Price Discrepancies

I'm continuing to work on the GM Guide for TS&R. I'm at the Dominion Management section now. I've never really come up against the prices for stronghold construction in the Expert Set/Rules Cyclopedia before, but while putting my version together (including some Asian style architecture and a few other things that I thought should be added), I checked out both the 1E DMG and the 2E Stronghold guide (one of the splatbooks...which I could only find in a fan-edited OCR version, not a scanned original PDF) and there are some big differences! 

The BX/BECMI prices are generally a lot higher for most buildings compared to 1E. 2E goes a bit overboard IMO with a whole formula to calculate the type of terrain, climate, vegetation, available materials and workforce. So instead of a simple price list, there's a (badly formatted in the version of the book I found) table with lots of numbers that seem all over the place. It may be a list of prices for the example castle they present. It doesn't seem very usable to me. Maybe if I had the original version with proper formatting, it would make more sense. 

Anyway, this leaves me with BECMI and 1E for my sources (and I suppose I could look at 3E+...but nah). 

For the construction costs, I stuck to the numbers I know. It's more expensive, but castles and other strongholds should NOT be cheap. 

However...in addition to structure costs, the Companion Set (and RC) have a list of monthly wages for various retainers and officials for your stronghold and the domain at large. Some of these seem very overly priced to me these days, and others are comically underpriced. Really, the Seneschal of the castle, the most important person you can hire, only gets Mercenary pay rates? Assuming it's a human knight (heavy horse), you only need to pay 20gp per month for this official. Meanwhile, the guard captain gets 4000gp per month. Say what? 

1E doesn't actually provide listings for these sorts of officials, from what I've found so far. Maybe it's in a sourcebook I haven't looked at, or a Dragon Magazine article somewhere (I don't have the archive...maybe I should track that down). So I had to just adjust the numbers to something I thought was more fitting. Every official I list is given a price to hire them, and most have had significant reductions from the Companion Set numbers. 

When we were kids, first making our own strongholds, our PCs were already pretty wealthy for their levels (my cousin Ben was a bit of a Monty Haul DM when he ran games), so paying the prices in the book for the various retainers didn't seem so bad. Besides, as we got up into the high teens and low twenties in level, we had copious amounts of treasure even without Ben giving out generous amounts. 

But if, going by the rules, a PC were to start a domain in a Wilderness or Borderland territory, it would take them a long time to build up the funds just from the domain income to hire many of these positions, so the money would have to come from adventuring spoils (as we did as kids). And going by the rates of treasure going to my group these days, by the time they reach Name Level, they will be spending most of their money on the strongholds, not leaving much for staff. So I feel fairly justified in reducing the staff costs. I may want to reconsider the construction costs as well... We'll see.