Cloakwood Mine/Supplying iron to Baldur's Gate

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Did you know?.

elminster

Despite Rieltar proclaiming the mine to be operational, it's never really made clear how the Iron Throne is going to get ore out of the Cloakwood Mines. The fort and bridge they've constructed is directed the exact opposite way you might expect mines to be directed if they were meant to connect to the Coast Way. There is also no clear evidence that there was ever a roadway in the direction you would expect for connecting the mine to the areas road network.

It's possible they intended to use bags of holding to do it (as they are mentioned in one of the letters as what they are using to bring iron into cloakwood), however, it's never really made clear what their plans are (especially since even the largest bags of holding can only hold 6x6x7 feet of material in 2E)

Chronicler

There were no real roads between the cloakwood mines and Baldur's Gate were there, now that I think of it.

It was a pretty treacherous journey for you and your adventuring party. Hard to picture caravans traveling between the mines and the rest of the world on the regular.

dunbar

Looking at the map the mines appear to be relatively close to the river. Could they have been planning on smuggling it across that way?

OlvynChuru

elminster said:

It's possible they intended to use bags of holding to do it (as they are mentioned in one of the letters as what they are using to bring iron into cloakwood), however, it's never really made clear what their plans are (especially since even the largest bags of holding can only hold 6x6x7 feet of material in 2E)

"Only" 6x6x7 feet of material? That's enormous! 6x6x7 cubic feet of material is 252 cubic feet! 252 cubic feet of iron would weigh over 60 tons. So you could put plenty of iron in there. I would be more concerned about the weight limit (if there was one in 2E).

BillyYank

OlvynChuru said:

elminster said:

It's possible they intended to use bags of holding to do it (as they are mentioned in one of the letters as what they are using to bring iron into cloakwood), however, it's never really made clear what their plans are (especially since even the largest bags of holding can only hold 6x6x7 feet of material in 2E)

"Only" 6x6x7 feet of material? That's enormous! 6x6x7 cubic feet of material is 252 cubic feet! 252 cubic feet of iron would weigh over 60 tons. So you could put plenty of iron in there. I would be more concerned about the weight limit (if there was one in 2E).

Are there smelting facilities at the mine? (It's been a while) If not, you'd be carrying iron ore, not iron. How many tons of ore do you need to get one ton of iron?

Raduziel

@BillyYank Depends from where you're extracting the iron.

Hematite (70% iron)

Magnetite (72.4% iron)

Limonite (59.8% iron)

Siderite (48.2% iron)

Ankerite (15% iron).

lroumen

So 126 slaves that cannot walk anymore. Good to know.

elminster

OlvynChuru said:

elminster said:

It's possible they intended to use bags of holding to do it (as they are mentioned in one of the letters as what they are using to bring iron into cloakwood), however, it's never really made clear what their plans are (especially since even the largest bags of holding can only hold 6x6x7 feet of material in 2E)

"Only" 6x6x7 feet of material? That's enormous! 6x6x7 cubic feet of material is 252 cubic feet! 252 cubic feet of iron would weigh over 60 tons. So you could put plenty of iron in there. I would be more concerned about the weight limit (if there was one in 2E).

True enough. The weight limit is 1,500 pounds. But all these measurements are just for the largest bags listed.

elminster

BillyYank said:

OlvynChuru said:

elminster said:

It's possible they intended to use bags of holding to do it (as they are mentioned in one of the letters as what they are using to bring iron into cloakwood), however, it's never really made clear what their plans are (especially since even the largest bags of holding can only hold 6x6x7 feet of material in 2E)

"Only" 6x6x7 feet of material? That's enormous! 6x6x7 cubic feet of material is 252 cubic feet! 252 cubic feet of iron would weigh over 60 tons. So you could put plenty of iron in there. I would be more concerned about the weight limit (if there was one in 2E).

Are there smelting facilities at the mine? (It's been a while) If not, you'd be carrying iron ore, not iron. How many tons of ore do you need to get one ton of iron?

There are smelters lower into the mines. I got a bit confused because the letters describe the Nashkel Mines as sending out iron ore but I think just iron when it comes to the cloakwood mines. Which makes sense since the ore wouldn't last if it were shaped into ingots or something. Either way, they've still got to deal with moving a lot of iron from the mine.

Wise_Grimwald

elminster said:

There are smelters lower into the mines.

It's possible to go right past them without thinking about what they are, but yes, on the first level up from the bottom, there they are.

BillyYank

Wise_Grimwald said:

elminster said:

There are smelters lower into the mines.

It's possible to go right past them without thinking about what they are, but yes, on the first level up from the bottom, there they are.

That seems to be an inefficient place to put them. No wonder I didn't remember them, I was going over my mental pictures of the structures on the surface, trying to remember if I'd seen any furnaces or chimneys.

