RLCS - Assets & Travel (Patreon)

Dear Heroes!

A joyous July's jend ... end ... uh, yeah, end. I hope the heat where you live is bearable. A heatwave's hit us here now that the monsoon's over and we bake by day and broil by night.

This week, I've got a fun little Rainbowlands update from the property section of the book (that's where the PCs weapons and armor and vehicles and services and real estate opportunities are gonna hang out).

Investments, Estates, Profit!

This is kind of a complement to the trade mechanics in UVG that I'd been meaning to write and setup for ages, but kept putting off because "this isn't the right book for that" or "this doesn't fit" or "something". I tested versions of it in Red Sky, but ... it didn't sit well there.

I just remember how I struggled to find a proper theme for the Seacat book. Well, with a bit of distance and less burnout, the Circle Sea is a natural theme and this mechanic is, I think, pretty cool.

Now, in the UVG, the PCs have their caravan as a mobile repository of their liquid wealth: loot, treasure, and more.

This makes sense, since they're traveling outside the civilized realms where things like reliably mercenary banking and finance are not so accessible. But, in the Circle Sea area, there are cities and corporations and banks.

How to square PCs accumulating ready assets with ... a civilization with banks?

Investments, Estates, Revenues (rents!), Expenses, and Incomes.

To simplify it a lot, PCs can invest 1,000 ecus (or gps or cash or diamonds) in an abstract "personal estate" (perhaps a rental timeshare? a landlord fund?) and thereafter automatically earn 1 ecu (or gp or cash or diamond) per week (assuming a 50 week year).

Very conveniently, this gives very round numbers (1gp per week in perpetuity for 1000gp invested ... i.e. a 5% annualized return) ... that also match up very loosely with the numbers in a Jane Austen novel ... which perfectly captures the status obsessed theme of the Rainbowlands middle and higher classes (the betters and lephines).

Also, quite beautifully, this is also an infinite PC money sink, because upkeep for status and lifestyle and nice houses ... all costs money per week. Making it very easy to balance the game around relatively small revenues and expenses.

I am quite pleased with it. Though I do need to still write out the main money sink: properties & upgrades that give special benefits.

Tintin-Style Travel

Now, if treasure (and wealth) in a civilization is different from in a wilderness, so is travel. This isn't a replacement for the caravan travel mechanic in the UVG so much as a complement. When you're in a civilized realm, you don't need your own caravan: taximobiles, golembuses, sentient boats, and more abound.

The problem isn't whether the PCs can go somewhere, but how they can afford to travel. Each trip has costs. Cheaper travel has more risks and tends to be slower.

Again, I think it's a pretty pleasant mini-mechanic that captures something of a classic BD. The PCs have to spend a certain amount of resources up front to book their passage, then there's a travel montage and a single roll to see if something happens during the travel itself (usually it doesn't) and then they arrive X days or weeks later at their destination, where the usual method from UVG asserts itself ([mis]fortune and encounter).

Oh, and just to speed up the whole "looking for a place to stay" - there's a list of some basic accommodations with sample benefits and semi-random locations. Should make moving forward to the next scene "...next day, the heroes set forth from Hotel Hotover to explore the tattered town of Stan Bringdisco."

I had quite a bit of fun with this section.

Meanwhile, Other Stuff

SDM: Eternal Return Key is now available in print at Exalted! Colorful!

SDM: There, A Red Door is also going to be printed. But for the print I had to add two pages, so I added maps there. See attached! Yep, you can now slot these right into your UVG.

And here, a refreshed discord link to the stratometaship server: https://discord.gg/zfjMVHDx  - a few folks have started a conversion document for SDM vs other rpg systems. I'm curious where that'll go.

Then, in some X news, I've frozen my Twitter platform wizardthieffighter profile. It's annoying, but in the end recent owner drama on that platform showed me that I was getting a lot of stress for very, very little engagement. For now, in the social media space, I'm most visibly on:

• Substack (http://lukarejec.substack.com/), where I share fiction and one link per post.
• Facebook (including the UVG group), where I check in every day or two.
• Instagram, where I share little pictures.
• And on the reddit osr subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/osr/), which is frankly the closest if imperfect echo of how G+ felt once long ago.

And, of course, here. Lovely being here with all you good folks with impeccable taste.

Meanwhile, Life Stuff

Finally, on the home front, not only is there a heatwave, we're in the last stretch of the child unit's gestation. The baby could be born any day now so ... 

I can't promise much about my schedule going forward. I'll keep trying to post as often as I can, but everyone also keeps warning me about the strange rhythms a child can bring.

Fingers crossed everything goes well!

OK! Take care, good humans, and see you in August!

—Luka.