Let’s say I currently have a PC snowed in for the winter in a relatively small village (Class VI market, but upgraded to Class V by being on a major trading route). In the absence of anything else to do with my money, I’ve elected to blow it towards an XP reserve for my next character. Is there any practical limit to how much cash I can waste in a particular amount of time given the economic capacity of the settlement in question? As a corollary, what other game effects might I bring about by dropping thousands of gp into a community under such circumstances?
Under normal circumstances, there is no in-game limit as to how much you expend on Reserve XP because it doesn’t have to be “spent” in an economic sense. E.g. If it comes down to it, you could be sacrificing it to the gods in ways that removes the wealth from circulation permanently.
If it is being spent, under normal circumstances, your Judge could treat the expenditures as investment towards increasing the population of the domain or size of the settlement. This would represent the local residents using their wealth to invest in capital goods purchased from out of town.
However, since the town is snowed-in, the wealth could not be deployed towards the purchase of capital goods, so it should not have count as investment in the near term. The immediate effect of spending in the town would be to cause prices to increase.
A Class VI town has about 7,500gp of economic activity per month (total) so you can use that as a gauge of how much to inflate prices by.
Xie xie!