Abi_Dalzim

elminster said:

There are smelters lower into the mines. I got a bit confused because the letters describe the Nashkel Mines as sending out iron ore but I think just iron when it comes to the cloakwood mines. Which makes sense since the ore wouldn't last if it were shaped into ingots or something. Either way, they've still got to deal with moving a lot of iron from the mine.

Well, a 1500 lb weight limit means that with just four bags, Tranzig could lug three tons of iron out of the mine per trip. He could also cast invisibility to bypass all the monsters in the forest. It takes a little over three days to walk from the mines to Baldur's Gate, so we're talking six tons per week, more or less. I don't know exactly how much a medieval city's military would expect to consume, but that certainly seems like a significant amount all told.

Wise_Grimwald

BillyYank said:

That seems to be an inefficient place to put them. No wonder I didn't remember them, I was going over my mental pictures of the structures on the surface, trying to remember if I'd seen any furnaces or chimneys.

Can you imagine the difficulty of removing fumes, not to mention the work involved in getting the coke down there?

semiticgoddess

What's this about smuggling coke and inhaling fumes?

elminster

Abi_Dalzim said:

elminster said:

There are smelters lower into the mines. I got a bit confused because the letters describe the Nashkel Mines as sending out iron ore but I think just iron when it comes to the cloakwood mines. Which makes sense since the ore wouldn't last if it were shaped into ingots or something. Either way, they've still got to deal with moving a lot of iron from the mine.

Well, a 1500 lb weight limit means that with just four bags, Tranzig could lug three tons of iron out of the mine per trip. He could also cast invisibility to bypass all the monsters in the forest. It takes a little over three days to walk from the mines to Baldur's Gate, so we're talking six tons per week, more or less. I don't know exactly how much a medieval city's military would expect to consume, but that certainly seems like a significant amount all told.

I think most bags of holding in the world (even if it's not reflected in the game) are going to fall in that 250 to 500 lbs max range. In PnP, about 30% of bags of holding have a limit of 250 pounds and 40% have a limit of 500 pounds. The 1,500 pound ones would be quite rare (if you are playing PnP its a 10% chance of getting one). The remaining 20% is for 1,000 pound bags.

If I've got the math right (no guarantees on that heh) then the weighted average limit is 765 pounds.

Also one thing to remember as well is that this is a crisis that has affected not only the military but anything involving iron. It's also a regional crisis as well.

Abi_Dalzim

elminster said:

I think most bags of holding in the world (even if it's not reflected in the game) are going to fall in that 250 to 500 lbs max range. In PnP, about 30% of bags of holding have a limit of 250 pounds and 40% have a limit of 500 pounds. The 1,500 pound ones would be quite rare (if you are playing PnP its a 10% chance of getting one). The remaining 20% is for 1,000 pound bags.

If I've got the math right (no guarantees on that heh) then the weighted average limit is 765 pounds.

Also one thing to remember as well is that this is a crisis that has affected not only the military but anything involving iron. It's also a regional crisis as well.

Okay, so again with four bags averaging out to that capacity, we still get just over 3 tons per week. Multiply by 52, and we've got 156 tons per year. Now, this is a tiny fraction of what, say, the Roman Empire could produce, but I'm pretty sure the Sword Coast had only a small fraction of Rome's population, too. Baldur's Gate only has 42,000 people, and Waterdeep 130,000, from what I gather, compared with Rome's million plus.

Also, the point of the scheme was to increase the Iron Throne's profitability through margins as well as through market share. So making enough iron to alleviate the local scarcity wouldn't really be in their best interests, even if they could do it.

elminster

I've split the thread up since it was probably going a bit too far off topic for the "did you know" thread.

I can't respond now but I'll make a post later about this.

Chronicler

Abi_Dalzim said:

elminster said:

There are smelters lower into the mines. I got a bit confused because the letters describe the Nashkel Mines as sending out iron ore but I think just iron when it comes to the cloakwood mines. Which makes sense since the ore wouldn't last if it were shaped into ingots or something. Either way, they've still got to deal with moving a lot of iron from the mine.

Well, a 1500 lb weight limit means that with just four bags, Tranzig could lug three tons of iron out of the mine per trip. He could also cast invisibility to bypass all the monsters in the forest. It takes a little over three days to walk from the mines to Baldur's Gate, so we're talking six tons per week, more or less. I don't know exactly how much a medieval city's military would expect to consume, but that certainly seems like a significant amount all told.

Wait, I'm reading up on Tranzig and I think I might have missed him and precisely what his role is in the story.

Is he a relatively powerful mage who dedicates his arcane might to running a villainous courier service?

I mean, I guess when you've got powerful wizards with nothing better to do than carry stuff from point A to point B a lot becomes possible. Wonder what his backstory is? This can't have been what he imagined when he was going to wizard school.

Abi_Dalzim

Chronicler said:

Wait, I'm reading up on Tranzig and I think I might have missed him and precisely what his role is in the story.

Is he a relatively powerful mage who dedicates his arcane might to running a villainous courier service?

