Dragaera

What are the obvious hanging plot hooks?

Howard Brazee howard at brazee.net
Thu Jul 6 09:01:39 PDT 2006

Teleportation as routine appears to be recent.   Roads still exist, and 
peasants still stay local (with their wagons going to near by 
markets?).   We don't see it being used to carry a handful of apples to 
a market in the other side of the empire where prices are good.

Teleportation would be useful in mining.

We have seen places where people don't teleport too closely for various 
reasons.

The people we have seen trading overseas are the Orca - who use ships 
for this trade.   Ships are useful for heavy loads, but if teleportation 
was widely available outside the empire, there would be some kinds of 
infrastructure for buying and selling small items that the traders got 
from the other side of the world a few minutes ago.

It is true that Dragaerans are conservative, and that times are changing 
quite rapidly as far as sorcery is concerned.    But money is money, and 
if such trade was easy, we would see lots of signs of it.

In our world, a great deal of world exploration was for spices.    
Magellan took 3 ships on his trip around the world.   He died, two ships 
were sunk, but one ship made it with a load full of black pepper.   The 
investors were richly rewarded by this fantastically successful 
return.    Trade in small things, that can be carried by someone 
teleporting can be quite profitable.

Conclusion:    Teleportation is not as common as we see, and much more 
difficult around the world than we might guess.