries through which the lifeblood of Evil Land flows.
For the Ashlanders, economy is mobility. They cannot hoard gold — too heavy, too slow. Their wealth is measured in what can be carried and consumed.
Trade Goods: Ashlanders barter in salt, cured meats, obsidian blades, and volcanic ash used as alchemical catalyst. Their textiles, woven from guar-hair and dyed with volcanic ochre, are prized by other tribes.
Currency of Memory: Transactions are sealed by oaths and debts of honor. Written contracts mean little; instead, promises are remembered across generations. A family may be obligated to pay a debt owed by an ancestor centuries past.
Resource Doctrine: Water is life. Ashlanders raid wells, seize cisterns, and guard springs more fiercely than gold. A single oasis may command allegiance of dozens of clans.
Trade Networks: Despite their isolation, Ashlanders know the value of caravans. They trade obsidian and salt to knights for steel, or to survivors for fungal medicines. Yet always, their exchange is cautious: outsiders may be cheated, robbed, or tested before trust is given.
Each tribe adapts its economy to its terrain. Where one tribe thrives on jungle resin, another prospers through herds, while another survives on salvage from ancient ruins.
Barter Systems: Coinage is rare. Shells, beads, carved bones, or rare fungi serve as mediums of exchange. The value is determined by scarcity and symbolism — a carved idol may buy a spear because the idol binds ancestral spirits.
Mobility Economics: Tribes refuse permanent markets, for permanence invites conquest. Instead, they carry goods to secret clearings, holding fairs that vanish overnight. To outsiders, these seem like ghosts’ markets, appearing and dissolving with the moon.
Raiding Economy: Raids are not only martial acts but economic ones. To take cattle, captives, or metal is to replenish stores. Raiding is both redistribution and survival strategy.
Doctrine of Plenty and Want: Tribes believe wealth circulates. Hoarded goods stagnate and rot, while shared goods multiply. A chief’s honor is measured not by possession but by generosity.
The kingdoms of Evil Land cling to feudal tradition, their economies bound to castles and fields.
Feudal Tithes: Peasants pay in grain, labor, and coin to lords, who redistribute to knights and mercenaries. Taxation is brutal: peasants starve while castles fill granaries to withstand sieges.
Coinage: Minted from salvaged metal, coins bear crude sigils of kings or saints. Counterfeiting is rampant, and barter often competes with coin.
Guilds and Crafts: Blacksmiths, masons, and alchemists form guilds, jealously guarding trade secrets. Guild wars erupt in alleys and market halls, hidden beneath the pomp of knightly jousts.
Doctrine of War Financing: War is sustained through taxation and loans. Kings pawn their jewels, pledge future tithes, or borrow from mercantile houses. When debts grow unpayable, wars of conquest are launched simply to seize wealth to feed existing creditors.
Where kingdoms cling to soil and tribes to memory, corporations see Evil Land as a ledger. Their economy is not survival but extraction.
Resource Extraction: Corporations strip-mine ruins, harvest fungal forests, and dam rivers for energy. They see landscapes as profit margins, not homes.
Monetary Dominance: Corporations issue their own scrip — chits, vouchers, or digital credits redeemable only in corporate enclaves. Villages trapped in corporate orbit must accept this currency, binding them in permanent dependency.
Labor Markets: Wages are paid not in money but in ration tokens, company housing, or addictive stimulants. Workers are both laborers and customers, ensuring wealth cycles back into corporate hands.
Doctrine of Planned Scarcity: Corporations often destroy excess goods to inflate value. A famine is profitable when it forces survivors to sell land, labor, or loyalty in exchange for overpriced grain.
The majority of Evil Land lives not under banners but in shadows. Their economies are small, improvised, and endlessly adaptable.
Scrap Economy: Everything is salvaged. A broken plough becomes spearheads, rusted armor becomes roofing. Value lies not in beauty but in function.
Fungal Cultivation: Survivors cultivate edible fungus in caves and ruins, creating steady if meager food supplies. Spores also serve as currency: rare bioluminescent fungi fetch high value in trade.
Village Fairs: Commons gather irregularly in markets where food, tools, and gossip are exchanged. These fairs are both economic and social, knitting together loose communities.
Doctrine of Dual Trade: Survivors always trade twice — one for goods, one for information. A sack of grain might cost a bronze knife, but its true price is the warning that a mercenary company was seen near the river.
Evil Land mixes traditions as readily as it mixes blood. New economic doctrines appear where factions collide.
Knight-Tribal Alliances: Knights pay tribes with land-use rights; tribes repay with livestock and hunting spoils. Both survive through uneasy compromise.
Corporate-Tribal Contracts: Tribes sell rights to sacred forests in exchange for drones or medicine. Years later, the forest is gone, and the tribe is enslaved by debt to the very corporation they invited.
Currency of Relics: Folklore insists that certain relics — shards of meteorite, bones of demigods, or Anunnaki seals — are worth more than gold. Their value is not rational but mythic. Possession of such relics confers authority as much as wealth.
Not all wealth circulates visibly. Some flows in shadows.
Slave Markets: Captives are traded by tribes, kingdoms, and corporations alike. Slavery is both labor force and currency.
Soul Economy: Sorcerers, Irenicus cults, and hidden necromancers traffic not in coin but in essence. A soul may be pawned, mortgaged, or consumed. Common folk whisper of villages selling collective souls to preserve harvests.
Famine Profiteering: Every famine is orchestrated or exploited. Lords hoard grain to force peasants into servitude. Corporations seed blight to control food prices. Tribes raid granaries, redistributing famine as weapon.
Doctrine of Ruin as Wealth: Ruins are more valuable destroyed than rebuilt. To loot the bones of old civilizations — Anunnaki vaults, fallen castles, collapsed factories — is to profit. Whole wars are fought not for fertile land but for rubble filled with salvage.
The economics of Evil Land is not stability but improvisation. No market lasts; no coin holds trust. Yet wealth continues to circulate: salt and fungus, relics and debts, scrip and souls. What binds it all together is not currency but desperation.
A chronicler of Evil Land once wrote: “Here wealth is not possessed but endured. To hold gold is to paint a target; to spend it is to buy one more day of survival.”
Thus, the true doctrine of Evil Land’s economy is this: survival first, profit second, morality last.