Settlement Building - Part 4
It’s been a while since the last part in Settlement Building, so as a quick refresher, here’s what we’ve covered already:
Part 1, we shared the basics about what we want this system to accomplish and some ideas on how the system would work.
Part 2 covered resources and basic buildings you can construct in your settlement.
Part 3 expanded on those buildings, added in labor resources and began going over how trade would work.
This week, I want to start nailing down some of those previous concepts and dive deeper into the concept of money for settlements. The only way to do that is to start, so let’s get going.
Settlements and Money
So let’s say you want to send out a trade caravan to trade your wood for money, cause you want to pay mercenaries to help defend your settlement from brigands (and the players don’t feel like being adventurers and setting off a fireball nuke in the brigand’s camp).
How much is that one wood worth? (And remember, it’s not a single piece of wood, but an abstraction of wood.)
That’s a difficult question to answer, and we don’t want to tie just 1 Money to any 1 Resource. Money, and by extension, resources, have a bit more granularity in them. Luxury goods are going to cost more than basic goods, so I think a good baseline may be as follows: (TP stands for Treasure Points)
Food (3 TP)
Metal (8 TP)
Ore (5 TP)
Precious Ore (10 TP)
Stone (3 TP)
Trade Goods (varies from 1 TP to 10+ TP)
Water (varies, treated as Trade Goods)
Wood (3 TP)
Now, the prices above are just a base price. This doesn’t go into any modifiers you might have from your trade caravan or your city’s reputation. It may also change as we go forward.
My thinking, though, is that 10 TP acts as the upper limit before you start adding in modifiers for a single resource. There are some things that might increase this number above 10, but 10 should be our base upper limit (just because we need one).
The rest of these numbers are based on vibes. Food is important, but also pretty easy to produce (there can be modifiers that increase this cost). Ore is more difficult to rip out of the ground, but Metal (which is finished ore and requires more processing) is going to have a higher base cost because it requires more processing. Stone and Wood are also priced at the same amount as Food, just because those are ‘generic’ resources, and they exist along the bottom of value. I might adjust Food down to 2 TP, so let me know what you think about these prices.
Of course, this brings us to… what do you do with your money/treasure points?
Obviously, you can use those funds to buy pretty things, like wood or food for your settlement. Additionally, I previously had gold costs for constructing buildings, but I’ll also include TP costs. You can also use those funds to purchase magic items, for adventurers, buy mercenaries and armies, and more.
While magic items don’t have prices (unless you use our pricing guide), we can also make taking the Trade action that the settlement can use to go after magic items, probably gated behind proficiency bonus and a big price tag. Something like:
Rarity / Proficiency Bonus Requirement (Min. Level) / Cost
Common / +2 (Lv1) / 1-10 TP
Uncommon / +3 (Lv5) / 10-25 TP
Rare / +4 (Lv9) / 25-100 TP
Very Rare / +5 (Lv13) / 100-250 TP
Legendary / +6 (Lv17) / 250+ TP
Now, let’s talk about that Proficiency Bonus requirement.
That requirement is only for finding that item within the settlement. If a Lv1 settlement wants to buy a legendary item, they can totally do that, but they’ll have to conduct a Trade action and send a caravan off to a large enough settlement that is of an appropriate level. I think there should also be a bit of a chance that settlements won’t have the item, but that’s something we can get into later and would be more on a GM basis than hard-coded rules. Some GMs run their worlds with no magic items, while others can’t help but give their players way too powerful items way too soon.
So that’s the basics of money… at least, so far. You see, settlements (at least the governments of settlements) cost a lot of money to run. But I think we can make that pretty self-sufficient and not have to worry about paying X amount of money every week to have a functioning settlement. Instead, for big pushes, special jobs, etc, the settlement can use its treasury of money to buy those upgrades — like city walls to keep dragons out, a dragon tax that ensures they aren’t burned down by a dragon, adventurers to kill said dragon, and more.
We’ll get into more opportunities for gold spending when the rules get more fleshed out. Speaking about fleshing out rules, this is where we are going to end this time. In the next part, we are finally going to start writing down all these rules and building out the core system so you can start using it in your games.
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