I mean, I guess when you've got powerful wizards with nothing better to do than carry stuff from point A to point B a lot becomes possible. Wonder what his backstory is? This can't have been what he imagined when he was going to wizard school.

He's not that powerful, really. No more so than Tarnesh, really. The real mystery is how on Toril he turned Branwen to stone, when he only casts level 3 spells at best otherwise. Hardly seems worth using a scroll for that.

Raduziel

Davaeorn being a level 11 Wizard may cast three level 5 spells per day. Considering that he knows the Iron Throne and his office at the mines very well, he can relatively safely teleport with several bags of holding.

Per PnP rules, he would be able to carry up to 500 pounds of gear with him per trip. Considering the above average os 756 pounds of iron per bad of holding we may conclude that smuggling it is quite easy.

jsaving

Everything about the Cloakwood mine seems inefficient if you were going to transport the ore on foot. The entrance faces the wrong direction, the smelters are on the wrong floor, the elevator is too small to carry more than a wheelbarrow at a time. Moreover the lack of either a road east or ferry north means all foot traffic would have to go through a series of treacherous forest maps with numerous foes and traps that don't distinguish between "friendly" Iron Throne members and "unfriendly" adventurers. There's no way a group of people weighed down by ore are going to survive that trip and it's unlikely even a single Iron Throne mage could make it.

On the other hand somebody able to cast teleport neatly solves all of those problems and in many cases turns them from "problems/bugs" to "design features".

Pingwin

The whole Cloakwood area of the world map seems wrong anyway - look at the times for traveling back to the Friendly Arm Inn from the final Cloakwood area. You are basically passing through the entire cloakwood forest to get back instead of heading east from the final area.

I'd say it is just a consequence of the devs trying to fit too many areas into a small part of the world map and the actual locations of those areas don't really match where they are on the world map. Maybe you could try to rationalise it by saying that Tazok knew of other paths through the forest and eventually they were going to build a proper road once their plans had reached a point where there was no longer a need to keep the mines a secret.

The entrance facing the wrong way is neither here not there. If there was a path to the east, the extra distance to leave by the wrong side and have to walk around the outside of the fort isn't going to make any real difference to the journey.

Chronicler

Abi_Dalzim said:

Chronicler said:

Wait, I'm reading up on Tranzig and I think I might have missed him and precisely what his role is in the story.

Is he a relatively powerful mage who dedicates his arcane might to running a villainous courier service?

I mean, I guess when you've got powerful wizards with nothing better to do than carry stuff from point A to point B a lot becomes possible. Wonder what his backstory is? This can't have been what he imagined when he was going to wizard school.

He's not that powerful, really. No more so than Tarnesh, really. The real mystery is how on Toril he turned Branwen to stone, when he only casts level 3 spells at best otherwise. Hardly seems worth using a scroll for that.

That's still 3 levels more than most delivery men I imagine...

Though I'm thinking about it more, and I'm not sure invisibility is the solution we think it is. Gameplay-wise invisibility is pretty foolproof, but lorewise he still makes sounds, emits odors, so on and so forth. He's not trained in stealth, and there are a lot of creatures of the woods that would probably notice an invisible wizard bumbling through their woods over the course of a 3 day trek.

Especially if he's making that trek twice a week for heaven knows how long.

elminster

jsaving said:

Everything about the Cloakwood mine seems inefficient if you were going to transport the ore on foot. The entrance faces the wrong direction, the smelters are on the wrong floor, the elevator is too small to carry more than a wheelbarrow at a time. Moreover the lack of either a road east or ferry north means all foot traffic would have to go through a series of treacherous forest maps with numerous foes and traps that don't distinguish between "friendly" Iron Throne members and "unfriendly" adventurers. There's no way a group of people weighed down by ore are going to survive that trip and it's unlikely even a single Iron Throne mage could make it.

On the other hand somebody able to cast teleport neatly solves all of those problems and in many cases turns them from "problems/bugs" to "design features".

I'm not sure it's really a design feature I just think the map was probably prepared without these sorts of considerations. In any case, if teleportation is a practical means of distributing iron then that does kind of demonstrate a problem with their plot. A mage like Duke Jannath, Halbazzar Drin, Thalantyr, or Shandalar (or really any mage that can cast teleport or ideally teleport without error), could be working with another iron mine hundreds of kilometres away and bring iron into the city that way. That wouldn't solve the existing contaminated iron, but having a more reliable source of iron would put an end to that mine.

It's probably economically a lot cheaper to just do it by road however.

Question2

The cloakwood area was designed for you to go in a semi-circle from the first area to the cloakwood mines. It would make more sense to be able to get back to the road by exiting east from the mines, but they probably didnt allow that because people would ask "why cant you just go to the mines directly instead of taking the long way round?".

ThacoBell

I just assumed Daveorn just teleported with bags of holding full of refined ore.

Very_BigSword

Or maybe they just transport the ore by river. You know, the one with the plug? The harbour district was fairly adjacent as I recall from the world map.

A bit too much overthinking going on here lol!