Thursday, December 9, 2010
Adventurer licenses
This has come up recently at RPGSite. I like the idea of a letter of writ for adventurers, and that it should be expensive. A suggest cost of 1,000 gp per year sounds good, and it allows for the DM to introduce loans for 1st level adventurers, possibly at very high interest rates. If the players get a writ, and they take a loan at 10% interest per day (since adventuring is a very dangerous profession), they could easily end up paying out 2,000 to 3,000 gold before paying the loan off. This is an easy way to prevent players from just getting rich quick and then retiring. It also enforces the setting construct of adventurers being very dangerous people, since you have to be desperate and capable before being willing to spend that kind of gold just for a license that might not pan out.
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5 comments:
Love this idea!
Good stuff. This reminds me of the Adventurers Guild in Dragonquest where you had to pay a 10% tithe, could get a loan, and have a safe place to stash valuables. It felt very late-medieval and not sword & sorcery at all which some players objected to.
It also implies a strong governmental structure capable of collecting those fees and enforcing the consequences of noncompliance on what amounts to a potentially very powerful group of uncontrolled mercenaries operating within their borders-- not usually the sort of leadership that tolerates rampant monsters, unexplored ruins, and unsupervised violence.
Now, if in the process of acquiring that license, you required the characters to provide a hometown, a next of kin, a lock of hair, and a date of birth, with further sever penalties for falsification, then I'd be totally into this-- because you'd have a complete hook established for later having the regime put them to the screws when necessary, and plant the seed for the adventurers being spurred to rebel, steal their contract, or push for that "one big score" which will clear their debt.
I would think they would be more along the line of the Letter of Marque and Reprisal where the adventurers get the legal right to plunder enemies of the Crown and the Crown gets a share. The Adventurers may have to but up a bond to insure their "lawful" behavior however.
In my campaign world their are adventurer guilds. So it works on the same premise, but with a little more organizational hierarchy influence and red tape BS. The reason why players would want to keep in the good with the guild is they have the best shops in town, access to more magical items, potions and information that the others.
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